All the Way to Mobile
Securing the Erie Canal as a Competitor and Regulator of the Railroads in the Age of the Trusts
by
Book Details
About the Book
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
About the Author
Ernest Rueter, an activist in the 1960s, brings to
this study experiences in lobbying and electioneering. He was a leading volunteer in the defeat of George Wallace in 1964. and an interest He worked
for the Gary Civil Rights Commission and the Lake County (IN) OEO program. He served briefly as an adjunct professor at Indiana University Northwest teaching
public policy.
Born in Seattle, Washington, where his grandfather William H. Gorham had
settled in 1884, he has spent his adult years the Midwest. He graduated with a. history major from
Carleton College, Northfield, Minn., and with a master' s degree in sociology
from Purdue University. He has had unusual experience in leading voluntary organizations. For example, during his college years he served two years as the president of the National Council of the Pilgrim Fellowship (Congregational church youth.) Later, a the Purdue campus he served three consecutive years as the chairman of two inter-faith clergy organizations. He served as president of the Gary Rotary Club and won a Paul Harris membership for his work in organizing conferences on inter-national affairs for older high school youth After moving to Lake County, Indiana, he became a two-term president of the Northwest Indiana Symphony. He and his
wife, Jeanne, now live in Vermont close to the families of two of their three
children.