Playing by the rules: Markets, manipulation, and the meaning of exchange in the American railway industry, 1900–1918
Abstract
In December 1917, Woodrow Wilson issued an executive order exerting operational control over the railroads of the United States. During the year previous, the railroad system had collapsed, unable to either supply freight cars to shippers, or clear a backlog of cars in the Northeast. Traditional interpretations blame the collapse on state and federal legislators, the railway brotherhoods, powerful shippers, or government regulation. This dissertation offers a different interpretation: the root cause was a systemic failure by railroad managers, beginning in 1900, to find a private mechanism for the regulation of their most basic function. Railroads failed at interchange, the simple movement of freight cars, loaded and empty, from one carrier to another, and in this the only regulation was that arranged between the carriers, neither instituted in law, nor managed by any state agency. The inability to control interchange, which is a market, is not specific to the railroad industry, but rather emblematic of the inherent tensions between short-term gain and long-term viability that are central to industrial capitalism. I analyze the efforts of railroad managers between 1900 and 1918 to control this market in order to illuminate Progressive Era industrial relations and to explore the heated debates within the railroad industry over definitions of property, individual rights and network efficiency. Regulation, far from being a rearguard action by the state to manage the economic power of large corporate entities in the interest of its citizens and economic growth, can also be a consequence of the failure of private actors to manage. The ways in which contemporaries discussed the problem of interchange reveals much about their understanding of capitalism, property, and networks. Car service and interchange made the promise of industrial capitalism possible, yet it was imperfect, and operated (or failed to operate) despite the vaunted invisible hand of market forces or the visible hand of its practitioners. Incentives to cheat perverted relations between carriers and inhibited efforts at reform; the failure of private regulation in the railroad industry suggests the limits of similar efforts in other industries both during the early twentieth century and up to the present.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Larson, Purdue University.
Subject Area
American history
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