Fists of Time

Book Review: Railroaded

There have already been several high-profile reviews of Railroaded (I especially recommend Gary Gerstle's review in Dissent) so I will not discuss the book in detail.  I would instead like to inform casual readers about the intensity of Railroaded.  The book provides a fresh interpretation of the Gilded Age - and industrial capitalism itself - but is stuffed with details that often render it impenetrable.

Author Richard White's basic premise is that the transcontinental railroads were failures because they lost money, ignored demand, wasted government subsidies, and plundered Native American land.  This is not just a book about railroads.  The implications are massive.  White (correctly) declares that these failures demonstrate that capitalism can be irrational.  He challenges key interpretations of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, especially Wiebe's Search for Order and Chandler's Visible Hand.  White does not entirely contradict Wiebe or Chandler; he allows that railroad barons formulated a rational, orderly veneer.  Railroaded openly promises to get in the very guts of corporations and expose their hidden corruption.

Those guts can be nasty, or at least unreadable.  In just a few dozen pages, readers will become lost among the many entrepreneurs, loans, scandals, and Congressmen.  I found myself skimming these passages, catching their general outline but confused by the level of depth with which they were described.  Richard White has obviously put in many years of research but much of it could have been synthesized or simply left out.

Railroaded is not all details.  Richard White has a literary flair.  Literary references abound.  (White particularly enjoys comparing corporate executives to Melville's "Confidence Man.")  This shouldn't be too surprising, as railroad barons soon captured the public's imagination; Twain's Gilded Age and Frank Norris's Octopus were directly inspired by them.  White's literary penchant also comes across in its "mise en scenes," asides that take the perspective of a diarist or memoirist who worked for the railroads.

The personal stories redeem Railroaded.  A few anecdotes are shocking or harrowing, such as the embezzler who was caught post-mortem, after stolen dollars had already passed down to his wife and father.  A worker and a woman are killed by trains in accidents that haunt their witnesses.  White workers trick a crew of African-Americans, lock them into a car, and nearly drive it into Puget Sound.  To top it all off is a compelling account of the Pullman Strike.

As engaging as many of the vignettes are, I question their inclusion in Railroaded.  The book is simply massive, inviting obvious comparisons to the very octopus it describes.  (This reviewer tasted the cheese and fallen right into that mousetrap.)  The book may have been more manageable without as many asides and anecdotes, or its discussions of Canadian and Mexican railroads.  In fact, this international perspective undermines one of White's key themes: that the intercontinentals helped create a U.S. national identity.

The intercontinental railroads indeed helped forged an American nationalism; Railroaded shows us how dark that national identity could be.  Anti-monopolism was subverted by competing railroads, who bought off congressmen.  (White cites a government finding that the Central Pacific alone allegedly spent nearly $5 million on bribes in the 1870s.)  Labor unions were typically racist.  If there is anything close to a hero in Railroaded (and there is not), it is Charles Francis Adams, president of the Union Pacific, a reform-minded railroaded executive who hid his disgust with prevalent business practices.  Adams's self-loathing is compellingly documented. In one private letter, he slammed the industry's "vicious practices."  "The railroad system," he said, "is wallowing in the mire."

Railroaded concludes with a quote from Adams's funeral eulogy by Henry Cabot Lodge: "business success - money-getting ... comes from a rather low instinct."  It is a fitting conclusion.

Book Review: Bush's Wars

After listening to Terry Anderson's panel at the latest AHA conference via YouTube, and seeing his latest book on the New Releases shelf at the local public library, I decided to give Anderson's Bush's Wars a read.  There have been a number of well-received books on the wars in Iraq and against al Qaeda over the last ten years, from Jawbreaker to Imperial Life in the Emerald City and Bob Woodward's trilogy-plus-one of books on George W. Bush.  Anderson suggested at AHA that he would be synthesizing these works in his short history of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.  I finished reading Bush's Wars wishing that I had picked up one of those other books instead.  If you read or watch U.S. or world news daily, as I have before and since 9/11, you will learn little from reading this book.

The most interesting, and obvious, feature of Bush's War is that much - about one-third - of the book describes the events that actually precede those wars.  This unconventional choice is welcome, if not effective.  I learned much about both Iraq and Afghanistan in these opening chapters.  However, the themes introduced here are absent from subsequent chapters.  Anderson enjoys establishing that Iraq is an "improbably country" and Afghanistan was the "graveyard of empires."  If his intention is to show that both Iraq and Afghanistan are historically difficult to govern and resistant to occupying forces, it may suffice to say just that.

Most egregious is Anderson's treatment of the war in Afghanistan, which hardly earns a more than a few dozen pages.  Of those pages, none of them address events occurring after the battle at Tora Bora.  I began the book hoping to learn more about the ongoing struggle between the Taliban, U.S., and Afghan forces and was completely let down.

There are one or two passages that are actually illuminating instead of obvious.  Several pages are dedicated to the rise of David Petraeus and his formulation of the counter-insurgency strategy.  Anderson - like most reasonable observers - agrees that this development was a critical turning point in the Iraq War.  The story was often overlooked in contemporary news accounts because they were overwhelmed by the Surge and its political proponents and detractors.

The real lost opportunity here is the lack of long-range analysis.  The book purports to make sense of the conflicts, but it instead feels like a series of major events.  Anderson repeatedly insists that both Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Global War on Terror were "Bush's wars."  "Thus, only six months after the invasion, by the end of summer 2003, the 'cakewalk' in Iraq... had  become an insurgency," he writes. "Next it would become Bush's War."  The book's unconventional timeline - which hinges on several chapters of background information - actually undercuts this claim.  By focusing on George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton's policies early on, the George W. Bush administration appears to have been locked into unavoidable conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Bill Clinton's pseudo-war, Operation Desert Fox, and the Republican congress's declaration of a regime-change policy, clearly guided the next president towards war.  (Ongoing skirmishes in the no-fly zone, events that this book glosses over, pushed the U.S. even farther in this direction.)  Terry Anderson even suggests that George W. Bush's cabinet was preparing for a possible war with Iraq since January 2001.  If all of this is accurate, I wonder if that war might have occurred with or without the 9/11 attacks.  Although it is unclear, perhaps Anderson is suggesting that a more competent president may have still waged war against Saddam Hussein but conducted the war in a way that would have prevented an insurgency or an invasion of al Qaeda terrorists.

In his concluding chapter, Terry Anderson rightly takes George W. Bush to task for his countless failures in the prosecution of the Iraq War.  "The Bush Administration was filled with cultural bravado and ignorance," he writes, adding "there is no alternative but to rank him as the worst president in U.S. history."  Reviewing the last ten years of war policy is highly unpleasant and sobering.  For readers aged 20-25, or anyone who might not have been politically cognizant during those regrettable years, this book will be catch you up to speed.  For everyone else, reading Bush's Wars will be like reliving a nightmare.

New Review on Beatbots: Roots of Steel

I just finished a review of Deborah Rudacille's Roots of Steel for the webzine Beatbots.  It is a powerful history of the Sparrow's Point steel factory outside Baltimore with labor-, social-, and oral-history dimensions.  Most impressively, at about 250 pages, it is compact and exceptionally readable.

Roots of Steel is a great book and I wanted to spread the word about it.  (Plus, the site came out of a core of Baltimore contributors, so I thought it would especially be of interest to that audience.)  But, if anything, I've started writing again for Beatbots just to try strengthening my writing chops.