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David Goodman, David Hochfelder. The Telegraph in America, 1832–1920., The American Historical Review, Volume 118, Issue 5, December 2013, Pages 1535–1536, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/118.5.1535
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David Hochfelder's The Telegraph in America is impressively researched and clearly written. It offers not a comprehensive history of the telegraph or of Western Union but rather a series of intriguing essays on major themes in those histories: the telegraph during the Civil War; the postal telegraph movement (which advocated a telegraph system run by the post office); the effects of the telegraph on American prose; the role of the telegraph and the stock market ticker in the development of financial markets; and the intertwined histories of the telegraph and telephone. The value of the book to readers is greatly enhanced by the substantial appended chronology and essay on sources.
Hochfelder's chapter on the Civil War demonstrates the importance of telegraphy to the war and explains Western Union's rise to dominance after it; it also sets the scene for the subsequent discussion of private enterprise versus government telegraphy. The exhaustively researched chapter on the postal telegraph debate shows how anti-monopoly activism shaped public discussion about communications in the United States from the 1840s to the 1940s. Proposals to place the telegraph industry under the control of the post office were staples of postbellum political debate; many thought eventual government control of the wires was inevitable. Hochfelder shows that, despite prevalent economic theories about the naturalness of monopolies in large-scale networked communication, Western Union felt it needed to use “hardheaded business practices to fend off competitors, particularly exclusive rights-of-way contracts with several hundred railroads and exclusive contracts with the nation's major press associations” (p. 35). Western Union's defensive commercial tactics—including its belief that “a static state of the art perpetuated the company's monopoly” (p. 42)—contained some of the seeds of its later failure. Hochfelder acknowledges the postal telegraph movement to be the “most thoroughly studied aspect of the history of American telegraphy” (p. 237) and describes Richard John's Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications (2010) as having covered the issue “completely.” While this is a rich chapter, it thus contains few major surprises for readers of John's book.
