Train of Catastrophes

Train of Catastrophes Richard R. John (bio) Richard White . Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America. New York: W. W. Norton, 2011. xxxix + 660 pp. Figures, illustrations, maps, appendices, notes, and index. $35.00. The transcontinental railroads that spanned the western half of the United States and Canada in the final decades of the nineteenth century are a perennial favorite for op-ed writers, non-academic historians, and the producers of TV documentaries. Like the space program or the Hetch Hetchy Dam, they symbolize the fruits of modernity and the mixed legacy of government-backed public works. Academic historians have by no means neglected the transcontinentals, though most of the standard monographs are several decades old. The planning, construction, and operation of the U.S. transcontinentals—of which the most fully chronicled are the Union Pacific and the Great Northern—have been ably described by business historians, while their economic consequences have inspired economic historians to undertake a pioneering case study in what its practitioners call "counterfactual" analysis.1 Historians of Canada have also found the transcontinentals congenial, which is not surprising, since the spanning of the continent by the Canadian Pacific has been, for over a century, a symbol of Canadian national identity.2 In the introduction to Railroaded, the distinguished Western historian Richard White explains that he originally intended to write a comparative history of the transcontinentals in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Having discovered that their histories were entwined—and, therefore, that a comparative history made little sense—he narrowed his ambit to the U.S. The resulting book is the most ambitious, synthetic, and provocative history of the U.S. transcontinentals to have ever been published. White's focus is the trans-Mississippi West in the decades between the first Pacific Railway enabling act in 1862 and the defeat of the Populist Party in the presidential election of 1896. As White's title implies, Railroaded is highly critical of its subject. In his view, the social, environmental, and political costs of the transcontinentals outweighed their benefits in both the short term and the long term. Even in narrowly economic terms, the transcontinentals were a failure. The low-cost [End Page 99] loans and generous land grants that the federal government lavished on railroad promoters were wasteful and unnecessary. In the period before 1900, shippers had little need for the facilities that the transcontinentals provided: by one estimate, only 5 percent of the Union Pacific's traffic crossed the continent in 1885 (p. 172). "Dumb growth" was the result (p. 462). Had lawmakers relied on market incentives instead of political fiat, the Panics of 1873 and 1893 might have been averted; the Great Plains might have been dominated by small family farms instead of huge absentee-owned tracts; the bison might not have been slaughtered to the point of extinction; cattle drives might not have despoiled the habitat; the Dakota might have remained, like the Navaho, relatively undisturbed on their reservations; and American electoral politics today might be less distorted by corporate lobbyists. The crux of the problem for White was not the construction of the transcontinentals, but their timing: 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. [p. 517] Among the most transformative of the many disturbing legacies of the transcontinentals, in White's view, were their insidious influence on American public life. By granting certain promoters special privileges, and, even more troublingly, by bailing out railroads when they defaulted on their loans—as every transcontinental other than the Great Northern did in the 1890s—federal lawmakers created mechanisms for "corporate competition" that institutionalized the corrupt nexus between the federal government and big business that has been a defining feature of electoral politics ever since: "Politics still offers a way for corporations to compete" (p. 512). White's portraits of the men...

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