Iron Empires Page 2
The simple answer was “their great wealth and power.” They deployed both to produce more of the same, subordinating every moral principle, every goal, every instinct to the getting of wealth and power alone, and to do so at every level of government and society. “Their influence,” Larrabee wrote,
extends from the township assessor’s office to the national capital, from the publisher of the small cross-roads paper to the editorial staff of the metropolitan daily. It is felt in every caucus, in every nominating convention and at every election. Typical railroad men draw no party lines, advocate no principles, and take little interest in any but their own cause; they are, as Mr. [Jay] Gould expressed it, Democrats in Democratic and Republicans in Republican districts. . . . Their favors, their vast armies of employes [sic] and attorneys and their almost equally large force of special retainers are freely employed to carry into execution their political designs, and the standard of ethics recognized by railroad managers in these exploits is an exceedingly low one.
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Henry David Thoreau, who could hear the passing New England trains from his refuge on the shore of Walden Pond, viewed the railroads as carriers of the disease of speed, and placed them among civilization’s distracting “pretty toys,” totems of a deluding modernity. To Thoreau the railroads went hand in hand with a second technology with which they were inextricably bound, the telegraph. “They are but improved means to an unimproved end,” he wrote in Walden, “an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; . . . We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.” He foresaw the oppression, physical and spiritual, that would come in the wake of progress. “We do not ride on the railroad,” he wrote; “it rides upon us.”
The wealth created by the railroad industry was prodigious, but unevenly bestowed. A railroad magnate’s decision about where to lay his tracks could turn a prairie hamlet of shacks into a great metropolis, or a thriving city into a ghost town. Decisions about how to raise capital and deploy it could filter riches to middle-class investors or turn their railroad securities from gilt to dross. The railroads were seen at first as providers of jobs, and good ones—jobs requiring skills that could be ported from location to location and road to road; by the 1880s, however, after the first punishing rounds of wage cuts and layoffs, they were regarded as exploiters of labor, becoming the targets of some of the first mass strikes in American history. Meanwhile, the mergers designed to eliminate what railroad owners called “excess” competition were condemned by their customers as instruments of monopoly allowing the roads to charge “excessive freight and passenger tariffs [operating] most injuriously to the best interest of the farming class,” and “extortionate charges” levied on merchants.
The nineteenth-century economist Henry George, a scold of inequality amid abundance, anticipated from his vantage point in San Francisco the railroad’s capacity to bring wealth to a few and poverty to the many. “A great change is coming over our State,” he wrote with trepidation only a few months before the transcontinental railroad’s completion. “The California of the new era will be greater, richer, more powerful than the California of the past; but will she be still the same California whom her adopted children, gathered from all climes, love better than their own mother lands? . . . She will have more wealth; but will it be so evenly distributed? . . . Will she have such general comfort, so little squalor and misery; so little of the grinding, hopeless poverty that chills and cramps the souls of men, and converts them into brutes?”
George saw how this story would unfold. “The completion of the railroad and the consequent great increase of business and population will not be a benefit to all of us, but only to a portion. . . . Those who have it will make wealthier; for those who have not, it will make it more difficult to get. . . . Can we rely upon sufficient intelligence, independence and virtue among the many to resist the political effect of the concentration of great wealth in the hands of a few?”
The answer would be no. By the end of the century the railroad would have changed California, and the United States, into something wholly unrecognizable to the Henry George of 1868.
One spur to that transformation was the flow of people into the American continental heartland, at a rate of three or four hundred thousand every year. The historian Frederick Jackson Turner declared the end of the American frontier in 1893, but what may be less appreciated is the role of rail in its disappearance. Wagon roads and canals eradicated the frontier between the East and the Mississippi in the 1840s and 1850s, but the truly revolutionary development was the penetration of the railroads into what had been judged the “great American desert,” stretching from Missouri, Arkansas, and Iowa west to the Pacific. Turner described this territory as “surveyed into rectangles, guarded by the United States Army, and recruited by the daily immigrant ship, [moving] forward at a swifter pace and in a different way than the frontier reached by the birch canoe or the pack horse.” As the empires of yore colonized their conquered territories around the globe, the railroad empires conquered and then colonized the American heartland.
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AS CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS had predicted, the railroads’ influence soon did touch every facet of American life: politics, business management, finance, labor, farming. All these were essentially local before the Civil War; all took on a national character afterwards, due to the ability of the railroads to transport goods and produce, wealth, and knowledge over vast distances with unprecedented speed, and to their insatiable demands for capital, manpower, technology, raw materials, and traffic.
One outcome was a disruption in social relations, especially between men and women. In the first part of the nineteenth century, the cultural assumptions of the middle class associated “respectable” womanhood with “domestic values and social deference,” observes social historian Amy Richter.
Such constraints could not survive the age of rail travel. Women were now seen aboard on honeymoon trips, or joining their husbands in business travel, opening private domesticity to public view. Soon women were traveling unescorted by males, whether individually or in groups. This reflected their increasing participation in business and politics, including the women’s suffrage movement, launched in 1848 by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Articles and books by female train passengers began appearing soon after the Civil War, instructing women readers about what to expect of rail travel, how to dress, and how to conduct themselves safely and in comfort among male travelers, while warning of certain privations. Caroline Healey Dall, a feminist and reformer who embarked on a long train trip on the advice of her doctors in 1880, reported that “thirty-three women and children and two men used our dressing room . . . the latter entirely without right.” She warned that decent meals and comfortable dining arrangements would be hard to come by, that luggage porters were ever grasping for tips and needed to be watched like hawks. “Do not travel alone if it can be helped,” she advised. “If you must, associate yourself on the way with another traveller to whom your service will be as valuable as that she renders you.”
Railroad managers and the male traveling public were unsure at first what to make of these customers. A stereotype of the female traveler permeated the popular press, which depicted her as perplexed about such simple matters as purchasing a ticket or reading a timetable, loaded down with excess baggage that burdened fellow passengers, and vulnerable to the attentions of dishonorable men.
Yet railroads, responding to the demands of the marketplace, were soon offering accommodations that female patrons might find more suitable—increasingly luxurious Pullman sleeping cars, for example—though the rail companies’ all-male managements remained hidebound in their view of women travelers’ habits. George Pullman, asked why he failed to equip the women’s dressing rooms on his Palace Cars with locks or bolts, replied that if he did, “but two or three ladies in a sleeping car would be able to avail themselves
of the conveniences, for these would lock themselves in and perform their toiletts at their leisure.”
To one category of social interaction the railroads were impervious: racial integration. In the Deep South, the lines complied with the Jim Crow laws in states of the former Confederacy mandating segregation in public accommodations, including trains. It was common for conductors to evict black travelers from first-class compartments even when they held first-class tickets, and to order them into cars designated for “colored passengers.”
Black leaders continually protested the conditions in the segregated cars and other indignities visited on black passengers. These “cattle cars” were always hopelessly overcrowded; one black pastor spoke of having seen “a squealing pig occupying a seat with two human beings, one of whom was a nicely dressed colored woman,” the New York Times reported. In Georgia, a conductor ordered the Right Reverend D. A. Payne, seventy-one, senior bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, into the second-class car designated for colored passengers despite his holding a first-class ticket. When he refused to move, the train was stopped and he was forced to walk five miles, carrying his own baggage, to the nearest depot.
Black women similarly were denied the deference afforded white women on the rails. The black journalist and activist Ida B. Wells recalled a conductor trying to eject her from her usual seat in the women’s coach during a ten-mile trip on the Chesapeake & Ohio in Tennessee and sending her to the smoking car, where black and white passengers could mix. As she wrote in her autobiography, Crusade for Justice:
He tried to drag me out of the seat, but the moment he caught hold of my arm I fastened my teeth in the back of his hand. . . . He went forward and got the baggage-man and another man to help him and of course they succeeded in dragging me out. They were encouraged to do this by the attitude of the white ladies and gentlemen in the car; some of them even stood on the seats so that they could get a good view and continued applauding the conductor for his brave stand.
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Wells disembarked at the next station, but held on to her ticket and sued the railroad. She won a $500 judgment, memorialized by the Memphis Daily Appeal under the headline “A Darky Damsel Obtains a Verdict for Damages Against the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad.” Four years later the verdict was overturned by the Tennessee Supreme Court, which ruled that the second-class smoking car and first-class nonsmoking car were “alike in every respect,” and slandered Wells as having insisted on keeping her seat merely “to harass with a view to this lawsuit, and . . . not in good faith to obtain a comfortable seat for the short ride.”
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THE TITANS WHOSE careers and conflicts are described in these pages shared many characteristics—vision, stubbornness, and unshakable self-confidence among them. But their differences were as important as their similarities. J. Pierpont Morgan was the only one who had been born and raised in an environment of patrician wealth, an upbringing that bequeathed him a distaste for financial disorder that would prompt him to assume an almost dictatorial role in eradicating it from America’s growing industries. Jay Gould was born to a tenant farmer in rural Massachusetts; from his father he inherited his obstinacy, and from the experience of losing his mother and stepmother at a young age he developed a preternatural self-possession and the conviction that whatever he could earn by the exercise of mental agility he deserved to keep for himself, never mind the claims of business partners or employees. Cornelius Vanderbilt, who died as reputedly the richest man in America, was the descendant of several generations of small farmers in the still largely wilderness precincts of Staten Island, New York, “a rustic of humble origin” in the words of his first biographer, W. A. Croffut. Harriman’s origins fell somewhat between these two poles. He was the offspring of a destitute clergyman whose forebears were people of distinction and wealth; all his life he seemed to carry within him a determination to restore the family’s stature. By the exercise of his own intellect he would succeed brilliantly.
All were very much products of their environment. That environment was transforming rapidly as they reached their maturity as business leaders. The railroads were not solely responsible for this transformation, but it could not have happened without them.
Still, in the first decade after the meeting at Promontory Summit, the railroad reigned as a potent symbol of America’s emergence on the world stage. Walt Whitman offered a paean to the industry in his poem “Passage to India,” which is thought to date from 1871 and appeared for the first time in the 1872 edition of his ever-changing Leaves of Grass.
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I see over my own continent the Pacific railroad surmounting every barrier,
I see continual trains of cars winding along the Platte carrying freight and passengers,
I hear the locomotives rushing and roaring, and the shrill steam-whistle,
I hear the echoes reverberate through the grandest scenery in the world,
I cross the Laramie plains, I note the rocks in grotesque shapes, the buttes,
I see the plentiful larkspur and wild onions, the barren, colorless, sage-deserts,
I see in glimpses afar or towering immediately above me the great mountains, I see the Wind river and the Wahsatch mountains,
I see the Monument mountain and the Eagle’s Nest, I pass the Promontory, I ascend the Nevadas,
I scan the noble Elk mountain and wind around its base,
I see the Humboldt range, I thread the valley and cross the river,
I see the clear waters of lake Tahoe, I see forests of majestic pines,
Or crossing the great desert, the alkaline plains, I behold enchanting mirages of waters and meadows,
Marking through these and after all, in duplicate slender lines,
Bridging the three or four thousand miles of land travel,
Tying the Eastern to the Western sea,
The road between Europe and Asia.
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Even before the poem was published, Whitman would be compelled to confront the dark side of this great human achievement. For the enterprise of which he sang so soulfully was in the hands of scoundrels.
Part I
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The Age of Scoundrels
1
Uncle Daniel and the Commodore
ON THE MORNING of November 8, 1833, a train of the Camden & Amboy Railroad on a route connecting New York and Philadelphia broke an axle and derailed, dragging many of its twenty-four passengers down a wooded embankment, killing two and grievously injuring almost all the others. Up to that moment, those riding in its three cars had thrilled at the novel sensation of careening across the landscape at twenty-five miles per hour. Then, in the blink of an eye, disaster.
This was the Hightstown rail accident, the first in the United States to result in the deaths of train passengers. Among the survivors was the sixty-six-year-old former president John Quincy Adams, who recorded for his diary “the most dreadful catastrophe that ever my eyes beheld.” Bodies were strewn all about the hillside, he wrote. “One man, John C. Stedman of Raleigh, North Carolina, was so dreadfully mangled, that he died within ten minutes. . . . The scene of sufferance was excruciating. Men, women, and a child, scattered along the road, bleeding, mangled, groaning, writhing in torture and dying, was a trial of feeling to which I had never before been called.”
Among the passengers on that train (albeit unmentioned by Adams) was Cornelius Vanderbilt. The steamboat owner had crossed the Hudson to Perth Amboy, New Jersey, where the pioneering rail line had its northern terminus, to judge the wisdom of making an investment. Now he was lying prostrate at the bottom of a hillside, covered in blood, his clothes torn to shreds, suffering from a broken leg, several broken ribs, and a punctured lung. Somehow he managed to command bystanders to carry him to a nearby farmhouse and have his family doctor summoned from New York; he was then transported in agony to his Manhattan town home, where he lay bedridden for a month.
Vanderbilt swore he would never again ride th
e rails. He had already expressed skepticism about this newfangled form of transport: In 1832 he had turned down an invitation to invest in the proposed New York & Harlem Railroad, which was to run from the Bowery at the southern tip of Manhattan to Harlem, then a suburb at the island’s distant north. “I’m a steamboat man, a competitor of these steam contrivances that you tell us will run on dry land,” he told the promoter. “I wish you well; but I shall never have anything to do with them.”
Eventually, however, he would succumb to the siren call of opportunity.
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AT THE TIME of the Hightstown accident, Captain Vanderbilt was in the process of assembling his first fortune, as a steamship entrepreneur. Robert Fulton and Robert Livingston had demonstrated the commercial possibilities of steam transport with the Clermont in 1807, but old-line rivermen persisted in their conviction that steam was “a mere plaything,” ill-suited to carrying freight. Among other drawbacks, it was said that the engines took up needed onboard cargo space. Few rivermen objected when the New York legislature awarded Fulton and Livingston a monopoly on Hudson River steam transport.