Railroaders

It is not by chance that a railroad clerk or track laborer rises to be president of the system. It is not by chance that universities select the heads of their boards of trustees and the chairmen of their endowment-raising committees. It is not by chance that Daniel Willard, president of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, now fills those two positions at Johns Hopkins University exactly as Howard Elliott, chairman of the Northern Pacific Railroad, fills them at Harvard University.

Mr. Willard was elected last week, after twelve years on the Johns Hopkins board and three years as mainspring of a committee that has raised some six millions to expand and endow the Johns Hopkins hospital and medi-cal school. Now he will be, with President Goodnow, the mainspring by which Johns Hopkins means to eliminate its elementary instruction, reorganize itself on its original lines of advanced and research work (TIME, March 8) and raise six more millions to finance the change.

They say that Daniel Willard's mind proceeds like one of his express trains--from start to destination without local stops. It must have run that way always. Born on a Vermont farm, he won a teacher's certificate before he was 16 and taught while finishing high school. Lacking funds to go to Dartmouth, he made the most of the Massachusetts Agricultural College--made too much of it, wore out his eyes. He got a track laborer's job with the idea of rising to the throttle of a locomotive, which he did in two years, at 20. Out west the infant Minneapolis, St. Paul & Sault Ste. Marie road offered openings. Young Willard steered clear of cards and drink, the avocations of the human riffraff that used to infest young railroads. Then the B. & 0. sent for him. He assisted its general manager for two years, when the president of the Erie sent for him. In 1910, before he was 50, the B. & 0. sent for him again, this time to be president. His conduct of that line wag such that in 1917, President Wilson picked him to direct the biggest railroading job ever attempted in this country--integrating all U. S. lines under Federal control.

He rides constantly on his own trains, studies them, studies commuters, calls his private car his "business" car. "There is nothing more important than accuracy," says Daniel Willard. His eyes flash, his slim figure, almost boyish 'at 65, straightens. He adds, "There is romance in this business." . . .

Howard Elliott, president of the Harvard Overseers and of the lately-created Harvard Fund Council--not a "drive" organization but a permanent institution through which Harvard alumni will contribute annually in small amounts to the university's development and support-- is a railroader of the same gauge, action, power. His career, except for an engineering course at Harvard, parallels Mr. Willard's closely--a New England parentage, ground-training in the Midwest, the presidency of the Northern Pacific at 42 (1903). In 1913 he accepted the task of rehabilitating the New York, New Haven & Hartford, but had to resign after four years. Recovering, he worked under Mr. Willard in the U. S. Railroad Administration. He is still a director of 19 roads. The breadth and activity of his other interests are witnessed by his membership in a baker's dozen of educational, sociological and political bodies besides the centre of his affections and labors-- Harvard university.

Harvard and Johns Hopkins stand, with very little company, at the forefront of higher education in the U. S.--for research, for great teachers, for liberal and progressive educational policies. It is notable to behold those policies, so far as they are brought about by boards of trustees, being furthered by the country's highest type of "captain of industry"; notable to behold two men, who have made very definite contributions to what the country economically is, now in their graying prime bringing an intellectual increment to what the country, culturally, shall be.