Working for the Railroad: The Organization of Work in the Nineteenth Century
350
Working for the Railroad: The Organization of Work in the Nineteenth Century
350Hardcover
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Overview
Originally published in 1983.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691638164 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/19/2016 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #660 |
| Pages: | 350 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.30(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.30(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Working for the Railroad
The Organization of Work in the Nineteenth Century
By Walter Licht
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1983 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-04700-3
CHAPTER 1
THE VIEW FROM THE TOP
No written history of nineteenth-century America is complete without a due account of railroads. Cliometricians may attempt to persuade with counterfactual arguments and extended calculations that the railroads' contribution to economic growth was less than indispensable; that, in effect, if the railroads had not been built, the graph of American economic progress would have assumed a shape similar to its realized pattern. While the iconoclastic contentions and methods of the "new" economic historians certainly dazzle the mind, no amount of inverted logic, fanciful model building, or simultaneous equations can obliterate the reality that the railroads were built and that they had in fact an enormous economic, social, and political impact on American history.
The railroads significantly lowered transportation costs, insured regular, year-round, relatively safe carriage of goods and passengers, quickly and efficiently extended the scope of the market economy, linked agriculture and industry in an interdependent network, and were important consumers of basic products like iron, steel, coal, lumber, machinery, and machine tools. The railroads also stimulated and benefited from western urban and frontier settlement and were agents of immigration, population dispersion, and real estate development. They pioneered in the introduction of corporate forms of ownership and bureaucratic principles of management, and were instrumental in the creation of new techniques and institutions for capital formation.
Less directly, the railroads served to create and heighten political tensions in the late nineteenth century, forcing government-business relations and the problem of concentrated political and economic power into the limelight. The railroads similarly provided the setting for several crucial incidents of nineteenth-century labor violence. At the same time, they comprised the first enterprises in America to undergo full-scale unionization and to develop institutionalized means for arbitrating employee-management disputes. As vivid examples of the power of American know-how and energy, the railroads also had important symbolic value, serving to engender optimism and belief in the potentialities of life in the young republic. Finally, in supplying the inspiration for numerous tales of mighty machines, daring enginemen, and ruthless promoters, the railroads contributed much that is rich in American folklore and song.
It is not the intention of this study, however, to add or subtract to lingering debates over the railroads' contribution to American history. The railroads' impact on the nation's economic, political, and cultural development will be taken for granted. What is of concern is to treat the railroads in a different way from those mentioned above-as places of work. The railroads will appear here not as agents of economic growth or political controversy, but rather as organizations employing and managing labor, organizations which mid-nineteenth-century American laboring people entered to earn their daily keep and in which they subsequently had work experiences.
The railroads did not provide a new kind of employment. For centuries, laborers had been occupied both in the overland and water transport of goods and people. It has been estimated that by 1830, when rail transport was in its infancy, 70,000 American workers, or approximately 2 percent of the labor force, were engaged in the carrying trades. While the numbers seem small, concentrations of transport workers did exist. In the burgeoning commercial cities of the East, hauling, carting, and general dock work were major sources of employment for the preindustrial urban laboring classes. On the high seas, a cadre of men formed an active merchant marine. Along the length and breadth of the nation's canals and turnpikes lived men who either worked full time or combined agricultural pursuits with work as boatmen, lightermen, loaders, and wagon and stagecoach drivers and conductors.
The railroads offered a new type of work experience. The rail companies that had emerged in America by mid-nineteenth century were vastly different kinds of business enterprises and employers than had ever existed. In terms purely of size — of initial capitalization, operating expenses, revenues, and number of laborers engaged — the railroads were comparable to no other concerns. In terms, too, of the complexity, diversity, and geographical range of operations, the railroads were rivaled perhaps only by earlier military organizations and campaigns. Finally, in the way in which work was structured and managed, the railroads introduced principles and techniques which were unique for their day. For men who had worked on farms, in homes, small workshops, or even textile mills, to enter into hire in a railroad company was to encounter an entirely new kind of work situation.
On February 12, 1827, twenty-five prominent citizens of the city of Baltimore gathered at the home of George Brown, a banker and member of a famous family of Baltimore merchants, to discuss the city's future commercial fortunes. The group included men whose very success in business affairs had enabled Baltimore to emerge as a leading shipping, trading, financial, and food-processing center for commerce passing to and from the trans-Appalachian West. However, the planning and completion of internal transportation improvement projects in Pennsylvania and New York and the potential diversion of trade to Philadelphia and New York City had begun seriously to jeopardize Baltimore's position and prosperity. Loss of western markets accordingly increased as a matter of concern and debate within the city during the 1820s. Among the men who assembled at George Brown's home, a number had closely followed experiments in England with steam locomotives and rail transport, and had become convinced of the advisability and necessity of building a railroad connecting Baltimore with points along the Ohio River.
During the course of their meeting, the group decided to appoint a committee to investigate various transportation alternatives. A week later they reconvened to hear a report strongly advocating the construction of a railroad linking Baltimore with the West. The report received unanimous approval, and the meeting adjourned with the group resolving to apply to the state legislature of Maryland for a charter of incorporation. Just nine days later, on February 28, 1827, an act establishing the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Company passed the legislature. The state's charter provided for a capital stock of $3 million, to consist of thirty thousand $100 shares. Ten thousand shares were reserved for subscription by the state of Maryland, five thousand for the city of Baltimore. Once $1 million were raised through private stock purchases, the company could organize officially with an elected board of directors and a president. The state charter further stipulated that construction had to be completed within ten years, that the legislature reserved the right to fix passenger and freight rates, and that the line would be exempt from state taxation.
Investors responded to the offering of company stock with enthusiasm. By April 23, 1827, sufficient funds had been raised to allow for the formal organization of the B. & O. Elected company officials then authorized the surveying of the line and the purchase of property. Planning proceeded apace and one year later, on Independence Day, 1828, amidst citywide parades and speeches, ground was broken in Baltimore to begin construction of the nation's first railroad. The initial stretch of line — 13¾ miles of roadbed and track reaching from Baltimore to Ellicott's Mills, Maryland — took two years to build. On May 22, 1830, the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad commenced operations with a team of horses drawing a train of passenger carriages and freight wagons along the track. Steam locomotive power did not come into regular service until two years later; the dream of building a railroad linking Baltimore and the Ohio River did not become a reality until the 1850s.
The men who had assembled in George Brown's home in February of 1827 underestimated the dimensions of the task they initiated and the project's ultimate returns. The committee appointed to draft a report on the feasibility of building a railroad calculated that 290 miles of track had to be constructed to reach the Ohio River; the length of the road when actually completed to the river was 379 miles. Similarly, they figured the costs of construction at $5 million. By the time the line reached the Ohio, close to $16 million had been spent. Finally, the architects of the road estimated revenues per annum at $750,000. In 1853, the board of directors of the B. & O. proudly reported that the company had earned more than $2 million during the fiscal year. With concern for their city's and their own financial futures, twenty-five prominent citizens of Baltimore thus launched a venture which would become one of the nation's major rail trunk lines and one of the country's largest and most important corporate enterprises.
Similar scenes, occurrences, facts, and figures can be cited for other towns and cities in the United States during the second and third quarters of the nineteenth century when railroad fever gripped the nation. Events unfolded in a fairly regular pattern. In community after community, local newspaper editorialists, politicians, bankers, merchants, manufacturers, and farmers first expressed concern for the loss of markets, the need to seize new commercial opportunities, and the importance of transportation linkages. Discussions took place in public forums, newspaper columns, private offices and homes, as well as in municipal, state, and eventually federal legislative bodies. Debate centered not only on the necessity of internal transportation improvements, but also on the respective merits of natural waterway, turnpike, canal, and railroad systems.
Support for internal transportation projects issued from various quarters and with a mixture of motives. Some promoters of improvements acted out of civic pride or from ideological commitments to economic expansion, while others clearly became involved to protect or boost their own business interests. Similarly, the stocks and bonds of transportation companies represented an attractive long-term outlet for surplus capital for some purchasers, while other investors had purely speculative ends in mind. Conversely, opposition generally surfaced in communities not served or favored by particular plans and in neighborhoods disrupted by construction and operation; among farmers and manufacturers threatened by competition from hinterland areas and individuals set against the increased taxation needed to pay for state-supported improvements; and finally, from groups who feared that government charters would aid only the privileged few and generate monopolies that could endanger republican ideals and institutions.
The early acceptance in this country of the legal principle of limited liability, liberal state incorporation procedures and laws, and the very decentralized structure of American government assisted the initiatives of those men of wealth and influence who attempted to translate concern into action. The state legislature of Maryland ruled favorably on the petition to charter the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Company within a few days of application. The relative ease of incorporation proceedings contributed to the unprecedented pace of railroad company formation and construction in nineteenth-century America.
The original charter of the B. & O. also served as a model for subsequent initiatives. With the exception of a few states that established for brief periods of time rail lines completely government owned and operated, state legislatures generally entertained petitions from private citizens for incorporation rights, but treated the chartered firms as quasi-public agencies. Early railroad charters included stipulations regulating the organization, capitalization, construction, administration, and prospective services of the carriers. In return, state governments extended various franchise and incorporation privileges to petitioners, and frequently established provisions for public financial assistance.
The securing of capital for the construction of railroads took several forms. Chartered companies first sold stocks and bonds to private citizens locally and in financial centers in the United States and Europe. The growing circulation of railroad securities, in fact, served to hasten the creation of formal exchanges and investment institutions in the 1830s and 1840s. Government also played an important, if not indispensable role. Municipal, state, and federal legislative bodies purchased sizable blocks of company stocks and bonds, and provided both direct donations of money and various indirect subsidies, including tax exemptions and land grants. The sale of government-offered land represented a major source of capital for road construction, especially for rail lines built in the Midwest and in western states. A hazy line thus existed between private and public initiatives in the building of the American railway network.
The legal formation of companies and the raising of adequate capital allowed railroad promoters to forge ahead with construction plans. To that task came a pioneer corps of civil engineers hired by boards of directors to survey and plot rights of way, and to supervise the construction and grading of roadbeds, the laying of track, the building of bridges, tunnels, stations, and shops, and the purchase of rolling stock. In the early years, rail companies normally contracted with local builders to construct portions of the road; later, lines either assumed direct charge of construction or established separate joint stock companies to perform the work. The latter course produced some of the more notorious boondoggles and scandals of the railway age.
The building of the American railroad system during the second and third quarters of the nineteenth century constituted a massive and historically momentous undertaking. By the end of 1830, the year the B. & O. inaugurated operations, twenty-three miles of track had been built in the country. Just ten years later dose to three thousand miles had been constructed, largely within the Atlantic coast states, at an estimated cost of $75 million. The United States by that early date already surpassed Great Britain in railroad construction.
By 1850, nine thousand miles of track had been completed at a cost of $310 million, and rail lines now stretched to and beyond the Appalachian range. The decade of the 1850s then witnessed an unprecedented boom. By 1860, 350 American railroad companies had invested close to $1.2 billion in the construction of thirty-one thousand miles of operating line. Most areas east of the Mississippi River already had convenient access to rail transportation facilities.
The Civil War failed to halt development. While the sectional crisis raged, plans were adopted to build a transcontinental road, and by war's end construction had nearly been completed. By 1870, rail lines had penetrated the Far West with track construction totaling fifty-three thousand miles. Another great building period ensued. Ten years later, the country had been linked by ninety-three thousand miles of operating line at the cost of $5.4 billion.
The return on the investment matched hopes and expectations. In 1880, American rail carriers reported total revenues of $613 million; in that year, purchasers of railroad stock received $77 million in dividends, while bond holders earned $107 million in interest payments. The benefits of railroad building, of course, filtered far beyond company investors to commercial interests in the country at large. Five decades after plans had been laid for the nation's first railroad line, a profitable and impressive intercontinental railway transportation system had been fashioned.
The prominent stockholders who served as directors of America's first railroad companies confronted entirely new sets of problems when their lines commenced operations. The management of business enterprises as large, complex, and geographically dispersed as railroads had few precedents. Rapid expansion and various exigencies forced early railroad managers to promptly devise administrative structures that were revolutionary for their day.
The earliest glimpse of the management of America's pioneer railroads is available in a report prepared in 1838 by Jonathan Knight and Benjamin Latrobe, two civil engineers in the employ of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. At the behest of the B. & O.'s board of directors, Knight and Latrobe surveyed the administration of nine operating carriers, and in their published study, The Locomotive Engines and the Police and Management of Several of the Principal Rail Roads in the Northern and Middle States, they rendered details on the organization of four. In each case, the primitive administrative arrangements they delineated reflected the small-scale nature of operations at the time.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Working for the Railroad by Walter Licht. Copyright © 1983 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- FrontMatter, pg. i
- Contents, pg. vii
- List Of Tables, pg. ix
- List of Illustrations, pg. xi
- Preface, pg. xiii
- 1. The View from the Top, pg. 1
- 2. The Supply of Labor, pg. 31
- 3. Working to Rule, pg. 79
- 4. The Rewards of Labor, pg. 125
- 5. The Perils of Labor, pg. 164
- 6. The Railwaymen: A Social Profile, pg. 214
- 7. The Legacy of the Early Years: Conclusions, pg. 244
- Appendixes, pg. 273
- Bibliography, pg. 306
- Index, pg. 321