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IkNOwSTuff
Id say a big part of where it went wrong is the strength of the propaganda you guys are constantly subjected too.
I get the impression the majority of Americans would readily believe the 1st paragraph from the OP but most would be disgusted that you even dare utter the 2nd paragraph.
Blind patriotism, America can do no wrong and your either with us or against us.
MrMaybeNot
George Carlin - "When you're born you get a ticket to the freak show. When you're born in America, you get a front row seat." Sums up my thinking pretty good.
As creatures of government and of taxpayer-funded schemes to subsidize the railroads and their wealthy owners through cheap loans and outright subsidies, the railroads quickly became scandal-ridden, wasteful, and contemptuous of the public they were supposed to serve.
...
In general, however, the economy of the West coast turned to the more efficient and more competitive sea carriers. By the 1860s, the sea carriers were already taking advantage of well-developed trade with the Panama Railroad across Central America, completed in 1855, that was providing true transcontinental shipping at a much lower price over a much shorter overland route.
In spite of massive subsidies and free lands equal in size to New England, the lack of overland trade made it difficult for the railroads to turn a profit, and after a series of bankruptcies, bailouts, and other schemes, railroad owners like Leland Stanford, Thomas Durant, and Jay Gould managed to make a lot of money manipulating federal largesse, but many others, including families and ranchers who followed the flood of money and capital west during the boom, but who found themselves as paupers on the western plains after the bust, were ruined by the railroad’s bubble economy.
With the signing of the first bill to create the transcontinentals in 1862, it was already known that there was no economic justification for the railroads, which is why they were, according to White, “justified on the grounds of military necessity.” Lacking any privately funded-entrepreneurs willing to build a road through more than a thousand miles of territory uninhabited by whites, the 1862 Railroad Act created the Union Pacific, making it the first federally-created corporation since the Bank of the United States. Legal and economic shenanigans ensued, and it would not be until the 1890s that anyone built a privately-funded railroad, the Great Northern Railway.
pheonix358
I was luckier. I was born in Australia.
P