Book Review

This book provides important insight into the operation of railroads in the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century South. Many studies have explored the development of the railroad's internal managerial hierarchy and its impact on wider society, including labor, technology, culture, and constitutional law. William G. Thomas throws new light on those themes by focusing on the role of lawyers working for and against the railroads, building up and tearing down the slowly industrializing region over two generations following the Civil War. He works out from concrete issues—the construction of corporate law departments, controversies over the free pass, accident law, political lobbying, and removal of litigation to federal court—to explain connections with Populism and Progressive reform, particularly the enactment of the Federal Employers' Liability Act (FELA) of 1906 and the rise of state and federal railroad regulatory commissions. He interweaves all that with the story of the railroad's impact on the legal profession itself, especially the division between corporate railroad defense lawyers and their opponents, the plaintiffs' attorneys litigating personal injury cases. The book is sensitive to the South's predominantly small-town life, its influence on state politics, and the constraints a changing federal system imposed on both. Thomas has consulted the records of many railroads, though most of his examples are drawn from a handful of them.

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