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Boats, Trains, Cars &the Popular EyeAuthor(s): Wayne FranklinSource: The North American Review, Vol. 273, No. 1 (Mar., 1988), pp. 15-19Published by: University of Northern IowaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25124938 .

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Boats, Trains, Cars

& the Popular Eye WAYNE FRANKLIN

A perspective of its own, vanishing speedily into the distance, the road

unified all space by focusing it in the motorist's eye.

it's hard to imagine P.T. Barnum, America's great show

man, in retreat. Certainly he scattered the world with

things any ordinary person ought to have found fearsome, and the very reason Barnum could persist in his hoaxes and humbugs was that he embodied the salient go aheadism of nineteenth-century America. He never

looked back. This is why it is curious to find him as timid as his auto

biography claims he was during a certain train ride in the Midwest. Due in Fort Wayne for a speaking engagement

in 1866, Barnum found himself stranded in Toledo long after all the regular connecting trains had left. So tight was his lecture calendar for the summer that Barnum knew he wouldn't be able to reschedule the Fort Wayne appearance for at least two months, and he was desperate to avoid disappointing his audience. Going to the superin tendent of the Toledo, Wabash and Western Railway, a

Mr. Andrews, Barnum tried to arrange for the rental of a

special engine and car. At first, Andrews refused Barnum's request: there were no extra locomotives avail

able, and besides, the tracks to Fort Wayne would be filled with freights all night. Once he realized who he was

talking to, however, Andrews quickly proposed that for Mr. Barnum, of course, one of the freights just about to

leave the station in Toledo could simply be comman

deered, the others warned aside, and the showman

allowed to dash westward. With typical bravura, Barnum had offered to "ride to

Fort Wayne astride of the engine, or boxed up and stowed

away in a freight car"?as always, he was thinking of the show he might make at the end of the line?but as the train was readied, more agreeable accomodations were

arranged. All but two of its cars were removed and Barnum was escorted to the caboose, where he was to

ride. Once ensconced in the caboose at the Toledo sta

tion, Barnum vowed that he felt "as happy as a king." "In

fact," he went on, "I enjoyed a new sensation of imperial superiority, in that I was 'monarch of all I surveyed,' emperor of my own train, switching all other trains from the main track, and making conductors all along the line

wonder what grand mogul had thus taken complete pos session and control of the road." At the first stop along the

route, the mogul in question wired ahead to Fort Wayne to assure the lecture committee of his timely?if unor

thodox?arrival, and dispatched an answer to Mr. Ander

son's query, received at the same station, regarding Barnum's comfort in the caboose: "The springs of the caboose are softer than down; I am as happy as a clam at

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high water; I am being carried towards Fort Wayne in a

style never surpassed by Caesar's triumphal march into

Rome." Never one to miss a chance for hyperbole, es

pecially in connection with his own ventures, Barnum

ended with a loud "Hurrah for the Toledo and Wabash

Railroad!"

We forget how radically the landscape of the United

States (and of Europe, and eventually the third world) was altered by the coming of the iron horse. A mere forty

years earlier, for instance, Barnum's whole venture?his

tightly scheduled, distance-defying lecture tour of the

continent's vast center?would simply have been impos

sible. Important innovations had taken place in the trav

eler's world forty years earlier, but that world was still a

tedious one by modern standards. The Erie Canal, which was just opening in New York State in the mid 1820s, when Barnum was a teenager, allowed for the economical

movement of people and goods between the seacoast and

the Great Lakes, but at that time, or earlier, all travel was

excruciatingly slow. A canal boat, the radical newspaper man Horace Greeley recalled after railroad travel had

become common, was famous for its "cent and a half a

mile, mile and a half an hour" rate and pace. The days

passed "slowly yet smoothly," Greeley remembered,

being ". . . enlivened by various sedentary games." But

the nights were "tedious beyond any sleeping-car experi ence." Covering a mere thirty-six miles a day at the rate

Greeley indicated, a canal boat would take several days before delivering its cargo, human or not, in Buffalo. The

advertised schedule for the Philadelphia to Pittsburgh route of the Pennsylvania Canal was a fast four days for

the full 394 miles, although it customarily took longer to

get through the 174 locks and to ascend and descend the

unusual rail section over the highest peaks of the Alle

ghenies. Canal travel, in short, owed its great attraction

not to its speed but to its low cost, especially for the move

ment of freight, since it greatly reduced the expense of

hauling manufactured goods west and farm produce east.

Henry David Thoreau, on his rowboat excursion with his

brother John in 1839, encountered upstream-bound canal

boats?these were sail and pole powered, however?so

slow that the brothers overtook them as they rowed their

own way upstream on the rather swift Merrimack. Of

these vessels in general, Thoreau noted that "With their

broad sails set, they moved slowly up the stream in the

sluggish and fitful breeze, like one-winged antedeluvian

birds, and as if impelled by some mysterious counter

current."

The pace on rivers like the Merrimack, or on the canals proper, was that of a pedestrian. The landscape

drifted by, perhaps as fast as four miles per hour, all of it

readily visible, not blurred, as tangible as the world which

might surround a fieldworker or a peddler in the pre modern world. With the coming of steamboats on the rivers and lakes of America, the landscape began to speed up?and to get noisy. The canal boat, of course, was a

relatively silent entity?perhaps made raucous by its sometimes crowded passengers, but not mechanically intrusive. The steamboat, however, began to move the

American traveler more quickly through the countryside, and began as well to cover the natural sounds of the land

scape with its clatter, and to blanket the scene with smoke. Still, the speeds were generally modest (certainly no faster than a quick team pulling a buggy) and the space of water which set the steamboat off from the shore

pushed the landscape back far enough from the viewer that it rarely blurred as the vessel passed upstream or

down. The canons of the painterly tradition, in other

words, were still appropriate to this first stage of mecha nized travel: one might look toward the shore and under stand what was to be seen there in completely prein dustrial terms. No new aesthetic was needed. Traditional

landscape assumed, as a radical principle, a viewer at

rest?perspective as a device, after all, organizes space

according to one set point of view. Early mechanized travel did not overcome the inertia of this arrangement, even though it had begun to push against such restraints.

Never found on railroads, the

dramatic vertical climb became

a popular attraction of the high

way, a kind of rollercoaster ride

a traveler could boast about

once the radiator had cooled

down and the clutch was fixed.

' l#oit&9 Up ?ter* JH.

?AYS MU. *10fU*6 HI ti. its?rr. _ ntsrr.

U* ??4 DOWN $ OVit THt tUJf ?DG? J?

MOUNTAINS *

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WAYNE FRANKLIN

Enter the train in general, and Barnum's train in particu lar. The very first trains hardly improved the typical speed

of horse or canal travel. But quite soon the train was going at a rate three times that of the old stagecoaches, shrink

ing distance dramatically. By mid-century, railroad

speeds were approaching what we might think of as a dis

tinctly modern pace. And in speeding up the process of travel the trains both shrank the landscape and distorted it. Visually, the landscape now consisted of several

roughly-dissociated planes seen sideways from the lateral windows of the passenger cars. First is the completely blurred closeup space, extending from the ties and ballast

immediately outside and below the window to the em

bankments alongside the tracks, the telegraph poles, the

brush, and any nearby buildings. The train's movement is so fast that little in this plane can be discerned: it is all

seen, but not truly perceived', colors predominate over

forms, orientations are twisted out of true, objects

replace, rather than truly flow into each other. The sec

ond plane consists of a space in the middle distance, ex

tending from several hundred feet to perhaps a mile, de

pending on speed and on the terrain in question. Within this plane there is a curious rotating effect, as if the land seen at any one moment is circulating around a point in the farther distance; the lines of perspective seem to

bend, as it were, as one proceeds. Only beyond this middle distance, along the horizon and in the areas this side of it where objects stop their rush, do we locate again the illusion of that world which predates the age of

speed?that world where the rail passenger can once

more regain the painterly landscape. A great deal of commentary from the last century

treats the effect produced on eye and mind by this multi

planar acceleration of travel. Wolfgang Schivelbusch's wonderful book, The Railway Journey, gathers good sam

ples of it, and I would like to cite some of those, adding to

Schivelbusch's finds others I have located in various sources. For example, we read in Schivelbusch how

George Stephenson, the greatest railroad figure in 19th

century Britain, testified at a Parliamentary hearing into

railway safety in 1841 that an engineer's ability to detect

upcoming obstacles depended on his line-of-sight. "If his attention is drawn to any object before he arrives at the

place," Stephenson noted, "he may have a pretty correct

view of it; but if he only turns himself round as he is pass

ing, he will see it very imperfectly." Four years earlier, Victor Hugo had caught precisely the latter problem: "The flowers by the side of the road," he wrote in a letter

describing the passenger's lateral view from a train, "are no longer flowers but flecks, or rather streaks, of red or

white; there are no longer any points, everything becomes a streak; the grainfields are great shocks of

yellow hair; fields of alfalfa, long green tresses; the towns, the steeples, and the trees perform a crazy mingling dance on the horizon; from time to time, a shadow, a shape, a

spectre appears and disappears with lightning speed behind the window ..." And the art historian Jacob Burckhardt, writing in 1840, likewise calls attention to

the fact that "It is no longer possible to really distinguish the objects closest to one?trees, shacks, and such: as

soon as one turns to take a look at them, they already are

long gone." So by 1840, long before trains reached any thing like their modern acceleration, the perceptual revo

lution they represented was being fully noted. One feels the impressionist aesthetic taking shape already in such comments: objects are dissolving, the eye is under con

tinual stress, the fact of perception is becoming dramat

ically relativistic. So serious were these effects thought to be in some

circles at the time that a British medical journal in 1867, cited by Schivelbusch, worried about the fatigue rail travel might induce. "The rapidity and variety of the im

pressions necessarily fatigue both the eye and the brain," it warned. "The constantly varying distance at which the

objects are placed involves an incessant shifting of the

adaptive apparatus by which they are focused upon the retina: and the mental effort by which the brain takes

cognizance of them is scarcely less productive of cerebral wear [merely] because it is unconscious. ..." The aes

thetician John Ruskin noted the corollary of this analysis: namely, that nervous excitation results in boredom?"all

travelling," he declared, "becomes dull in exact propor tion to its rapidity." If the eye and mind were over

whelmed with impressions, they responded first with

frenzy, then disinterest. The traveler's world lost its

coherence; it also lost its emotional integrity and affective

appeal. As Schivelbusch notes, those travelers old enough to have known the age of pre-industrial travel often showed an incapacity to adjust to the demands of indus trial movement, and exhibited a corresponding despair over its dulling assault on their senses.

Ralph Waldo Emerson praised Thoreau and his brother in 1839 for having fronted the world directly in their river voyage, not "getting

. . . into a railroad-car

where they have not even the activity of holding the

reins," but rather launching forth in a boat they had built with their own hands. Emerson himself, riding a train in

1843, spoke of the "dreamlike travelling on the railroad." "The towns which I pass between Philadelphia and New

York," he said, "make no distinct impression. They are like pictures on a wall." Emerson admitted in the same

year that his fellow citizens found the railroad, which was "but a toy coach the other day," as familiar and comfort

able as "the cradle in which they were born." And again in that same year of 1843 he saw the laborers who were at

work on the rails as grand figures: "men, manlike em

ployed," fit subjects in fact for heroic sculpture. Still, his own response to the rails as a domain for travel was not to

feel at home with them or to see along them the pos

sibility of great art, and his diversion was not to look out the window at the "dreamlike" picture at all, but rather to immerse himself in books?French novels, he ad

mitted?as the dream sped past.

The French novelist Gustave Flaubert, on the other

hand, read neither the fiction of his compatriots nor the

essays of the American Emerson while aboard. "I get so bored on the train that I am about to howl with tedium after five minutes of it," he complained in 1864, adding that he stayed up all night before a trip in order to exhaust himself and thus be able to sleep through it. Just how

perverse that procedure was, a moment's reflection will

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suggest: here was a piece of travel, an adventure as it

might have been in the old days before machines, re

duced to an annoyance. Flying through space with great

speed, one took flight from the flight itself. Not even the

greatest speed conveyed one fast enough through such a

trial.

Yet there was, Schivelbusch argues, a newer eye, one

eager to leave traditional travel behind and to revel instead precisely in the speed of the new machines. A

signal example of this is offered by the American land

scape gardener Frederick Law Olmsted during his visit to

England in 1850. Olmsted told of how he left the ship in

Liverpool and?though intending to walk about the

country?decided to complete the first leg of his journey by rail. As the train sped away from that gray city,

Olmsted found its passage shouldered for long stretches on either side by high but green embankments. Having left America in a dun April coat, and having seen little

verdure on the passage over or in Liverpool, Olmsted

responded powerfully to this slanted wall of color. But he

responded even more strongly to the vistas opened up momentarily as the train sped past breaks in the embank ments:

Soon the road ran through a deep cutting, with only

occasionally such depressions of its green-sodded bank, that

we could, through the dusty glass, get glimpses of the coun

try. In successive gleams: A market-garden, with rows of early cabbages, and let

tuce, and peas;? Over a hedge, a nice, new stone villa, with the gardener

shoving up the sashes of the conservatory, and the maids

tearing clothes from the drying-lines;? A bridge, with children shouting and waving hats;? A field of wheat, in drills as precisely straight, and in earth

as clean and finely tilled, as if it were a garden plant;? A bit of broad pasture, with colts and cows turning tail to

the squall; long hills in the back, with some trees and a

steeple rising beyond them;? Another few minutes of green bank;?

A jerk?a stop. A gruff shout:

"BROMBRO!" [Bromborough]

This catalog of "successive gleams" represents the rise of an industrial eye as early as 1850, an eye and a prose style to match. Are we not already edging toward the cinema,

whose own "successive gleams" soon will create a series

of pictures which?like the images framed by the train window?are said to "move"? To be sure, once

Olmsted's train stops he is quite happy to leave the

lurching discontinuities of a modern style for the more

restful order of the older one. Hence he went outside the station where his train left him and for the first time encountered the richness of an English rural spring, something the glimpses from the passenger car had not

really prepared him for:

There we were right in the midst of it! The country?and such a country!?green, dripping, glistening, gorgeous! We

stood dumb-stricken by its loveliness, as blooming May?in an English lane; with hedges, English hedges, hawthorn

hedges, all in blossom; homely old farm-houses, quaint sta

bles, and haystacks; the old church spire over the distant

trees; the mild sun beaming through the watery atmosphere, and all so quiet?the only sounds the hum of bees, and the

crisp grass-tearing of a silken-skinned, real (unimported) Hereford cow, over the hedge.

Here is the England not of J.M.W. Turner but rather of

Constable, an England of extraordinary order. We may note in passing that this order encircles the viewer rather than passes him by; that it likewise implies a fixed view

point rather than a moving one; that its horizon (where the

spire appears over the trees) is a point of reference rather than a spot of temporary convergence; that the landscape is devoid of the least industrial hint; finally, that it is

composed of stolid details rather than the vignettes of Olmsted's earlier "successive gleams." In short, it is what

Peter Laslett has called "the world we have lost"?lost in substance due to the industrial revolution, but lost also in

Minimally engineered, with lit

tle attention given to obvious

hazards, the early auto road

twisted and dipped as it roared

through the land.

IyY '~? t~9

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WAYNE FRANKLIN

perceptual terms, lost because the eye proper to its recep

tion has been lost. In Olmsted's neat counterpointing of the fluid and the fixed landscapes he discovered in rural

England we may find implicitly inscribed the perceptual crisis of the modern era.

This was a crisis obviously associated with the railroad. Yet the railroad was in many ways merely a transition in an even more radical transformation. The passenger, after

all, confronted the speeding railscape only laterally: speed was not focused on the traveler, but rather flowed

past to the side, in what might be called the eye's peripheral zone. Popular views of the railscape in the last

century in fact appropriate very easily the canons of the

painterly tradition, eliding speed and giving the viewer instead a kind of composed middle and far distance. Or

they show us the train as an element in a landscape viewed not from within the car, but rather from the village street, the farmstead, or the wagon road. As a matter of

daily fact, the train represented speed less as a bodily or a

perceptual experience than as a passing phenomenon: the train moving across a fixed landscape in which the

viewer's own position also was fixed.

How different has been the case of the automobile, which has spawned what the National Park ranger and naturalist Edward Abbey has called the "industrial tour

ist." Abbey uses that term to denounce the auto-fixated

traveler who roars through the Western national parks, unable to climb out of the metal box and walk the earth? homo automobilius, as we might say. But the general Amer

ican response to the auto was less moralistic: after all, the

car, Warren James Belasco has reminded us in Americans on the Road, was viewed as a force which liberated the traveler from the corporate control of the railroad com

panies, and so it opened the American landscape to the citizens in a new, exciting way. Especially in its more

rural forms, the American road thus seemed a throwback to older, quieter times, and the fantasy that the roadscape

was interchangeable with the landscape of the horse age was very strong indeed in America in the first three dec ades of this century. This fantasy produced, among other

substantial markers on the land, gas stations which look like quaint cottages, overnight lodgings which look like

peasant villages, and any number of supposed "Coaching Inns" and country tearooms.

There were tremendous ironies here: for the auto

mobile was an industrial advance over the train just as the train was an industrial advance over the steamboat and the

canal. The auto, in fact, more radically altered the Ameri can eye than any previous revolution in transport had done. Travelers were no longer perpendicular to speed;

the landscape no longer sped by laterally, beyond a win dow which might be ignored or even covered over as one went on. Instead, the speeding landscape aimed itself

inevitably at the driver's eye, converging there with a

kind of dynamic that in the railscape was known only to

the engineer. We tend to forget that the car, especially in the United States, was the first complex machine that the

ordinary citizen was given control over?a fact of special

importance when we also recall that the car could make its

way, willy-nilly almost, over the face of the land. While

the necessity for an expensive, highly engineered road

bed for the train vastly limited the train's effect on the

landscape, and the necessity for a specially-trained class

of engineers placed a visual and mechanical and social buffer between the average traveler and the world he or

she was speeding through, with the coming of the car even a muddy cowpath might be attempted (if not negoti ated) and virtually anybody could take control.

These changes showed themselves more markedly in the popular arts than in the academic ones. The pho tographs and engravings associated with rail travel easily took over the fixed aesthetics of heroic landscape paint ing, but those depicting the early roadscape show a much

more lively, as it might be kinetic, sense of space. The road quickly became a realm of personal adventure and

physical challenge, a landscape spreading out with con siderable dynamism in front of the windshield. It is not seen perpendicularly, nor reduced to a mere line cutting across the land, as typically the railroad was: it is instead a

dramatic embodiment of perspective, angling off, rising and falling, twisting, inviting movement. Much of the

challenge here may seem tame to eyes growing accus

tomed to eight lanes of roaring traffic, backfires replaced now with the percussion of handguns. But a democratiza

tion of motion was taking place as the nation switched from the rails to the roads, and as industrial tourists?

while still seated as the land sped by?at least had some

urgent need to keep their eyes alertly focused out through the frame of the windshield.

And there was a kind of horror associated with this shift to the most personal of all machines, this most

intensely personal form of rapid transport. A return to P. T. Barnum will help suggest the dimensions of that horror. Had he lived into the age of the modern auto

mobile and the improved road, Barnum of course would have been able to make it to Fort Wayne?probably in a

rented stretch limo?without the heroics of Mr. Anderson and the Toledo, Wabash, and Western. There would have been, so to speak, nothing to it. And yet Barnum on

his special freight sensed exactly what the car might demand in return for its convenience, exactly how it

might transform the landscape?or rather our experience of the landscape?even as it liberated us from the

rigidities of corporate travel. After Barnum sent his tele

grams and came back out onto the platform, the engineer on his train invited him to ride for a time in the loco motive. The experience quickly transformed the "grand mogul" of the previous run into a cowering, disoriented man. "It fairly made my head swim," Barnum admitted.

"I could not reconcile my mind to the idea that there was no danger; and intimating to the engineer that it would be a relief to get where I could not see ahead, I was permitted to crawl back to the caboose." If the train demanded a new eye, one capable of catching those "successive

gleams" which Olmsted found flitting by in England, then the auto was to demand of the modern tourist?of all

of us, in point of fact?the ability to take the frontal assault of the land, to feel the lines of perspective drilling at our eyes with unrelenting speed. The world is no

longer a picture, and there is no longer a caboose to crawl

back to. D

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