There was pulling power between that president and his board, and the pulling was all in a single direction. Their system--a railroad that acknowledged no superior--could not keep in the very front rank without its terminal in the heart of the seaboard city, eliminating forever the delays and the inconveniences of a ferry service; the road could not afford to drop into second rank, and so it assumed the great undertaking.
That meant many things more than laymen understand; the selling of securities in delicate markets, home and foreign, which fluctuate wildly on the promulgation of anticorporation talk; the evading of untiring competitors; the appeasing of hungry politicians, only too anxious to feed at the hands of a wealthy corporation. In this case, it meant more than all these things, for the two rivers were quite as treacherous as the American engineers had pronounced them. They would sound in their tunnel bearings and find rock which seemed soft, and their dynamite charges would be sufficient. Then it would prove hard, and their blast as inefficient as that of a child's toy cannon. Again, the rock would drill as hard as the hardest gneiss--the very backbone of Mother Earth herself, and the hard-rock men would prepare a heavy charge of dynamite. Then the stuff was as soft as gravel, and their heavy charge would have torn off the roofs of half a dozen houses. When they were under one of the rivers they found its bed--the roof of their tunnel--as soft as mud. There came a day when the little foaming swirls of water above their headings became a geyser: the river-bed had blown entirely out.
After that, some of the younger engineers felt like throwing themselves into the wicked river, but the biggest engineer of all never lost his faith. He sent upstream and brought down a whole Spanish Armada of clumsy scows, each heaped high with sticky clay. That clay--in thousands of cubic yards--made a new river-bottom and the tunnel shields went forward.
There were other obstacles and discouragements, almost an infinite array of them, to be surmounted, but this railroad president had steeled his mind to the accomplishment of that terminal. In the making of it he gave his life. When the day came for the drafts upon the railroad's treasury, mounting higher and higher, he was cheer; when bad news came from the burrowing engineers, he was courage; when timid stockholders and directors began to worry, he was comfort. He gave of his vitality to the organization, to the making of the terminal, until the day came when he gave too much--and his life went out while he was still like a mighty king in battle. He did not live to see the classic lines of the great station building. As he stands in the waiting-room, he stands in bronze. Those bronze eyes are powerless to see the splendid fruition of his endeavors.
That sort of thing--heroic courage and death-bringing devotion to an enterprise--repeats itself now and then among the executives of the railroads. When the panic of 1907 reached high tide, there was a certain railroad president who, like his fellows, viewed it with no little alarm.
He had lunched with a big steel man, the kind the newspapers like to call a magnate, and the steel man had scared him. The company for which the former labored was going to close half a dozen of its plants--was going to throw some thousands of poorly provided men out of work.
The railroad president took that bad news back to his comfortable office; at night it travelled with him in his automobile to his big and showy house. It would hit his company hard in its heavy tonnage district, but that was only a single phase of the situation. He thought of things becoming more disjointed when the news became public--before that week had run its course. That night the president made up his mind to take a big step. It was risky business, but he thought it worth the risk.
He sent for the steel man in the morning and asked him what was the best price he could make for his product. The steel man cut his regular profit in half, but the president was not satisfied.
"You'll have to show me a better margin than that," he said.
"We'll eliminate profits," said the steel man, "and give you the stuff at cost, to save shutting down our plant."
"Is that the best you can do?" persisted the president.
Before he was done, the steel man had also eliminated depreciation on plants and half a dozen minor expenses. He agreed to deliver at the mere cost of raw material and labor. Then he received an order that would have broken some records in prosperous times. The road was committed to some big building projects and it needed whole trainloads of girders and columns; bridges by the dozen. The railroad president went further, and helped out the steel man's car-building plant. He ordered 3,000 steel freight cars, and every day he was getting reports from his general manager of a further falling of traffic tides. They had motive-power rusting on sidings, and they were dumping freight cars in the ditches along the right-of-way because they did not have storage-room for them.
That took courage of a certain high-grade sort. When those freshly-painted new steel cars began to be delivered in daily batches of sixty, some of his directors asked him where he was going to find room to store them. He did not answer, for he did not know; but in the long run he won out. His company had a new equipment for the returning flood-tide of traffic which had cost it 25 per cent less than that of its competitors. When the time came to build its big improvement it had the steel all stored and ready.
The president was able to tell his directors then that he had saved them $1,700,000 on that close bargain that he had driven in panicky times.
Sometimes a little thing makes a railroad president big.
The head of a busy road in the Middle West was hurrying to Chicago one day to attend a mighty important conference of railroad chiefs. His special was halted at a division point for an engine-change, and the president was enjoying a three-minute breathing spell walking up and down beside his car. An Italian track laborer tried to make his way to him. The president's secretary, who was on the job, after the manner of presidents'
secretaries, stopped the man. The signal was given that the train was ready, but the president saw that the track-hand was crying. He ordered his train held and went over to him. The story was quickly told. The track-hand's little boy had been playing in the yards and had hidden in an open box-car; so his small companions had reported. Afterwards the car had been closed and sealed by a yardmaster's employee. Somewhere it was bumping its weary way in a lazy freight train, while a small boy, hungry and scared, was vainly calling to be let out.
Perhaps that president had a boy of the same size--they always do in stories; and perhaps--this being reality--he did not. But he stopped there for three precious hours, at that busy division point, while he sent orders broadcast to find the boy, orders that went with big authority because they came from the high boss himself. He was late at the conference, because that search was taking his mind and his attention. He hung for hours at a long-distance telephone, personally directing the boy-hunt with his marvellously fertile and resourceful mind. When action came entirely too slowly he ordered the men out of the shops and all interchange freight halted, until every one of 12,000 or 14,000 box cars had been opened and searched. Finally, from one of these they drew forth the limp and almost lifeless body of a small boy.
The railroad chief died a little while ago and was buried in a city 500 miles away from the line that he had controlled. The track-hands of his line, with that delicate sensibility that is part and parcel of the Italian, dug deep into their scanty savings and hired a special train, that they might march in a body at his funeral.
It sometimes takes a big man to do a little thing in a big way.
Here is Underwood, the railroad president who took hold of the Erie when the property was a byword and a joke, who began pouring money into it to give it real improvements and possibilities for economical handling, and made it a practical and a profitable freighter, a freighter of no mean importance at that. He once issued an order that any car on the road (no matter of what class of equipment) with a flat wheel should be immediately cut out of the train. The order was posted in every yardmaster's office up and down that system.
Some time after it went into effect, Underwood was hurrying east in his private car. It was essential that he should reach Jersey City in the early morning, for he had a big day's grist awaiting him at his office. A real railroad president, working 18 hours a day, can brook few delays. But when the president awoke, his car was not in motion; the foot of his bunk was higher than the head. He looked out and found himself in a railroad yard three or four hundred miles from his office. When he got up and out he saw why his bed had been aslant. The observation end of his car was jacked up and the car-repairers were slipping a new pair of wheels underneath it. A car-tinker bossed the job and Underwood addressed him.
"Who gave you authority to cut out my car?" he asked.
"If you will walk over to my coop," said the car-tinker, politely, "you will find my authority in orders from headquarters to cut out any car (no matter of what class of equipment) with a flat wheel."
When the new wheels were in place the president of the road put his hand upon the shoulder of the car-tinker and marched him uptown. The man obeyed, not knowing what was coming to him. Underwood walked him straight into a jeweller's shop, picked out the best gold watch in the case and handed it to the car-tinker.
"You keep right on obeying orders," he said.
The relations between a railroad president at the head of the organization, and some man who struggles ahead in the army of which the president is general, would make a whole book. They still tell a story in Broad Street Station, Philadelphia, of Mr. Cassatt, the Pennsylvania's great president, and the brakeman.
It seems that one of the suburban locals that took Cassatt to his country home up the main line was halted one night by an unfriendly signal. The president, mildly wondering at the delay, found his way to the rear platform. On the lower step of that platform, in plain violation of the company's rule, sat the rear brakeman. Cassatt was never a man who was quick with words, but he said in a low voice:
"Young man, isn't there a rule on this road that a brakeman shall go a certain distance to the rear of a stalled train to protect it by danger signal?"
The brakeman spat upon the right-of-way and, without lifting his eyes from it, said:
"If there is, it's none of your damn business."
Cassatt--the man who could strike an arm of Pennsylvania into the heart of metropolitan New York at a cost of many millions of dollars--was much embarrassed.
"Oh, certainly it isn't," he said with an attempt at a smile. "I was merely asking for information."
The next morning the president of the Pennsylvania summoned the trainmaster of that suburban division to his desk and reported the matter.
The trainmaster turned three colors. It was _lese-majeste_ of the most heinous sort. He proposed the immediate dismissal of the offending brakeman. Cassatt ruled against that. He was too big a man to be seeking to rob any brakeman of his job.
"Just tell him," he said to the trainmaster, with a suggestion of a smile about his lips, "that he cussed the president, and that, as a personal favor, I should like him to be more polite to passengers in the future."
No two railroad presidents come up to their problem in quite the same way.
Take the two members of the Western railroad world--one gone now--Hill and Harriman. In J. J. Hill's domain the personality of the man counts for everything. He picks his men, advances them, rejects or dismisses them, by a rare intuitive sense, with which he judges character. A high chief in his ranks once asked for a vacation in which to take his family to Europe.
Hill granted it. When the man came back from Europe another was at his desk. Hill did not approve of long vacations, and that was his method of showing it. The department head should have known better.
On the other hand, Harriman measured his men impersonally--as if in a master scale. He measured them by results. A man might personally be somewhat repugnant to him, but if he accomplished results for the road, he held his place, at least until some one came along who could do even better.
W. C. Brown, of the New York Central, and James McCrea, of the Pennsylvania, are the heads of two railroads great in mileage and in volume of traffic; yet their methods are in many essentials radically different. McCrea is the essence of Pennsylvania policy--coldly impersonal. It is easier to gain an audience with the president of the United States than with the president of the Pennsylvania. No Pennsylvania man from president down to the lowest ranking officer, grants an interview to a newspaper reporter. It would be risky business for any officer of the Pennsylvania to have his photograph published or himself glorified by reason of his connection with the company. The company is the corporation.
When it speaks, it speaks impersonally through its press agent, a clever young man with clever assistants, who both answers newspaper questions and advances newspaper information. His function is a new one of the American railroad, and allies itself directly with the office of the president.
W. C. Brown, of the New York Central, probably stands preeminent to-day among American railroad executives. He has shouldered himself up from the ranks of the railroad army, and only good wishes have gone to him as he has stepped from one high post to a still higher one. He has come, as nine out of ten successful executives have come, from the operating end of the railroad.
Brown is particularly accessible to newspaper reporters. He talks with them, carefully and painstakingly, and sees to it that they are correctly informed as to each of the great railroad problems of the day. He believes sincerely that the head of a railroad should be personality and that the personality should stand forth directly in the guidance of the property.
In his own case, at least, he has demonstrated the value of his theory.
For all this work and all this strain, the railroad president demands that he be adequately paid. He has a good many perquisites--chief among them a comfortable private car at his beck and call; but perquisites are not salary. The head and front of the American railroad to-day receives anywhere from $15,000 to $75,000; an astonishingly large percentage of railroad presidents are receiving at least $50,000 annually. But they work for their pay--sometimes with their life-devotion, as in the case of the big man who built the big terminal; other times with the hard sense of the president who bought his steel girders and cars in the time of panic. Here is a case in point.
A road in the Middle West, which was so compact as to make it quite local in character, had a big traffic proposition to handle and was handling it in a miserable fashion. One local celebrity after another tackled it, until the directors were laying side bets with one another as to the precise day when the receiver should walk into the office. Finally, Eastern capital, which was heavily interested in the property, revolted at the local offerings, and sent out an operating man with a big reputation to take hold of it.
The directors received him with a certain veiled distrust as coming from another land, but in the end they hired him. The matter of salary came up last of all.
"Fifty thousand," said the New Yorker in a low voice.
One of the local directors spoke up.
"Fifteen thousand!" said he. "It's out of the question. We've never paid more than twelve."
"So I should imagine," was the dry response. "But I said fifty, not fifteen."