The Filth of Progress: Immigrants, Americans, and the Building of Canals and Railroads in the West

by Ryan Dearinger

The Filth of Progress  explores the untold side of a well-known American story. For more than a century, accounts of progress in the West foregrounded the technological feats performed while canals and railroads were built and lionized the capitalists who financed the projects. This book salvages stories often omitted from the triumphant narrative of progress by focusing on the suffering and survival of the workers who were treated as outsiders. Ryan Dearinger examines the moving frontiers of canal and railroad construction workers in the tumultuous years of American expansion, from the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825 to the joining of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads in 1869. He tells the story of the immigrants and Americans—the Irish, Chinese, Mormons, and native-born citizens—whose labor created the West’s infrastructure and turned the nation’s dreams of a continental empire into a reality. Dearinger reveals that canals and railroads were not static monuments to progress but moving spaces of conflict and contestation.

284 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2015

Reviews

[Miranda Warren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Awesome book, a must read for any historian of American West.

[Christal · Rating 1 out of 5]

Repetitive statements with few concrete examples and evidence from primary sources

[Jared · Rating 4 out of 5]

"American progress was built on the backs of people deemed second-class citizens at best. Its dark underbelly was punctuated by grueling labor, low wages, suffering, and survival."