Institute on California and the West Railroaded Workshop, Huntington Library, San Marino, CA, July 9, 2011: Railroaded, or just railroading? The mundane madness of management.

Usselman, Steven W.

Madness! Madness!" These are the words uttered by Major Clipton at the conclusion of David Lean's 1957 epic film, The Bridge on the River Kwai. Clipton, a British medical officer, has just watched a Japanese supply train plunge spectacularly from a mangled railroad bridge to the river below. Moments before, the delirious Colonel Nicholson has managed to blow up the bridge, which he and his imprisoned troops have spent most of the movie erecting. Nicholson, a fastidious professional officer, has envisioned the construction project as a way to sustain morale among his troops while also demonstrating British fortitude and thus humbling their captors. Belatedly, he has grasped how the bridge will also serve the purposes of that enemy--a point Clipton had tried gently to impress upon him as the work progressed. Now all is dust, and mud, and waste. Madness!

Clipton's summary comment springs to mind as I reflect upon Richard White's epic new history of the western transcontinental railroads. Perhaps it is the book's grand cinematic quality. As history, it harkens back to those star-studded, widescreen productions of the fifties and early sixties, as filmmakers tried desperately to lure their wayward audience back from television. Remember How the West Was Won? (White's version is more like the antidote, How the West Was Lost.) Here one of our greatest academic historians, a master of small gems such as The Organic Machine, paints on a truly broad canvas. Filled with famous men engaged in grand escapades, his book might well sit comfortably alongside those we expect to find on the front tables of our national bookstores. You know the ones. Only this book, like Lean's film in its day, has a decidedly darker cast than most of its companions. Courage undaunted? Hardly. For White's voice, like Clipton's, is that of the chorus reflecting on a Greek tragedy. If the film were a Western--perhaps the more appropriate cinematic analogy for today's event--White would be the old fellow perched on the bunkhouse steps or serving up grub to the trail hands, shaking his head and spitting dismissively into the dirt as the action swirled around him. Darned foolishness!

HOW DO THINGS MANAGE TO GET DONE?

At its heart, White's book poses the same question that fascinated Lean: How do things manage to get done, and to work, amidst such foolishness? How can a material world get built, function, and endure, when its governing apparatus appears so infused with madness? For Lean, of course, the source of that madness was war and the ethos of the officers trained to conduct it. For White, the absurdity resides not so much in war (though the western railroads that fascinate him might, in fact, be seen as products of war), but rather in corporate finance and its attendant politics. Above all, in finance--a world characterized by White as so filled with chicanery, duplicity, and shenanigans as to border on madness. Or maybe cross the border. "Money," writes White in discussing finance of the western cattle trade, "was a wonderful mask for madness." (476)

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The question White poses is a serious one. It crosses my mind regularly, in both my private and professional capacities. I begin most of my days by reading my morning newspaper, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which often leaves me shaking my head at the latest nonsense perpetrated by my local and state politicians. (Some of these occasionally make their way into the Times of Los Angeles and New York.) Then I get into my car for the short drive to work and about halfway to campus, as I rise up on one of those high-arching flyovers and see much of the city arrayed before me, I often marvel to myself, "But it's still there, and working." Or, in a variant perhaps more to the point, "Well, the bridge hasn't fallen--yet." It's a wonder, but things do carry on. How?

When I arrive at campus and put on my hat as a historian of technology, such questions hardly disappear. For in many respects, the mystery White ponders in Railroaded (and I am indulging on my drive to work) touches the most basic concern of my field. How do things take shape? What forces bring our structures and machines and the routines that govern them to life? And what sustains them? In this sense, I read White's book as a fundamental contribution to the history of technology. In posing the questions he does about how finance and politics and the exaggerated publicity that pervades those realms pertain to the obvious and inescapable material import of the railroad--and in suggesting how railroads are at once artifacts of the imagination as well as of iron and steel--White is addressing central themes in the history of technology. Indeed, these are the same questions that occupied me in my studies of railroads located to the east of the transcontinentals. Regulating railroad technology, I concluded, was no easy task. (1)

White draws a pretty sharp line between "my" railroads and his, and there are certainly some good reasons for him to do so. Lines in the East were not generally built "ahead of demand," as White believes the transcontinentals were. Most received little direct federal aid and drew their support primarily from enterprises in the territories they served. The regular flow of local traffic enabled roads such as the Pennsylvania to develop routines that imparted a more machine-line character to their enterprises and made them a training ground for ordered management, as business historian Alfred Chandler famously described. (2) I'm not sure whether White actually believes this of the eastern roads, or whether he accepts Chandler's portrayal in order to accentuate the distinctive characteristics he sees of railroads in the West. My own view of the matter is that eastern roads were less ordered than Chandler portrayed them, while those in the West were not nearly so chaotic or ill-guided as White suggests. To evoke one of White's many witticisms, Chandler coexisted with Dilbert, in both parts of the country.

Like most attempts at humor, this comment has an edge. It gets to the heart of what I must confess is my rather critical response to the book. But before saying more about that, let me first make clear how much I genuinely admire what White has done. First and foremost, I want to praise him for his willingness to learn about new and difficult subjects. He is not resting on his ample laurels. He has waded into unfamiliar territory here, and he has waded in deep. It is no easy task to sort through the vast correspondence of railroad executives and financiers, to parse their extensive testimony before Congress, to follow the stories written about them (and perhaps by them) in the press of the day, and to digest this into coherent stories about bond issues and legislative battles. It is no small matter to master the intricacies of financial instruments and the receivership process, to comprehend such concepts as fixed costs and long-haul, short-haul pricing, and to explain it all cogently in terms readily accessible to a general audience. And it is no small matter to take seriously a literature in business history that many American historians would not deign to address.

Then there is the richness and texture with which White brings the experience of railroading to life. In a book distinguished by its pithy, sardonic prose, his vignettes of railroad lives stand out as especially finely crafted examples of historical writing. Through them we sense the loneliness and danger inherent to the railroad life, the perpetual movement, and the ways these qualities shaped how men conceived of themselves and their place in the larger order of things. And there is also the appendix, which contains the fruits of a novel exercise in mapping data and representing in graphic forms how railroads helped reshape the flows of commerce in the West. White shows, for instance, that goods often flowed in large volume from East to West--that the lines were not merely tentacles reaching like straws from Chicago and sucking out the natural bounty of the western landscape. Some animals moved West when young and then back East again for slaughter. White shows as well that the products moving East from California were much more likely to be high-value foodstuffs, including many subject to spoilage. Everywhere, bulk grain moved to the nearest port for water transport. These charts reveal the richness of traffic flows more vividly than I have ever seen. (523-33)

White also has shed new light on the realm of politics, particularly in his extended treatment of the antimonopoly tradition, which he astutely recognizes as central to the period he is studying. He is particularly astute in explaining how antimonopoly influenced labor relations, not always in ways that worked to the benefit of workers or cast those workers in the best of light. He manages to portray antimonopoly neither as a backward-looking response to progress nor as an unproblematic antidote to aggregated power. Ever a shrewd observer, he is alert to aspects of American politics that others often overlook--not just to the bribery and influence, but also to the fact that legislation is much easier to block than to pass and lobbyists can more effectively influence battles over specific bills than shape public opinion or alter partisan elections. He is alert, too, to the ways politics operates simultaneously at the local and national levels, greatly complicating the efforts of those who seek to accomplish ends through political means. In striving to comprehend how ideology blends with interest to shape the legislative process, he practices a brand of political history scholars often seek but seldom achieve.

Above all, White's history sensitizes all of us who study the nineteenth century to the centrality of information, and to the sometimes peculiar ways in which information flowed in that world. It is this quality, of course, that makes his book so resonant with our own times. But rather than rush to flesh out those parallels, I would prefer that historians pick up his challenge and consider how information flowed in the past. White's book brims with suggestions about how Americans coped with a watershed in communications technology, many of which beg for further examination.

So, I find much to admire in this work. I have no doubt that it deserves, and will garner, a large readership and the serious attention of scholars in many disciplines of history. I suppose that goes without saying, given the occasion. But the book also gives me some pause, and I think a forum such as this calls upon me to explain why that is so. I did not come all this way merely to praise Caesar.

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OPERATIONS AND POLITICS: A TRANSREGIONAL PERSPECTIVE

My hesitation goes back to Messrs. Chandler and Dilbert, and to that matter of whether western railroads were really quite so different from those in the East. The peculiar roots of the western lines, hatched in the anomalous congressional politics of Civil War and Reconstruction, undoubtedly saddled the transcontinentals with unusual burdens and obligations while also opening unique opportunities for political chicanery. But the issue of railroad debts had long been a staple of state politics, and few legislatures in any part of the country escaped the taint of corruption that followed. Eastern railroads always had been deemed special entities operating in the public interest, and they came under scrutiny from antimonopolists at both the state and federal levels, even before the Golden Spike was hammered. (3) The roots of the Reagan bill lay in issues arising in Pennsylvania and New York. Rate structures were hopelessly convoluted in all regions, made more so by state commissions that heard grievances and refereed disputes. (4)

Capital markets mattered to the eastern lines as well as the western ones, as lines in the East competed to build connections (including ones with the transcontinentals, as the Pennsylvania was doing at St. Louis during the 1870s, with ample assistance from its former vice president Tom Scott, who in pursuing a southwestern route was not quite the renegade White suggests) and to push more traffic through their trunks, while likely milking isolated communities that lacked competitive service. Strong roads such as the

Pennsylvania grew stronger, while several prominent eastern lines, such as the Philadelphia and Reading and the Baltimore and Ohio, fell into the same sorts of receiverships that plagued so many (but not all) western lines. Lines in the two regions operated in the same political economy. (5)

What was true of politics was also true of railroad operations. The sparseness and ruggedness of western geography doubtless presented some distinctive challenges--not merely in construction, but also in attracting business, recruiting personnel, and supervising operations. The labor history of these lines makes this clear, not least through the region's persistently high wages. There was certainly ample opportunity for bribes and kickbacks, though this hardly distinguishes these railroads from other enterprises operating sales networks across vast regions. Most railroads of the era tended to deal with favored partners, to butter the bread of those who funneled them business, in ways that a modern auditor would doubtless find alarming but which were also commonplace in the East and might well seem familiar to any member of a modern frequent-flier program. Seasonal variations likewise plagued lines in all regions of the country; part of the business of management was to learn to deal with them. Operational managers everywhere were coping with a world of great uncertainty and trying to reduce the accompanying risks. They met in the same technical associations, read the same trade journals, attended the same schools, and solicited advice from one another. What gave definition to their efforts, in many cases, were the complexities of the technology itself.

This notion is, of course, the essence of the structural-functionalism that underlies Chandler, and if he perhaps takes the concept too far, White seemingly takes pains to discount it at every opportunity. White promises to dig deep into the managerial records--to do the hard work that most railroad historians eschew--and he comes through in spades when this involves presidential correspondence. The work involved in following the financial and political machinations is truly prodigious. But I am less impressed when it comes to operational managers. The promised chapter on them consists largely of extracts from the correspondence Union Pacific President Charles Francis Adams Jr. conducted with a parade of general managers and with others expressing frustration with those general managers. Adams seems to have had the same luck with general managers that Lincoln had with generals.

Aside from those lovely vignettes on railroad lives, only occasionally do we glimpse further down into the managerial hierarchy. And when we do, it is often to learn of some malfeasance or oddity, as when one Southern Pacific manager employs a detective to follow another. (453-54) We have no idea that during this same period these managers were conducting a trial of freight train brakes that stands as one of the most significant cooperative technical evaluations in the annals of American technological history. (6) Nor do we hear much about the freight agents, whom the historian Olivier Zunz portrays as enthusiastically embracing the corporate ethos and dutifully carrying out its dictates and responsibilities, such as filling out weekly traffic reports. (7) Nor do we get any sense that experts from the world over came to see for themselves how engineers built these lines across vast spaces and through rugged mountainous terrain and to observe how crews handled trains on the steep grades of the Rockies and High Sierra. When managers at the Pennsylvania wanted to know how to operate long trains with air brakes, they looked to the Union Pacific.

For these western railroads did carry traffic. And they did drive down the costs of transport. White presents a series of charts that show this in dramatic detail. But he often reads them far differently than I do. He is likely to focus on the jaggedness of the lines, rather than the slopes or curves. He wants us to concentrate on the disruptions. Now, there is no denying that the late-nineteenth-century economy was subject to booms and busts, not least in the West, where booms played themselves out with stunning rapidity (and often with devastating effects on the environment). But there is also no denying the long-term trends. At one point, White quotes an alarmed executive who has projected that in order to justify the amount of capital being invested in the western transcontinentals during the mid- to late 1880s, traffic would have to grow by seven times that carried by the Central and Union Pacific before the massive expansion in facilities. (205, 211) And when I look at Chart A, I find that traffic did grow at just about precisely that rate. Investors did not earn increasing returns, but neither were their investments for naught.

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Which is why the Union Pacific found itself short on locomotives and cars in 1892, and its managers fretted about how much the resultant congestion was driving up costs, and the operating people pointed fingers at the traffic agents for drumming up too much business, and the traffic agents pointed back at the operating personnel for failing to do their job, and top management naturally sided with the agents and took steps to limit the responsibilities of the operating personnel until they improved the situation. This was railroading. I describe similar scenes at the vaunted Pennsylvania in the early twentieth century. Managers there tried to restore harmony across the ranks, quite literally, by having the operating personnel and traffic agents join together in song--"down where the steel tonnage flows" was a favored number. (This was Pittsburgh.) When that failed, management considered adding a rule mandating that everyone cooperate. (8) All this is easy pickings for Dilbert fans. Beyond that, it reveals how intractable the problems were, and the limits of engineering approaches in coping with them. But there was great earnestness in the effort--far more than White allows, or at least certainly more than he admires--and they learned some useful things along the way.

On the rare occasions when White does give voice to such men, he is usually quick to read duplicity into their efforts, and above all to brand them as naive. The engineer William Hyde trying to secure access to the Southern California harbor doesn't know how to play the game of politics as practiced by Huntington. (88-92) The engineer Arthur Wellington, who develops a sophisticated analysis of how to lay routes in the West--an approach that seeks to incorporate business considerations such as the potential for traffic development rather than merely considering narrow technical criteria--is selling out to the ethos of insider trading. (143-49) The accountant William Mahl, who strives to produce financial reports that more accurately reflected the material and commercial assets of the railroads, is a facilitator and apologist for Huntington. His son, whose promising career as a civil engineer is cut short by tuberculosis, leaves behind a wallet full of passes for White to pick. (270-77)

Something of the same is true when White turns to the halls of politics. He will go to great lengths to question the motives of politicians, demonstrate their duplicity, and suggest that they have been bought. He is less interested in exploring what they thought, and his interest fades further when we turn to the matter of actual administration, through instruments such as congressional hearings and appointed commissions. At a couple of places in the narrative, the California State Railroad Commission comes on the scene. These appearances come out of the blue; we never learn about its origins or operations.

White concedes that politics was often running against the railroads; they lost control of the press in San Francisco and never achieved much legislative success in Congress once the Democrats returned in sufficient numbers. He is more reluctant to acknowledge that reform sometimes accomplished meaningful goals and imposed constraints on the institutions Congress had created in the hothouse of the Civil War and early Reconstruction. That task was all the more difficult because the entities created were still anomalies in American political economy. It was difficult to meet the challenges railroads posed without violating fundamental precepts of American governance and potentially inflicting damage on the rest of the economy. Yet the wheels of politics did turn to confront the institutions government had created. Bills did pass. They were not exactly what antimonopolists desired, because as White recognizes, the last thing railroads needed was additional competition. But neither were they what the railroads would have preferred. They established a regulatory framework that provided an outlet for a new generation of professional social scientists and ultimately imposed significant constraints on the railroads.

LEARNING FROM RAILROADED

What I came to realize in reading this book is that while White and I are interested in the same question, he is more interested in posing the question than in answering it. To answer the question makes it less interesting and less compelling. Thus, his tendency is to sustain the sense of mystery. We wallow in the obfuscations and subterfuges, for by wallowing in them we retain the essential sense of madness.

White characterizes his book as hopeful, while acknowledging that many readers may have trouble reading it that way. In delegitimizing its central characters and undermining the supposed necessity and rationality of their accomplishments, he suggests the possibility that things can be dramatically different. I follow his logic and sympathize with the sentiment. Surely, I prefer his approach to the sort of triumphalism that has characterized so much writing on these western railroads and on the West more generally. We have much more to learn from western railroads than the notion that we can summon extraordinary courage, subdue nature, and build great things.

One never knows, of course, what readers will make of a book. White worries that he will be read as resurrecting the robber barons. He may be right, though personally I accept his defense that the notion implies a more ordered power (and shared consensus) than railroad executives could actually muster. To my mind, his work is more likely to take us back to another historical warhorse, that of the "Great Barbecue," a world where businessmen and politicians are seen as feathering each other's nests on a scale unprecedented in American history. (9)

The portrayal here is less one of an organized capitalist class disrupting and sullying politics (except in White's view when courts grant corporations the rights of citizens) than of politics muddying the waters of commerce by handing out favors to privileged opportunists and enabling firms that should rightly have failed to survive through generous receivership provisions. If they find it, I suspect White's book will serve for many readers as a case study in what can go wrong when government meddles with private enterprise. Congress got involved, railroads got built ahead of demand, and energies got directed toward manipulating the strings of politics rather than toward making an honest living by pursuing efficiencies and gaining advantage in a competitive marketplace. Tea Party advocates might find much fuel here for their fire, while progressives advocating public investment might well take pause. Such are the perils of writing about American political economy.

What troubles me about White's approach is that it obscures another source of hope we might derive from the past--the hope provided by seeing how Americans came to grips with difficult, nearly intractable problems. They didn't find the best solution; they didn't find the worst solution. They struck compromises, not least with their own ideals. They struggled to reconcile market mechanisms with central administration. They learned the limits of their own expertise. But on the whole, they tried to find ways to make things work. This was largely the work of bureaucrats--not the supremely efficient managers imagined by Chandler but the midlevel types (often trained in the professions, especially accounting and engineering) who muddle along and tolerate the daily absurdities and frustrations we laugh about in Dilbert. They are human; they have biases; they are subject to influence; the solutions they devise work to the advantage of some and the disadvantage of others. In short, they have a history; they embody an accumulated cultural inheritance. They make easy targets, of course. It is easy to dismiss them or poke fun at them, and hard to make them exciting. What was the last good movie you saw about middle management that didn't make them victims of greed or the butts of jokes? But for all that, I think they have a lot to do with why my overpass doesn't fall.

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NOTES

(1) Steven W. Usselman, Regulating Railroad Innovation: Business, Technology, and Politics in America, 1840-1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

(2) Alfred D. Chandler Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 79-187.

(3) The ceremony of the Golden Spike on May 10, 1869, at Promontory Point, Utah Territory, united the 1,774 miles of railroad built by the crews of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroads.

(4) During the 1877-78 Congressional session, Texas representative John H. Reagan, an antimonopolist and chairman of the commerce committee, introduced a bill for the regulation of interstate commerce. The bill to federally regulate the railroads was opposed, White writes, by "virtually all railroad men." (356)

(5) See Usselman, Regulating Railroad Innovation, and Richard Franklin Bensel, The Political Economy of American Ind The Political Economy of American Industrialization, 1877-1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

(6) Usselman, Regulating Railroad Innovation, 191-99, and Steven W. Usselman, "Air Brakes for Freight Trains: Technological Innovation in the American Railroad Industry, 1869-1900," Business History Review 58 (1984): 30-50.

(7) Olivier Zunz, Making America Corporate, 1870-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 37-66.

(8) Usselman, Regulating Railroad Innovation, 339-71.

(9) The notion, commonly used to describe congressional politics during the Gilded Age, derives from the practice of politicians throwing barbecues for favored constituents on the eve of elections; see Vernon Louis Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought, vol. III, The Beginnings of Critical Realism in America, 1860-1920 (New York, 1930), 23.

STEVEN W. USSELMAN is professor at the School of History, Technology, and Society, Georgia Institute of Technology, where he teaches a variety of courses pertaining to technology, business, and law and policy in the United States. He has published widely and is the author of Regulating Railroad Innovation: Business, Technology, and Politics in America, 1840-1920 (Cambridge University Press, 2002), which received the Ellis W. Hawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians and the Hilton Prize in transport history, and coeditor of The Challenge of Remaining Innovative: Insights from Twentieth-Century American Business (Stanford University Press, 2009). Previously, he served as associate director for research at Georgia Tech's Sloan Center for Paper Business and Industry Studies (CPBIS) and as president of the Society for the History of Technology.