Age of Betrayal The Triumph of

Book by Beatty Jack

Chapter 1: Annihilating Space

There have been two great dispensations of civilization, the Greek & Christian and now comes the railroad.
—William Cregg,
southern textile mill owner, 1853

Julius Caesar regularized the calendar in 46 B.C. Pope Gregory XIII reformed it in 1582. King George III subtracted eleven days from the British calendar nearly 200 years later. On November 18, 1883, America’s railroad corporations stopped time.

In the 1850s Americans set their watches to eighty local times—thirty-eight in Wisconsin alone, twenty-seven in Indiana, twenty-three in Illinois. Noon in Chicago was 11:27 A.M. in Omaha, 11:50 A.M. in St. Louis, 12:09 P.M. in Louisville, and 12:31 P.M. in Pittsburgh. An 1883 railway gazetteer included time conversion tables for over 8,000 stations. Fingers plowed the ink off dark columns of type, plotting a route across the temporal Babel.

Yet, perhaps because few Americans traveled far, most of them tolerated this time quilt, to judge by the letters column of the New York Times, which printed seven letters of travelers’ complaints in fifteen years. Basically, Americans took nature’s word for time: Noon arrived when the sun looked nearest to being overhead, at times that differed with locations. (“A movement of one degree around the earth’s surface—about 48 miles due east or west in the United States—changes local time four minutes,” according to one authority.) Town clocks, to be sure, were set not by sundials but by almanacs that averaged the sun’s variations over months and years. A scattering of localities rented astronomically precise time from observatories, which wired them through Western Union.

These innovations, however, only welded time more firmly to place. “[I]t would appear to be as difficult to alter by edict the ideas and habits of the people in regard to local time,” a U.S. Senate report concluded in 1882, “as it would be to introduce among them novel systems of weights [and] measures.” The Senate failed to reckon with a self-sovereign power that, having “annihilated” space—a railroad-boomer verb phrase—sought dominion over time. The sun told time from Genesis to 12:01 A.M. on November 18, 1883, when the railroads dispensed with it. “The sun,” the Indianapolis Centennial commented, “is no longer to boss the job.” Fifty-five million people “must eat, sleep, and work as well as travel by railroad time. . . . The sun will be requested to rise and set by railroad time. The planets must, in the future, make their circuits by such timetables as railroad magnates arrange.”[1]

Those magnates rode the mystique of progress. The founding of the Greenwich observatory in 1848 stimulated a worldwide movement to standardize time in zones of longitude. That Greenwich promoted itself as the “prime meridian” consternated the French, who urged Paris.[2] American time chauvinists likewise objected to “John Bull’s time.” The railroads themselves only slowly came around to the idea. Rate wars undermined their will to cooperate. As competition yielded to consolidation, resistance weakened.

At an 1883 railway time convention, William F. Allen, the editor of the Traveler’s Official Guide to railways, used two maps to show railroad managers the advantages of standardizing time. One depicted the prevailing forty-nine different times in a fling of colors; the other, four broad bands, north to south, fifteen degrees of longitude apart. The old map, in the clashing hues of competition, represented “the barbarism of the past”; the new map, a consolidated rainbow, “the enlightenment we hope for in the future.”[3] The delegates left persuaded, and with cosmic presumption set out to fix time.

When Britain adopted the reformed Gregorian calendar in 1752 a mob gathered outside Parliament demanding “Give us back our eleven days!” By contrast, the railroads’ imposition of standard time on the United States occasioned anxiety but not protest. On November 17 city jewelers, the New York Times reported, “were busy answering questions from the curious, who seemed to think that the change in time would . . . create a sensation . . . some sort of disaster, the nature of which could not be exactly entertained.”[4] On the eighteenth, the master clock at Chicago’s West Side Union Depot was stopped at 12:00, waiting for the railroad-decreed noon, which arrived, via telegraph, nine minutes and thirty-two seconds later. “Have you the new time?” strangers inquired of one another. In Washington the attorney general ordered federal employees to conduct business in the old time. The railroads could not force their standard on the U.S. government. That would take an act of Congress. Popular disquiet over the issue delayed legislation until 1918, when government surrendered time to the railroads.[5]

Railroads had long since accelerated the tempo of life, and a book, American Nervousness: Its Causes and Consequences (1883), traced that condition partly to this source. The author, George Beard, introduced a new term, “neurasthenia,” to describe the “nervelessness” or “lack of nerve power” brought on by “modern civilization” in its most emotionally invasive form, the railroad. Its shrieking whistle, the historian Barbara Young Welke observes, “shattered the traditional division between public and private,” and making the train on time quickened dictatorial anxiety. Using a new word, a Cincinnati paper feared that “the longer a man is a commuter the more he grows to be a living timetable.” “Today a nervous man cannot take out his watch and look at it when the time for an appointment or train is near,” Beard asserted, “without affecting his pulse.” He listed depression, dyspepsia, inability to concentrate, uterine irritability, and impotence as symptoms of neurasthenia. The diagnosis caught on. By 1888 a magazine editor could call “neurasthenia . . . almost a household word.”

Until the 1880s, when total railroad trackage and passenger usage both doubled over the decade, the speed-up captured by watchwords like “on time” and “on the tick” and “on the clocker” had occurred gradually, and under cover of celebration. Standard time focused a pent-up ambivalence.[6] “Damn Vanderbilt’s time! We want God’s time,” one old party fleered at a railroad time consultant. Many pre-codgers felt the same way. Told that his train left at eight o’clock “standard” time, a Pennsylvania Irishman, thinking of Standard Oil yet making a railroad-resonant point, replied, “Well that settles it.” Settles what, asked the conductor? “Why, the whole of it. They’ll be gittin’ the wind next, they’ve got the time now.”[7]

Pittsburgh banned standard time until 1887. Augusta and Savannah held out until 1888. City after city balked in Ohio. When the Bellaire school board voted to adopt standard time, the city council had the board arrested.[8] The mayor of Bangor, Maine, vetoed a time-altering resolution passed by its city council. Any change “that disarms the customs of people handed down from time immemorial,” he argued, “should at least have the sanction of the State legislature.”[9]

Standardizing time challenged both nature and democracy. “The system adopted by you,” editor Allen boasted to the railroad managers at their next meeting, “now governs the daily and hourly actions of at least fifty million people.”[10]

But who elected the railroads to govern? “Today the 75th meridian is standard because the railroad kings have ordered it,” one congressman declared. “Tomorrow the railroads may make it the 76th, or the 80th.” Let the people decide, he said. Put time to a vote.

Private enterprise had done more than upend a convention rooted in millennia of observation and agreement. Standard time, the New York Herald observed, “goes beyond the public pursuits of men and enters into their private lives as part of themselves.” In his fascinating book Keeping Watch: A History of American Time, source of much of the detail above, Michael O’Malley explains: “Once individuals experienced time as a relationship between God and nature. Henceforth, under the railroad standards, men and women would measure themselves in relation to a publicly defined time based on synchronized clocks.”[11]

Already they measured distance in time, translating miles into minutes. “[T]he real distance between New York and Philadelphia,” a writer in Niles Weekly Register noted in 1848, “is just the same as it was a hundred years ago—but the relative distance is changed from seven days to seven hours.”[12]

To a Nebraska editor, the conquest of space and reordering of time offered “signal proof” that railroads were “the most potent factors of our progressive civilization.” He marveled that, “In a quarter of a century, they have made the people of the country homogeneous, breaking through the . . . provincialisms which marked separate and unmingling sections.”[13] The railroads had knit back together a broken Union—but in their time and on their terms. Those twenty-five years yielded up a new dispensation. From November 18, 1883, the phrase “corporate America” meant most of what it suggested.
The railroad pierced horizons. Just before sleep young Richard Nixon would hear the whistle of a train cutting the night, inviting him to dream. Where might those tracks lead? The yearning the whistle spoke to, the train alone could satisfy. You could go anywhere<...