• U.S.

Business: The Nickel Plate

3 minute read
TIME

For four days last week before the Interstate Commerce Commission at Washington, lawyers for opposing factions of railroaders, bankers and investors tersely yet passionately made their final pleas for and against the proposed billion-and -a -half consolidation of the Nickel Plate, Erie, Pere Marquette, Hocking Valley and Chesapeake & Ohio railroads into a fourth great eastern system to complement the already existing New York Central, Pennsylvania, and Baltimore & Ohio lines. Stock in the five roads involved sufficient to swing the deal is already controlled by Oris Paxton Van Sweringen and his brother Mantis J. Van Sweringen, the genii of the plan, together with their banking associates. It remains for the Commission to decide its public policy.

Vigorously opposed to such a merger are certain minority stockholders of the Chesapeake & Ohio repsented by Colonel Henry W. Anderson, a lawyer resourceful in arguments, who thus summed up: “The interests behind this plan want to get the Nickel Plate and the Erie, through the Chesapeake & Ohio, into both [the Pennsylvania and

West Virginia coal fields], so that when labor troubles come in one field they can haul out of the other. When they get it these great interests will be in a position to whipsaw this country.

“The second reason lies in the operation of this plan to give its promoters and bankers an enormous immediate profit.”

Further he imputed sinister connections between the Van Sweringens and their bankers, J. P. Morgan & Co., the Union Trust Co. of Cleveland, and the First National Bank in Manhattan; estimated huge personal profits for the brothers.

Roused to fury, dapper Newton Diehl Baker, onetime Secretary of War, now a Cleveland lawyer and chief counsel for the merger proponents, snapped to his feet as soon as proceedings permitted, keen eyes sparkling, clipping words contrary to his usually calm setting forth of arguments as purely intellectual concepts, refuted charges and implications, recalled that “Desdemona’s handkerchief in hands other than her own became a wanton’s gift to her paramour in the eyes of her suspicious lord.

“Here we are at the trial to see whether the Transportation act will work. We are to see whether this is a consistent piece of legislation intended to strike midway between doing nothing and Government ownership. It is of almost tragic importance in that it is the first attempt to try out a national policy, and the suggestion of fraud is most unfortunate. It will have no effect here, but it goes spawning through the records and hatches new troubles and difficulties in out of the way places.”

After some six weeks the Commission will decide one way or another.

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