Guest Post: Roscoe Conkling has a Grand Vision

This article first appeared on Today in Alternate History.

The Eastern Seaboard had been basking in unseasonably mild weather until cold air from Canada collided with the warmer weather of the southern gulf. Temperatures plunged as sustained winds rose above eighty miles per hour. Over fifty feet of snow fell in a matter of hours. The Great Blizzard of 1888 had begun.

In New York City, railway and telegraph lines were disabled. Citizens dug fifty feet of snow off sidewalks for no pay. The City's infrastructure stopped functioning. It was a uniquely humbling and frightening experience for even the most affluent in New York society, including influential American lawyer and Republican politician Roscoe Conkling.

Conkling was a leading advocate of physical culture. He always made a habit of walking the three miles home from his law office on Wall Street. But, sensing the freezing temperature and heavy snowfall, he correctly judged this option as highly dangerous. Unlike the comparable city of London, New York did not yet have a subway. Instead, horse-drawn carriages congested the streets during better weather conditions. With the roads blocked by the storm, he had no alternate means of returning home and made the eminently sensible decision to sleep overnight in his office.

The blizzard cleared in three days, but many American mainstays had failed: telegraphs, fire stations, elevated trains and railroads. When the snowstorm finally abated, over three hundred lives had been lost, many of them children. Sensible measures were taken in the aftermath, most notable, a United States Weather Bureau that was established two years later. But there was a public outcry to avoid a repeat of such a disaster, and Conkling emerged as a key figure in that public discourse. The night trapped in his office had been spent with much reflection, and he felt he must leap back into politics despite his retirement after a feeling of betrayal by his former protege Chester A. Arthur.

The Great Blizzard had radically changed his mindset, and he embraced his viewpoints fundamentally different from many Americans. Having repeatedly turned down a Supreme Court appointment, Conkling decided to seek the position once again.  Former compatriots and rivals found common ground with him and decided the third time was he charm. From the bench, Conkling played a major role in encouraging women's suffrage and strongly argued against the wrong-headed principle of "separate but equal" in a powerful dissension of Plessy v. Ferguson written with Justice John M. Harlan that laid the groundwork for it to be overturned during the Roosevelt administration's findings of lacking equality.

Perhaps even more popularly known, Conkling understood that public transportation made sense in densely populated Eastern Seaboard cities. He strongly advocated for a nationwide passenger public transportation system. The "City Beautiful" movement was sparked by his keynote speech at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Conkling greatly progressed his initiative because it required a great deal of negotiation with railroad barons to keep their support. The long-term consequences would be significant. Transportation in New York would be transformed with a free-of-charge streetcar system that would minimize the use of private automobiles in the city.

Author's Note:

In reality, Conkling unwisely choose to walk home and became disoriented and stuck in a snowdrift. He collapsed in Union Square and was helped to his residence. Tragically, he contracted pneumonia and developed mastoiditis several weeks later, which, following a surgical procedure to drain the infection, progressed to meningitis. Sadly, Conkling passed away in the early morning hours of April 18, 1888.

Many infrastructure improvements resulted from the snowstorm. This included the burying of overhead utility lines in major cities and the creation of America's first subway in Boston, Massachusetts, which opened nine years later.

Provine's Addendum:

Conkling's words returned to popularity in the 1940s during the General Motors Streetcar Conspiracy. National City Lines, a puppet company that bought up city rail systems throughout the United States using subsidiaries, pulled in investment from General Motors, Firestone Tires, Phillips Petroleum, Mack Trucks, and other parties interested in destroying the public transit infrastructure to encourage the purchase and maintenance of personal vehicles. The conspirators were caught in the act by whistleblowers echoing Conkling's use of the principle of "Pursuit of Happiness" from the Declaration of Independence as an encouragement of public transit. Outcry devastated the images and stock prices of the companies, leading to a breakup of National City Lines into regional city companies continuing local contracts. Eventually many of these followed the route of NYC's famed public transit. Along with the Interstate Railway System that allowed passengers to travel coast-to-coast without ever needing to pay a dime, cities continued to grow with high density rather than spreading out in a "suburb" system.