¹ Prior to 1900, aside from the patronage machines of urban politics, the only convincing domestic model of complex bureaucratic growth was provided by the railways. The railways led in the furtherance of the business virtues of order and regularity. For the development of bureaucratic forms of administration by the American railways, see Chandler, Alfred D. Jr., Strategy and Structure (Cambridge, Mass., 1962)Google Scholar, and The Railroads: The Nation's First Big Business (New York, 1965)Google Scholar. Aside from detailed working rules and an operational hierarchy of control, the railways gave rise to an elaborate intraindustry associationalism of a quasi-professional character. The Master Mechanics' Association was organized in 1867, the Master Car Builders' Association in 1866, the American Roadmasters' Association in 1883, the Car Accountants' Association in 1876, and the American Association of Railway Accountants in 1888. The American Railway Association was formed in the same year. By 1900 the superintendents, the freight claim agents, the travelling engineers, the telegraph superintendents, the superintendents of buildings and bridges, all had their annual meetings. Even the American Bar Association began as a meeting of railroad attorneys. See also Crease, D. L., “Organizations of Railway Employees,” Outlook, LXXXVI (July 6, 1907), 503–510Google Scholar.

² Biographical Directory of the Railway Officials of America (Chicago and New York, 1885), iiiGoogle Scholar.

³ “Railroad Organization,” Railroad Gazette, XII (1880), 358–59Google Scholar, quoted in Jenks, L. H., “Early History of a Railway Organization,” Business History Review, XXXV (Summer, 1961), 155Google Scholar. See also Overton, Richard C., Burlington Route (New York, 1965), 180–81. Charles Elliott Perkins reminded his subordinates that it was up to every official “to see that, in the ranks below him, men are growing up who can take the responsible places now filled by himself and others.”Google Scholar

⁴ It remained the boast that “the men who rule them have fought their way up by sheer force of ability and energy.” The “beginning” of the railway president was “usually in the telegraph office, the machine shop, or in the freight yard.” Morris, F., “The Rulers of the Great American Railways,” Munsey's Magazine, XXIII (September, 1900), 773Google Scholar.

⁵ Theodore Roosevelt to Henry Cabot Lodge, Buffalo, N.Y., September 9, 1901, in Selections from Roosevelt-Lodge Correspondence, 1884–1918 (New York, 1925), I, 499Google Scholar.

⁶ Eaton, J. Shirley, “Educational Training for Railway Service,” Ch. 17, U.S. Department of the Interior, Report of the Commissioner of Education, 1898–99 (Washington, 1900), 941. “In business,” Eaton wrote, “he stands for the promptitude, precision, and infallibility of the great corporation which he represents.”Google Scholar

⁷ Johnson, Walter, ed., Selected Letters of William Allen White (New York, 1947), 158Google Scholar.

₈ Cottrell, Fred, The Railroader (Stanford, 1940), 83Google Scholar.

⁹ French, Chauncey Del, Railroadman (New York, 1938), 60–61Google Scholar.

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¹¹ Haines, H. S., American Railway Management (New York, 1897), 139Google Scholar.

¹² Interstate Commerce Commission, Twenty-third Annual Report on the Statistics of Railways, June 3, 1910 (Washington, 1912), 33Google Scholar, and Rules Governing the Classification of Steam Railway Employees (Washington, 1915)Google Scholar.

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¹⁴ Progressivism — And After (New York, 1914), 38Google Scholar.

¹⁵ County, A. J., “The Desirability of a College Education for Railroad Work,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, XXVIII (July, 1906), 128Google Scholar.

¹⁶ Eaton, “Educational Training for Railway Service,” 873.

¹⁷ A survey of fifty-three railway presidents in the 1870s shows that twenty-five of them assumed the post with no prior experience of railroading. See Crandall, Barbara, “American Railroad Presidents in the 1870's: Their Backgrounds and Careers,” Explorations in Entrepreneurial History, II (July, 1950), 282–295Google Scholar. See also Chandler, Alfred D. Jr., “The Railroads: Pioneers in Modern Corporate Management,” Business History Review, XXXIX (Spring, 1965), 38Google Scholar, and Kirkland, Edward C., Men, Cities, and Transportation (Cambridge, Mass., 1948), II, 452–75Google Scholar.

¹⁸ Drift and Mastery (New York, 1914), 45Google Scholar.

¹⁹ The Modem Corporation and Private Property (New York, 1932), 70–90Google Scholar.

²⁰ “The Business Elite in Business Bureaucracies,” in Miller, William, ed., Men in Business (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), 286–306Google Scholar.

²¹ “In 1872 Oscar G. Murray entered the services of the Galveston, Houston and Henderson as ticket agent at Galveston, Texas. In the next eight years promotion was steady, and 1880 found him general freight and passenger agent of the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe.” Then he became traffic manager of the Missouri Pacific lines in Texas, and also of the Texas & Pacific. From September 1881 to October 1888, he was freight traffic manager of all the Missouri Pacific lines, a position he resigned to accept a similar one with the Big Four and the Chesapeake & Ohio. From 1892 to 1896 he was second vice-president. “When the system was placed in the hands of the court he was appointed as one of the receivers, and helped pull the road through its troubles. In 1904 he became president of the system and also of the Baltimore and Ohio South-western, the position which he occupies at the present time.” “Climbing the Ladder,” The Railroad Man's Magazine, I (December, 1906), 480Google Scholar.

²² “Rising from the Ranks,” The Railroad Man's Magazine, I (November, 1906), 481Google Scholar. See also The Confessions of a Railroad Man (New York, 1904), Ch. 10Google Scholar, “Climbing to the Top,” 150–59. Railway work in America was “one long apprenticeship,” and “after years of hard work” there came to the “intelligent, earnest and capable man the hope that he will reach a position of responsibility, and of corresponding remuneration, to reward him for his struggle.” County, “Desirability of a College Education,” 128.

²³ Since many clerks went on to become telegraph operators, the figures understate the number of clerical and commercial employees who progressed from telegraph operator to trainmaster (or yardmaster), with the possibility of a further promotion to a division superintendency.

²⁴ Henig, Harry, The Brotherhood of Railway Clerks (New York, 1937), 19Google Scholar.

²⁵ Mclsaac, Archibald M., The Order of Railroad Telegraphers (Princeton, 1933), 19Google Scholar.

²⁶ Locomotive Firemen's Magazine (1902), 3. Quoted in Henig, The Brotherhood of Railway Clerks, II.

²⁷ Eaton, “Educational Training for Railway Service,” 875.

²⁸ Proceedings of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, XXVII (May, 1908), 484Google Scholar. On the Pennsylvania Railroad, civil engineering remained the main avenue of managerial promotion. Many division superintendents were civil engineers, and of the seven presidents between 1880 and 1940, five started out as rodmen or chainmen, the major exception having passed through the Altoona shops as an apprentice and having begun work as an assistant road foreman. See Burgess, George H. and Kennedy, Miles C., Centennial History of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, 1846–1946 (Philadelphia, 1949)Google Scholar. On special apprentices at the Altoona shops see Tyson, J. Aubrey, “The Making of Railway Officials,” Munsey's Magazine, XXX (March, 1904), 868–872Google Scholar, and Railway World, L (December 14, 1906), 1076Google Scholar.

²⁹ Eaton, “Educational Training for Railway Service,” 875.

³⁰ Stringer, Arthur, Power (Indianapolis, 1925)Google Scholar.

³¹ In 1940, 84 per cent of the heads of engineering and maintenance in thirty-one of the largest and most important railways were graduates of schools of engineering. See Dunn, Paul C., The Selection and Training of Railroad Supervisors (Cambridge, Mass., 1942), 40Google Scholar.

³² See Newcomer, Mable, “The Chief Executive of Large Business Corporations,” Explorations in Entrepreneurial History, V (October, 1952), 1–33Google Scholar.

³³ See, for example, “Attorneys at Railroading,” Railway Age, CXXXXVII (July 27, 1959)Google Scholar.

³⁴ A 1960 study of the background of senior officials in French state-owned enterprises showed that the top 159 men in the S.N.C.F. had all received higher education, 111 of them at the Ecole Polytechnique, the training school for France's scientific and engineering elite. This was a much higher proportion than in any other branch of public industry. See Delefortrie-Soubeyroux, Nicole, Les Dirigeants de L'Industrie Française, Recherches sur L'Economie Française, No. 6 (Paris, 1960), 127, 131, 172–180Google Scholar. In marked contrast to the United States, this predominance of engineers, and especially graduates of the Polytechnique, was in large measure continuous with the development of the French railways from their state-subsidized beginnings in the 1840s and 1850s.

³⁵ Dunn, Selection and Training of Railroad Supervisors, 47.

³⁶ Reports of the Mosely Educational Commission (London, 1904)Google Scholar, Report of R. Blair, 59.

³⁷ According to Paul C. Dunn, writing in 1942, with the known exceptions of the Southern, the Pennsylvania, and the Chesapeake and Ohio, the American railways replenished “their organization from time to time by what might be called an informal ‘hit or miss’ method of recruiting civil engineers and placing them as rodmen, instrumentmen, draftsmen, or engineering assistants.” Dunn, Selection and Training of Railroad Supervisors, 11.

³⁸ See Rothstein, William G., “The American Association of Engineers,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review, XXII (October, 1968), 48–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁹ Gormley, M. J., “Railroading as a Career for College Men,” Railway Age, LXXXVIII (June 21, 1930), 1548Google Scholar P16. The railways expected the college man to start on an equal footing with the non-college man. Conversely, college students came to look upon the railroad industry as “the single isolated example in business where the old line system of appprenticeship” still prevailed. Since the attraction of this kind of apprenticeship decreased as alternative opportunities multiplied, the railways were confronted with the college man's “enormous impatience.” See letter to the Railway Age Gazette, LXXXVII (November, 1913), 580–81Google Scholar. Railway leaders found it impossible to satisfy him “either with a routine of work or with normal increases of pay, or promotions.” They mixed exhortations to “stick it and make good” with sour criticism of “the fellow with the useless rudder, the defective compass, or the broken-down engine that gets on the rocks of discontent.”

⁴⁰ “The Special Apprentice,” Railroad Gazette, XXXVI (March 25, 1904), 223–24Google Scholar.

⁴¹ On the tension between ordinary machinists and special apprentices, see three letters to the American Engineering and Railroad Journal, LXXVI (March, 1902), 82Google Scholar, (April, 1902), 113, and LXXVII (June, 1903), 241.

⁴² See “The Special Apprentice,” American Engineering and Railroad Journal, LXXVII (April, 1903), 140Google Scholar and also letter to Railway Age, LXXX (March 27, 1926), 891Google Scholar. “One of the most discouraging sights to the newly admitted college man,” noted the Railway Age letter, “is that of individuals who have been in the service of the railroad for many years but who have never advanced in the scale of responsibility.”

⁴³ “Mechanical Engineers in the Railroad Industry,” Railway Mechanical Engineering, CI (February, 1927), 93–95Google Scholar. Significantly, at Wisconsin railway work remained part of the civil engineering course, and the Professor of Railway Engineering was a civil engineer.

⁴⁴ Ibid., and Dunn, Selection and Training of Railroad Supervisors, 40, 14. In 1926 only 43.8 per cent and in 1940 only 40 per cent, of the heads of mechanical departments were college graduates. In 1940 one railroad found that less than 25 per cent of their special apprentices had stayed with the company and that only 4 per cent had become successful supervisors. The railways came to rely increasingly upon their own schemes of apprenticeship training. See Morris, J. V. L., Employee Training (New York, 1921), 167–174Google Scholar.

⁴⁵ Editorial in Railroad Gazette, LV (November 7, 1913), 851Google Scholar. In terms of general administration this view is supported by a 1924 survey of the general officers of thirty-two railroads whose presidents or chairmen were members of the Executive Committee of the Association of Railway Executives. Whereas forty-one of forty-seven law officers were college graduates, only seventeen of forty-nine operating vice-presidents and general managers, and six of forty-six traffic vice-presidents and freight traffic managers, were college men. See Proceedings of the American Economic Association, XV (March, 1925), 70–71Google Scholar. See also Railway Systems and Management Association, Railroad Career Development (Chicago, 1965), 47Google Scholar. A writer in the latter source observed, “I suspect that with certain exceptions, railroads are not quite accustomed to too many college graduates in the mainstream of management — and in fact still lag behind industry in general.”

⁴⁶ See, for example, Thwing, Charles F., College Education and the Business Man (New York, 1904)Google Scholar.

⁴⁷ Young, J. T., “Business and Science,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, XXVIII (July, 1906), 32Google Scholar.

⁴⁸ See, for example, “Railway Education,” address to the St. Louis Railway Club, January 12, 1906. Reprinted in Dewsnup, E. R. (ed.), Railway Organization and Working (Chicago, 1906)Google Scholar, and Person, H. S., “Education for Business,” Annals of the A.A.P.S.S., XXVIII (July, 1906), 105Google Scholar.

⁴⁹ Bossard, James H. S. and Dewhurst, J. Frederick, University Education for Business (Philadelphia, 1931), 192CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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⁵¹ See Harvard Business School Association Directories, 1916 and 1930.

⁵² “Training Understudies for Official Positions,” Railway Age, LXXXII (February 26, 1927), 574–76Google Scholar.

⁵³ See Dozier, Howard D., “Why Do Not College Men Enter Railroading?,” Railway Age, LXXV (July 7, 1923), 19–20Google Scholar. “In the constant stream of representatives of business” who by the 1920s were “scouting the college campuses of the country from January to July looking for recruits,” Dozier wrote, the railroad man was “conspicuously absent.” See also Daniels, Winthrop M., “Can Railroads Use the Universities?,” Railway Age, LXXVIII (May 2, 1925), 1083–85Google Scholar; “College Men and Railway Service,” Railway Age, LXXVIII (February 7, 1925), 375–76Google Scholar; and the very discouraging picture painted by the Yale careers handbook, The Choice of an Occupation (New Haven, Conn., 1929), 225Google Scholar.

⁵⁴ Report on “Railroad Traffic Organization” by the Federal Co-ordinator of Transportation, as cited by Cunningham, William J., The Present Railroad Crisis (Philadelphia, 1939), 44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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⁵⁷ Dunn, Selection and Training of Railroad Supervisors, 37.

⁵⁸ Ibid., 39.

⁵⁹ Bureaucracy and Trusteeship in Large Corporations, 46. It was suggested that “the unprogressiveness of railroad management in service, pricing, and operational policies may well be due to some extent to the decreased mental and physical vigor of those at the top, although doubtless there is more than this in the picture as a whole.”

⁶⁰ Overton, Burlington Route, 549. Daniel Willard became president of the Baltimore & Ohio in 1910 at the age of forty-nine, and he retired in 1941 at the age of eighty.

⁶¹ “The usual superiority of private management,” declared sociologist Giddings, Franklin H., “becomes conspicuous in great emergencies. The energy displayed by the Pennsylvania Railroad, in re-establishing its through traffic after the Johnstown flood, was something not to be expected of any governmental maangement that we are acquainted with at present.” Democracy and Empire (New York, 1900), 151Google Scholar. See also Adams, Brooks, America's Economic Supremacy (New York, 1900), 48Google Scholar.

⁶² “Efficient Railroad Management,” quoted in Haines, American Railway Management, 177–78. See also Adams, Charles Francis Jr., “The State and the Railroads,” Atlantic Monthly, XXXVII (March, 1876), 360–371Google Scholar, and Royse, C. A., “Will Public-Ownership Increase or Diminish Political Corruption?,” Arena, XXXVIII (October, 1907), 373–384Google Scholar.

⁶³ Address by Samuel O. Dunn to the Buffalo Club, Buffalo, New York, March 30, 1918. Reprinted in Railway Age, (April 15, 1918), and in Phelps, Edith M., Selected Articles on Government Ownership of Railroads (New York, 1920) 154–162Google Scholar.

⁶⁴ See Government Ownership or Government Control of Railroads (New York, 1919), 9–11Google Scholar.

⁶⁵ Wilgus, William J., “Making a Choice of a Profession — VIII Railroading,” Cosmopolitan, XXXV (August, 1903), 462–65Google Scholar.

⁶⁶ Cottrell, The Railroader, 84–87.

⁶⁷ See Martin, Albro, Enterprise Denied: Origins of the Decline of American Railroads, 1897–1917 (New York, 1971)Google Scholar.

⁶⁸ Woodruff, Robert E., A Guide to the Making of a Railroad Officer (New York, 1925)Google Scholar. The following is an example of Woodruff's brand of managerial advice: “Work in shops is so diversified that almost any type of man can be utilized in a large shop. Consideration should be given to putting concave and brunette types on work in which there is considerable routine; convex and blonde types on work calling for initiative and resourcefulness.”

⁶⁹ Roberts, Frank, “What is Wrong with Railroad Management?” Railway Mechanical Engineer, 94 (March, 1920), 137–140Google Scholar. “The authority is too far removed to be efficient. Everybody must see his superior and get official authority before he can act and the different departments and divisions do not co-operate properly to make railroad work attractive or efficient.” See also Clapp, E. J., “An American Transportation System,” New Republic. XXIX (February 1, 1922), 267Google Scholar.