Driving the railroad of theory onto the tracks of history

This week we read Railroaded by Richard White. The question that was poised for our assigned problem related to the position of theories within the discipline of history as well as within this book. Theory in this context can come in two flavors, “small” and “grand” theories. Thank of the grand type as theory’s equivalent to infrastructure; in that it is a global and holistic entity that seeks to provide an answer to all sides of a historical occurrence. Small theories are less ambitious and more limited in scope, but often work in concert with one another to support a grand theory.

In Railroaded the author has a very clear global theory and several smaller supporting theories interwoven. This book focuses on the development of railroads, especially during the Gilded Age, and tries to discover how it influenced American development without and Railroad industrial development within. While workers are touched on, the real stars of this book were the railroad executives and politicians such as Jay Gould and Collis Huntington and to a lesser extent the bankers. The grand theory put forth by White is that railroads influenced American development and were, to some degree, successes despite being financial failures and corruptly run, but which would have been more successful and influential in the long run if they had not rushed and overbuilt ahead of social demands.

Every small theory this book provides is always within the context of this grander theory. Having generally outlined the grand theory it would be helpful now to explore some of the smaller, and personally felt, more interesting small theories that White puts forth. The largest of these “small” theories was that the railroads were political entities which included the concept of a system of “Friendship” among railroad executives, bankers, influential patrons and politicians. White emphasizes this theory again and again and draws a lot of his support from personal letters and existing records relating to railroad bond and monetary dealings (or the telling lack thereof). This small theory is used to help explain the puzzling occurrence of men getting rich as railroads go into debt and receivership and how railroads came to be the main source of traffic for some forms of cargo, despite other systems such as steamer which would have made more sense to use. Another small theory was that the spatial aspects of the railroad and the costs related to them had far reaching impacts of American social and economic development. By using travelogues, charting census data out on a visual map and looking at shipping costs and worker union activity White was able to creatively get an idea of who and what was being moved where and why, and presented the data (as seen with the visual displays in the appendix) in such a way that new insights could be gained. The final major small theory was of overbuilding, railroad competition and how American railroad construction compared in a global context to railroad construction going on in other areas of the world (for the purposes of the book, the other areas were Canada and Mexico). This comparative theory allowed readers to see how widespread corruption and other flaws were while at the same time highlighting what made American railroads and their systems unique from the others.

Overall Railroaded was an interesting book which, in trying to prove its grand theory, was  forced to ask unusual and searching questions about smaller aspects which otherwise might not have been linked to railroad development but which none the less showed correlations. By using a theory-based approach to history White was required to be omnivorous and creative in his use of defining and using sources. Additionally, the strength and weakness of the theory approach is that it gets at answers otherwise unattainable but relies on subjective logic and intuition. If done right the theory based approach can be very revealing and evocative for further research and can help to prove what one piece of evidence alone is unable to confirm. But historians must be aware of the inherent biases of spurious causality if they work in such a framework and strive, as much as possible to ground any grand theories they produce in smaller more concrete and provable theories, as White has done in his book.

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