But when the Japanese ship finished unloading at Seattle, it was forbidden to engage in cabotage, that is, it could not pick up either cargo or passengers in Seattle and carry them to some other American port, say San Francisco. And, specifically, it could not deliver American items to Alaska. Any goods or passengers traveling from one American port to another had to be transported in American ships manned by American sailors, and not even the slightest deviation was allowed. Businessmen in Seattle revered the principle of cabotage as if it were Scripture, for it ensured them protection from competition from Asian vessels whose poorly paid crews enabled them to move freight at the lowest cost. So the more deeply the two young Venns probed into the intricacies of cabotage, the more clearly they saw that the future of Seattle, and especially the profitability of their family firm, depended upon the retention, strengthening and strict application of cabotage.
When they next gathered at their father's sickbed to discuss the matter, he showed his pleasure at their quick mastery of the situation, but he was distressed at their failure to identify the next step Seattle would have to take to protect itself completely:
'Tom, the people of Alaska aren't going to support any strengthening of cabotage.
In fact, they're going to fight against it. In Congress.'
Venn nodded: 'They would get their goods a lot cheaper if ships from Europe and Asia could haul them. Maybe even ships from Canada would be able to undercut us.'
'I'm especially afraid of the Canadians. So what you must do when Congress takes up the matter, which the people of Alaska will insist upon, is line up a type of support we've never had before.'
'I don't understand. Cabotage is a shipping concern. We're for it. The businessmen of Seattle are for it. West Coast shippers are for it. But who else?'
'That's where statesmanship comes in. Move away from the coasts. Enlist a whole new body of supporters in cities like Pittsburgh, Chicago and St. Louis.'
'And how do we do that?'
'Labor. Add one simple provision to the navigation bills and you'll have all labor shouting support for our cabotage bills.'
'And what is this magical provision?' Lydia asked, and her father replied: 'Require that the American ship, owned by American businessmen and staffed by American officers and seamen, be built entirely in American shipyards by American workers.' As he finished his prescription for the ensured growth of Seattle and the R&R shipping lines, he settled back on his pillows and smiled, for he was convinced that if such a bill could be shepherded through Congress, the possibility that Alaska might somehow evade control from Seattle would be eliminated.
But his clever son-in-law spotted the danger in relying upon Congress to pass a law which would aid the few and harm the many. 'Alaska will fight like hell to prevent a law like that,' he warned the old man, who merely nodded: 'Of course they'll protest.
They've never understood, up there, that they must rely on us for their well-being.
R&R has never taken one nickel out of Alaska that wasn't justified. It'll be the same way with the bill I'm talking about. We'll pass it to protect Alaska from herself.'
'How?' Tom asked, and he received a recommendation he did not savor: 'We'll do it as we've always done it. The West Coast hasn't enough power in Congress to do it alone, but we do have friends in the other states. We must mobilize those friends, and there's only one man can do that job for us.' Tom felt a sinking feeling in his stomach, and he was right to be apprehensive, for Ross said firmly: 'Get Marvin Hoxey.'
'But he's a crook!' Tom cried, recalling his distaste for this fraudulent operator.
'He still carries weight in Washington. If you want to protect our interests in Alaska, get Hoxey.'
This Tom was reluctant to do, but in the anxious days that followed, as the directors of R&R convened to decide whom to select as Malcolm Ross's successor as head of the company, it became clear that Ross was not going to bestow his blessing on Tom Venn unless the latter hired Marvin Hoxey, the proven lobbyist, to maneuver a new maritime bill through Congress. Her father warned Lydia, when she met with him alone: 'If Tom doesn't get Hoxey out here right away, I'll tell the board outright that he's not the man to replace me.'
'But Hoxey is an evil man, Father. He's shown that again and again.'
'He's an able man. He does what he says he'll do, and that's all that counts.'
'And you'll block Tom if he refuses?'
'I must think about the safety of my company. I must do what's right.'
'You call hiring a crook doing what's right?'
'Under the circumstances, yes.'
That night Lydia told her husband: 'I think you'd better telephone Hoxey.'
'I will not do that.'
'But, Tom ..."
'I will not humiliate myself again in connection with that swindler.'
There was a protracted silence, after which Lydia said quietly: 'When Father dies, I'll be the principal stockholder ... Mother's shares and the ones he'll leave me. So I must act to protect my interests. I'm calling Hoxey.' Tom, in disgust, left the room, but as he paced back and forth outside the door he realized that he was forcing a break between himself and his wife, and at a moment when she deserved his fullest support, so he returned to the room, just as Lydia finished putting hi the call. Taking the telephone, he said with as much control as possible: 'Marvin Hoxey?
This is Tom Venn.... Yes, we knew each other in Nome during the great days, and during the salmon leases.... Yes, I'm married to Lydia Ross.... Sorry to tell you that her father is quite ill.... Yes, he wants to complete one big job before he dies.... He needs you. Right away.... Yes, Alaska.' A long silence followed, during which the ebullient lobbyist delivered an oration.... 'Yes, I'll tell her.'
When he hung up, he looked sheepishly at Lydia: 'The old rascal! He'd already guessed what Seattle would want done on the maritime bill. Had already started visiting congressmen on the assurance we'd call.'
'What else did he say? During that one long spell?'
'He said he knew Alaska like the back of his hand and that everything was going to be all right.'
Shortly thereafter the wily old campaigner came to Seattle to consult with Malcolm Ross. Sixty-four years old, heavyset, florid efface and clean-shaven, he breezed into the sickroom, cocked his right forefinger as if it were a pistol, and fired an imaginary bullet at Ross: 'I want you out of that bed by nightfall. Orders.'
'I wish I could obey, Marvin. But the ..."He tapped his chest and smiled. 'Draw up a chair and listen.' And as the dying merchant prince lay in bed, he plotted his last great strategy for the enhancement of Seattle.
In these years the state of Washington was represented in the Senate of the United States by a hardworking, amiable Republican named Wesley L. Jones, whose devotion to duty had elevated him to the chairmanship of the important Senate Commerce Committee.
Always attentive to the interests of his home state, he had listened when Malcolm Ross consulted with him concerning ways to nail down permanently all traffic heading for Alaska. He agreed early and firmly that nations like Japan and Canada should be eliminated from the profitable trade, and he saw no good reason why the established state of Washington should not take precedence over the unformed territory of Alaska, but he cautioned Ross and his fellow Seattleites: 'It's not like the old days, gentlemen.
Alaska is beginning to have a voice in our nation's capital. That little son-of-a-bitch Sheldon Jackson, no bigger than a pinpoint, he stirred up a lot of good Christians back there. We can't just run your bill through this time. We'll have to work on it, and work hard.'
It was in April of that year that the Seattle men had awakened to the opposition which existed in the industrial states and those along the Mississippi. At the last meeting he chaired before becoming bedridden, Ross had reported: 'You'd be astonished at some of the charges they're making against us. They say we're robbers, pirates trying to keep Alaska to ourselves. We've got to come up with some new tactic.'
Just who it w
as who had the clever idea of enlisting labor in the fight to keep Alaska a colony was not recorded; Ross had not been at the meeting when this was first proposed, but as soon as members of his committee brought the suggestion to his bedside, he had grasped its significance: 'Ride that one very hard. We're not trying to protect our interests. We're thinking only of the American workingman, the American sailor.'
Now, in the closing weeks of his life, he outlined to both Marvin Hoxey and Tom Venn the strategy that would enable Senator Jones to ramrod through a maritime bill in 1920, the one that would remain in force for the rest of the century, binding Alaska in the harshest, most restrictive fetters any American territory would know since the days of King George Ill's repressive measures which had goaded the Colonies to revolt.
No one in the entire American political establishment was more influential in getting this act passed than Marvin Hoxey. Only three years younger than Malcolm Ross, he had four times the explosive energy and ten times the shameless gall. It took him less than three minutes to perceive the brilliance of enlisting labor in the fight, and before that first meeting ended, he had devised a presentation which would capture the imagination of congressmen in all parts of the nation. It required him to patrol the halls in Washington, while Tom Venn visited those state capitals whose representatives would cast the deciding votes.
Tom did not appreciate the assignment, for it meant that he would have to telephone Washington every night to inform Hoxey as to how things were going, and he might have refused to serve as Hoxey's assistant had not Malcolm Ross taken a sharp turn for the worse. Informed of the situation, Lydia and Tom rushed to his bedside, and when the two stood before him he gave them their last commission: 'Any industry of magnitude faces moments of crisis ... when decisions of life and death are in the process of being made. Choose right, up to the stars. Choose wrong, down to Avernus.'
He coughed, then flashed that smile which had served him so well at other times when he was striving to convince people: 'And the hell of it is, usually we don't recognize that the decision is vital. We make it blind.' He coughed again, his shoulders shaking violently; now the smile left his drawn lips and he said softly: 'But this time we do know. The prosperity of this part of the nation depends upon getting Senator Jones's bill enacted.' He asked Tom to promise that for the next crucial months he would work with full vigor on this campaign: 'Let the company guide itself.
You get out there and line up the votes.' Then he reached for his telephone and called Marvin Hoxey, telling him to catch a night train. But at midafternoon Tom placed another call: 'Marvin? Tom Venn. Cancel the trip. Malcolm died forty minutes ago.'
THE JONES ACT OF 1920 PASSED WITH ITS THREE Essential provisions in place: no ship of foreign ownership and registry could carry American goods from one American port to another; only ships owned and manned by Americans could do that; the ship itself, even if it was American-owned, had to have been built in the United States by American labor. The future of Seattle was ensured.
The effect of the Jones Act could best be illustrated by what happened to a modest grocery store in Anchorage. Sylvester Rowntree had invested his savings in a new store half again as big as the old one, and by the year 1923 it had again doubled, so that the owner could have profitably ordered, from suppliers across the United States, his goods in cargo lots. But this was not practical, because a custom had evolved whereby goods destined for Alaska had to be handled in curious ways by the railroads and in ways downright insane at the docks in Seattle. Even before Rowntree's cargo was ready for loading onto an R&R vessel he would be forced to pay fifty percent more freightage than if his goods had been destined for some West Coast destination like Portland or Sacramento.
But now provisions of the Jones Act came into play: to use the Seattle docks for shipment to Alaska cost almost twice what the same dock services cost for a shipment, say, to Japan. And when the R&R ship was loaded, the cost-per-mile of goods to Alaska was much higher than the cost of the same goods being shipped to other American ports by other lines. R&R had a monopoly which exacted a fifty-percent or better surcharge on every item freighted in to Alaska, and the territory had no escape from this imposition, for there were no other avenues by which goods could get in: no highways, no railroads, and as yet no airplanes.
'That damned Jones Act is strangling us,' Sylvester Rowntree wailed, and he was right, for the Act exercised its tyranny in the most unexpected ways. The forests of Alaska could have provided wooden boxes for the Alaskan salmon canneries, but the cost of bringing in American sawmill equipment was kept so excessive that it was much cheaper to buy the wood from Oregon than to use trees which stood fifty feet from a cannery, and tariffs kept out non-American.
In the years following passage of the Act, a dozen profitable extractive industries went out of business because of the exorbitant costs imposed by the new rules, and this happened even though scores of Canadian ships stood ready to bring heavy equipment in at reasonable cost and take finished products out at rates that ensured a good profit.
Such discrepancies were explained away by Marvin Hoxey, defending in public the Act which he had engineered, as 'inescapable minor dislocations which can be easily corrected.'
When no attempt was made to rectify them, he told Congress: 'These are nothing more than the minor costs which a remote territory like Alaska must expect to bear if it is to enjoy the privileges of life within the American system.' In- his bid age Hoxey had converted himself into a revered oracle, forever prepared to justify the indecencies to which Alaska was subjected.
What infuriated Alaskans like grocer Rowntree was not the pomposity of Hoxey and the self-serving statements of Thomas Venn, president of Ross & Raglan, but the fact that Hawaii, much farther from San Francisco than Alaska was from Seattle, received its goods at substantially cheaper rates. Rowntree's seventeen-year-old son, Oliver, figured: 'Pop, if a grocer in Honolulu places a hundred-dollar order at the same time you do with a wholesaler in New York, by the time the two orders reach the West Coast docks, his has a total cost of $126, but yours is $147. Dockage fees being so different, by the time his goods get aboard they cost $137, but yours are $163.
And now comes the rotten part. Because R&R rates are the highest in the world, by the time his goods reach Honolulu, they cost $152, while your goods landed in Anchorage cost us $191.'
The boy spent the summer of his senior year conducting similar studies regarding various kinds of in and out shipments, and wherever he looked he found this same terrible discrepancy, so that for his graduating paper in English he composed a fiery essay entitled: 'The Slavery Continues,' in which he drew parallels between the economic servitude under which Alaska now suffered and the governmental chaos of the 1867-period. Fortunately for him as it turned out later this lament did not appear in the school journal, but Oliver's father was so proud of his son's insight into Alaskan affairs that he had three unsigned copies made, sending one to the territorial governor, one to Alaska's nonvoting delegate to Congress and one to the Anchorage newspaper, which did print it. His arguments played a role in the continuing attack Alaskans made against the cruel provisions of the Jones Act, but nothing was-accomplished because in Seattle, Thomas Venn, increasingly active as head of R&R, and, in Washington, the aged warhorse Marvin Hoxey prevented any revision of the Jones Act or even any orderly discussion of its harmful effect upon Alaska.
Young Oliver Rowntree, nursing his outrage, spent the summer brooding about what he could do to retaliate. And that fall, on his way to the University of Washington in Seattle where he had won a scholarship he evolved a plan. Prom then on, as he traveled back and forth on R&R ships, he began slowly and slyly to sabotage them.
He stole silverware from the dining rooms and quietly pitched it overboard at night.
He jammed pillowcases down toilets. He wrenched fittings off newel posts, messed up documents he came upon, and threw large amounts of salt into any food he could contaminate without being caught. On some trips, if he w
as lucky, he did up to a hundred dollars' worth of theft and breakage.
Whenever he committed one of his acts of retribution he muttered to himself: 'That's for stealing from my father ... and the others,' and twice each year he continued his depredations.
When Tom Venn, from his headquarters in Seattle, studied reports of this sabotage he was at first perplexed, and at dinner one night he told his wife: 'Someone is conducting a vicious campaign against us, and we have no way of determining who it is,' but when she studied the records she said immediately: 'Tom, the worst cases seem to appear in autumn down to Seattle, in spring back to Anchorage.'
'And what's the significance of that?'
'Don't you see? Probably some student. Feels a grievance toward our line.'
Grasping at this clue, Tom initiated a study of passengers who sailed on the ships that had been attacked, and his staff came up with the names of eighteen young people who had sailed on at least three of the six affected voyages and seven who had been on all of them.
'I want a full report on each of the eighteen, with special details on those seven,' Tom ordered, and during the weeks when these were being compiled, Oliver Rowntree was doing some thinking on his own, and he had learned in a math class dealing with the laws of probability that there were many ways by which a shrewd mind could analyze data which seemed at first capricious: Some smart operator could look over the passenger lists and make correlations, and if he was really bright, he could identify four or five likely suspects and then narrow it down intelligently by legwork. Oliver knew that his name would be thrown up by such an approach and what there was in his background which would alert R&R detectives to his being responsible for the sabotage his essay on the evils of the Jones Act: