668
THE GREEN BAG
the Santa F6 Railroad and the Southern Pacific Railroad, shippers should have no dealings whatever with connecting carriers if they wanted a through rate; the two initial lines would thenceforth choose for them selves what Eastern lines should carry be yond their own terminals; and shippers should designate the destination of their fruit and adhere to it. Consternation and dismay followed the announcement of this radical change. The orange industry was thought to be ruined beyond recovery; the two great Western railroads had taken the industry out of the hands of the growers and into their own; they would thenceforth divide the traffic between themselves and among their East ern friends as they thought fit, would extort higher rates than ever, give slower service than ever, and subject their impoverished customers to all the ills of a tyrannical and conscienceless monopoly. Seven weeks after the new rule went into effect, com plaint was made, in a fever of haste, to the Interstate Commerce Commission. Six years later, almost to a day, a final answer was given by the courts. The Interstate Commerce Commission ordered the two rail roads to refrain from enforcing the routing rule. The latter disobeyed. The commis sion then brought suit in the United States Circuit Court, at Los Angeles, to compel obedience. Judge Wellborn, in that court, decided for the commission, and enjoined the enforcement of the routing rule. Appeal was taken to the Supreme Court, and on February 24, 1906, that court reversed the two previous decisions and declared unani mously in favor of the railroads. Immediately a storm of denunciation broke upon the heads of that devoted court. A leading journal of Los Angeles three days later fulminated thus : "As a bolt from the blue came from Wash ington yesterday the news that the United States Supreme Court had reversed the Wellborn decision in the citrus fruit routing case and delivered the orange growers and
shippers of Southern California, bound and gagged, into the hands of the railroad combine. Stunned amazement was the first effect pro duced by the news upon shippers of fruit. Some tried to find a ray of hope in the sur mise that the court had found technical de fects in the proceedings which might be rem edied in another action, but that hope went glimmering when the grounds of the decision were made known, and it appeared that the Supreme Court had gone into the merits of the case and driven another nail in the coffin of the powers of the Interstate Commerce Com mission. . . . The United States Supreme Court has been whittling away for years the power which the people of the United States intended to delegate to, and thought they had conferred upon the commission created' to administer laws regulating commerce, and by this latest pro-railroad decision it has reduced the commission to a pitiful futility . The court says the commission is powerless to grant any relief from railroad oppression to the people. ..." At a mass meeting of fruit growers and shippers at Corona, an orange center, the following week, it was resolved that "the recent decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, taking from the shipper the right to rout his fruit, does to the citrus fruit industry of California a great and last ing injury, paralyzing said industry to a great extent and causing at times great loss to the grower, and at the same time legalizing pooling by the railroad lines." At Redlands, about the same time, a sim ilar mass meeting resolved unanimously that the decision gives legal sanction to freight pools, that it denies control of commerce and of rates to the Interstate Commerce Commis sion, and that it places Californians and their business at the mercy of the railroads. Let us see. II The orange-producing lands of Southern California comprise about eighty-eight thou sand acres. Of these, some twenty-seven thou
