Analysis: A Glitch In The Modernity Of Western America

Babanjit S. Boyal
A Glitch in the Modernity of Western America In the few beginning passages of Richard White’s “Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America” he talks about how big monopolized corporations in the late nineteenth and early twenty first centuries built an overabundance of railroads adjoining the East with the West in the United States. These railroads where indefinitely built ahead demand when analyzing the fact that the country had just finished fighting the Civil War at the time. Virtually almost every railroad corporation owner(s) went bankrupt, some multiple times. Regardless of this, these owners still managed to acquire a fortune with the help of corruption and government subsidies as the back-bone

It is known that the railroad was one of the initial installments in the many of federal government ventures but really how socially and environmentally contributive was it to the rest of the country at the time? The author wants the readers to wrap their minds around the fact that since the railroads expanded towards the West, the population of Native Americans has took a major hit and figuratively speaking might have been the worst occurrence to happen to them since the Mayflower docked the East Coast. Tracks that pierced through the Great Plains also single-handedly made the Bison population extinct due to trains stopping at times to allow men to shoot at them or even occasionally running them over. A major factor in neutralizing some of the greed and corruption of cheap manufacturing, material, and transpiration of goods was the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887. Through federal government regulations some disposal was brought to the headstrong railroad owners but it was still a futile effort at the

As stated before, being narrow minded while building a corporation or business venture for the simple fact of acquiring a mass amount of wealth, one might think it would be more efficient to use the least amount of material and labor in the process. While this might be more beneficial to the callous owner’s wallet, the well-being of cheap labor workers on the tracks was not being taken into consideration as the conditions were inhumane. Due to the railroads being interlocked and capital coming from the same area, conditions for the union of workers did not vary other than the climate they worked in. The way these corporations functioned was in a sense they reinvented capitalism into a better and more modern form every time. It was as if they cocooned capitalism until there was a “rock on the track” and proceed to hatch a new form, per se “Capitalism 2.0”. In all, the countless labor of track building, purchasing, and corruption through the government, the majority of tracks ended up being accumulators of rust. There was a perpetual amount of competitive routes without any trains actually putting them to use due to the fact some companies tracks were simply to narrow or wide for certain trains to transition onto. This can be somewhat a foreshadow of California’s high-speed rail project which is also in comparison not only eating away at