Postal Riders and Raiders

by W. H. Gantz

Now notice this: The terms of such contracts not only implied but specifically required a daily carriage of the mail weight for the number of days designated, allowing, of course, for wrecks, washouts and other unavoidable interruptions in the movements of trains.

Keeping that in mind, suppose the Postmaster General discovered that on a good many mail runs—“lines” or “half-lines”—suppose that the chief of the department discovered a condition on many mail runs similar to that I personally know to have existed on a few, in years 1907 and prior. That was, briefly stated, this:

The contract called for a daily carriage of so much mail weight and the government paid for that per diem carriage, the days of unavoidable interferences and interruptions included. Suppose that the postoffice authorities discovered that, by reason of the diversion of the mails to other lines, the daily mail service was not rendered; or discovered, as in at least one instance I discovered, that the contracting road (or roads) gave little consideration to the daily service clause save during the weighing period, dropping the mail from train—skipping a day’s service—whenever it was to their interests to do so, and often assigning the most flimsy reasons for so doing or assigning no reasons at all?

That order of June 7, 1907, would have a tendency to stop that sort of disrespect and abuse of contract stipulations, would it not?

Fifth: The writer of the article from which we have quoted appears to have got himself somewhat twisted in his consideration of that order of March 2, 1907. It seems that (see first paragraph of quotation) he would have the reader class it among those several forced reductions which “various government committees” had called unjust. But, further along, it is stated that “surely there could be no other fairer basis of determining the average weight” than that furnished in that order of March 2.

I wonder why the railroad lobby so strenuously opposed that order of March, 1907—connived and schemed for its rescinding, until the order of June 7, 1907, gave the gang of corruptionists something still more objectionable to the interests they served? Yes, I wonder why they so hotly opposed that order of March 2? If there could be “no other fairer basis of determining the average weight” in June, 1911 (the publication date of the article from which we have quoted), why was it not fair in March, 1907? And why was it not a fair and just basis for arriving at the average daily mail weights for many weighing periods prior to 1907? Did anyone ever hear any railway man advocating the “fair basis” provided in that order of March? Most certainly The Man on the Ladder never heard of such advocacy. The railway people did not advocate such a “fair” method of ascertaining the average daily mail weight their roads carried during a period of fifteen weeks—or during any other period—because they were beneficiaries of some very unfair methods and practices which gave them pay for mail weights their roads did not carry.

As I refer later to some of the practices indulged in the weighing periods, I will here mention only a method used for years prior to the issuance of that order in March, 1907—a method of arriving at the “average daily weight” for the carriage of which the railroad was to be paid for a period of four years. That method was, though I have been unable to learn that it was ever officially authorized by the Postoffice Department, to find the daily average for each week covered in the weighing period and then arrive at the average for the whole period by dividing the sum of the weekly averages by the number of weeks in which the mail was weighed.

Nothing wrong with that is there? Should work out fair and square, should it not? Well, it did not. The method was all right in theory and in letter, but a crooked practice was worked into its application—worked into it by collusion between crooked railway and public officials. And the crookedness of the practice was very plain and bold and bald. It was what in street parlance would be called “raw.” Here it is in figures:

Take a “heavy” mail line. Say the total mail weight for a week was, using a round figure, 840,000 pounds or 420 tons. Now dividing that total by 7, the number of days in a week and the number of days also on which the mail was weighed, would give a daily average of 120,000 pounds, or 60 tons. That is all clear and straight, is it not? Most certainly it is.

But the crooked application of the method divided the week’s total by 6 instead of by 7—divided the total of seven days’ weights by six. The railway people, you see, were great respecters of the Sabbath. They would run trains on Sunday to accommodate the public and to meet the necessities of their business, which was, and is, perfectly proper. They would also carry the mails for your Uncle Sam, which was also right and proper. But their lofty respect for the Holy Sabbath, or the high esteem in which they held our much loved and much abused Uncle, was such as induced them to hold up said Uncle as a respecter of the Sabbath, or seventh day, while they “held him up” in averaging his mail weights.