Jesse White
The world’s first transcontinental railroads were built in America after the Civil War. Considered one of the greatest technological feats of the 19th century, the transcontinentals transformed American life. But historian Richard White says this happened as much by their failure as success. He draws on 12 years of research to cut through myths about the opening of the West and the evolution of corporations. We talk about the economic, social, political and environmental consequences, and he draws parallels with the economic crises we face today.
Guests
- Richard White MacArthur award-winning professor of American history at Stanford University.
Author Extra: Richard White Answers Questions
Mr. White stayed after the show to answer a few more questions.####
Q: I am wondering what Prof. White thinks are the most important 3 or 4 key facts or understandings that high school students should learn about the railroads in order to be informed citizens.
- From Mary via email in Salt Lake City
A: Since I am not sure if you mean the contemporary railroad system or the historical one, I will address both. Historically, the students should look at railroads as a transformative technology similar to the internet today. But they should realize that it is not the technology itself that changes society but rather who controls it, how it is used, and how it is regulated. Secondly, they should know that it was the organization of the railroads as massive corporations that was the most controversial thing about them during the nineteenth century and looking at this gives great insight into political change in the United States. Third, railroads in the United States, then and now, were freight railroads. Their major use was carrying things, not people. Fourth, what matters about any technology, particularly railroads, is where, when, and how it is used.
Q: Can you speak to the Beef Trust’s monopoly on insulated icebox cars and its effect on rail commerce?
- From Ryan via Twitter
A: I can, but I am only echoing William Cronon’s wonderful book “Nature’s Metropolis.” As he explains, refrigerated cars gave the Chicago slaughterhouses a great advantage over local butchers who slaughtered animals imported by rail. First, centralized slaughterhouses could undersell local butchers because the slaughterhouses relied largely on meat by-products for their ultimate profit. They could sell the meat at cost or even under cost. Local butchers could not compete because they did not operate on a large enough scale to capture the by-products. The railroads initially tried to keep the live cattle trade alive because it gave them more traffic than the chilled beef trade, but they failed. There initially was consumer resistance to chilled beef, but the meat packers overcame this through low prices and aggressive advertising. Cronon tells this story very well.
Q: In reviewing the financial disasters of his study, how would your guest compare the long-term national economic impact of the railroad barons, in their successive bankruptcies, on the government and the people, left holding the bag, to the long-term national impact of their peers today ? – From Charles via Email
A: Well, we don’t know the long-term impact of today’s financial crisis, but the transcontinentals contributed to two depressions and a very sharp recession over roughly thirty years. They fueled political corruption and contributed to environmental and social damage. I would argue that the railroads were brought largely under control in the early twentieth century by the Progressives, although the roots of the reforms lay in the nineteenth century. I hope that the present crisis does not repeat itself, and I hope it will not play out over the next thirty years.
Q: I’m listening to the author of Railroaded and interested to know about the other public technologies supported.I suspect before railroads there were canals, and then electricification, roads, and air travel with also maybe public education. Are there others and did the railroads teach later lessons as we invested in other technologies? – From J.E. via Email
A: This is a very good and very complicated question. Most of the early canals were subsidized by the public and many of them were owned by the states. There were state subsidies for railroads before the Civil War, but this led to financial disaster in many states, which then outlawed further public subsidies. The federal government and western states continued to give subsidies. Large dams have largely been a federal enterprise, and most airports and roads are built and funded by the public. The key questions to ask about subsidies are first, if the public builds infrastructure does the public control the projects and get revenue from them, or does the public build projects and allow the profits to go to private corporations as was the case with the western railroads? Second, when the public subsidizes these projects, do legislators identify a revenue stream – such as gas taxes – that will pay for them or are the subsidies drawn from the general revenue stream?
Read an Excerpt
Reprinted from RAILROADED: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America by Richard White. Copyright (c) 2011 by Richard White. Used with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc:
Transcript
11:06:55
MS. DIANE REHMThanks for joining us, I'm Diane Rehm. In a new book titled, "Railroaded," historian Richard White says, "The transcontinentals of the 19th century transformed American life, but not because of their success." He joins me in the studio to talk about why he thinks their failures laid the groundwork for many of the problems we face today.
11:07:27
MS. DIANE REHMRichard White is a professor of American history at Stanford University. Throughout the hour, we'll invite your calls, questions, comments, 800-433-8850, send us your e-mail to drshow@wamu.org, join us on Facebook or Twitter. Good morning to you, sir.
11:07:57
MR. RICHARD WHITEGood morning, Diane. It's my pleasure to be here.
11:07:58
REHMThanks for being here. Thank you. How much do you compare the railroad of the 19th century to what's happening now, in terms of the internet, the growth of communications.
11:08:19
WHITEWell, when I started writing the book, I didn't compare it much at all, but the book, as you said, took 12 years. And over that time, I watched the growth of the internet, I wrote this in Seattle, I wrote it in Palo Alto. I watched the rise of the dotcoms, I watched Enron, I watched, I watched the financial crisis and after a while, the late 19th century seemed to be very close in many ways to the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
11:08:46
REHMYou see that comparison because of the push, the boom and then the failures.
11:08:58
WHITEWell, I see it for those reasons and I also see it because it's the first time that the United States -- in the United States that corporations really began to take a large role in politics. This is really the birth of the modern corporation, with the transcontinental railroads and other railroad corporations and they invent, I argue in the book, the modern lobby. And what they make is politics becomes a way of doing business.
11:09:23
WHITEThe business is not just a competition between corporations and the market, but the market itself is entwined with politics and, in fact, these corporations compete for political favors. They get lobbies, they get all kinds of politicians involved.
11:09:38
REHMIt's interesting because you say that the railway tycoons were actually muddling through. What does that mean?
11:09:47
WHITERailroad tycoons who take over the transcontinental railroads were not experienced railroad men. As a matter of fact, they got it because no experienced railroad man would touch the transcontinentals. It made no sense to build railroads over thousands of miles where there was not enough people living to produce things for market, where it's going to cost them a huge amount of money.
11:10:10
WHITEAnd so railroad men would not touch it. People who would touch it are people who knew that you could make some money from constructing the roads, financing the roads and from land speculation along the road. So the people who built the roads did not know how to run railroads, nor where they particularly interested in running railroads.
11:10:26
REHMAnd, of course, even the term transcontinental is questionable.
11:10:32
WHITEYeah, these are railroads that by and large stop at the Missouri River. They're railroads that will build across places where you should build railroads, Kansas, Nebraska and places where it's pretty dubious to build railroads, Wyoming, Utah on into California. And what people warned would happen did happen, the railroads go bankrupt, they go bankrupt not once, they go bankrupt repeatedly and they have to be rescued by the federal government over and over and over again.
11:11:00
REHMI want to go back earlier to the actual construction of the railroads and the laying of those lines, which really called on many thousands of Chinese immigrants.
11:11:16
WHITEEspecially building from the West, 'cause all of these railroads build in two directions, they build from the East to the West and the West to the East. There is not a labor force available on the West Coast that will work at wages which would make it practical to build these railroads. The solution to the problem becomes the Chinese.
11:11:34
WHITEMany of the Chinese who are already in the West because of the gold rush, they're recruited. Other Chinese come in and the Central Pacific, the Canadian Pacific, the Northern Pacific, none of the roads would've been built without Chinese labor. They enabled the building of the roads. And it's low paying, brutal, dangerous work.
11:11:55
REHMHow many actually survived. Do we know?
11:11:58
WHITEWell, most will survive. What you have on the railroads is the railroads, in general, it's not just the Chinese, anybody working in the railroads, this is a dangerous profession.
11:12:08
REHMWhy?
11:12:09
WHITEBecause what you're working with is a technology which they could've improved, but they didn't. The things when you actually run a train that kill people are going to be very simple things like brakes. Most of the brakes on a railroad train, especially a freight train in the late 19th century, are hand brakes, which means people have to be on top of the cars turning a wheel to manually stop the road.
11:12:28
WHITEPutting the cars together are manual couplers, which means human beings have to put their hands in-between very often moving railroad cars to hook them together. For construction with the Chinese, you're building through mountains and because there becomes a kind of race in order to get subsidies, you're building in the middle of a Sierra winter, it's cold, you're building beneath deep snow, you're using nitroglycerin and dynamite with very little safety precautions and the critical criteria is speed and that speed causes injuries.
11:13:03
REHMWhat happened, did the Chinese men leave families behind or did they travel with them?
11:13:12
WHITEThe Chinese, in this way, are much like any other worker who works in the West. These are workers who leave their families behind and who intend to go back themselves. Many of them will, many others won't. I mean, one of the things that happens in American immigration generally is immigrants, I would say, virtually always intend to return, but things happen. You stay in the West, you get hurt in the West, you never quite make enough money to go back.
11:13:40
WHITEBut very many Chinese do go back and actually, the first Chinese railroad, if I'm not mistaken, is urged forward and is going to be partially built by Chinese who had had experience building American railroads.
11:13:51
REHMHow fascinating. How did the construction of the railroads sort of change our sense of time and space even.
11:14:02
WHITEWell, what railroads will do is bring the world, in one sense, much closer together. The great cliché of the 19th century is that they've eradicated time and space. Places that had taken months to get to, you could now get to in a week. And it alters. I give the story of one man who's a freight agent, H.K. Thomas, in the Union Pacific, he's so close to New England where he comes from that he never really, in a sense, leaves New England.
11:14:33
WHITEHe reads New England papers, he has a fiancée who will break his heart in New England, but they correspond by mail. He will go back to visit New England, then when he forgets his toothbrush in New England, his toothbrush can be sent to him over the rail and be there in a few days and this was unimaginable just a little time earlier. There'll be people who will talk about places that it took army officers three months to get to, they now get to in 48 hours.
11:14:58
WHITESo the railroad, in that sense, utterly transforms time and space, but that's when the railroad works efficiently. Much of the time, railroads do not work that efficiently.
11:15:08
REHMNow, what were the railroads like before the Civil War and even during it?
11:15:15
WHITEWell, before the Civil War, what you have, if you look at a railroad map, it's utterly deceptive. You can open up a history book and it shows these rail lines spreading over the North and the South. But the thing to imagine is, let's say some of those railroads whose HTO model railroads and some are Lionel model railroads. The railroads don't connect. You literally have to offload from one railroad, load it on another.
11:15:39
WHITECities, like Philadelphia, will not allow the railroads to connect because they're freighting companies that make their money freighting goods from one railroad to another. These railroads are much faster than anything else, but they're wonderfully inefficient. They come in numerous different gauges and in many ways, many railroads will not allow their cars to go on a rival railroad's...
11:15:59
REHMTracks.
11:15:59
WHITE...tracks, yeah.
11:16:02
REHMSo you've got competition even for the track themselves.
11:16:06
WHITEYeah. And one of the things that happens during the Civil War is that the North, obviously, to make a railroad system work to supply troops and to move troops can't put up with this. The federal government will demand and in many cases enforce all kinds of changes that begin to turn it into a single gauge national system.
11:16:23
REHMRichard White, he's professor of American history at Stanford University and his new book is titled, "Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America." Do join us, 800-433-8850. You talk about the Pacific Railway Act of 1864 and you say it was the worst act money could buy.
11:16:58
WHITEWhat it is, is it's sloppily written, many of the people who criticize the act know full well what's going to happen with it, but in fact, what you can overwhelm them with, it's two arguments, one of which is patriotism. We have to hold the country together, it's during the Civil War. And the second one is, yes, there's no traffic for this railroad, but if we build it, they will come. The traffic will come after it.
11:17:22
WHITEBut to get this through, what you have is something that will become pretty much a feature of the Gilded Age. Railroad promoters offer Congressmen bonds, promises of stock, participation in insider construction companies, jobs after they're done and it becomes, in many ways, the worst act that money can buy. Money does buy it. It still doesn't give enough incentives in 1862, so in 1864, they have to sweeten the pot.
11:17:53
WHITEThey don't pay any attention to -- there's requirements that the railroads will have to pay the government back, but they say nothing about the interest, whether it's going to be compounded, whether it's going to have to be paid back yearly, whether it's going to be paid back at the end, so there's a huge gift of basically a loan in which no interest has to be paid for 30 years by the railroads. And by the time the loans come due, the railroads will argue they shouldn't have to pay it and the government will have to coerce the railroads as the end of the century to get any of the money back at all.
11:18:22
REHMAnd hence, the creation of one of the largest lobby firms in the country. Short break here for Richard White, his new book titled, "Railroaded." I do welcome your calls, 800-433-8850.
11:20:03
REHMAnd welcome back. Richard White is with me, he's professor of American history at Stanford University. He's written about the construction and, indeed, the aftermath of the construction of the transcontinental American railroad. His new book is titled, "Railroaded." And here's an e-mail from Jim who asks, "Did you write about the genocide of Native Americans proceeding and during the building of the railroad?"
11:20:45
WHITEI write a great deal about the relationship of Indian peoples and I use the word Indian peoples advisedly. That's -- I have a lot of experience working with Indians and they call themselves Indians. But I would not characterize it as genocide. Genocide takes place in the United States, Northern California, Southern Oregon during the gold rush.
11:21:06
WHITEWhat happens with the railroads is much more insidious. Essentially, the land grants that go to the railroads come out of Indian lands. The railroads will move in and end up abrogating the treaty system because it's so corrupted, the treaty system, that land was being conveyed directly to the railroads rather than to the United States to be opened to settlement.
11:21:25
REHMHow did they do that?
11:21:27
WHITEThey did it through money and political connections. Sometimes in the Senate -- the best one is actually a character Senator Pomeroy, who Mark Twain turned into his main character in, "The Gilded Age," and he's a man after that who's always less famous than his own caricature.
11:21:49
WHITEBut what he did is he headed a railroad company, he than arranged for a treaty with the Kickapoos. He then made sure that none of the Kickapoo leadership would have a say in the treaty unless they were already amenable to it. He then wrote into the treaty that the money would -- the land would be conveyed at a minimal price directly to the railroads who would then sell it. And then he steered it through ratification through the United States Senate.
11:22:09
WHITEI mean, one of the things people forget is we think about the Johnson administration and the Grant administration as being incredibly corrupt. The Lincoln administration was pretty corrupt, also. And Congress will, for a set of complicated reasons I discuss in the book, end the treaty system in the early 1870s. After that, there's going to be agreements but very often many of the peoples who are negotiating the agreements are on railroad payrolls. Many of the senators who steer these things through Congress are so-called friends of the railroads, also on railroad payrolls, so it's very much an inside job.
11:22:45
REHMBut at the same time, you call -- you say there is kind of a sorcerer's apprentice quality to those railway tycoons.