[...] Shelgrim presents himself as a bundle of social forces, the embodiment of impersonal currents—and he is, but not of the currents he claims. Because it wasn’t demand for wheat that built the speculative railroad lines. Supply and demand determine commodity prices—though not nearly so directly as we’ve been led to believe—and if someone orders a loaf of bread, you can’t tell the hungry customer to hold on while you build a railroad, a farm, a mill, and a bakery. Capital and capitalists built the lines, under logic much closer to “If you build it they will come” (or even “There’s a sucker born every minute”) than to “Give the people what they want.” As Richard White explains in his book Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of America, many if not all of the railroads were nonsensical from a consumer supply-and-demand perspective. The impersonal drive animating those big men in suits wasn’t the people’s hunger for bread; it was capital’s hunger for profit.