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Show 139 Railroad Co. came along to the SCOTUS, that the railroads had already penetrated mechanical, economic, and political assemblages. They soon impacted the legal assemblage. When Southern Pacific refused to pay property taxes for its California property in San Mateo County, the debates that followed were not about economic fairness; they were about the equality of corporations as people protected under the United States Constitution. The Supreme Court had to sort this out during the 1880s. It was during this time that the Court was at the crux of postwar political debates about how corporations should function in social, cultural, and economic contexts. Whether the justices knew it or not, their decision would set in motion what has now become known as the Corporate Bill of Rights. At the time, the economy was soaring, but the exact purpose of corporations, which were moving capital but also centralizing its profits, had not yet been determined. As we shall see, there were numerous legal critics that believed regulation was pivotal to the development of our nation's growing economy. This legal camp believed that the Fourteenth Amendment should be interpreted in a narrow sense in order to preserve its ability to protect African Americans from land, labor, and the oppressive states that had deprived them of basic legal rights. On the other hand, however, there was a new group of legalists that believed it was time to rethink the formalisms of the law and better account for how the real world was actually working. This new industrial world, of course, was created by the railroad, and those who successfully fought for a broader interpretation of the constitution labored for the train to connect its industrial networks to the Supreme Court. The following section thus discusses how the Supreme Court became the next logical ally of the transcontinental railway's subjective network. |
