The Underworld of Western Progress: Contested Frontiers of Transportation Labor, Masculinity, and Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century America

This study examines moving frontiers of “unskilled” construction labor on canals and railroads in the American West from 1830 to 1890.  It utilizes comparative case studies of Irish laborers on canals and railroads in the U.S. Midwest; Irish, Chinese, and Mormon workers on the transcontinental railroad in the Mountain West; and Irish, Mexican-American, and Indian laborers on two competing railroads in the Southwest.  In a significant methodological departure from previous scholarship, I analyze canals and railroads not as ends of progress but as moving spaces of conflict and contestation.  In contention were immigrant and native-born construction workers, on one hand, and groups of elite and ordinary citizens, on the other, who battled over the meaning of work, progress, manhood, and citizenship.  Construction workers found ways—on the job, in construction camps, in recreation, protest, and violence—to redefine their role in American progress and refashion their inherited notions of manhood and citizenship.  American citizens, however, used canals, railroads, and the “wilderness” they ostensibly conquered to rehash notions of “civilization,” to (re)construct boundaries of citizenship and manhood, and to erase the work of “unskilled” immigrants while praising the industrial progress that these workers helped create. 
On these frontiers of progress, dignitaries, journalists, and artists crafted narratives that re-imagined the indispensable yet “unskilled” laborers as cultural curiosities, unmanly and reckless slaves of industry, or as mere accessories to uniquely American triumphs over nature.  Workers fought back, laying claim to a rightful place in the success of America.  In the contest of words, actions, and images emerged conflicting narratives of manhood, citizenship, and progress.  If one dominated the American imagination, it does not deny identities that sustained the vulnerable and subordinated in their daily struggles.