A curious little anniversary in the annals of fake news comes up this Saturday.
On May 10, 1869, a golden spike was driven into the ground at Promontory Summit in modern-day Utah that signified the connection between the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads. The real news there was that shipping materials and people between Iowa and California became a whole lot faster and cheaper. The buildup of the event marked what’s seen as the first “pseudo-event” in the United States.
Its central character was the 17.6-karat gold, copper-alloyed spike driven into the ground during a ceremony akin to a modern-day ribbon-cutting. The backdrop was two massive locomotives _pulled head-to-head near the spike site, one the Union Pacific No. 119 and the Central Pacific No. 60. It’s a more mechanical version of the corporate logos of today you see shadowing the microphones at a press conference after your favorite sports team’s coach explains a win or loss.
Accounts vary how many people attended the ceremony; historians put it somewhere between 500 and 3,000. Fenders, or “cowcatchers” on the two locomotives were made to touch — something of an iron-horse themed completion of Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam” — and photographs were taken of the triumphant industrialists and some of the workers who actually built the railroad. Alas, no such piece of gold was actually kept in the ground, as the gold spike and laurel tie were taken out in case of theft and replaced with a regular iron one. The “first golden spike” is displayed at the Cantor Arts Museum at Stanford University, while a second one, cast and struck evidently for the sheer heck of it, was held by the family of David Hewes (a San Francisco financier and the brains behind the over-the-top-for-its-times promotion) for more than a century before ending up at the California State Railroad Museum. If you happen to get a Utah state quarter from 2007 as part of your change at the convenience store, you’ll see the Golden Spike depicted on the coin’s reverse side. The summit itself is now a U.S. National Historic Site; at 2,735 acres, it’s bigger than the 1,852.75-acre Vicksburg National Military Park.
Made-for-media moments in later decades trended toward the flash and not so much the substance of creating transportation routes. The Academy Awards are Hollywood’s one night of the year to break out of its dressed-down nihilism to put on a tacky dress or flashy tux. Starting Thursday night, the NFL Draft at long last takes place in New York. What used to take a few hours on a Saturday morning and afternoon is now spread over three days and is filled with endless hot air from talking-head “analysts.” Thanks, Roger.
And the most recent chapter of the pseudo-event, a term I first heard from my journalism instructor at Nicholls State University, takes place at our fingertips each day on social media. Each “shared” photo of inconsequential information, each non-sequitur of an inner thought by that friend you don’t see much anymore and video of some dork making his or her pet do crazy things litters the data flow into our brains daily. Actors James Earl Jones and Malcolm McDowell did a spot-on spoof of this culture we’ve created for ourselves in a Sprint commercial some months back. It’s a must-see for any cultural critic.
My best advice for surviving this glut of useless information we surround ourselves with each day? Look for the iron in everyday life — people that do the unheralded grunt work of holding it all together. After all, I’ve never heard of “fool’s iron.” Fool’s gold, on the other hand…
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Danny Barrett Jr. is a reporter and can be reached by email at danny.barrett@vicksburgpost.com or by phone at 601-636-4545.