Ernest A. Rueter

All the Way to Mobile: Securing the Erie Canal As a Competitor and Regulator of the Railroads in the Age of the Trusts Ernest A. Rueter

Ernest A Rueter, M. S. in Sociology and great-grandson of George C. Gorham, (1832-1909) has authored All the Way to Mobile: Securing the Erie Canal as Competition for the Railroads in the Age of Trusts. The volume describes the policy conflict between the railroads and waterways as the setting for the factional fight in the New York Republican Party. Rueter shows the relation between rivers and harbors appropriations (1876). Senate committee organization (1873-1881), the railroad strike (1877), resumption of specie payments (1878), the Hepburn hearings by the New York Assembly (1879), the cartel and its lobbying (1878-1881), the Garfield administration and the rise of the Anti-Monopoly Movement (1881), and the adoption of the New York free canal amendment (1882). Most interestingly, he has found that the young Assemblyman Theodore Roosevelt supported the amendment, a fact which certainly was on his mind in his later support for the canal as Governor and for trust-busting as President