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theses

From the mid-nineteenth through early twentieth centuries, American railroad companies played a crucial role in shaping the physical and cultural landscape of the nation. These companies altered the land by constructing tracks, building stations, and platting towns. Railroad companies also redefined the cultural landscape of the nation by heavily promoting immigration, targeting specific ethnic groups that railroad officials considered desirable, such as northern Europeans, attracting them with employment opportunities, sale of cheap lands, and reduced transportation rates. Although dependent on immigrant traffic and land sales, railroad companies largely catered to the expectations of middle-class American citizens by designing their built environment in accordance with contemporary attitudes toward immigration, not only revealing class and ethnic hierarchies but also reinforcing them. On the East Coast, railroad companies operated at ports of entry in facilities like Baltimore’s Immigrant Station (1868-1914), New York’s Castle Garden (1855-1890) and the purpose-built Ellis Island Immigration Station (1892-1954), in order to move European immigrants as swiftly as possible through the station buildings and onto waiting trains headed for the country’s interior. On the West Coast, however, restrictive legislation for Asian immigrants, who had largely constructed the Transcontinental Railroad, resulted in a prison-like design for the Angel Island Immigration Station (1910-1940), which featured barbed wire fencing, barred windows, and racially segregated barracks. Further along the immigrants’ journey into the United States, segregated train cars and waiting rooms quelled fears of foreign-born illness and reinforced ethnic and economic divisions between immigrants and citizen-travelers. Yet these immigrants were a source of profit for the railroads, and company officials organized ethnic enclaves in order to settle their Midwestern lands, targeting groups known for their agricultural skills, such as the German Mennonites. These spaces of immigration—ports of arrival, railway stations and train cars, and railway-established towns—may be read as physical manifestations of the country’s changing immigration policies, of constructed popular ideas of otherness, and of ethnic and social hierarchies in the United States. This dissertation situates those spaces within the larger networks of American politics, capitalism, and culture.

ETD_5058

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Catherine Clare Boland Erkkila

doi:10.7282/T39W0CH4

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.