Book of the week: Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America by Richard White

(Norton, $35)

This “scathing and wonderful” new book by one of America’s greatest historians will “entertain and outrage readers” in equal measure, said Buzzy Jackson in The Boston Globe. Taking aim at a core chapter in this country’s self-mythology, Stanford University’s Richard White has made the building of the first transcontinental railroads look like an exercise in venality and ineptitude rather than a triumph of enterprise. “Think of Railroaded as Michael Lewis’s Liar’s Poker set in a Gilded Age just as fantastically sick” as Lewis’s 1980s Wall Street. In this story, though, it’s not the thieves’ successes but their serial failures that define the age: White seems most enraged that the railroad bigs whose incompetence dragged down the entire economy in the 1870s were rewarded—with both federal bailouts and enduring power.

He’s thinking too small, said Donald Worster in Slate.com. While Railroaded now ranks as “the best business history I have ever read,” its bottom-line complaint is merely that the transcontinental railroads were built in the wrong places and in the wrong decade. White is right that there was no real need for coast-to-coast rails in the 1860s, and that government subsidies caused the tracks to be laid across states, like North Dakota, where they’d prove most useless to development and disruptive to indigenous tribes. But Leland Stanford, Collis Huntington, and the other rail barons he paints as the mean-spirited and corrupt catalysts of this misguided endeavor weren’t unique to their moment. Fast-forward 20 years, and there’d have been others like them. It wasn’t any particular group of men who botched the job. It was the nation’s collective drive to civilize the frontier, to “see whatever was wild brought under control.”

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White doesn’t seem to aspire to offering a measured perspective, said John Steele Gordon in The Wall Street Journal. He often sounds more like “the old capitalist-hating historians of the early 20th century” than a modern business scholar. What he forgets is that mistakes were almost inevitable when industrial capitalism was in its nascent stages. “No one in the dawn of the age of the railroad, after all, had any idea how to run a railroad.” That doesn’t mean the corruption of the era wasn’t staggering: It was, and White chronicles it “most entertainingly.” That, and his prodigious research, ensures that Railroaded will long be “required reading” for anyone interested in the 19th century’s breakneck race to develop the American West.