Yes, labor. Labor at last was to sit in the high council of railroad transportation. That had a new sound in the game. Yet McAdoo was quick to include it in his plans. And at that time he added:
"I am putting in men of no partisan views--partisan neither to capital nor to labor. In every case I have tried to select men who will inspire confidence. I want men of broad vision."
The man who dug the great tunnels under the Hudson River when every one else had pronounced the project as chimerical could hardly stand accused himself of any lack of vision. Moreover McAdoo's selections in nearly every case justified his words. He began by choosing as his right-hand assistant and general adviser Walker D. Hines, an extremely able New York lawyer, who in the forty-seventh year of his life was chairman of the board of the Santa Fé. On the average road the chairmanship of the board of directors is likely to be a sort of sanitarium for retired executives. Not so with the Santa Fé. Its late president, E. P. Ripley, the man who was instrumental in bringing it out of bankruptcy and up to its place as one of the greatest single systems in the United States, ten or twelve years ago was seeking a young man who could represent the road in New York, and represent it with the proper authority. He found such a man in Hines, then barely turned forty, and he never regretted his choice. Moreover Hines, in a brilliant legal connection with the Louisville and Nashville before going to the Santa Fé, had begun to acquire his remarkable knowledge of railroad conditions in virtually every section of the land.
The Santa Fé has always had much good motive-power, human and mechanical. McAdoo chose two of this first class, Hines and Edward Chambers, its former vice-president in charge of traffic. These men formed the beginning of his advisory cabinet. To them he added gradually several others--Henry Walters of Baltimore, chairman of the board of the extremely sound and conservative Atlantic Coast Line; John Skelton Williams, controller of the currency, who had been not only the president but really the creator of the Seaboard Air Line; Carl R. Gray, at that time president of the Western Maryland railroad and now occupying a similar post upon the Union Pacific; and Judge John Barton Payne, who also had served as chairman of the Shipping Board and as secretary of the interior.