FINAL REMARKS
Character of Associates
It is to be regretted that the oil, land, and timber litigation of recent years has once more presented the Southern Pacific in the light of a corporation more heedful of its own financial interests than of the requirements of public policy or of a high ethical code. In all fairness to the company, it should be said that this controversy does not truly represent its attitude at the present time. Stanford and Huntington are dead, and their properties are in other hands. The great railroad system which they left, controlled by leaders who are responsive to new policies, is in general no longer a profit-making device in the hands of a small group of men, but instead is a powerful machine for the promotion of industry and commerce on the Pacific Coast.
Our narrative will now close with a few words of summary and conclusion.
The purpose of the writer in presenting the story of the Southern Pacific has been to throw light upon the problems encountered by the most important railroad upon the Pacific Coast, and to characterize and interpret the policies adopted by that railroad and by the men who governed it.
The writer’s view with regard to the so-called Southern Pacific associates, Stanford, Huntington, Mark Hopkins, and Crocker, is that they were rough, vigorous, and grasping men, tenacious of rights to property once acquired, kind-hearted within the circle of their families and intimate friends, but narrow in vision, uneducated, and inexpert in the details of railroad operation, and uninformed in all that related to questions of public policy. Huntington alone, while rough and selfish as the others, showed important constructive capacity in the railroad field. The strength of the associates lay in their courage and persistence, in their loyalty to each other in business matters, in their readiness to attract and to support able men whose views did not differ too greatly from their own, and in a native shrewdness which, in Huntington at least, reached to a superlative degree.
Achievements of Group
The reputation of the Huntington group rests upon the fact that within fifty years they built up an organization operating 11,152 miles of lines and earning an operating revenue in a single year of no less than $282,000,000. A statement like this is quickly made. The significance of it comes home, however, only to those who understand the difficulties of successful management of great corporations and who appreciate the multitude of decisions as to policy which must have been, on the whole, soundly made, at least from the point of view of the corporation itself, in order to achieve such a success.
Doubtless most of the details of the Southern Pacific management were necessarily handled by subordinates. It is unlikely, for instance, that the associates had much to do with the construction of railroad rates in the West, with the negotiation of special contracts with California shippers, or with agreements with the Pacific Mail. The contribution of the owners was here the appointment of competent men at liberal salaries to attend to matters which they did not understand or for other reasons were not able to handle themselves. The credit for general direction and support of the policies adopted, however, belongs to the associates even in these matters, when credit is due, just as responsibility for errors properly falls upon them.