More than Embers of Sentiment: Railroad Nostalgia and Oral History Memories of the 1920s and 1930s

Abstract

MICHAEL KAMMEN OF CORNELL UNIVERSITY finds instructive lesson in the way Americans perceive the cultural meaning of railroads from the Jacksonian Era to the present: During a span of roughly a century and a half the railroad shifted from being a symbol of dramatic and unimagined progress (1830s and '40s) to representing abusive and regressive economic power (1880s and '90s) to becoming the object of wistful nostalgia on the part of tradition-oriented train buffs. Tourists now thrill to the whistle of an olde-tyme steam train; we have museums entirely devoted to railroad history; and huge locomotive and diesel engines provide some of the most awesome exhibits in the Henry Ford Museum and the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. We have passenger stations that have been abandoned by their lines and now serve as atmospheric restaurants. Retired railroad cars situated on adjacent tracks commonly serve as cocktail lounges. From dangerous cinder sparks to embers of sentiment: the railroad really exemplified [Nathaniel] Hawthorne's notion that progress is circular rather than linear. Here we have an instance of transformation: from innovation to tradition, via memory, in about five generations.'