Success Quote by William Graham Sumner

Sumner is doing something sneakier than scolding bad projects: he’s puncturing a founding myth. The early American story likes to frame canals, turnpikes, and railroads as inevitable progress - bold men, big horizons, pure payoff. By calling the “waste of capital” between 1800 and 1850 “enormous,” he drags the romance down to the ledger and forces a different picture: modernity as an expensive series of guesses, many of them wrong.

The intent is partly corrective, partly ideological. Sumner, speaking as a businessman steeped in late-19th-century laissez-faire instincts, is warning against confusing “development” with “wisdom.” The subtext is that markets punish fantasy, and that the celebrated infrastructure boom was littered with speculative dead ends - canals that lost to rail, rail lines laid too early or in the wrong places, routes engineered for politics rather than traffic. He’s also aiming at a favorite American habit: treating sunk costs as proof of virtue. If you poured money into it, the story goes, it must have been necessary.

Context matters: 1800-1850 is the era of internal improvements fever, state-backed canal schemes, land-company hype, and repeated financial panics (especially 1819 and 1837). Sumner’s sentence reads like an early draft of a modern critique of “build it and they will come” economics. It’s not anti-infrastructure; it’s anti-amnesia. Progress, he implies, isn’t a straight line - it’s a pile of failed prototypes we prefer not to inventory.