Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2006 The other side of the tracks: railroads, race, and the performance of unity in nineteenth-century American entertainment Elissa Sartwell Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the Theatre and Performance Studies Commons Recommended Citation Sartwell, Elissa, "The other side of the tracks: railroads, race, and the performance of unity in nineteenth-century American entertainment" (2006). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 3148. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/3148 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. THE OTHER SIDE OF THE TRACKS: RAILROADS, RACE, AND THE PERFORMANCE OF UNITY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN ENTERTAINMENT A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of Theatre by Elissa Sartwell B.A., George Fox University, 1998 M.A.T., George Fox University, 1999 May 2006 Acknowledgments Thirteen years ago, my high school English teacher assigned an “Oregon Project” in which students were required to research and write a paper on anything found in Oregon. Little did I know when I chose to research a small Oregon cemetery that I would go back to that cemetery as a graduate student, drawn to the grave of a Chinese man who had been buried as an “Indian Unknown.” My curiosity about that Chinese man grew into additional research on railroad construction and the plight of Chinese-Americans in the late nineteenth century. I will always be grateful to Mrs. Kissinger for cultivating my writing skills and for modeling for me the joy of research. Thanks also to Jo Lewis, Becky Ankeny, and Bill Jolliff, who contributed to my education and inspired me to pursue graduate studies. I could not have completed this dissertation without the help of my committee members: Leigh Clemons, John May, Kristin Sosnowsky, Les Wade, and especially Jennifer Jones Cavenaugh, who patiently mentored me along the way. I am grateful, too, for the companionship and encouragement I have found in my fellow doctoral students, particularly Kristin Hanson, John Wright, and Don Whittaker. Members of the Lunch Bus – thank you. I want to thank the countless reference librarians and archivists who went out of their way to help me find the tiniest kernels of information. Jeannie Woo of the Chinese Historical Society of America, Pat Keats of the Society of California Pioneers, and Karen Kinzey of the National Park Service (Arlington House) are to be commended for their dedication to preserving the past and for their willingness to share it with the present. Finally, I am grateful for the support of my family, especially Dick, Linda, and Debbie Sartwell. I also wish to thank my late grandparents for sharing their histories with me and nurturing my interest in the past. ii Table of Contents ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS………………………………………………………...……………..........ii LIST OF FIGURES…………………………………………………………………………………..iv ABSTRACT………………………………………………………………………………………....v CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION…………………………………………...…………………………….1 2. THIS TRAIN IS BOUND FOR GLORY; OR, “THE TRACKS THAT LAID THEMSELVES”: THE ROLE OF POPULAR ENTERTAINMENT IN THE ERASURE OF RAILROAD LABORERS………………………………………………..….13 3. “I BEEN WORKIN' IN THE LAUNDRY”: THE ROLE OF PERFORMANCE IN THE RECASTING OF MINORITY RAILROAD LABORERS AS MENIAL LABOR…………………………………………………………...………………...…..69 4. DIVIDE AND CONQUER; OR, “MY WHITE, BLACK, AND YELLOW BOYS”: ETHNIC JOCKEYING IN LATE NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN ENTERTAINMENT……………………………………………………………………..132 5. SELLING THE “OLD WEST”: THE NEGOTIATION OF NOSTALGIA AND GUILT IN TWENTIETH AND TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY PERFORMANCES OF THE RAILROAD AND THE AMERICAN FRONTIER……………………………….…..166 6. “A MINGLED YARN”: FINDING UNITY IN DIFFERENCE………………………………213 WORKS CITED…………………………………………………..……………………………….223 APPENDIX: PERMISSION FORMS…………………………………………………..……………..233 VITA…………………………………………………………………………………………….236 iii List of Figures 2.1. Russell’s Photograph Taken at Promontory Summit on May 10, 1869…………………….21 2.2. Poster From Under the Gaslight………………………………………………………….....36 2.3. “Central Pacific Railroad – Chinese Laborers At Work”.…………………………….…….55 2.4. “What Shall We Do With Our Boys?”……………………………………….……………..56 2.5. “Watch Us Pull His Tail”.…………………………………………………….……………..57 2.6. "Rough on Rats"……………………………………………………………….…………....58 2.7. “The Chinese Problem Solved By Peerless Wringer”………….…………………………...59 2.8. The Daily Stage, October 6, 1880…………………………………………………………...65 3.1. “A Great Big Chickapoo Chief”…………………………………………………………….88 3.2. “An Unsightly Object”………………………………………………………………………99 3.3. “All-A-Same, or The Chinee Laundryman”……………………………………………….107 3.4. “Uncle Sam’s Troublesome Bedfellows”………………………………………………….130 5.1. Visitors Watch a Reenactment of the Golden Spike Ceremony at the Golden Spike National Historic Site………………………………………………………………………178 5.2. The Narrator (Telegraph Operator) Signals the Arrival of the Union Pacific Locomotive…………………………………………………………………180 5.3. “Stanford” Addresses the Crowd…………………………………………………………..180 5.4. The Narrator Requests a “Cheer”………………………………………………………….181 iv Abstract Nineteenth-century Americans took great pride in the completion of the first transcontinental railroad in 1869. This pride was not solely grounded in the knowledge that a grand, technological feat had been accomplished. When placed in its historical context, the celebration surrounding the completion of the railroad suggests a clear and visible statement of unity following a bitter and divisive civil war. The transcontinental railroad of 1869 undeniably unified the States. But any railroad simultaneously unites and divides, for while the tracks serve to link distant locations, they also produce a literal and metaphorical division in the communities through which they travel: “the other side of the tracks.” This study examines the intersection of performance, history, and politics in the historical glorification of the railroad and the simultaneous erasure and degradation of the men who built it. Specifically, this dissertation examines dozens of nineteenth-century plays, songs, and cartoons, exploring the power of performance in cementing a history of the railroad and the complicity of performance in a political movement that aimed to devalue the contribution of Irish, Mormon, and Black laborers and to expel the Chinese from the United States. This study ultimately engages the larger question of how performance can be used to shape collective memory, history, and a national definition of what it means to be a part of the “United” States of America. v Chapter 1 Introduction Herodotus thought of historians as the guardians of memory, the memory of glorious deeds. I prefer to see historians as the guardians of the skeletons in the cupboard of the social memory . , which reveal weaknesses in grand and not-so-grand theories. There used to be an official called the 'Remembrancer.' The title was actually a euphemism for debt collector. The official's job was to remind people of what they would have liked to forget. One of the most important functions of the historian is to be a Remembrancer.1 I begin my work with this quote by Peter Burke because I believe it captures the spirit of the task I have determined to do. Revealed in Burke’s eloquent passage are two fundamentally different approaches to history. The one, espoused by Herodotus, views history as a record of “glorious deeds” that, when reviewed by the historian, will tell the story of a people. The other, embraced by Burke, approaches history by examining those not-so-glorious deeds, those memories that tell a darker, more honest story. The aim of the present study is to examine nineteenth-century representations of the transcontinental railroad and the laborers who built it. As I set out upon this project, I had no idea how “divided” an undertaking it would be. I anticipated that I would find images of railroad laborers adjacent to images of the railroad. What I quickly discovered is that images of railroad laborers do not exist in conjunction with the railroad. Rather, the laborers represented in nineteenth-century popular entertainment are distanced from the railroad, erased from the “glorious deed” of railroad construction, and relegated to the “cupboard of social memory.” This study, then, will explore the ways in which nineteenth-century popular entertainers embraced the role of Herodotus in their exaltation of the railroad while they simultaneously pushed to the margins aspects of the railroad that they did not find worthy of glorification; 1 Peter Burke, Varieties of Cultural History (Cambridge, UK: Polity P, 1997) 59. 1 specifically, these entertainers reflected and perpetuated a belief that the railroad's ethnic laborers were unworthy both of recognition and of inclusion in the United States of America. Nineteenth-century Americans took great pride in their technological accomplishments: the cotton gin, the telegraph, the steamboat. The railroad, however, seemed larger than any of these other accomplishments. It