IRON EMPIRES

A vigorously told history of the transcontinental railroad barons and the commercial and transportation empires they forged.

Los Angeles Times columnist and reporter Hiltzik opens with a westward-bound Scotsman named Robert Louis Stevenson, not yet famous for his adventure tales, who took careful note of the emigrants aboard an early Union Pacific line and the contempt with which the railroad workers treated them. The great empire-builders among the railroad entrepreneurs—Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, and J. Pierpont Morgan among them—“formed a continuum that for more than four decades…transformed America’s railroads from a patchwork of short lines waging constant self-destructive war with one another into a titanic enterprise that could justly be considered America’s first big business.” They also helped transform the U.S. into a continent-spanning, and then international, power. Few were models of ethical capitalism; as Hiltzik notes, Gould in particular was “a master of financial chicanery,” but at least he was an unostentatious and retiring sort, whereas others were flagrant in buying judges and politicians. The worse the capitalists became, the greater the strength of labor activism arrayed against them. However, as the author observes, “the desire to counter the policies of the tycoons was hamstrung by the absence of instruments to do so”—until the crusading labor leader Eugene V. Debs came along. No matter, for the very White House was in the railroad owners’ pockets—the attorney general in Grover Cleveland’s Cabinet, who spent years as an executive with different railroad corporations, was paid more on the side by them than in salary by the federal treasury—until Theodore Roosevelt began his vigorous work on antitrust reforms. The story will be well known to readers versed in late-19th-century American history, but the rest will benefit from Hiltzik’s clear exposition of key episodes and players.

Students of the Gilded Age and its unraveling will value this survey.