How Trains Became People: Southern Pacific Railroad Co.’s Networked Rhetorical Culture and the Dawn of Corporate Personhood

This essay analyzes how a rhetorical culture emerged in which the Supreme Court of the United States assumed corporations were constitutional persons under the Fourteenth Amendment. Approaching rhetorical culture from a networked standpoint, I argue that corporate personhood emerged from Southern Pacific Railroad Co.’s networks and alliances with environmental preservationists, politicians, publics, lawyers, judges, and immigrants in the late 19th century. Contributing to literatures on rhetorical culture and agency, this study shows how Southern Pacific Railroad Co., through networks of influence and force, was a rhetorical subject that shaped a networked rhetorical culture that expanded the boundaries of the Fourteenth Amendment even though the Supreme Court of the United States had not worked out the philosophical underpinnings of corporate personhood. Corporate personhood remains theoretically restrained by legal discourses that reduce subjectivity to a singular, speaking, human subject.

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Constitutional Law in 1909-1910: The Constitutional Decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States in the October Term, 1909

American Political Science Review ◽

10.2307/1944927 ◽

1910 ◽

Vol 4 (4) ◽

pp. 483-497

Author(s):

Eugene Wambaugh

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Supreme Court ◽

Due Process ◽

The United States ◽

Prima Facie ◽

Fourteenth Amendment ◽

Successful Attempt ◽

Commerce Clause ◽

State Statutes ◽

The Supreme Court

It is indeed a substantial grist that the Supreme Court of the United States at the last term of court has ground for students of political science. The first opinion was delivered on November 1, 1909, and the last on May 31, 1910, and the court decided no less than sixty-five constitutional cases. Notice that with caution it is merely said that the court decided no less than that number; for it is often somewhat a matter of opinion whether a case should be classed as constitutional, and it may well be that there are readers who will find that the court exceeded sixty-five. And how were those sixty-five divided? Many turned on more constitutional points than one, and thus an enumeration of the cases bearing on the several clauses of the Constitution will reveal a total exceeding sixty-five. The enumeration, subject to amendment in accordance with each student's views, gives the following results: The Fourteenth Amendment, twenty-four cases; the Commerce Clause, twenty-one; the Obligation of Contracts Clause, eight; whether cases arise “under the laws of the United States,” eight; Full Faith and Credit Clause, five; and sixteen other clauses, from one to four cases each, aggregating twenty-seven.Through these dull figures some important facts shine distinctly. The Fourteenth Amendment and the Commerce Clause clearly took a vast part of the court's energy, and each of these provisions has to do with the curtailment of functions which prima facie belong to the several states. In other words, the chief feature of this term, as of every recent term, has been a more or less successful attempt of litigants to overthrow state statutes as denials of due process and equal protection or as interferences with interstate commerce.

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