Supreme Pleasure

With conservative railroad executives the least popular member of the Interstate Commerce Commission is Joseph Bartlett Eastman of Massachusetts. They consider him "dangerously radical." Vainly did they implore President Hoover not to reappoint him. Last week in Manhattan Commissioner Eastman, twelve years in office, made a speech about government ownership which explained in part why railmen dislike him. Excerpts:

". . . Government in business is not an idea that I view with alarm if the business is of such a nature that it cannot be carried on by private enterprise without an elaborate system of public regulation.

"Being somewhat in advance of the times I have an abiding conviction that the sound and sensible way to carry on such a business is for the Government to assume complete responsibility for it. . . .

"I'm not prepared to say this country is ripe for such ideas now and still less for their execution. Therefore I shall not press such Bolshevistic suggestions but merely record them in order that I may some day have that supreme pleasure, if I live long enough, of saying 'I told you so.' "

The carriers' move for increased freight rates to offset reduced earnings and avert wage cuts got up more steam last week. Following the Chicago meeting of the Association of Railway Executives for the same purpose (TIME, May 18), 40 members of the Eastern Railroads' Presidents' Conference gathered in Manhattan, named a committee to petition the I. C. C. for a general revision of the rate structure. To the support of the executives came Labor (weekly), official mouthpiece for the 1,800,000 members of the four great railroad brotherhoods. As holders of $1,200,000,000 in rail bonds, the National Association of Mutual Savings Banks meeting in Washington last week endorsed "all endeavors which may be made by the railroad companies to restore their earnings to a normal basis."

The I. C. C. expected the carriers would ask, besides rate upping for long hauls, for sharp cuts on short hauls where they compete directly with motor trucks. So desperate is the railroads' fight against bus & truck competition that fortnight ago before the I. C. C., Reading Co. made a horrid example of its own motorbus subsidiary as a beneficiary of undertaxation.

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