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Image and Reality: The Railway Corporate-State Metaphor*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 June 2012

James A. Ward
James A. Ward
Affiliation:
Professor Of History, University of Tennessee, Chattanooga
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Abstract

Of the innumerable types of business enterprise that flourished in nineteenth-century America, none was more important than the railroads. For the first time in the national experience they provided relatively cheap, dependable transportation into the heartland and created a national market that prompted the growth of so many other aspects of national endeavor. As railroad leaders built what became America's first big business, they also developed a new self-image and with it a vocabulary drawn from their conception of competition as war. It is this new self-image and the lexicon that went with it that form the subject of this article by James A. Ward.

Type
Research Article
Information
Business History Review , Volume 55 , Issue 4 , Winter 1981 , pp. 491 - 516
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 1981

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