Warren S. Stone

He was a great Labor leader who never called a strike. He was a great Labor leader who proved himself a financier. He spent 25 years in the cabs of snorting locomotives. He spent 21 years building up a great national institution. And last week he died--of acute Bright's disease.

On his father's farm at Ainsworth, Iowa, he was born in 1860. At 19, his education was complete. His father wanted him to study Law. He wanted to study Medicine. So he got a job as fireman on a locomotive. Five years and three-quarters he fired. Then he was made engineer and for 19 years and one-quarter he drove freight trains and passenger trains. Then, one day in 1903, the Grand Chief of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers died and he was elected to the post. He went to the headquarters of the organization at Cleveland. It was his first trip east of Chicago.

Then he proceeded to do things. He divided the affairs of the Brotherhood into Eastern, Western and Southern groups and made separate employment agreements with each. He built a 14-story office building in Cleveland for the Brotherhood. The building paid for itself in ten years. He established compulsory life insurance for all engineers. When he went into office, the Brotherhood had 38,000 members with $69,000,000 worth of insurance. Today, it has 90,000 members with $200,000,000 worth of insurance. In 1916, he helped to secure the passage of the Adamson Law for railway labor.

In 1918, he presented a plan for a cooperative bank. The triennial convention of the Brotherhood authorized him to establish one. On Armistice Day, 1920, the first engineers cooperative bank was opened in Cleveland. Today, the Brotherhood controls 13 banks and investment companies with assets of perhaps $150,000,000. Today it owns four large office buildings in Cleveland, one in Manhattan, besides other buildings.

Under the great leader's guidance, engineers invested more than $2,000,000 in coal mines of Kentucky and West Virginia. He led the way in the formation of a profit-sharing mail-order store for engineers.

Why did he make all these capitalistic ventures on behalf of Labor? He answered :

"There is an identity of interest between railroad workers and railroad owners, but hitherto there has been no way of expressing that identity. When there is trouble the owners have been inaccessible ' to us. They were to be found in Wall Street, no matter where the road in question was located. So we decided to buy into 'Wall Street.' Now we can sit at the same table with these men and talk things over."

Now Warren S. Stone is dead. The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers must now find not only another great Labor leader, but also a first-rate financier.