Battle in the West

Journalistic Homers have sung for years the deeds of the Eastern trunk lines in their unceasing consolidation battles. Last week they smote a new chord on their lyres, began a new canto of the railroad epic. They turned to the West and the great Western railroads. In San Francisco last week sat Charles D. Mahaffie, Interstate Commerce Commissioner. Before him came Ralph Budd, President of the Great Northern, Paul Shoup, President of the Southern Pacific, Arthur Curtiss James, Western Pacific Board Chairman, Harry M. Adams, Western Pacific President, and some 200 other witnesses and parties in the case. All these persons came before Commissioner Mahaffie either to support or to denounce the building of 200 miles of railroad tracks in Oregon and California. Location and not length makes the proposed line important. It would connect two powerful allies, the Great Northern and the Western Pacific. Vigorously fighting these two roads on the question of the new line is the Southern Pacific, backed by its ally, the Union Pacific.

Achilles in this canto of the railroad epic is played by Arthur Curtiss James of the Western Pacific. Bearded, eye-glassed, urbane, he is known for different things to different people. To Manhattan socialites he is the host of a huge granite mansion on Park Avenue at 69th Street. To yachtsmen, he is the able and enthusiastic skipper of the famed square-rigged yacht, Aloha. To many a rich old lady he is vice president of Phelps-Dodge Co. To flower fanciers he is known for the unique arrangement of his Park Avenue mansion: the bedrooms open on a central hothouse filled with orchids, whose perfume lulls to sleep and soothingly awakens the James household. But to railroad men, and to the general public, Arthur Curtiss James is the man who owns more railroad stocks than any one else in the country. Great are his holdings in the Great Northern--Northern Pacific--Chicago, Burlington & Quincy group. His Western Pacific holdings are even more extensive. Strangely, in this present battle he is the largest stockholder of his foremost opponent, the Southern Pacific.

The line that Mr. James wants to build runs parallel to the coast, about 175 miles inland, from Klamath Falls, Ore., to Paxton, Calif. Only one through route, the Southern Pacific, exists between the Pacific Northwest and San Francisco. The James extension would join the Great Northern and the Western Pacific into a second, and in some ways much superior, through route. Said Mr. James last week to Commissioner Mahaffie and the 200 witnesses and participants in the case: "I saw in the transportation and industrial situation in central and northern California an opportunity to carry on a constructive work which would be of real value to the country, through the strengthening and expansion of the Western Pacific. Having come to this conclusion, I bought control of the Western Pacific. . . . I see in northern California an opportunity to play my part in the constructive development of a great region. . . ."

Hector to Mr. James's Achilles is played by Paul Shoup, of the Southern Pacific. There is no abler railroad head than quiet-voiced Paul Shoup, who began his career as a small-town newspaper correspondent* and is rounding it out as President of the 20,000-mile Southern Pacific system. He is Hectoring Mr. James on the Klamath-Paxton extension because of the serious competitive threat to the Southern Pacific in a second through route along the North Pacific coast. The new line, claims Mr. Shoup, is "an invasion" of a territory (northern California) that belongs to the Southern Pacific by right of prior development.

True to the epic tradition, mighty ghosts hover behind the two heroes. Behind Mr. James is the late great James Jerome Hill, who 20 years ago planned some day to connect Great Northern with the Western Pacific. Behind Mr. Shoup is the late great Edward H. Harriman, who 20 years ago controlled both the Union Pacific and the Southern Pacific. Today, as two decades ago, the "Hill roads" are lined up against the "Harriman roads" in the West. The four systems now battling before Commissioner Mahaffie over a 200-mile extension push their combined 45,000 miles of track into every state West of the Mississippi.

*He still admits "an itch to push a pencil," regrets that the Sunset Magazine, which he founded in his 20's as a Southern Pacific house organ, was so successful that it was long since sold to an outside publisher.