History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.
The above is attributed to Mark Twain, which is somewhat apt, as he, along with Charles Dudley Warner wrote The Gilded Age.
A week or so ago I was perusing the blogs, and read a post by Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money, which, somewhat in passing, heaped praise on a book by Richard White called Railroaded, The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America, so I downloaded it onto my Kobo (no Kindle for me, my local bookstore gets a cut every time I buy an e-book.)
Sort of as an aside, it seems to me that one of the main jobs of modern historians is to refute the fairy tale version of our history that predominated a half century ago when I was just a lad reading a lot of that fairy tale history. All the brouhaha about critical race theory really boils down to a demand on the part of the racists that we stick with that fairy tale version of history instead of facing up to the actual facts.
Railroaded is not about race, but it certainly describes a situation that rhymes with a lot of what’s going on today.
We were taught that the railroads were the triumphant expression of American expansion, with the driving of the golden spike symbolizing a golden moment in our history when the continent was united by the efforts of railroad men such as Leland Stanford, whose name is enshrined as the founder of a rather prestigious university.
What we aren’t told is that the men (no women involved, of course) that “built” these railroads were con-men and swindlers who make Donald Trump look like a rank amateur. They put up no money of their own, but were heavily subsidized by the federal government, both by land grants and loans that were never repaid. Most of the roads lost huge amounts of money, but the swindlers who ran them made out like bandits. One common dodge: they would bribe Congress into giving them loans to build the railroads, and would then contract with construction companies they happened to own to build said railroads, thus lining their own pockets while driving the railroads themselves into debt. Speaking of rhyming, this reminds me of a common charter school dodge nowadays: the “non-profit” school gets public money, much of which it must pay to the landlord that owns the school building, that landlord being a corporation in which the operators of the charter school have a substantial, if not sole, interest. The railroads also made sure rates stayed artificially high. For instance, the California railroads paid a steamship line, that could have easily transported goods east from California via Panama cheaper than the rails could do so overland, a monthly bribe to keep its rates artificially high, thereby enabling the railroads to charge higher rates.
That brings us to the rhyme that keeps repeating itself: the corruption of politicians who enabled the railroad con-men. The methodology of delivering a non quid pro quo bribe was different back then, but certainly rhymes with the kind of stuff going on now. One common method back in the Gilded Age to bribe a congressman: Loan him the money to make an investment in your business. Despite the fact that the business was losing money hand over fist (while you are walking away with millions) hand him a handsome return on that investment in just a few months, more than enough to repay the loan and generously line his pockets. Of course both congressman and con-man assured one another that their arrangement had not the slightest impact on how the congressman might vote on legislation important to the con-man.
It’s not the history that we learned years ago, though there were certainly plenty of people aware of what was going on back when this was all happening.
For the most part, bribery is handled differently these days, but the essence is still there. Massive campaign contributions, which they take (looking at you especially, Krysten and Joe) while eschewing any implication that it will affect their votes at all. Republicans, in particular, can look forward, should they lose their seats, to a gilded retirement in which they sit back and collect money while “working” for a think tank funded by the folks whose water they so faithfully carried while in office. There can be little question that there are other methods that have not yet been exposed, but things may once again get more blatant now that the Supreme Court has ruled that, at least for Republicans, it is necessary to prove an explicit quid pro quo in order to convict a bribe taker. A mere wink-wink, nod-nod, is definitely not enough.
I think it’s fair to say that the corruption excesses of the Gilded Age were significantly curtailed in later years. That’s not to say there was none, but the more or less blatant corruption faded. We’re now in a second Gilded Age, with that corruption getting perhaps less attention from our press than it did then, despite the fact that back then, there were lots of newspapermen taking bribes to give the railroad men good press. Given the other things going on, and the present day ability of the corporations to also engage in unprecedented types of propaganda to maintain a large constituency for their policies and their subversion of our institutions, it seems unlikely that we’ll be able to pull out of this Gilded Age even to the extent we managed to get the last one somewhat behind us.
Anyway, to complete the book report, it’s a good read.