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, 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

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.