Arizona, New Mexico, and western Texas were vast tracts of empty land, cows, and sheep. These herds were in the midst of collapse from drought and overgrazing. Western mines produced silver that no one needed.

So that’s a view of the lack of motivation for the building of America’s transcontinental railroads you don’t often hear, but White makes his case, concluding

Overbuilt, prone to bankruptcy and receivership, wretchedly managed, politically corrupt, environmentally harmful, and financially wasteful, these corporations nonetheless helped create a world were private success often came from luck, fortunate timing, and state intervention.

Heavy on the state intervention. The federal government ceded massive amounts of land along the railway routes to the railroad owners at no cost, who then laid down grids for towns trackside as far as they ran and sold the lots to the highest bidders. The railroads themselves never made that kind of money.

White is no less acidic when it comes to the robber barons who built the railroads, or didn’t, as the case might have been, but he agrees that all of them made a packet out of the business.

These railroads have led me into a 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…I had to confront the real questions of this book. What were the results of a world dominated by large, inept, but powerful failures whose influence could not be avoided?…Seen from within western railroads and Congress modernity gradually seemed to me the reverse of the homilies of the Gilded Age: it was the triumph of the unfit, whose survival demanded the intervention of the state, which the corporations themselves corrupted.

I didn’t buy into all of White’s conclusions but he writes with wit and authority and there is much here that resonates spookily in our current oligarch-ridden day.

Book Review Monday Chatter Railroaded Richard White