White Makes 5 Claims Summary

White Makes 5 Claims, as follows:
1. "Corporations used the federal government to punish rival corporations while gaining advantages for themselves. They made politics a realm of private competition."
2. Railroads reshaped how people thought of time and space, but it was often arbitrary because it was dictated by the railroad and not necessarily real proximity or logical sense.
3. White claims that, though Wiebe and Chandler say otherwise, the railroads did not bring “order, rationality, and effective large-scale organization.”
4. Antimonopolism was the reaction against corporations, not the state, because they saw them as the new form of social inequality.
5. White doesn't just want to make this about robber barons, but these tycoons'

failures and successes were important. He's amazed at how well things did work, even when people were so stupid and self-centered.
White supports each claim thoroughly throughout the book, but I think claim one, that the politics used the government and politics as a means of private competition, was his most consistently supported claim.

From chapter 1 to the conclusion, he consistently shows this: “corruptions scandals were, however, the frosting rather than the cake in the government-railroad relationship” (p. 6). He reaffirms, “the western railroads need the state and needed it badly…congress helped picked winners and losers every time it acted” (p. 512).
I wonder if his fifth claim, which is actually a preemptive defense, is the least well supported because he comes back to explicitly stating it. He can only defend motive, but not necessarily his selection. I think he is trying to give the view that he got from descending into “the bowels” of their correspondence, writings, etc., but he does them no favors either. (For example, he calls Huntington and Villard and others “portly male

barbies.”)

To begin positively, I think White portrays Charles Francis Adams pretty fairly. He criticizes him, to be sure, but he explains how Adams thought about himself, and gives him credit when he was successful and/or made a positive impact. I think this summarizes White’s treatment of Adams in a nutshell, "Adams may have been right. Or he may have been a crank. Or he may have been both a crank and right" (p. 505).

White’s treatment of W.H. Holcomb struck me as particularly extreme, but I wonder if it’s because he mostly quotes Adams’ words about him (who called him “old flabby-guts” and said that his “gross, inexcusable, and still inexplicable incompetency” was what ruined Adams’ plans. pp. 386-387). Not only does White use colorfully describe how terrible he was, but pins quite a bit of blame on him for failures under Adams.

White’s interaction with Chandler is both positive and negative.

He affirms that Chandler has made great contributions to the field, even saying that Chandler was “brilliant.” White agrees with Chandler (and Wiebe) that the new managerial class did try to create order (but disagrees that they succeeded). The major premise that White disagrees with Chandler about is that the railroads brought order from chaos. Throughout the book, White does a good job of illustrating that the railroads were, indeed, “dysfunctional.” In Chapter 6, where he debunks the idea of the octopus, he vividly supports this point and sums it up saying, "the actual octopus was a sadly conflicted monster…a group of divided, quarrelsome, petulant, arrogant, and often astonishingly inept men…usually less fearful than funny and

fantastic."

Concerning Chandler’s sources, White makes clear that he takes a different approach. In one statement, he lays out his own approach and critiques Chandlers: “mine is not a view from the boardroom…I don’t trust annual reports. I try to descend into the bowels of the organization." I think White does a phenomenal job with the sources—he shows historical complexity. I found his discussion and fleshing out of his sources, also in chapter 6, strong: "If the goal is to have great villains or powerful heroes, don't read the mail of the men who ran the transcontientals." Later he makes a remark that reading Huntington’s letters makes people’s notions about these men and their dealings “laughable” (p. 233).

Lastly, chapter four, I don't think, fits in with White's major goal which is to show how people were the center of how the railroad was formed, ran, triumphed and failed. However, it appears that he included it to explain why people made some of the decisions they did and to bolster one of his claims, that railroads were instrumental in reshaping how people thought about space and proximity. This chapter illustrates and explains better how everyone was dependent on the railroads. Railroads often dictated which businesses survived and failed.