White in the reading describes the rapid settlement of the American midwest because of the railroad and its perception and impact. Moreover this rapid change in the Midwest reflects a growing idea of American exceptionalism that I have begun to notice in class. White starts off the chapter with a hypothetical “If a western Rip Van Winkle had fallen asleep in 1869 and awakened in 1896, he would not have recognized the lands that the railroads had touched. Bison had yielded to cattle; mountains had been blasted and bored.Great swaths of land that had once whispered grass now screamed corn and wheat.” (White 455) This hypothetical spin on the Rip Van Winkle story exemplifies just how rapid of a change occurred in a 30 year period and how people out the time would view it.
Moreover from the accounts of Hesse-Wartegg who was a German traveler in America, we get a non-American view of the settlement of the west. “Built through a dry, treeless, unpeopled desert, the railroad now crosses an agricultural paradise. Civilization sweeps like a storm across the plains and smashes what will not bow down or give way before it.” Although this review may have been a bit biased as Hesse would be incentivized by the railroad to write good things about it, what Hesse chooses to praise about the railroad and its effects says alot about what the americans/railroads would have valued. Hesse describes the railroad’s effects as a storm of civilization that rips through everything without question.
Both Wartegg account and Van Winkle use aggressive language that presents the railroad as a civilizing force that pushes through lands and peoples. Their accounts remind me of American Progress by John Gast which is the quintessential representation of manifest destiny. Manifest destiny was enabled by the railroad and plays into the larger idea of American exceptionalism because it is rooted in ideas of divine right. The seeds of this have been planted since the first settlers and their city upon the hill and the ambitious egalitarian principles rooted in the constitution which strived to be better than England. Moreover the idea of conquering nature, grass to corn, buffalo to cattle, and the positive feedback by people of the time indicate the idea that Americans have the ability to change the world through their own ability, ie technology like railroads, selective breeding etc etc.
This seems like a somewhat superficial reading of the White chapter that engages more with the primary source accounts he cites—mainly in order to argue against them—than with White’s arguments or substance. You’re right, of course, that ideas about manifest destiny and American exceptionalism helped to shape the developments he describes, but White is much more interested how the operations of capital, credit, and human frailty and short-sightedness shaped the railroads, and the west. By the way, the geographic region he’s describing for the most part is the Far West, not the Midwest.
3/4