The Filth of Progress: Immigrants, Americans, and the Building of Canals and Railroads in the West by Ryan Dearinger (review)

The canal and railroad transportation infrastructure built in the United States from the 1820s to the 1870s was a revolution in transportation that helped to facilitate the market revolution and later industrial capitalism. Central to these internal improvements – as they were known in the 19th century – were wage workers. Although the canals and especially the first transcontinental railroad were viewed by contemporaries as a means to bind the nation together and to progressively move the nation forward, the common workers on these projects were largely left out of the national narrative that celebrated American progress in the 19th century. Nevertheless, scholars in recent decades have noted their contribution to the country's transportation infrastructure and have examined their historical agency in selective contexts. In an effort to provide a more comprehensive history of the wage workers who laboured on the mobile 19th century wage labour frontier is Ryan Dearinger's The Filth of Progress. Dearinger does not leave out native-born transportation construction workers, but his primary focus is on three main groups of wage labourers: Irish, Chinese, and Mormons. In his study, he argues that immigrant and native-born workers clashed with elites and other Americans "over the meaning of work, progress, manhood, and citizenship." (9) And out of this conflict, these workers, who were considered unfit by many Americans for inclusion as equal members of the republic, were able "to redefine their role in American progress and refashion their inherited notions of work, manhood, and citizenship." (9) In the sparsely settled regions of the antebellum Midwest, where major canal works were initiated, local labour was insufficient in the numbers necessary for such large scale construction enterprises. Even though the wages could be comparatively high for this type of grueling manual labour, the work itself was found to be quite objectionable by many native-born men. Contractors, however, could turn to a transient labour population of immigrant Irish who were entering the United States in ever growing numbers. These Irish workers came to dominate the labour on Midwestern canal building and some of the early railroad construction of the era as well, such as on the Illinois Central Railroad. Researching and writing the history of these labourers is difficult given that little written evidence, from the workers themselves, is left in the historical record. Historians, therefore, have to turn to other primary sources, which can be highly biased against these workers in many regards. Dearinger sifts through a plethora of sources to write a compelling history of Irish workers and reveals that the Irish exhibited a vigorous, collective effort to have a say in their workplace through the demand for better working conditions, hours, and pay. Dearinger also deconstructs acts of violence and alcohol consumption to demonstrate the social and culture space that these immigrants carved out for themselves as men and as workers, for they believed that they were just as fit for the status of whiteness and citizenship as native-born Americans of European ancestry. Here Dearinger effectively builds on the scholarship of David Roediger, Peter Way, and Noel Ignatiev, who have dealt with similar themes.

Turning to the Far West, one of the more innovative chapters in Dearinger's book is his examination of Mormon wage workers on the transcontinental railroad. Mormons were a considerable contrast to Irish immigrant labour and other workers on the construction of the Union Pacific Railroad's portion of the line. Mormons, the author argues, took advantage of the opportunity to be part of the grand, national enterprise that linked the West and East of the country together. Here they could fight for inclusion in the 19th century national progressive narrative and yet stay true to their religious and cultural convictions, especially their sense of masculinity and constructive labour on the western frontier. Mormons contested the prejudices against them though their productivity, entrepreneurialism and, in their minds, upright moral character...