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Brian P. Luskey, Ryan Dearinger. The Filth of Progress: Immigrants, Americans, and the Building of the Canals and Railroads in the West., The American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 5, December 2018, Pages 1664–1665, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhy284
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In The Filth of Progress, Ryan Dearinger examines canal and railroad construction in multiple nineteenth-century American Wests, from antebellum Indiana and Illinois to the postbellum Rocky Mountains. Dearinger’s book is a persuasive mix of social and cultural history based upon an impressive array of documents that include government records concerning internal improvements, correspondence of employers and labor contractors, newspaper editorials and advertisements, and photographs and political cartoons. Dearinger shows that labor historians were right when they proclaimed that workers—and not capitalists—should get the lion’s share of the praise for building America. Indeed, the men who dug ditches and laid track performed the labor that made rich men richer. Yet Dearinger accomplishes something even more important in this book. He explains why labor historians had to make such a claim in the first place by excavating the ways elite, native-born Americans used immigrants’ labor as central building blocks in their own cultural productions. The hard work and ingenuity that “un-American” immigrants used to construct these colossal technologies of transport might have served to validate their own claims to masculine independence and citizenship. Instead, native-born authors obscured that physical labor in order to claim canals and railroads as monuments to their own hard work and foresight, symbolic of the myths of self-making and upward mobility taking hold in nineteenth-century America.
