Klein - The Life and Legend of E.H. Harriman

At this end of the twentieth century the name of E. H. Harriman may be less familiar than that of his son W. Averell Harriman, who followed an already impressive career in business with long and distinguished service in diplomacy and politics. To any American living in the first years of this century, however, the name and face of E. H. Harriman were as familiar as those of his fellow titans J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie. Like them, he had become to the public the very essence of what he did. Morgan stood for banking, Rockefeller for oil, Carnegie for iron and steel, and Harriman for railroads. But where the first three men had achieved their lofty reputations through a lifetime of steady achievement in their fields, Harriman burst onto the railroad scene like a comet at the age of fifty and worked his magic on the industry in a single decade.

Harriman differed from the others in personality as well. Morgan was aloof and aristocratic, Rockefeller secretive and reclusive, and Carnegie voluble and hungry for the limelight. Harriman was intense and combativethe forerunner of an age when speed and efficiency would replace grace and charm. On duty he was a human computer, his mind racing so quickly over data to conclusions that others could hardly follow him. Coming late to railroads, the oldest and most hidebound of major industries, he looked at its hoary traditions with fresh eyes and with startling speed literally reinvented the business. In one decade his innovations shoved an industry made moribund and dispirited by the depression of 1893-97 into the twentieth century. The railroads under his control became models for others to emulate. He modernized not only their physical plant but their organizations, business practices, financing, and safety records.

He began in 1898 with the Union Pacific Railroad, the once-proud transcontinental line then emerging in pieces from nearly five years of bankruptcy. In only a few years Harriman rebuilt the line, reorganized its management, reacquired its lost subsidiaries, and turned it into one of the most profitable properties in the nation. In 1901 he acquired the Southern Pacific, then the largest transportation system in the world, and worked the same formula on it. To the newly integrated Union Pacific-Southern Pacific system he brought a bold management structure that shocked traditional railroad men because it seemed to violate all the known principles of how such things were done. The Harriman touch was extended to other roads and with it the formula that became the mantra for railroad success in the twentieth century: long hauls of high volume at low rates. Harriman did not invent the formula, but he applied it more rigorously and with greater speed and efficiency than anyone else.

Harrimans vision did not stop at the waters edge or the national boundary. He built lines into Mexico and looked to extend them deep into Central America. Late in life he envisioned a combined rail-water transportation system that would circle the globe. To that end he visited Japan and negotiated for rights to construct lines in China, Manchuria, and elsewhere that would complete such a system. Nothing stirred him more than a challenge. In 1899 he transformed a vacation cruise to Alaska into a major scientific expedition that left a lasting legacy of knowledge about the region. When the earthquake of 1906 devastated San Francisco, Harriman rushed to the scene to direct Southern Pacific operations personally. When the Colorado River overflowed its banks and threatened to immerse the entire Imperial Valley of California, he ordered the Southern Pacifics long and expensive campaign to force the river back into its bed.