Lego Company Photo
Domestically the country remains bitterly divided and the losers simply do not want to accept the results, and are turning to violence to make their points.
And not only that: in foreign relations those pesky Russians are at it again, and the Senate just doesn’t have solons of the stature of old to meet the new threat.
It seems that the only hope, the only thing people on all sides might agree on, is a vast infrastructure project.
If that sounds like déjà vu all over again, it may be because it’s not only a descriptor of the second week of the Donald J. Trump presidency, it’s also what was happening shortly after Ulysses S. Grant got reelected in 1868 and was juggling one crisis after another in early February of 1869.
Gilder Lehrman Collection
“Joining the rails at Promontory Point,” photo by Andrew Russsel, May 10, 1869
Join us on this episode of “This Day In New Haven History” to hear how the Russians were forcing their cowed neighbors, this time the Poles, to turn from the use of the western Gregorian calendar back to the old-fashioned Julian.
On the latest episode of TDNHH yours truly and my regular co-host Jason Bischoff-Wurstle of the New Haven Museum time-travel back to Washington where officials are hearing about out-of-control ex-Confederate Texans — “cutthroats, assassins, and banditti” — who threaten any northern man who goes down there and murder freed Negroes at will.
Even four years out from Appomattox the wounds of the Civil War were far from healed in the Lone Star State, and in fact Jim Crow was rapidly being established wherever Federal troops were in absentia.
Meanwhile — on another theme close to the travails of the present moment — Carl Schurtz, the German immigrant who despite having commanded Union troops at Gettysburg, was being decried as too radical and too foreign to be allowed to take his seat in the U.S. Senate, to which he had just been elected.
No wonder we turned, finally, to just about the only activity that appeared to be uniting the country then — and maybe now — the benefits of infrastructure.
The Union Pacific Railroad, one of three that was building the first coast-to-coast track for the iron horse, declared in the pages of New Haven’s weekly Palladium, “A 1000 miles of the Union Pacific Railroad are now completed.”
A couple of months later the “golden spike” would be driven at Promontory Point, Utah, marking the completion of the the project.
Not to be outdone, in the first week of February Elm City railroaders also hailed the driving of the first pile for an ambitious new railroad spur, about 2,000 feet long ‚to extend from the round house in the main rail yard on Union Street all the way out into the harbor, essentially on a new wharf paralleling Long Wharf.
Now goods could be off-loaded from ships directly onto the railroad cars. Infrastructure, infrastructure. Jobs, Jobs!
“The work will be pushed forward with vigor,” declared the Palladium’s reporter.
To catch how the wheel of time seems always to be repeating itself on WNHH’s “This Day In New Haven History” — and also to hear how President Lincoln’s widow Mary finally, after humiliating appeals, was awarded her $5,000 pension — click on the audio file above or listen on SoundCloud or iTunes.
