Alternative Tracks: The Constitution of American Industrial Order, 1865–1917 by Gerald Berk

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 705 evenly dispersed and modest-sized regional markets versus those who envisioned a landscape dominated by relatively few large cities. Para­ doxically, the advocates of regionalism lost the contest over regulation in the nation with a fragmented state (the United States), while, as Chandler shows in Scale and Scope, the modern central state in Ger­ many was forced to cede substantial powers over rate structures to district railway councils. Whether this resulted in different patterns of mature railroad organization, operations, and efficiency in the United States and Germany remains unclear. But the questions that motivate Politics and Industrialization—what were the effects of politics on in­ dustrialization and of industrialization on politics?—demand more research. This study opens as many questions as it answers. Gerald Berk Dr. Berk, assistant professor of political science at the University of Oregon, is the author of Alternative Tracks: The Constitution ofAmerican Industrial Order, 1865—1917, a study of the political construction of the modern railroad corporation. The first sign of his current project on the relationship between antitrust and specialty manufactur­ ing in the early 20th century was published in the spring 1994 issue of Studies in American Political Development. Alternative Tracks: The Constitution of American Industrial Order, 1865— 1917. By Gerald Berk. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. Pp. xi + 243; tables, notes, bibliography, index. $35.95. This is a serious and thought-provoking study of the relationship between the American democratic state and the large, often imper­ sonal corporation. It challenges the widespread belief that our ad­ vanced technological civilization could only have been made possible through the centralization of industry and the development of com­ plex corporate hierarchies—this in tandem with dense bureaucratic government regulation. To illustrate his thesis, Gerald Berk offers a detailed study of a single midwestern railway, the Chicago Great Western, in the years between 1883 and 1908. He selects a railway for his study since the railroad was America’s first big business, and issues of competition, bureaucratic hierarchy, efficiency, and monopoly arose first in that industry, although these features would also become characteristic of many other industries with the passage of time. It became common­ place to say that the railroads were destined to develop into large national lines that needed to be controlled and regulated in the na­ tional interest by the courts and by the Interstate Commerce Commis­ sion. It became the standard progressive view at the end of the 19th century and in the early 20th century that railroads were so enormous and so unresponsive to their various publics that the only alternative was for government to step in and put them under control. Actually, for years the works on history given to the nation’s young 706 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE have gotten the facts about the development of railroad regulation all wrong. Generations have been taught that the public clamored for regulation of the railroads because they had become too large and greedy. The fact is, most governmental and judicial restraints on the railroads came about because the railroads had tried and failed to manage their own brutal cartels. The railroads also overbuilt in the 1880s and 1890s, so they needed to call in outside help to keep from cutting each other’s throats. But government regulators did not really do much to promote competition; strictly they bowed to the railroads’ interests, keeping a sickly industry hobbling along for the better part of a century. Berk believes that railroads (and by implication other industries) could have developed along different lines. The Chicago Great West­ ern case attempts to show that a regional carrier could survive in good health with natural competition and in a climate of what he calls “regional republicanism.” Berk shows that some early members of the Interstate Commerce Commission actually favored “moder­ ately-sized decentralized regional markets for the railroads,” but that this ideal (practiced successfully by the Chicago Great Western) was eventually lost when upset by the courts and legislatures which re­ sponded to the typical railroad executive’s belief in rate structures that favored “long-haul over short, carload over less-than-carload” (P· 17>The thesis here is...