Who built America’s railroads and why did they matter? Where did America’s electrical grid and gas stations come from? Why does everyone own a car? Why do we work a five day/40 hour work week?
These are the questions that the History Channel strived to answer with their four part documentary called “The Men Who Built America“, which focuses on America’s Industrial Age and the intertwining lives of five absurdly wealthy industrialists — Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Rockefeller, Morgan and Ford.
In an age when the History Channel spends most of its hours airing reality TV crap like “American Pickers” and “Pawn Stars” (which has about as much to do with history as PBS’ “Antique Roadshow”), the fact that even a fraction of the History Channel’s budget is still dedicated to producing and airing documentaries that involve actual history marginally restores my faith in mankind.
Further, in my experience, the teaching of American history often bounces from major military event to major military event. The time period between Reconstruction and the start of the first World War is often treated as just that — a time of peace between major wars when America was rebuilding (when most textbooks would assert that nothing of consequence happened). There is often a focus on the transcontinental railroad (and, in the Asian American historical context, a discussion of anti-Asian immigration laws, many of which were passed at the time), but mostly this period of American history is ignored in popular retelling.
Through the History Channel’s documentary, however, I personally learned a great deal about how the events during that American peacetime helped influence the way that America looks today. This era was a time of rampant capitalism and market free-for-all — before anti-trust laws, labour laws, or even income tax. And this was an era of profound technological innovations including the invention or popularization of kerosene, steel for large-scale construction, gasoline, electricity, and the combustion engine. In short, I found the documentary an informative unique perspective on American history.
Yet, there are a few internet memes out there that ridicule “The Men Who Built America”, presumably because it focuses on five rich White men in a documentary titled to the casual observer as if it were crediting the building of America solely to these five rich White men and not to anyone else. Stuff Black People Don’t Like, for example, remarks “Wait, I thought it was Black people who built America while white people sat around drinking.”
Honestly, I find this criticism a little absurd.
It’s true: the documentary doesn’t tell the story of women or people of colour and their roles in shaping America during the Industrial Age. It doesn’t focus on suffrage, or Reconstruction, or the Chinese Exclusion Act, or other political instances that involve the intersectionality of disenfranchised groups with American history. But, is the historical perspective of this documentary invalid because it doesn’t?
The impact of the five industrialists profiled in “The Men Who Built America” is persuasive. We learn about how America’s most successful industrialists were men who took advantage of the unregulated market to build and maintain obscene amounts of wealth that, correcting for inflation, could make up a substantial chunk of America’s debt today. We learn about how the greed of these men helped permit faster-than-horse travel by rail in America for the common man; helped build the first oil pipelines; helped build the first power grid in America to bring electric lights to every home; helped build America to build up rather than out to create the modern skyline; and helped build the first automobiles priced so that they are accessible for the average working man.
We learn, also, about how the greed of these industrialists created the backlash that helped birth the notion of collective bargaining and the modern labour movement (in turn responsible for the modern workweek and the concept of both minimum and liveable wages); how the accumulated wealth of Wall Street was able to purchase an American presidency, inspiring modern campaign finance laws; and how the incredible influence of these industrialists inspired the anti-trust lawsuits that have now been codefied into modern American anti-trust law.
In short, the documentary “The Men Who Built America” doesn’t actually claim that these industrialists single-handedly built America (or that they even ever got their hands dirty in a steel mill or an oil refinery plant), but it does claim that they did heavily influence the building of our modern concept of what America is through the use of their money and associated political power.
It’s gratifying for progressives to make fun of things like “The Men Who Built America”, putting together silly memes that express outrage at the exclusion of non-White, non-male historical figures in this documentary. This outrage comes from a valid and understandable place: the teaching of American history has long ignored the contributions of women and people of colour. I firmly believe that ethnic studies and womens’ studies programs — academic programs focusing on the historical and contemporary contributions of minorities and women — help to rectify this absence by offering alternative perspectives on our common history that are more inclusive.
But those of us who advocate for a more inclusive telling of American history must be wary of letting our outrage seep into a place where we are dismissive of the contributions and influence of White men to our history. After all, there’s a simple fact that we cannot ignore: during the Industrial Age, women and minorities were still largely oppressed, and through that oppression denied access to the kind of political and economic power that permits a person to wield significant influence over the direction of America. Thus, we must acknowledge that there was a time when a great deal of the influential people in American history are going to be White men — these were the only people who had the power and privilege to be influential.
And, considering that the five industrialists profiled in this documentary together controlled monopolies on rail, gasoline, kerosene, electricity, manufacturing and steel — all the major technological innovations of the day — and were even able to purchase a presidency, these five industrialists weren’t just “influential”; they were the textbook definition of influential to the shaping of America. There was a period of time when three of these industrialists alone and collectively wielded more money and power than the U.S. federal government at the time; and even a time when they actually banded together like a real-like Injustice League to sway an American election. It would be stupid to suggest that these men did not have a hand in building what we conceive of as America today.
To that end, a measured telling of the contributions of folks like Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and J.P. Morgan on modern America (and progressive politics) is worth teaching, even if it means focusing on five industrialists who were all White men.
What frustrates me the most about these Internet memes is that it feels as if progressives criticizing “The Men Who Built America” do so without having actually seen the documentary. Yes, the History Channel’s choice of this documentary’s title is sensational, but the documentary itself was often quite critical of the five industrialists it profiled. It was also highly informative about a period of history often ignored because there wasn’t any war happening at the time.
In summary, advocating for an inclusive teaching of American history that includes the contributions of non-White, non-male peoples is damaging when we let that turn into being exclusive of the teaching of American history from the perspective of White males; yet, this is precisely what I think the lampooning of “The Men Who Built America” — particularly from a place of being ignorant of what the actual documentary says — does. It communicates that in reaction to the fact that the traditional telling of history is selective for the contributions of White men, our side doesn’t want to broaden the telling of history; instead, we want to tell a different kind of selective history.
As you can expect, this is a doomed, and anti-intellectual, strategy.
Rather than to lampoon “The Men Who Built America” from a place of exclusion wherein we deny the relevance of this documentary’s subject matter, we should instead focus our energy towards encouraging the History Channelto devote equal resources to telling the story of, say, “The Women Who Built America”, or “The African Americans Who Built America”, or “The Asian Americans Who Built America”, and so on.
Also, it’s always better to have seen something before you assume it is racist and dismiss it. That’s just a general rule of thumb.
