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Stalled Professionalism: The Recruitment of Railway Officials in the United States, 1885–1940*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 June 2012

Stuart Morris
Stuart Morris
Affiliation:
Lecturer in American History, University of Manchester
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Abstract

Professor Morris' investigation of American railway management indicates that the railroads, which had been such innovative institutions in the nineteenth century, clung to ossified and outmoded managerial practices after the industry reached maturity. Inbred and inflexible systems of recruitment and promotion, he argues, were a noteworthy aspect of the economic decline of American railroads in the twentieth century.

Type
Research Article
Information
Business History Review , Volume 47 , Issue 3 , Autumn 1973 , pp. 317 - 334
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 1973

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References

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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