"A Thorstein Veblen for Our Times"

"The story of the transcontinentals, White writes, 'is more than just a phase, the unruly youth of corporate capitalism.' It represents the beginning of 'a deeper mystery of modernity: how so many powerful and influential people are so ignorant and do so many things so badly and how the world still goes on.' Why do the 'unfit' seem always to triumph? I don't find his answer very clear or satisfactory. Leland Stanford and his fellow railroad men did not make America; it was America that made them, and it was foreign as much as domestic investors who gave them money. Voters and investors, workers and capitalists, all wanted to see the West 'civilized' as quickly as possible. They dreamed of human empire over nature, and in that dreaming they didn't bother about balancing costs and benefits. The conquest was worth whatever it cost, in lost economic opportunity, in injustice, and in environmental destruction."

Donald Worster in Slate reviews Richard White's Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America.