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Joseph Bartlett Eastman was born in Katonah, New York on June 26, 1882. He was the only son and younger of two children of John Huse Eastman, a Presbyterian minister, and his wife, Lucy King, of Binghamton, New York. He was a direct descendant of Roger Eastman, a native of Langford, Wiltshire, England, who settled in Salisbury, Massachussets, in 1638. Young Eastman grew up in Katonah and later in Pottsville, Pennsylvania.
Joseph attended the local high school in Pottsville.
He then spent a year learning the Latin and Greek necessary for entrance into Amherst College (his father's alma mater), from which he graduated with a B. A. in 1904.
In 1906, at Brandeis's suggestion, he enrolled in the Boston University law school, but his duties at the League forced him to drop out the next year.
In 1904 a fellowship to work on the small staff of Robert A. Woods at the famed South End House in Boston launched him on his lifelong career as a public servant. Like many American cities at the time, Boston was experiencing a vigorous reform movement. In 1900 several eminent lawyers and businessmen, including Louis D. Brandeis, Edward A. Filene, and George W. Anderson, had founded the Public Franchise League to serve as a "watchdog" over the municipal utilities. In 1905, when Brandeis sought a full-time secretary for the League, Woods suggested the twenty-three-year-old Eastman. For the next decade, Eastman for all practical purposes was the League, personally and sometimes single-handedly investigating proposed railway mergers, testifying before legislative committees on pending railway, gas, and electric rate changes, exposing stock frauds, and preparing bills for presentation to the state legislature.
For much of the time, Eastman worked for an uncertain salary that rarely reached $1, 000 a year; sometimes he was forced to enclose in the League's Annual Report personal pleas for money from its putative sponsors.
In 1913, in part as a result of Eastman's efforts, Massachusetts established a state Public Service Commission. Two years later Eastman replaced George W. Anderson on the Commission when President Woodrow Wilson named Anderson United States District Attorney for Massachusetts. In 1917 Wilson elevated Anderson to the Interstate Commerce Commission. When, late in 1918, Anderson moved on to a federal judgeship, Eastman once more replaced him.
On January 24, 1919, when the Senate confirmed his appointment, Eastman became, at thirty-six, one of the youngest members to sit on the ICC; he was to remain with it for the rest of his life, serving twice as chairman.
Though appointed by a Democratic president, he gained reappointments from Harding, Hoover, and Franklin Roosevelt. Eastman's nondogmatic objectivity was almost universally acknowledged. Thus, for example, although most railroad managements had sharply disagreed with Eastman's position on vital issues, they accepted equably his reappointment by Harding in 1922 because they recognized his stern competence.
His demonstrable expertise and judiciousness made him the perfect candidate for Federal Coordinator of Transportation when Congress acted in 1933 to bring some order to an industry damaged more than most by the Great Depression. Although he was not a lawyer, his ICC reports were extensively respected.
His formal powers lapsed when Congress declined to renew them in 1936. In 1941 another national emergency produced a final call to Eastman to serve in the capacity of coordinator, this time as Director of Defense Transportation. His greater success in this special assignment probably resulted from his tacit recognition this time of the need to work with the principal spokesmen of interest groups most directly engaged in the transportation industry. Thus he came to rely heavily on railroad management leaders and on representatives of the major shippers' associations.
He died in Emergency Hospital, Washington, D. C. , of a coronary occlusion, after a brief illness. He was buried in the family plot in Binghamton, New York.
Joseph Eastman's extraordinary contribution to public administration cannot be demonstrated readily by references to "landmark" decisions or innovations such as lend drama to legislative, executive, diplomatic, or judicial careers. Nevertheless, one may catch something of the man's uniqueness from his longevity in office in a sector of government notorious for short tenure.
Although he professed no particular religious affiliation, funeral services were held at All Souls' Memorial Episcopal Church in Washington.
A believer in "scientific" efficiency in government, he eschewed politics and belonged to no party.
Many of Eastman's most noteworthy specific efforts proved to be in losing causes. While still with the Massachusetts Public Service Commission, in 1916, he was the first clearly to formulate the "prudent investment" principle for determining "fair" rates for the regulated utilities companies.
The federal Supreme Court in 1898 (in Smyth v. Ames) had ruled that no commission could fix rates that failed to permit a fair and reasonable return, but it neglected to declare whether the returns should be based on the value of a company as measured by capital actually invested or as measured by the physical assets of the company, to be gauged, in turn, by current potential replacement costs.
Mindful of continuing inflationary pressures, the railroads favored the latter, but Eastman asserted that "capital honestly and prudently invested must, under normal conditions, be taken as the controlling factor. " In St. Louis and O'Fallon Railway Co. v. United States (1929), however, the Supreme Court (with Justices Holmes, Stone, and Brandeis dissenting) overrruled Eastman's attempt to apply the principle to ICC decisions.
Shortly after World War I, during which the nation's railroad system was taken over by the federal Railroad Administration, Commissioner Eastman advised against returning the railroads to private management. Although he had little faith in public ownership per se, he believed the railroads were in a poor credit position at the time and therefore could not operate efficiently without government coordination. This placed him in direct opposition to railroad owners and management, who disingenuously charged the Railroad Administration with "ruining" the railroads.
"As you know, " he wrote to a friend in 1923, "more deliberate lies were told in regard to what happened during federal control than there have been upon almost any subject that I am acquainted with. "
His views on the subject also nettled the nation's shippers, with whom Eastman had usually been identified in the past. The shippers had come to distrust the Railroad Administration because during the war it had tended to adopt policies that originated with railroad managers, contrary to the trend of ICC policy over the previous decade. Moreover, businessmen generally, and especially in 1919-20, reacted emotionally to anything that suggested "socialism, " and the fact that only organized labor gave support to public ownership - in the form of the Plumb Plan - helped foredoom Eastman's discerning advice. His "alliance" with labor interests was not enduring.
Eastman found it necessary to oppose some of labor's demands on the grounds that the railroad industry was not strong enough to absorb them, and by the late 1920's much of organized labor had begun to treat him with suspicion.
Eastman's efforts as Federal Coordinator nevertheless failed. In attempting to develop a policy to maximize the public interest, Eastman transgressed upon the special interests of railroad labor and railroad management, as well as upon certain jealously guarded prerogatives of other governmental agencies. When "both the carriers and the unions, by treaty, made temporary peace with each other and then deserted the coordinator, " he had no power base from which he could operate effectively.
Quotes from others about the person
A final tribute by the Washington Post fairly summed up Joseph Eastman's achievement: "Here was a man who dignified the title 'bureaucrat. '"
Eastman's special place is perhaps best expressed by a somewhat offhand comment made in a critical study of the federal regulatory commissions written in 1962. "In the 1920's, " writes Henry J. Friendly, "when the spirit of Commissioner Eastman was abroad throughout the land, " students of government had "been taught to expect, or at least to hope" that the regulatory agencies could "combine the celerity of Mercury, the wisdom of Minerva, and the purity of Diana".
As Chief Justice Harlan F. Stone remarked some years later, "When our court gets a case which involves a decision and order of the Interstate Commerce Commission, we always thumb it through first to see what Joe Eastman has said in his Opinion. "
"He effected little coordination of the railroad groups, " writes the episode's historian, "because they would not let him. "
Eastman never married. He lived with his sister, Elizabeth Eastman, from 1919 until his death.
