Historians generally agree that, of the great modern innovations, the railroad had the most far-reaching impact on major events in the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly on the Industrial Revolution. There is, however, considerable disagreement among cultural historians regarding public attitudes toward the railroad, both at its the decades after 1880. But the argument he provides in support of this position is unconvincing.
What Stilgoe calls “romantic-era distrust” was in fact the reaction of a minority of writers, artists, and intellectuals who distrusted the railroad not so much for what it was as for what it signified. Thoreau and Hawthorne appreciated, even admired, an improved means of moving things and people from one place to a reaction against the prevailing attitude in the 1830s that the railroad was an unqualified improvement.
Stilgoe’s assertion that the ambivalence toward the railroad exhibited by writers like Hawthorne and Thoreau disappeared after the 1880s is also misleading. In support of this thesis, Stilgoe has unearthed an impressive volume of material, the work of hitherto unknown illustrators, journalists, and novelists, all devotees of the railroad; but it is 1830s and the minority of intellectual dissenters during that period extended into the 1880s and beyond.
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