William Thomas – Page 14 – William G. Thomas III

February 27, 2011

National Railway Historical Society Banquet: Great Plains Chapter

Last night I had the great pleasure to be with the Great Plains Chapter of the National Railway Historical Society. We were in Grand Island, NE, in the historic Burlington depot at 603 Plum St. Over forty railroad enthusiasts and historians showed up on a snowy Saturday evening for the banquet. Of course, the depot is no longer in service but it still sits right next to the Burlington tracks, which have been elevated, and the coal trains came by regularly throughout the proceedings, rumbling south toward Lincoln and then on to Kansas. The local railroad modeling club has turned the old baggage room in the depot into a fantastic railroad model of both the Burlington local scene and the Union Pacific, complete with reconstructions of historic buildings, 50s cars, and landscape backgrounds. These rail lines intersected and crossed in Grand Island, making one of the most colossally congested intersections in American railroading.

With James L. Hanna, the president of the local chapter, February 26, 2011.

Not surprisingly, the participants in this society know a great deal about railroads, historic structures, and history, especially about the local railroads and old depots. Jim Reisdorf has published numerous books of history and photographs and old postcards of the local depots. Other experts were on hand as well. The Society is full of railroad history specialists who are concerned with historic preservation and sharing history with the public. I was pleased to be invited to talk with this group and to be part of the banquet. Everyone was generous and we had some great questions on how railroads shaped modern America.

In the old Burlington depot, 603 Plum St., Grand Island, NE, February 26, 2011.

No trip to Grand Island at this time of year is complete without stopping to see the migration of snow geese, Canadian geese, and the spectacular sand hill and whooping cranes. The cranes were farther west, but I managed to watch tens of thousands of snows and Canadians landing in a nearby field. An amazing sight and sound of the Great Plains.

Thousands on thousands of geese and cranes in migration, February 26, 2011, Grand Island, NE.

February 17, 2011

Des Moines Civil War Roundtable–Leading the way toward a new Civil War history

Last evening I met with the Civil War Roundtable in Des Moines, Iowa. Over fifty Civil War enthusiasts gathered at the Machine Shed Restaurant for dinner and a program. With the 150th anniversary of the Civil War underway, interest is high and growing. And it was great to see so many active participants in Des Moines. Their program has already included sessions on guerrillas in the war, as well as women’s history, the experience of soldiers, the activities of women spies, and the ways the home front dealt with the dislocation and trauma of the war. The range of these topics indicated to me just how vibrant the Civil War Roundtables are, and how much they are leading the way toward new social histories of the conflict. Members have read widely in Civil War scholarship and they routinely comb the blogs of the New York Times Opinionator, Civil War centers, and academics.

With John Liepa, at Des Moines Civil War Roundtable, February 16, 2011

The proceedings last night were led by John Liepa and Ronald Nurmi. They have created a terrific set of programs and cultivated interest in the community. They made me feel right at home, as did the other members. And we had a wonderful time talking about the Civil War, railroads, and how the war was a modern conflict. I’ve always enjoyed the Civil War Roundtables, but this one was exceptional.

February 5, 2011

Dystopia Anew–Evgeny Morozov’s The Net Delusion

In The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom (Public Affairs, 2011), Evgeny Morozov looks at the Internet and our present technologies of Twitter, Google, iPads, iPhones, ad infinitum with a healthy dose of skepticism and irony. Has our technology enabled democracy, social equality, and progress? Most Americans might answer yes without hesitation. Not so fast. Morozov’s book reminds us that these technologies can be used to suppress as much as to liberate. And that human nature and will govern the power relations in society.

I’m very sympathetic to this view. Looking back in the nineteenth century, we see a similar kind of euphoria over the convergence of rail and telegraph in American society. And yet we also fought a Civil War in which over 600,000 Americans died. For generations we have carefully separated these two events–in large part because our faith in technological progress has been so embedded in our national culture ever since. We want to see both our first great technological transformation and the Civil War as similarly progressive. And of course they were in many important ways. Yet, if we look closely we see in the nineteenth century many of the same unintended consequences–most prominently, the ways technology could extend and enable slavery in the American South.

And the similarly powerful technological transformation underway now, as Morozov reminds us, should make us more alert, not less, to its varied consequences. For an excellent review, see The New York Times book review by Lee Seigel.

February 3, 2011

French Railroads, The Holocaust, and American Slavery Reparations

In 2010 France’s state-run railroad, SNCF (Societe Nationale des Chemins de fer Francais), apologized for its role in the deportation of tens of thousands of Jews during World War II. Expressing “sorrow and regret,” the company’s apology came only after it emerged as a leading bidder in a $2.6 billion high speed rail project in Florida. Jewish citizens in Florida, no doubt, might see the company’s apology as nothing more than self-serving, and too little too late. SNCF America is also a potential bidder in a similarly large project in California. At first, the company issued its apology only on its English-language web site.

Then, last week (late January 2011), SNCF announced that it would create a Holocaust memorial outside Paris at its long-abandoned Bobigny depot, from which over 76,000 Jews were transported to the concentration camps. The company has long maintained that it merely cooperated with the Nazis, that it did so under duress, and that many of its trainmen found in the French Resistance and were themselves deported and killed for their actions. The case brings up complicated histories of occupation, resistance, war, and the “banality of evil.” It raises questions about how one can assess the crime of deportation and the responsibility of a corporation for such violence.

Nevertheless, as Sarah Wildman’s Politics Daily report on “The Railroad to Hell” makes clear, numerous scholars have found reason to challenge the company’s view of its role in the Holocaust. Both Harriet Tamen, an American lawyer representing 600 survivors who filed suit against the company in 2006, and Jean-Marc Dreyfus, a historian at the University of Manchester, have compiled detailed evidence that the company’s officials were complicit in the deportation. Tamen has led the effort to claim reparations for the survivors.

The question that the French and SNCF are wrestling with is now focused, at least in part, on whether reparations should be paid to the survivors, and this is one that American historians of slavery should pay attention to. Ironically, Florida’s railroads were nearly all initially constructed with slave labor before 1865 when the Civil War ended slavery. Indeed, the major railroad companies in the U.S. today, including C.S.X., Norfolk Southern, and B.N.S.F., among many others, are the successors to the slave-built railroads of the Old South. Over 10,000 miles of southern railroad track was built with slave labor. Politics certainly has shaped the French case–as Florida’s representative Ron Klein sought to require potential high-speed rail contractors to disclose any participation in deportation (see New York Times, January 25, 2011). But in the U.S. the same questions could be raised about descendant companies which bought and sold slave labor to such a degree that they were some of the most heavily committed to the institution. In fact, they were the most exploitative in many ways as well.

January 30, 2011

Tracking Dr. Alexander T. Augusta, black soldier and doctor

After five years, The Iron Way: Railroads, The Civil War, and the Making of Modern America is moving through copyediting and should be ready for publication in November 2011.

And I’m still finding new material to include or reference. The book will cover the way that Americans experienced the technological transformation surrounding the railroads and at the same time how these changes helped make the Civil War more likely, as well as more destructive. Railroads did not cause the Civil War, slavery did, but railroads were changing slavery, making its extension all the more possible into the West in the 1850s.

There are many new pieces of material I keep finding after the manuscript went in. One example is the story of Dr. Alexander T. Augusta, one of the highest ranking African Americans in the Union Army during the Civil War. He was a surgeon and after the war became a prominent black physician in Washington, D.C. I was writing about his involvement in the case of Catharine (Kate) Brown, who filed a lawsuit in 1868 because she was violently thrown off of the Washington & Alexandria Railroad for attempting to sit in the ladies car. The railroad claimed segregation was common and lawful, yet Brown succeeded in taking the case to the Supreme Court where she prevailed.

I knew relatively little about Augusta, and began searching for more information. Then I found out that he had written a piece for The Christian Recorder on an 1863 incident in Baltimore, and on an streetcar confrontation in Washington, D.C., when he too was violently thrown out of the cars. Need to work this, and many other notes, into the next round of edits for The Iron Way.

Kate Masur’s new book, An Example for All the Land, fills in much of this important history of Washington, D.C., after the Civil War.