Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America

Richard White wants his readers to view the nineteenth-century transcontinental railroads in a new light. He retells in sweeping style their story and that of the entrepreneurs who built them, illuminating this familiar tale with fresh insights, new details, and an engaging style that entertains as well as informs. The book has the scope of an epic and the humor of a black comedy. Its central theme will spark debate among business and economic historians, and its tone will exasperate some readers. “The issue is not whether transcontinentals eventually proved to be a good idea,” White argues; “it is whether they were a good idea in the mid and late nineteenth century” (p. xxiv). He thinks not. Too many of them were built, often in the wrong places, at a time when they were not needed. Their builders often reaped great fortunes but in the processcreated inefficient, costly, dysfunctional corporations… . They built railroads that would have been better left unbuilt, and flooded markets with wheat, silver, cattle, and coal for which there was little or no need. They set in motion a train of catastrophes for which society paid the price. (p. xxvi) By the 1890s the western railroads were “bloated, ill managed, heavily indebted, and corrupt” (p. 450).