Word: railroads
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Everyone knew the big day had come. The excitement even awakened the Male-mutes that snooze on the boardwalk before the town's false-front stores. There was open water under the big railroad bridge half a mile upstream; that meant the Tanana River jam was breaking...
...cushion the new line against pressure from the west, the Japanese seemed also to be building a defense belt beyond the railroad. There was a worse, though still remote possibility: from Loyang, the Japanese might try to push on westward through the famed Tungkwan mountain pass, spill into the loess plain of Shansi. Then even China's truck roads to Russia would be in peril...
...longer routing would have diverted the freight to a section of the Southern Railway built years ago under a Government land grant. Under land grants made in 1850 and thereafter, the Government subsidized southern and western railroad-building by giving builders a total of 132 million acres of land-7,500 acres of adjacent land for every mile of track they laid. In return the railroads granted the Government, in perpetuity, a 50% reduction in rates for transportation of military supplies and troops...
...free land financed the building of 79 railroads. The railroad barons mortgaged the land, sent agents abroad to lure swarms of emigrants to the west. Jay Cooke's Northern Pacific publicity agent blanketed Europe with brochures describing the Northwest as "a vast wilderness waiting like a rich heiress to be appropriated and enjoyed." Adventurous easterners, meantime, found occasional diversion on the long trip west by shooting buffalo...
Finger in the Machinery. When trust-busting Roosevelt I appointed Holmes to the U.S. Supreme Court, Holmes at once disappointed T.R. by supporting Railroad Tycoons James J. Hill and J. P. Morgan in an antitrust case. Said the new Justice in his first Supreme Court dissent: "Great cases like hard cases make bad law. For great cases are called great not by reason of their real importance in shaping the law of the future but because of some accident of immediate overwhelming interest which appeals to the feelings and distorts the judgment. ... We must read the words before...