and so there's a lot of, a lot of commentary on that and the conservative columnist george will tries to claim -- blame springsteen for reaganism in the right. that's part of the story pretty well known of the giver and the boss. >> you can watch this and other programs on line at.org. >> next richard white presents a history of the transcontinental railroads. the author recounts the creation of the railroads which changed the way americans lived and opened the country to westward expansion. this is a little over an hour. >> good evening and welcome to tonight's meeting of the commonwealth club of california, the place where you are in the

know. find this on the internet at commonwealth.org. i'm david kennedy, professor of history emeritus and codirector of the building center for the american west at stanford university, and your moderator for this program. tonight's program is being held in association with the california historical society. it's now my pleasure to introduce our distinguished guests, richard white, also professor of history at stanford university and codirector at the center for the american west with me and the author of the new book "railroaded: the transcontinentals and the making of modern america." richard is to be more precise the market byrne professor history at stanford where he has been since 1998. he previously taught among other places at the university of utah and the university of washington would he took his ph.d. my wonderful colleague is widely

regarded as a leading, one might say the leading scholar in three distinct but related field, the history of the american west, environmental history, and native american history. he has been the recipient of awards and is the author of several notable works including a book entitled it's your misfortune and none of my own, published in 1991. a comprehensive history of the american west. a book entitled "the middle ground." also published in 1991. and one of my favorites, the organic machine, the remaking of the columbia river, published in 1996. and now we have his new book,

"railroaded: the transcontinentals and the making of modern america." the book has already been reviewed in "the boston globe," just this last weekend when it was described as a scathing and wonderful new book. and i think the full implications of the scathing part, as well as the wonderful, are likely to be clear in this discussion. probably know at the outset the book is not the classic story about building the transcontinental railroad. the story has been told many times, very ably in fact. richards story essentially begins when the railroads are virtually finished, and his history is a history of how they were operated in the first 30 years or so. so it's important to keep that in mind. this is not another epic saga of building the railroads but have several transcontinental lines were actually moderated. operated. so richard, you've entered a

field of study here that others have been in before you, i think especially in the work of chandler and vogel. who have studied the railroads as the precursors of the modern american economy and the modern corporation. your view is so different and i hope we'll get to that different view you have with vogel and chandler and others but to begin, maybe can say something about how, given your very large corporate work issues having to with a wealth wealth of the native americans and the clinton river and so on, how did your interest in railroads grow out of your previous work, or maybe grab some source altogether? >> the book comes after the fact i wrote about my mother which is about history and memory. i wanted to get back to the american west, and whether one was a subject which would allow me to look at the entire late 19th, early 20 century west,

around a single thing. and also at the time i wondered why historians, unless their business historians, did not write about corporations. and so corporations, the entire west, i turned to railroads. and the next step was fairly easy. i thought well, i'll start looking at the railroads but once i looked at them i thought there are railroads in canada, mexico. so the book became mexico, canada and the united states. i thought this would be comparative. i would just look at how they operate and see the differences between countries. what i found out was this is one big river. my guys are the same guys whether they are in mexico, canada, the united states. capital for all the roads comes from the same place, technology from the roads come from the same place. the roads are operated.

it is an interlocking system. so at that point as is usual, in my books, i realized i did not know what i was talking about. and the book became very different from the one i sent out to right. i will talk about later with david, i started out thinking that these are going to be powerful inefficient corporations. what i will be seeing is the birth of modernity in the north american west we don't expect to see it. and i did find the birth of modernity in the north american west. it's just not the modernity i expected to find. my military hasn't much to do with fairly as it does with success. >> one way to reach a book least in my view is you conduct a kind of running argument with the great austrian born longtime harvard economist joseph schumpeter who is most well-known i suppose for the phrase created destruction, the history of capitalism, modern

economies is all about creative disruption. anti-as i read at least is one of their principal foils as you advance your own argument. said he wanted tells a little bit of a your regard for joseph schumpeter and we have taken them on? >> i admire him a great deal. what i to see is creative destruction taking place all over the west. it was schumpeter's greatest inside the cap wasn't as is it's always a revolution system and that it's always has to destroy the old to bring in new. and he was perfectly right thing that going on in the white corporations operate the way the 19th century. where i begin to differ is that in schumpeter's account, things always turn out well. entrepreneurs always in fact, if they fail they're just a lemonade. if they succeed they are de facto bring in a new world. well, my entrepreneurs fail at bringing in a new world and they also fail and make a whole lot

of money. and that became the puzzle for me as i went on. i agreed with schumpeter but i didn't see the same results coming out of it and i really wanted to understand why, how this process really worked. why virtually every railroad i've looked at ended up going bankrupt. many of them go bankrupt not once but twice. some of the highchairs go bankrupt three times in the spirit of 10 years. they are widely hated, and they cause all kinds of political, social and environmental problems, yet the men who run them grow immensely wealthy. and that became a puzzle for me. that became the central puzzle of the book. how exactly does the system work. because for schumpeter if you feel you are supposed to bear the burdens of your failures. my guys feel by any usual measure, but they did for a while for themselves. that's a stream that runs throughout the whole book. what i end up doing any phrase

that probably won't go far but it might, is it's about growth but this is really dumb growth. this is growth for all kinds of things happen that probably would've been better if it didn't happen, and sometimes when i had a sense was a wasn't working in the north american west, i was watching a soviet 20 your plan or something what it's not that it doesn't do things but in hindsight it just didn't seem a very good idea to have done it. >> you see not only is the net result of all this activity done growth but in this instance i believe you add the term environmental catastrophe. you want to say something about the second part of that indictment? >> what i started to do is i started to isolate things that would not have happened, at least the way they did without the building of transcontinental railroads, i'll talk a little bit about the distinction i make about transcontinental. and transcontinental. and the isolate is used to look at is the great plains. what happens if the great plains

between 1861 the first roads penetrated and 1890s. well, the first thing is the demise of the bicycles which simply is not the railroads are fully responsible for the demise of the bison herds but the finite is result of railroad building because you could not get those heights out without railroad trains. so the railroads unintentionally bring about the near extinction of bison. doesn't bother people much a time because they're going to replace them with cattle and all kinds of cattle to go in, and cattle fries for a while. it will thrive until the 1870s, 1880s. and have catastrophic winners on planes which have a over grace and its a virtue collapse of the cattle industry, almost overnight. bankruptcies, and even ranchers come hard and ranchers who say they've never wanted to look at another cow again after they'd seen the results of those winners. after that which it is wheat farmers coming in. it's not the wheat farmers, the

problem for wheat farmers is the move on the planes, coaches, badgers tickets equally catastrophic because for this time they're dumping large amounts of sweets onto a market for which there's no market for wheat. the prices falling in the winter outcomes, particularly on the great plains, many of them are busted. as the railroads to bring development, for small and small scale bison herds, then you have with cattle industry, then with wheat farming. and all of the men by the 1890s in catastrophe, environmental damage, and political turmoil. >> there's another, of course, another native art indigenous population on the planes that's also impacted by the railroads, and, of course, i'm referring to native americans. something i know you're talking about next week at another occasion. but i wonder if you might give us a little preview of what you're going to say then and just summarize your views about

what the transcontinental lines did to the native american population. >> i have to be very careful when i say this because what i will say, though i might have to retreat a little on it, is railroads were probably the worst thing that happened to indian peoples in the far west, the great plains, through the great basin, through the far west. but i hesitate to it because so many bad things happen to them that that is really hard to single out the railroads. want to talk about if you look at how american population, it takes americans if we started jamestown about two and half centuries to get a little more than halfway across the continent. by the civil war for all practical purposes there just be on the missouri river. it will take a generation to move the rest of the way. so what you have for indian peoples in the west, there's no time to adjust. everything happens virtually overnight. the railroads in a space of a few years managed to end the

treaties system to bankrupt the treaty system which is corrupt enough to begin with but by the court in such a way that congress advocates the treaty system in 1871. the railroads also have a problem. the transcontinental get the subsidies for two reasons. the first reason is they have to secure california for the union. the problem with that is civil wars over over and 1865, and they haven't started building the railroads in 1865. so you don't really, can choose the civil war as an excuse. what you substitute is the railroads on the way to subjugate intense. it's perfectly true. the railroads to bring about very rapid subjugation of indians by billy to move troops but my argument would be without the railroads there would've been no needs to fight those wars to begin with. this settlement would've taken place much more gradually. and i think any in the much of the midwest would look a lot more like the navajo reservation that it would like the pine

ridge reservation. that the kind of developers that take place very quickly could have been postponed, and, in fact, it would've cost the united states little bigger would've gained the indians much but i'm not arguing of course in the end indians are going to become subjugated by the unisys. a document when and where it happens, the speed and how it happens. >> one of the audience asked the question, your description of railroads, feeling as owners profit since very similar to recent bank fees owners profit. do you agree? and just expand the question by sharing with the audience here a passage from the book where you offer a kind of summary, of what the story is that you've been telling. here's your characterization of the railroads at the end of the day. overbilled, prone to bankruptcy and receivership, wretchedly managed, politically corrupt, environmentally harmful, and

financially wasteful. these corporations nonetheless helped create a world where private success often came from locke, fortune of time and state intervention. prophet arose more from financial markets and insider contracts then from successfully selling transportation. now, before you answer i just want to remind you of the subset of the book and i think this underlies the question direct from the audience that you talk about the transcontinental see it as some kind of precursors of modern america, some kind of harbinger of modernity in your story. so is it in fact, is it a fact that is the observation of the current economic and financial scene that was part of your motivation for writing? >> this book to 12 years. many of the disasters it seems unfair '02 this had not taken place when i was writing this book. and the other thing is odd as it may sound, i became fond of some of these guys.

though it doesn't sound like it from that passage. i wrote this in two places. i rode in seattle where star the book, and then i rode in palo alto. i wrote it when the beginnings of things like enron, the dot.com bust. then finally financial crisis which comes towards the end of the book. and i began to realize that there were certain parallels because i started this, i the great admiration for business history. i learned a lot about it, but either very naïve idea that the way people made money from corporations is the corporations make money selling something and then they divided it up among stockholders. die the whole bunch of corporations that lost money. the stockholders very often got very little and yet the people who control the corporation made vast fortunes. so i began this is -- begin to

see a special among the dot-coms, i was trying to my house at the same time in the silicon valley and they knew that anybody who walked in with a stake in one of those companies, any time i saw someone under 30, i could not buy a house. but there've making huge amount of money and all those companies tanked. the financial crisis was the same thing. they had to be bailed out. but bankers themselves do very little. they do quite well. i began to think this isn't just something that is the late 20th century. in a weird way, they seem to be a lot like the 19 century, everything seemed to be like the 19th century. and a change for a historian, i like about the past are people who live there were not like us. and in many ways there are

differences but clearly the kinds of structural things, the kind of modernity that we are used to was beginning to emerge with the first corporations in the american west, and all the kinds of entanglement with washington. all the kinds of financial markets. all the kinds of chicanery that we became all too familiar with. these guys were doing it simpler but they were doing much the same thing. >> i would ask a question that maybe tissue beyond the boundaries of your own book, your research and writing. but there is a lot of history that intervenes between the late 19th century and now. and do our own age man some similarities to this, a lot of things have intervened. for example, the creation of interstate commerce commission in the 1880s to try to bring some order to the railroad industry through federal government regulation. and a series of other government initiatives to bring order to there is marketplaces over the course of the late 19th and

through the 20th century. the new deal would be one great moment when a lot of those things come to debate. so what's their story? do the trick some of the evils of the problems that you see in the 19th century? now have let our guard down again, or is it one continuous story of corruption and malfeasance on the 18 the 1860s forward? >> no, you've got onto the problem with that. that doesn't mean everything in between was. one of the things i noticed and is a chart in the book that comes from an english economic historian, what he did was start to catch a per capita income. so i went into the railroads thinking say what you will, which is the usual phrase can say what you will about the late 19th century. there were rising standards of living all over the united states. actually their work. andy dick in the west they were dropping. they dropped they drop until 1900. and the progressives, even if you follow this literature, professional historians have

been hard on, we probably should let up a bit. because that's when per capita incomes are individual in the united states start arise. they will continue to rise all the way through as david says the new deal, world war ii, the 1950s, '60s, '70s. they stagnate when we begin to get the kinds of things that i've seen here. so there is a long interval. one of the things i say about this book, most of the review so far has stressed the critical elements of it but one of the things i tried to bring out is the gilded age. late 19th century was also an age of reform. and in the 20th century many of those reforms worked. it's not that those things are unmanageable. it's not that people can take some control. so i really do, i'm not a happy face for storing. i never will be. it's not going to happen but if you try to point out for all the limits of reform in the late 19th century, it does achieve

many things which show up in the 20th century. and people ignore the fact that the roots of some of these things are in the late 19th century so many of them come and opposition to wrote. >> summon any audience as the following question to pose the biggest challenge you encountered in researching this book? in other words, when did you know you're just stopping research. i assume you could have continued for years. in the course of your response to that you might want to does a little something about your own research and writing habits, do you write at night or in the morning or in the middle of the day? do you have research assistants and so on? >> usually i don't use research assistants. i owe virtually all my writing habits to my children when they were small. the only time i could ever write was to get very early in the morning before they were out. and i set a pattern of just writing very early in the morning, helping get the kids ready for school, been teaching all day, late at night i'm not

much good. i can rebut really can't write. so much of the book will be written in those for predawn hours which i become very, very fond of. a habit which is hard to do to my children but it's one that asserting very, very well. i owe a great debt of gratitude. i guess i've never expressed it to them that way. i operate differently from many historians. many historians will go out and read off of secondary literature. i did not read his secondary literature first. i go into the archives. what i really want to do is get to know people. i can say this to david or other historians any audience and they know what i mean, otherwise it seems strange. the people i write about are more real to me than most other people i see on the streets every day. this is something that scares my

wife. she's gotten used to it. after all, these years. that it really is true. and what you began to do when you know you know them, is when you get to a situation and you can predict what they're going to do and they do it at that point you think okay, i really have reached some kind of understand much of the research ideas technical and railroad issues. i read other peoples notes. that's what i do. in 19 century, the thing i liked about these guys is i really came to respect the business letter. it's to the point that it's not long. it has to be pithy. it goes right into the other things i can, guys honest. but i would call confront. they say things i could live they were saying anti-come to the bottom of the letter and it says destroy this letter. burn this letter. tells you a lot about the 19 century that is so me items in archives that clergy are unburned and i'm destroy. that people are so trusting in a

way that it's hard for me to believe. thank god they didn't have twitter in the 19th century. but believe me to be. so the things about that i say our skating, mostly what i do is quote what they say about each other. they do come to dislike each other a great deal and it is quite perceptive about why they dislike each other. that i had organized by corporations. the place i stopped, for all for storage you can literally go on forever. when the yield anything new really begin to diminish, at that point it was time to stop reading because i could go on forever. 12 years is a long, long time. >> this is i must say a prodigiously deep researched book at archival research that underlies the narrative is truly phenomenal. you refer to the principles that

appear in your store as my guys. kind of a grudging fondness for them. when you touch on you enter into this very, very controversial area of corruption and how corrupt they were. i am reminded of some things that mark twain said, perhaps in that they must not leave you with charles dudley warner, the gilded age which gave the name to the era, but someplace maybe elsewhere he said america has no native criminal class, except for the united states congress. and i think another was i once met a congressman who was an s.o.b., but why do i repeat myself? and there's more than a little of that flavor in your book. so maybe want to say a little something about what you mean by corruption, word that appears if not on every page certainly in high-frequency in your account. mark twain's notion of

corruption i think was mostly direction of the body politics, the politicians were for sale, definition of an honest congressman is when he was state bought. so it was the crushing of the political realm in particular that bothered him. you have some of that on your mind but as i read, you have an even broader definition of corruption. you want to say something about the nature of corruption? >> it's quite complicated. i will quite simply and add a few other complications. winning by corruption basically is something very, very simple, but i branched out from the. i made any exchange of public goods for private favors. and that became the kind of thing that railroad would do favors for congressman, and congressman would grant them charters, grant them subsidies, grant them that help them against rivals, all of these things but essentially this is what americans most feared in the 19th century.

this is due in the years after the civil war, this delay jacksonian element and they thought the republic is going to fault because, in fact, private interest or going to take over the republic. and the corporation as they sought was going to be the thing with the engine that drove all of this. that does happen but i argue in the book is something more subtle really happened. is the corporation wasn't interested in running the united states. the corporation wasn't interested in taking over politics. all these guys wanted to do was make some money. and so they really have limited ambitions, and then to make money they had to make sure, this is one of the central insights at least one in the book, is they turned politics into the way that businesses compete. it goes on to the present day. and one business wants to stop another business, you can see now the quarrel between the banks and retail merchants.

both of them are fighting in congress for business advantage. that's what the railroads did. everybody had, it's a word that became in many of my books, i would for a couple of years and i go that's what they mean. the word was friends. everybody here was friends. it sounds like a quitter meeting a lot of time to read the correspondence. but when you know that they don't like each other, and you begin to get it, friendship mean something uzbek a deep friendship as a social form. hatred is personal. friendship is business. that's what they do with these guys. so would have is a series of commitments and when the mark point core, and honest congressman is somebody is someone who is body stays bought. many of them are union veterans who run the railroads. the worst thing you can say about some of is they are a traitor.

the worst thing is treason. for them, they carry over that kind of ethics which had once been noble to save the union into business relationships, and that's how the whole thing operates. they have friends who were newspapermen, they are french or politicians. they have friends who were judges. they have friends who are other business been. they have friends who are bankers pick but if you want to understand the late 19 century its friendship. they don't write each other. bribery is a failure of friendship. to bribe somebody it's an ad hoc purchase and you can't count on them. what a friend does is a reciprocal interest at a friend can be counted on and know they will be rewarded later. that's how this kind of intersection of business and politics comes about. these guys will serve a year or two in congress. it sounds to me again. it become obvious. they become corporate employees. they become lawyers for the corporation. they move back and forth.

they get payoffs. they are taken care of. but you have to bribe somebody, that raises the whole issue of the corruption of the government itself. it makes everything far too visible. it's far too messy. it's not that they don't do it but you like to avoid it. >> i just want to remind our radio audience or listen to the commonwealth club of california, radio program and our guest today is richard white, a professor of history at stanford university and codirector at the building center for the american west at stanford. we are discussing his new book, "railroaded." and discussing myths about the transcontinental railroads in the building of the american west. richard, we have more than one question here that i suppose you have anticipated. about the founder of our university. so, one questioner says he was the founder of the university

that presumably pays your salary as well as that of the moderate. that's me. don't you anything positive said about the so-called robber barons and insane than another question asking your position with stanford, this made it difficult question, but how credible is leland stanford? [laughter] >> okay. first of all, you know, as my wife said one of the things sometimes she does, think she's going to put on my gravestone, one of them is he bites the hand that fed him. and that's fair enough. but leland stanford, let me give you a piece of advice which by most of you know already. do not destroy your personal papers. if you destroy your personal papers, your site every thing that happens is pretty much going to be lost. what all those other letters which might have marked destroyed when read are resting very safely in archive. and all kinds of people who hate

you. the most, does show that he is quite corrupt, but there's nothing else getting stanford sides of the story because it's unclear who would almost certainly jane stanford destroyed all of leland corresponds. so what is left is the letter she wrote to other people. and they are abundant and they are damning, and his testimony that he did. so he is very much a part of it because one of the things that happens is that people who ran the central pacific were known as the associates. they were in it together. things became so messy and they all had so much to hide that nobody could ever back out of this corporation. the only we got out of the southern pacific is you died. people tried, sort like mafia, they came back. you had to come back in. for a while i thought that's because they will never steal from each other, but that left

out david cole. the day they captured black bart, the last ditch coach robert in california, is the date the golden trial started. for to go back to sever cisco papers you have first of all the count black bart, the stage refuse to leave that poetry with his victims. didn't have the opening of the cold and dry which become the most famous trial in late 19th century california. david gold was an associate who was getting from the other associates. when he tried the associates figured out that he embezzled from. they went to his widow and still it back. in doing this they also found out that because the books were so corrupt it is very easy for the employees to steal from them. they found that their bookkeeper and still $600,000. there's all kinds of theft and corruption up and down but by and large the associates themselves came to dislike each

other but they stuck together all the time. and stanford is one of them. the real person who runs this is huntington. and huntington is corrupt buddies also funny, tough, mean. he's of all the people i have sort of red and historical stuff i would hesitate to go up against him. it doesn't mean you're going to lose a fight to huntington bunch of other not going to win it and you're almost going to certainly which were never in the to begin with. the question asked about the robert pear, the term as i still was put into common circulation as the title of the book but joseph and published in 1930. that book is very relevant of the extremely antibusiness, anticorporate sentiment of that great depression. decade. i just want to go to a list of some of the people who i suppose

qualifies as robber barons or their lackeys and accolades. that you write about and i want to make come as you question about the robert pear interpretation of history. is about half a dozen or more people here. i'm quoting your characterizations of them. you say of thomas durrant that he was a buffoon. john murray forbes was near money. silas see what was corrupt and largely incompetent. james harvey's stonebridge was a racist. randall dodge was a liar and an eclectic hated the way to do loudly and a monstrously. sam brandon was a buffoon, another one. folks and was belligerent and obtuse. and a gaggle of southern pacific executives were a divided course and petulant arrogant and inept men. that sounds a little bit like matthew joseph. you say in your introduction that you think the robert pear interpretation of history is likely to be, the most likely

misinterpretation of what you try to argue. given that tone and the we do with individual robber barons, how i is that your account is distinguishable in his analytical court from matthew josephson's account and the whole robert pear three? >> one of things after 1012 years of reading the correspondence, much of that is paraphrasing what they said about each other. i gave you one quote. it was the golden age, so when i quote something i often think this is actually pretty mild compared to what this thing about each other. but the sever cisco business involved often on what the southern pacific said about charles crocker, let me see if i can get this right. he was a living, breathing, waddling monument to viciousness, vulgarity and dishonesty. i'm up against masters here. [laughter] compared to the kinds of things

they said, what i say it is quite myopic many other things i do say, thomas durrant, despite the nicest thing anybody ever said about him. so on that, yeah, i do say them but i am reflecting pretty much the sources that i have. but they are not robber barons and the two books that probably dominate most about our vision of what these railroad corporations are like were josephson's book and also of course frank nourse is the octopus. my main differences in my guys were not nearly as competent. i think what you can do have is you look in the outside of these corporations and they seem to be so dominant that they seem to have an idea of what they want to achieve and they go ahead and achieve it. they might be evil and rotten and corrupt, but they are certainly capable. there seems to be no resistance. you go inside these corporations as i say one time, it's for a

fat guys in octopus it in their fighting over the control of the engine. it really is, when chandler who does the visible hand, he looks at board records. i'm looking at what the president say, the vice president say, what the managers say and what the workers say. all of us know that's a very different view of an organization. when you go into the bowels of these organization, or charles francis adams was one of the main characters in the book. he could not contain himself about the ineffectiveness, inefficiency of union pacific. and what turned into within is under self-loathing, but he was ahead of this corporation that he could never despite sacrificing many years of his life could get to work. so i think my difference is, they are not as competent. that goes back to my central problem, and all this goes back in many ways to conversation i had with my father. i must've been 10 or 11 years old. my father was a businessman.

he was a vice president at the time. and probably he was working the equivalent of an organization like this. i was just eating my breakfast but i didn't know what he was talking about. and he said i want you to tell me something. i want you to tell me how, when you go to work today, and nobody, nobody can do their job, nobody knows what they're doing, nobody can give you an accurate piece of information, you cannot find an honest man, how is it that the world works? that the sun is going to set? this is going to rise. we will do it all again tomorrow. i that he was talking about me. [laughter] i was tempted but it's also one of those questioned lingers back in my mind. and became the ministry of how corporations work. i mean, they are dysfunctional. totally dysfunctional. but they function. they going. they will collapse if they will be brought back together by the court info government and off they go again. collapse again.

this is how this world begins to work. that became the puzzle i was trying to figure out. it's very different than the kind of either major corporations, the triumphant entrepreneur or like the octopus or robber barons. it's not the way it works. and my account of it largely comes from there, because the number of men in the 19th century who were on the verge of a nervous breakdown is unbelievable. is a wonderful moment in the panic of 1873 where huntington who is about as tough individual as i've ever encountered as i said, huntington said in his office and says i say tear going nowhere not knowing what to do. and he writes it another time that he has slept maybe three hours in the last week. this is the kind of thing that happens. they feel overwhelmed by a system they are both creating, but which clearly is not under their control.

and that's the problem with the robber barons. the robber barons are in control. i can't find the people who are in control and the corporations. and i talk about the transcontinentals. not talking but other railroads. i messed with the i have an evidentiary base and the key to the evidentiary base. not necessarily universalize it to all of the corporations. >> part of what you are doing, i think there's successfully in the book, is demythologizing disinherited notion of the supreme potentates known as robber barons that they really, they might have had a lifestyle but they did have a running a power. even over their own corporations. so there's lot of demythologizing going on here. among the people that you are demythologizing our people who bought the mythological light even at the time were people like frank doors and the octopus about assuming california students have read over generations and people

elsewhere. and even it would appear one of california's most famous governors, hiram johnson who made his political career i taking on the octopus, the southern pacific road, much of the political system we have in this state today not least of all our a direct attack. but by your account, 19 in, 1911 the octopus was an anti-sue. there really was no true power there. so how can contain praise mike norris and johnson have gone so wrong? >> there's a brief window. of window between 1882 and probably about 1882-1894, 1884-18 age is a better date in which there really isn't octopus where there is a political machine. san francisco still is but it really was a colorful city in the 19th century, but what leland stanford does is hook up with a guy whose the blind boss,

chris buckley. is a democrat. stanford israel public and acquitted is essentially run the state. stanford is elected senator. he buys the election but it's very clear at the time. and then george hearst buys the election. and that's very clear at the time. so there's a good one in fact there's building up this reform weighed against the octopus. the octopus, by 1892 with stanford and huntington starter cory is this utterly divided mission. chris buckley, the guys he trained he trained far two of the he decide she's having separate poor health and he goes to london. even though the grand jury indictments of them are illegal, they're thrown out in court, he sees the writing on wall. he has done. huntington comes to stanford and says here's the evidence that you bought. the senate seat. here's what want you to do.

we will send you back to the senate to you resign as president of the southern pacific river. stanford takes video. huntington takes it over and says he's getting the southern pacific out of politics but he's not getting it out of politics. instead which it is the southern pacific will be running three different candidates representing three different factions of the southern pacific. what the achieving 1892 is the miraculous. they allow somebody named stephen white, no relation to me, to become a democratic anti-monopolist senator from california. it's really white far more than hiram johnson the hiram johnson's father worked for the southern pacific or choose what the congressman who's who is in the pocket. he breaks the power. but there's this memory of those ages that is quite real and that's what goes on with numerous. noris uses that and i think for johnson it would be interesting to go back and look at johnson. my sense is, i can prove it, is hiram johnson is a really smart

politician. the octopus is far too viable to throw away. i mean, everybody isn't a big they might not know it's powerful and more but he turned into something he can just went back and forth up and down the state. hairy man comes in and takes over the southern pacific. is not the political operator that he is picky is no match for johnson. i think what johnson will do this deal the root issue, make it a progressive republican want to put in an awful lot of reforms. the octopus is dead by the early 1890s. >> you pretty thoroughly demythologizing the railroads as the all powerful entities that many people thought they were. but what if they brought in the terms of that point and assess jimmy speaking to what if anything at all is left of the broader myths of the american west, cowboys, sod buster's, homesteaders, the oregon

trekkers, california trail trekkers, is anything defensible on historical standards? the whole thing is to be put into the fabled dustbin? >> any set of stories that can have the power that those stories have, my feeling as a historian, it makes no difference if they are true. they become their own truth. what happens here is people themselves really begin to live according to these kinds of mistakes. and so what you have is, there's wonderful account that others had used. i have used it, and it sort of captures the way this works. it is kit carson comes to rescue a woman has been captured by i think the cheyenne. is too late. what they do is they kill oppressors and right away. and in going through the stuff that has been captured he begins going to the debris in the camp and he finds the novel.

the novel is about kit carson rescuing women from the apaches. kit carson sits down and starts reading the novel. kit carson is upset because in the novel he saved the women. this time he lost the women. for kit carson begins to realize here's an actual historical character now constructing himself out of these kinds of myths. buffalo bill cody who i think is a great genius of the american west produced is the one who understood this. what he understood is the west itself could become a commodity. buffalo bills wild west show which never calls itself a show will take the actual people or involved. which met in buffalo bill's wild west show is indians who had fought oscar within joined buffalo bill bill's wild west show to fight custer in onstage and in the arena. and before wounded knee which buffalo bill will go out and scout for the army, indians the buffalo bills one bushel of some of the indians who fight.

at this point who can tell the reality and fiction? it just goes back and forth. my larger point is you can demythologizing the west all you want. you will never get at the heart of these stories. these stories are really about not so much the west. they are about america. they're about to send that you can reimagine yourself. you can begin again. that there's a place in fact that you can go which is untouched. all of this is utterly out a place that is untouched where you could be the first person there. all of these things play very deeply into the american psyche. it's no wonder, when we talk about genres there's a western. best-of-seven. there's no midwestern. it begins to in catholic this whole set of hopes. i love west's. the last thing i'd want to. i don't want to see "true grit" and say no.

it's wonderful but it does capture something. doesn't capture what it was like an indian territory in 1880s? probably not. but is after much larger game the net. >> one of the great iconic western films, the man who shot liberty balance one of the most single muslim will dash of memorable lines of the film, when the truth becomes legend, print the legend. the west has been an engine of driving these myths of legendary portions. there's at least, i'm going to call them robber baron, appears to be an outlier in your set of villains. that's james j. hill. who built the great northern railroad, one of the four major transcontinental's that was built largely without federal subsidy.

and it's the northernmost of the u.s. transcontinentals. i believe he wants it subject to the effect and many lives where the snow don't fault a to take a stand. because he is trying to populate the regions along his line. legitimate to understand that maybe i misunderstood you. he should not be admired as the one person who did it as a solid private enterprise. that there was plenty of operative in the face up legal system and the standard can of corruption as well. >> deal is more complicated. his most famous quote is getting enough swedes and whiskey and i will build you a railroad to help. [laughter] what he'll had is hill is the only one who realizes, though she's a little bit ahead, he foresees in fact, he's going to build a railroad which is something to put on. that's the major problem with the lelan transcontinentals. his core rotor and the great

northern is the st. paul minneapolis and manitoba, which is in the largest land grants in minnesota and dakotas and very valuable link if that becomes the core around which extends that road into the great north. the real thing he'll does is hill builds a road at about the time were for the first time you really need transcontinental's. because in 1890, after the depression of 1893, the american economy takes off. for the first understaffed for the throat. the single fact that struck me about the problems before that are the united states government subsidizes transcontinental railroads. transcom the railroads are built to california. transcontinental railroads will take part of the money that they get an pitchout subsidy to steamship lines to raise their rates back east. the reason is they cannot compete with the steamship lines for freight. so during this whole time the government is paid a subsidy so

that everybody can raise rates so that the fact you can make some money transfer and goods across the country. otherwise virtually everything would have gone by ship down to a relative panama into new orleans are up to the east coast. that is far and away the cheapest route it as it turned out because the way railroads run, i won't bore you with details, it is nearly as quick as putting it on the river car because what you send a relic are from san francisco and you headed east, that knows what it's gone. they have a hard time tracking these things that can take a very long time before you find a railroad car again. >> james j. hill did not do it very differently from the others. >> though his timing was better. >> you also suggest that other countries did it differently. not necessarily mexico and canada which is part of your tran three system. but you do only to the fact that

without developing the point that the europeans did it differently. they built their major-label transportation system on a different model. how different with a? with a something that this country should have emulated? >> people set we should do but it was too late. and the techniques he had worsened. many, many of the problems in the united states cannot happen in france, did not have in germany. each one did it differently. what the english did is something really simple. if you're going to build a railroad you have to put your own money and. there has to be stock. that is bought and paid for. than most english railroads, the capital is raised by selling stock. there's actually stock at risk in a railroad the most american railroads are not built that way. american railroads are built with bonds. they are although with borrowed money. americans try to control their rose by regulating the rates. the french are much smarter. the french say you will always have great problems. you'll always have great wars.

always have schools and have corruption internally. if we allow you to build a railroad any place you choose. so what the railroads is the routes have to be approved by the state. what they don't allow is what kills railroads in the west is these endless competitive routes without enough traffic to support them. the french do it that way. the germans have much more state control. to be fair they don't face the same problem the united states does the france, england and germany are relatively small countries. the united states has this vast area. at the time the 19th century, french, german and england had far more capital than the united states the. we were a poor nation, capital poor nation. we have to borrow a lot of the money that comes in. but if you compare railroads in the 19th century as historians have done, several have done it, and the united states doesn't come off by any statistical measure, we don't come off that

will. our low rates are large because we carry cheap commodities very long distances and so it's not so much the total fare is low, but rates per mile our low because we carry so many miles. >> you also write a lot in the book quite substantially about not just the managers and their mismanagement but also about the workers, especially the confrontation between american railway union and the management of a nationwide railway system in the 1890s. in what way on the labor side of the dimension here do we see a template for my 30 the way you see it on that basis and financial site? >> for some ice we don't. one of the interesting things that was going back is i discovered something which historians tend to ignore because we divide it up between labor unions, populous, green backers. and at the time people called it something much simpler,

anti-monopolist and. there's a strong anti-monopolist when in the republic in part, and the democratic party, the third parties are all anti-monopolistic there's worker anti-monopolist and. today which made by monopolies corporation. pretty much they use the word anonymously. the reason to dislike corporations is they think control is being taken away from ordinary people. i begin to realize in the 19th century there's something which is not modern in the sense, it's vanished from current politics. if it is you i haven't seen it. americans in 19th century, not all of them but a majority, believed that the purpose of an economy in a republican society is to produce republican citizens. it's not to produce the highest gross national product. instead what they say is it should produce citizens are able to take their civil role in the

republican, and they're very clear on what they're talking about. it means a worker should be able to support a family. that they should be a kind of independence among producers. nobody can dictate to them about the condition in which they will reach market. they really hold of these things very, very seriously, and it becomes the core of this politics. a politics i think we utterly miss understand now but they understood very well at the time. so the unions i look at, the knights of labor is not a modern labor union. the knights of labor, businessmen join it, lawyers join, all kinds of people. instead what they see themselves is taken republican ideals, small or republican ideals, and bring them over into the economy. that's not the economy should be subservient to the republic and not vice versa but it wasn't the governments job to serve business, at the visit should produce certain kinds of citizens of the american republic would survive.

that way it's very dracone. they see the country is largely made up of meddling people. the problem they have is to think that they define these things in terms of manhood. by manhood they mean white man at the most anti-monopolist's our bases to the core. this really is about white men did it and it's also about men. it's about the ability of men to support a family. it's about women being domestic, being indo. so there's really much to this ticket is not the kind of thing you bring over into the late 20th century. but to me it was another one of those revealing portrait am looking at a different way of seeing the world. americans in the late 19th century are not like us. they thought of the world in a very, very different way. once you understand that the politics become much more comprehensible. >> i just want to dwell for a minute i think i'd be remiss if i didn't, on one of the

stylistic properties of this book. it's not nearly a deeply researched and compellingly told analytic narratives of history, but you sprinkled through the book, i'm not sure quite what to call them, elements that reminded me of the way others put together so many different elements in that famous u.s.a. trilogy. you call yours railroad life, or railroad lives, and dashed it which are just these passages that are scattered through the narrative itself. how did you come to the conclusion he wanted to put that kind of thing in there? and what is the purpose it is intended to serve for the rear? >> that analogy is dead on. this is so embarrassing. is what authors should never be allowed to give an account of what they did. david said it to me today. it sounds a lot like, and i said that's why god from.

i loved him as a teenager to clearly lurking back there somewhere it existed and a deposit for the same reason he did. this is a big narrative. what i wanted to do is bring it down to daily life. what it wanted to do is bring it down to not just the associates, big corporations, but how the railroad transforms people in their daily lives here and like any historian i also found stuff in the archives that was just too good not to use. ..

>> there's a lot of stuff that's written about it, and what it turns out is one statistic says it's a dollar a day. she worked as a maid in a motel in missouri. by the time they were dope with the hospital bills, her bill amounted two years of her work. worked two years to pay the bill for the hospital. huntington doesn't want to pay the bill because he realized he's cheated by all the local people, the hotel people, undertaker, and all the doctors. he is being cheated, but they see it as a chance to make

money. what they've done is take on somebody who cheats on such a colossal one, they don't know what they got into. he breaks them down, buys out the father's farm mortgage. her father had five chirp, nun of them had shoes. there's a detail in there too. where did the mortgage come from? the mortgage came from the coupe clerk who embezzled the school fund and loped it out to local farmers for mortgages. at this point i thought, you know, from bottom of the top, no wonder mark twain called it the guilded age. there's always these stories. there's honest people in the 19th century, not many, but --

>> well, we've come to the point in the program where there's time for only one last question. i'm afraid it's a big question. i'll paraphrase several versions of it from the audience. one standard narrative of the transcontinental railroad is it's the first installment of a series of federal investments in the development of the west that extends from the railroad themselves, hsm federally subsidized through the great hydroprojects of the early and middle 20th century, hoover dam, grand cooley dam, interstate act of the 50s and now the high speed rail of the national corridor. some people argue there's a direct genealogy and part of a long running project to invest in the communication and energy producing infrastructure that

made the region. in a sense that's the story, you argue, in fact, the initial step was badly misplaced and mistimed. extrapolate from that from the later installations of the same system and something i know you piped about in the "new york times" recently with high speed rail. >> make the position as clear as i can. i oppose the high speed rail because i just say i see that as much more like the transcontinental, but i'm not against federal infrastructure investments. all i ask is that you do two things. first of all, when you build something, think of the consequences of building and think if it's needed now. much of the problem with the railroad is they were built ahead of the man. by the time you needed them,

they would have decayed into rust. there's a sense of billing it now and using it later. you don't build your house and live in it 40 years later. you pour money into it keep it up. once you build them, it's a constant demand. 23 you build them ahead of demand, it's extraordinarily costly. the railroads -- most of the railroads would have been built without federal subsidies. railroads in california would have been built without federal subsidies. the subsidies are really needed in between the 100 meridian and the sierras. did you need it then? why then? did you need so many of them? what are the cost of having done so? i read the book on the columbia river, organic machines. again, that was about building dams, federal subsidies, but

things turn out differently. in the dams, the united states got up credibly -- incredibly lucky. the contribute sicks said what are you building? why irrigate more land when you want people to abandon land? those were rational argument, but what happened was world war ii. it had nothing to do with the building of the dams and you needed the electricity, you needed it for as much food as you can produce. it was just sheer luck. it's best to be cautious about these things. my argument is not against subsidies per se, but against this dumb growth to think about what we're subsidizing and why because people can give you all

the arguments that the transcontinue thenals were plausibles and ended up not being true. >> thank you to richard white, professor at stanford university and at american west, and most importantly for our purposes here this evening, the author of the new book, the making of modern america, and it's a book that entertains and provokes on every page. we also thank our audiences here and on radio, television, and internet. tonight's program held in association with the california historical society. i'm professor david kennedy from stanford, and now the meeting of the commonwealth club of the here and the know is adjourned. [applause] >> wonderful program, wonderful program. we'll have you sign books.

>> okay. [inaudible conversations] >> this event was hosted by the commonwealth club of california in san fransisco. visit commonwealthclub.org for more information. >> how did you select the narrative you included in your edited work? >> we were looking, my research team and i, looking for out of print narratives and some that were known. bos p king, one of the 18th century slavings is known in british abolitionist circles, but he actually was from south carolina and defected to british lines in the american revolution, and then went to canada and nova scotia and africa. including him as a south carolinaian was a new way to conceive of the history.

people like that, we had a collection of seven people that were not woal nope or were known as other contacts, and we brought them back into print, put them together to see the connection between many coherent narrative of what the south carolina slavery was like. >> what were the major seans included -- scenes included in the reflection? >> well, both small and big scenes. there were small patterns. three of the four people were child jockeys. others were slaves to confederate forces in the costal war of the carolinas. they were slaves to the confederate sources in the battle. there were odd little connections to that, but the biggest connection was even the people who left south carolina and were glad to have escaped or survived slavery otherwise left the states all wrote of their lives as south carolinaians, all

formally identified themselves as having a relationship to where they are # from, but, oh, they would not identify themselves as africans with the one exception of boston king. the rest of them, they distinctly wanted to claim themselves as part of this history even though they may vo left the states, and i think that was the most powerful scene to be found in the 18th through the 20th century. >> what story resinates most with you? >> oh, a number of speak to me in different ways. one of the 18th century narratives, clarinda, a short odd document, we don't know the origin, but she played violin and leading people into sin. when i read that, i want to to

know her. she doesn't fit the normal slave narrative story and what happened to her. another 20th century writer wrote his memoirs as an old man, around 1913 when he wrote the story so he had been a child as a slave in urban charleston, and he had an edge to him. he wrote one of his lines with many people talk to the better side of slavery and how you can view it, but the only good thing about it as far as i'm concerned is the emancipation proclamation. he had an edge to him and a man i would have liked to have known. they all spoke to me. >> what do you hope readers will learn from this book? >> oh, i hope they learn to get rid of their expectations, i think. the voices were hard. the 18th century narrative, these are two individuals who

spoke about slavery, indeed, about their lives as conscribed under slavery, but they also define their lives as slaves to sin. their memoirs are also about religious awakening and the freedom they found through their spiritual awakening, and that doesn't fit what you think a slave narrative should be about, but yet i respect it and learned from that tone. two of the narratives written in the abolitionist area are by men who escaped, and they just depight a lot of violent and stressing scenes, but ones they are witnesses, they are testimony of witnessing, and i hope readers come away with a respect for the political and personal goals they have as individuals, but also about their community and these other voices. some are terrifies and powerful

narrative the of john andrew jackson, and the other is anonymous. he was a fugitive when he wrote and still writing when his story was published. the last three although sam had an edge to him, but the other two, jacob and herbie were post narratives because i wouldn't say they had good things to say about slavery, but they spoke about a lot of love they experiencedded in their lives as -- experienced in their lives as slaves. one of no stall jibing at moments and that's hard, troubling, and fascinating to understand why he would articulate his life story in such a way. i hope readers come through that south carolina slavery across

the state was different from each individual and these are voices of people who wanted to be read. these are not general interviews, but people who wrote their story and wanted it out in the way they framed them. it's beautiful and troubling and frightening in some ways some of them, but i think they all speak to a new way we can learn to listen to the stories perhaps. >> thank you very much. >> sure thing. >> hear this week's nonfiction best sellers according to amazon.com.