Click on title to link to Wikipedia's entry for the (First) Transcontinental Railroad discussed below.
Book Review
Nothing Like It In The World: The Men Who Built The Transcontinental Railroad, 1863-1869, Stephen E. Ambrose, Touchstone Books, New York, 2000
I have spend a great amount of time, and I believe rightly so, in drawing out the lessons of the struggle against slavery as they were played out as the great task of the American Civil War of the mid-19th century. I have mentioned, generally in passing, that the other great task of that fight was the preservation (and extension) of a continental nation-state by the victory of the Union forces. As Karl Marx did, steeped as he was in the traditions of historical materialism, I too saw the creation of a unitary capitalist state at that time as a historically progressive outcome. That said, it is one thing to be in favor of such an outcome, another to see how, in the specific circumstances of the vast North American land mass, that state was to be unified. The subject of this book, the struggle to create a transcontinental railroad, goes a long way to understanding how that task was accomplished, not only as a marvelous engineering feat but as a spur to a more systematic capitalist mode of mass production.
As the author the late Stephen Ambrose, previously known more for his historical works chronicling the war leaders and dog soldiers of his generation, the generation of my parents, the so-called “greatest generation” that survived the Great Depression of the 1930s and fought World War II, has noted this Herculean task was done using the most basic pre-capitalist methods, simple tools and man power, lots of man power. When completed in a few years time , as he also noted, the United States looked, or rather would look shortly thereafter light years different that the simple agrarian society projected by the founders of the country. Today, in our digital age, we are probably closer to those who created the transcontinental railroad society that they were to the hundred of generations before them who walked or used horses to do their traveling.
Of course, this railroad story is a rather good cautionary tale about the virtues and vices of capitalism, capitalists and the onset of the “Gilded Age” that the railroads, their financing and their political clout would speed up. This then is not a laconic tale of hoboes jungled up along some railroad right of way or “riding the blinds” or taking to the road in search of adventure as Kerouac's “beat” generation did. This is a tale of dreams, plans, power, greed, more greed, hard work, hard living, hard drinking and hard dying. Ambrose lays it out in a very compelling and easy to read way, although a minor fault is a too frequent repetition of the facts in one chapter being used again in another in order to bulk up a narrative with a pretty straightforward theme.
As to the dreams, that was the easy part and affected everyone in pre-Civil War America from the old railroad lawyer Abraham Lincoln to such well-known speculators and Gilded Age figures as Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker, Mark Hopkins and Coliss Huntington. As to the plan- private enterprise (backed by the government) was the order of the day and the route, finally established after much political dickering, through the center of the country with two competing lines-the Central Pacific (now part of today’s Southern Pacific –the sight of which when I travel in the West still makes me nostalgic) and the aptly-named Union Pacific.
As to the massive engineering task forgotten names like Ted Judah and the Civil War general, Grenville Dodge. drove the thing forward, through thick and thin. As to the hard work, mainly done by my Irish forbears on the UP side and the Chinese (with important help from the Mormons in Utah) on the CP side, as detailed by Ambrose represents the first inkling of what industrial mass production would look like later. Needless to say the heroes of this story who left no diaries or other writings are those workers who toiled endlessly and effectively to completion. I do have one question, just to be contrary as usual. Why was this project not done as a national task by the central government? As we know the later tales of railroad finacing after 1869, like the Credit Mobilier scandal, not covered in the book, made some of today’s financial shenanigans look tame by comparison. Why were the rails only nationalized, if at all, after those private railroads went belly-up with the advent of mass production automobiles and super highways ( of which one, I-80, follows the basic CP-UP route from Omaha) in the late 20th century?
Book Review
Nothing Like It In The World: The Men Who Built The Transcontinental Railroad, 1863-1869, Stephen E. Ambrose, Touchstone Books, New York, 2000
I have spend a great amount of time, and I believe rightly so, in drawing out the lessons of the struggle against slavery as they were played out as the great task of the American Civil War of the mid-19th century. I have mentioned, generally in passing, that the other great task of that fight was the preservation (and extension) of a continental nation-state by the victory of the Union forces. As Karl Marx did, steeped as he was in the traditions of historical materialism, I too saw the creation of a unitary capitalist state at that time as a historically progressive outcome. That said, it is one thing to be in favor of such an outcome, another to see how, in the specific circumstances of the vast North American land mass, that state was to be unified. The subject of this book, the struggle to create a transcontinental railroad, goes a long way to understanding how that task was accomplished, not only as a marvelous engineering feat but as a spur to a more systematic capitalist mode of mass production.
As the author the late Stephen Ambrose, previously known more for his historical works chronicling the war leaders and dog soldiers of his generation, the generation of my parents, the so-called “greatest generation” that survived the Great Depression of the 1930s and fought World War II, has noted this Herculean task was done using the most basic pre-capitalist methods, simple tools and man power, lots of man power. When completed in a few years time , as he also noted, the United States looked, or rather would look shortly thereafter light years different that the simple agrarian society projected by the founders of the country. Today, in our digital age, we are probably closer to those who created the transcontinental railroad society that they were to the hundred of generations before them who walked or used horses to do their traveling.
Of course, this railroad story is a rather good cautionary tale about the virtues and vices of capitalism, capitalists and the onset of the “Gilded Age” that the railroads, their financing and their political clout would speed up. This then is not a laconic tale of hoboes jungled up along some railroad right of way or “riding the blinds” or taking to the road in search of adventure as Kerouac's “beat” generation did. This is a tale of dreams, plans, power, greed, more greed, hard work, hard living, hard drinking and hard dying. Ambrose lays it out in a very compelling and easy to read way, although a minor fault is a too frequent repetition of the facts in one chapter being used again in another in order to bulk up a narrative with a pretty straightforward theme.
As to the dreams, that was the easy part and affected everyone in pre-Civil War America from the old railroad lawyer Abraham Lincoln to such well-known speculators and Gilded Age figures as Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker, Mark Hopkins and Coliss Huntington. As to the plan- private enterprise (backed by the government) was the order of the day and the route, finally established after much political dickering, through the center of the country with two competing lines-the Central Pacific (now part of today’s Southern Pacific –the sight of which when I travel in the West still makes me nostalgic) and the aptly-named Union Pacific.
As to the massive engineering task forgotten names like Ted Judah and the Civil War general, Grenville Dodge. drove the thing forward, through thick and thin. As to the hard work, mainly done by my Irish forbears on the UP side and the Chinese (with important help from the Mormons in Utah) on the CP side, as detailed by Ambrose represents the first inkling of what industrial mass production would look like later. Needless to say the heroes of this story who left no diaries or other writings are those workers who toiled endlessly and effectively to completion. I do have one question, just to be contrary as usual. Why was this project not done as a national task by the central government? As we know the later tales of railroad finacing after 1869, like the Credit Mobilier scandal, not covered in the book, made some of today’s financial shenanigans look tame by comparison. Why were the rails only nationalized, if at all, after those private railroads went belly-up with the advent of mass production automobiles and super highways ( of which one, I-80, follows the basic CP-UP route from Omaha) in the late 20th century?
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