All right.
All right, so each one of these characters
is either a video or a document about the Transcontinental
Railroad.
So you're going to tell me what you would like to know about.
Would you like to know about adoption,
African-American workers, African-American porters,
archeological artifacts, biracial 19th century
journalists, the Civil War, Chinese death rituals,
Chinese descendants of railroad workers, Chinese exclusion,
phrasebooks from the 19th century,
Cholera, environmental change, ghost towns,
gender roles on trains, hobos, Hollywood,
immigration questionnaires, Irish-Americans, labor unions,
land art, Robert Smithson and the Great Salt Lake, manifest
destiny, mass murder, Mormons, Native Americans,
the Plains Indian war, photography, polygamy,
prostitution, presidential impeachment,
race relations on the train, the telegraph, or LGBTQ lives?
Choose your poison.
You just yell it out.
Mormons.
OK, what else?
Laborers.
Laborers, OK.
Cholera.
Oh, you guys are a fun crowd.
You guys are a fun crowd.
No, a lot of people are like, Oh, prostitution.
But I know you're thinking that.
We'll get to it.
I know it.
OK, so let's start with labor first.
Oh my gosh, is it easier on this other screen?
Oh my gosh.
Yeah, that would work, that would work.
No more wine for Paisley before reading.
OK, don't do the obvious thing.
No, that would be stupid.
OK, here you go.
Not.
Dennis Kearney, speeches, 1878.
"I am not a railroad king, banker, professor, bummer
politician.
Under their flag of slaveholder, they have rallied
and we permitted them to grow rich.
They have loaded down our nation with debt.
They have stolen public lands by their unprincipled greed,
brought distress on millions.
They who have resources enough to feed, clothe, and shelter
the entire human race.
We propose now to take charge.
The press will say I am a common Irishman.
Good, I am a working man too like you
who did not come here as English, Scotch, Dutch,
or Irish, not Catholic either, Protestant, or infidel.
Let there be no sects.
We are white working men who will
elect the hard-fisted, obscure artisans, coopers,
bank smashers.
If the legislature oversteps human decency,
then rope will be our battle cry.
White men, women, girls, and boys
will not compete with the mechanics of the market.
The Chinese must leave our shores.
None but an idiot would hope to work as cheap.
None but a slave make the effort.
Death is preferable to life on par with these.
We make no secret of our intentions.
We can discuss if it would be better
to hang, shoot, or cut the capitalists to pieces later.
Money is always on alert to divide us.
But as I walk into this starless heaven,
still I know Mars holds its course,
Venus whirls in flashing fields of light.
Thus it is with a movement of our kind.
We are working men and we will exhibit ourselves
when the time is right.
Not in loneliness or in shame, but splendor,
alive in our true and native powers."
Anywhere and everywhere.
You will not replace us.
The book has notes.
Each one of these notes is a mini lyric essay.
All the notes together comprise one essay.
So each poem comes with its note and this is the note for Not.
Dennis Kearney was an Irish immigrant
who in 1877 along with J.G. Day and H.L. Knight, founded
the Workingmen's Party of California,
an American labor organization formed in response
to high unemployment caused by the 1873/78
national depression.
Members of the Workingmen's Party of the United States
participated in the great railroad strike of 1877,
which began in West Virginia and spread
to New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland,
Missouri, and Illinois, leading to the burning of railroad
stockyards and buildings and the deaths of at least 100 people.
After the California party won a significant number of seats
in the California state senate and state assembly,
it rewrote the state constitution
to deny Chinese citizens voting rights.
It also wrote into the constitution
the California Railroad Commission,
which oversaw the activities of the Central and Pacific
railroad companies.
The party's anti-Chinese sentiment
helped fuel support for the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act.
Nearly 150 years later, ostensibly concerned
that Chinese nationals at US universities
were stealing state or technological information,
the Trump administration canceled the visas
of more than 1,000 Chinese students and researchers
in the United States who had direct ties to universities
affiliated with the People's Liberation Army.
In fall 2020, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo
said he wanted China's government funded
Confucius Institutes, which have branches on university campuses
across America, shut down.
The US state department also announced
that the entry of senior Chinese diplomats to US campuses
would require state department approval,
lectures were canceled, fellowships revoked,
universities unsurprisingly balked.
My own institution, the University of Utah,
includes a Confucius Institute.
It is directly responsible for funding this project.