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This work is a history of the transcontinental railroads and how they transformed America in the decades after the Civil War. The transcontinental railroads of the late nineteenth century were the first corporate behemoths. Their attempts to generate profits from proliferating debt sparked devastating panics in the U.S. economy. Their dependence on public largess drew them into the corridors of power, initiating new forms of corruption. Their operations rearranged space and time, and remade the landscape of the West. As wheel and rail, car and coal, they opened new worlds of work and ways of life. Their discriminatory rates sparked broad opposition and a new antimonopoly politics. With characteristic originality, range, and authority, Richard White shows the transcontinentals to be pivotal actors in the making of modern America. But the triumphal myths of the golden spike, robber barons larger than life, and an innovative capitalism all die here. Instead we have a new vision of the Gilded Age, often darkly funny, that shows history to be rooted in failure as well as success.… (more)
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The transcontinental railroads of the late nineteenth century were the first corporate behemoths. Their attempts to generate profits from proliferating debt sparked
With characteristic originality, range, and authority, Richard White shows the transcontinentals to be pivotal actors in the making of modern America. But the triumphal myths of the golden spike, robber barons larger than life, and an innovative capitalism all die here. Instead we have a new vision of the Gilded Age, often darkly funny, that shows history to be rooted in failure as well as success. 8 pages of black-and-white illustrations.
The protagonists (perhaps, the villains?) of this work are the capitalists who lead the railroad companies including Charles Francis Adams, Jay Cooke, Collis P. Huntington, Tom Scott, Leland Stafford, and Henry Villard. But the greatness of this book is that it looks at the transcontinental railroads from many perspectives including construction workers, railroad workers, anti-monopolists, local politicians, union organizers, and Native Americans. Some of the best parts of this book are the "A Railroad Life" mini-chapters that offer a case study of an individual's life experiences with the railroad. White also writes in a engaging, sometimes snarky, style that make reading about 19th century finance and corruption fun!
Favorite Passages:
“How, when powerful people can on close examination seem so ignorant and inept; how, when so much work is done stupidly, shoddily, haphazardly, and selfishly; how, then, does the modern world function at all? It is no wonder that religious people see the hand of God and economist invent the invisible hand.” – p. xxxii
“The transcontinentals were not so much about earning revenues from moving people and freight as about finance and politics. Finance and politics were in the late nineteenth century about networks, and networks, in turn, were functions of family, friendship, and information.” – p. 96
“Nineteenth-century Americans were not shocked by the corruption of the press; neither were they surprised that businessmen cheated, lied, and stole; what worried them was the corruption of the republic. In the Gilded Age, Americans feared the republic had become corrupted – diseased, decaying, and dying. They identified the source of this corruption as monopoly, and they made monopoly synonymous with the corporation.” – p. 98
“Both the Southern Pacific and the Texas and Pacific were so dependent on credit that they resembled two large and angry men trying to fight while on life-support. Both corporations carried immense debt, and both depended on steady infusions from existing subsidies, bond sales, and loans. Each flailed at the other, each trying to maintain its own lifelines while cutting off those of its opponent.” – p. 106
“The exclusive right to build a railroad was more valuable than an actual railroad in a newly settled agricultural region because an actual railroad in such a region would lose money until the population grew thick enough to provide the traffic necessary to turn a profit.” – p. 212
“Railroads remained largely speculative enterprises meant to make a profit through their financing” - p. 215
“What seemed a single corporation was the tool of four men – and eventually four families – who grew increasingly divided, bitter, and distrustful.” – p. 266
“The trouble with good accounting and transparent reporting was that it made visible, to railroad commissions and investors, what the railroad wished to be invisible. This was why the practices railroad men encouraged with one hand, they sometimes blocked with the other.” – p. 273
“There was little logical reason why a corporation was considered a single rights-bearing person while a union was merely a collection of rights-bearing individuals. The legal reason was that corporation had chosen to incorporate, but in organizational terms there was little difference between a union such as the American Railway Union and a corporation.” – p. 420
“Railroaded is not a kind of Robber Baron redux. The railroad corporations that I have examined here were unsuccessful and powerful. My guys could be ruthless, but their corporations were failure constantly in need of subsidy and rescue. They fascinate me precisely because they do not fit into our usual way of seeing things. And, in part, this book has been a study of how the unsuccessful and the incompetent not only survived but prospered and became powerful.” – p. 509