Politics & Power Quote by John Moody

A single sentence, and you can already hear the gears grinding: “public interest” is framed less as civic passion than as spectator sport, a national audience craning its neck not for achievement, but for payout. John Moody’s phrasing turns a supposedly heroic saga of building “through the mountains” into something closer to a rigged tournament, where the trophy isn’t innovation or service but “big government subsidies.” That last adjective does a lot of work. “Big” isn’t descriptive so much as accusatory, a wink to readers who suspect the state is being played.

The intent is bluntly demystifying. Moody, a businessman and a pioneering chronicler of American finance, is writing from an era when railroads were the tech giants of the day: continent-shaping infrastructure wrapped in corporate ambition, political influence, and speculative fever. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, railroad expansion routinely relied on federal and state support - land grants, bonds, favorable terms - and the competition for those benefits often looked like lobbying dressed up as destiny.

The subtext is that the “contest” isn’t really about who can lay track best; it’s about who can capture government favor most effectively. By describing the nation as watching, Moody also implicates the public: people are drawn to the drama of progress, even when the plot hinges on subsidy-chasing and backroom leverage. The mountains offer a convenient symbol of difficulty and grandeur, but Moody’s sentence strips away romance and leaves the real obstacle course: politics.