Ghosts of Gold Mountain – The epic story of the Chinese who built the transcontinental railroad

By Gordon H. Chang

Huffington Mifflin Harcourt – 2019

Reviewed by, Steve Halpern

Thinking about Gordon H. Chang’s new book, Ghosts of Gold Mountain – The epic story of the Chinese who built the transcontinental railroad made me think of another book. This was Edward E. Baptist’s book titled: Half Has Never Been Told – Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. That book is about the unimaginably horrendous conditions of chattel slavery in this country, and about how that institution was the foundation for the capitalist system. With all the books written about slavery in the United States, Baptist argues that, “Half has never been told.”

We might make a similar statement about the hundred-year war against Native Americans to rob them of their land and culture. We might also mention that after slavery was outlawed, the Supreme Court of the United States openly supported the Jim Crow laws that effectively robbed African Americans of citizenship rights. Those rulings were flagrant violations of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution.

Then, we can talk about the theft of land from the descendants of the original inhabitants of the Southwest that we know today as Mexicans. After that theft, there was the systematic discrimination against Mexican people who lived on both sides of the Rio Grande River. We can also talk about the horrendous conditions of men, women, and children in the early years of basic industry.

While the pro-capitalist press likes to highlight prominent capitalists and politicians in this history, it was the workers who were the ones who built this country. Gordon H. Chang has given us another glimmer into the history of the labor movement. This is about the 20,000 Chinese railroad workers who were 90% of the labor force on the western leg of the transcontinental railroad.

Chang deserves credit for making a determined and comprehensive effort in telling this story. He acknowledges that there is much about this history that we don’t know. So, given Chang’s determined effort, we can also say that, half has never been told.

Life in Southern China in the 1800’s

Most of the Chinese who worked on the railroad came from Guangdong province. Within the Guangdong province is the Siyi, that is composed of four counties. Across the water from Guangdong is present day Hong Kong.

The 1800s were particularly turbulent times in China. The Manchu are a minority nationality In China. About 90% of the Chinese population consists of the Han nationality. Manchu royal families ruled China from 1644 to 1910.

The Manchu royal family required Chinese men to wear the hairstyle known as the queue. This meant that men did not cut their hair and wore it in a pigtail. The front of their head was shaved. Failure to wear the queue was punishable by death.

Many Chinese women were compelled to have their feet bound and broken in an early age. This made it difficult for women to walk.   

There were three Opium Wars. The British decided to flagrantly violate Manchu royal edicts that prohibited opium imports. The defeat of China in the Opium Wars caused a financial catastrophe for the entire nation.

The Taiping Rebellion challenged the deteriorating conditions in China. While the Taipings were a fundamentally religious movement, they favored basic reforms for women that included an end to foot-binding. The Taiping Rebellion lasted from 1850-1864.

The imperialist powers supported the Manchus in their effort to defeat the Taiping rebellion. According to what I’ve seen, about 10 to 30 million Chinese lost their lives in the Taiping Rebellion that took place during the same years as the Civil War in the United States.

Faced with that reality, about 200,000 people living in Guangdong province left China. They went to many countries in the world. One of those countries was the United States.

We might also keep in mind that the Chinese people had a long history of completing huge construction projects. The Great Wall of China extends for about 5,500 miles. This is over twice the distance from New York City to Los Angeles, California. The Grand Canal of China is a human made waterway that extends 1,500 miles. The Chinese constructed hundreds of ships that sailed across the Indian Ocean in the year 1410. During the 1500s the Chinese supplied Europe with vast amounts of silk and porcelain in exchange for silver that Native Americans mined in the Spanish colonies.

The climate in Guangdong is warm and humid. As we will see, the Chinese immigrants found a completely different climate in the United States.

The Gold Mountain

Most Chinese came to the United States to take advantage of the gold rush that was centered in San Francisco, California. After gold was discovered in California, people came from all over the world in hopes of striking it rich. The population of San Francisco skyrocketed as a result. Because of that reality, the Chinese referred to the United States as the “Gold Mountain.”

Leland Stanford was born in New York state, became a lawyer, lived in Wisconsin, and then moved to California. He became wealthy by running a general store that catered to miners. He was also a politician and founded Stanford University.

Stanford, along with Charles Crocker, Mark Hopkins, and Collis Huntington invested in the idea of building a transcontinental railroad. One leg of this railroad would start on the east coast. The other leg would start in California and meet in the center of the United States.

 At that time, travel from the East Coast to California would take months and was extremely dangerous. With the completion of the transcontinental railroad, travel across the United States took six days.

We should also say that the building of this railroad coincided with the genocidal war against Native Americans. General Phillip Henry Sheridan reflected the horrendous views of the United States government when he stated: “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” Following that sentiment, the government organized to murder millions of buffalo so the Native Americans would not have the means to live.

Leland Stanford initially had racist views of the Chinese. Living in California, and being exposed to the Chinese people, he began to change his views.

One of his relatives received effective medical treatment by a Chinese doctor. At that time, the Chinese had a long history in medical care. Their treatments were as good or better than the treatments of the doctors in this country at that time.

 Stanford eventually came to realize that the labor of the Chinese workers was indispensable to the completion of the transcontinental railroad. Stanford’s racist views were typical of the predominant views about the Chinese at this time. While people of European heritage prided themselves in being industrious, the history of the construction of the transcontinental railroad is a testament to the fact that it was the Chinese who had the stamina, persistence, and determination to complete this massive project.

Gordon H. Change did extensive research into writing this book. He discovered that there were many letters from the Chinese railroad-workers to their homes in China. He could not find a single one of those letters. However, he was able to piece together an outline of what it meant to work building the transcontinental railroad.

Chang found the correspondence of an engineer who had been hired to survey the western leg of the railroad where most of the Chinese workers toiled. This engineer faced mud, snow, cold, and a seemingly impassible terrane. After six months, this engineer resigned because he could no longer tolerate the job. The Chinese rail-workers would have a much more difficult job.

The Western leg of the Transcontinental Railroad was significantly more difficult to build than the Eastern leg. This was because of the mountains, the need to cut a path through uncertain terrane, and the need to build a series of tunnels.

One persistent problem was the snow. Many rail workers perished as a result of avalanches in the mountains. The snow, at times, was so deep that rail workers needed to live under the snow. This meant they needed to cut air vents so they could breathe, and tunnels so they could get to work.

Then, there were the tunnels that needed to be cut through the granite in the mountains. Drills were powered by the Chinese workers who used a sledgehammer to slowly drive long drills into the granite mountains. Then, dynamite was placed in the holes, and the granite was blasted away. As we might imagine, many Chinese workers perished because of accidents in using that dynamite.

Due to the institutionalized racism of the rail bosses, the Chinese workers were paid significantly less than their caucasian coworkers. Yet when the railroad bosses hired Scottish workers who specialized in this work, the Chinese proved that they were much more productive than their Scottish counterparts.

Gordon H. Chang doesn’t fully understand how the Chinese workers were able to lower themselves down steep cliffs in order to blast through granite and build tunnels. He knows that, at times, Chinese workers lowered others with ropes in hand made baskets. They then cut a deep hole in the mountain, inserted dynamite, lit the fuse, and got out of the way in a hurry. I don’t believe that workers who were not Chinese ever attempted to blast through mountains using this method.

We might also mention that much of the food the Chinese workers prepared for themselves was shipped from China. This trade, across the Pacific Ocean, thrived in spite of the fact that the Chinese railroad workers had salaries of about one dollar for a workday that might be sixteen hours.  

The Strike

Gordon H. Chang devoted an entire chapter to a strike by Chinese workers who protested these conditions, as well as the systematic discrimination they faced. In June of 1867, 3,000 Chinese rail workers from many locations laid down their tools and went on strike. They took a break from the arduous and dangerous work, and gave themselves some much-deserved time off.

The owners of the Union Pacific Railroad panicked. While they did absolutely no work to build the railroad, they invested a lot of paper values known as money. The Chinese railroad workers had developed skills that were necessary to complete this massive project. Without their continued labor, investors could have lost considerable amounts of money.

According to Chang, the rail bosses cut off the supply of food to the workers. After about one week, the strikers went back to work without getting the company to grant many of their demands.

We might look at this strike in the context of the history of this country. During the Civil War, literally hundreds of thousands of slaves freed themselves. They walked off the plantations and joined the Union forces.

President Abraham Lincoln understood that he needed thousands of soldiers to replenish the Union Army. He recruited about 260,000 Black people to fill that gap. This was one of the main reasons why Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

Then, after the Chinese strike of 1867, there was another strike of railroad workers in 1877. This was followed by the strike against the Pullman Palace railcar company.

Given the fact that the labor of the Chinese railroad workers transformed the economy of the United States, we might ask the question: How were the Chinese treated after the completion of the transcontinental railroad?

Racist mobs targeted Chinese workers scapegoating them for the lack of available jobs. Many Chinese workers were murdered or forced to leave their homes.

Then, in the year 1882 Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act that made Chinese immigrants ineligible for U.S. citizenship. The law also prohibited Chinese immigration to the United States. President Chester Alan Arthur vetoed this legislation, but congress overrode his veto. Then, in 1892 Congress made this law even worse with the Geary Act.

Clearly this was an insidious betrayal of the arduous and indispensable work of the Chinese railroad workers. However, when we look at the history of the United States, we find many similar betrayals.

During the revolution that created the United States, the Cherokee fought on the side of those demanding independence. The new government rewarded the Cherokee for their service with a treaty saying they had a right to live on their traditional homeland. This land is located in what is now the state of Georgia.

President Andrew Jackson violated that treaty and subjected the Cherokee to a forced march to what is now Oklahoma. The Cherokee land in Georgia then was used to establish slave labor camps. Thousands died on that forced march. Then, after the Civil War the Cherokee land in Oklahoma was confiscated.

Thousands of Black soldiers and of ex-slaves were instrumental in the Union victory against the confederacy in the Civil War. Yet in 1877 racist mobs overthrew the reconstruction governments and Black people lost citizenship rights with the Jim Crow laws.        

Saying all of this, we can also say that the labor movement in the United States has been hampered by the institutionalized discrimination in this country. It wasn’t until the 1930s, during the depression, when workers of all nationalities began to understand that, “An injury to one is an injury to all.”

Today there are many in the labor movement who do not support the demands of workers who were born in other nations. Yet, there is also a new generation of workers who are beginning to see the importance of international solidarity.

China today

When we look at the tremendous amount of work required to build the transcontinental railroad, we can also begin to appreciate the recent developments in the nation of China. In a three-year period, China used more concrete than the United States used in 100 years. As a result, today China is the most industrialized nation in the world.

This reality begs the question: Why did hundreds of thousands of Chinese leave their homeland, in the 19^th century, while today China has more industrial workers than any other nation? How is it that today China has transport, energy, and communications projects in 68 nations where the majority of the world’s population live? The Chinese government calls this their “Belt and Road” initiative.

Part of the answer to these questions comes from the fact that there has been a massive transfer in manufacturing from the developed nations to nations where wages are between $1 and $10 per day.  As a result, millions of manufacturing jobs have been eliminated in developed nations like the United States.

Another part of the answer to these questions has to do with the reality of the Chinese Revolution. During the first years of the Chinese revolutionary government, there was an emphasis in bridging the gap between workers, farmers, and capitalists. This was a different perspective from the from the idea of “dictatorship of the proletariat” as advocated by Karl Marx and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

After the death of Mao Zedong, the Chinses government opened up the country to massive capitalist development. Because of the centralization of the economy, and the fact that China was no longer under imperialist domination, trade with the world capitalist market mushroomed.

The nation of India has a similar population as China. India also has a similar history of colonialism. However, India never had an anti-imperialist revolution. Today, the infrastructure of China is much more advanced than India, and the standard of living is significantly better in China than in India. China’s economy is about four times larger than the Indian economy. We might also say that China has done more to eliminate hunger in the world than the rest of the world combined.

However, because China is tied to the capitalist economy, that nation also has problems linked to the international capitalist system. China has a largely export economy. The current downturn of capitalism will affect China. In the past three years, there have been 20,000 Chinese strikes every year. These strikes protested the horrendous working conditions in the country.

When we think of these strikes, I believe we can link them to the Chinese railroad workers strike in 1867. Clearly there have been immense changes in the world since the 19^th century. However, the demand that Chinese workers receive the respect and dignity they deserve continues to be relevant today.