Childhood: The Romance of the Rails
The romance of the rails is strong. When my boys were little, we went up the hill to the miniature steam trains in Berkeley’s Tilden Park, enchanted as the engine belched and chugged through the redwoods. We owned plenty of children’s books with train themes, and toy trains of all kinds. The boys were addicted to the Thomas the Tank Engine videos from the U.K. The engines had peculiar faces, spoke with stilted British accents, and exhibited wildly divergent personalities. We sang train songs together at bedtime while I played guitar. The history of the railroad in the U.S. isn’t nearly as pretty.
I have been ruminating on American privilege. We rest, like royalty, on the endless layers of bedding of those who have been obliterated, enslaved, indentured, and forgotten. From time to time, like spoiled and oblivious monarchs, like the Princess and the Pea, we feel a slight twinge that sets us to investigating the source of our discomfort. After much searching through the historic bedding, a culprit in the form of some uncomfortable event is identified and, after some examination, we heave more bedding onto the pile beneath us, sink back again into our deep, laminated comfort, and contentedly doze off. At some point it seems we will topple from our carefully crafted tower of bedding. Our history can’t be dismissed, we can only cushion and blunt the pain of our past, pushing it further down and trying to forget.
A small exhibit at the Oakland Museum of Andrew J. Russell’s photographs commemorating the 150-year anniversary of the 1869 completion of the Transcontinental Railroad (http://museumca.org/exhibit/pushing-west-photography-andrew-j-russell) caused me considerable discomfort. Leland Stanford, the tycoon who both funded and profited from the endeavor and later established Stanford University, proudly pounded a golden spike into the earth. Between the steam engine from the East and its mirror engine from the West an assembled crowd of white men toasted the historic achievement with a bottle of champagne. Those who laid down the rails and those whose land and lives were taken from them in the process are conspicuously absent in the photograph.
The story of who performed the dirty work is old and tired: local recruitment failed to generate sufficient labor with only a few hundred men materializing instead of the hoped for 5,000. Those who began working on the railroad left shortly for better incomes and the lure of striking it rich in the Nevada silver mines. Chinese immigrants to California were hired on an experimental basis, the prejudice against them running deep. To supplement the workforce, thousands of laborers were imported directly from China. Eight thousand Chinese men dug tunnels, while 3,000 laid the tracks for the Central Pacific. Coming from the other direction, the Union Pacific employed 10,000 Irish immigrants, many of whom had fought in the Civil War. The Chinese were paid less than the Irish, provided their own rations, and often slept in the tunnels they were digging (not infrequently perishing when those same tunnels collapsed). The Irish, besides receiving $5 more in monthly wages, were given living quarters, food, and alcohol. In 1867 the Chinese laborers staged an epic 8-day strike demanding equal pay, shorter hours, and improved working conditions. The director of the Central Pacific simply withheld food, supplies, and transportation to the Chinese, forcing them to return to work with not a single concession made.
The historic achievement of the Transcontinental Railroad struck another nail, this one into the coffin of the Native Americans on whose land the rails trespassed. The landscapes Russell photographed are vast and seemingly empty, contributing as the exhibit points out, to the narrative of a country open for the taking. The ubiquitous tribes inhabiting the land, already on their last legs, posed a nuisance. They had been routinely slaughtered, infected with imported diseases, converted to Christianity, and deported to inhospitable and foreign territory. The treaties written by the U.S. Government awarding the Native Americans land and rights were no more valuable than the paper they were written on. Even before the expulsions and genocide, the railroad and white settlers decimated the buffalo and bison from the Great Plains; the estimated 15 million beasts before the railroad plummeted to around 1 million after. The Plains Indians’ lives, intertwined with the buffalo and bison, suffered a devastating blow.
As was the fashion at the time, many of Russell’s photographs and captions depict the Native Americans as inferior, as curiosities, and as dangerous savages. One photo, entitled “Indians on the warpath,” shows a ragtag group of beleaguered and spent Native Americans on horseback, looking as if they have been to hell and back, their world shattered. Fake news of a previous era. Photos of Native American women engaging in private daily routines feel like trespass of another sort, on display as if part of a traveling freak show or zoo exhibit. Russell was dismissive of the peoples whose land and lives were taken in the name of progress. He had a fantasy of a glorious and unified America. Today, like yesterday, we hear of a promised return to greatness (MAGA) that, like Nazi Germany and so many other genocides, is great for the few. It requires the kind of amnesia that is good only for the royalty atop the bed piled high with quilts.
