INDUSTRIALIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS 159
transcontinental railroads, it seems, few had asked
whether they were actually necessary. To add insult
to injury, the railroads had become so powerful that
they were too big to fail: their economic troubles and
misdeeds fueled nationwide financial convulsions
in 1873 and 1893. By 1884 the Northern Pacific’s
increasing debt and falling stock price forced Villard
out, yet the company continued to grow while the
public bore the costs of its losses.
All of this monopolistic behavior generated
a backlash. In 1877 a series of wage cuts on the
Baltimore & Ohio Railroad prompted a strike by
workers that spread along its own route and then to
other lines. In Washington Territory, anger focused on
the Northern Pacific’s ongoing control of 7.7 million
acres. Congress had the authority to confiscate the
land, which made this a powerful political issue for
Democrats given that Republicans had largely been
responsible for authorizing the original grants. In
broadsides such as this, Democrats portrayed a
cozy relationship between Republicans and these
“soulless corporations.” The map itself is designed to
stoke the anger of voters by dramatically highlighting
the vast areas held in reserve by the NP, even as its
promised route remained unbuilt.
The Democrats used the broadside to charge
the Republicans with recklessly squandering the
public domain. Nowhere in the country, they argued,
did “the ingenious, crooked, and devious railroad
lines” control so much as in Washington Territory.
In its 1884 platform the Democratic Party called for
all lands that had been “improvidently granted to
railroad corporations” by the Republican Party to be
restored to the public domain. Though both parties
courted the railroads, the political tactic paid off for
the Democrats: for the first time in nearly thirty years,
they won the White House, and by 1890 Congress had
reclaimed 28 million acres in the West.