The Imperial Self in American LifeStephen J. Whitfield
From Columbia Journal of American Studies Vol. 4, No. 1 2000
By the Jacksonian period, the popular taste for quick travel had already become obsessive, reflecting the national desire to defy the limitations of time. The wagons, railroads and steamboats were usually built only with a shrewd business eye for immediate needs and with barely a consideration for the future. The style was haste, and the tendency was for accelerated motion. The cost in destructiveness was therefore enormous. Risks of travel may have been greater on the Mississippi River than on the Atlantic Ocean; for by the mid-nineteenth century, a third of all the steamboats built for that river had been lost in accidents. Two thirds of the total casualties due to steamboat accidents on the (mid)western rivers were the result of explosions, because the incentives encouraged engineers who, for the sake of speed, knew how to get still more power from even decrepit boilers, sometimes by not "wasting" steam at the safety valve. The most lethal accidents of that century usually claimed more lives than all but the very worst airplane crashes of the next century.
When the railroad became more popular than the steamboat, the same pattern was repeated: the aim was to get there first and quickest, not necessarily in the safest or most comfortable fashion. Trains were not built for durability, and usually a single track rather than a double track was laid. The work was generally too hasty to level down inclines or to cut tunnels or to construct embankments, so that trains were subjected to far steeper grades and more hairpin turns than in Europe. The United States had the flimsiest and cheapest tracks and roadbeds. Railroad wrecks were as common and as notorious, especially in the West, as steamboat accidents had been earlier; and to the astonishment of foreign visitors, Americans tended to accept these disasters as routine.
Visitors were also amazed by the openness of the passenger cars themselves and at the restlessness of Americans on the trains. Fidgety travelers passed from one car to another, crossing over open platforms separating the cars despite the dangers of being crushed between the cars or being hurled off the train, despite the warnings that one railroad company posted on each door by painting a gravestone. The ubiquitous "lunch counter"--the distant ancestor of the fast food emporia of the second half of the twentieth century--had already been invented in the Jacksonian era. What was satisfied was not only the hunger for snacks but also the demand for haste in railroad travel. [22]
Stephen J. Whitfield holds the Max Richter Chair in American Civilization at Brandeis University. He is the author of eight books, including most recently A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till (1988), The Culture of the Cold War (1996), and In Search of American Jewish Culture (1999). Professor Whitfield is also the editor of A Companion to 20th-Century America (2004).