Customer Reviews

Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America

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1 star:		(3)

 

 

On May 10, 1869 at Promontory Summit, Utah, the lines of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroads were symbolically linked together to celebrate the completion of the first transcontinental railroad. An iconic photograph celebrates this event. Once viewed as a seminal moment in the making of the United States and the West, the events at Promontory Summit and their aftermath receive a great deal of critical attention in Richard White's provocative and polemical book, "Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America" (2011). White, the winner of a MacArthur Award and the Parkman Prize is the Margaret Byrne Professor of American History at Stanford University. He has written extensively on the American West.

Much in this book will be familiar to students of the post-Civil War Gilded Age of American history. White's history differs from most accounts in its virtually unilateral criticism of the building of transcontinental railroads in the West. White claims the transcontinentals were built far too early when they were not needed, were drastically overbuilt, corruptly financed, and incompetently managed. They destroyed the environment and the Indian tribes, contributed to depressions and economic dislocation, and promoted poor land use and poor settlement patterns in the West. White concludes (p. 517): "The issue is not whether railroads should have been built. The issue is whether they should have been built when and where they were built. And to those questions the answer seems no. Quite literally, if the country had not built transcontinental railroads, it might not have needed them until much later, when it could have built them more cheaply, more efficiently, and with fewer social and political costs."

White writes in detail about the financial and other corruption of the transcontinental railroads. Much of the book is devoted to the arcane and dismal world of railroad finance in the 19th Century. In White's account, the financiers played a shell game in building the railroads putting other people's money and the money and land of the Federal government at risk with little risk to themselves. They financed the building of the railroads through mirrors and construction corporations, such as the infamous Credit Mobilier during Grant's presidency, which they themselves controlled. The railroad owners proved markedly adroit in pulling out the capital the corporations were to receive to their own personal accounts resulting in debts for money never received that the railroads could not pay. The system floundered while individuals grew rich, in White's account. The railroads were controlled by easterners such as Henry Villard, Leland Stanford, Jay Cooke, Collis Huntington, Tom Scott and not by people in the West whom the roads were ostensibly designed to serve. In White's account, the curmudgeonly figure of Charles Francis Adams (1835 -- 1915) stands out. Adams served as the president of the Union Pacific Railroad until forced out by the road's bankruptcy. Adams vainly and ineffectively railed against the system at times and tried to reform it while as an executive he all too often fell victim to it. In the final analysis, White finds little reason to treat Adams more kindly than his other characters or, as White frequently calls them, his "guys".

Besides the emphasis of financial chicanery, White describes the close relationships between financiers and politicians in Congress and in the state governments. There was pervasive corruption in a culture White describes as being based euphemistically on the relationship of "friends." The book details the terrible human cost of the railroads in the form of accidents. It discusses the long misuse of the Chinese, both by the railroads and by their workers. A highlight of the book is a lengthy treatment of the Pullman Strike of 1894.

White intensifies his historical analysis through the use of metaphors. The term "creative destruction" in the title of this review derives from the economist Joseph Schumpeter who saw the rise of 19th century capitalists as sweeping away the old to make way for the new. White fundamentally disagrees with Schumpeter on the positive achievements that allegedly resulted from the building of the transcontinentals. Another figure in the book is the "Octopus" derived from Frank Norris' famous novel about railroad abuses in California and the closely related term "Robber Baron". White rejects these terms as giving too much credit to the financiers and managers of the railroads. He argues that far from making the corporations instruments of power and efficient management, the owners gutted the railroads to their own ends. Their success as individuals, for White, masked their failure as entrepreneurs as witnessed most dramatically by the depressions of 1873 and 1893 and the receiverships which became the frequent fate of the transcontinental systems. Another frequent metaphor of White's is the "Sorceror's Apprentice" by which he means that the railroad monguls unleashed forces that they did not understand and could not control. White does not use another figure which leaps to mind -- that of the formidable Wizard of Oz who proves upon close acquaintance to be "a very poor wizard."

In his Introduction, White identifies several strands of the argument of his book. He argues that the transcontinentals were intertwined from the beginning with the largesse of the Federal government and that the story of private capitalism and initiative is largely a myth. Second, White argues that the transcontinentals changed the concept of "space" in the West to reduce it to the cost of shipping. The book offers a good overview of the difficulties of cost pricing for services offered by the railroads. The difficulties of setting prices led to much abuse, favoritism, and economic dislocation. Third, White argues that the railroad corporations were not "harbingers of order, rationality, and effective, large-scale organization" but were instead incoherently and irrationally managed. Fourth, White offers qualified praise to the antimonopoly movements that arose in the Western states to combat the abuse of the railroads. As his final point, White tries to deflate the myth of the "Rober Barons" for reasons alluded to earlier.

There is much to be learned from White's book. I found the book marred by its patronizing, overly casual writing style and by its aura of certainty. Although he acknowledges the risks of importing current values into a different time, the book seems to me to lack a full historical sense. White pushes on his readers issues such as Enron, the IT bubble, and the economic collapse which began in 2008 as parallels for understanding 19th Century transcontinental railroads. These analogies may be perilous.

The book has provoked a substantial debate among my fellow reader reviewers here on Amazon. I found this a good, thoroughly researched study of the transcontinental railroads in which the author makes no secret of his opinions and possible biases. Students of American history, the West, and the Gilded Age will benefit from the book. A degree of skepticism and a willingness to witthold hasty judgment are valuable qualities to bring to the reading of this book.

Robin Friedman

Many of the histories of railroads in America fall into two categories: Detailed accounts for railroad nerds who love to map and plot the old roads and visit the old sites, or stories of glory and bravery that create heroic myths about a foggy, inaccessible past. This book is the long-awaited, much-needed comprehensive history of long distance railroads. It both recreates the immediacy and contingency of the construction of these roads--unlikely events! extraordinary consequences!--and slices through the hazy fog of myth with a thrilling interpretation. For White, the long distance railroads were economic and environmental disasters that could never have been created without massive federal subsidies and an extraordinary amount of financial chicanery. The men who built the transcontinentals are strongly reminiscent of the men who brought us Enron and the recent financial collapse. That is not to say, as some reviewers have claimed here, that White is an "anti-capitalist" who hates private enterprise.

To the contrary! White shows that railroads weren't free market enterprises at all: They were publicly-supported, intentional subsidies. Their ultimate success, and their incredible power to remake American life, is not due to brilliant and energetic entrepreneurs but rather to a national decision to tolerate inefficient management and thieving railroad barons in order to further the public interest.

This is useful history. This is powerful interpretation. And it is exhaustive, document-based research. I hope those reviewers who complained about the book will consider David M. Kennedy's advice: We must refuse to believe something merely because we wish it to be true. History is very hard on belief, but it can be a powerful tool for the living.

If you want to get a sense of the book before buying, White has twice been interviewed on the radio this month (check out his interview with Diane Rehm in June or his July 11 Morning Edition interview on NPR).

Most railroad books have far too little solid information about railroading, and far too much nostalgia about steam engines. Thus Mr. White's book comes as a refreshing and very welcome contrast.

The book genuinely is about railroading, and it is an important book about understanding the origins of the big western roads. It considers railroading from many, many points of view. It also has - perhaps not entirely intentionally - stunning relevance to America's contemporary financial and political problems. On those grounds alone it can be recommended not merely to those interested in railroads, but to anyone interested in financial skulduggery and the corrupting effect it has on political institutions. Some things never change.

This book is a good book, perhaps even a very good book.
It could have been a great book, or maybe volume I of a great work on the railroads.
Chapter 3, pages 93 - 133, entitled "Friends", is a thing of genius, and worth the entire price of the book.
Chapter 4, pages 140 - 178, entitled "Spatial Politics" is very nearly as good.

There are weaknesses, however.

First, the story ends too soon.
What happened afterward? No epilogue?
How did those struggling roads of the 1890's become the powerhouses of the 20th Century? Volume II is clearly required.

What about those other transcontinentals, the Canadian Northern and the Grand Trunk Pacific? The book discusses every other transcontinental.

Second, the writing in the chapters concerning labour disputes might have benefited from greater restraint: The facts speak for themselves, very starkly. They would speak even more starkly without varnish.

Third, what was the relationship between the western roads and the big roads of the official territory east of the Mississippi? The book touches on this, but gently. It is a topic that probably merits its own volume.

In any case, this is the best book of its kind that I have yet seen.

I had a feeling this was going to be a very good book and I wasn't disappointed. American history is so influenced by the railroads and this book did a great job diving into the subject of how the expansion of the railroads affected the West. I believe you will be surprised by the author's conclusions though. I loved the premise of the book and the author's writing style is smart and sarcastic at the same time. You can really get a sense for his expertise. I also enjoyed the author's references to Joseph Schumpeter's economic brillance and how it relates to the railroad industry. In summary, a great book for those who enjoy economics, politics and American history.. you won't be disappointed.

Many who have reviewed this book seem to have missed the point entirely. Richard White states in the introduction that Railroaded "emphasizes finance capitalism-the use of financial markets-as the central engine of corporate growth and expansion in late nineteenth-century North America."

He recognizes that "Although the transcontinental railroads emerged in markets shaped by large public subsidies and particular legal privileges, neither subsidies nor privileges were new in and of themselves. American states had subsidized and granted special privileges to canals, banks, and railroads in the 1820's and 1830's. These proliferating and often financially disastrous subsidies had brought about a constitutional reaction in the 1840s that dramatically curtailed the ability of the states to subsidize development and lend their credit" leading to the unique viewpoint of his book, "[which]left the ground open for the federal government."

The direct correlation he makes between railroad owners of the 18th century and the financial engineers of the 21st is this: "Transcontinental railroad corporations transformed the government itself by making the government an arena in which the corporations themselves competed, and by making Congress, bureaucracy, and the courts a mechanism for corporate competition."

I for one appreciated White's viewpoint that as a historian you cannot take the privilege of hindsight but must explore every option that the contemporary figures faced, which necessarily takes some bias. The science of history is ever more learning that to tell a history purely objectively is impossible, and in this instance, the idea that these railroad owners were greedy, odious people that shared little with the common good was certainly well represented in the late 19th century.

So if your looking for a sweeping history of the railroads and all its "grandeur" for "civilization," then I would recommend you look elsewhere. But if your looking for a unique perspective on the history of the railroads or a historic model of today's corporations, then cozy up to a good read.

Richard White is a harsh and persistent taskmaster. He has retroactively tasked the management of the transcontinental railroads with building them only when justifid by demand, building them well, paying for them through honest and aboveboard financing arrangements, building them without subsidies while avoiding political subversion, operating them efficiently, and operating them profitably. As the management in question achieved none of these desiderata, White feels his continual, gratuitous rain of adjectives such as corrupt, incompetent, dishonest, and greedy is entirely justified.

To be sure, White knows what happened. With ten years' research, and 108 pages of scholarly notes to the text it is hard to fault his facts. And when they can be ascertained, some of the facts White presents are quite interesting. But the text is such a mixture of fact, fantasy, and denigration, that it seems impossible for the reader to extract a balanced view. A typical fantasy, "Scott was not so much tainted by corruption as impregnated with it," is not just rhetoric - it is entirely beyond the realm of provable assertions.

My initial impression after reading a third of the book was that White is a Marxist. However, on further reading, that impression yielded to a different view: White does not comprehend normal business conduct and practices. Even if he might understand today's practices, he takes no account of the developments in business `technology' between the late 19th century and the present. Much of the theoretical infrastructure of accounting was under development in that time span. Are we then surprised, then, that cost accounting was inferior to today's? Are we surprised that financial reports did not properly reflect depreciation? Are we surprised that corporations that would be in bankruptcy today continued to operate because nobody knew they were dead? Are we surprised that shoddy salesmanship filled the void that venture capital would later occupy? And are we surprised that venality and self-interest existed? Apparently, much of this is news to White, who reacts with scorn.

It is particularly annoying to read White's repeated charge of poor construction. How well ought a line to be built if it is only going to carry a few trains a week at ten miles an hour? Surely, any rational manager would not lavish unnecessary expense on such a line. These speculative ventures could be upgraded if they panned out. Until then it made no sense to engage in building a state-of-the-art showpiece.

The charge of excessive costs in the earlier lines rings similarly hollow. It is only natural that construction technology advanced in twenty years so that the old lines could have been built for less had they been built later. This is just the way of technology - it is continual process of improvement, based on correcting prior mistakes and on new discoveries in related technologies. It is no use lamenting the thousand dollars an early scanner cost me, just because a scanner today is a zero-cost add-on to my printer. White, a denizen of Silicon Valley, should know this.

Finally, it is disturbing that White shows so little regard for the humanity of his subjects. Instead of a historical report, the overall impression this book makes is that of an angry editorial.

This leaves us with the following question for White: Suppose the transcontinentals had not been built until there was a real economic justification for them -- then when would they have been built, where would the borders of the US now be, and where would White (who works at Leland Stanford's University) be employed?

What starts out as a counter history of the building of the transcontinentals (or "intercontinentals" as the current occupant of the White House would call them) ends up as a relentless attack upon the early railroaders. White finds nothing good to say about any of them. Even James J. Hill, who built the Great Northern without any government assistance, ends up as a bad guy in this scenario. William Van Horn, the scion of the Canadian Pacific, ends up trashed in what becomes a polemic, strongly reminiscent of Dee Brown's "Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow." What became truly irritating after a while was White's constant reference to the Chicago and Northwestern. Apparently, his scholarly research skills failed him at this point: it was the Chicago and North Western, from the time of its founding to its incorporation into the UP system. If you want to read truly good histories of the transcons, try "The Empire Express" (although the prose is a bit tortured at times), "Rival Rails," and Maury Klein's superb history of the Union Pacific. I repeat: White is NOT a railroad historian and his views of the history of economic theory as presented in the book are frequently offbeat as well (how many references to Schumpeter can you cram into a book on railroads?).

I bought this on the basis of strong reviews, but they were a bit overly-positive. The thorough research in the book creates some tedious reading (tons of vegetables, miles of track, bank loan interest rates, etc.). But it's fascinating to read about the cupidity and stupidity of the legendary "railroad men" and the conspiratorial relationship with elected representatives. The conditions for the workers, the rise of unionism, the fate of the buffalo, and the incompetence of much of the work do provide wonderful reading, contrary to the myths about the transcontinental railroads (there really was no such thing). It tough sledding at times, and you could use a good engine to pull you our of the minutiae that fouls up the rails.

This books looses a lot of creditability with it's treatment of JJ Hill and the Great Northern. The Great Northern was build without Government help and it was build to last. JJ Hill made sure that no shortcuts where taken and it was always profitable in his lifetime. The book is misleading when it says the Great Northern eventually went bankrupt just like the others. The Government in fact likely caused the eventual bankruptcy when it broke up the Northern Securities Company which included the Great Northern, Northern Pacific and Union Pacific in 1904. The actual bankruptcy didn't occurred during JJ Hill's lifetime anyway.

I apologize for this review. Professor White wrote a great book on the environmental history of Whidbey Island which I used in teaching for many years. But I am like an addict. As my mental acuity declines with age, I keep plugging away at reading and thinking. I can't seem to stop though I am sure what I have to say becomes more episodic and confusing. So here are my comments.

Were the social costs of the industrial revolutions worth its achievements? That is the question White poses for the Transcontinental Railways. Were limbs mangled in 19th century textiles mills, white lung disease, emiseration of the barefoot Irish of Manchester, overproduction, undermining of Egyptian and Indian local production, the collapse of the Ottoman empire and gutters as hospitals of the poor worth the cheapening of clothing or computer advances implicit in the automated loom? I wonder whether Professor White would forgo medical treatment for his kids because the social costs of medical development have been corruption, venality, environmental catastrophe, sacrificed prisoners, poisoned American blacks and third world guinea pigs. At an Earth First gathering in Jemez mountains of New Mexico around 1990 the anti-modern, ecoterrorists assembled called in a medivac chopper when one of their spawn broke his leg and would have risked a fatal thrombosis on a bumpy car ride out of the woods. It was thrilling standing in a circle with flashlights so the chopper could find the opening in the woods at night. But it represented a real contradiction in the ideology of Earth First as were Dave Foreman's sentimental descriptions of Ed Abbey, environmental superman and monkeywrencher, dying in a hospital. Sure we might like socio-economic changes to be different, but we are not about to forgo the advantages we personally incur from them even if they have terrible ongoing social and environmental costs.

The question Prof. White poses is an odd one. He likes counter-factual history. He ends his book with, "---if the country had not built the transcontinental railroads, it might not have needed them until much later," when it could have done the job cheaper with less social costs. My anarchist soul rebels at the how capitalism has stolen, wasted, destroyed, enslaved, and bred war and mass murder. To catalogue these things is a great gift toward understanding the nature of human existence. But the Transcontinentals are hardly unique. The Maoris did a good job on New Zealand and each other as did the Sumerians and maybe even our hunter-gatherer ancestors who proportionately may have been more violent than we but simply on a smaller scale. To argue that it was not worth it or could have been done with a lot less social, political, and environmental damage is to state the obvious. Marx and Engels made the point a hundred and fifty years ago much more poetically. And it begs the question that economists saw the Transcontinentals as creative destruction or the beginning of the large rationally run corporation. Sure, free market apologists don't take into account constraints of trade, influence, embedded incompetence, subsidies, human wreckage, industrial waste and dead Indians. And organizational types prefer Max Weber without favoritism, mafias, paternalism, prejudice, etc. etc which are really how the world has worked and continues to work with some exceptions. Things have gotten better in Amurika since the 19th century---but it is a mixed bag. They may be slipping back in terms of distribution of income, Tea Party racism, inane imperial wars with their collateral damage of the women and children and religious hatred. And that is what I think Professor White is really writing about. In page after page the similarities stand out. His home near Silicon Valley has permeated his orientation towards history. And he is right. Reading about railroad political corruption, the siphoning of collective largess into private hands and the financial manipulation lead one to shout: "Oh my god. Things haven't changed much!" Huntington, Stanford, Hopkins, et al didn't got to jail---though they were crooks as much as the recent heads of big brokerage houses, banks, the chairman of the FED, the Secretary of the Treasury and bribed congresspersons are today. Greenspan and Summers hobnob with brokers, prosecutors, judges and congressmen, all of whom should be held accountable for the suffering their klepto-capitalism is inflicting. And as lack of organization, machismo and racism of the Knights of Labor, and the American Railway Union limited their effectiveness, so lousy education, class and occupational privileges, TV, video games, social media, big business news, and personal malaise keep the victims of today's corruption impotent in the face of mercenary armies, complex finances, and racial undertones. The history that Prof. White presents is an unbearable waste of limited human and natural resources. What could have been done with the moneys that filled the Transcontinental swindlers' pockets or went to feed the Cold War, Vietnam, oil, farm and mining subsidies, NASA, the export of jobs, the Savings and Loan scandal or the military industrial complex. Moral hazard seems simply one powerful interest after another with their hand in the honey pot. But Transcontinentals are our history. So let us look at tidbits of it.

Parts of the book which I liked included the coverage of the people who came into conflict with the railroads: workingmen, farmers, small town businessmen, the Chinese, etc. I felt the author could have said more about racism in the US following the Civil War as the background for hatred of Chinese. Ethnic conflict was rife from before the Revolution of `76 and played maybe more of a role than the specific hatreds. I had never before heard of evangels giving up on the Chinese leaving them without even church protection, enjoyed a bit by Blacks and more so by the Irish. There must be an interesting story in there. I found White's chapter on space and the politics of space quite incomprehensible and am not sure what it added to the book except that historians sometimes want to be philosophers or poets while in my dotage I prefer simple stories than post modern explanations. I liked the book's demonstration that the logic of grain never really worked. There was too much and the RRs could never carry it profitably enough. The sources cited for these claims are dated. I would have thought there might be more recent studies. But the roads did make money delivering manufactured goods back to the farmers. That grain was overproduced and the price dropped were cited as examples of the railroads' engendering waste. The Transcontinentals seemed irrelevant to that. Supply and demand has created boom and busts under many delivery systems. I liked White's mention of the Argentine railroad/grain debacle. But how about the Ukraine? When my mother was carried in a basket in 1910 via Odessa to Bremerhaven and on to Canada, Odessa had street cars while Winnipeg's streets were still mud. After all the cost of food has diminished as a proportion of the cost of living, at least for the First World. Good or bad, were the railroads majorly responsible for this? I found his description of the railroads' contribution to the destruction of the buffalo a bit unconvincing. Might it not have happened without railroads. The demand for pelts could have been met as it had for beaver one hundred and fifty years before the railroads. Counter-factual history can be used to argue against other counter facts.

As Buffy St. Marie sang, "the cavalry fired and the Indians died"---yes moving troops by railroad outflanked the Nez Pierce but General Clark, dad of the Clark of Lewis-and-Clark, slaughtered the Indiana Indians with nary a steam engine. Range cattle of the West is an interesting story. The RRs certainly played a crucial part. Cattle's boom and bust was an unbelievable waste. That the West only produced a marginal amount compared to the Midwest and East was a point made 20 years ago by environmentalists attacking welfare ranching. In his first year Clinton tried to do something about federal subsides but ran afoul of the rotten borough power of Western Senators. Devastated landscapes and giant hobby ranches are the heritage of the longhorn, get-rich schemes that the RR's made possible in Texas, NM, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, etc. White depicts this known story quite well. Economically there was nothing very heroic about cowboys---though working on a cow/calf operation in Eastern Oregon was one of my most fulfilling personal experiences.

So I have lots of questions? We are told the Penn RR was run right and the Northwestern also did well. At night at age 10 in Chicago I could identify which RR whistled and chugged from the direction it came through my open window on hot summer nights: Illinois Central, CB&Q, Great Northern, North Western, EJ&E. But now I need a more explicit description of the difference between East and West. What about Europe? Were there financial swindles and waste at all comparable? Darwin made a fortune investing in RR stocks. And the Trans-Siberian RR, was that done with comparable social costs? White compares the RRs that passed through the western areas of the plains to those that hit where farming was possible and found the latter worked with merely trunk lines whereas the former with Transcontinentals had insufficient traffic and the people lured to western parts failed as framers. His most damning argument against the Transcontinentals is that shipment across the isthmus of Panama from even before the Civil War was cheaper and could easily handle the traffic. The Transcontinentals did exactly what the auto companies did to street cars and the Inter Urban RRs (what we would now call commuter trains). (The Tunerville Trolley was one such.) They bought up the competition. Free enterprise or constraint of trade?

I found White's citing of all the swindles somewhat repetitive but similar repetition of political bribery more engaging. It is interesting that the capitalists were as faithless to each other as they were to the investors they cheated. I certianly did not find the owners of the Union, Pacific, Central, and Southern RR's as likeable as the author seemed to. And the Goulds and Hills who came after seemed just as corrupt. Charles Francis Adam's is an anomaly. White did not like him as much as the others, but, at least he tried to think out a what a rescue of the Union RR would require had its internal corruption of work rules, with skimming and bribery at each stage, allowed reform. And Adams had the brains to try to translate his understanding into useful transferable knowledge. That his Eastern educated managers made no headway in the company given its rough and tumble internal culture can no more be blamed on him than the loss of Vietnam on the Harvard ROTC Second Lieutenants who were "fragged" by their men weary of a war based on lies. I can understand a continuing hatred for Stanford's University and the rest's museums and libraries that working people had for Carnegie's charitable institutions. It was blood money, not great philanthropy. If victims of the Holocaust are entitled to compensation then so must descendents of those so ill treated by men who stole through the agency of the Transcontinentals.

I find it fascinating that the patriotic zeal which made the promotion of war bonds to pay for the civil war successful laid the foundation for the sale of worthless RR bonds. While politicians as corrupt as those who came after Lincoln managed to pay war debts, i.e. do right by their country. LBJ and Shrub beggared their country by not paying for their wars, and in the latter's case simultaneously diverting the wealth of the country to the rich. Now Obama is making the poor and lower half of the middle class pay for it all. At least productivity grew during the Gilded Age, what White calls the overproduction of grain, ore, coal, RR cars, so there was some largess to pass around. The military industrial complex killed that in the late `60s and Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush the epigone, gave the productivity increases of the computer revolution to the rich. Now there is nothing to trickle down, only ill-gotten gain to confiscate. So White's book is a mirror of what we are living through at the moment. I appreciate the effort and care he took in laying out the story. It makes me even more cynical about the possibilities of change. There are too many well-to-do now, including most of the liberals. It doesn't seem as though anything short of another depression would induce those that have to share with those who don't. Poor America. It is our real manifest destiny and I don't expect to live long enough to see it fulfilled.

Charlie Fisher, author of "Dismantling Discontent: Buddha's Way Through Darwin's World," on Amazon.