Leadership Quote by John Moody

Moody’s line reads like an early 20th-century version of “move fast and break things,” except spoken with a banker’s caution and a reformer’s nerve. By calling railroad “evils” partly “inherent,” he sidesteps the satisfying moral story in which villains twirl mustaches in boardrooms. He’s insisting that the chaos around railroads - rate gouging, monopolistic behavior, political capture, brutal labor conditions, financial speculation - wasn’t only the product of bad men, but of a society improvising rules for a technology that suddenly reordered space, time, and markets.

The key move is his pairing: “both managers and public.” Moody spreads responsibility upward and outward. Executives weren’t fully fluent in the economic and logistical “laws” of a networked industry; the public (and by extension lawmakers, courts, regulators, and small-town shippers) demanded stability and fairness from something that functioned more like an ecosystem than a simple business. That framing quietly legitimizes regulation without romanticizing it. If nobody fully understands the agency, then oversight becomes less a punitive crusade than a necessary act of collective learning.

Context matters: railroads were the first truly modern corporate system in the U.S., with complex financing, opaque accounting, and national reach. Moody, a businessman and financial writer, is also protecting capitalism’s legitimacy. The subtext is exculpatory but not indulgent: don’t confuse systemic volatility with destiny, yet don’t pretend outrage alone can engineer order. The sentence argues for maturity - an admission that modernity arrives before its instruction manual.