Lets start a new Transcon with all the money that is floating around like Hedge Funds and Crowd Funding.

[schlimm]

Wizlish

 

 

Victrola1

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/general-article/tcrr-scandal/

 

 

" ... young muckraker Charles Francis Adams"???

HOW many years before there was actually 'muckraking'???

I hate it when the wrong kind of amateurs try to do revisionist or supposedly topical history.

 

One wonders which Charles Francis Adams he referred to?  Senior was a distinguished federal diplomat and politician, son of John Quincy Adams.  CFA Jr. was president of the UP for six years. Son Henry was a fine historian, hardly a 'muckraker' by any stretch of the imagination.  

[Wizlish]

He was referring to that Charles Francis Adams as if he were an inflammatory journalist - perhaps having been exposed to his "Notes on Railway Accidents" (with its eerie description of oil-car accidents).

Enough to make people who care about historiography tear their hair - if any is left from all the other things happening to objective truth these days.  [/rant]

[wanswheel]

The Nation, March 25, 1915

CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS.

It has often been said that the Adams family is America's chief contribution to the doctrine of hereditary genius. High ability persistent in a direct line for four generations is rare anywhere: in the United States we have no other instance of it so notable. And if a man like Galton had traced this intellectual inheritance in detail, he would not have failed to note the way in which the special quality of the mind descended from father to son. It has always had, so to speak, a timbre of its own. In the first Adams as in the one whose death has just made the country poorer, there were traits that marked their possessor from other men. To characterize them accurately would be difficult, but everybody knows what they suggest—a certain austerity joined with great personal independence, a gift of incisive speech, breadth of mind accompanied by intense convictions, always a keen sense of public duty, with a Brutus-like firmness in insisting that truth and law have their course.

A true-bred Adams in all these ways, Charles Francis Adams had an outthrusting personality all his own. For something like forty years he had been a kind of American Socrates, in the sense of being a gad-fly to thought, and of continually driving his fellows to search the foundations of their comfortable opinions. He discharged this function over a wide range of human activities. No one more often stirred more people to exasperation and even resentment, but he cared not for that so long as he stirred them to inquire and to think. His “Chapters on Erie” has been called the first piece of muckraking in the United States. It is a term which he would have abhorred, but in the effect he took a grim satisfaction. To shock his countrymen out of complacent but ill-founded beliefs, to compel them to go to the historical sources, to see the facts clear, and then to think straight about them—this was the aim or, at all events, the result of his work in many lines.

His famous attack on the courses of study at Harvard, with his blunt arraignment of the illiterate undergraduates, was not sustained, on the whole, in the opinion of the judicious, but it produced a mighty fluttering in the college dove-cotes and doubtless led to reforms. But Charles Francis Adams was always seeking to go behind the conventional thing to the real thing, always taking traditional historians by the ear and making them study the documentary evidence. His researches into the actual social and moral conditions of Puritan New England opened and pained many eyes. And much other of his historical writing compelled revision of accepted judgments. His brief Life of his father—a larger work, we understand, is some day to be published—set the whole matter of the relations between England and the United States during our Civil War completely straight. One can imagine the quiet pleasure which he took in publishing the correspondence between his father and Lord Palmerston, over the New Orleans affair, in which the impetuous old English statesman, who had put himself in the wrong, got such a right Adams douche. On our whole Civil War period Mr. Adams thought and wrote much, as witness his noteworthy lectures at Oxford, in 1913; and was working, it is known, upon new material which he had gathered on that subject.

Few nowadays knew that Charles Francis Adams was a soldier. Yet he served all through the Civil War and won the brevet rank of brigadier-general. But this title he at once laid aside, as did Carl Schurs when the war was over, as if wishing to emphasize his devotion to the peaceful duties of a citizen. These he discharged with a vigor as uncompromising and a patriotism as shining as if he had been leading a storming party against the enemy's fortifications. His military experience stood him in good stead in the performance of one civic duty—his stout and scornful opposition to the abuses and frauds of our pension system. Equally clear-eyed and plainspoken was he regarding the monstrosities of the protective tariff. The terseness and pungency with which he characterized the rush of the tariff-fed swine to the trough must have left a sting under the hide of even the most hardened and greedy of them.

One outstanding and delightful quality of Mr. Adams, which he displayed to the full in the last decade of his long life, was his open-mindedness and his intellectual curiosity. He never became petrified into a severe dogmatist. It might be said of him, as it has been of another, “He died learning.” About him in Washington it was his pleasure to gather young men—students, scientists, even newspaper men—with fresh points of view. No one was so welcome at his table as the man who could enlighten him or quicken his interest in favorite themes. He was intensely alive to all that was going on in the world. Needless to say, the European war set all his fibres tingling. His general position of hostility to the Germans was made known in letters to the English press. These were naturally more restrained than his personal talk and correspondence. From a private letter written by him no longer ago than March 13, the following characteristic passage may be taken; it was Mr. Adams's comment upon the assertion that Americans do not understand Germany because they “cannot think like Germans”:

Suspecting this in my own case, I have of late confined my reading on this topic exclusively to German sources. I have been taking a course in Nietzsche and Treitschke, as also in the German “Denkschrift,” illumined by excerpts from the German papers in this country and the official utterances of Chancellor von Bethmann-Hollweg. The result has been most disastrous. It has utterly destroyed my capacity for judicial consideration. I can only say that if what I find in those sources is the capacity to think Germanically, I would rather cease thinking at all. It is the absolute negation of everything which has in the past tended to the elevation of mankind, and the installation in place thereof of a system of thorough dishonesty, emphasized by brutal stupidity. There is a low cunning about it, too, which is to me in the last degree repulsive.

[schlimm]

"Chapters on the Erie" was a fine work of history, hardly muchraking, unless Pollyannas think anything that gives a factual account of both triumphs and corruption of a railroad is such.

[wanswheel]

"What this Credit Mobilier is seems to be as much shrouded in mystery as is the fate of the missing $180,000,000 of capital stock of these roads."

Adams was 33 when “Railroad Inflation” was published, containing the quote attributed to a young muckraker by PBS, and he was 70 before Theodore Roosevelt finally coined the word.

https://archive.org/stream/northamreview108miscrich#page/130/mode/2up

http://www.theodore-roosevelt.com/images/research/speeches/trmuckspeech.pdf

Interestingly, at the time Adams wrote the Railroad Inflation article, he was a railroad commissioner of Massachusetts.

[trackrat888]

How did the $%^% we get here? However I am learning something new abot RRing that I never knew before!