“Unlimited American Power”: How Four California Newspapers Covered Chinese Labor and the Building of the Transcontinental Railroad, 1865–1869

Abstract

The transcontinental railroad joining the eastern and western halves of the country has been lauded as one of the greatest displays of American engineering and innovation, yet it could not have been completed without the help of thousands of Chinese laborers. This study considers four newspapers’ coverage of the Chinese in three California railroad towns as their populations swelled with foreign workers from 1865 to 1869. It considers the coverage within the framework of Clint Wilson's five historical phases of (white) press coverage of minorities. For journalism historians, the story of the railroad is valuable because of what it tells us about press treatment of a large minority group during a significant display of American nation-building.

Notes

Charles Nordhoff, “California: What to See There and How to See It,” part 2, Harper's New Monthly Magazine, June 1872, 66.

Barry B. Combs, Westward to Promontory: Building the Union Pacific across the Plains and Mountains (New York: Promontory, 1969), 17.

Stephen E. Ambrose, Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 17. An 1863 editorial in the Pacific Appeal urged freed slaves to take advantage of the “innumerable benefits that will accrue from the building of the Pacific railroad,” which would include the development of new towns and access to “common school education.” Peter Anderson, editorial, Pacific Appeal, February 14, 1863.

Carolyn Kitch, Pennsylvania in Public Memory: Reclaiming the Industrial Past (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press), 18.

The railroads, argues historian Alfred Chandler Jr., with their large-scale management activities, provided the basis of modern corporate management. Alfred Chandler Jr., “The Railroads: Pioneers in Modern Corporate Management,” Business History Review 39, no. 1 (Spring 1965): 16–40. See also Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011).

Omaha Weekly Herald, November 2, 1866.

The sentiment is drawn from an inscription for the California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento, California.

Charles Nordhoff, “California: What to See There and How to See It,” part 1, Harper's New Monthly Magazine, May 1872, 878.

See, for example, Frederick Merk, Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963). The author writes that manifest destiny “meant expansion, prearranged by Heaven, over an area not clearly defined,” and that “in some minds, it meant expansion over the … region of the Pacific; in others over the North American continent; in others, over the hemisphere,” 24. Also see Albert K. Weinberg, Manifest Destiny: A Study of Nationalist Expansionism in American History (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1963), in which the author explains rationales for expansion: that the Anglo-Saxon race possessed a “natural right” to the land, that it could put the land to better use, and that taking over the land could help spread democracy. Norman Graebner, Empire on the Pacific: A Study in American Continental Expansion (New York: Ronald Press, 1955), argued that the real reason for expansion was the quest for Pacific ports to support a growing Asia trade and the need for a naval base to protect that trade, 17; Sister Magdalen Coughlin, “California Ports: A Key to Diplomacy for the West Coast, 1820–1845,” Journal of the West 5 (1966), insisted the only goal was the port of San Francisco, 153.

Randall Bennett Woods, A Black Odyssey: John Lewis Waller and the Promise of American Life, 1878–1900 (Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1981), 67. According to the author, African Americans who settled in Kansas towns during the 1870s and 1880s became “visible” as a group when they reached 7 percent of the population. Another important component in visibility was likely the length of residence.

The Statistics of the Population of the United States, Nine Census, Volume I (Washington, DC: US Bureau of Census, 1870), 346–347.

Ambrose, Nothing Like It in the World, 120.

Ibid., 123.

Ibid., 148.

Ibid., 147.

David Roediger and Elizabeth Esch, The Production of Difference: Race and the Management of Labor in US History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 73–74. The authors note the 1876 testimony of Charles Crocker, a Central Pacific Railroad construction manager, who told a congressional committee on Chinese immigration that managers thought the Chinese ill suited for the work but were compelled to try them given the unreliability of white workers.

Ambrose, Nothing Like It in the World, 149.

Bain, Empire Express, 219–220.

Ambrose, Nothing Like It in the World, 148–149.

Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (Boston: Little, Brown, 1998), 12.

Roediger and Esch, The Production of Difference, 70.

Edna Bonaich, “A Theory of Ethnic Antagonism: The Split Labor Market,” American Sociological Review 37, no. 5 (October 1972): 547.

Wesley S. Griswold, A Work of Giants: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962).

George Kraus, High Road to Promontory: Building the Central Pacific (Now the Southern Pacific) across the High Sierra (Palo Alto, CA: American West, 1969).

Ibid., 10, 20–21.

David Haward Bain, Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad (New York: Penguin Books, 1999).

Barry B. Combs, Westward to Promontory: Building the Union Pacific across the Plains and Mountains (New York: Promontory Press, 1969). The book narrates the nineteenth-century photographs of Andrew J. Russell, who documented construction of the Union Pacific. See also Glenn Willumson, Iron Muse: Photographing the Transcontinental Railroad (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013). Although the emphasis here was on the scale and, thus, power of the steam engine, some photographs included workers though few were portraits of the workers.

A recent digital-humanities project at Stanford University provides primary and secondary resources related to Chinese railroad workers. “Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project,” Stanford University, http://www.stanford.edu/group/chineserailroad/cgi-bin/wordpress.

See, for example, Andrew Gyory, Closing the Gate: Race, Politics, and the Chinese Exclusion Act (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 48.

Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 80.

Daily Alta California, May 12, 1852, as quoted in Takaki.

Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (New York: Hill & Wang, 2000), 28. See also John Schrecker, “‘For the Equality of Men—For the Equality of Nations’: Anson Burlingame and China's First Embassy to the United States, 1968,” Journal of American-East Asian Relations 17, no. 1 (2010): 9–34.

Jacobson, 4, 79.

Gyory, Closing the Gate, 78.

Frankie Hutton and Barbara Strauss Reed, eds., Outsiders in 19th Century Press History: Multicultural Perspectives (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1995).

Shi Xu, “The Images of the Chinese in the Rocky Mountain Region: 1855–1882” (Ph.D. diss., Brigham Young University, 1996).

Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 14, 16, 18, 80–81, 100.

Najia Aarim-Heriot, Chinese Immigrants, African Americans, and Racial Anxiety in the United States, 1848–1882 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 1.

Herman B. Chiu, “Power of the Press: How Newspapers in Four Communities Erased Thousands of Chinese from Oregon History,” American Journalism 16, no. 1 (Winter 1999): 59–77. See also Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 6. “Many existing history books give Asian Americans only passing notice or overlook them altogether.”

Kirk, “Radical Labor, Racism, and the Preservation of Hegemony in Ogden, Territorial Utah, 1885–1886.” See also Andrew Taylor Kirk, “Dens of Hell in the Cities of Zion: Newspaper Coverage of Opium Abuse in Territorial Utah, 1869–96,” Journalism History 35, no. 4 (Winter 2010): 229–237.

Cheryl L. Cole, “Chinese Exclusion: The Capitalist Perspective of the San Francisco Union, 1850–1882,” California History 57, no. 1 (Spring 1978): 8.

Clint C. Wilson II, Black Journalists in Paradox: Historical Perspectives and Current Dilemmas (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991), 14–15.

Ibid., 15–17.

Ibid., 18. See also Clint C. Wilson II, Felix Gutierrez, and Lena M. Chao, Racism, Sexism, and the Media: Multicultural Issues into the New Communications Age (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2013).

Wilson, Gutierrez, and Chao, Racism, Sexism, and the Media, 56. The authors note that this was the dilemma of Anglo-European settlers confronted with Native Americans and from it emerged the “noble savage” stereotype.

Edward C. Kemble, A History of California Newspapers, 1846–1858 (Los Gatos, CA: Talisman, 1962), 149–151.

Ibid.

Dutch Flat Enquirer, May 12, 1866.

The Statistics of the Population of the United States, Ninth Census, vol. 1 (Washington, DC: US Bureau of Census, 1870), 346–347.

Kemble, A History of California Newspapers, 162.

Ibid.

Sacramento Daily Union, March 29, 1856.

See, for example, H. M. Lai, “The Chinese American Press,” in The Ethnic Press in the United States: A Historical Analysis and Handbook, ed. Sally M. Miller (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1987), 27–43; Karl Lo and H. M. Lai, Chinese Newspapers Published in North America, 1854–1975 (Washington, DC: Center for Chinese Research Materials, 1977).

Chinese names (in comparison to immigrants from other nations) were identified by familiarity with the Chinese language. There are only 438 Chinese surnames, 408 of which are monosyllabic. A giveaway was if someone's first name was recorded in news coverage as “Ah,” an honorific similar to “Mr.” or “Brother.” Sometimes the Chinese were referred to as “Chinaman,”“John Chinaman,” “John,” or “Celestials.” See Samuel Wells Williams, A Syllabic Dictionary of the Chinese Language, part 2 (London: Ganesha, 2001), 1242–1250. Chinese names were spelled multiple ways in different issues of the paper. When similarly spelled names were linked to the same court cases within days of each other, it was assumed they were the same person.

Bain, Empire Express, 239; Ambrose, Nothing Like It in the World, 155.

Railroad Record, November 23, 1865, as quoted in Ambrose, Nothing Like It in the World, 159; and in Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 85. For the use of “Celestials” as a reference to the Chinese, see, for example, Richard D. Locklear, “The Celestials and the Angels: A Study of the Anti-Chinese Movement in Los Angeles to 1882,” Historical Society of Southern California Quarterly 42, no. 3 (September 1960): 239–256.

Placer Herald, September 30, 1865.

Ambrose, Nothing Like It in the World, 152.

John W. Reps, Cities of the American West: A History of Frontier Urban Planning (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 29.

Central Pacific records show that tracks reached Dutch Flat on July 5, 1866.

“Railroad,” Dutch Flat Enquirer, February 10, 1866.

“Around the Horn,” Dutch Flat Enquirer, April 28, 1866. See also “Progressing,” Dutch Flat Enquirer, May 7, 1866.

Bain, Empire Express, 221.

Ibid., 222.

Ibid., 200.

Ambrose, Nothing Like It in the World, 164.

Ibid.

“The Summit Railroad Tunnel,” Placer Herald, October 14, 1865.

Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 85.

“Burglary,” Placer Herald, June 3, 1865, 2.

“No More Chicken for John?,” Placer Herald, May 27, 1866, 2.

“A Cute Chinese Thief,” Placer Herald, April 28, 1866.

Dutch Flat Enquirer, September 8, 1866.

“Caught,” Dutch Flat Enquirer, June 30, 1866. Another story warned, “Our citizens are nightly in danger of having their premises set on fire by the torches which our celestial neighbors are constantly carrying through the streets in place of lanterns,” cautioned the Dutch Flat Enquirer in a March 10, 1866, item. “Large flakes of fire drop from these torches on wooden sidewalks, and in case it should be blown under a dwelling house or other premises, serious consequences might be the result. Steps should be taken to put a stop to this dangerous practice.” See “Celestial,” Dutch Flat Enquirer, March 10, 1866.

See, for example, “Accomplice Caught,” Dutch Flat Enquirer, August 4, 1866; “Before Judge Aubury,” Dutch Flat Enquirer, August 4, 1866; “Chinaman Shot,” Dutch Flat Enquirer, August 4, 1866; “Another Victim,” Dutch Flat Enquirer, September 8, 1866.

“A Thief Bagged,” Dutch Flat Enquirer, August 18, 1866.

Dutch Flat Enquirer, May 12, 1866, 2.

“A Leper,” Dutch Flat Enquirer, June 9, 1866, 2.

“Graveyard,” Dutch Flat Enquirer, June 23, 1866, 2.

Ibid., 198, 303–305.

“Died,” Sacramento Daily Union, March 15, 1869.

“Married,” Sacramento Daily Union, March 16, 1869, 2.

“Married,” Sacramento Daily Union, April 8, 1869, 2.

“Celestial Happiness,” Sacramento Daily Union, April 19, 1869.

As for marriage and birth announcements, the exclusion of Chinese suggests more than race was at stake. Fewer than 9,000 Chinese women came to the US between 1852 and 1882. There were likely never more than 5,000 Chinese women in all of America at any time—and most of those were victims of sex trafficking. See, for example, Sucheng Chan, Asian Americans: An Interpretive History (Boston: Twayne, 1991), 104.

Bain, “Empire Express,” 367, 504.

“Telegraphic,” Sacramento Bee, April 24, 1869.

“Railroad Men,” Sacramento Bee, April 30, 1869, 3.

Sucheng Chan, Asian Americans: An Interpretive History (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991), 28.

“Police Court,” Sacramento Daily Union, March 29, 1869, 3. “Police Court,” Sacramento Daily Union, April 2, 1869; “City Intelligence,” Sacramento Daily Union, April 2, 1869, 3. “Police Court,” Sacramento Daily Union, April 5, 1869, 3; “Police Court,” Sacramento Bee, April 17, 1869, 5; “Police Court,” Sacramento Daily Union, April 19, 1869; “Police Court,” Sacramento Bee, April 21, 1869; “Police Court,” Sacramento Daily Union, April 23, 1869, 5; “Police Court,” Sacramento Bee, April 23, 1869, 3. Also see “Self Convicted,” Sacramento Daily Union, March 27, 1869, 3; “Arrests,” Sacramento Daily Union, March 27, 1869, 3; “Stealing Rice,” Sacramento Daily Union, March 27, 1869, 3; “Police Court,” Sacramento Daily Union, March 27, 1869, 3; “Cruelty to Animals,” Sacramento Daily Union, April 3, 1869; “Police Court,” Sacramento Bee, April 24, 1869, 3; “From Folsom,” Sacramento Bee, April 26, 1869, 3; “Police Court,” Sacramento Bee, April 26, 1869, 2. It should be noted that when a Chinese man was charged with stealing rice from a local market, his bail was set at $1,000; by comparison, a non-Chinese man, James Flinn, was listed as having plead guilty of drunkenness and fined $10. “Arrests,” Sacramento Daily Union, April 5, 1869, 3; “Captured,” Sacramento Daily Union, April 7, 1869; “Petit Larceny,” Sacramento Daily Union, April 17, 1869, 5; “Police Court,” Sacramento Daily Union, April 18, 1869.

Randall Bennett Woods, A Black Odyssey: John Lewis Waller and the Promise of American Life, 1878–1900 (Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas), 67.

Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 79.

Ibid., 91.

Bonaich, “A Theory of Ethnic Antagonism,” 547.

Aarim-Heriot, Chinese Immigrants, African Americans and Racial Anxiety in the United States, 1848–1882, 38.

Saxton, The Rise and Fall, 295.

“New Field for Chinese Labor,” Dutch Flat Enquirer, May 19, 1866, 3.

“Chinese Dignity,” Sacramento Daily Union, March 17, 1869; italics for emphasis.

“John Chinaman's Soliloquy,” Placer Herald, April 28, 1866.

Wilson's fifth phase, however, could be broadened to include minority populations sustained by a steady influx of single, first-generation immigrants. Niche and alternative publications, albeit their lesser circulations, could offer a corrective to “white” press.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Herman B. Chiu

Herman B. Chiu was an assistant professor at Lock Haven University, Department of Communication and Philosophy, Lock Haven, PA. He passed away in 2008.

Andrew Taylor Kirk

Andrew Taylor Kirk is Digital Media Editor for Townsquare Media Tri-Cities, 2621 W. A Street, Pasco, WA 99301, [email protected].