Scope and Content Note
The papers of Ernest Irving Lewis span the years 1897-1944, with the bulk of the material concentrated in the period 1921-1944 when Lewis was a member of the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC). A printer, reporter, editor, photographer, and world traveler from Indiana who acquired an expertise in transportation management and public utilities, Lewis was credited with helping to establish the Public Service Commission of Indiana in 1913 and then extricating it from political intrigue four years later. He functioned as chair of the state commission from 1917 to 1921, before going to Washington to join the ICC at the invitation of President Warren Harding. Here he spent the remainder of his career, serving first as commissioner in charge of valuation of common carriers, then as chair, and finally, under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, as director of the commission's Bureau of Valuation. In 1942 he sat briefly on the Federal Anthracite Commission to investigate economic conditions in anthracite coal regions. Lewis was a railroad enthusiast and a lifelong photographer whose films and prints, most pertaining to travel, transportation, and the ICC, have been retained by the Library.
It is Lewis the public servant rather than Lewis the newspaperman or private citizen who is portrayed in this collection. Personal papers unrelated to his official capacity as a federal transportation specialist are few in number but when present can be located in the miscellany and in the speeches and articles file. Absent from the collection are his family papers and any material pertinent to his term as chair of the Public Service Commission of Indiana. The miscellany does contain information collected during his presidency of the Georgetown Citizens' Association as well as a few records of his participation in the Travelers Aid Society of Washington, D.C.
In the subject file are the papers Lewis collected and organized in his capacity as ICC commissioner. As with the correspondence and the collection as a whole, these papers have been kept basically in the order in which Lewis arranged them. Material derived from Lewis's tenure on the wartime Anthracite Commission is limited to one folder containing several drafts of the commission's report and some exchanges with interested parties within the government.
Lewis was ICC chair from 1929 to 1932. This period and the early part of his chairmanship of the Bureau of Valuation are most fully documented. The papers show him to have been a friend to railroads who advocated for regulation and consolidation as one means of preventing the slow but definite decline of rail service and profits in the United States. Two tasks that dominated the commission's activity in the 1930s and that dominate the subject matter in this collection are the formulation of a plan to consolidate the nation's railroads into nineteen major systems and the institution of continuous methods of valuating railroad and pipeline properties. As an investigative agency with power to hear and decide cases concerning rates, mergers, schedules, and abandonment, the ICC received complaints and appeals from shippers, carriers, and consumers who called for more or less regulation and who frequently sought adjustments to favor particular interest groups. Many of these appeals went directly to Lewis before being officially studied by the commission. His files are replete with case studies, docket materials, valuation indexes, passenger and freight rate schedules, and other legal and statistical data necessary in the performance of the commission's duties.
Lewis's personal connections were those of a Hoosier, a Republican politician, and a utilities expert. Prominent among his correspondents are Indiana figures such as Albert Jeremiah Beveridge, James P. Goodrich, Harry S. New, Arthur R. Robinson, James E. Watson, and Will R. Wood. Also important are Daniel Willard, Clyde Martin Reed, Herbert Hoover, Joseph B. Eastman, Balthasar H. Meyer, Clyde Bruce Aitchison, John F. Shaughnessy, Donald R. Richberg, R. V. Taylor, Jonas Waffle, Mark Winslow Potter, and Morris Sheppard.
Interspersed in the alphabetically-arranged correspondence folders is supplementary material Lewis filed according to the individual, organization, or topic to which it pertained. This material includes clippings, articles, speeches, pamphlets, and other miscellaneous items.
The collection is organized into four series: Correspondence, Subject File, Speeches and Writings File, and Miscellany.