The 1857 Rock Island Bridge Case: Lincoln, River Boats, and the Triumph of Railroads

In the summer of 1856, the steamboat Effie Afton smashed into the Rock Island Bridge, the first railroad bridge to span the Mississippi River, connecting Rock Island, Illinois, to Davenport, Iowa. The collision set the boat ablaze, damaged the bridge, and ignited one of the most consequential lawsuits of the 19th century: Hurd v. Rock Island Railroad Co. (often called the Effie Afton case).

The plaintiff, the steamboat’s owner, argued that the bridge itself was a public nuisance and an illegal obstruction of a navigable waterway. Behind him stood the powerful St. Louis river lobby—steamboat companies, shippers, and merchants—who feared that railroad bridges would choke off the Mississippi’s commercial lifeblood. If one bridge was allowed to stand, dozens more would follow, ending the golden age of river transport.

The Rock Island Railroad hired a relatively unknown 47-year-old Springfield lawyer, Abraham Lincoln, as co-counsel. Lincoln had no formal legal brief on interstate commerce or admiralty law, but he understood something deeper: the railroad was not merely a competitor to the steamboat; it would be its successor.

At trial in Chicago in September 1857, Lincoln dismantled the steamboat interests with plainspoken brilliance. He argued that the Mississippi belonged to the nation, not to any single mode of travel. Rivers had a right to be kept open, but so did the people’s right to cross them. Using maps, models, and a clever demonstration with sticks and string to show wind and current patterns, he proved the Effie Afton had struck the pier because of poor piloting, not the bridge’s design.

More importantly, Lincoln looked forward. In his closing, he declared that “one man’s rights end where another man’s begin,” and that the same public necessity that once justified steamboats now demanded railroads. Bridges were not obstructions; they were the next chapter of American progress.

The jury deadlocked, which legally upheld the bridge. Within months, railroad bridges sprouted across the Mississippi. The steamboat era began its long decline, and the transcontinental railroad network became inevitable. Lincoln’s fee was $500, modest by any standard, but the case cemented his reputation as a lawyer who could see the future. Two years later, when he ran for president, the phrase “a railroad lawyer from Illinois” was meant as a slur by river-state Democrats. History rendered a different verdict: in defending that single bridge, Lincoln helped bind a continent together.

I bring up this story because it seems emblematic of many conflicts throughout our history. Horse and buggy enterprises ultimately yielded to the automobile. Ice harvesters were eliminated with the advent of refrigerators. Typesetters were no longer needed with the advent of desktop publishing. The internet has crippled newspapers. Streaming media has wounded the theater industry.

Can we hold back the future? Should we? Across the country today there is opposition to data centers, even though every single organized group fighting to stop them uses the services that data centers provide. 

What is needed is a real collaboration between the adversaries of data centers and the advocates. Must there always be winners and losers? Is there no possibility of a universal win-win-win for all parties?

Sources:

Lincoln & the Rock Island Bridge Case

Hurd vs. Rock Island Railroad Company

Lincoln's Greatest Case (Tennessee Bar Assn.)

Abraham Lincoln and the Rock Island Bridge

Collision of Interests

A Lost Masterpiece: Fellini's 73 Ambushes and Captivates

Mastroianni as Francesco Conti

It appears that I'm on a Fellini kick, having been enthralled by his films when I was in college.  Watching them more than a half century naturally adds perspective that I could never have had in my youth. I never watched all of Fellini's films the way I did Kubrick and attempted with Hitchcock, but I saw quite a few. Despite being outside Hollywood, he is one of the majors as a director. This is a review of his film 73, a small, almost clandestine film that he never quite admitted was autobiographical.

Directed and co-written by Federico Fellini the 110-minute film again stars Marcello Mastroianni in the company of Anouk Aimée and Laura Antonelli.

Shot quickly between the baroque excesses of Roma and the haunted nostalgia of Amarcord, 73 is a whisper where most of his work shouts. It's also, without question, one of his most painful and beautiful.

Marcello Mastroianni (playing a character named Francesco Conti) is a fifty-year-old matinee idol whose face has begun to look like a tired carnival mask. After a near-fatal heart attack on the set of a ridiculous spy thriller, Francesco experiences what he can only describe as a visitation: a quiet, almost embarrassed encounter with Christ in a hospital corridor lit by failing fluorescents. He wakes up a believer. Not theatrically, not with trumpets, but with the sheepish certainty of a man who has discovered what people mean by the twin notions of peace and joy.

The film’s first half is vintage Fellini farce: Francesco tries to confess in three different Roman churches and is turned away each time (too famous, too late, too many photographers outside). One priest mistakes him for a paparazzo. Another asks to have his picture taken with him. A third simply locks the confessional when he hears the name “Conti.” Fellini films these scenes with the merciless glee of La Dolce Vita, except the laughter keeps catching in the throat.

Then the tone changes. Francesco finds a tiny evangelical parish in the outskirts, a converted barn where working-class Romans sing off-key hymns and drink real coffee after the service. He starts attending incognito (bad wig, sunglasses at night, the full ridiculous arsenal). He wants to belong, desperately. He learns the chords to “Amazing Grace” on a battered guitar. He brings expensive pastries and is politely asked not to, because they make the poorer members of the congregation uncomfortable. He tries to give testimony and is gently cut off after twenty minutes because “Brother Mateo has prepared something on the Book of Habakkuk.” Mastroianni’s face during that scene (half crushed, half illuminated) is worth more than most directors manage in a lifetime.

I found myself rooting for Francesco to make it, to be at home with his new family. It was hard to read how this would unfold.

Fellini refuses to mock the parishioners. That is the film’s great, almost shocking act of grace. These are not grotesques; they are ordinary people with crooked teeth and sincere handshakes. The cruelty comes from Francesco himself, from his inability to shrink to human size. When he finally explodes in frustration (“Don’t you know who I am?”), the room falls silent, and you feel the old Fellini thunder. But the thunder is followed by rain: a quiet elder takes Francesco outside, points to the night sky, and says, “Up there, nobody’s famous.”

The final sequence is pure cinematic sacrament. Francesco returns to the empty soundstage where he once filmed a sword-and-sandal epic. He walks among the ruins of cardboard temples and plastic lions, humming the hymn he never quite mastered. The camera cranes up slowly until he is just a speck beneath the rafters, still humming, still trying. The lights dim one by one, fade to black. Credits roll over silence.

73 was barely distributed. Fellini called it “a home movie I accidentally showed to strangers.” Critics at the time found it minor, even embarrassing. Today it feels like the key to everything else: a great showman confronting the one audience that will never applaud him. It's tender, funny, merciless, and finally heartbreaking. In a catalogue full of masterpieces, it may be the one that hurts the most, because it is the one in which Fellini finally asks to be forgiven, and isn’t sure the answer is yes.

Watch it alone. Watch it late. And when the last light goes out on that abandoned set, you will understand why Mastroianni, in his memoirs, simply wrote: “That was the best I ever was.”

The Ethanol Fallacy: A 2025 Update

The Ethanol Fallacy
January 22, 2008

Public domain

The February 2008 issue of Popular Mechanics features a challenging story by editor James B. Meigs called The Ethanol Fallacy. Unless you’ve been sleeping in a cave for two decades, you’ve undoubtedly been aware of the ongoing debates regarding the best way to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. A wide range of technologies has been evaluated from solar and wind energy to hydrogen power and fuel cells. Since transportation eats up the lion’s share of our energy use, much of the debate centers on how to power our cars and trucks.

Unfortunately, writes Meigs, the best solutions may not be getting the attention they deserve. Washington politicians have bought the “ethanol solution” hook, line and sinker.

Politicians have been falling all over themselves to prove their commitment to energy independence. The bill they have been crafting and carving has as its moniker the title “Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007.” No longer just an energy bill, it is a security matter, giving it a special reverence. According to Meigs, the 2008 presidential candidates “have outdone each other with vows to flood the nation with ever-increasing rivers of ethanol for at least a generation.”

It’s what our politicians love to do, of course. Take action fast. Look like a leader. Problem is, “shoot first, ask questions later” is a silly way to approach these kinds of issues.

The average person who votes is not really that knowledgeable about these matters, which gives the ethanol lobbyists a leg up. The truth is, it takes energy to make energy. The article points out that growing corn requires nitrogen fertilizer, a product of natural gas, and chemical herbicides, made mostly from oil. The heavy machinery that harvests these 93 million acres of corn all require diesel fuel and lubricants, as do the trucks that transport all this corn. According to one Cornell researcher, it takes more than a gallon of oil to make a gallon of ethanol. Now what’s that all about? How does this reduce our dependence on foreign oil.

There’s something corny about this ethanol business. As I have always suspected, and which the author here is not afraid to point out, the big winners are companies like Archer Daniels Midland whose lobbyists labor night and day in those corridors of power inside the beltway. And for who’s benefit? Not yours or mine.

So what can we do about it? Not sure, really. Any suggestions?

The Ethanol Fallacy, Revisited 2025.

Photo: Farm Progress

It's been 17 years since I penned the above piece and, if anything, the ethanol saga has only grown more entrenched—and more problematic. Back in 2008, the Energy Independence and Security Act was the shiny new toy, mandating a ramp-up to 36 billion gallons of renewable fuels by 2022, with corn ethanol as the star. Politicians from both parties hailed it as a win for energy security, rural economies, and the environment. But as the Popular Mechanics piece I referenced warned, it was a rushed fix, propped up by lobbying muscle from agribusiness giants like Archer Daniels Midland (ADM). 

Fast-forward to today, and the "rivers of ethanol" promised by those 2008 presidential candidates have become a flood—one that's drowning common sense in subsidies, environmental strain, and higher grocery bills.

Let's start with the numbers on corn, which is the heart of the original critique. In 2007, about 14% of the U.S. corn crop—roughly 2.05 billion bushels out of 14.5 billion total—went to ethanol production. Fast-forward to the 2023-24 crop year, and that figure has ballooned to a staggering 5.45 billion bushels, or nearly 45% of the total harvest. That's enough corn to fill over 200,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools, diverted from food, feed, and exports to chase the biofuel dream. 

Some reports even peg it higher when including co-products like distillers grains used in animal feed, pushing the effective share past 50% for biofuel and alcohol combined. Meanwhile, total U.S. corn production hit a record 15.2 billion bushels in 2023, but the ethanol slice keeps growing—projected to hold steady at 5.45 billion bushels for 2024-25. Farmers love the demand (and the prices it props up), but at what cost to the rest of us?

What's weird to me is how Paul Ehrlich in his bestseller The Popular Bomb (1968) stated the global food supply would not be able to keep up with much more population growth. The world population was 3.5 billion then. Now we're over 8 billion people and instead of using farming to provide food we're using it for fuel. What's with that?

The energy math hasn't improved either. That Cornell researcher I quoted in 2008 nailed it: it still takes roughly a gallon of fossil fuels to produce a gallon of corn ethanol. Recent analyses peg the energy return on investment (EROI) at just 1.04:1 for corn-based ethanol—meaning you get back barely more energy than you put in, and that's being generous. 

For context, gasoline clocks in at 8:1 or better; even tar sands beat ethanol at 4:1. No wonder critics call ethanol a "net energy sink" for society—it's like running on a treadmill to power your house. And the environmental toll? Corn ethanol's full lifecycle emissions (including fertilizer runoff, soil erosion, and methane from processing) often make it as dirty as—or dirtier than—regular gasoline, especially when indirect land-use changes like deforestation abroad are factored in. It's led to toxic algae blooms in the Gulf of Mexico, higher water bills for Midwest communities, and a "food vs. fuel" dilemma that's jacked up global prices for everything from tortillas to turkey.

So why is nobody talking about this!!!!

Policy-wise, the machine keeps humming. The Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), that 2007 mandate, is still law, with EPA-set volumes ticking up: 21.87 billion gallons of total renewable fuel in 2024 and 22.68 billion in 2025, much of it corn ethanol. Direct blender's tax credits may have expired in 2011, but they've been replaced by a subsidy buffet. The new Clean Fuel Production Credit (Section 45Z), kicking in fully in 2025, dangles up to $1 per gallon for low-emission biofuels—potentially costing taxpayers $8.5 billion in FY2031 alone. Add in $3.2 billion in direct farm subsidies for corn in 2024 (30% of all commodity crop aid), and it's clear the lobbyists are still earning their keep. ADM and peers aren't complaining: the industry pumped out a record 16 billion gallons of ethanol in 2024, supporting 370,000 jobs and $30 billion in inputs—but mostly in rural pockets, while urban families foot the bill through higher feed costs and pump prices.

So, has anything changed for the better? Some might say there are a few positive glimmers in the data. Exports hit 1.91 billion gallons in 2024, easing some domestic pressure, and there's buzz around "second-generation" ethanol from waste or algae, which could sidestep the food fight, though it's years from scaling, and I'll believe i when I see it. (I suspect I will be dead before then.) Electric vehicles are finally denting the transportation pie—EVs made up 7.6% of new car sales in 2023, up from zilch in 2008—and wind/solar now outpace ethanol in renewable energy growth. But corn ethanol clings on, a relic of that "shoot first" era.

What can we do? Demand better. Will Congress be open to reforming the RFS toward truly sustainable biofuels. Better yet, vote with your wallet—seek out E0 (ethanol-free) gas if your state allows. The fallacy isn't just corny anymore; it's costly. Time to harvest smarter solutions before we ethanol-ize our way into a bigger mess. 

What do you think—still buying the hype? 

Why the JFK Assassination Still Intrigues and Rankles America

More than sixty years after November 22, 1963, the assassination of John F. Kennedy remains the wound America cannot stop picking at. It is not simply that a young president was murdered in broad daylight; it is that the nation watched its own innocence die on live television and then spent the next six decades arguing about what, exactly, it saw.

The intrigue begins with the sheer improbability of the official story. A lone gunman, a misfit Marine with a mail-order rifle, fires three shots in six seconds and changes history forever. The Warren Commission assured us this was possible, yet every subsequent investigation, from the Ramsey Clark panel to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, has nibbled away at that certainty. Acoustic evidence suggested a fourth shot; the “magic bullet” still performs geometric miracles no ballistics expert can fully replicate. Doubt metastasized into a thousand theories because the evidence itself seemed to conspire against closure. (Read The Dark Side of Camelot by Seymour Hersh.)

But the deeper rankling is existential. Kennedy’s death arrived at the precise moment when postwar optimism was curdling into cynicism. Vietnam was escalating, the CIA was running rogue operations, and organized crime felt untouchable. If a president could be erased with such apparent ease, then no one was safe and nothing was sacred. The assassination could easily be labelled the original sin of modern American paranoia: the moment citizens realized their government might lie to them not out of incompetence, but by design.

What keeps the fascination alive is not the hope of solving the crime; most serious researchers now accept we never will. It is the recognition that JFK’s murder marked the fracture line between the America that believed its myths and the America that could no longer afford to. Every new document batch, every grainy Zapruder frame slowed to agony, is less about finding the killer and more about staring into the abyss of what we became when we stopped trusting the story we were told. I think here of Kurtz's stark observation in Heart of Darkness upon staring into that abyss: "The horror."

For those who lived that moment in time, every one of us remembers exactly where we were, what we saw, what we felt. It was quite similar to having you car struck by a speeding vehicle that ran a red light, leaving you dazed and confused. We were suddenly lost in a nationwide concussion. 

In remembrance of that day and event, here is a collection of links to some of my past blog posts about the JFK assassination as well as the life of JFK.

Did Lee Harvey Oswald Act Alone? Here's a Fresh Analysis and Disturbing Conclusion

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2025/08/did-lee-harvey-oswald-act-alone-heres.html

Flashback Friday: Will A.I. Finally Solve the JFK Assassination?

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2024/11/flashback-friday-will-ai-finally-solve.html

Notes of Infamy: Paul Metsa's Song About the Shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2023/11/notes-of-infamy-pul-metsas-song-about.html

JFK -- Murder Most Foul and the Debate Goes On

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2020/04/jfk-murder-most-foul-and-debate-goes-on.html

More Thoughts on Murder Most Foul: Most Foul Indeed

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2020/07/more-thoughts-on-murder-most-foul-most.html

JFK's Speech to the Northland Shows What Hibbing Was Like During Dylan's Youth

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2020/04/jfks-speech-to-northland-begins-by.html

Latest Dylan Release Brings Back Memories of JFK's Three Visits to the Northland

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2020/03/latest-dylan-release-brings-back.html

Dylan Dishes Up A New Meal with a Feast of References: Murder Most Foul

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2020/03/dylan-dishes-up-new-meal-with-feast-of.html

Wordless Wednesday: The JFK Assassination

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2012/01/wordless-wednesday-jfk-assination.html

11/22/63, The Rest of the Story

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2012/01/112263-rest-of-story.html

A Midpoint Book Review: 11/22/63 by Stephen King

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2012/01/midpoint-book-review-112263-by-stephen.html

A Book That Changed History

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2009/10/book-that-changed-history.html

A Few JFK Quotes

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2009/09/few-jfk-quotes.html

Where were you on this day in 1963?

All the World’s a Stage and I Am But a Player

William Shakespeare by John Taylor

William Shakespeare. The name carries weight, influence. His remarkable power with words defies comprehension. Not only the quantity of words, but the quality of his content... When writers review the rich catalog of his works, they are impressed and humbled. The guy could turn a phrase. Moreover, those phrases contained so many dense pearls of distilled wisdom. How did he do it?

Well, I have since learned that he did not do it. There was a committee, founded by two playwrights Geoffrey Williams and Walter Shakespeare. They hired a team of young writers and put them to work. The published sonnets and plays were said to have been penned by a William Shakespeare. A scandal arose at one point when one of the writers revealed...

 

Please do not believe the muttering in this previous paragraph. It would astonish me even more to discover that Shakespeare's art had been produced by committee. Have you ever done art by committee? I myself stand in awe at the volumes produced by authors like Shakespeare who with no keyboard, no word processors, no typewriters moved the world.

 

The best way to enjoy a good quote, by the way, is not to read a series of them quickly, as presented here below. Rather, make as if each were a tea bag. Heat your cup of water, dip it and let it steep. Allow the aroma of each idea to seep into and saturate your mind. Once you have supped from the first, you may proceed to the next. There are flavors rich and subtle here. Take your time, enjoy each one.

 

» The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.

 

» Though this be madness, yet there is method in it.

 

» Our doubts are traitors and make us lose the good we oft might win by fearing to attempt.

 

» Be great in act, as you have been in thought.

 

» Love all, trust a few. Do wrong to none.

 

» Blow, blow, thou winter wind

Thou art not so unkind,

As man's ingratitude.

» There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,

than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

 

» Brevity is the soul of wit.

 

» Cowards die many times before their deaths,

the valiant never taste of death but once.

 

» Neither a borrower nor a lender be;

For loan oft loses both itself and friend,

And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.

This above all: to thine ownself be true,

And it must follow, as the night the day,

Thou canst not then be false to any man.

 

» All the world's a stage,

And all the men and women merely players.

They have their exits and their entrances;

And one man in his time plays many parts...

Originally published January 2008