He is a calculating machine. He knows nothing of sentiment in business. Susceptible as he is to appeals to his own pocket, he never permits an invested nickel to be diverted from its duty of making more nickels.
—Seattle Post-Intelligencer
on James J. Hill
Sunday, February 27, 1910
St. Paul, Minnesota
The events unfolding in the Cascade Mountains were not meanwhile going unnoticed in the rest of the country. The massive storm system terrorizing the entire Pacific Northwest had become national news, monitored by newspaper readers from the East Coast to California. One person in particular was following the developments with a uniquely proprietary eye. James J. Hill, now seventy-one years of age, was no longer president of the railroad he’d created, but he was still its chairman. Already fabled in the industry for taking an active part in the daily operations of his company, he was now preparing to take an even more hands-on role than usual. Just the night before, his son Louis, the Great Northern’s president ever since the elder Hill’s resignation in 1907, had left with his family on a six-week vacation to California. In Louis’s absence, the Empire Builder himself was going to sit in for him. With the railroad’s main line to the West Coast locked down for the foreseeable future—disrupting freight and passenger traffic as well as delivery of the all-important U.S. mail—Hill was doubtless anticipating a rough few weeks.
The seventeen years since the completion of the Great Northern’s transcontinental line had been good to James J. Hill. His railroad empire had expanded steadily and inexorably, growing into one of the half dozen or so largest railroad networks in the country. Thanks to a frugal management philosophy and an unerring instinct for strategic acquisition, the former steamship clerk now controlled upwards of 20,000 miles of track in three major American railway systems (including roughly 7,000 in the Great Northern, 5,000 in the Northern Pacific, and 8,000 in the Burlington system). As one writer put it in 1907, “If the three [Hill] lines were placed end to end in a single track, they would reach from Seattle, across the continent, across the Atlantic, across Europe and Asia, to the eastern shores of China, where one might take one of Hill’s big Pacific line steamers and complete the trip to Seattle.”
By 1910, moreover, Hill’s fame and influence had reached far beyond the realm of transportation. He was practically an American institution by now. One of the last of the great railroad titans, he consulted with presidents, influenced trade and agricultural policy, and expounded regularly in the national media on everything from animal husbandry to international politics.
Yet for all his eminence, in recent years Hill had been finding it necessary to defend his achievements against an increasingly hostile American public. As Hill saw it, the nineteenth century’s noble virtues of individual enterprise and bold, visionary entrepreneurship had come under broad attack in the new century. Average Americans seemed to find only fault with the railroad industry and its leaders. Where once the Great Northern had been hailed as the economic savior of an entire region, it was now being reviled as something more like its economic demon.
Considering the enthusiasm with which railroads were first welcomed in many parts of the country—particularly in the West—the story of their fall from grace is especially disheartening. Once the general public had realized that railroads were not a ticket to automatic economic success, disenchantment had set in with a vengeance. As late as 1872, a railway brakeman could still make the claim that “any rail-road man was popular. The railroad meant prosperity to the community, and this reflected back in goodwill upon all railroad employees.” But by the end of the following decade, the romance with the rails had largely soured. As historian Robert H. Wiebe has written: “By the eighties [the railroads] had alienated a remarkable range of Americans: the farmer saw them as the arrogant manipulator of his profit, the smalltown entrepreneur as the destroyer of his dreams, the city businessman as the sinister ally of his competitors, the labor leader as a model of the callous, distant employer, and the principled gentleman as the source of unscrupulous wealth and political corruption.”
For this alienation of affection the railroads had no one to blame but themselves. Numerous financial scandals in the mid- to late nineteenth century, combined with rate and fare structures that struck many as arbitrary, inconsistent, exorbitant, and often downright vindictive, had eroded the public’s initial goodwill. The railroad barons themselves, meanwhile, were increasingly often perceived as arrogant opportunists who had enriched themselves at the expense of the communities their railroads were supposed to serve. As one dyspeptic latter-day observer would put it, the men who ran the railroads were little more than “buccaneers who took a positive delight in throttling the public interest, dragging it down a dark alley, raping it, and leaving it for dead.”
Whether this depiction of the so-called robber barons is accurate or hopelessly wrongheaded and biased (as some revisionist historians now claim), it is undeniably true that they were, as Stewart Holbrook has deftly suggested, men more noteworthy for their abilities than for their morals. In any case, the resentment against them eventually reached epidemic proportions, culminating most vividly in the publication of that orgy of anti-railroad indignation, Frank Norris’s 1901 novel The Octopus. According to Norris, the railroad was “a vast power, huge, terrible … leaving blood and destruction in its path.” The fact that the novel’s sensationalistic plot was based on actual historical events—the Southern Pacific’s bloody conflict with wheat farmers in the 1880 Mussel Slough tragedy—lent an air of credence to this indictment. To Norris—and to an increasing number of disillusioned Americans—the railroad had become nothing less than “the soulless force, the ironhearted power, the monster, the colossus, the octopus.”
This was, needless to say, an exaggeration. And certainly there had been plenty of attempts over the years to fight the railroads’ growing power. Not long after the Civil War, several state and local legislatures had taken arms against the industry, using a weapon rarely employed in that laissez-faire era: governmental regulation. With the passage of the Granger Laws of the 1870s, legislators had tried to impose controls on railroad operations and end discriminatory practices.
These attempts, however, had proved short-lived. As an inherently interstate business (and one rich enough to hire very able lawyers), the railroad industry had been successful in overturning these early laws in the courts. The first real federal attempts at regulation—in particular, the creation of the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1887—had also been hampered by well-funded legal harassments. (“Hoh, yes, the Interstate Commerce Commission,” an anti-railroad farmer remarks scornfully in The Octopus. “The greatest Punch and Judy show on earth.”) But as the new century began, laws to give the ICC some bite were eventually passed. The Hepburn Act of 1906 empowered the agency not only to regulate but also, to an extent, to set actual rates and fares, a power that was further augmented by the Mann-Elkins Act of 1910 (which was a few months from passage as the Seattle Express stood stranded in the snow at Wellington).
Naturally, such laws infuriated Jim Hill, who attributed their passage to the influence of “a lot of doctrinaires … mainly either politicians seeking office or college tack-head philosophers and preachers.” To his way of thinking, all of this hostility toward the railroads was just so much political grandstanding. “It really seems hard,” he wrote in 1902, “when we look back at what we have done in opening the country and carrying at the lowest rates, that we should be compelled to fight political adventurers who have never done anything but pose and draw a salary.”
One such political adventurer was Hill’s special nemesis. President Theodore Roosevelt, a man with a strength of personality to match even that of the Empire Builder himself, clashed with Hill in a confrontation that came to be emblematic of this new attitude toward the railroads and other big businesses. Shortly after rising to the presidency upon William McKinley’s assassination in 1901, Roosevelt had decided that it was time to do something about the increasing power of the enormous trusts and holding companies that had been multiplying at an alarming rate in the final years of the Gilded Age. “The conscience of business had to be aroused,” Roosevelt would later explain. “The authority of the government over big as well as small had to be asserted.” Whether his subsequent efforts were motivated by true moral rectitude or by cynical political opportunism, the results were to be enormously troublesome for the so-called Moses of the Northwestern Wilderness. For the trust that Roosevelt chose to bust first was that great octopus of the Northwest—the vast and ever-growing railway empire of James J. Hill.
Roosevelt’s attack took the form of a federal lawsuit against an attempted combination of Hill’s three major railroad systems—the Great Northern, the Northern Pacific, and the Burlington—under the umbrella of a separate entity called the Northern Securities Company. This combination, which was the brainchild of Hill, E. H. Harriman, J. Pierpont Morgan, and the Rockefeller interests, would have created a holding company so enormous (second in size only to U.S. Steel) as to be all but impervious to corporate raiding. The deal was hardly easy in the making. In a struggle between Hill and Harriman over the Northern Pacific and the Burlington early in 1901, the two titans caused a stock-market panic that only Morgan’s millions were able to reverse. Compromise was eventually reached, however, and on November 13, 1901, the world first learned of this mighty thing that Hill and his associates had made. As a writer subsequently quipped in the magazine Life: “God made the World in 4004 B.C., but it was reorganized in 1901 by James J. Hill, J. Pierpont Morgan, and John D. Rockefeller.”
Even if God had no objection to this reorganization of His world, however, Theodore Roosevelt did. Believing Northern Securities vulnerable to attack, the president instructed his attorney general to file suit against the combination under the auspices of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. The reaction from Hill was predictable: He wanted to fight. The barbarian hordes of government regulators, led by their yawping chieftain in the White House, were not about to tell Jim Hill how to run his own railroads. So whereas Morgan and Harriman were inclined to settle the case, the Empire Builder was adamant, determined to do battle with what he regarded as “the newly established court at Washington, with all its tinsel and red-stockinged and gilded flunkies.”
The Northern Securities case ultimately went on for two years, occupying so much of Hill’s attention that his family and associates began to worry aloud about his obsessive preoccupation with it. But his long fight was to no avail. The suit was eventually upheld by the Supreme Court, and the combination was duly undone. Hill, chastened but unbowed, tried to make light of the setback. (“The three railroads are still there,” he would later say, “earning good money”) And there are some historians—Hill’s biographer Albro Martin among them—who maintain that Roosevelt chose Northern Securities as a target since busting it would make him look like a crusading reformer while not doing much actual harm to capitalist interests. Still, the suit did achieve at least one objective: encouraging the nation, as Richard Hofstadter has put it, “to feel at last that the President of the United States was really bigger and more powerful than Morgan and the Morgan interests, that the country was governed from Washington and not from Wall Street.”
For Hill, the case was a grim lesson in the new politics of the Progressive Era. He still had control of his three railroads, but (to quote railroad historian Kurt Armbruster) “he would henceforth find Uncle Sam in the fireman’s seat.” At least Hill could console himself with the thought that the much-despised Roosevelt was finally gone from the White House. By February 1910, the ex-president was about as safely out of the way as he could be, on a hunting safari in Africa (where, as Morgan famously remarked, “I trust some lion will do its duty”).
Not that Roosevelt’s successor was much better. William Howard Taft, who had assumed the presidency in 1909, may have been a man more to Hill’s conservative tastes, but he was, by Hill’s lights, “a platter of mush, a jellyfish,” too likely to be influenced by grandstanding reformers unfriendly to big business. This new president was also proving dangerously susceptible to foolishness in a matter that was to turn quite troublesome for Hill over the next few weeks—namely, a three-month-old strike of railway switchmen that may have played a larger role in creating the Wellington crisis than anyone in the company would ever afterward admit.
Their strike is a modern repetition, in the industrial field, of the little band of 300 Greeks of ancient times, standing off the countless hordes of Persians at the Pass of Thermopylae.
—Seattle Union Record,
on the switchmen’s strike
The ongoing switchmen’s strike was probably not the main thing on Hill’s mind as he took up the reins of the company in his son’s absence. Certainly there was plenty of other pressing business for him to be thinking about (including talk of a possible firemen’s strike that would make the switchmen’s walkout look like a mere inconvenience). Whether or not Hill realized it, though, the controversy with the switchmen was soon to provoke—or at least exacerbate—a major public relations fiasco connected to the mess at Stevens Pass. With the idling of those four rotaries and the near-total exhaustion of the coal supply at Wellington, certain questions would inevitably be raised about the company’s preparedness for such a crisis. Specifically, the missed delivery of extra coal that now sat in the Leavenworth yard was bound to be cited as an indication of how the railroad’s refusal to deal fairly with the switchmen had hindered its operations. After all, while the responsibility for getting those four cars of coal to Wellington may have been that of the chief dispatcher, the actual work of attaching them to a westbound train would have been a switchman’s job.
The strike had begun some three months earlier, on November 30, 1909. The switchmen’s demands had been relatively modest—a six-cent-per-hour raise, along with a few other concessions. From the very start, though, the Great Northern had been rigid in its refusal to entertain such a notion. “We will fight,” president Louis Hill had announced at the outset of the conflict. “We carried the men through the financial depression [of 1907] without a cut in pay. Every five years or so we have to meet this question and now it is time to settle.”
Negotiations were energetic, but neither side proved willing to compromise, and so the union went out. Not all of the GN’s switchmen honored the strike, but enough did to force high company officials—including superintendent O’Neill himself—to leave their offices and help out in yards throughout the western divisions. And though rail traffic throughout the West was severely crippled for several days, the Great Northern soon had matters well in hand.
“We are getting in better shape every hour,” general manager J. M. Gruber announced to the papers on December 4. “New men are going to work right along. In fact, we now have more men in St. Paul and Minneapolis than we need. We will ship some of them tonight to Seattle and Tacoma, the only two points on the system where they are needed. The paralysis of traffic is practically over.”
In the months since then, the striking switchmen had been hanging on, but barely. Sporadic violence had broken out, once even in Leaven-worth, but the railroad was making do, using strikebreakers and other scab labor to get the job done. Chairman Hill, for his part, was adding fuel to the conflagration by mocking the alleged inadequacy of workers’ wages: “Half the problem of the high cost of living lies in the discretion of the housewife,” he told reporters in New York in January. “If a housewife, instead of standing in front of the telephone to order the family supplies, would go to market and learn what foods are cheapest and what are dear, there would be less of this kind of talk. As I have said before, the high cost of living is the cost of living high.” This comment may not quite qualify as a 1910 version of “Let them eat cake,” but it does show a distinctly unsympathetic attitude toward labor in a season of suddenly rising prices (and at a time when the GN was experiencing its most profitable year ever).
Certainly Hill’s railroad had throughout its history earned a reputation as a less than generous employer. The Great Northern was reviled among railroaders for charging high boarding rates while at the same time paying below-average wages. Hill, who claimed to believe that “organized labor is socialistic,” had a straightforward philosophy about wages: they were to be set at the sole discretion of management, with absolutely no interference from outside sources such as national unions. “Why,” he once famously remarked, “should I have to pay a fireman six dollars a day for work that a Chinaman would do for fifty cents?”
Hill had paid for this anti-labor attitude more than once over the years. Shortly after the line through Stevens Pass had been completed in 1893, for instance, Hill had used a spreading nationwide depression as an opportunity to cut wages no fewer than three times over the space of seven months. This had prompted a strike against the Great Northern that eventually became so disruptive that Hill called on President Grover Cleveland to send in federal troops to restore order. Cleveland refused (unlike in the soon-to-follow Pullman strike) and the issues at stake were eventually resolved by arbitration, but not before the strike had generated plenty of animosity toward the defiant Hill. “It would be a fitting climax,” one bitter correspondent wrote to him afterward, “if you should be taken by your employees and hung by the neck till dead, from one of the triumphal arches so recently erected at the expense of the very people you are now defrauding of their hard earnings. … I send this to your wife in order that it may strike you in your home.”
By 1910, of course, Hill was no longer as closely involved in the GN’s labor conflicts, having given up the president’s post three years earlier. But with the current president now making his way toward the Casa Lomo Hotel in Redmond, California, the aging chairman would find himself once again dealing with the labor problems his policies had created. Although there had been signs in recent weeks that the switchmen were near capitulation in their strike, the current crisis in the Cascades was apparently giving them a new issue with which to rejuvenate their cause. Within days, the press committee of the switchmen’s union would be taking advantage of the situation, publishing broadsides in the Seattle Union Record attributing the long entrapment of train No. 25’s passengers to the deranging effects of the strike. In an attempt to lift the blockade before it got any worse, general manager J. M. Gruber was planning to head west to Washington State that very morning to try to assist superintendent O’Neill in person. With him would go some of the top operating officials in the company, including G. H. Emerson, the superintendent of traffic and motive power. Along the way, they would also pick up scores of extra men and several trainloads of extra equipment—whatever was required to get the railroad moving again.
Regardless of how the crisis was eventually resolved, however, the Great Northern was not likely to emerge from the situation in the Cascades with its reputation unscathed, and this could not have been a pleasant prospect to the old man at 240 Summit Avenue in St. Paul. At seventy-one, James J. Hill had to be thinking about the legacy he would be leaving upon his death. That legacy, while certainly as impressive as ever, had been damaged more than once recently in the eyes of the public. He would not have wanted his railroad’s name—or its sacred bottom line—to sustain any more harm.