[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] California's Capitalist Founders

Fri Mar 7 04:25:47 MST 2008

by Mark Arax

Truthdig (February 07 2008)

You don't have to be a fly on the wall to know what the editors and
marketers at Atlas Books/W W Norton were thinking when they first kicked
around the idea of their "Enterprise" series. The question before them
was the same one that confounds every book publisher and newspaper in
the country today. How to compete in an America besotted with gadgets
and gossip? How to tailor stories for a public mind jammed by the racket
of cell phones and MySpace?

Whether it is really true that technology's thrall has changed what
people are willing to read, the newspaper where I worked for twenty
years, the Los Angeles Times, has already thrown overboard its tradition
of literary journalism. Gone are the 10,000-word features and
investigative pieces that accounted for so many Pulitzer prizes. So it
is understandable, if not entirely laudable, that a publisher such as
Atlas/Norton, seeking to widen its audience for business books, would
launch a series devoted to the proposition of Narrative Lite.

____________________

The Associates: Four Capitalists Who Created California
by Richard Rayner (W W Norton/Atlas & Company, 224 pages)
____________________

The execution is rather straightforward. Turn loose some of America's
most engaging writers on epic stories of empire building - the only
constraint being that their narratives cannot be epic in scale but
rather 200 pages or fewer. If the fit is right, the thinking goes, it
doesn't matter how worn out the subject. This is how Tim Parks came to
do the Medici clan {1}, and George Gilder plunged into the Microchip
Swashbucklers {2} and Stanley Bing pursued the rise and fall of Rome Inc
{3}.

Now comes Richard Rayner, with a novelist's fine eye, tackling the tale
of four men - the fixer, the politician, the contractor and the
accountant, otherwise known as Huntington, Stanford, Crocker and Hopkins
- whose improbable railroad, the Central Pacific, connected the American
West to the world. At the outset, Rayner, the author of one other work
of nonfiction and five novels, sweats a little too much trying to
justify a story told with far more deliberation in a score of previous
books, including Oscar Lewis' The Big Four (1938), David Lavender's The
Great Persuader (1970) and David Haward Bain's Empire Express (1999).

"It's been told many different ways", Rayner writes in The Associates.
"As a kind of triumph of will, guts, and the American can-do spirit over
almost unimaginable difficulty and danger; as a tragedy involving the
virtual elimination of Native American culture; as a race between Irish
navvies of the Union Pacific laying track from the east and the Chinese
coolies of the Central Pacific advancing from the west.

"All these versions have some validity. But really it's a story about
cash, about rapacity. The railroad was built - actually built, as
opposed to dreamed of and talked about - by men who cared only about
money and were absolutely ruthless about money. They didn't care about
the railroads as such. They wanted to line their own pockets, to do
business."

Hype more or less out of the way, Rayner begins his energetic portraits
of the four merchants - also known as The Associates - who had come to
California not to dig gold from the earth but to sell the pickaxes and
shovels, at rip-off prices. It is a treat to watch a writer have fun
with his subjects, and Rayner has great fun bringing to life Collis
Huntington on the East Coast, tickling the palms of congressmen, and
Charles Crocker on the western slope of the Sierra, directing 8,000
Chinese in a triumph of engineering that reads no less mind-boggling for
the 150 years of feats that have followed.

"No railroad in the world had tackled anything like this before", he
writes. "Crossing the Sierra became the CP's epic. The drifts were so
deep that five locomotives coupled together could not push them aside.
There were forty-four storms; temperatures dropped to thirty below. The
hard granite in the tunnels bent steel drills like licorice. Ten inches
a day was excellent progress. Many days saw the tunnel grow by only two
or three inches."

Mammoth, too, was the swindle by the Central Pacific and Union Pacific,
headed by Thomas Clark Durant, mastermind of one of the truly ingenious
shell games in American history. Reading how easy it was for the two
behemoths to hoodwink a federal government predisposed to the
righteousness of a transcontinental railroad and preoccupied with civil
war, you cannot help but recognize a strange inevitability to the family
of crimes and criminals to follow. So this was the forebear of the
monumental frauds of, say, Halliburton.

Robber barons and their monopolies, Huntington would concede, are part
of America's DNA. Capitalism was not meant to be democratic. "It seems
to be assumed that competition, which may be called a state of war of
capital, is a good thing in itself, and is to be promoted and
intensified by Acts of Legislature", Huntington said. "Competition is
killing".

The easy criticism would be that for a story so grand, 200 pages is a
piffle. But I read it in the same spirit that I travel the interstate,
to get from vista to vista without a whole lot of meanderings in the
middle. That is not to say that Rayner doesn't manage several scenic
byways. There are wonderful side portraits of Theodore Judah, whose
harebrained scheme it was to traverse the Sierra with rail, and Ambrose
Bierce, the San Francisco writer whose attacks on a decrepit Huntington
are perfectly scabrous:

"The spectacle of this old man standing on the brink of eternity, his
pockets loaded with dishonest gold which he knows neither how to enjoy
nor to whom to bequeath, swearing it is the fruit of wholesome labor and
homely thrift, was one of the most pitiable it has been my lot to
observe. He knows himself an outmate of every penal institution in the
world; he deserves to hang from every branch of every tree of every
state and Territory penetrated by his railroads, with the sole exception
of Nevada, which has no trees."

Rayner packs a lot into compressed space without ever making the story
feel crowded. To indulge in the thinking of the day, it is just such a
breezy and smart account that a kid in high school might be required to
read and, finding himself sufficiently enthralled, might work his way
back to the tomes. But if those heavier volumes are not forthcoming, the
kid could do far worse than Rayner's account as the final word on the
railroad that made the West.

Links

{1} http://www.timparks.com/19.html

{2} http://www.powells.com/biblio?isbn=9780393328417

{3} http://www.powells.com/biblio?isbn=9780393060263

_____

Mark Arax, author and journalist, is finishing his third book, a
collection of essays on California to be published by PublicAffairs. He
is the author (along with Rick Wartzman) of The King of California: J G
Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire (2003), also
published by PublicAffairs.

http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/20080207_mark_arax_on_californias_capitalist_founders/

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