-
9. Private Enterprise and Public Regulation: Safety between the Wars, 1922–1939
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Normalcy for the railroads did not arrive immediately with the end of World War I. The year 1919 brought an inflationary bubble, while the U.S. Railroad Administration returned the carriers to private hands in March 1920. Comparative stability finally returned in 1922, but the good times lasted only about eight years until 1929 ushered in a decade that for the railroads can only be termed catastrophic. Yet these tumultuous conditions had far less impact on safety than the longer-term forces that had been reducing accidents for decades. By the early 1920s passenger traffic was declining while freight faced new competition from trucks, waterways, and pipelines. Employers’ liability and workers’ compensation laws had ballooned injury costs while wage pressures by the brotherhoods along with ICC rate regulation contributed to the profit squeeze. The carriers responded in predictable ways. Reducing all types of accidents became a corporate goal that was institutionalized in both the ARA and individual safety departments. Especially in the 1920s, many lines made major investments to improve safety and efficiency. In addition, the carriers and their suppliers expanded and institutionalized research efforts, leading to a host of important but incremental technological improvements. In accord with the informal safety compact that had emerged, the ICC intervened sparingly in these events, but it did mandate a large-scale experiment with train control and helped force major improvements in rail and brake technology. 9 PrivateEnterpriseandPublicRegulation SafetybetweentheWars,1922–1939 It is of course recognized that improvements in the roadbed [and], bridges . . . must be made . . . but at the same time there must be progress in methods of protecting trains [from collisions]. —Interstate Commerce Commission, 1925 The basic principle which should govern all expenditures . . . is . . . to secure the greatest possible return per dollar spent. —ICC Commissioner Frank McManamy in dissent, 1925 237 238 DeathRodetheRails As a result of these forces, the social costs of railroading (measured as fatalities per unit of output) continued to decline. Safety for workers and passengers improved steadily throughout the interwar years, and so railroad safety largely disappeared from popular view, becoming instead the province of regulators, unions, and managers. The automobile also powerfully shaped safety, but in contradictory ways, reducing trespassing but enormously magnifying crossing accidents and transforming them into a public and ultimately a federal matter. The carriers’ deteriorating finances also brought into the open a conflict between economic and safety regulation that would grow in the postwar decades. SafetyOrganizationsandPersonnelManagement The USRA had given safety work a powerful boost and legitimized it to the brotherhoods.The unions had largely dismissed the carriers’earlier efforts as a public relations smoke screen and as H. R. Lake, trainmaster on the Santa Fe, later recalled, their refusal to cooperate had doomed early safety work on his line. When the carriers returned to private control they determined not to make this mistake again.In 1920 Richard Aishton became president of the ARA; he was committed to better safety, having been general manager on the North Western when Ralph Richards began his campaign. In mid-1921 the ARA took over the safety section from the USRA, while Isaac Hale, the Santa Fe’s chief of safety, met repeatedly with the brotherhoods, gaining the support of the Trainmen and some of the other unions as well. Yet while safety men pursued labor’s blessing they rarely invited the unions into their councils. Although President William G. Lee of the Trainmen sometimes spoke at safety conventions, and the brotherhoods were often represented on local safety committees and at national meetings , neither the Safety Section of the ARA nor the National Safety Council included union representation. The failure to include labor was a major blunder, for labor went its own way on safety, continuing to propose expensive and often irrelevant measures.1 A second shortcoming was that the ARA Safety Section remained largely a hortatory body. It never developed the expertise or authority of the carriers’ other technical associations such as the Bureau of Explosives or the AREA, and it rarely coordinated with these groups—failures that prevented it from pressing effectively for industry-wide reforms and narrowed its focus to rules and behavior. Inclusion of labor might have usefully broadened the focus of safety workers. Because labor tended to be overly enamored with technological fixes their representation might have led to a more balanced attack on accidents. For example, the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen, not the carriers’ safety men, led the charge for better handbrakes, although with uneven success...