Pub Date : 2019-12-02DOI: 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469652818.003.0006
R. S. Huffard
This chapter traces anxieties over railroad safety and train wrecks in the South, which had the nation’s most dangerous railroads by the 1890s. As carnage piled up on the South’s rail lines, companies tried to shift blame to anonymous gangs of train wreckers as a strategy to avoid lawsuits and stave off attempts at state or federal regulation. The chapter uses two case studies of train wrecks – a wreck at Bostian Bridge in Statesville, NC and in Cahaba Creek in Alabama – to show how corporate lawyers and officials tried to perpetuate the myth of the train wrecker. The chapter gives quantitative data that shows how southern newspapers fuelled the panic over train wrecking. The chapter argues that this panic was racialized and many of the accused wreckers were African Americans that some of the same dynamics that led to lynchings. It closes with a discussion of train wreck ballads
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Pub Date : 2019-12-02DOI: 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469652818.003.0003
R. S. Huffard
This chapter discusses how white boosters used the symbolic power and magic of the railroad to support their regional and local claims that a New South had risen. It opens with a discussion of the New Orleans Exposition in 1884, which provided a microcosm for the transformations of the railroad. The chapter discusses how this magical thinking around the railroad meshes with Walter Benjamin’s concept of the phantasmagoria. The chapter then traces the arguments promoting 1880s railroad expansion projects in Macon, Greensboro, and Troy to show how this spirit filtered down into small towns across the South. It discusses how railroad construction imposed the logic of capitalism on southern environments and ends by looking at the community celebrations and travel narratives that boosters and journalists used to welcome new railroads.
{"title":"The Phantasmagoria of the Rail","authors":"R. S. Huffard","doi":"10.5149/northcarolina/9781469652818.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469652818.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter discusses how white boosters used the symbolic power and magic of the railroad to support their regional and local claims that a New South had risen. It opens with a discussion of the New Orleans Exposition in 1884, which provided a microcosm for the transformations of the railroad. The chapter discusses how this magical thinking around the railroad meshes with Walter Benjamin’s concept of the phantasmagoria. The chapter then traces the arguments promoting 1880s railroad expansion projects in Macon, Greensboro, and Troy to show how this spirit filtered down into small towns across the South. It discusses how railroad construction imposed the logic of capitalism on southern environments and ends by looking at the community celebrations and travel narratives that boosters and journalists used to welcome new railroads.","PeriodicalId":315222,"journal":{"name":"Engines of Redemption","volume":"111 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125513787","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-12-02DOI: 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469652818.003.0002
R. S. Huffard
This chapter details how white southerners used the economic and cultural power of the railroad to reunify with the North and to move beyond the sectional tensions of the Civil War. For white southerners, the memory of the war and the destruction of the region’s railroads inspired calls for new development. Travel narratives and arguments from boosters like Henry Grady show how these elites saw the railroad as critical to idea that a New South would rise. The chapter then goes into a discussion of how northern railroad corporations like the Illinois Central and Louisville & Nashville pursued southern expansion strategies after the Civil War. Finally, the chapter discusses a key moment of reunification in 1886, when southern railroads shifted the gauge of thousands of miles of track to match the northern standard gauge.
{"title":"Reunited with Bands of Iron","authors":"R. S. Huffard","doi":"10.5149/northcarolina/9781469652818.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469652818.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter details how white southerners used the economic and cultural power of the railroad to reunify with the North and to move beyond the sectional tensions of the Civil War. For white southerners, the memory of the war and the destruction of the region’s railroads inspired calls for new development. Travel narratives and arguments from boosters like Henry Grady show how these elites saw the railroad as critical to idea that a New South would rise. The chapter then goes into a discussion of how northern railroad corporations like the Illinois Central and Louisville & Nashville pursued southern expansion strategies after the Civil War. Finally, the chapter discusses a key moment of reunification in 1886, when southern railroads shifted the gauge of thousands of miles of track to match the northern standard gauge.","PeriodicalId":315222,"journal":{"name":"Engines of Redemption","volume":"50 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124776166","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-12-02DOI: 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469652818.003.0009
R. S. Huffard
The conclusion opens with a vignette about the death of Southern Railway president Samuel Spencer in a train wreck and it looks at how this moment revealed how transformative the previous decades had been in southern railroading. Spencer’s death also was a moment for critics to share a counter narrative of the New South success story, as Tom Watson argued that “a procession of spectres” haunted Spencer’s wealth. The chapter then recaps the main arguments of the book, and uses the “procession of spectres” as a metaphor to describe the anxieties that railroads and capitalism unleashed in the region. In the end, New South boosters and white elites used racial division, Jim Crow segregation, and white supremacy to distract from and overcome the monsters of the railroad. Capitalism and white supremacy advanced in tandem through the New South. The conclusion then discusses how storytelling and narrative continue to be essential to the success of capitalism. The chapter closes with a discussion of a Johnny Cash documentary that focuses on train songs and notes how the South’s railroads have now mostly moved into the realm of nostalgia.
{"title":"A Procession of Spectres","authors":"R. S. Huffard","doi":"10.5149/northcarolina/9781469652818.003.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469652818.003.0009","url":null,"abstract":"The conclusion opens with a vignette about the death of Southern Railway president Samuel Spencer in a train wreck and it looks at how this moment revealed how transformative the previous decades had been in southern railroading. Spencer’s death also was a moment for critics to share a counter narrative of the New South success story, as Tom Watson argued that “a procession of spectres” haunted Spencer’s wealth. The chapter then recaps the main arguments of the book, and uses the “procession of spectres” as a metaphor to describe the anxieties that railroads and capitalism unleashed in the region. In the end, New South boosters and white elites used racial division, Jim Crow segregation, and white supremacy to distract from and overcome the monsters of the railroad. Capitalism and white supremacy advanced in tandem through the New South. The conclusion then discusses how storytelling and narrative continue to be essential to the success of capitalism. The chapter closes with a discussion of a Johnny Cash documentary that focuses on train songs and notes how the South’s railroads have now mostly moved into the realm of nostalgia.","PeriodicalId":315222,"journal":{"name":"Engines of Redemption","volume":"27 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117104416","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-12-02DOI: 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469652818.003.0007
R. S. Huffard
This chapter discusses the life and legend of two train robbers active in Alabama in the 1890s – Railroad Bill and Rube Burrow. While there is a tendency to see train robbers as embodiments of resistance to capitalism, this chapter argues that it is more useful to see these men as personification of the dangers of capitalism. In their train robbing careers, Rube Burrow and Railroad Bill both exploited the increasing systemization, expansion, connectivity, and circulation of the southern railroad network. The crimes of these men touched off panicky reactions that revealed southerners anxieties about the railroad itself. In the end, these anxieties were obscured by the mythmaking that occurred after their violent deaths. Railroad Bill faded into legend as the subject of a folk song that stretched the truth about his deeds and popular memory and the media conflated Rube Burrow’s legend with that of Jesse James and sought to portray him as an anti-capitalist and neo-confederate avenger.
{"title":"Ubiquitous, Promiscuous, Frequent, and Numerous","authors":"R. S. Huffard","doi":"10.5149/northcarolina/9781469652818.003.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469652818.003.0007","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter discusses the life and legend of two train robbers active in Alabama in the 1890s – Railroad Bill and Rube Burrow. While there is a tendency to see train robbers as embodiments of resistance to capitalism, this chapter argues that it is more useful to see these men as personification of the dangers of capitalism. In their train robbing careers, Rube Burrow and Railroad Bill both exploited the increasing systemization, expansion, connectivity, and circulation of the southern railroad network. The crimes of these men touched off panicky reactions that revealed southerners anxieties about the railroad itself. In the end, these anxieties were obscured by the mythmaking that occurred after their violent deaths. Railroad Bill faded into legend as the subject of a folk song that stretched the truth about his deeds and popular memory and the media conflated Rube Burrow’s legend with that of Jesse James and sought to portray him as an anti-capitalist and neo-confederate avenger.","PeriodicalId":315222,"journal":{"name":"Engines of Redemption","volume":"29 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116908167","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-12-02DOI: 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469652818.003.0008
R. S. Huffard
This chapter focuses on the creation and expansion of the Southern Railway corporation and the ways in which the corporation overcame anti-monopoly sentiment in the South. While the company styled itself as an embodiment of the New South, northern capitalist J.P. Morgan financed its reorganization, and its expansion engendered resistance in Georgia and North Carolina. This chapter traces the origins of this company in the economic depression and wave of railroad bankruptcies in the 1890s and notes the attempts to brand this new company as a southern enterprise under the leadership of its first president Samuel Spencer. The chapter then traces resistance to the new company in Georgia and North Carolina, two states in which the Southern Railway tried to purchase other railroads. Foes of the railroad, which formed a broad coalition of Populists, Democrats, and other anti-monopolists, labelled the road as an “octopus” for its monopolistic tendencies. In two case study states – Georgia and North Carolina – appeals to white supremacy and elections marked with violence, as in the Wilmington Massacre of 1898, defeated the anti-monopoly critique and preserved the power and size of the Southern Railway.
{"title":"Fighting the Octopus","authors":"R. S. Huffard","doi":"10.5149/northcarolina/9781469652818.003.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469652818.003.0008","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter focuses on the creation and expansion of the Southern Railway corporation and the ways in which the corporation overcame anti-monopoly sentiment in the South. While the company styled itself as an embodiment of the New South, northern capitalist J.P. Morgan financed its reorganization, and its expansion engendered resistance in Georgia and North Carolina. This chapter traces the origins of this company in the economic depression and wave of railroad bankruptcies in the 1890s and notes the attempts to brand this new company as a southern enterprise under the leadership of its first president Samuel Spencer. The chapter then traces resistance to the new company in Georgia and North Carolina, two states in which the Southern Railway tried to purchase other railroads. Foes of the railroad, which formed a broad coalition of Populists, Democrats, and other anti-monopolists, labelled the road as an “octopus” for its monopolistic tendencies. In two case study states – Georgia and North Carolina – appeals to white supremacy and elections marked with violence, as in the Wilmington Massacre of 1898, defeated the anti-monopoly critique and preserved the power and size of the Southern Railway.","PeriodicalId":315222,"journal":{"name":"Engines of Redemption","volume":"50 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124728208","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-12-02DOI: 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469652818.003.0005
R. S. Huffard
This chapter discusses how railroads became a vector for the spread of yellow fever in a series of epidemics. It focuses first on a devastating outbreak that spread north from New Orleans in 1878 along rail corridors. As southerners realized that railroads were spreading contagion, and as railroad companies refused to halt or shutdown traffic, conflicts between small towns and railroad companies emerged. The next major outbreak in the region, in 1888 in Jacksonville, witnessed widespread “shotgun quarantines,” in which local vigilantes tied up rail traffic. In 1897, Mississippi citizens reacted to an outbreak with violence against railroad infrastructure. Federal and state health officials tried to create boards of health and institute rational quarantine policies but their ultimate failure to control shotgun quarantines reflected a lack of trust in railroad companies and regional anxieties over new railroad connections and circulation. Yellow fever scares like this continued until Walter Reed’s discovery that the mosquito transmitted the disease and the last major outbreak in the region was in 1905.
{"title":"Flight of the Yellow-Winged Monster","authors":"R. S. Huffard","doi":"10.5149/northcarolina/9781469652818.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469652818.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter discusses how railroads became a vector for the spread of yellow fever in a series of epidemics. It focuses first on a devastating outbreak that spread north from New Orleans in 1878 along rail corridors. As southerners realized that railroads were spreading contagion, and as railroad companies refused to halt or shutdown traffic, conflicts between small towns and railroad companies emerged. The next major outbreak in the region, in 1888 in Jacksonville, witnessed widespread “shotgun quarantines,” in which local vigilantes tied up rail traffic. In 1897, Mississippi citizens reacted to an outbreak with violence against railroad infrastructure. Federal and state health officials tried to create boards of health and institute rational quarantine policies but their ultimate failure to control shotgun quarantines reflected a lack of trust in railroad companies and regional anxieties over new railroad connections and circulation. Yellow fever scares like this continued until Walter Reed’s discovery that the mosquito transmitted the disease and the last major outbreak in the region was in 1905.","PeriodicalId":315222,"journal":{"name":"Engines of Redemption","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128156362","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-12-02DOI: 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469652818.003.0004
R. S. Huffard
This chapter discusses how African Americans tried to harness the magic of the southern railroad and how white southerners tried to circumscribe this power. It opens with a discussion of the myth of Black Ulysses and black folk songs to show how black men would “conjure the railroad” and invoke its magic as they toiled to build lines and moves into a discussion of the racialized convict labor system that companies used to build much of the railroad mileage in the South. In other aspects of railroad labor, white officials limited advancement of black workers and kept them in subservient roles like the Pullman Porter. Through a discussion of travel narratives, the chapter shows how white travellers used the railroad to apply new pernicious stereotypes to African Americans. While black activists like Ida B. Wells tried to fight for equal access to rail travel, white authorities moved to segregate railroads and the supreme court case that ultimately enshrined Jim Crow segregation – Plessy v Ferguson – took place after a challenge to a railroad’s segregation policies.
本章讨论非裔美国人如何试图利用南方铁路的魔力，以及南方白人如何试图限制这种力量。它以黑人尤利西斯的神话和黑人民歌的讨论开始，以展示黑人如何“召唤铁路”，并在他们辛勤地修建铁路时召唤它的魔力，然后进入到种族化的囚犯劳动系统的讨论，该系统是公司用来建造南方大部分铁路里程的。在铁路劳动力的其他方面，白人官员限制黑人工人的发展，并使他们处于从属地位，如普尔曼搬运工。通过对旅行叙事的讨论，本章展示了白人旅行者如何利用铁路将新的有害刻板印象应用于非裔美国人。当艾达·b·威尔斯(Ida B. Wells)等黑人积极分子试图争取铁路旅行的平等权利时，白人当局开始实行铁路种族隔离，最高法院最终将吉姆·克劳种族隔离奉为圣物的案件——普莱西诉弗格森案——发生在对铁路种族隔离政策的挑战之后。
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