a poem found during the election of 2020
In 1879, at the height of America’s Gilded Age, Charles Francis Adams, Jr.—brother to Henry Adams, grandson of John Quincy Adams, great-grandson of John Adams—published his book Notes on Railroad Accidents with G.P Putnam’s Sons. In November of 2020, during an election held as national leadership failed and a pandemic spiraled out of control, I came across Adams’ book and found this poem among its pages.
A railroad in quiet times
is like a ship in steady weather
Almost anyone can manage
the one or sail the other
It is the sudden stress
which reveals the undeveloped
strength or the hidden weakness
The disaster was due not
to any single cause
but to a combination of causes
Engineers and conductors were left
to grope their way along as best
they could, when in doubt they were
to stand stock still. The trains stood
for hours in stupid obedience to a stupid rule
The accidents, invariably, belong
to one class: insufficient control
of those in charge over its momentum
of such unheard rapidity. It is
the most noticeable fact in the history
of railroad development that controlling
speed by no means kept pace
with the increased rate of speed
Each conductor or station-master
had to look out for himself
Writers and orators seem always
to forget that, next to the immediate
sufferers and their families, the unfortunate
officials are the greatest losers
by railroad accidents. For them,
bread is involved
With railroads in America,
as everywhere in life,
passengers, men, women,
and children are left to scramble
across tracks as best they can,
are expected to take care of themselves.
The trains glide to and fro,
coming suddenly into sight
from beyond the bridges and
as suddenly disappearing—
winding swiftly in and out
and at times four of them running
side by side on as many tracks
but in both directions—the whole
making up a swiftly shifting maze
of complex movement under the influence
of which a head unaccustomed to the sight
grows actually giddy
Any person, who cares to pass
an hour during the busy time
of the day in front of an American
city station, cannot but be struck
while watching the constant movement
with the primitive way in which
it is being conducted, a practically
irresistible force crashing
through the busy hive of modern civilization
at a wild rate of speed, going hither and thither,
across highways and by-ways:
Such an agency cannot be expected
to work incessantly and yet never
come into contact with the human frame
Those cars were the most approved
form of American construction;
there should have been no accident
Ninety-nine times in a hundred
the brake proves reliable—nine times
in the remaining ten of the thousand,
in which it fails, a lucky change averts
disaster; but the thousandth time
will assuredly come, as it did
Men of a certain type always have protested
and will continue to protest that they have
nothing to learn. It will not do for the American
railroad manager to pride himself too much
on his own greater ingenuity
~~~
Darlene O’Dell is a former instructor at the College of William and Mary and Clemson University and the author of the author of The Story of the Philadelphia 11 (Seabury Books, 2014), Sites of Southern Memory (UVA Press, 2001), and I Followed Close Behind Her (Spinsters Ink, 2003). She has also written for Patheos, National Catholic Reporter, Hashtag Queer, Cobblestone, Frogpond, Under the Bashō, Wales Haiku Journal, the National Park Service, and others. She is currently a writer and workshop leader for the Family Narrative Project.