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  • The People of Western Union
  • Susie J. Pak (bio)
Joshua D. Wolff. Western Union and the Creation of the American Corporate Order, 1845–1893. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 318 pp. Footnotes, list of manuscript collections, and index. $90.00.

Joshua Wolff's Western Union and the Creation of the American Corporate Order, 1848–1893, is a well-written, engaging business history of one of America's most important corporations. The book follows the story of the controversial firm from its founding in Rochester, New York, through its ascendance to become one of the great conglomerates of the Gilded Age. Based on archival research and building on an extensive literature by Robert Luther Thompson, Richard John, and others, Wolff's text studies the ways in which the history of Western Union illuminates key economic and political issues of the nineteenth century, from the debate over monopoly to controversies over ownership rights, to labor-capital relations.

Unlike Menahem Blondheim's News Over the Wires (1994), Richard John's Network Nation (2010), and David Hochfelder's The Telegraph in America (2012), which all include a study of Western Union, Wolff's text is not a history of communications or a history of the technology of the telegraph.1 It is essentially a biography of the firm, more similar to Thompson's treatment of the corporation in his 1947 text, Wiring a Continent—which is not to say that it is therefore limited in its scope.2 Like Thompson, who argued that the history of Western Union was a story of the nation's steady march towards monopoly, Wolff seeks to find the greater analytic meaning in the history of the firm with regards to the development of American capitalism. In this way, his book, which extends beyond the period of Thompson's text, also speaks to the work of Richard John, who has argued for the theoretical reinterpretation of the history of the telegraph in the broader context of U.S. political economy.

Chapter one studies the early history of Western Union in the context of a dysfunctional telegraph industry, the intense competition over patent rights, the chronic lack of capital, and the conflicts among the early pioneers. The second chapter describes the effect of the Civil War on the telegraph industry and highlights the central role of the state in the debate over public versus private interests. It also discusses how the state was an important party to [End Page 245] the story of the firm and to the telegraph more generally, particularly when it became a major threat to private telegraph companies. Chapter three looks at the debate over monopoly in the context of party politics in the period after the Telegraph Act of 1866, “the first federal law regulating telecommunications” (p. 85). Organized around the general theme of inefficiency, chapter four describes the firm's challenges within the context of the history of standardization. It also includes a study of labor relations in the telegraph industry. Chapter five continues the discussion about the firm's relationship to a growing state power and includes the arrival of Cornelius Vanderbilt as a major stockholder. The next chapter follows Vanderbilt's consolidation of the telegraph industry and introduces the figures of Jay Gould and Thomas Edison. Chapter seven looks at Western Union after Gould's complete takeover of the firm and the continuing conflict over patent rights. The conclusion looks at the firm in the period after Gould's death in 1892, a time that was marked by the presence of labor conflicts.

Though Western Union includes some of the better-known and more colorful characters of the Gilded Age—such as Gould, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, and Edison—the story of the firm is primarily carried by lesser-known historical figures like Amos Kendall, who was telegraph inventor Samuel Morse's agent; Henry O'Rielly, another telegraph entrepreneur; or Western Union presidents Jeptha Wade, Hiram Silbey, William Orton, and Norvin Green. The dramatic narrative of the conflicts between these men is one of the most engaging aspects of the book. It is quite interesting that Wolff writes “the rise of the American telegraph industry . . . is first and foremost a story of the...

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