User talk:VirtualInitiative/Archive 1

Treatment of the CPRR's Chinese workers on May 10, 1869 et seq

Hello. The claims made regarding the treatment of the CPRR's Chinese workers on May 10, 1869 et seq taken from the Zia book were not deleted because you failed to identify the modern source from which they came, but instead because the claims the author made in the cited quote are demonstrably false. Please go to the article's Talk Page and read the earlier discussions on this subject contained in sections 11.1 and 14. You can also follow the external hyperlinks included there to see original contemporary source documents and first person accounts of what actually happened. Far from being excluded from the celebrations and dismissed by the CPRR, the Chinese construction workers in fact participated in the driving of the Last Spike ceremony, were specifically feted by the CPRR's Officers and management at a dinner held in their honor after the ceremony. Many Chinese workers remained in the employ of the CPRR following completion of the Sacramento to Promontory Summit line to build additional infrastructure along the grade as well as to grade and construct many more hundreds of miles of additional CPRR lines north to Oregon, south to Los Angeles, and elsewhere in the CPRR's continuingly growing system. Centpacrr (talk) 09:09, 25 December 2010 (UTC)

That's your opinion of what the original documents say. The quote comes from Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People, which was a finalist for the prestigious Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize. VirtualInitiative (talk) 19:24, 1 January 2011 (UTC)

Irrespective of the modern source of this quote, primary sources do matter if they do not support the Zia claims which are not a primary source. Her claims do not appear to comport with the historic record on this matter, and no primary sources are cited that support her conclusions. The Zia quotation, which appears on page 27 of the book, is neither footnoted nor otherwise sourced (in fact the book appears to have no footnotes or chapter notes at all), and instead only appears to represent the very strong personal POV of the author. Reviews of the book also describe the work as "polemical" (New York Times Review of Books, March 5, 2000, P. 20) as well as a "novelization of history". I have written two books on this subject myself and have been researching this topic for more than a dozen years. While there was certainly anti-Chinese sentiment in the West in the 19th and early 20th centuries, her claims that "Chinese workers were barred from celebrations", that "speeches congratulated European immigrant workers for their labor but never mentioned the Chinese" and that the Chinese workers were "summarily fired and forced to walk the long distance back to San Francisco" and "forbidden to ride on the railroad they built" are clearly disproved by contemporary documents and accounts of the events. For instance the May 15, 1869, edition of San Francisco Newsletter & California Advertiser described the final moments of the "Last Spike" celebration at Promontory Summit, UT, on May 10, 1869, thusly: "... The Chinese really laid the last tie and drove the last spike. ... (CPRR Construction Chief) J.H. Strobridge, when the work was all over, invited the Chinese who had been brought over from Victory for that purpose, to dine at his boarding car. When they entered, all the guests and officers present cheered them as the chosen representatives of the race which have greatly helped to build the road....a tribute they well deserved and which evidently gave them much pleasure." In his testimony before the Joint Special Committee of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives appointed to investigate the "character, extent, and effect of Chinese immigration" in 1876, the CPRR's Charles Crocker stated: "Wherever we put them (Chinese workers) we found them good, and they worked themselves into our favor to such an extent that if we found we were in a hurry for a job of work, it was better to put Chinese on at once. Previous to that we had always put on white men; and to-day if I had a big job of work that I wanted to get through quick with, and had a limited time to do it in, I should take Chinese labor to do it with, because of its greater reliability and steadiness, and their aptitude and capacity for hard work." Centpacrr (talk) 22:07, 1 January 2011 (UTC)