Transportation

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TRANSPORTATION

Transportation underwent a revolution in the waning years of the nineteenth century and the early ones of the twentieth that would irrevocably alter the course of American life. As the period began, the railroad was king, but alternate modes of transportation soon emerged. Starting in the late 1870s, the bicycle offered an unprecedented combination of independence and convenience. The automobile arrived as a viable form of personal transportation at the turn of the century. This new mode of travel combined the bicycle's independence with the ability to cover considerable distances in ease and comfort. The automobile ideally suited the American national character, and car became king in the twentieth century. Other forms of urban mass transit—the electric streetcar, the elevated train, the subway—were also developed during the period. Though ocean liners remained the only way of crossing the Atlantic, the airplane was approaching viability as a mode of long-distance transportation at the end of the period.

THE RAILROAD

On 10 May 1869 the Union Pacific Railroad, building west from Omaha, Nebraska, and the Central Pacific Railroad, building east from Sacramento, California, met at Promontory, Utah, to create the first transcontinental route. Before the completion of this cross-country railroad, people wishing to travel through the American West had little choice but to take the stagecoach, an uncomfortable, time-consuming, and often dangerous method of transportation. Perhaps no single literary work illustrates the contrast between the two better than Mark Twain's Roughing It (1872). Narrating events that occurred before the completion of the transcontinental route, yet written afterward, Mark Twain (1835–1910), with characteristic hilarity, related the hardships involved with stagecoach travel. For the sake of comparison, he also included a newspaper account written by a traveler who crossed the plains of Nebraska from the comfort of a Pullman dining car, sipping champagne and eating broiled trout. With the transcontinental railroad, Mark Twain implied, travelers gained much in terms of speed and comfort but they lost something, too. The hardships associated with more rugged forms of transportation can help make great stories.

The transcontinental route did inspire its share of travel literature, but even the travel writers could not deny that the train had changed the way people experienced the world through which they traveled. Richard Harding Davis's (1864–1916) The West from a Car-Window (1892), to name one of the most popular travels books of its day, shows how the mode of transportation can shape an author's perspective. Taking travelers through harsh, intimidating terrain quickly and comfortably, the railroad isolated them from the regions through which they passed. The train changed how travelers saw the towns and cities they entered, limited the variety of people they encountered, and transformed the landscape into a picture to be observed rather than an environment to be experienced. The window of a railway car and, more generally, the railroad itself mediated the travel experience, turning the environment into an abstraction, a phenomenon Carl Sandburg (1878–1967) recorded in his three-line poem "Window":

Night from a railroad car window

Is a great, dark, soft thing

Broken across with slashes of light.

Given its unprecedented level of comfort, the passenger train gave people sufficient leisure time to let them relax and read. The railroads thus influenced popular literary tastes and shaped the reading process. Reading had been virtually impossible in a stagecoach, but train travel was conducive to reading, and businesses catering to reading passengers emerged. In 1864 William Henry Williams began the Union News Company, an endeavor which grew into an extensive chain of retail stores located at railway stations in major cities throughout the United States. The Union News Company later became affiliated with the publishing and distribution firm the American News Company, and together they significantly influenced the publishing industry. The Union News gave the railway newsstand a professionalism and uniformity that its haphazard predecessors had lacked. Under its management, the railway newsstand became more lucrative than newsstands anywhere outside the railway station.

Aboard the train, passengers could buy cheap pamphlet novels from the newsboys who rode the rails to peddle books. The unique design of the American railway car made the newsboy's trade possible. Unlike European railway carriages, which consisted of multiple compartments accessed from the side of the train, American railway cars were designed with exits at each end, a long aisle spanning its length, and rows of upholstered seats on either side of the aisle. The newsboys could thus enter a car through the doors at one end, walk down the aisle, easily serve each passenger, exit through the doors at the other end, and repeat the process in the following car. Describing a railway journey from New York to Philadelphia and complaining about how often the doors at either end of the railway car were noisily pulled opened or slammed shut, William Howard Russell, a British traveler found that the nerve-jarring nuisance was usually "the work of a newspaper boy, with a sheaf of journals and trashy illustrated papers under his arm" (p. 31). The marketing of cheap books on the train had a significant impact on the retail book trade, too. Describing his American travels, Anthony Trollope (1815–1882) wrote, "I do not know that anything impresses a visitor more strongly with the amount of books sold in the States, than the practice of selling them as it has been adopted in the railway cars" (p. 273).

Railroads continued being built on a large scale through the nineteenth century, reaching a peak in the 1880s. To most, they represented the wonder of machinery and the progress of America. Walt Whitman, for one, imagined great possibilities for the transcontinental railroad. In Specimen Days (1882) he beckons readers, "If you want to see what the railroad is, and how civilization and progress date from it—how it is the conqueror of crude nature, which it turns to man's use, both on small scales and on the largest—come hither to inland America" (pp. 871–872). Making imaginative use of the transcontinental railroad in "A Passage to India," Whitman expressed the idea that this connection between the east and west coasts of America represented the final link connecting Orient and Occident. With its completion, all parts of the world could be linked together in universal brotherhood. "A Passage to India" presents one of the greatest celebrations of the transcontinental railroad:

I see over my own continent the Pacific Railroad

surmounting every barrier,

I see continual trains of cars winding along the

Platte carrying freight and passengers,

I hear the locomotives rushing and roaring, and

the shrill steam-whistle,

I hear the echoes reverberate through the grandest

scenery in the world.

(P. 532)

To some, however, the numerous railroads symbolized the reach and rapaciousness of the railroad barons who owned and operated them. Perhaps the finest articulation of this idea occurs in The Octopus (1901), the novel by Frank Norris (1870–1902), whose protagonist sees the railroad as

the galloping monster, the terror of steel and steam, with its single eye, Cyclopean, red, shooting from horizon to horizon . . . the symbol of a vast power, huge, terrible, flinging the echo of its thunder over all the reaches of the valley, leaving blood and destruction in its path, the leviathan, with tentacles of steel clutching into the soil, the soulless Force, the iron-hearted Power, the monster, the Colossus, the Octopus. (P. 617)

From this perspective, the railroad represented the destruction of the American pastoral ideal and the dehumanization of the American people. The size and power of the railroad showed individuals how puny and insignificant they were in the face of the vast industrial forces that shaped the United States at the turn of the century.

THE BICYCLE

The Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia presented multiple exhibits displaying the history of the railroad in the United States and the potential contribution the railroad could make to the future development of the American continent. One exhibit hall was named Machinery Hall, and it served as a vast shrine to the power of machines, especially the steam engine. Many other kinds of machines were exhibited here, but not all were steam-powered. One exhibit displayed a human-powered, two-wheeled contrivance from Great Britain that had become known as a bicycle.

The frame was made of tubular steel and its tires of hard rubber; the front wheel was quite large and the back quite small. The large front wheel, proportionate to the rider's inseam, allowed the bicycle to cover an impressive distance with every rotation of the pedals. Attending the Centennial Exhibition, Colonel Albert Augustus Pope (1843–1909) became fascinated with these high-wheeled bicycles. Recognizing their commercial potential, he began importing English bicycles in 1877 and arranged for them to be made in America the following year, contracting the Weed Sewing Machine Company in Hartford, Connecticut, for their manufacture. The indigenous manufacture, combined with Pope's rigorous commercial promotion of the practical yet fun-filled machine and his shrewd legal maneuvering whereby he secured patents that forced other American manufacturers to pay him for permission to make their own high-wheeled machines greatly facilitated the bicycle's emergence and made Colonel Pope the single most important individual responsible for establishing the bicycle in the United States.

The high-wheeled bicycle developed an enthusiastic following among fairly affluent young men in the 1880s. They formed bicycle clubs and established elegant club rooms. Being a wheelman became a way of life. Wheelmen belonged to that class of gentlemen-adventurers, sportsmen in the broadest sense of the term, who enjoyed an evening in their club rooms after a day in the wilds, who enjoyed a sumptuous meal but only after working up a good appetite through vigorous outdoor exercise, who appreciated a good cigar as much as they appreciated a lungful of fresh air, who enjoyed a snifter of cognac as much as they did a draught from an icy mountain stream, and who could read Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Lord Byron as well as they could read a map.

The bicycle inspired some adventuresome wheelmen to attempt long distance travel and, in so doing, made an important contribution to American travel literature, too. Thomas Stevens (1854–1935) crossed the continent in 1884 and went on to circle the globe atop his wheel, a journey he told in Around the World on a Bicycle (1887). Stevens's adventure encouraged others to attempt long-distance travel, including, most importantly, George Nellis (1865–1948), who set a record in 1887 for crossing the continent by bicycle in seventy-two days. Nellis also a contributed to American travel literature: he financed his trip by writing it up for local newspapers and for the Wheel and Recreation, the most prominent of many cycling magazines that were being published at the time. Nellis's personal charm, his love of cycling, and his wry sense of humor show through in the delightful letters he published during the course of his trip. West of Omaha, he took a route parallel to the Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroads, but traveling by bicycle, he experienced the nation in a much different way than those who traveled by rail. He saw sights, visited towns, and met people that the passenger trains passed by without stopping.

The high-wheeled bicycle remains an icon of the era, but riding one took a fair amount of skill and buying one took a fair amount of money. A good-quality bicycle in the 1880s cost about a quarter of the annual salary of a factory worker. With the invention of the safety bicycle and the pneumatic tire, bicycling gained a huge popular following over the next decade. Increased demand brought increased production, which decreased prices. As the high-wheeler gave way to the safety bicycle, the bicycle went from being a privileged recreational pursuit to a mode of popular short-distance transportation and recreation. Whereas the locomotive presented a vast machine that belittled the individual, the bicycle, like the automobile after it, was a machine that empowered individuals and gave them the freedom to travel where and when they wanted.

THE AUTOMOBILE

The popularity of the bicycle in the 1890s anticipated the coming popularity of the automobile. That same decade, numerous automobile companies were being formed, and numerous experimental automobiles were being produced. Colonel Pope, for one, shifted corporate operations from bicycle to automobile manufacture in the 1890s. In 1896 Henry Ford (1863–1947) created the lightweight Quadricycle, his first experimental car to use an internal combustion engine. Ford Motor Company sold its first automobile in 1903, two years after what is considered the first commercially successful, American-made auto, the curved-dash Oldsmobile. Whereas Ford and Oldsmobile went on to experience great commercial success, other pioneering automobile manufacturers were less fortunate. The early automotive industry was viciously competitive, and few companies survived the first decade of the new century. Colonel Pope's company, sadly, went into receivership in 1907.

Many bicycling enthusiasts met the automobile with derision. Writing in 1900, a pseudonymous contributor to the Overland Monthly observed: "The automobile puffs its lugubrious way through our streets and byways. The automobile is not pretty; it is not, so far, even effective. It has merely succeeded in being prosaically noisy and vulgarly ostentatious. But the bicycle possesses all the gentlemanly qualities. It is graceful, well-conducted, quiet and modest" (Rotifer, p. 521). Though one was quiet and human-powered while the other was noisy and engine-driven, both the bicycle and the automobile gave Americans what they characteristically desired the most: freedom and independence.

Henry Ford recognized what American motorists wanted and understood how to give it to them. After producing several modestly successful automobiles, Ford released the Model T, the first mass-produced car, in 1908. At an initial cost of less than $1000, the Model T was the first automobile many people could afford. Before the last one came off the assembly line in 1927, the price had dropped below $300, and Ford had sold 15 million units.

In terms of the history of American literature, the automobile found its first great enthusiast in Edith Wharton (1862–1937), whose Motor-Flight through France (1908) begins with a paean to the automobile:

The motor-car has restored the romance of travel.
Freeing us from all the compulsions and contacts of the railway, the bondage to fixed hours and the beaten track, the approach to each town through the area of ugliness and desolation created by the railway itself, it has given us back the wonder, the adventure and the novelty which enlivened the way of our posting grandparents. Above all these recovered pleasures must be ranked the delight of taking a town unawares, stealing on it by back ways and unchronicled paths, and surprising in it some intimate aspect of past time, some silhouette hidden for half a century or more by the ugly mask of railway embankments and the iron bulk of a huge station. The villages that we missed and yearned for from the windows of the train—the unseen villages have been given back to us! (Pp. 1–2)

For Edith Wharton, the automobile, that most modern of personal contrivances, paradoxically brought back a bygone era—the time before steam locomotives—because it allowed travelers to see what the railroads had obscured. Furthermore, it freed people from schedules and timetables. Wharton's Motor-Flight through France anticipates the American love affair with the automobile that would develop quickly over the next few decades. Not all recognized such benefits to the automobile as quickly as Edith Wharton, however. She often tried to get Henry James (1843–1916) to come along on her motoring trips, but he disdained the automobile. James often enjoyed bicycling from his English home to visit nearby friends, but he could never fathom Wharton's passion for the automobile. He nicknamed her "Firebird" and called her automobile the "Chariot of Fire."

To some, the auto became a menace to the city streets and only confirmed impressions that modern urban mass transit was suggesting. In New York, the first mode of rapid urban transit, the elevated railways or el-trains, were constructed from 1867 through 1870. By the early 1890s, elevated lines crisscrossed Manhattan from South Ferry to 155th Street. The noisy, dirty eltrains darkened and polluted streets, made buildings shake, and continually disturbed anyone living at the third-floor level along the elevated routes. The el-trains served as a pervasive reminder of the extent to which industrial technology controlled people's lives. The development of the electric street cars and subways around the turn of the century presented better alternatives to the el-train, but they, too, served as powerful reminders of the speed, technological advancement, and noise indicative of modern existence.

As more highways were developed, the use of the automobile for long-distance travel became more prevalent, but it would not effectively supplant the railroad until the middle of the twentieth century. Through the early decades of the century, the steamship remained the only method of traveling overseas. Despite disasters like the sinking of the Titanic and the Lusitania, American vacationers visited Europe via steamship in increasingly large numbers before and after World War I. By 1920 a new form of transportation was emerging. Though passenger airlines would not really be developed until the next decade, the invention of the airplane marked the start of the next great transportation revolution.