Progress in the nineteenth-century American West was hard work: the hard work of Irish, Mormon, and Chinese laborers who dug the canals, blasted the tunnels, and laid the track that pulled Americans across the continent. Their work was dirty, dangerous, painful, disease-ridden, degrading, unfair, and always underpaid. And it has been largely forgotten, argues Ryan Dearinger. American progress, thanks to the hard work of canal and railroad promoters, politicians, and, yes, historians came to seem inevitable, natural, and oddly bloodless. Dearinger wants to correct that mistake, and he has written a book about the very men who built America, who made “functioning continental empire” possible between 1820 and the 1870s.

The book begins on the antebellum western frontiers of Indiana and Illinois with the digging of the Wabash and Erie and the Illinois and Michigan Canals and the construction of the Illinois Central Railroad. All of these projects relied on Irish labor, and all of the project directors found the Irish vexing, even dangerous, employees. Employers blamed worksite violence and disruption on imagined Irish “traits” of drunkenness and clannishness rather than on the appalling conditions in which Irish workers completed remarkable feats of construction. In the end, boosters found it easier to forget about the Irish altogether, erasing both physical labor and violence from their narrative of progress.

As transportation networks moved west, directors continued to use (and then forget) Irish workers as well as Chinese laborers, but in Utah the Union Pacific employed Mormon laborers as well. In the book's most original and intriguing chapter, Dearinger shows how Mormon elite and workers alike saw railroad work as an opportunity to challenge popular perceptions of Mormons and to proclaim themselves as manly American citizens. It was an uphill battle to be sure, but Mormons largely succeeded by highlighting their own manly distance from the troublesome, “uncivilized,” and definitely un-American Irish. Progress, it seemed, could now include Mormons but only by continuing to ignore the work of the non-white, non-native born. Dearinger concludes the book with a chapter on the completion of the first transcontinental railroad. The importance of Chinese labor is well known, but Dearinger makes us see just how much work the Chinese did. Working in freezing cold or scalding heat, suspended perilously over cliffs, and handling dangerous explosives, the Central Pacific could not have been built without Chinese workers. The Big Four knew it; the Chinese knew it; the famous photograph of the “golden spike” ignored it.

One of the book's projects is to examine how workers “understood themselves and their work over space and time” and how almost everyone else “understood and described this diverse array of workers” and their work. In this, Dearinger succeeds admirably, skillfully showing just how Irish and Chinese workers were pushed outside the American national narrative, so that “progress” could appear natural, inevitable, and above all, white. Celebrations of completed projects, the reports of which Dearinger reads effectively, carefully replaced laborers with engineers, politicians, and local elites. As a result, the “American experiment in democratic and technological perfection” was “advanced” “at the expense of the central contributors.” Dearinger succeeds at showing “how labor and progress worked from the perspective” of those actually doing the work (6). He seems less interested, however, “interrogating the problem of progress” (5). With the notable exception of the excellent chapter on Mormon laborers, we rarely see the idea of progress up for grabs in nineteenth-century America, its meanings and manifestations wrangled over.

While Dearinger returns workers and their toil to center stage, he keeps several of the long-standing historiographic explanations for expansion and economic development at the center of his work, most notably the idea of a transportation revolution, but also, implicitly, the centrality of canal companies and railroads, railroad owners (especially the Big Four), and the state. Workers may have made a transportation revolution literally happen, but he suggests that it was the transportation revolution that drove expansion and growth. Similarly, the canal and railroad companies, as well as their executives, set the transportation revolution (and thus expansion) in motion with substantial help from state and federal governments. Dearinger thus leaves us with several historiographic questions: Does placing Irish, Mormon, and Chinese workers front and center alter these older arguments at all? If so, how might we rewrite these master narratives of economic history and western expansion? Or does this book offer an alternative explanation for Gilded Age economic growth?

Dearinger does intervene directly and quite forcefully against historians' easy reproduction of nineteenth-century promoters' idea of progress. If native-born white Americans assumed “Progress” was white and Protestant, so too have many historians, Dearinger argues. They have largely chosen to focus on the “divisiveness, sectionalism, corporate and personal greed, political logrolling and constitutional dilemmas” generated by internal improvements. (194) Have historians really forgotten who built America? Dearinger here avoids much recent historiography that also puts dirty, difficult, and underpaid (or unpaid) labor at the center of American growth. Historians of capitalism in the antebellum period, including Seth Rockman, Adam Rothman, Edward Baptist, and Sven Beckert, among others, have directly attributed capitalist development to the labor of enslaved men and women, the poor, and the desperate. Recent works on transportation networks certainly acknowledge workers' central roles even if they do not focus on labor.

Where Dearinger does add, and add significantly, to this literature is by insisting that workers were more than their work. He shows these men actively managing their working conditions. Much of the time, he argues, they even were successful, if only briefly. Irish workers, for instance, dug the canals, but they also worked hard at controlling the canal job market, driving off potential competition, demanding (even getting) higher wages, flexing political muscle when possible. They actively asserted new formulations of masculinity that did not depend on (nor come from) skilled labor, but rather from pride in the difficult work of canal building. Even when workers did not achieve their goals, they were often so well organized that employers were seriously alarmed. In 1867, when Chinese workers on the Central Pacific struck for higher wages, the railroad “panicked.” It was only able to squash the strike with violence and vows to stop food deliveries to the worksite.

The Filth of Progress offers important directives for Gilded Age historians. It urges us to remember who built the infrastructure that defined the Gilded Age. It asks us to consider the legacies of their work in the last decades of the nineteenth century. It reminds us that creating the idea of progress was also laborious. And, in suggesting just how much Gilded Age ideas about nation, citizenship, masculinity, and work were shaped by omitting Irish, Mormon, and Chinese workers, it reminds us of the power and perils of forgetting.