Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America

by Richard White

A Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize

"A powerful book, crowded with telling details and shrewd observations." ―Michael Kazin, New York Times Book Review The transcontinental railroads were the first corporate behemoths. Their attempts to generate profits from proliferating debt sparked devastating economic panics. Their dependence on public largesse drew them into the corridors of power, initiating new forms of corruption. Their operations rearranged space and time, remade the landscape of the West, and opened new ways of life and work. Their discriminatory rates sparked a new antimonopoly politics. The transcontinentals were pivotal actors in the making of modern America, but the triumphal myths of the golden spike, Robber Barons larger than life, and an innovative capitalism all die here. Instead we have a new vision of the Gilded Age, often darkly funny, that shows history to be rooted in failure as well as success. 8 pages of illustrations

Genres: History, Nonfiction, American History, Economics, Business, Railways, Politics

720 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2011

About the author

Richard White is the author of many acclaimed histories, including the groundbreaking study of the transcontinentals, Railroaded, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Francis Parkman Prize, and a Pulitzer Prize finalist. He is Margaret Byrne Professor of American History, Emeritus, at Stanford University, and lives near Palo Alto, California.

Reviews

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chances are, you’ve been affected somehow, in some way, by the Great Recession. I know I have. I live in Omaha, which oddly enough, has suddenly become an extremely appealing place to be (we are the most affordable city in the US; our unemployment rate is half the national average; and contrary to myth, we have never elected a head of cattle to the state legislature). We’ve certainly weathered the storm better than most (I’m looking enviously at you, North Dakota); still, the cutbacks, belt-tightening, and general anxiety exist are omnipresent.

In this shoddy economic environment, you might not want to read Richard White’s Railroaded. Its tale of companies grown too big to fail, and of the leaders of those companies, who managed to maintain their wealth despite wrecking the national economy, might hit a little too close to home. After all, there are enough things to get angry about in the 21st century, without having your ire raised about the 19th. Indeed, you might get a helpless sort of feeling that the market is a rigged game, and always has been, and always will be.

On the other hand, if you read Railroaded, you will get the satisfaction of White’s witty, scalpel-sharp takedown of imbecilic 19th century railroad magnates and the two-bit operations they ran. It’s a cold comfort, but these days, you got to take what you can.

Right off the bat, it’s important to note what Railroaded is not about: it’s not about the building of the transcontinental railroads. If you want a drum-thumping, flag-raising, feel good against-the-odds story of American ingenuity and American grit triumphing over nature and the Indians, you’ll have to look elsewhere (and you’ll probably land on Stephen Ambrose’s Nothing Like it in the World). Railroaded is about the aftermath of the building of these tracks; as the title implies, White doesn’t think very highly of them.

In White’s telling, the arguments against the transcontinentals are numerous. He believes they were built in the wrong place and at the wrong time (that is, far sooner than the nation actually needed a transcontinental railroad). He also argues that the railroads became dangerously large, dangerously stupid corporate monsters, which caused broadly felt economic panics by massive leveraging. These corporations also represented a colossal boondoggle with regards to the tax-paying American public, as the railroads sucked at the swollen udders of the federal government (somehow, I imagine that Leland Stanford, Collis P. Huntington, and all the rest would consider themselves free market capitalists, despite their receipt of gigantic subsidies).

Richard White is not the first person to take on the railroads. In 1901, Frank Norris published The Octopus, which portrayed the railroad as greedy, all-powerful, and in opposition to the individual. Norris’ work is part of the “robber baron” view of the railroads, a view that has been discounted by more recent revisionist works. White makes clear that he doesn’t subscribe to the robber baron analysis To the contrary, he doesn’t think the corporate heads of the railroads had enough mental capacity to form the intent to be barons. (Unfortunately, White never explains how, if these guys were so stupid, they died so rich).

A large – and yes, enjoyable – portion of Railroaded is dedicated to excoriating the various businessmen running the transontinentals. For example, White takes a certain pleasure in relating Collis Huntington’s view of his partner Leland Stanford: “Huntington had long despised Stanford for his stupidity and carelessness, his selfishness and greed, his laziness and his immense self-regard…” In dealing with these characters, White shows a gift for a brief, piercing biographical portrait.

If White has an underlying thesis, it’s that the transcontinental railroads should have been built a decade or more later than they were. His belief is that the transcontinentals were responsible for avoidable environmental, economic, and humanitarian (specifically, dispossession of the Indians) disasters.

In proving this point (and he does prove this, for all the good it does now, absent the invention of a time machine), White employs a thematic, rather than chronological approach. Instead of laying events down on a timeline, he uses each chapter to discuss related topics, and concludes each chapter with a vignette titled “A Railroad Life.”

Until you get the hang of this structure, it can be a bit confusing. This confusion is especially prevalent at the beginning. White jumps around so quickly, assaulting the reader with an avalanche of names and figures and bond yields, that it’s hard to know what’s going on, who is who, and why it should matter. Eventually, the pace slows, but throughout the book, due to the thematic clustering, White will mention something that he won’t get around to explaining for several hundred pages. For instance, White talks about the Pullman Strike several times early in Railroaded; however, it isn’t until the end of the book that he gets around to describing what it was.

Another point of difficulty concerns the matters of high finance. Even financiers can’t figure out what they’re doing much of the time; that’s why they’re so successful making money with nothing but slips of paper. There were many, many passages in the book, filled with percentage signs and interest calculations that I had to read several times over. Moreover, White’s challenge in describing the complicated financial structures, types of debt, and various corporate strategies (dummy companies being a favorite strategy) is compounded by the fact that the nomenclature has changed since the 19th century.

Really, though, White doesn’t get bogged down in the numbers. And if you start to despair, he always gives you the bottom line. Thus, even if you aren’t sure how the railroads were screwing taxpayers by paying simple (as opposed to compound) interest on $50 million worth of U.S. bonds loaned by the government to the railroads, White lets you know with certainty that the taxpayer was, in fact, getting screwed.

Railroaded takes on a daunting subject, one that lacks the intrinsic, visceral delights that would have accrued had White simply talked about how the transcontinentals were built, rather than how they operated. In a book like this, it would be very easy to get lost in the abstracted world of corporate finance. White manages to keep things grounded with an unerring eye on humanity, whether that is through his “A Railroad Life” sections at the end of each chapter, or when he is insulting Leland Stanford, the man who built the school where White teaches.

(White’s acid pen can go a bit overboard. I thought it was a bit much to devote an entire page to insulting Stanford’s Memorial Arch, built following the death of Jane and Leland Stanford’s only child. I understand that Leland was a greedy buffoon, but White’s conclusion that the memorial revealed an “astonishing” display of “egotism and arrogance” entirely misses the point that it actually revealed an entirely human sense of grief).

Railroaded has the benefit of being heavily researched and meticulously sourced. White’s command of the material is evident. For readers such as myself, unversed in 19th century business, his command might be too good, and can be a little intimidating. Yet, for an academic history, Railroaded has the rare benefit of being beautifully written. I found certain passages just brilliant. I especially liked White’s chapter on spatial politics:

The gorgeous maps printed in the late 1880s…depicted the American railroad network and its recent expansion as a jungle of multicolored railroad lines, their trunks crossing and their branches sometimes intertwining. They captured the growing extent of railroad space, but they could not capture the way this expansion changed space itself since, like all maps, these were static. The deeper meanings of railroad space remained invisible unless the trains were put in motion. Emphasizing motion was essential to creating a spatial politics.

The railroads made space political by making the quotidian experience of space one of rapid movement. A railroad train in motion was a snorting, smoking, roaring thing; for all the beauty of its movement, it was an assault on the human senses, which registered that it was the train’s movement that mattered. But it wasn’t just the train that moved; the things the train connected seemed to move with it. The British novelist Anthony Trollope wrote, “The town that is distant a hundred miles by rail is so near that its inhabitants are neighbors; but a settlement twenty miles distant across the uncleared country unknown, unvisited, and probably unheard of by women and children. Under such circumstances the railway is everything. It is the first necessity of life, and gives the only hope of wealth.”

The subtitle of Railroaded is The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America. I fully understand that the job of an editor to cram the word “modern” into every history book, to make it more accessible. Still, if you do this, there should at least be some attempt at connecting up the old with the new. That doesn’t really happen here. White’s brief epilogue does not convince me that the railroads made anything (other than a huge mess, that is).

If there is a modern-day echo to the story told in Railroaded, I think it would have to do with the rise of the corporation. A corporation is a business form. Its chief advantage is that it allows for the raising of extensive capital, and provides limited personal liability for investors. In the 19th century, a cruel and business-minded Supreme Court subverted the 14th Amendment – clearly passed to help heal the deep wounds of slavery – to transform the corporation into a person. Just this last term, the current Supreme Court put the finishing touches on the Corporate Individual by giving him/her (choose your pronoun; just don’t use “it”) the right to free speech. Corporations now have most of the advantages of humanness, without the chief disadvantage of penal consequences.

The transcontinentals took full advantage of the corporate form. The men who ran these companies used them as piggy banks. They issued debt, took out loans, and received subsidies; they set up dummy companies and directed corporate funds towards these companies; and at the end of the day, they paid themselves a handsome dividend and waddled home rich as Croesus. Meanwhile, the corporations built tracks to nowhere, hemorrhaged money, and triggered massive financial panics. If this all seems very familiar…well, it seems very familiar. I’m not sure why White didn't draw this parallel to our modern times more clearly, though it’s quite possible he just didn't want to think about our modern times.

Because, frankly, who does?

[robin friedman · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Transcontinental Railroads And Creative Destruction

On May 10, 1869 at Promontory Summit, Utah, the lines of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroads were symbolically linked together to celebrate the completion of the first transcontinental railroad. An iconic photograph celebrates this event. Once viewed as a seminal moment in the making of the United States and the West, the events at Promontory Summit and their aftermath receive a great deal of critical attention in Richard White's provocative and polemical book, "Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America" (2011). White, the winner of a MacArthur Award and the Parkman Prize is the Margaret Byrne Professor of American History at Stanford University. He has written extensively on the American West.

Much in this book will be familiar to students of the post-Civil War Gilded Age of American history. White's history differs from most accounts in its virtually unilateral criticism of the building of transcontinental railroads in the West. White claims the transcontinentals were built far too early when they were not needed, were drastically overbuilt, corruptly financed, and incompetently managed. They destroyed the environment and the Indian tribes, contributed to depressions and economic dislocation, and promoted poor land use and poor settlement patterns in the West. White concludes (p. 517): "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."

White writes in detail about the financial and other corruption of the transcontinental railroads. Much of the book is devoted to the arcane and dismal world of railroad finance in the 19th Century. In White's account, the financiers played a shell game in building the railroads putting other people's money and the money and land of the Federal government at risk with little risk to themselves. They financed the building of the railroads through mirrors and construction corporations, such as the infamous Credit Mobilier during Grant's presidency, which they themselves controlled. The railroad owners proved markedly adroit in pulling out the capital the corporations were to receive to their own personal accounts resulting in debts for money never received that the railroads could not pay. The system floundered while individuals grew rich, in White's account. The railroads were controlled by easterners such as Henry Villard, Leland Stanford, Jay Cooke, Collis Huntington, Tom Scott and not by people in the West whom the roads were ostensibly designed to serve. In White's account, the curmudgeonly figure of Charles Francis Adams (1835 -- 1915) stands out. Adams served as the president of the Union Pacific Railroad until forced out by the road's bankruptcy. Adams vainly and ineffectively railed against the system at times and tried to reform it while as an executive he all too often fell victim to it. In the final analysis, White finds little reason to treat Adams more kindly than his other characters or, as White frequently calls them, his "guys".

Besides the emphasis of financial chicanery, White describes the close relationships between financiers and politicians in Congress and in the state governments. There was pervasive corruption in a culture White describes as being based euphemistically on the relationship of "friends." The book details the terrible human cost of the railroads in the form of accidents. It discusses the long misuse of the Chinese, both by the railroads and by their workers. A highlight of the book is a lengthy treatment of the Pullman Strike of 1894.

White intensifies his historical analysis through the use of metaphors. The term "creative destruction" in the title of this review derives from the economist Joseph Schumpeter who saw the rise of 19th century capitalists as sweeping away the old to make way for the new. White fundamentally disagrees with Schumpeter on the positive achievements that allegedly resulted from the building of the transcontinentals. Another figure in the book is the "Octopus" derived from Frank Norris' famous novel about railroad abuses in California and the closely related term "Robber Baron". White rejects these terms as giving too much credit to the financiers and managers of the railroads. He argues that far from making the corporations instruments of power and efficient management, the owners gutted the railroads to their own ends. Their success as individuals, for White, masked their failure as entrepreneurs as witnessed most dramatically by the depressions of 1873 and 1893 and the receiverships which became the frequent fate of the transcontinental systems. Another frequent metaphor of White's is the "Sorceror's Apprentice" by which he means that the railroad monguls unleashed forces that they did not understand and could not control. White does not use another figure which leaps to mind -- that of the formidable Wizard of Oz who proves upon close acquaintance to be "a very poor wizard."

In his Introduction, White identifies several strands of the argument of his book. He argues that the transcontinentals were intertwined from the beginning with the largesse of the Federal government and that the story of private capitalism and initiative is largely a myth. Second, White argues that the transcontinentals changed the concept of "space" in the West to reduce it to the cost of shipping. The book offers a good overview of the difficulties of cost pricing for services offered by the railroads. The difficulties of setting prices led to much abuse, favoritism, and economic dislocation. Third, White argues that the railroad corporations were not "harbingers of order, rationality, and effective, large-scale organization" but were instead incoherently and irrationally managed. Fourth, White offers qualified praise to the antimonopoly movements that arose in the Western states to combat the abuse of the railroads. As his final point, White tries to deflate the myth of the "Robber Barons" for reasons alluded to earlier.

There is much to be learned from White's book. I found the book marred by its patronizing, overly casual writing style and by its aura of certainty. Although he acknowledges the risks of importing current values into a different time, the book seems to me to lack a full historical sense. White pushes on his readers issues such as Enron, the IT bubble, and the economic collapse which began in 2008 as parallels for understanding 19th Century transcontinental railroads. These analogies may be perilous.

The book has provoked a substantial debate among my fellow reader reviewers. I found this a good, thoroughly researched study of the transcontinental railroads in which the author makes no secret of his opinions and possible biases. Students of American history, the West, and the Gilded Age will benefit from the book. A degree of skepticism and a willingness to withhold hasty judgment are valuable qualities to bring to the reading of this book.

Robin Friedman

[Charlene · Rating 3 out of 5]

My interest in the construction of the railroad and its impact on society is extremely high. Because of that, I could not wait to get my hands on this book. While it is filled with valuable information, it didn't read like a sweeping history of the railroad and civilization. I wanted this book to grab me, reign me in, and pique my curiosity in such a way that I could not wait to see what the next page held. That didn't happen. It felt more like a chore than a joy to read. If this book were a date, I would say we simply had bad chemistry, even though I was impressed with my date's knowledge.

[Nann O'neill · Rating 5 out of 5]

Admirable AND readable: a clear-eyed, deeply researched account with disturbing contemporary implications. A fine example of intelligent, provocative history, and an unsparing anatomy of the American character. If you find yourself arguing with the author, or thinking, "I never knew that" or "That can't be true," the book is doing its job and more.

[Stefania Dzhanamova · Rating 4 out of 5]

Richard White’s “Railroaded” is my first book on post-Civil-War railroad construction in the US, and it impressed me favorably.
The main virtue of this work is the focus on all the different classes of people who stood behind the magnificent system. Not only is it devoid of dry facts, but it is also interspersed with witticisms.
At the beginning of the book the author provides the reader with a profound insight into the personalities and actions of the most eminent owners of railroad monopolies.
One of my favorite passages, for instance, characterizes Simon Cameron: When Abraham Lincoln decided to give Cameron the post of Secretary of War, the leader of the Republican Party, Thaddeus Stevens, expressed his fears that Cameron “might” not be the most suitable candidate. When the President asked him directly whether Cameron would steal, Stevens answered, “He won’t steal a red hot stove.” His words somehow reached Cameron. When asked by him to retract his words, Stevens told Lincoln in a private conversation, “I take my words back. I’m not sure he won’t steal a red hot stove.”
Although “Railroaded” teems with funny episodes of that kind, in general, it is a serious book, which pays a lot of attention to all the laborers with whose strenuous efforts the railroads were built. White gives us a dramatic account of all the deaths among the brakesmen, reaching the climax with the heartbreaking story of Johanna Gordon, a young, poor Chicago girl who worked for 2 dollars a week to support her parents and siblings. Her leg was cut off by a railroad car and she died all alone from the infection after her employer refused to pay for a doctor.
The author exposes all the machinations of the railroad monopolies, criticizing them for their rapacity and desire for political influence.
Richard White reproaches them for their decision to build railroads in the 1800s. In his opinion, if they had been built in the 1900s, many lives would have been spared.
Another significant topic in the book is the cruel exploitation of Chinese and Japanese labor, resulting in the degradation of the working class as a whole.
Generally, “Railroaded” is highly commendable for high school students who would like to learn about the history of the retail road system in an easy and interesting way.

[Ollie Z Book Minx · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting and thoroughly researched but rambling and disorganised.

[Vicky Hunt · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Reverberating, Lurching History of the North American Transcontinental Railroads

Richard White has linked the railroad men of the 19th Century with the financial and political conveyances that set the trans-continentals in motion across the US, Canada, and Mexico. As much as I've read about the "Robber Barons" of the railroads, I never realized the role of these men in building the trans-continentals of Canada and Mexico. But, that is just a tiny bit of the book. The Big Picture of Railroaded is the economical story of how the railroads were built, and how they failed. More than the philosophy of economics; it covers the praxis, or practice of economics in this continental scale work. From premature, to failure, to paradox; White details his views as to why the railroads were not financially fit.

"The Northern Pacific had always been notable for selling more paper than transportation ..."

"Borrowing and building were symbiotic."

Bonds, notes, and other financial papers floated the financing and building of the trans-continentals, while making it possible for incompetent corporations to survive and prosper. And, here is where this book varies from others on the same topic. Mr. White paints the railroad men as corrupt, yes, but not as intelligent and shrewd as many people would believe. For example, Frank Norris' Octopus presents them as being designers of a corrupt system that connived and controlled. (I only started to read The Octopus once. It is a classic that has a rather dry start. I would like to actually read it soon.) But, Railroaded presents a rather more fragmented picture of the lurching ineptness and criminally careless greed of flawed men.

"Transcontinental railroads were a Gilded Age extravagance that rent holes in the political, social, and environmental fabric of the nation, creating railroads as mismanaged and corrupt as they were long..."

"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."

Railroaded's final verdict is that of the when and where of the trans-continentals. The author does an excellent job of presenting the history. He covers such topics as anti-monopolism, race, corporations, labor, and unions. Many important developments and spinoffs of the railroads are explained, like the Pullman strikes and the Labor Day national holiday. And, most importantly, the lives of the many men of that time are fleshed out in detail to present a train of living moments in time experienced by individual people. The book is a far-reaching historical account of life in the United States in the last quarter of the 19th Century.

I enjoyed this book in the Kindle and Audible whisper-sync. It is rather lengthy reading and definitely something I would like to read again in the future. It provides a wealth of fascinating information for further reading as well, since it is footnoted in detail. I recommend this for anyone who enjoys reading history. The narration of the Audible is high quality. I started the book the week we traveled to New Orleans by train. It made a good train read, providing a glimpse of the inside of the life of the railroads.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Richard White questions the building of the transcontinentals and the men who headed these massive 19th century corporations. Titans of the "Gilded Age," the transcontinentals proved to be extremely efficient at being inefficient. The railroad men prove to be rather lousy businessmen, and their corporations constantly need government assistance to bail them out of trouble. Whether it is receivership, lack of demand, or labor strikes, the government was always there to help these failing enterprises. White shows that with the development of the transcontinentals we have the development of many modern facets of the economy, e.g. the lobby. Politics was economized by the railroad corporations, and the result was disastrous. White very methodically dismantles the romanticized version of the railroads helping the U.S. conquer the west; it turns out that these Modern Mechanized Marvels were built ahead of demand, without the proper capital, and when there was no need, and that the public hated them for it. White does not argue that there would never have been western railroads (or transcontinentals), his argument is that they would have never have been built as they were (when there was simply no demand for them) without the government subsidizing them and protecting their interest.

[Drtaxsacto · Rating 5 out of 5]

What can one say about the role of the transcontinental railroads that has not been said many times before? Emeritus professor White gave a clear answer in his book Railroaded. His key points were a) the systems were built out early and could have been better done a bit later. b) That the railroad barons when you look at all closely were every bit as bad as the muckrakers said they were.

White is a meticulous researcher and this book shows the results of all that work. He discusses the financing mechanisms/machinations in building the roads; the role of the transcontinentals in Congress, in working with and breaking unions, and in altering the landscape and several businesses including cattle and grain.

White has a good way of explaining complex stories.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

"In terms of their politics, finance, labor relations, and environmental consequences, the transcontinental railroads were not only failures but near-disasters, and in this they encapsulated the paradox of the arrival of the modern world in western North America." (507)

Richard White has provided a near-encyclopedic historical monograph on the building, sustaining, and fall of the American transcontinental railroads, from the Civil War to the end of the Gilded Age. Following a monumental cast of characters, perhaps most notably Colin Huntington and Charles Francis Adams on the side of the railroads and to a lesser extent Terence Powderly, Joseph Buchanan, and Eugene Debs on the side of labor, White seeks to correct what he sees as the fundamental mistake in railroad historiography—the traditional "Robber Baron" mythology implies success at any cost, whilst the later "entrepreneurial" historiography paints the railroads and their managers as visions of the progress of managerial capitalism.

White rejects both. The managers of the railroads were Robber Barons in a sense—they utilized new corporate structures, overcapitalization, securities, and the whole host of tools available from finance capitalism to scam and defraud millions of dollars from their investors, constantly "cooking the books" it were. They were also entrepreneurs, constantly building new railroads and taking risks. More than this, White emphasizes, they were consistently and utterly incompetent, the railroads always upon the risk of receivership and complete failure. Pointing to a core critique of capitalism, White emphasizes that the collective failure in a corporation can (and did) still to individual success and profit.

The best parts in this work are perhaps, to me, the 7th and 10th chapters, the 7th dealing chiefly with labor as it occurred on the railroads and the rise of the skilled "brotherhoods," and 10th a general history of the Pullman Strike, Eugene Debs, and the American Railway Union. However, the section that captivated me the most was the sixth section of the 9th chapter, an account of the Panic of 1893 and the efforts of Colin Huntington and the Associates to save the Southern Pacific, however briefly. One clearly understands the fragility of capitalism when you read of the desperate efforts to secure loans and capital, to the point of Huntington taking out massive personal loans. In a way, the railroad barons were psychological victims of the system they perpetuated.

My main critique of the book would be that White never truly organizes his conclusion to conclusively prove his thesis, that the transcontinentals were not the net benefits that they are portrayed as in the traditional historiographies. He gives an account of the environmental impacts of "dumb growth" in the destruction of bison populations, the rapid growth and collapse of the open-range cattle industry, the overstimulation of wheat production, and intensifying aridity and drought in the Great Plains, but this is it. It would be nice for summary to appear in the conclusion of the rest of the damage of the railroads, what White spent his book detailing, than devoting so much space to the characters of Huntington, Stanford, Villard, Gould, etc.

[Stephan Benzkofer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Railroaded, a Pulitzer finalist, is a an exhaustive examination of the impact of transcontinental railroads in the Western United States in the mid- to late-1800s. The author appears to have left no 19th century letter unread, no federal and state legislation unexamined, and no obscure organizations' minutes unperused in the making of this book. But all of that prodigious effort would have gone to waste if the writing weren't so entertaining. Richard White is funny. His sardonic commentary drives forward what otherwise would be a much-too detailed examination the railroads' financial hanky-panky or the vagaries of Gilded Age politics or any number of other social, political, environmental, and economic facets that he covers. This is a history that the comedian Steven Wright ("Smoking cures weight problems ... eventually.") might have penned.

Railroaded's scope is vast, covering not just the public and private financing of the railroads, but also their relations with their employees and then their employees' unions. It examines many social aspects of the roads, including how their speed shrunk the distance between two points even as shipping rates often lengthened the distance between two points.

The men who ran the railroads were, by and large, crooks. The transcontinentals were Ponzi schemes riven with corruption, bloated and mismanaged corporations run like personal piggy banks by incompetent and greedy executives. It was amazing they ever succeeded, and few of them actually did.

Leland Stanford comes under particular scorn. According to the author, a professor emeritus at Leland Stanford Jr. University, Stanford was an idiot and a crook. But he didn't stand out in his perfidy or his idiocy. He had lots of company.

The author successfully argues that the transcontinental railroads were unnecessary, they were built too early and at too great a public expense. When you hit the total button on their economic, environmental, political, and social impact, it was disastrous. Railroaded demolishes myriad "truths" meant to support the myths we tell about U.S. expansion across the Great Plains, cowboys and cattle drives, Western individualism, and corporate efficiency. It is exactly what history scholarship should like like. And if we're lucky, sound like!

Finally, the audiobook narration by Paul Woodson built on the author's tone to brilliant effect.

[Pamela · Rating 3 out of 5]

So happy to have finally finished this long, complicated book. I nearly quit reading several times, and did take a long pause here and there through the months, but glad to have persevered and finished reading it.

My rating reflects the convoluted writing style and poor organization of the book. While the topics and major points are made and deserve a full five stars.

This includes: the railroad building that occurred with a fever in the late 1800's were too soon, ahead of demand, extremely poorly done with extensive corruption, and decimated the environment along with the Native Peoples. The extent of the corruption mixed with politics and the economy is amazing. It brought several economic depressions, wiped out the huge buffalo herds and in the end, actually did some social good as well. Railroads were going to be a necessity, but it could have been done in a wholly different manner and the repercussions of this railroad building is still evident today.

I may write more fully my thoughts on this long book, but for now, my initial thoughts on completion just moments ago, will have to leave it here.

[Matthew Hall · Rating 2 out of 5]

Imagine you read a book full of barely parsable subtweets, half-formed arguments and long-winded analogies of complex processes rather than explanation or analysis.

Then imagine the writer is so far up his own ass he thinks his book deserves an epilogue and a separate conclusion (just ignore that they're the same thing.)

That's this book. What a waste of time.

[Lauren Hiebner · Rating 4 out of 5]

White’s book is a detailed economic analysis of the post Civil War RR industry. He explains how the RR conquered space, time, and nature but that it was a flawed system. White identifies the depth of corruption that infested the RR industry from top to bottom. While corruption was typical for the Gilded Age, White explains how bankers and politicians colluded in the business. White explains how competition led to monopolies, how labor unions were crushed, and how the RR practices and collapse led to the 1893 panic. Creative destruction in competition is explained with it’s results of “dumb growth” and environmental catastrophe. The questions White addresses at the end regards the social costs and was there a need for the transcontinental, when and where it occurred? The answer to the later part is no and as for social results, just ask the Native Americans.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Richard White is brilliant. This book breathes life into the Robber Barons, with swarms of facts, statistics, anecdotes and personal observations. The book deftly zips from a technical explanation of laws, subsidies and graft to stories from the bit players. His portrayals of Eugene V. Debs and the Pullman strikes, his references to Frank Norris' The Octopus and the final chapters on the demise of the railroads are worth reading.
Ironically, White has some harsh words for Leland Stanford, the founder and benefactor of the University where White holds tenure and lectures.
My only criticism is the book is a slow read. As you can see it took about 3 months. From here, it is on to his much bigger book on Reconstruction and the Gilded Age = The Republic for Which It Stands. It might take a year. But based on the satisfaction from reading Railroaded, it will be worth it.

[Harry Lane · Rating 3 out of 5]

In some ways, an excellent reexamination of the burst of railroad construction that followed the Civil War. The author' thesis is that contrary to the common view of romance or heroic "man against nature", the actual experience was one of failure and unintended consequences, mostly bad. The relationship between government and business was remarkably similar to some of what we're seeing today. But, in the end, I found the material repetitive, and the book is simply too long for the average reader. I didn't finish it.

[George Kelley · Rating 3 out of 5]

If I were rating this book based on content and useful research, I'd give it a 7 out of 5 stars. However, based on the delivery, which is pretty dry, I have to give it only 3. I think it is a very good book to read to get a feel for how corporations (railroads) have abused their privilege and access throughout American History.

It's a very good book, it is just hard to get through.

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

Seeing his talk at Stanford inspired me to read the book. It's about how the rail barons bilked millions out of the US taxpayer and laid out useless railroads to nowhere. The barons knew con, but didn't know or care about railroading.

Kind of like 21st century Wall Street and banking. A more modern subject than you would think based on the historical aspects.

[Charles · Rating 2 out of 5]

a good subject but not a well written book

[Matthew Rohn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book does a lot with the transcontinental railroads, the history of capitalism, commodities history, and much more. Well researched and well theorized, although gets very into the weeds of specific business negotiations that go outside the scope of what I was interested in, but would be interesting to some people and I'd recommend the first portion of the book pretty widely

[Kevin Whitaker · Rating 3 out of 5]

This sounded great on paper but I could never get into it - the big themes were too repetitive and the details not engaging enough.

[Doug · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of the parts were dense and difficult to understand, but the overarching themes of the book are fascinating. This book should be required reading for every presidential candidate because I would be very interested in hearing their opinion of the transcontinentals and for what should happen at the intersection of business and government. True, they were the coveted New Economy companies for its time, and by opening the West for development, were undoubtedly Jobs Creators, but they also were Washington Insiders feeding at the public trough, and were also Too Big To Fail Companies that needed Bailouts. Some of the more interesting passages that stuck in my mind:

Railroad entrepreneurs were innovators. They sought advantage by adopting new techniques. But whereas the celebrations of entrepreneurs usually make their success synonymous with the firm, the men I examine usually succeeded at the expense of the firm. The paradox at the heart of the book is that such individual success as there is usually comes at the price of corporate failure. Personal wealth often brings with it social failure. The innovations entrepreneurs brought to the railroads . . . were as harmful to the public, the republic, and even to the corporations as they were profitable to many of the innovators. (p. xxvi)

The celebrated creative destruction is, it seems, gentle with the rich. . . . [F]ailure and success were not always binaries. Certain kinds of failures impose more public than private costs. (p. xxxiii)

The transcontinentals were not so much about earning revenues from moving people and freight as about finance and politics. . . . Huntington and Scott knew what modern scholars sometimes forget: the federal government did not leave the railroad business to the market and the states to regulate, and their most decisive competition often took place in Congress. Their political lobbies connected politics and business, but these were only part of a second, larger web of politicians, newspapermen, bankers, and businessmen. The webs ensnared what the railroads needed to survive – subsidies, friendly legislation, newspaper stories that made it easier to market the railroads’ securities of all kinds. (p. 96)

There is something paradoxical in this logic. The rewards to entrepreneurs come quickly, but judgments about the utility and worth of their innovations come much more slowly. There arises a kind of evaluative shortcut in which all those who engaged in creative destruction – changing the nature of existing systems – and reaped great rewards were, ipso fact, heroic entrepreneurs, producing a better product and a more efficient way of doing things. They contributed not only to their own wealth, but the efficacy of the system and the larger material advantage of humanity. . . . But how do we know whether the market is right in rewarding particular entrepreneurs if we can only judge their innovations in the long term? (p. 253)

Taken together, the Dakotas seem to offer a compelling argument against land grants in general and the subsidized transcontinentals in particular. Not only did unsubsidized railroads build to meet demand, but they operated more efficiently. Farmers paid less for land, settled the better lands more quickly, and avoided marginal arid lands. The government aided settlers, not railroads, while securing a more efficient railroad network and denser settlement. (p. 486)

These railroads led me to the deeper mystery of modernity: how so many powerful and influential people are so ignorant and do so many things so badly and yet the world still goes on. We are confronted with this constantly, yet we often to choose to believe that those in high places know what they are doing and that those who achieve great riches are being rewarded for merit. The paradoxical railroads of Railroaded were not the railroads that I expected to find, but having found them, I had to confront the real questions of the book. What were the results of a world dominated by large, inept, but powerful failures whose influence could not be avoided? What were the structural conditions that permitted these corporations to survive and dominate, if not thrive? Seen from within the western railroads and Congress, modernity gradually seemed to me the reverse of the homilies of the Guilded Age: it was the triumph of the unfit, whose survival demanded the intervention of the state, which the corporations themselves corrupted. (p. 509)

[Daryl Thompson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Learned a lot about the US railroad history.
An enjoyable read

[Paul · Rating 2 out of 5]

This had a lot of boring details about railroad deals, and the few times it delves into political or economic ideology it horribly mischaracterizes the ones that I know things about, so I would take all of this with a big grain of salt.

The moralizing and boringness aside, if you like long and extremely detailed histories of financial transactions, this does at least seem to be... thorough.

1.5 of 5 stars

[Marks54 · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a history of the transcontinental railroads -- those railroads that moved out from the limits of eastern and midwestern growth in the US in the 1860s and afterwards to establish a continental rail network that included Canada and Mexico as well as the US. These railroads were different from earlier ones, in that they were built ahead of demand rather than in response to a need for enhanced infrastructure. This made these roads inherently speculative ventures that required considerable government subsidies as well as public investments if they we to prove feasible. Market demand alone would not have led to their construction.

The book's argument is complex, the research and documentation exhaustive, and the writing style dense. This is definitely not a quick and easy read. The story the author is telling is an important and subtle one. White steers between two poles of interpretation that have characterized serious (and not so serious) writing about 19th century US economic development. The first pole focuses on the systematic and "rational" development of fundamental infrastructure, core industries, and overall US economic productivity over the century and especially following the Civil War. The second and opposite pole focuses on the role of fast buck artists, swindlers, stock jobbers, and corrupt politicians in the growth of an oppressive system of industrial capitalism that made a few men very rich while leaving most arguably less better off than before industrialization.

The poles are both oversimplifications, of course, but a real question is how to reconcile the world of the swindler with that of the professional manager. That is the contribution that White brings to the story with his study of the transcontinental railroads. The speculators and swindlers triumph early on, through the use of some questionable financing rules, a general lack of oversight, and a culture conducive to corruption. The result is a massive rail system that is overbuilt relative to demand and of largely poor quality. Not surprisingly, this is associated with the bankruptcy of the systems, the need for bailouts and restructurings, and the rationalization of the systems by subsequent managers so that the infrastructure can function as planned - or at least as it seemed to function in retrospect.

The story is messy but rings true. White does not mystify the robber barons or the reformers. The chaotic process the built the railroads caused many problems and led to massive failures. In spite of this, it also provided the basis for an infrastructure that could support subsequent economic development and establish the conditions for the 20th century economy.

White provides a vehicle to see how many of the conflicting stories around US industrialization, of which the railroads were a prime example, can be reconciled into an overall perspective that gives the many devils at work in the process their due. It will probably take some background knowledge to fully appreciate what is going on in the book, but White tries to make it readable and provides copious charts as well as vignettes about the odd personalities involved in the story.

The book is worth the effort.

[Porter Broyles · Rating 2 out of 5]

NOTE: This is a review of the Audiobook.

I purchased the Audiobook from Audible and this will be the first one where I take advantage of their exchange program. The book has some very interesting facts and I started out enjoying the book.

The discussion on some of the embezzlements that occurred with Railroads was fascinating. For example, the cost for shipping on a railroad exists largely in loading and unloading the train. Once the train is loaded, the cost per mile is negligible. If you were travelling 10 miles, the cost to the railline might be $26 bucks, 25 dollars to load the car plus 0.10 per mile---or $2.60 per mile. The cost to travel 100 would be $35 bucks. $25 to load the car plus $0.10 per mile---or $0.35 per mile. Railroads succeeded in getting contracts with the government that paid per mile, but those contracts were based upon the $2.60 rate, not the $0.35 rate. So raillines made a killing.

The book also did a good job at discussing the various types of securities (bonds vs stocks, selling long vs selling short, etc) and how those were used to the advantage of the financially savy at the expense of the common folk.

This doesn't even cover the shere quantity of land/mineral rights given to the railroads for the lines. (If the land given to the railroads was aggregated into one state, it would be the third largest state behind Texas and Alaska).

In other words, the book covered some good and important information.

Unfortunately, I found the audiobook difficult to listen to. The narrator's style made it hard to follow when the author shifted subjects. Changes in subject, which are obvious by a gap in a written text were lost in the audio. This created numerous cases where the narrator would be talking, the subject would change, but as a listener you didn't realize the subject had changed until something jarring occurred.

This is a book that I might someday pick up to read, but cannot recommend the audio version.

[Randall Russell · Rating 1 out of 5]

Despite this book being a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2012, I have to say that I really struggled to get through it, which is pretty unusual for me. The author's writing style was as dry as dust, and he just sucked all the life out of what should have been the very dramatic story of the transcontinental railroads. While I think he had some interesting points to make about the corruption and incompetence involved in the building and running of the railroads, the sheer boredom of the book was just overwhelming. What makes that surprising is all of the drama involved in the building and running of the railroads and the opening of the West, and the characters involved - men like Leland Stanford, Collis Huntington, Jay Gould, and many others - all vain, interesting, corrupt, and greedy. And yet, somehow the author makes all of that seem - yes - boring. Now that takes a certain kind of talent! I've read other books on the building of the transcontinental railroads that we're much better, so I would not recommend reading this book, unless you're suffering from insomnia, and then this is just the ticket!

[Geoff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding book. I love all of Whites work. His redefinition of the captialists to the finaciers is great. His use of the individual characters in samll chapters describing unique individual railroad people is intriguing. His description of the railroads in Mexico and Canada is excellent. The thesis that these early robber barons where NOT too bright is also very interesting, and I don't feel very sorry for Leland Stanford at all (or his wife). White describes the early GLO's manipulation very well, and he provides the interesting proposition that the railroads had more to do with the abuse of the western range than almost anything else.

History does repeat itself, as he points out. Fiberoptics? Wall Stree investment bankers, and the inability of Congress to work in the public interest over private, monied, interst.

I will buy this book one day. Must read for all western historians.

[Christopher Mitchell · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent look into the insiders of the Transcontinentals - the men who gave us crony capitalism. It helps to start with a basic understanding the of railroads of the late 1800's before opening this book.

One cannot help but come away with the idea that the 20th century didn't happen. The corrupt practices common in 1899 led right into 2000. The reforms of the 1900's were killed in the 1900's.

A long and dense read, but exactly what I was looking for.

[Tami · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a long book with lots of historical details that just got to be too much for me to actually finish the book. I had heard this author in an interview on NPR and was intrigued by the topic. I did learn a lot in the process of reading it but know it was written by a history professor who was really into tracking down minutiae about the early railroads and the men how ran them.