708 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE powerful myths, it was on some level true. “Railroad” was defined in the Devil’s Dictionary as “the chief of many mechanical devices en abling us to get away from where we are to where we are no better off.” It was part of a pattern, what the author calls “varieties of railroad antagonism.” This involved adjustments to the physical expression of the railroad of the kind Emerson and Hawthorne had spoken of. These included facing the obvious hazards of the mechanism, as well as the profound changes it made in the understanding of time, the psychological sense of speed, and the relationship between time and space. It also involved, particularly in the Gilded Age, the challenge of making sense of the corporate side of the phenomenon. Those adjustments, in turn, were part of a self-serving reaction about keep ing the railroad “within its proper sphere,” culminating in Hiram Johnson Progressivism, and well described by Charles Crocker’s com ment, quoted in this book, that “You can get any man to be unfriendly with a railroad after it is built.” The end of this book melds well into the opening of Albro Martin’s Enterprise Denied, and is part of a com plex pastiche of misunderstood reality that led to political action based on a “Robber Baron” model that survives into modern text books. Railroad Crossing ties that broad theme to local case studies (of sinophobia , of the Pullman strike in California, of the Los Angeles Free Harbor fight, of the Mussel Slough controversy, of the rhetoric of Dennis Kearney’s workingman’s movement) in a way that well illus trates how the stereotyping translated itself into political action—how culture, in short, became legislation. It is based on a collection of sources both deep and wide. It uses primary manuscript collections, as well as newspapers, some oral history, literature, and a variety of pamphlets and broadsides, as well as secondary sources. This is no railfan’s railroad history, but its sophistication is presented in vivid style that should prevent no serious reader from enjoying and bene fiting from it. It combines literary analysis, business history, political history, and social history in regional railroad history at its very best. Craig Miner Dr. Miner is Willard Garvey Distinguished Professor of Business History at Wichita State University. His most recent business history is Wolf Creek Station: Kansas Gas and Electric Company in the Nuclear Era (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1993). Getting There: The Epic Struggle between Road and Rail in the American Century. By Stephen B. Goddard. New York: BasicBooks, 1994. Pp. xi + 351; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $28.00. This is very much a lawyer’s book. The author, an attorney in practice in Hartford, Connecticut, has assembled a brief for the trans port policy he favors, one that provides more public investment in TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 709 rail systems relative to highways. He has drawn on a large number of sources, heterodox and orthodox, to assemble his argument. As a consequence, the book contains a mixture of the correct with the incorrect in factual information, the erroneous with the valid in his torical judgments, and the practical with the impractical in policy recommendations. And the book is replete with accused persons, mainly General Motors and the members of the highway lobby. After some orthodox interpretations of 19th-century railroad his tory, Stephen Goddard sets forth Albro Martin’s argument that puni tive regulation stifled management in the 20th century, rendering the industry incapable of dealing with the rise of highway rivals. General Motors, Goddard’s argument runs, did in the streetcars in concert with other firms through National City Lines, and the highway lobby rigged federal investment to assure that all of the funds were spent on road building. Public dissatisfaction with the consequences led to the movement for diversion of highway trust fund money to rail transit in the 1970s. More of this, Goddard argues, is needed, along with greater funding for Amtrak, high-speed rail, and innovative technologies such as magnetic-levitation trains, electric automobiles, and various work-at-home devices. He also advocates what has be come...