Scott Martelle
…Richard White's detailed dissection of the rise and eventual fall of the nation's railroads…brings…a fresh and welcome agglomeration of wide-ranging historical detail, including eviscerations of some of the key figures—from Jay Gould to Leland Stanford—and an acute analysis that in failure came success and in many ways the map of the nation.
—The Washington Post
Michael Kazin
"Transcontinental railroads," [White] asserts in Railroaded, "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." This is a bold indictment, but White supports it convincingly with lavish detail and prose that swivels easily from denunciation to irony.
—The New York Times
Publishers Weekly
The transcontinental railroads "created modernity as much by their failure as by their success," writes MacArthur fellow and Parkman Prize–winning historian White in this important and deeply researched history. Often poorly built and with no real demand for their services the railroads never paid for themselves and left chaos in their wake—e.g., displaced Native Americans, environmental disaster through encouraging the farming of nonarable land. Experienced railway men weren't interested in investing in transcontinental routes, writes White (The Frontier in American Culture), so six Sacramento businessmen (who formed the Central Pacific) and a slapdash federally chartered corporation (the Union Pacific) took the bait of money and land offered by the federal government. Their first act was to bribe Congress to increase land grants and relax restrictions on raising money. Then the race was on. Readers will be amazed, amused, and disgusted by the antics of obscure and familiar names (Stanford, Huntington, Dodge), mostly ignorant of railroading and spectacularly dishonest. White delivers an opinionated, delightfully witty but astute account of sleazy Gilded Age politics, business, and journalism, as well as the complex (but uncomfortably familiar) financial maneuvers men used to enrich themselves. Maps, charts. (May)
Edward L. Ayers
"This is history as dark comedy, brilliant and unsettling, puncturing facile economics and bland history alike. With ingenious research and iconoclastic perspective, Richard White recasts our understanding of a major chapter in American history. Mark Twain would be bitterly amused to learn just how gilded the Gilded Age really was."
Geoffrey C. Ward
"There is not a historian in America with a steadier gaze than Richard White’s: with him, no assumption goes unchallenged, no wisdom is ever merely received. Railroaded is a wonderful book: fresh, provocative, witty, filled with foreshadowing of our world but always true to its time, and told with the narrative force of a locomotive roaring across the empty plains."
William Cronon
"Richard White is one of those rare historians with an unfailing ability to transform any topic he writes about, no matter how familiar that topic might seem. In Railroaded, he tells the story of the western transcontinentals as it has never been told before, with insights that speak as much to our own time as to the nineteenth-century era he explores with such wit and intelligence."
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette - Glenn C. Altschuler
"Imaginative, iconoclastic, immensely informative and mordantly funny."
William Deverell
"This brilliant book will forever change our understanding of the great railroad projects of nineteenth century America. Stripping away easy assumptions of technological triumph and financial wizardry, Railroaded tells a richer and darker story of post-Civil War America. Smashingly researched, cleverly written, and shrewdly argued all the way through, this is a powerful, smart, even angry book about politics, greed, corruption, money, and corporate arrogance, and the America formed out of them after the Civil War."
Rebecca Solnit
"When it comes to the American West, there is no other writer like Richard White, a serious scholar with a highly original take on familiar subjects and elegant prose besides. His subject, the making of the transcontinental railroads, is perhaps the pivotal story of the West, but it’s not the one we know from movies and myth. It’s about the birth of all those things that most trouble us nowadays, a genesis story in which the serpent in Eden is the railroad itself writhing across the continent."
Shepard Krech III
"Railroaded is a leviathan, a provocative challenge to a major myth about the American West: that transcontinentals were a triumph of American entrepreneurship and ingenuity, and a godsend to those who invested in, worked on, rode, lived near, or encountered them. Far from it, Richard West argues in a strongly written narrative that barrels along the track as it draws on intimate vignettes of players great and small, these railroads often proved to be a disaster for all but the handful that dreamed them up and, abetted by cronyism and complacent governmental regulation, enriched themselves as they impoverished the rest. This tale of havoc is an unsettling allegory of today's financial collapse and essential reading for all unnerved by the thought that we seem doomed to repeat history whether we are aware of it or not."
San Francisco Chronicle - Walter R. Borneman
"A different and provocative view of the role of the transcontinentals in developing the American West. Railroaded will no doubt spark lively debate and become required reading for those seeking an insightful and recast history of the transcontinental railroad saga."
Wall Street Journal - John Steele Gordon
"Required reading for anyone interested in the history of American railroading…This is an exciting story and well told."
Scott Martelle
"An acute analysis that in failure came success and in many ways the map of the nation."
Slate - Donald Worster
"A model of narrative skill and [an] insightful reinterpretation of the Gilded Age. It is easily the best business history I have read."
Patricia Limerick
"Combining a robust wit with a dedication to endless labor in archives, Richard White delivers a sharp-edged new understanding of industrialization in the Gilded Age. Railroaded offers flabbergasting views of the human talent for self-justification and contradiction, provides a valuable—if unsettling—comparison to the financial troubles of our times, and shows why the best historians are compared to detectives. To readers intimidated by the topic of railroad finance: master your fears and stay on board for a very wild ride."
Boston Globe - Buzzy Jackson
"A scathing and wonderful new book. [Railroaded] will entertain and outrage readers."
From the Publisher
"White delivers an opinionated, delightfully witty but astute account of sleazy Gilded Age politics, business, and journalism, as well as the complex (but uncomfortably familiar) financial maneuvers men used to enrich themselves." ---Publishers Weekly Starred Review
From the Publisher - AUDIO COMMENTARY
"White delivers an opinionated, delightfully witty but astute account of sleazy Gilded Age politics, business, and journalism, as well as the complex (but uncomfortably familiar) financial maneuvers men used to enrich themselves." —Publishers Weekly Starred Review
Library Journal
White (American history, Stanford Univ.; The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815) takes on the task of explaining the achievements and failings of the few transcontinental railroads that spanned North America in the latter half of the 19th century. He concentrates on their financial, political, and social impact. In clear and often critical terms, he describes the corruption that made the railroad's founders wealthy but hamstrung the companies, the bribes to politicians, the antipathy between management and workers exacerbated by imported Chinese laborers, the antimonopoly movements against railroad practices, and the end of the buffalo and the way of life of Native Americans. By the 19th century's end, White explains, the transcontinentals—built poorly, heavily in debt, and fiercely competitive for sparse business—collapsed financially and brought about the nation's worst financial crisis yet with the Panic of 1893. White does credit the transcontinentals with tying together North America from east to west. VERDICT White's exhaustive study is recommended to serious students. A better choice on the topic for general readers is Walter R. Borneman's Rival Rails: The Race To Build America's Greatest Transcontinental Railroad.—Lawrence Maxted, Gannon Univ. Lib., Erie, PA
APRIL 2019 - AudioFile
Narrator Paul Woodson does a marvelous job with this audiobook. His deep, resonant voice brings to mind nineteenth-century intonations and pronunciations. Narrating at a lively clip, he has a command of the author’s intent, pausing and accentuating for effect and to create dramatic tension. What makes Woodson’s job a bit easier is that he’s narrating history written by one of the giants in the field. The story of the building of the western railroad after the Civil War is a story of America itself. There’s greed, ambition, the public good, racism, government involvement, and the wealthy industrialists, known as the Big Four—Stanford, Huntington, Crocker, and Hopkins—who got it done. R.I.G. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
The railroads may not have advanced civilization in America, notes this sharp-edged history, but they were eminently creative in their destruction.
Latter-day corporatistas will not be pleased with the neo-Marxist slant that eminent historian White (American History/Stanford Univ.; Remembering Ahanagran: Storytelling in a Family's Past, 1998, etc.) brings to his vigorous account of the 19th-century transcontinental railroads. It is that great scholar of entrepreneurship Joseph Schumpeter whose spirit guides much of White's book, particularly his notion that capitalism involves "creative destruction," the constant uprooting of the old for the new in order to sell it all over again. (Think of CDs replacing LPs, and of MP3s replacing CDs.) In the case of the railroads, the creative destruction involved the replacement of one form of corporation with another—and if, as White argues, the 19th-century railroad corporations almost always went bust in the manner of the dotcoms in our own time, the individuals who controlled those corporations mostly did well for themselves. As he writes, "[t]he celebrated creative destruction of capitalism is, it seems, gentle with the rich," an observation not to be lost in our own time. White peoples the narrative with characters who are fascinating as case studies of the seven deadly sins, such as entrepreneur and wheeler-dealer Tom Scott, who "was not so much tainted by corruption as impregnated with it"; and Samuel Huntington, who railed against Scott for beating him at his own game, complaining that "the devil, the communist, and the Pa. R.R. have united against us." Huntington opposed Leland Stanford, too, but Stanford was a staunch Republican, and the Republican powers that be warned him that if Huntington's opposition cost Stanford his Senate seat, "they would punish Huntington by punishing [his] railroad." And so forth, one alliance conspiring against another—but, as White makes clear, all conspiring to grow rich, and all at the expense of the working people.
Excellent big-picture, popularly written history of the Howard Zinn mold, backed by a mountain of research and statistics.
