May 29, 2025 • 19 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, in the 34th episode of our Story of America series, Hillsdale College professor and Land of Hope author Wilfred McClay tells the story of how the railroads fundamentally transformed American life—from the way we handle finance, to how we receive mail, to how we tell time. Or, as he puts it, “Suddenly, we were on the clock.”
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we returned to our American stories. Up next, the
thirty fourth installment of our series About Us, the Story
of America series, with Hillsdale College professor and author of
Land of Hope, doctor Bill McLay. This story the story
of the Industrial Revolution. Let's get into it. Take it away, Bill.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
The impact of the Civil War on every single aspect
of American life is something we can over estimate. The
costs were profound in human and economic terms. It marked
the dividing line between early America and what might best
be called modern America. What was once a sparsely settled,
(00:57):
mostly agrarian nation was transforming itself into a bigger, densely populated,
more diverse, and mightier industrial nation. These huge tectonic forces
were exhilarating to some and frightening to others, because there
(01:20):
were winners and there were losers. But one thing was certain.
Industrialization was not some theoretical idea or abstraction. It was
real and there were real life consequences to it. And
it's often the case with such things, it's sometimes difficult
to connect them with our real life experience, with the
(01:41):
things that we can touch and see and feel. Sometimes
it takes an event to make it come to life.
That's where we're going to try to do and we
can do it with A moment that occurred at the
end of the Civil War, the Grand Review of the
Union Army, a procession ordered by the Department of War
(02:04):
thirty nine days after General Lee had surrendered at Appomatics.
This was a spectacle on a scale never before seen
in our nation's history. The procession was led by three
hundred plus regiments, nearly thirty cavalry regiments, forty artillery batteries, engineers,
(02:27):
and ambulance drivers. They all marched like lords.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
Of the world.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
Over two hundred thousand troops marched for two long days
the streets of America's capital city, a line stretching at
times to twenty five miles. Massive crowds gathered along Pennsylvania Avenue.
Many had traveled hundreds of miles to pay their respects.
Soldiers had come from everywhere, almost anywhere but Washington, d c.
(03:05):
They were mostly small town farm boys from states like
Ohio and Michigan, Irish city dwellers from cities like New York,
and don't forget African Americans from the South. Though they'd
been born and raised all across the north and the
south onlookers crammed in every nook and every space available,
from the tops of buildings to stands that lined the streets.
(03:29):
There were bands and choruses and church choirs everywhere, and
countless flowers and bouquets were tossed at the feet of
the marching soldiers. Banners of all kinds stretched along the
parade route. One in front of the Treasury Building had
these words emblazoned on it, all in capital letters. The
only national debt we can never pay is the debt
(03:52):
we owe to the victorious Union soldiers. No one in
attendance would have disagreed. It was an awesome spectacle in
the fullest sense of the word awesome, and it must
be remembered. There was no such victory parade, no grand
(04:13):
review of the armies for the soldiers at the end
of the Revolutionary War or the War of eighteen twelve,
or the Mexican War. This was the parade, the pageant
the new version of America deserved. These men had become
national men through their participation in and membership in the
(04:34):
most powerful military force anyone in this part of the
world had ever seen. There was no more powerful symbol,
no more powerful articulation of that truth, that reality than
something simple we would take for granted a long line
(04:55):
of blue uniformed soldiers, blue uniform soldier marching as one
through the cramed streets in front of adoring crowds in
the nation's capital. But there were questions in some people's hearts.
Was an older America being left behind? What lay ahead?
(05:18):
What was in this new and uncharted future, a new
version of America that was unavoidable but that no one
had really chosen. Had Patrick Henry and the anti federalists
been right all along and their fear of centralized power
being incompatible with the genius of republicanism, or were they
going to be proved wrong in the years ahead. The
(05:40):
big question even then was whether the Constitution itself would
endure as an expression of enduring truths about the nature
of government, or was it now rendered a relic something
that worked for the eighteenth century, when America was still
a small, rural nation, but one that had little elevance
to this new emerging industrial power. The fact is that
(06:06):
is what America was now becoming, whether anyone liked it
or not, and it was happening fast at the time
of the Grand Review, American's industrial power didn't rival that
of a single European nation. A mere thirty five years later,
the close of the nineteenth century, America had leapfrogged all
(06:30):
of them. It was an astonishing, unprecedented move forward, and
American business thrived. And the very first big business was
the business that drove all others, the railroad.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
In the city.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
In eighteen sixty five, there had been a total of
thirty five thousand miles of railroad track of the nation,
which salot, but by nineteen hundred that number had grown
by six times, to almost two hundred thousand miles more
railroad track than in all of Europe. This industry didn't
just grow, it exploded. Not really that surprising, because America
(07:16):
had the ideal conditions, the perfect climate with the capital
P and a capital C, the perfect climate for business growth.
What did we have. We had great natural resources readily
at hand, including rich mineral deposits, raw materials like coal, iron, ore,
and copper, vast supplies of timber. And we had a
(07:39):
rapidly growing population, which made for an expanding consumer market
and also a growing labor market. And then there were
the never ending inventions in technological breakthroughs, which bolstered American productivity.
Because America was also a colossus of innovation, the railroad
(08:01):
industry went on to stimulate the economy in unimaginable ways,
in remarkable ways. First and foremost, to build out the railroad,
they need to purchase goods from all kinds of other industries.
The railroad industry created the steel industry. In eighteen seventy,
we were producing seventy seven thousand tons of steel. By
(08:24):
nineteen hundred that number had skyrocketed to eleven point four
million tons. It's harder than cast iron, it's tougher than
wrought iron, simply better than iron for things like railroad tracks,
girders of tall buildings and bridges, all the foundations in
building blocks of industrial America and of the cities that
(08:52):
rose up in it. And behind this remarkable rise steel
production was a man from western Pennsylvania who had been
a poor Scottish immigrant boy who rose from textile mill
worker to the leader of the steel industry and one
of the captains of industry, Andrew Carnegie.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
And you've been listening to Professor Bill McLay of Hillsdale College,
and what a story he's telling about America. Right after
the Civil War. My goodness, there was the difference, that
dividing line between early America and modern America, between agrarian
America and urban America. The industrialization of the country was
about to happen, and in rapid speed. More Over, the
(09:43):
story of us, the story of the Industrial Revolution. Here
on our American Stories, and we continue with our American
(10:11):
stories and with doctor Bill McLay and our Story of
America series. When we last left off, doctor McClay was
talking about the railroad's impact on American life. Let's return
to the story.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
The new national Railroad created a new, improved and scaled market.
People could move any available good in product anywhere and everywhere,
and do it quickly. And the scale and speed of
transportation increased production of goods for the new and expanding
national market, creating a virtuous economic cycle. Perfect example of
(10:55):
this was the rise of the mail order business, first
by Reward and raised to a high art form by Sears,
Roebock and Company. The Amazon and Walmart of their day.
Customers could riffle through the catalog to find whatever they
(11:16):
needed and lots of things they didn't need, and the
company used the mail system to shift products directly to
their doors quickly thanks to the transportation system. This was
great for customers, especially rural customers. Railroads also stimulated growth
and less developed parts of the country, luring savvy settlers
(11:38):
to move to places and spaces where the railroads were
located or scheduled to be located. There were also important
technological advances that merit our attention. George Westinghouse's air brake,
a breakthrough no pun intended in railroad and engineering that
(11:59):
allowed all the railroad cars on a train to break
at the same time. Imagine how difficult it is to
stop a train if you can only stop the head train.
In the railroads, as in other ways, time is money.
This engineering feed allowed trains to be much longer and
to travel at higher speeds safely. Add to that the
(12:21):
invention of the pullman's sleeping car, which made long distance
travel not just something to be endured, but something to
be looked forward to, something that was actually a kind
of luxury. And then there was the development of the telegraph,
a source of almost instantaneous communication needed for the control
and operation of the rail lines functioning. Think of it
(12:42):
being like the central nervous system of the body. Somebody
steps on our foot, we wouldn't know about it if
we didn't have a nervous system to relay the message
to us and cause us to say ouch. So there
was a relationship there and the two were joined at
the hip. The railroads could never function without the telegraph,
and the telegraph lines could not have been built but
(13:05):
for the cleared lands and lanes prepared by enormous crews
that built the railroad tracks that made the trains possible.
It was an impeccably timed marriage of technology that would
change America. Railroads were aul in or nothing propositions. It
(13:29):
wasn't something that could be built cheaply. He couldn't do
it as a side gig, bid by bid. It takes
a tremendous amount of capital investment to make a railroad
system possible, let alone profitable. Give you an idea of
just how expensive this was. The cost per mile was
thirty six thousand dollars, and this is a time when
(13:50):
the average annual salary was generously about one thousand dollars annually.
The scale and cost and size of this operation and
outgrew what even the most wealthy family owned business could manage.
What rose up to manage the problem was called the
(14:10):
modern corporation, which was a further development of the joint
stock company so vital to the development of early America.
The modern business corporation had many advantages. Unlike a traditional partnership.
There was limited legal liability for investors, a solid protection
from financial ruin, ensuring investors that they wouldn't be held
(14:34):
responsible for suits and other liabilities directed at the business
as a whole, and it was incentive for investors to
invest to have that kind of protection from these scaled
Modern day business corporations also grew modern management structures to
coordinate the many and multifaceted aspects of running such a
(14:57):
massive business as a railroad. One of the things that
railroads needed more than anything to succeed was a high
degree of standardization to become truly efficient. It's hard for
us to imagine now. Before the invention of the modern
railroad system, time was a completely local sling. It was
decided by the position of the sun at the place
and discretion of any local town when the sun was
(15:20):
at its zenith. If you were in os Gosh, Wisconsin,
it was new. It wasn't new in Sacramento until the
sun got there. Well, this is not something you could
run a railroad on, or a railroad schedule. So the
solution was something we don't even give a second thought
to today, the adoption of standard time zones, in which
the nation's clocks could be synchronized within those zones. And
(15:44):
this made local time a relic of the American past.
Suddenly you're on the clock. The whole world is on
the clock. It's quite a change. The other major development
in modern American life was the modernization of finance. Remember,
(16:06):
local banks didn't have the capital to meet the needs
of these growing industrial businesses, and so rose the world
of investment bank. And no one was more prominent in
that than JP Morgan, a forceful man with a forceful personality.
A contemporary of has noted that after a visit with
Morgan has felt as if a gale had blown through
(16:27):
the house. It's worth noting Morgan believed to his core
that competition was not good, that it was wasteful, inefficient,
created chaos. So he did whatever he could to bring
order and stability to the economy by working to consolidate,
that is, to combine entire industries wherever and whenever possible.
(16:51):
You may remember that back in the days of Patrick Henry,
consolidation was kind of a dirty word. Not so in
this time period, Not so in this economy. Indeed, through
Morgan's work and through his financially human us Steel became
the world's first billion dollar company that is capitalized in
terms of a billion dollars. Morgan would have massed so
(17:13):
much wealth that he was called by the President of
the United States not once, but twice in eighteen ninety
five and nineteen oh seven to save the government and
the country from financial panic and potential ruin. This kind
of thing rattled Americans. How could their great national government
(17:35):
become so dependent on one wealthy, massively wealthy private citizens.
This kind of power, this monopolistic power, was the kind
of thing that had given rise to fears of concentrated
power in our earliest days, in the formation of our republic.
This was not something new, This was not something Unamerican
(17:57):
to have grave reservations about these enormous changes. And there
were other concerns, concerns about big business itself, the ways
it forced us to organize our lives around it in
the image of big business, the fact is with every
new invention, every new technology, every new way of doing business,
there's going to be good news and bad news. There
(18:19):
are going to be winners and losers. There's going to
be change. Local life in the wake of the Civil
War had been changed forever, not just because of the
events of the war, but even more because the modernization
of the country. Lives that were measured by the daily
(18:40):
rhythms of agricultural life are the time told by the
ringing of the local church bells, now set by the
outside world, by the national economy from which they had benefited,
but which also placed its own demands on them. The
locals really had no choice in the matter, for better
or worse. The great forces transforming the economy were transforming
(19:04):
American life itself, and soon would transform American culture in
its image.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
The story of the Industrial Revolution. Here on our American
Stories
And we returned to our American stories. Up next, the
thirty fourth installment of our series About Us, the Story
of America series, with Hillsdale College professor and author of
Land of Hope, doctor Bill McLay. This story the story
of the Industrial Revolution. Let's get into it. Take it away, Bill.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
The impact of the Civil War on every single aspect
of American life is something we can over estimate. The
costs were profound in human and economic terms. It marked
the dividing line between early America and what might best
be called modern America. What was once a sparsely settled,
(00:57):
mostly agrarian nation was transforming itself into a bigger, densely populated,
more diverse, and mightier industrial nation. These huge tectonic forces
were exhilarating to some and frightening to others, because there
(01:20):
were winners and there were losers. But one thing was certain.
Industrialization was not some theoretical idea or abstraction. It was
real and there were real life consequences to it. And
it's often the case with such things, it's sometimes difficult
to connect them with our real life experience, with the
(01:41):
things that we can touch and see and feel. Sometimes
it takes an event to make it come to life.
That's where we're going to try to do and we
can do it with A moment that occurred at the
end of the Civil War, the Grand Review of the
Union Army, a procession ordered by the Department of War
(02:04):
thirty nine days after General Lee had surrendered at Appomatics.
This was a spectacle on a scale never before seen
in our nation's history. The procession was led by three
hundred plus regiments, nearly thirty cavalry regiments, forty artillery batteries, engineers,
(02:27):
and ambulance drivers. They all marched like lords.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
Of the world.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
Over two hundred thousand troops marched for two long days
the streets of America's capital city, a line stretching at
times to twenty five miles. Massive crowds gathered along Pennsylvania Avenue.
Many had traveled hundreds of miles to pay their respects.
Soldiers had come from everywhere, almost anywhere but Washington, d c.
(03:05):
They were mostly small town farm boys from states like
Ohio and Michigan, Irish city dwellers from cities like New York,
and don't forget African Americans from the South. Though they'd
been born and raised all across the north and the
south onlookers crammed in every nook and every space available,
from the tops of buildings to stands that lined the streets.
(03:29):
There were bands and choruses and church choirs everywhere, and
countless flowers and bouquets were tossed at the feet of
the marching soldiers. Banners of all kinds stretched along the
parade route. One in front of the Treasury Building had
these words emblazoned on it, all in capital letters. The
only national debt we can never pay is the debt
(03:52):
we owe to the victorious Union soldiers. No one in
attendance would have disagreed. It was an awesome spectacle in
the fullest sense of the word awesome, and it must
be remembered. There was no such victory parade, no grand
(04:13):
review of the armies for the soldiers at the end
of the Revolutionary War or the War of eighteen twelve,
or the Mexican War. This was the parade, the pageant
the new version of America deserved. These men had become
national men through their participation in and membership in the
(04:34):
most powerful military force anyone in this part of the
world had ever seen. There was no more powerful symbol,
no more powerful articulation of that truth, that reality than
something simple we would take for granted a long line
(04:55):
of blue uniformed soldiers, blue uniform soldier marching as one
through the cramed streets in front of adoring crowds in
the nation's capital. But there were questions in some people's hearts.
Was an older America being left behind? What lay ahead?
(05:18):
What was in this new and uncharted future, a new
version of America that was unavoidable but that no one
had really chosen. Had Patrick Henry and the anti federalists
been right all along and their fear of centralized power
being incompatible with the genius of republicanism, or were they
going to be proved wrong in the years ahead. The
(05:40):
big question even then was whether the Constitution itself would
endure as an expression of enduring truths about the nature
of government, or was it now rendered a relic something
that worked for the eighteenth century, when America was still
a small, rural nation, but one that had little elevance
to this new emerging industrial power. The fact is that
(06:06):
is what America was now becoming, whether anyone liked it
or not, and it was happening fast at the time
of the Grand Review, American's industrial power didn't rival that
of a single European nation. A mere thirty five years later,
the close of the nineteenth century, America had leapfrogged all
(06:30):
of them. It was an astonishing, unprecedented move forward, and
American business thrived. And the very first big business was
the business that drove all others, the railroad.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
In the city.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
In eighteen sixty five, there had been a total of
thirty five thousand miles of railroad track of the nation,
which salot, but by nineteen hundred that number had grown
by six times, to almost two hundred thousand miles more
railroad track than in all of Europe. This industry didn't
just grow, it exploded. Not really that surprising, because America
(07:16):
had the ideal conditions, the perfect climate with the capital
P and a capital C, the perfect climate for business growth.
What did we have. We had great natural resources readily
at hand, including rich mineral deposits, raw materials like coal, iron, ore,
and copper, vast supplies of timber. And we had a
(07:39):
rapidly growing population, which made for an expanding consumer market
and also a growing labor market. And then there were
the never ending inventions in technological breakthroughs, which bolstered American productivity.
Because America was also a colossus of innovation, the railroad
(08:01):
industry went on to stimulate the economy in unimaginable ways,
in remarkable ways. First and foremost, to build out the railroad,
they need to purchase goods from all kinds of other industries.
The railroad industry created the steel industry. In eighteen seventy,
we were producing seventy seven thousand tons of steel. By
(08:24):
nineteen hundred that number had skyrocketed to eleven point four
million tons. It's harder than cast iron, it's tougher than
wrought iron, simply better than iron for things like railroad tracks,
girders of tall buildings and bridges, all the foundations in
building blocks of industrial America and of the cities that
(08:52):
rose up in it. And behind this remarkable rise steel
production was a man from western Pennsylvania who had been
a poor Scottish immigrant boy who rose from textile mill
worker to the leader of the steel industry and one
of the captains of industry, Andrew Carnegie.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
And you've been listening to Professor Bill McLay of Hillsdale College,
and what a story he's telling about America. Right after
the Civil War. My goodness, there was the difference, that
dividing line between early America and modern America, between agrarian
America and urban America. The industrialization of the country was
about to happen, and in rapid speed. More Over, the
(09:43):
story of us, the story of the Industrial Revolution. Here
on our American Stories, and we continue with our American
(10:11):
stories and with doctor Bill McLay and our Story of
America series. When we last left off, doctor McClay was
talking about the railroad's impact on American life. Let's return
to the story.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
The new national Railroad created a new, improved and scaled market.
People could move any available good in product anywhere and everywhere,
and do it quickly. And the scale and speed of
transportation increased production of goods for the new and expanding
national market, creating a virtuous economic cycle. Perfect example of
(10:55):
this was the rise of the mail order business, first
by Reward and raised to a high art form by Sears,
Roebock and Company. The Amazon and Walmart of their day.
Customers could riffle through the catalog to find whatever they
(11:16):
needed and lots of things they didn't need, and the
company used the mail system to shift products directly to
their doors quickly thanks to the transportation system. This was
great for customers, especially rural customers. Railroads also stimulated growth
and less developed parts of the country, luring savvy settlers
(11:38):
to move to places and spaces where the railroads were
located or scheduled to be located. There were also important
technological advances that merit our attention. George Westinghouse's air brake,
a breakthrough no pun intended in railroad and engineering that
(11:59):
allowed all the railroad cars on a train to break
at the same time. Imagine how difficult it is to
stop a train if you can only stop the head train.
In the railroads, as in other ways, time is money.
This engineering feed allowed trains to be much longer and
to travel at higher speeds safely. Add to that the
(12:21):
invention of the pullman's sleeping car, which made long distance
travel not just something to be endured, but something to
be looked forward to, something that was actually a kind
of luxury. And then there was the development of the telegraph,
a source of almost instantaneous communication needed for the control
and operation of the rail lines functioning. Think of it
(12:42):
being like the central nervous system of the body. Somebody
steps on our foot, we wouldn't know about it if
we didn't have a nervous system to relay the message
to us and cause us to say ouch. So there
was a relationship there and the two were joined at
the hip. The railroads could never function without the telegraph,
and the telegraph lines could not have been built but
(13:05):
for the cleared lands and lanes prepared by enormous crews
that built the railroad tracks that made the trains possible.
It was an impeccably timed marriage of technology that would
change America. Railroads were aul in or nothing propositions. It
(13:29):
wasn't something that could be built cheaply. He couldn't do
it as a side gig, bid by bid. It takes
a tremendous amount of capital investment to make a railroad
system possible, let alone profitable. Give you an idea of
just how expensive this was. The cost per mile was
thirty six thousand dollars, and this is a time when
(13:50):
the average annual salary was generously about one thousand dollars annually.
The scale and cost and size of this operation and
outgrew what even the most wealthy family owned business could manage.
What rose up to manage the problem was called the
(14:10):
modern corporation, which was a further development of the joint
stock company so vital to the development of early America.
The modern business corporation had many advantages. Unlike a traditional partnership.
There was limited legal liability for investors, a solid protection
from financial ruin, ensuring investors that they wouldn't be held
(14:34):
responsible for suits and other liabilities directed at the business
as a whole, and it was incentive for investors to
invest to have that kind of protection from these scaled
Modern day business corporations also grew modern management structures to
coordinate the many and multifaceted aspects of running such a
(14:57):
massive business as a railroad. One of the things that
railroads needed more than anything to succeed was a high
degree of standardization to become truly efficient. It's hard for
us to imagine now. Before the invention of the modern
railroad system, time was a completely local sling. It was
decided by the position of the sun at the place
and discretion of any local town when the sun was
(15:20):
at its zenith. If you were in os Gosh, Wisconsin,
it was new. It wasn't new in Sacramento until the
sun got there. Well, this is not something you could
run a railroad on, or a railroad schedule. So the
solution was something we don't even give a second thought
to today, the adoption of standard time zones, in which
the nation's clocks could be synchronized within those zones. And
(15:44):
this made local time a relic of the American past.
Suddenly you're on the clock. The whole world is on
the clock. It's quite a change. The other major development
in modern American life was the modernization of finance. Remember,
(16:06):
local banks didn't have the capital to meet the needs
of these growing industrial businesses, and so rose the world
of investment bank. And no one was more prominent in
that than JP Morgan, a forceful man with a forceful personality.
A contemporary of has noted that after a visit with
Morgan has felt as if a gale had blown through
(16:27):
the house. It's worth noting Morgan believed to his core
that competition was not good, that it was wasteful, inefficient,
created chaos. So he did whatever he could to bring
order and stability to the economy by working to consolidate,
that is, to combine entire industries wherever and whenever possible.
(16:51):
You may remember that back in the days of Patrick Henry,
consolidation was kind of a dirty word. Not so in
this time period, Not so in this economy. Indeed, through
Morgan's work and through his financially human us Steel became
the world's first billion dollar company that is capitalized in
terms of a billion dollars. Morgan would have massed so
(17:13):
much wealth that he was called by the President of
the United States not once, but twice in eighteen ninety
five and nineteen oh seven to save the government and
the country from financial panic and potential ruin. This kind
of thing rattled Americans. How could their great national government
(17:35):
become so dependent on one wealthy, massively wealthy private citizens.
This kind of power, this monopolistic power, was the kind
of thing that had given rise to fears of concentrated
power in our earliest days, in the formation of our republic.
This was not something new, This was not something Unamerican
(17:57):
to have grave reservations about these enormous changes. And there
were other concerns, concerns about big business itself, the ways
it forced us to organize our lives around it in
the image of big business, the fact is with every
new invention, every new technology, every new way of doing business,
there's going to be good news and bad news. There
(18:19):
are going to be winners and losers. There's going to
be change. Local life in the wake of the Civil
War had been changed forever, not just because of the
events of the war, but even more because the modernization
of the country. Lives that were measured by the daily
(18:40):
rhythms of agricultural life are the time told by the
ringing of the local church bells, now set by the
outside world, by the national economy from which they had benefited,
but which also placed its own demands on them. The
locals really had no choice in the matter, for better
or worse. The great forces transforming the economy were transforming
(19:04):
American life itself, and soon would transform American culture in
its image.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
The story of the Industrial Revolution. Here on our American
Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
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