HARDWOOD RECORD 



in getting down to brass tacks and sjieuding its monej- intelligently 

 to aceoniplish a work that should have been done vears ago, i. e., to 

 educate the public on the surpassing merits of wood for most pur- 

 poses; and particularly to show the superiority of particular varieties 

 of wood for specific purposes; and furthermore, to show the compara- 

 tive weakness of the majority of materials that are being employed 

 as substitutes for wood. 



Lumbermen must recognize that they are going up against a des- 

 perate game of organized big business, as comprised in the ' ' Morgan- 

 ized" methods of the steel trust, its allied cement trust, its automo- 

 bile trust, its transportation trust, and even its political trust. Tlie 

 Morgan bunch has the business of the country in very bad shape, and 

 it is only by dint of the utmost endeavor that it is possible even to 

 take reasonable care of the immense consolidated output that its 

 plants are capable of producing, and which it must produce, in order 

 to show dividends on the watered stock of hundreds of its enterprises. 

 As a concrete example : The Chicago Journal of December 7, through 

 its very capable Wall Street correspondent, John Parr, writes: 



The force of Mr. Morgan's car order, placed through the New York 

 Central after he had agreed with the management to raise the money 

 needed to buy the cars, has evidently spent itself in the steel trade, 

 which needs now some fresh stimulus. A Ijig steel order might do the 

 trick, but somehow there is less Inclination for anybody to stock up 

 with rails than with steel products for which the ciuotations have de- 

 clined. When the New York Central placed large orders for cars at 

 very low prices, other railroads were the more easily influenced to fol- 

 low its example because of the fact of prices being low. but steel rails. 

 Th-.-y are the great monument to the stability of a price — to the theory 

 that the price of a thing after all is merely a state of mind. 



The price of the steel rail has not declined a penny per ton since the 

 steel corporation was formed, and in the meantime the capacity for 

 {jroducing rails has reached 4,000,000 tons, whereas the maximum rear's 

 consumption has never exceeded 3.000,000 tons. So perhaps it is not 

 so feasible nor so psychologically effective for Mr. Morgan to place a 

 large rail order through one of the railroads he dominates, in order to 

 stimulate the steel trade in which he has very much at stake. How 

 keenly Mr. Morgan is interested in the steel trade, how much he has at 

 stake in it just now, may be guessed from the fact that bevond procur- 

 ing all the advertising possible out of the large orders placed last month 

 by the railroads for steel cars, Mr. Morgan had his son-in-law give an 

 interview to the press on the superiority of the steel car over the 

 wooden car, taking as his text an accident the day before in which 

 the steel cars had come out remarkably whole. 



There are people in the steel trade, not attached to any stock ticker, 

 who believe the present price level in steel and iron products will be the 

 mean level for a long time. They say there is no price improvement in 

 sight. The reason they cannot imagine much improvement in prices 

 is that the capacity for producing steel products is for the present so 

 greatly in excess of maximum consumption. The low prices now pre- 

 vailing leave very Ifttle for profit. Wc know of an instance in which 

 a manufacturer of steol bars i-efused to take an order at the price his 

 big customer named, but said, instead, to that customer : "Take the mill 

 yourself and run if, make your own steel bars at cost. All we want is 

 to keep the mill open." The customer's cost would have been higher 

 on those terms than the price he was offering for the bars. 



The steel situation, which is duplicated in the cement industry, 

 shows the evil of over-production, and is a lesson that should be taken 

 to heart by lumber manufacturers. Building wood producers have 

 practically killed the goose that laid the golden egg for years by 

 producing lumber in excess of legitimate demand. On the contrary, 

 the majority of the hardwood clement of the trade has taken its medi- 

 cine justly and honestly, and has curtailed output to a degree that 

 today even a thirty days' normal trade would clean up every foot of 

 desirable dry lumber in first hands. 



H.\RDtvooD Eecokd has no wish to antagonize the National Lumber 

 Manufacturers' Association and its advertising committee, and has 

 absolutely no interest in its method of exploiting building woods. It 

 has no selfish interest in having a hand in a campaign to increase 

 wood consumption, although out of its own funds it has spent a con- 

 siderable sum of money with that end in view, in which it has shown 

 the possibilities of definite commercial results that can be secured to 

 the hardwood industry by carrying on a campaign of education di- 

 rectly to the ultimate buyers of wood, and through the editors of 

 newspapers. 



There is an implication that editorial opinion is a matter of pur- 

 chase and sale in a great many quarters. This may be true, but rep- 

 resented in the great mass of sterling American newspapers and mag- 

 azines publishers, the big element is willing without reward to not 

 only tell the truth, but to argue in favor of the truth pertaining to 

 any subject of national importance. It may be all right enough to 

 stand in the position that the lumber trade does not desire to seek 

 favors from any newspaper, and prefers to pay for its advertising 

 space, -which hasn't a tenth of the value of the proper utilization of 

 editorial space, but, considering all the facts, it would seem that a 



just proposition would be to spend a good deal of time and money 

 in both personal visits and literature of a truthful and sane char- 

 acter to present the truth about lumber before the leading editorial 

 writers of the United States. Hardwood Record has had no difficulty 

 in becoming the widest quoted paper in the country during the last 

 three nionths, and if there is any truth concerning the frailties of 

 steel cars, it surely demonstrates that high-class publications are 

 willing to print fax'ts without being directly paid for doing so. 



It is a matter of small moment, but worthy of comment, that the 

 following paragraph involved in the second report of the National 

 Lumber Manufacturers' Association committee be reproduced, as it 

 gives credit in a left-handed way to Hardwood Eecord, and at the 

 same time accuses it of securing photographs illustrating the Fort 

 Wayne wreck in a not-tobe-commended manner: 



"When the Advertising Bureau of the N. L. M. A. shall be a fact we 

 apprehend that it will often be required (and we trust that it may be 

 enabled ndeciuately to equip itself) to take instantaneous and effective 

 local action in such oases as Jackson. Birmingham. Boston. Rochester 

 and Chicago, as the present committee did in the matter of the wreck 

 of the Pennsylvania Railroad 18-hour New York-Chicago 'all-steel' train 

 at Fort Wayne. Ind.. Sunday night, September 13. Through our repre- 

 sentative we leai'ned early Monday morning that there was one wooden 

 coach in the train, sandwiched in between 'all-steel' cars. 



"The conditions were hard to beat as a demonstration of their relative 

 safety. 



"We placed a specially employed photographer (with detailed instruc- 

 tions) 'on the job' before they had begun to remove the wreckage, and 

 he secured a set of pictures at various stages of the clearing-up which 

 proved surprisinglj- flattering to the solitary wooden coach (and de- 

 cidedly flattening to the steel coaches). The wood coach did far more 

 damage to the steel car ahead of it than the steel car behind it did to it. 

 It is stated that the railroad purchased and suppressed all random nega- 

 tives taken and we have every reason to believe that we now have in 

 our possession the only set of original plates of this important case. 



"I'he fact that copies of our negatives were secured a few days later 

 by the innocent error of an employe of the committee's photographer, 

 and that publication of same occurred ahead of our intentions, does not 

 diminish our satisfaction over the general result; and the considerable 

 discussion aroused by them is especially gratifying, inasmuch as our 

 chief purpose was in large part accomplished and the expense of their 

 wide publication was saved us." 



The wreck occurred on August 13 and not on September 13. 

 The facts surrounding these photographs and the story published 

 in Hardwood Record are as follows: 



Herbert W. Fee of Fort Wayne, son of Frank F. Fee, the well- 

 known lumberman of Dermott, Ark., is a graduate of the Biltmore 

 Forest School. One of the requirements to secure his diploma was 

 the preparation of a thesis on some important feature of wood. He 

 saw the wreck of the Fort Wayne eighteen-hour train and photo- 

 graphed it, and prepared a thesis on the subject. 



Another young man, who is a clerk of a Fort Wayne photographer, 

 also made some postal card photographs at the same time, and among 

 others another picture was made by a photographer named Miner of 

 Fort Wayne. The last named photograph was reproduced as the first 

 one in Record's article entitled "Steel vs. Wooden Passenger Cars," 

 and the otlier pictures were made iu jiart by Mr. Fee and in part by 

 the clerk referred to. 



A copy of Mr. Fee's thesis and the accompanying photographs were 

 forwarded to Hardwood Record by Dr. Schenck, director of the Bilt- 

 more Forest School, as a basis for an argument in favor of wooden 

 cars as against steel car construction, and from this data and from 

 newspaper reports was secured the text of the article. 



It is believed to be true that a Chicago professional publicity pro- 

 moter a few days after the wreck wired the advertising manager of 

 a Fort Wayne newspaper to secure for him the negatives of all 

 pictures taken of this train, and Mr. Fee sold him, through a second 

 party, the negatives involved in Hardwood Record's story, save the 

 one i>icturc made by Mr. Miner, which he did not own. If the com- 

 mittee of the National Lumber Manufacturers' Association knows 

 anything about the truth of this matter. Record would like to ask 

 it if these are not the succinct and accurate facts in the case. Fur- 

 thermore, it would like the acknowledgment that it did not place a 

 "specially employed photographer with detailed instructions on the 

 job liefore they had begun to remove the wreckage and he secured a 

 set of pictures at various stages of the clearing up," etc., etc. 



Hardwood Record would also like to ask the committee if it is not 

 a misstatement when it says: "Some of our negatives were secured 

 a few days later by the innocent error of an employe of the commit- 

 tee's photographer, and that publication of same occurred ahead of 

 our intention, etc. ' ' 



