by the next year McAdoo was out of the job. The Armistice had been signed on November 11, 1918, and immediately thereafter Mr. Wilson gave heed to Mr. McAdoo’s protestations that, the war-time emergency having passed, he was no longer needed and that he must go out into the world to recoup his shattered personal fortune. Accordingly he ceased to be director-general of the United States Railroad Administration on January 11, 1919, and was immediately succeeded by his right-hand assistant, Walker D. Hines, whom we have seen already as the one-time chairman of the board of the immensely important Santa Fé railway system.
Hines is in many ways the very antithesis of McAdoo. There is nothing dramatic or spectacular about him whatever. On the contrary he is what he began to be, a typical corporation lawyer, cool-headed, judicial, shrewd, and honest. He probably would tell you himself that he broadened a good deal down in the offices of the Railroad Administration. I could see the changes. He became vastly more human; his Washington experience seemed to quicken his sympathies and to broaden his understanding of men.
His job was vastly different from that of McAdoo. The job, like the man, now lacked fireworks. There were no longer troops and their munitions to be moved double-quick to the seaboard; instead there was the rather leisurely return of the boys in khaki to their homes. Industrial production across the land was slackening, not quickly but appreciably. Oddly enough, however, railroad revenues still were increasing; they were not to reach their peak until near the end of 1920. Total operating revenues of the Class I roads, which were $4,014,142,743 in 1917, and which had increased to $4,880,953,480 in 1918, came to $5,144,795,154 in 1919. In 1920 they reached, under the stimulus of tariff increases ranging from 20 to 50 per cent., the enormous summit total of $6,171,493,301. In the first ten months of 1921, the most recent figures at hand, they were but $4,672,651,346, as compared with $5,082,819,687 for the same ten months of 1920.
It was under the Hines administration that most of the national working agreements were made, to which the private railroad operators were to take such extreme exception after the return of the properties to their control. But again I must ask you to defer comment or criticism until we have taken up the entire question of railroad labor as a sizable problem by itself. It is enough to say here that Hines encountered a very considerable opposition when he raised wages generously, and raised rates not at all.
The fact remains, nevertheless, that Mr. Hines had in his stewardship a very thankless job at the best; it is always hard to follow a prima donna upon the stage. And McAdoo was some prima donna! Yet in loyalty and in energy Hines gave place to no one. He took the thankless job and made the best of it. He undermined his health by his devotion to it and received no praise from any quarter. His best reward must come in his own knowledge that, all in all, he did a good job, with difficult timber—the best of the subordinates of the Railroad Administration already were leaving it for future peace-time jobs of permanency—and with no encouragement whatsoever. And when the United States Railroad Administration ceased its active career upon March 1, 1920, and handed the railroads back to their owners for operation, I fancy that none was more rejoiced than Walker D. Hines.
What then was the net result of our first—and possibly our last—national experiment in the government operation of our huge railroad plant?
Even to-day, fully twenty-four months removed from the experiment itself, that is a difficult question to answer quickly and fairly. It is even difficult to say that, regarded merely as an experiment, it was a fair test. Certainly no laboratory expert deliberately would choose the critical final hours of a great war as an ideal time for dispassionate experimentation. It was in such hours that McAdoo, who was the head and front of the entire experiment, worked. When his successor came to high office the entire country was in the “let-down” that swept across the land as the very natural sequence of great national tension and endeavor.
The distinguished writer upon railroad economies, William J. Cunningham, James J. Hill professor of transportation at Harvard and himself for a time a subordinate executive of the Railroad Administration, does not believe that the experiment was a success. In a recent issue of the “Quarterly Journal of Economics” he says:
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