Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: n or twice only I have heard the question raised whether Mr. Tattle’s remarkable hold on the confidence and affection of the labor world in New England were not due to a policy of
giving them everything they wanted. Nothing of the kind. Labor costs did not range appreciably higher on the Boston and Maine than on other railroad systems properly comparable with it; from the standpoint of loyal and faithful service in return for the expenditure, they were probably the lowest in New England. Mr. Tuttle was perhaps as hard-headed and shrewd a business man as the Yankee stock ever produced?with a difference. Always he was the man first, the manager afterwards. It is precisely this difference, long held in low esteem of miscalled
practical men, that is coming into belated recognition these latter days as comprising very nearly the whole distinction between success and failure in modern big-scale corporation management. It has been a chief element in the business folly of many generations to visualize the logical type of industrial captain as a purely executive machine in his office, as a man and citizen only in his home and clubs. To spend ten minutes with Mr. Tuttle at his desk in the North Station, over a critical labor complication, or an evening hour as a guest in his library, wasto hold conversation with one and the same essential man. It is a type of many possibilities, but incapable of turning one face to the business world, another to the social and another to civic obligation. Grant every demand coming up from the huge complex of twenty- five thousand workingmen he could not. Secure to every man a fair hearing he could and did, with a right of appeal extending if need be through to the top. By no means did this mean that every, or indeed more than a scattered few,…
