Is the America of today even capable of performing great building feats?

“The railroads,” they write, “were the first great crony capitalists. They bought politicians, bribed judges, and, in Henry Adams’s phrase, turned themselves into ‘local despotisms’ in one state after another.” In the 1860s, when railroads helped the North subdue the South, “Congress repeatedly gave away parcels of land the size of northeastern states.” Gifts to the Union Pacific were, cumulatively, equivalent to New Hampshire and New Jersey combined. By one scholar’s estimate, if all the land given to railroads in that decade were cobbled into one state, it would be the third largest, smaller than Alaska and Texas but larger than California.