Union Pacific the Rebirth 1894 - 1969 Volume 2 by Maury Klein w dust jacket

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Union Pacific the Rebirth 1894 - 1969 Volume 2 by Maury Klein w dust jacket
Union Pacific the Rebirth 1894 to 1969  VOLUME 2 by Maury Klein
Hard cover With dust jacket
has plastic protective covering
COPYRIGHT 1989 JANUARY 1990 first edition
654 PAGES iNDEXED
Any historian of American business or railroads knows that precious little has been written on the carriers and their fate in the twentieth century.
This is not surprising. The nineteenth century was the golden age for American railroads. It has the most stirring sagas, the cleanest story lines, the happiest endings, and the most colorful cast of characters. Life got more complicated after 1900 for everyone, including the railroads. The sagas moved indoors, the story lines got more involved, the characters more drab, and the endings anything but happy in most cases.
This was in fact true of American business in general, but the railroads occupied a unique role in the American economy and American life. In the nineteenth century they were the pioneers in big business, the conquerers of the West, the network of steel that held an expanding industrial system together. They were at the forefront of everything from finance to technology, and a man could have no prouder job than one with the railroad.
By 1920 this was no longer the case. The railroads were still important, but no longer the leading edge of progress. They had not shrunk in importance; rather the nation and its economy had grown with incredible speed. New technologies rose to challenge their supremacy in transport, reducing the once mighty iron horse to simply one more steed in the stable. With the hubris of all who occupy the center stage of history, the railroads let time pass them by until they became emblems of a bygone age.
The railroads did much to fashion this image of themselves. Like most maturing enterprises they allowed success to make them complacent, conservative, obstinate. While the world around them changed rapidly, they stood stolidly in the shackles of tradition, clinging to the old ways as if sheer repetition could somehow restore the golden age. But industries cannot reclaim their past any more than men can regain their youth.
The history of railroads in the twentieth century, then, has been one of constant, grudging adjustment to new conditions that threatened not merely their supremacy but their very existence. In its own way this story is fully as fascinating and important as the earlier saga because it allows us to glimpse the larger life cycle of a key industry rather than just its youthful triumphs. The bloom of innocence has long since faded from American industry in this, the second century of its life. We need to know far more about its patterns of growth and decay, strength and weakness, death and transfiguration.
The railroads offer exceptional insights into these patterns because they set the precedents followed by so many other industries. For example, they furnished the model for federal regulation of business in the twentieth century, and for collective bargaining at the national level. Neither model turned out very well, but their influence ran wide and deep beyond the rail industry.
Writing about railroads in the modern era presents some novel problems. Because so much of their activity transfers to the national level, the story of a single road cannot be understood outside this larger context. Then there is the problem of competition. In the nineteenth century railroads competed mostly with each other; after 1920 they faced stiff challenges from new modes of transport. To grasp the role of railroads, therefore, one must know something of cars, trucks, buses, airplanes, barges, and pipelines. Throughout I have tried to give the reader enough context to understand why railroads behaved the way they did in the face of these new external forces.
Volume 1I of this history has posed a very different challenge than did Volume I. Since the earlier story of the Union Pacific had been told many times by many people, the task there was to sweep away the myths, half-truths, and inaccuracies that had distorted it for generations. For the modern era the task is to tell a tale that has not yet been told, and to tell it honestly and well.
The biography of every firm is both unique in its own right and grist for the larger patterns of business history. While the history of the railroad industry may be more than the sum of its parts, it is inexplicable without the insights furnished by the story of individual roads. We still need good case studies, but a corporate history is useless to anyone unless it tells the whole story, warts and all. Otherwise, it is no more believable than a commercial or a campaign biography.
The Union Pacific, like all firms, has had its share of warts as well as triumphs, and I have treated them with candor. It is a clichof life that people learn from their mistakes, and this holds true for corporations as well. The ultimate fate of a company often depends on how well it handles weakness and adversity. In business as in medicine, pathology offers a far surer and swifter road to cure than denial.
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