Eh Harriman Author:George Kennan Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER XX CHANGES IN THE ILLINOIS CENTRAL THE year 1906 was a trying and harassing one to Mr. Harriman, for the reason that it brought him into open and act... more »ive conflict with his old friend and associate, Stuyvesant Fish. In the board of directors of the Illinois Central there had long been a feeling of dissatisfaction with certain features of President Fish's administration; and in the latter part of 1906 it culminated in a movement to oust him from his position. Mr. Harriman, as chairman of the finance committee, was virtually compelled to become the leader of this movement, partly because he was largely responsible for the management of the company's finances, and partly because he shared the feeling upon which the opposition to Fish was based. Owing, however, to the fact that he was president of the Union Pacific, as well as a director of the Illinois Central, his actions were generally misjudged and his motives misconstrued. It was said, for example, that he opposed Fish and tried to oust him from the presidency, not because he thought a change would promote the interests of the Illinois Central, but because he believed that if he could remove Fish and replace him with a man of his own, he could get control of the road and virtually turn it over to the Union Pacific. This charge was repeatedly made, not only by Fish's friends, but by Fish himself.1 Then, of course, Har- riman's enemies took the matter up, accused him of disloyalty to his old friend as well as treachery to the road that he pretended to serve, and asserted that his sole motive was an unscrupulous determination to bring the Illinois Central under the domination of the Union Pacific and thus extend and increase his own power. The press and the public generally, ignorant of the reasons for the opposition to...« less