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Culture & Society

Railroading America : Towards a Material Study of the Nation

Ginette Verstraete
Theory Culture Society 2002 19: 145
DOI: 10.1177/026327602761899192
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Railroading America
Towards a Material Study of the Nation

Ginette Verstraete

Introduction: Materializing the Nation

HIS ARTICLE studies the material production of the national
community in 19th-century America. More particularly, it concentrates on the intersection between particular technologies of transportation, representation and dissemination in the imaginary formation of
the American nation in the 1860s. As the prime technologies with which
individuals can collectively be placed, displaced, replaced in relation to an
imaginary geography and with which spatially and temporally distant
citizens can connect and feel connected, systems of transportation and
communication have been the site of fierce struggles for power among the
nation-builders. But they have largely been overlooked in narrowly cultural
approaches to nationhood (Bhabha, 1990; Hall, 1994; Minh-ha, 1989). In
this culturalist reinterpretation of Benedict Andersons (1983) pioneering
work, it is only in the form of a homogeneous national culture defined as
language, literature or imagination that the masses embody and exemplify
the whole of the political community. Identification with the nation implies
an imagined entrance into a field of spatial and temporal commonness. Similarly, nationhood is believed to be an imagined construct, a product of
creativity, consciousness and language devoid of material relations, connections and mediators. Little attention is paid to the tensions between different
kinds of mediators, say between visual and verbal languages or between
ways of dressing and ways of travel, and the various imagined communities
these mediations generate within a specific historical, political, and
economic context.
In what follows I propose to revisit the cultural relation between the
nation-state and its citizens and immigrants in a more contextualized and

 Theory, Culture & Society 2002 (SAGE, London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi),
Vol. 19(5/6): 145159
[0263-2764(200210)19:5/6;145159;028411]

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146 Theory, Culture & Society 19(5/6)

material setting that will allow us not only to unravel the myth of a unified
national culture but also to recuperate the social-economic relations at the
site of its material production and reception. Our scene will be that of the
construction and marketing of the first transcontinental railroad in 19thcentury California at a time when post-Civil-War American entrepreneurs
and politicians were redefining the territorial and symbolic borders of both
the state and of the nation in it. Showing the contradictory material production that went into the implementation of this nation-making and nationmarketing technology, I will unearth a heterogeneous national practice that
besides white Anglo-American capital, mobility and technology involved
white female domesticity and Chinese migrant labor as well as a complex
displacement of all particulars through a mass-publicity of nationalist
symbols such as the steam engine and the western landscape on a regional
and national scale. Studying the formation of the nation from the perspective of the work of emplacement and displacement that went into it allows
me to highlight what tends to remain hidden in cultural (textual) approaches
to nationhood: its involvement in racial, gendered and class-related inclusions and exclusions.
Ultimately, what this essay focuses on is the (re)production of the
social/national through the circulation of divisions as offered by a specific
material apparatus in this case the railroad and the words and images
circulating along its tracks in the service of an all but homogeneous
ideology. As Aijaz Ahmad (1993) has stated:
[T]he nation is not a thing which once made, simply endures . . . nation,
like class, is a process, which is made and remade, a thousand times over,
and, more than process, nation is a terrain of struggle which condenses all
social struggles, so that every organized force in society attempts to endow it
with specific meanings and attributes.

To highlight this contradictory social-economic dynamic of unity and

difference mediating between the national subject and object of belonging
is to put the national community at risk and to open it up to its internal
material differences. Homi Bhabha has described this as
the Janus-faced discourse of the nation . . . where meanings may be partial
because they are in medias res; and history may be half-made because it is
in the process of being made; and the image of cultural authority may be
ambivalent because it is caught, uncertainly, in the act of composing its
powerful image. (1990: 3)

In the material context here discussed, we will replace Bhabhas poststructuralist Janus-faced ambivalence of language itself with what I would
like to describe as the critical intersection of a nations constitutive capitalist technologies, such as the railroad (including its gendered and racialized labour and leisure) and its dissemination and reception through verbal
and visual practices, especially photography. These are technologies that
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certainly do not emerge in a social vacuum but that are located in a particular historical, material and social context that they co-constitute
and immediately transform (mobilize) in various ways, which, in turn, alters
the conditions under which those technologies function. Transformations in
the terms of technological production in turn lead to shifts in the definition
and symbolic representation of the social realm. To say it with Donna
Haraway, technology is not a neutral given: The machine is not an it to be
animated, worshipped, and dominated. The machine is us, our processes,
an aspect of our embodiment (1991: 180). Thus defined, the social constituted in and through industrial technologies and technology embedded in
varying social relations, are structured by the performative logic of Bhabhas
nation as address (1990: 3). By thus considering the strained relation
between the technology that is present (as object) and the meaningful but
heterogeneous utterances that it is making (as social subject) to and about
the citizen-viewer, we have entered the realm of technology as cultural
performance.
Railroading America
That the railroad played a crucial role in the production of the American
nation should hardly surprise us: since Tocqueville mobility is regarded as
a national characteristic to be an American one has to go somewhere, to
the West. In 1862 Congress decided to connect the Atlantic to the Pacific
Coast by means of a transcontinental railroad for several reasons1 to
strengthen the ties with California and Nevada during the Civil War and
keep them into the Union; to be able to quickly transport military weapons
and personnel westward in future wars against the Indians; to draw more
settlers to the mid-West; and to be able to cheaply transport goods to the
west coast and from there into Asia. As has often been noted, Americas
national destiny was to transcend local conflicts by collectively going
westward:
Above all, the West was there to serve the national good: it was owned by all
and it was an important goal in a nation many feared was tearing itself apart.
It was more amorphous than most goals, but it gave promoters a handy
geographical destination for their roads . . . Railroads and the West naturally
joined together metaphorically and otherwise to illustrate the character of the
nation. (Ward, 1986: 945)

At first two railroad companies had to make that westward journey

possible: the Central Pacific Railroad Company founded under the laws of
the state of California in 1861 was to start building eastward from Sacramento and meet the other one on the way, namely The Union Pacific
Railroad Company which started building westward from Omaha, Nebraska.
The Central Pacific Railroad was headed by Leland Stanford, who interestingly was also governor of California: thanks to him the private company
was to encounter little political opposition and highly lucrative state interventions. The federal government provided all the land, much of which was
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148 Theory, Culture & Society 19(5/6)

taken from Indian and Mexican land-owners, and it offered high loans per
mile of tracks laid but not until the first 40 miles of track were built at the
expense of the companies themselves. In this financial setting, constructing the railroad was really a race against time. For this purpose, the CPR
began to massively hire Chinese railroad-workers from 1865 onward: since
white labourers could not be found for the job, and since the celestials
were precise, fast and cheap, Stanford employed thousands of them. A lot
of the Chinese labourers either froze to death in the mountains, or got killed
when blasting the tunnels. Competition, speed, massive corruption, the huge
personal profit of local politicians functioning as national entrepreneurs,
together with the exploitation of cheap Chinese coolie-labour at a time the
country was waging a war over the abolishment of slavery, were the main
ingredients of what has become a classic story of dubious but nevertheless
heroic white male ingenuity in California history. All this consecrated by
that memorable celebration of the completion of the first transcontinental
railroad on Promontory Point (Utah) on 10 May 1869, which goes by the
name of the last spike eternalized by Andrew Russell, official photographer for the Union Pacific:
In May of 1869, gathered at a desolate and lonely spot in northwestern Utah
called Promontory, representatives of the two railroad companies drove the
ceremonial last spikes into the rails that tied the Atlantic with the Pacific.
Photographers captured the scene for posterity, after the Chinese laborers
were asked to step aside. (Deverell, 1994: 22)

Along with the camera displacing the Chinese, the telegraph, newly
installed along the rails, was mobilized to simultaneously send the sounds
of the ceremonial striking to telegraph operators all over the country who,
in turn, gave the signal for church-bells to be tolled and cannons to be fired
in celebration. According to a 20th-century historian:
It was a moment of history likened afterward to the signing of the Declaration
of Independence and the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers. National progress
awaited only the hammer taps that signaled the end of a long campaign to
level mountains and span deserts dividing a great people. (Kraus, 1969:
2801)

However, as Deverell (1994), Haas (1995), Stromquist (1987) and

others have demonstrated, because of their forced displacement groups of
Californian people identified themselves not along the course of industrial
progress westward that the railroad was implementing for the sake of the
nation, but through a relation to the land and the labour that was lost, albeit
a relation that was mediated by conflicting interests and affections. For
while white Californian farmers mostly dreaded an increase of land values,
industrial corporations and population (migrants) and a concomitant
decrease of wages and of independence (Deverell, 1994: 21), the Californio
ranchers (from Spanish descent) including their propertied women often
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lost their land altogether and were forced to start again as day labourers
(Haas, 1995: 80). Indigenous Indian men and women in California, who had
long been deprived of legal titles to their territory by the Californios, were
now forced to live on designated reservation land (Haas, 1995: 58), while
the Indian women also worked as servants and slaves in New Mexican
households (Haas, 1995: 82). Thus, instead of simply making the people
part of one huge capitalist nation, the railroad tracks also functioned as
hyphenations temporarily suspending the relation between those dispossessed citizens and their territory. At the same time the tracks installed
linkages between these varied inhabitants who found themselves excluded
along racial, ethnic, economic but also gender lines. The railroad thus
simultaneously opened up a space where the horizon of the nation was
articulated to its structural outsides, marked by racial, ethnic and gendered
differences. Seen from this perspective, difference, exclusion and particularity more than homogeneity, inclusion and universality were the outcome.
This heterogeneity of particulars found its cultural erasure in a nation-wide
marketing strategy meant to generalize and thus overcome them.
Selling the Railroad: Travelling Citizens and Domestic
Women
What the studies by Haas and Deverell teach us is that the railroad as a
nation-making machinery was controversial from the start, that it elicited
much opposition and that the more the hostility to its hegemony increased,
the more it had to expand its powers to stifle antagonism: the railroad barons
engaged in public practices that ranged from bribing public officials,
manipulating the government to buying up critical newspapers and staffing
them with writers favourable to the railroad. The wealth of mediations generated by the CPR in its reliance on the power of rhetoric, but also the photograph and the spectacle, were a crucial step in mobilizing the audience into
identifying with the steam engine on its linear course westward and hence
into buying it. For some railroad defenders, the vision of the train as a
democratizing force marked the train as a specifically American machine,
especially insofar as the United States embraced technology and mechanization in an intense and rapid manner compared to other nations (Kirby,
1997: 26). Thus, along with the train came the symbolic conception, indeed
emplacement, of a particular citizenry characterized by linear progress
and bourgeois spectatorship as constitutive parts in the expansion of the
railroad network.
To the extent that the production of these progressive American
citizens-viewers as crucial stops in the successful itinerary of the transcontinental was itself accompanied by peculiar rhetorical displacements (of
immigrant workers for instance) and temporal and spatial shifts in localization, we could say that mobility and location, but also difference and
identity, particularity and universality were intricately intertwined in the
technological production of Americas mobile nation. In fact, it seemed that
the conflicts of the social dynamic returned (in a different form) as the
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publicity around the CPR was hard pressed to contain and displace them.
And they recurred couched in all the old familiar representational strategies
conceivable: such as the opposition between female nature and male technology, immigrant labour and national leisure; or the Aristotelian plot
characterized by a clear beginning, middle and end; or the tradition of 19thcentury panoramic painting; or the evocation of the American sublime; or
the picturesque, the pastoral and so on.2 The rhetorical topoi (or commonplaces) that the railroad mobilized in its attempt to overcome a growing
resistance to its social-economic-political power were meant to create a
recognizable place that certain American people could inhabit, a face they
could identify with, a position they could take up in the midst of uncertainty
and uprootedness. And while these tropes involved themselves complex
processes of displacement, they had the effect of a map. They told the
audience where they were, what their manifest destiny was, and hence who
they were going to be, an American subject molded in relation to new forms
of perception, leisure, temporality, and modern technology (Kirby, 1997:
24).
That the railroad was as much a technology of transportation as it was
a technology of representation; that it was as much about literally moving
all people in different ways (some lost others gained their land) as it was
about figuratively emplacing a specific citizenry white, male and heterosexual already becomes clear from the promotional rhetoric delivered at
the completion of the transcontinental on 10 May 1869 itself. Let us first
discuss Stanfords famous address in California:
Gentlemen of the Pacific Railroad, the last rail needed to complete the
greatest railroad enterprise of the world is about to be laid; the last spike
needed to unite the Atlantic and Pacific by a new line of trade and commerce
is about to be driven to its place. To perform these acts the east and the west
have come together. Never since history commenced her record of human
events has man been called upon to meet the completion of a work so magnificent in contemplation, and so marvellous in execution. California, within
whose borders and by whose citizens the Pacific Railroad was inaugurated,
desires to express her appreciation of the vast importance to her and her sister
States of the great enterprise which by your action is about to be consummated; from her mines she had forged a spike, from her laurel woods she has
hewn a tie, and by the hands of her citizens she offers them to become a part
of the great highway which is about to unite her in closer fellowship with her
sisters of the Atlantic. From her bosom was taken the first soil, let hers be
the last tie and the last spike, and with them accept the hopes and wishes of
her people that the success of your enterprise may not stop short of its brightest promise. (Kraus, 1969: 2748)

While the marriage of the two railroad companies from the east and
the west is an all-male American event both the speaker and the audience
belong to the male brotherhood of American workers, engineers, entrepreneurs and politicians that Russells photograph eternalized after he had
asked the Chinese to step aside the beneficiary of this greatest railroad
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enterprise of the world is presented as female. It is to express the gratitude

of California, in whose bosom the whole project was conceived, that Stanford
takes the chair. Unique in having delivered the land and the resources (the
iron, wood, money) for her own cultivation, California is the reproductive or
fertile state par excellence, only in need of the penetration of mens technology to enlarge her habitat into a Union of Sister States in closer fellowship. In contrast to Kirbys case-studies (1997: 20911), in which the
railroad appears as the heterosexual coupling-machine between men and
women, Stanfords rhetorical tour de force evokes the concept of the citizen
to mediate between female nature and male technology. While, according
to him, California has herself forged spikes and ties from her own resources
from her mines she had forged a spike, from her laurel woods she has
hewn a tie it is by the hands of her citizens that she offers them to
become a part of the great highway which is about to unite her in closer
fellowship with the rest of the country. Having first erased the Chinese and
then naturalized the violence of their work by placing it in the hands of the
virgin land, Stanford then goes on to relocate the product in the hands of
her children-citizens symbol of equality before the law to purify it from
particulars and endow it with a larger political meaning: thanks to the
progressive touch of her citizens, California becomes part of the great
highway of America, which by [mans] action is about to be consummated.
Thus, while the labour is female, its technological progress(ion) is male. She
delivers the material and foundation, he the direction and ultimate goal. Inbetween lie the hands of generous citizens passing her work on along his
highway of the union while abstracting it from its materiality on the way.
The coupling of feminine reproductive labour and masculine mobility yields
the birth of the citizen: site of transition between one white American
subject and the next. He who is one-and-the-same subsuming or displacing
her in his generality/generosity.
Thus it is that the technical and rhetorical formation of the Union of
States goes by way of an exclusion of the Asian labour force building it and
a concomitant division between white women (associated with reproduction,
fertility and hence maternal labour) and men (identified with technology,
mobility, civilization, progress) and their reunification in the citizen:
subject of, and to, the Union. By thus relocating the enterprise and the
asymmetries that go with it in the hands of the citizens, Stanford generalizes a particular asymmetrical, racial and gendered, relation as the
supposedly equivalent relation between citizens, while at the same time
sanctifying it in the name of the Union, home of all citizens.
Now given that the concept of the American citizen equal before the
law is here evoked to mediate between male and female, it will hardly
surprise us that in other promotional rhetoric, citizenry is often associated
with that other, more intimate, triangular relation that all Americans share:
the patriarchal family-structure. Ward (1986) provides us with numerous
examples of how the iron bond is frequently compared to a bond of blood
and familial descent. Citizenship based on territory and progress gives way
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152 Theory, Culture & Society 19(5/6)

to racial nationhood based on sexual reproduction. As Father Dwinnell puts

it to the people of Sacramento: Clearly these iron bonds which bind States,
and in some cases nations together, hint a higher and warmer and purer
brotherhood of mankind, and a snugger home-feeling beneath our common
fathers roof, for the race (Deverell, 1994: 12). Besides inhabiting the
Union, all Americans are by birth always already located in the nations
nuclear family-structure. At the end of the line, then, lies the white heterosexual family as home to the American Nation. It is the 19th-century site
of reproduction for the nation, the locus for repeating citizenry in its racial
equality and sameness.
The mobility promoted by the Central Pacific clearly stands in the light
of this sentimental reaffirmation of the white bourgeois home, including its
gender relations, as witnessed by the metaphors of intimate family-life and
domestic tranquility abundant in the speeches surrounding the launching
of the railroad. Time and again, the publicity of the CPR centres around
this evocation of cosiness, security and indeed the immobility of the home
(Ward, 1986). Moreover in the brochures that specifically target the male
adventurer-farmer as tourism begins to flourish in the 1880s also women
and children are increasingly addressed travel is often presented as
presided over by an angelic maternal figure, closely related to the image of
the virgin land Leo Marx (1964) has described at length.
While Kirby (1997: 857) interprets these goddess-like muses as
attempts to legitimate, and indeed aestheticize, the dirtiness of capitalism
and the uprootedness of travel with the image of a woman as figure of
morality and tradition, I would argue that her appearance above the railroad
is both much simpler and much more complex. The angelic woman transcending earthly mobility stands for the comfort of the white bourgeois
home, for the safety of travel guaranteed by the railroad. At the same time,
and related to this, the female figure is the product of mans nostalgic reconfiguration of what he believes to exclude in his technological journey
forward Mother Nature. In this sense, the image of the female figure functions much as the photograph does according to Walter Benjamin: it is the
work of commemoration retaining the memory of the authentic that it
displaces in the process.3 The white bourgeois female here functions as the
figure of authenticity infinitely reproduced by the very technology that has
destroyed the aura of originality, nearness, immediacy. She is the image of
naturalness and white purity that comfortably returns to man as he annihilates it in the name of American progress. As the predestined site to which
his journey, and the yearning it inscribes, will lead him back, woman always
already awaits him to guide him to his dream: the bourgeois family, wealthy
white home to the American nation.4
Alfred Harts Railroad Stereographs and the Spectacles of
National Geography
But let us now see how the CPR creates this mediation between mobility
and location, the national and the domestic, by means of another material
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technology, namely a photo-industry that aims to bring home to the citizen

the yet unknown national land. If the home of the white bourgeoisie becomes
the target of a nation-wide publicity, it is because it has never simply been
a private space but, on the contrary, the states socially controlled site of
sexual and economic reproduction: it is the private space of the nation where
the links between the individual and the community, the local and the
national (defined as a nation of bourgeois families) are massively repeated
and thus generalized. If the train is to take the American subject outward,
then the image-industry that develops along with it brings the outside
inward. Public and private spheres, the land and its domesticated image,
merge to create an imaginary space of identification with the nation
conceived as a family of travellers in a stereotyped landscape. We might
well describe this emergence of railroad-photography as an investment in
the development of familiarity, and hence trust, in the midst of the violent
disembedding of social relations from their local surroundings. To quote
Susan Sontag: As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a
past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in
which they are insecure. Thus, photography develops in tandem with one
of the most characteristic of modern activities: tourism (1989: 9).
As the opposition to the railroad increased, rhetoric about the home
of the American nation was not enough to unify a divided audience and
locate an interested consumer/citizen. Especially at times of severe drawbacks in the construction-phase, publicity for the railroad had to be much
more pervasive, much more spectacular and it had to come from outside:
journalists, writers, painters, photographers were given free passes to the
construction sites and asked to capture both the heroism of the building and
the grandeur of the landscape that was awaiting the future traveller (Hyde,
1990; Fifer, 1988; Danly and Marx, 1988). The first professional photographer to work for the CPR on a long-term basis was Alfred A. Hart
(18161908), predecessor to his more famous colleague Carleton Watkins
(18241916). Hart photographed the construction scenes and the surrounding landscapes from the railhead at Sacramento in 1864 until the completion
in Utah in 1869.5 Quite a bit of his railroad collection would be on sale in
railway stations, or end up on the walls of the hotels along the railway lines,
or as woodcuts in Harpers Weekly and in Harts own railroad tourist guides.
Nearly all of Harts pictures of the railroad were taken with a doublelens stereo-camera producing the famous 19th-century stereograph. Stereographs were two pictures taken simultaneously by two lenses placed about
2.5 inches apart, which is the average distance between two eyes. Each
picture records the vision of one eye. When seen with a stereoscope, the
two images both fill the viewers field of vision and merge them to produce
the sensation of perspective that we have in daily life. The stereoscope thus
restored the experience of space lost on the two-dimensional photograph.
No wonder, then, that stereographs became a nation-wide obsession both in
Europe and in the States, where they could be found on most of the middleclass parlour tables. To return to Harts CPR collection: through his
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154 Theory, Culture & Society 19(5/6)

stereographs the transcontinental railroad entered not only the commodified

space of Far Western image-consumption but also a three-dimensional
space that the (bourgeois) Americans, by now familiar with the paintings of
Thomas Cole and Albert Bierstadt, recognized as their own: distant vistas,
awe-inspiring mountains, and steep ravines dropping hundreds of metres
below the train. Besides reproducing a recognizable landscape from the past
for the sake of a mythical future, Harts three-dimensional views added to
the spectacular distance, depth and magnitude of both Americas sublime
landscape and, most important, the even more sublime transcontinental
railroad conquering it.6
In order to sell this feeling of awe for the American West that hardly
any of the Americans had experienced so far in reality; in order to make his
photograph as proof that he had been there, into a collective document that
would invite others to go there, Hart had to select and compose his views
carefully: first of all, he himself had to remain invisible (offer a disembodied view); secondly, less impressive sights had to be left out of the picture;
thirdly, depth, distance and especially height (elevation) had to be looked
for; and fourthly, the workers, most of whom were Chinese, had to be
displaced.
In nearly all of Harts CPR photographs, the workers, most of whom
were Chinese, are literally subjected, mostly absented, by the immensity of
the railroad structures (tunnels, bridges, tracks, trestles, snowsheds) and the
natural scenes over which they triumph. This gives rise to aestheticizing
panoramic and tunnel visions (Hyde, 1990) the effects of which are the
same as Russells photograph on Promontory Point: the Chinese are
displaced, made part of the background scenery, so that the heroic workstructure called the transcontinental railroad can be pictured as an allAmerican white (Yankee) male achievement.
Related to Harts creation of an imaginary heroic national space in
which gendered and cultural differences are created and displaced is the
teleological narrative inscribed in his collection. The numbered 364 stereographs gradually unfold in time and space as they follow the history of the
railroads construction: from 1864 to 1869, from Sacramento to Promontory
Point, from the competition between the two railroad companies to their
inevitable happy marriage at the end of the film. In this illusion of sequence,
Harts collection resembles the drama evoked in the biblical moving
panoramas that he made before joining the CPR. The epic story about,
inscribed by, the railroad can perhaps best be judged by the aesthetic
criteria that Hart himself developed for landscape paintings: Any painting,
to be entitled to high rank as a work of art, must not only be finished in the
sense that leaves nothing more to be added to its composition in the way of
thoroughly elucidating the story intended to be told by the artist. It should
tell the story at a glance (Kibbey, 1996: 198).7
If the story needs to be told at a glance, then also individually the
images must bring into focus a linear vision of the distance to be covered,
and of the future (pictures) it will bring. Containing the whole vista
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surrounding it, each photograph is mobilized to point beyond its frame much
like a symbol does. In most of Harts images we are carried (often along the
tracks) beyond the site of depiction toward a larger imaginary space that
the other photographs and later also his tourist guides are to bring home
to the viewer. Each image functions as a passage from here to there, from
one site to the next; what lies in-between is the teleological history of
construction of the photographs as of the railroad and the linearity of
railroad travel. In this manner, each picture positions the viewer vis--vis
the individual scene while already directing him/her to another imaginary
end-point. This produces a dynamics of location and mobility, image and
narrative, through which the viewer is both invited to enter the frame and
moved to set out on route from one landmark (site of construction) to the
next. Travelling through this prepackaged movement (of the photograph as
of the railroad), the viewer traces a larger national space in which the
work depicted becomes the occasion for carrying on, carrying over. This is
the work of metaphorization. And it leads to an idealization of progress at
the expense of the workers who now seem to be laying the ground for their
own displacement.
But linearity, substitution and displacement are not the only
prerequisites to turn one picture into the projection of a national space.
Neither is it enough to subjugate the worker to a god-like surveying camera
and aestheticize his labor within a 19th-century tradition of American
panoramic painting. Similarly, simply watching the sequence of stereographs does not turn the viewer into a group of American travelling citizens.
In order for the event of construction to become a national event, the railroad
company has to do more than turn it into a spectacle. The pictures themselves have to travel en masse. Besides linearity, massive circulation is
needed. Each line of track has to become a site of reproduction and distribution in all directions. This is the moment of simultaneity Benedict
Anderson (1983) talks about in his discussion of the role of print-capitalism
in the imagining of the nation: the simultaneity of experience, of sharing
the books one reads, and the pictures one watches, without which no series
of individual acts would constitute a collective, no particular (racial,
gendered) perspective a general frame.
Not surprisingly, the documentation of the construction of the CPR ran
parallel to the development of the reproducible photographic paper-print
which began to massively replace the non-reproducible daguerreotype in
the 1860s. The arrival of the paper-print and stereo-card commercialized
the image industry in the hands of a burgeoning white bourgeois audience,
for whom citizenry meant first of all participation in a commodified nationstate. For the bourgeois spectator to consume Harts birds eye views in their
leisure time was to enter an imaginary social and geographical space from
which to look down on the railroad workers and into the magnificent vistas
that literally lay at their feet: only waiting to be travelled through. To the
extent that it circulated through thousands of parlour-rooms, the stereograph
became a socializing image reflecting the position of power that the
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middle-classes wanted to see: a social division of labour between working

immigrants and travelling citizens, between (female) nature and (male) technology, between toil and leisure-culture, and of course between the (disembodied) subject seeing and the object being seen. In the objectification and
circulation of the immigrant worker, hardly visible in the sublime national
landscape, the community of American citizens-travellers sees its disembodied cultural authority concretized and multiplied.
As said, the circulation of the photographs aims at recontextualizing
the (future) travelling citizen within the familiar surroundings of a stereotyped national geography, but the multiplicity of views thus distributed are
constantly in motion, slicing the commodified Western landscape from
different, contradictory, angles. No territorial unification without the production of individual subjects embodying it. Add to this the fact that a national
body is being created not only in the circulation of its repressed labour but
also in the disembedding of an authentic national space and its visual reproduction, and the precarious position of this national collective will be clear
indeed. What keeps this potentially disruptive heterogeneity of viewing
positions together is the particular economy of 19th-century railroad travel:
a linear sequence of successive positions that at once synthesizes and
subsumes the sites travelled through as parts of an imaginary destiny, a
sequence which Hyde has described as follows: [A]fter the Pacific Railroad
surveys introduced Americans to the almost inconceivable variety of the far
western landscape, the Pacific Railroad Act limited the focus of their
examination. New interest in the railroad and the specific terrain it would
traverse riveted attention on a thin strip of land. Despite the beauties and
strange sights present in other areas of the Far West, for the next thirty years
few Americans would look beyond the path of the old Overland Trail (1990:
62). Training vision into a disciplined path, these pictures fixate the viewer
in the very act of transporting him. Thus, each (viewing) position in the
photographed journey becomes the site from which the subject can relate
to all the other positions while adopting a legitimate place in the national
order that of the American spectator over and against the tamed virgin
land. With the economizing of the movement comes the inscription of a
disembodied American vision: the traveller-viewer inscribed by technology
stands for civilization subjugating the wilderness of nature that is projected
in the (linear) process. Disappearing in the sublimity of the American landscape are the Chinese builders, whose illegal presence (as non-citizens) in
the picture at once constitutes the foundation of the nation and its illegitimacy. Hence the need to frame the immigrants in their collective indifference or hide them from our view. The highway of the Union, it should be
emphasized, promotes equality even as it generates and displaces racial,
economic and gender differences. In this homogenizing movement the
commodified images become parts of a tale about linear development and
progress. They become icons of American destiny.

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Conclusion
This article has studied the material production of the national community
in 19th-century America. More particularly, it has concentrated on the intersection between particular technologies of transportation, representation
and dissemination in the imaginary formation of the American nation in the
1860s. As the prime technologies with which individuals can collectively
be placed, displaced, replaced in relation to an imaginary geography and
with which spatially and temporally distant citizens can connect and feel
connected, systems of transportation and communication have been the site
of fierce struggles for power among the nation-builders. But they have
largely been overlooked in narrowly cultural approaches to nationhood. My
analysis of the contradictory mechanism of placement and displacement,
location and mobility, identity and difference at the heart of a particular
state-sanctioned field of national production the construction of Americas
first transcontinental railroad in 19th-century California has highlighted
what tends to remain hidden in cultural (textual) approaches to nationhood:
its involvement in racial, gendered and class-related divisons between
private and public space, home and travel, labour and capital, technology
and nature. This essay has shown that if territorial nation-building implies
the technical implementation of natural frontiers (the Atlantic and Pacific
Coast) around a carefully mapped out racialized (white) and gendered
geobody, then by the same token it generates gendered immigrants and
citizens on the move: the former as the outlawed laborer; the latter as the
prototypical American distanced from the very home(land) for which he
yearns and which he must learn to reimagine as the destination of a collective railroad journey. Ultimately, I have argued, this national geography
this icon of authentic location projected along (with) the tracks of
Americas first transcontinental railroad exists as a series of contradictory
sites/sights (between one site and the next, but also within one image
between Chinese and Americans, labourers and tourists) homogenized in
narratives of citizenry (Stanford) and in the abstracting movement of railroad
travel. In this motion the complex particularities of local places are cast as
spaces of transition to a distant goal in relation to which the viewer assumes
a disembodied position that of the citizen freely travelling in a commodified space called America.
Notes
Earlier versions of this article were presented at the University of California at
Berkeley, at Brunel University and at the University of Amsterdam. I am greatly
indebted to the Fulbright Commission in Brussels for the funds that made the
research on the transcontinental railroad possible and to the staff of the Bancroft
Library, the California State Library, the California Historical Society, the California
State Railroad Museum and the Huntington Library for the patience and support
with which they guided me through the research material. I thank Pat Hilden for
her perceptive comments on the first draft of this essay. My greatest thanks go to
Caren Kaplan for the intellectual stimulation that she, as Director, brought to the
scholars of the Beatrice M. Bain Research Group at Berkeley.
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1. The following historical survey is based on Deverell (1994), Galloway (1950),
Lewis (1938), Martin (1992) and Kraus (1969).
2. See chapter 2 of Hyde (1990) for a good discussion of the promotion of the
western landscape as sublime in the publicity surrounding the transcontinental
railroad.
3. According to Yuval-Davis, women have long been burdened with being the
symbol of authenticity in nationalist projects: A figure of a woman, often a mother,
symbolizes in many cultures the spirit of the collectivity, whether it is Mother
Russia, Mother Ireland or Mother India. In the French Revolution its symbol was
La Patrie, a figure of a woman giving birth to a baby . . . In peasant societies, the
dependence of the people on the fertility of Mother earth has no doubt contributed
to this close association between collective territory, collective identity and womanhood (1997: 45).
4. I have developed the racial tensions between white and non-white femaleness
in a follow-up essay.
5. The biographical details about Hart are taken from Kibbey (1996).
6. On the American railroad as sublime engine of progress, see Nye (1994).
7. The painterly aspects of Harts railroad photography are discussed in further
detail in Hyde (1990: 826).
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Ginette Verstraete holds the Simone de Beauvoir Chair in Contemporary

Intellectual History at the University of Amsterdam. She is also the Director
of the MPhil Programme in Cultural Analysis and member of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. She is the author of, among others, Fragments of the Feminine Sublime in Friedrich Schlegel and James Joyce
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998). She is currently finishing a book-length manuscript on various cultural practices of travel, migration, and globalization in the United States and Europe, provisionally
entitled Tracking Communities: Travel, Technology and the Politics of
Location.

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