The railroads were one of the most powerful and corrupting American institutions in the post-Civil War years. Leading the charge was the aged Cornelius Vanderbilt, a Dutchman born back in the previous century who had made his fortune as a young man in the steamboat business. A crude, coarse man with little education, Vanderbilt was shrewd and ruthless, and he eventually amassed a fortune of $100 million, some of which he gave to found Vanderbilt University. In his 60s, when most men would be planning retirement, he turned his attention to the railroads.Technological advances in the postwar years benefited the booming railroad business; one was the rise of steel tracks which were not as brittle as cast or wrought iron tracks and could bear more weight. Gauges became standardized. The Westinghouse air brake was a boon to safety. Ultra-luxury Pullman palace cars debuted in the 1860s and were denounced by critics as wheeled torture chambers; the cars, constructed of wood and lit with swaying kerosene lamps, promised to become blazing infernos. Deadly and spectacular accidents continued to be frequent despite improving safety features like the telegraph, double tracking, and the block signal.
The railroads gave the country a truly national infrastructure and made travel from coast to coast cheap and easy. They helped the incredible industrial of the postwar years; the steel industry itself rose off the demand for supplying rail tracks. Farm and city life was transformed by the railroads. But most importantly, the industry bred a new class of millionaires that displaced many of the older elite class of American society.Scams and fleecing were endemic as the Credit Mobilier scandal proved; Jay Gould spent nearly 30 years manipulating the stocks of the Erie, Kansas Pacific, Union Pacific, and Texas and Pacific in booms and busts. A favored cheat was stock watering, named after a disreputable practice done by the beef industry where cattle were given a large quantity of salt and water prior to weighing to bloat them up. Railroad stocks were often sold for far more than the line was actually worth and railroad managers had to resort to price gouging or other ruthless tricks to pay off their bloated investments.Business ethics during this era were distressingly low. Cornelius Vanderbilt once scoffed "Law? What do I care about the law? Haint I got the power?" He once told a competitor "I won't sue you, for the law is too slow. Instead I'll ruin you." His son William once told a reporter "The public be damned" when he was asked about the discontinuation of an unprofitable fast mail train. The railroads bought, owned, and bribed elected officials and judges and also elected their puppets to public office. They gave journalists and politicians free passes; one reporter remarked in 1885 "No man in the West who is in a position of power thinks he ought to pay anything to ride on the railroad."
For some time the railroad barons were among the most powerful men in America, and unlike Congress or the president they could not be voted out of office. Eventually they came to give up crude competition for industrial combinations to protect their monopolies. This included dividing the business in an area and sharing the profits. Other rail barons granted secret rebates or kickbacks to powerful shippers in exchange for steady and assured traffic. Often they cut rates on competing lines but more than made up for it on non-competing ones where they might actually charge more for a short haul than a long one.The American public was slow to react as traditional principles of laisse-faire and government non-interference in private industry still held. The 1870s depression first goaded farmers into action; state attempts to regulate the railroads were shot down by Federal judges in the pay of the railroads who argued that railroads engaged in interstate commerce could be regulated only by Congress. It appeared that Congress was willing to call their bluff when they passed the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 over President Cleveland's objections, which banned rebates and pools and required railroads to publicly disclose their rates. It also forbade unfair discrimination against shippers and outlawed charging more for a short haul than a long one over the same line. Most significantly, it set up the Interstate Commerce Commission to enforce and administer the new legislation.
The ICC was less effective than it seemed on paper; one of the leading corporate lawyers of the day, Richard Olney, observed that the railroads could easily exploit it to their advantage while it momentarily satisfied public calls for regulation of some kind on them. The net effect was that the ICC allowed railroads to resolve disputes in an orderly manner instead of engaging in piratical actions against each other, and it seemed more fair and not as vengeful as the "pitchfork mob" regulations attempted by state legislatures. The ICC in the end was more a sign of the railroad industry maturing past its Wild West days than an attack on its power and privileges. All the same, it was the first time the Federal government had made a concerted attempt at regulating private industry and it spawned numerous offspring in the following century.
>>18362915>regulations don't really work and in fact mostly just solidify corporate monopoliesShock.
modern day lefty trainfags are very funny because they forget that railroads back in those days were seen as the ultimate symbol of capitalistic greed and excess
>>18362943I’m just a regular autistic trainfag and I find that hilarious, as well as the rightoid attitude that passenger trains are Bolshevism on wheels. Our “evil capitalist” meme is still a gilded age rail baron, a portly cigar smoking vulgarian in a top hat. One reason we didn’t have a socialist uprising is that a lot of the public loved these guys the way they love Trump. They seemed like a lot more fun than the old “codfish aristocracy”, living large with champagne, lavish banquets, showgirls and racehorses, and many of them came from humble backgrounds. Your life might suck as a working man but you could live vicariously through them and maybe grab the golden ticket like they did.
>>18363126that old codfish aristocracy ended up being so resentful of Carnegie and Rockefeller overtaking them that they became the worst liberals
You can find similar situations in Europe at that time; the old landed nobility were being displaced by a new capitalist class and many were not happy about it.
>>18362935Badly made regulations you mean. Many of which tend to be made with the help of lobbyists or people with vested interests in the private companies who are part of the regulatory entity
https://vtdigger.org/2017/02/12/vermont-peddler-wall-street-robber-baron/Jim Fisk was peak robber baron. A Vermont farm boy who ran away to be a circus roustabout, thrived off Civil War profiteering, then pulled all kinds of railroad stock scams, some at the expense of Vanderbilt. He met his end at the hands of another robber baron over some “actress”, thousands attended his funeral and he was celebrated in popular ballads.
>>18363178It was common for bankrupt English landed gentry to marry the daughters of American robber barons for a cash infusion.
>>18363178when you read Nietzsche or Bauderlaire's rants about the evils of mass democracy and that the commoner is a barnyard animal not fit to govern itself, understand they were typical intellectuals of their era longing for an imagined aristocratic past
>>18362943Okay you epicly owned us, so can we finally have a decent passenger rail system now since it's Based and Capitalist and no longer transgender communist? I'm really tired of dealing with airport security and Japan's Shinkansens were pretty nifty for getting around
>>18363222>If it benefits me it's based/trad>If it diminishes me it's retarded/gay/jewishHumans truly are the same animals we always were. 10k years of society and civilization hasn't changed us one bit.
>>18362910>Other rail barons granted secret rebates or kickbacks to powerful shippers in exchange for steady and assured traffic.I dont see the problem here other than the secret part desu
>>18363171>One reason we didn’t have a socialist uprising is that a lot of the public loved these guys the way they love Trump.There was a flash of it though in 1877 which drew comparisons to the Paris Commune:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Railroad_Strike_of_1877
>>18362904Luv me Ticket to Ride (Zug um Zug for all you Germans out there)
>>18363499The 1894 railroad strike was crazy too, and for decades anarchists were dynamiting and busting caps on robber barons and their political allies, but it was never quite enough to topple the system.
>>18363171>>18363255I'm convinced that the reason America doesn't have trains is that they aren't present the right arguments. How about you tell the billionaire and Congress you can put tvs there on these trains which will be watched by thousands of commuters trapped there for 3 hours or more. Like imagine you have nothing to do but watch OANNFree wifi? You need to watch an ad every time you log on.And you can put pamphlets on the seats from [insert your favourite preacher]
>>18364062Freight trains are just too profitable to be clogging up the tracks with passengers. America's trains are run by video game minmaxers
>>18362904Big tech is doing that now, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Big social media, Netflix
