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Railroad Trains and Train People in American Culture SC
Railroad Trains and Train People in American Culture By McPherson & Williams Soft Cover Copyright 1976 185 Pages
Not many young boys-maybe not any-want to grow up to be railroad engineers. There was a time when many of them did, and knew the lines they would work on and pictured the engines in their minds. Well, there aren't lines in the sense that there once were, and as passengers, we did just about lose the habit of traveling by rail. With Amtrak, we're slowly getting back into the habit. We know that we won't ever hear that whistle again, and probably there won't be any more railroad songs written-or railroad heroes to sing new songs about-but people will sit in day coaches and travel slow enough and look out the windows at something better than clouds.
This is important, and so the train is important. It carried this country a good part of the distance it's traveled, and it's no exaggeration to say that we can't understand this country if we don't know the story of the railroad. Whatever we believe our country is made of-people, songs, fables and stubborn forces-more often than not it is the people, songs, fables and force of the railroad that we remember or ought to.
These people we speak of were not the abstract "people" of ideology. They were human beings, pioneering human beings who regarded toughness of spirit and resilience as the most admirable of human qualities. They confronted in their daily lives the most powerful and frightening symbol of nineteenth-century American technology, and made it reflect all the values which we identify with the human personality. They did it not by taking on the personality of the machine but by taking parts and dimensions of the machine-its whistle, its sound, its coaches, its tracks, the work it required-and using these to express something about their own hopes and fears and sorrows and happiness. It is true that the railroad transformed the people; but it is also true that the people transformed the railroad. The experience has made the people no less human, nor has it made the machine any more frightening. But the experience, especially the people's articulation of it, has produced a great deal of art. This art has been what has kept things in the right perspective.
To remember the railroad as it was, and as it changed, is to know our history in special ways. It's to know the Civil War and the move West, and the development of our industry and commerce. To remember the railroad is to know the ways in which our history and the train's history are the story of laboring people-the workers who laid track and shoveled coal and waited on tables. No industry ever relied more heavily on the people who worked with their hands to keep it going-especially the Chinese and the Negroes and the Irish. No industry played so large a role in the birth and growth of labor unions, and no unions ever fought harder for the workers' share. The labor leaders Eugene V. Debs and A. Philip Randolph are as important to the history of the rails and of America as are Commodore Vanderbilt and Jay Gould. The great railroad strike of 1877 was all but a revolution.
All those people are here, and those events, and the songs and the fables. And pictures, And old and new poems and stories the railroad still hisses and whistles through. To have us remember and to have us believe again in the simple/complex truth of Emerson's 1844 prediction in "The Young American":
Luckily for us, now that steam has narrowed the Atlantic to a strait, the nervous, rocky West is intruding a new and continental element into the national mind, and we shall yet have an American genius ... It seems so easy for America to inspire and express the most expansive and humane spirit; new-born, free, healthful, strong, the land of the labourer, of the democrat, of the philanthropist, of the believer, of the saint, she should speak for the human race. It is the country of the Future. It is the country of the Future ... it is a country of beginnings, of projects, of designs, of expectations.
It may happen yet that one day, with our concern now for the uses of energy and the purity of air and the pace and quality of life, a fifth-grader-boy or girl, Negro, Anglo, Chicano, Oriental, or whatever-will tell us if we ask that he or she wants to grow up to be a railroad engineer. And grow up to be one.
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