Friends can agree to disagree on whether John’s cuter than Paul, but one and all must agree on the vile role played by the Southern Pacific Railroad (SP) in California history. Until now, that is. Author Richard Orsi says, on behalf of the Southern Pacific, "We was misunderstood," and he says it eloquently and fulsomely in this new and magisterial account of the all-important role played by the SP in how California came to be.
BY BOBBY WINSTON, EDITOR
Published: August, 2005
Sunset Limited: The Southern Pacific Railroad and the Development of the American West - 1850 to 1930
By Richard J. Orsi, University of California Press © 2005
Friends can agree to disagree on whether John’s cuter than Paul, but one and all must agree on the vile role played by the Southern Pacific Railroad (SP) in California history.
Until now, that is. Author Richard Orsi says, on behalf of the Southern Pacific, We was misunderstood, and he says it eloquently and fulsomely in this new and magisterial account of the all-important role played by the SP in how California came to be.
Now, there is no doubting that California history is benighted. American California was born into original sin via theft by a band of drunken renegades in Sacramento, but it took the Mexican-American war to seal the deal. Opposition to that blatant war of aggression was inspiration for Thoreau’s tract Civil Disobedience, which inspired Mahatma Ghandi’s emancipation of India, anti-Nazis in pre-World War II Germany, and Martin Luther King’s civil rights movement.
Pre-Orsi, accepted wisdom regarding SP amounted to an unremitting tale of greed and betrayal: Frank Norris’ authored the novel Octopus, which was first published in 1901. It was originally intended to be one-third of a never-completed Epic of the Wheat trilogy that would focus on modernity and progress in California. SP was, of course, the octopus.
But Orsi, who was granted unprecedented access to company archives, gives a revisionist account, one that styles the SP as more benevolent, and more often than not, a beneficent agent for wise community development. Those inclined to believe SP influenced Orsi in exchange for the special access he was granted have more than Orsi’s impeccable academic credentials to consider: SP has been gobbled up and digested so often it’s but a shuck of its former self.
Sunset Limited a nuanced and impeccably researched account that will capture and hold hostage the interest of far more than just foamers. That’s what public officials privately call train fanatics, a breed of usually older men descending into second childhood, who literally foam at the mouth at public meetings, so fanatic is there emotional call for a revival of railroading. Whence California? This is one of the best books to pick-up if you want a better insight.
Excerpts:
The Southern Pacific was the only major U.S. Railroad to be organized and operated by Westerners, and to be built from west to east. Throughout its history, from its founding in the mid-19th Century to its absorption into the rival Union Pacific in the late 1990s, the Company continued to be managed from a Western locus of power in California, and particularly San Francisco. Pioneers in the region, or at least long-time residents, Southern Pacific managers also often had extremely long tenure in their company positions. Their Western roots ran deep, and they had wide connections to outside movements and organizations, as well as friendships and business relationships with other prominent business, civic, educational, artistic and scientific leaders, with whom they shared values and hopes for their community.
Undoubtedly, the most influential expositor of the pro-agricultural ideas of the Southern Pacific was William H. Mills, Chief Land Agent from 1883 to 1907, the time when the railroad’s major agriculture, land, and resource policies took shape... Mills attacked mining, the earliest industry in California, Nevada, and southern Arizona, for causing economic instability, social disorder, and sluggish population growth. He appealed, instead, for efforts to expand farming and other Far Western and Southwestern regions. The pioneer population of any country gives direction, color and character to its growth... (w)e are by no means emancipated from the influences of our earliest environment... the very prosecution of the industry is itself a process of impoverishment.
In 1898, the SP launched Sunset, a San Francisco monthly… early issues publicized the attractions of Yosemite, Hotel Del Monte, Paso Robles Hot Springs, Coronado, Santa Monica, and other attractions in California, especially focusing on the theme of the state as a health resort. By the end of 1899, Sunset had a circulation of 15,000, including schools, libraries, newspapers, and private subscribers in every state… In 1899 and 1900, the magazine expanded greatly in size, added new departments and services, and adopted a more attractive format, including lavish photographs and lithographs, covers and drawings by artists such as Maynard Dixon, and stories and poems by Mary Austen and other regional writers. By the early 1900s, Sunset, edited now by Charles S. Aiken, had become California and the West’s leading promotional journal, emphasizing not only the opportunities for tourism and recreation, but also agricultural developments, small scale farming, and cooperative colonies, irrigation, forestry, and resource conservation, urban and industrial investment, and the preservation of the region’s Indian cultures, historical heritage, and wilderness.
(Historians) do not mention the Southern Pacific’s notable influence on that state’s water history, including its role in the development of Imperial Valley Irrigation. Writers who have acknowledged that railroads played any part in water history have often cast railroads as villains, narrowly self-interested spoilers of popular movements for economic and social progress through water development.
Breaking Gridlock: Moving Toward Transportation That Works
Jim Motavalli, Sierra Club Books © 2001
Jim Motavalli wears his earnestness on his sleeve. He edits a small newspaper called E: The Environmental Magazine and has written a trenchant, if meandering, book focused squarely on, arguably, the most important issue of our time, automobile dependence.
No automobile dependence, little, if any at all, demands the need for wars, like that which exists in Iraq.
No automobile dependence, little, if any at all, demands rationale for soulless suburban sprawl.
But since World War II, automobile dependence has been metastasized to be indistinguishable from the very American way of life, worth dying and killing for. Motavalli’s book knowledgably and engagingly explores the byways and highways of how we got to such a woeful state of affairs.
Excerpts:
…a third of the average city’s land is devoted to serving the car, including roads, service stations, and parking lots.
One of the major barriers to the fledgling automobile industry at the turn of the century had been the poor state of the roads. One of the first such lobbying groups was the League of American Wheelmen, organized by the colorful electric car and bicycle magnate, Colonel Albert Pope...(t)he Wheelmen founded good roads associations around the country, and in 1891, began lobbying state legislatures.
The highway lobby’s legacy to the United States is urban sprawl, one of today’s most hotly debated topics. We live in a country with 60,000 square miles of paving, covering 2 percent of the country’s surface area, and as much as 10 percent of its arable land… A lot of us in the environmental movement say that we’re not against growth; we just don’t want it to waste resources for land unnecessarily, or cause excessive traffic congestion.
Walkable communities are, of necessity, high density. According to Robert Cervero’s The Transit Metropolis, ‘Every 10 percent increase in population and employment densities yield between a 5 and 8 percent increase in transit ridership.
During a Los Angeles stop in the early days of the 2000 presidential campaign, then Republican candidate, George W. Bush, showed his sensitivity to the city’s bus passengers. At a Univision town hall meeting designed to help the candidate reach out to Hispanic voters, Bush listened to the complaints of a man who rides two buses to work every day. The man wanted to know how Los Angeles’s public transportation system could be improved. My hope is that you will be able to find good enough work, so that you will be able to afford a car, replied Bush.
While cities like Portland in the United States are trying to follow the European model, they are still far more car-dependent than Zurich, or many other urban centers. Only six percent of Portland’s commuters use mass transit. In Stockholm, Sweden, by contrast, 70 percent of peak hour trips are on public transit. And in Berlin, Germany, it’s 40 percent, though the long-term goal is 80 percent.
Watts Wacker, a futurist who heads the Connecticut-based consulting firm, FirstMatter, notes that… the three traditional domains of American life — personal, professional, and societal — have been enlarged with the addition of a fourth domain — mobility. And anything people do in these other areas, they will expect to do when mobile, he concludes.
Jane Holtz Kay, in her book Asphalt Nation, tallies the average cost of maintaining a car in the United States as $6,000, for such internal expenditures as gas, parking, tires, depreciation, and maintenance, plus $3,000 to $5,000 for such external social factors as land consumed in sprawl, police protection, environmental damage, and uncompensated accidents. She adds that hidden costs for cars add a burden of $750 billion to the American economy.
The most visible American anti-car group is the Alliance for a Paving Moratorium, headed by a dedicated Arcata, California activist named Jan Lundberg. He would appear to be a rather unlikely anti-car agitator…(because of) his family’s petroleum-trade magazine, The Lundberg Letter… it is certainly true he’s come a long way from his roots… The Alliance publishes a quarterly magazine with a circulation of 15,000. Called The Auto Free Times, it features articles like How We Pay Oil Companies to Pollute, The Joys of Carelessness, and Turn Your Ignition, Melt a Glacier. But Lundberg is hardly a deskbound editor. He travels quite a bit by bicycle, and last owned a car in 1989. He has been arrested and jailed for blocking highways. He has a band called The Depavers. I don’t think the auto will be replaced, Lundberg told me. I know it will be.
