California

CALIFORNIA

CALIFORNIA, whose name derives from a fifteenth-century Spanish romance, lies along the Pacific Coast of the United States. Formidable natural barriers, including the Sierra Nevada and the Cascade Mountains to the east and the north and the Sonoran Desert to the south and southeast, isolate it from the rest of the continent. Streams plunging down from the mountains form the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers in the Great Central Valley, while coastal ranges divide the littoral into isolated plains, valleys, and marine terraces. The state contains a wide variety of ecologies, from alpine meadows to deserts, often within a few miles of each other. San Francisco Bay, near the center of the state, is the finest natural harbor in the eastern Pacific.

The first known people came to California thousands of years ago, filtering down from the north in small bands. In the varied geography, especially the many valleys tucked into the creases of the coastal mountains, these early immigrants evolved a mosaic of cultures, like the Chumash of the southern coast, with their oceangoing canoes and sophisticated trading network, and the Pomo, north of San Francisco Bay, who made the beads widely used as money throughout the larger community.

Spanish California

Spain claimed California as part of Columbus's discovery, but the extraordinary hardships of the first few voyages along the coast discouraged further exploration until Vitus Bering sailed into the northern Pacific in 1741 to chart the region for the czar of Russia. Alarmed, the viceroy in Mexico City authorized a systematic attempt to establish control of California. In 1769, a band of Franciscan monks under Fray Junipero Serra and a hundred-odd soldiers commanded by Gaspar de Portola traveled up the peninsula of Baja California to San Diego with two hundred cattle. From there de Portola explored north, found San Francisco Bay, and established the presidio at Monterey. Spanish California became a reality.

Spanish policy was to Christianize and civilize the Native peoples they found. To do this, Serra and his followers built a string of missions, like great semifeudal farms, all along what came to be called El Camino Real and forced the Indians into their confines. Ultimately, twenty-one missions stretched from San Diego to Sonoma. The missions failed in their purpose. Enslaved and stripped of their cultures, the Native people died by the thousands of disease, mistreatment, and despair. From an estimated 600,000 before the Spanish came, by 1846 their population dropped to around 300,000.

The soldiers who came north to guard the province had no place in the missions, and the friars thought them a bad influence anyway. Soldiers built the first town, San Jose, in 1777, and four years later, twenty-two families of mixed African, Indian, and Spanish blood founded the city of Los Angeles. The settlers, who called themselves Californios, planted orange trees and grapevines, and their cattle multiplied.

In 1821, Mexico declared its independence from Spain, dooming the mission system. By 1836, all the missions were secularized. The land was to be divided up among the Natives attached to the missions but instead fell into the hands of soldiers and adventurers. The new Mexican government also began granting large tracts of land for ranches. In 1830, California had fifty ranches, but by 1840 it had more than one thousand. Power gravitated inevitably to the land holders. Mexico City installed governors in Monterey, but the Californio dons rebelled against anybody who tried to control them.

When the Swiss settler Johann Sutter arrived in 1839, the government in Monterey, believing the land was worthless desert and hoping that Sutter would form a barrier between their holdings and greedy interlopers, gave him a huge grant of land in the Sacramento Valley. But in 1842, when a band of nineteen American immigrants came over the Sierras, Sutter welcomed them to his settlement and gave them land, tools, and encouragement. John Charles Frémont, a U.S. Army mapmaker, on his first trip to California also relied on Sutter's help. Frémont's book about his expedition fired intense interest in the United States, and within the next two years, hundreds of settlers crossed the Sierras into California. Many

more came by ship around Cape Horn. By 1846, Americans outnumbered the Californios in the north.

The U.S. government itself had long coveted California. In 1829, President Andrew Jackson tried to buy it. When Mexico indignantly declined, American interest turned toward taking it by force. The argument with Mexico over Texas gave the United States the chance. In May 1846, U.S. forces invaded Mexico. On 7 July 1846, Commodore John Drake Sloat of the U.S. Navy seized Monterey, and Frémont raised the American flag at Sonoma and Sacramento. The Spanish period was over; California had become part of the United States.

The Americans Take Over

Signed on 20 May 1848, the Treaty of Guadeloupe Hidalgo officially transferred the northern third of Mexico to the United States for $15 million. Because of the gold rush, California now had a population sufficient to become a state, but the U.S. Congress was unwilling even to consider admitting it to the Union for fear of upsetting the balance between slave and free states. In this limbo a series of military governors squabbled over jurisdictions. Mexican institutions like the alcalde, or chief city administrator, remained the basic civil authorities.

Yet the American settlers demanded a functioning government. The gold rush, which began in 1848 and accelerated through 1849, made the need for a formal structure all the more pressing. When the U.S. Congress adjourned for a second time without dealing with the status of California, the military governor called for a general convention to write a constitution. On 1 September 1849, a diverse group of men, including Californios like Mariano Guadeloupe Vallejo, longtime settlers like Sutter, and newcomers like William Gwin, met in Monterey. The convention decided almost unanimously to ban slavery in California, not for moral reasons but for practical reasons: free labor could not compete with slaves. After some argument, the convention drew a line along the eastern foot of the Sierra Nevada as the state's boundary. Most important, the convention provided for the election of a governor and a state legislature in the same statewide polling that ratified the constitution itself on 13 November 1849. On 22 April 1850, the first California legislature elected two U.S. senators, gave them a copy of the constitution, and sent them to Washington, D.C., to demand recognition of California as a state.

Presented with this fait accompli, Congress tilted much in favor of California, but the issue of slavery still lay unresolved. Finally, Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky cobbled together the Compromise of 1850, a law that gave everybody something, and California entered the Union on 9 September 1850.

The state now needed a capital. Monterey, San Francisco, and San Jose all competed for the honor. General Vallejo offered to build a new capital on San Francisco Bay and donated a generous piece of his property for it, but the governor impetuously moved the state offices there long before the site was ready. In 1854, citizens from Sacramento lured the legislature north and showed the politicians such a good time that Sacramento became the capital of California.

After the Gold Rush

Before the discovery of gold, hardly fifteen thousand non-Indians inhabited California. By 1850, 100,000 newcomers had flooded in, most from the eastern United States, and the 1860 census counted 360,000 Californians. These people brought with them their prejudices and their politics, which often amounted to gang warfare. In San Francisco, Sam Brannan, who had become the world's first millionaire by selling shovels and shirts to the miners, organized a vigilante committee to deal with rowdy street thugs. This committee reappeared in 1851, and in 1856 it seized power in the city and held it for months, trying and hanging men at will and purging the city of the committee's enemies.

A Democratic politician, David Broderick, a brash Irish immigrant with a genius for political organization, dominated the early years of California politics and represented the state in the U.S. Senate. In Washington, his flamboyant antislavery speeches alienated the national Democratic leadership, and he was on the verge of being run out of the party when he was killed in a duel in 1856. At Broderick's death, his followers bolted the Democrats and joined the young Republican Party, sweeping Abraham Lincoln to victory in 1860 and electing Leland Stanford to the governorship. Republicans dominated state politics for decades.

San Francisco was California's first great city, growing during the gold rush from a tiny collection of shacks and a few hundred people to a thriving metropolis of fifty thousand people. The enormous wealth that poured through the city during those years raised mansions and splendid hotels and supported a bonanza culture. Writers like Bret Harte and Mark Twain got their starts in this expansive atmosphere; theater, which captivated the miners, lured international stars like Lola Montez and impresarios like David Belasco. By 1855, the gold rush was fading. Californians turned to the exploitation of other resources, farming, ranching, whaling, and manufacturing. In 1859, the discovery of the Comstock Lode in the eastern Sierra Nevada opened up another boom.

The state's most pressing need was better communication with the rest of the country, but, deeply divided over slavery, Congress could not agree on a route for a transcontinental railroad. With the outbreak of the Civil War, the slavery obstacle was removed. In 1862, Congress passed a railroad bill, and in 1863 the Central Pacific began building east from Sacramento.

The Era of the Southern Pacific

In 1869, the Central Pacific Railroad, building eastward, met the Union Pacific, building westward, at Promontory Point, Utah. The cross-country trek that had once required six grueling months now took three days. The opening of the railroad and the end of the Civil War accelerated the pace of economic and social change in California. A steady flood of newcomers swept away the old system of ranches based on Spanish grants. A land commission was set up to verify existing deeds, but confusion and corruption kept many titles unconfirmed for decades. Squatters overwhelmed Mexican-era land owners like Sutter and Vallejo. The terrible drought of the 1860s finished off the old-timers in the south, where cattle died by the thousands.

The panic of 1873 brought on a depression with steep unemployment and a yawning gap between the haves and the have-nots. A laborer might earn $2 a week, while Leland Stanford, a senator and railroad boss, spent a million dollars in a single year to build his San Francisco mansion. Yet as the railroad was vital to the growing country, labor was vital to the railroad. In 1877, railroad workers gave the country a taste of what they could do in the first national strike, which loosed a wave of violence on the country. In San Francisco the uprising took the form of anti-Chinese riots, finally put down by a recurrence of the vigilante committee of the 1850s, which raised a private army, armed it with pick handles, and battled rioters in the streets.

But labor had shown its strength. In San Francisco its chief spokesman was Denis Kearney, a fiery Irishman who in 1877 formed the Workingmen's Party, which demanded an eight-hour day, Chinese exclusion from California, restraints on the Southern Pacific Railroad, and bank reform. The sudden vigorous growth of the Workingmen's Party gave Kearney and his followers great clout in the 1878 convention, called to revise the state's out-grown 1849 constitution.

The new constitution was not a success, especially because it failed to restrain the Southern Pacific Railroad. The Southern Pacific controlled the legislature and many newspapers. Where it chose to build, new towns sprang up, and towns it by passed died off. The whole economy of California passed along the iron rails, and the Southern Pacific took a cut of everything. The railroad was bringing steadily more people into the state. The last Mexican-era ranchos were sold off, and whole towns were built on them, including Pasadena, which arose on the old Rancho San Pascual in 1877. This was a peak year for immigration, because the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad had finally built into Los Angeles, giving the Southern Pacific some competition. The resulting fare war reduced the ticket price to California to as low as $1, and 200,000 people moved into the state.

Immigration from Asia was a perennial political issue. Brought to California in droves to build the railroad, the Chinese were the target of savage racism from the white majority and endless efforts to exclude them. Later, the Japanese drew the same attacks. Meanwhile, the original people of California suffered near extinction. White newcomers drove them from their lands, enslaved them, and hunted them like animals. The federal government proposed a plan to swap the Indians' ancestral lands for extensive reservations and support. The tribes agreed, but Congress never accepted the treaty. The government took the lands but supplied neither reservations nor help. Perhaps 300,000 Native Americans lived in California in 1850, but by 1900, only 15,000 remained.

Progressivism

The entrenched interests of the railroad sparked widespread if fragmented opposition. Writers like Henry George, in Progress and Poverty (1880), and Frank Norris, in The Octopus (1901), laid bare the fundamental injustices of the economy. Labor organizers took the struggle more directly to the bosses. Activists, facing the brute power of an establishment that routinely used force against them, sometimes resorted to violence. In 1910, a bomb destroyed the Los Angeles Times Building, and twenty people died. The paper had opposed union organizing. In 1905, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) began to organize part-time and migrant workers in California, especially farm workers. This struggle climaxed in the Wheatland riot of 2 August 1913, in which several workers, the local sheriff, and the district attorney were killed. The National Guard stopped the riot, and the IWW was driven out of the Sacramento Valley. In 1919, the legislature passed the Criminal Syndicalism Law. Syndicalism was an IWW watchword, and the law basically attacked ideas. Protesting this law, the writer and politician Upton Sinclair contrived to be arrested for reading the U.S. Constitution out loud in public.

Nonetheless, the government of corruption and bossism was under serious assault. The great San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906 only postponed the graft prosecution of the mayor and the city's behind-the-scenes boss. Grassroots progressives in Los Angeles helped build momentum for a statewide movement that swept the Progressive Republican Hiram Johnson to the governorship in 1910. In 1911, Johnson and other progressives passed a legislative agenda that destroyed the political power of the Southern Pacific and reformed the government, giving the voters the referendum, recall, and proposition and providing for direct primary election of senators with an allowance for cross-filing, by which a candidate could run in any or all party primaries. Cross-filing substantially weakened both parties but generally favored the better organized Republicans, who remained in control of the state government.

The Rise of the South

In 1914, the opening of the Panama Canal and the completion of the harbor at San Pedro made Los Angeles the most important port on the Pacific Coast. The southland was booming. Besides its wealth of orange groves and other agriculture, southern California now enjoyed a boffo movie industry, and vast quantities of oil, the new gold, lay just underfoot. The movie business took hold in southern California because the climate let filmmakers shoot pictures all year round. In 1914, seventy-three different local companies were making movies, while World War I destroyed the film business in Europe. The war stimulated California's whole economy, demanding, among other goods, cotton for uniforms, processed food, and minerals for the tools of war. Oil strikes in Huntington Beach and Signal Hill in the early 1920s brought in another bonanza.

All these industries and the people who rushed in to work in them required water. Sprawling Los Angeles, with an unquenchable thirst for water, appropriated the Owens River in the eastern Sierra in 1913. In 1936, when the Hoover Dam was finished, the city began sucking water from the Colorado River and in the 1960s from the Feather River of northern California. San Francisco, also growing, got its water by drowning the Hetch Hetchy Valley despite the efforts of John Muir, the eccentric, charismatic naturalist who founded the Sierra Club.

The boom of the Roaring Twenties collapsed in the Great Depression of the 1930s. Thousands of poor people, many from the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma and Arkansas, drifted into California, drawn by the gentle climate and the chimera of work. John Steinbeck's Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939) described the Okies' desperation and showed a California simmering with discontent. At the same time, utopian dreams sprouted everywhere. People seemed ready to try anything to improve their lives, and they had a passion for novelty. Spiritual and dietary fads abounded, and the yawning gap between the wealth of some and the hopeless poverty of so many spawned a steady flow of social schemes. Among others, Sinclair and the physician Francis E. Townsend proposed elaborate social welfare plans, which pre-figured social security.

More significant was the return of a vigorous labor movement, particularly in San Francisco's maritime industry. The organizing of Andrew Furuseth and then Harry Bridges, who built the International Longshoreman's Association, led to the great strike of 1934, which stopped work on waterfronts from San Diego to Seattle, Washington, for ninety days. Even in open-shop Los Angeles, workers were joining unions, and their numbers made them powerful. As part of his New Deal for bringing back prosperity, President Franklin Roosevelt supported collective bargaining under the aegis of federal agencies like the National Labor Relations Board, and instead of radical outsiders, labor leaders became partners in the national enterprise.

World War II

In 1891, Japanese immigration to California began to soar, and the racist exclusionary policies already directed against the Chinese turned on this new target. In 1924, the federal Immigration Act excluded Japanese immigration. The ongoing deterioration of Japanese-American relations ultimately led to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 and U.S. entry into World War II. In 1942, thousands of Japanese American Californians, most of them U.S. citizens, were forced into concentration camps.

The war itself brought California out of the depression. Defense industries surged, including shipbuilding, chemicals, and the new aircraft industry. California had been a center of airplane building since the early start of the industry. Lockheed and Douglas Aircraft plants had been building warplanes for other nations as well as for the United States since the beginning of the war in Europe, and with U.S. entry into the conflict, production surged. Douglas Aircraft alone built twenty thousand planes during the war.

The state's population continued its relentless growth. Thousands came to California to work in the defense industries, and thousands more passed through the great naval base in San Diego, the army depot at Fort Ord, and the marine facility at Camp Pendleton. In April 1945, the United Nations was founded in San Francisco. World War II brought California from the back porch of America into the center of the postwar order.

Modern California

In 1940 the population of California was 6,907,387; in 1950 it was 10,586,223; and in 2000 it was 33,871,648. In part this growth was due to a nationwide shift from the Northeast to the so-called Sunbelt, but also, especially after 1964, when the new federal Immigration Law passed, immigrants from Asia and South America flooded into California.

This extraordinary growth brought formidable problems and unique opportunities. The economy diversified and multiplied until by 2000 California's economy was ranked as the fifth largest in the world. Growth also meant that pollution problems reached a crisis stage, and the diversity of the population—by 2000 no one ethnic group was in the majority—strained the capacity of the political system to develop consensus. Yet the era began with one of the most popular governors in California history, Earl Warren, so well-liked that he secured both the Republican and the Democratic nominations for governor in 1946 and received 92 percent of the votes cast. He gained an unprecedented third term in 1950. In 1952, President Dwight Eisenhower appointed him chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, and Warren's opinions and judgments helped liberalize politics and made the African American struggle for social justice a mainstream issue.

California emerged from World War II with a huge production capacity and a growing labor force. The aircraft industry that had contributed so much to the war effort now turned to the production of jet planes, missiles, satellites, and spacecraft. Industrial and housing construction boomed, and agriculture continued as the ground of the state's wealth, producing more than one hundred cash crops. In 1955, Disneyland, the first great theme park, opened, reaffirming California's corner on the fantasy industry.

The opening of the Golden Gate Bridge in 1939 had signaled the state's increasing dependence on automobiles, fueled by an abundant supply of gas and oil and by Californians' love of flexibility and freedom. Highway projects spun ribbons of concrete around the major urban areas and out into the countryside. Los Angeles grew more rapidly than any other area, increasing its population by 49.8 percent between 1940 and 1950. Above it, the air thickened into a brown soup of exhaust fumes.

Population growth changed politics as well. In 1958, after decades of Republican control, the Democrat Edmund Brown Sr. took advantage of his opponents' divisions and, in a vigorous door-to-door campaign, won the governorship. California's political spectrum included extremes at either end. On the right, the John Birch Society incorporated all the paranoia of the postwar anticommunist crusade, and on the left, the free speech movement at the University of California demonstrated many young people's anarchistic defiance of authority. Throughout the rest of the century, political consensus and civility itself were often out of reach.

In 1962, Governor Brown campaigned for reelection against Richard M. Nixon, who, two years before had lost the U.S. presidency to John F. Kennedy. Brown won, sending Nixon into what seemed a political grave. But California's needs and priorities were changing, and steadily growing diversity meant sizable blocs developed behind a variety of conflicting philosophies. No politician could accommodate them all, and many, like Nixon, chose to exploit those divisions.

On 11 August 1965, the discontent of the poor African American community of Watts in Los Angeles exploded in one of the worst riots in U.S. history. Thirty-four people were killed, hundreds were wounded, and $200 million in property was destroyed. Watts inaugurated years of racial violence. An indirect casualty was Governor Brown, who lost the 1966 gubernatorial race to the former actor Ronald Reagan. Reagan came into office announcing his intentions to restore order, to trim the budget, to lower taxes, and to reduce welfare. In actuality, he more than doubled the budget, raised taxes, and greatly increased the number of people on the dole. Nonetheless, Reagan's personal charm and optimism made him irresistible to voters suffering a steady bombardment of evil news.

In 1965, the dissatisfaction of rebellious youth found a cause in the escalating war in Vietnam. Demonstrations featuring the burning of draft cards and the American flag spread from campuses to the streets. By 1968, it seemed the country was collapsing into civil war, and the country was obviously losing in Vietnam. Also in 1968, U.S. voters elected Nixon to the presidency, but his flagrant abuse of power led to his forced resignation in 1974.

Bruised and self-doubting, California and the rest of the nation limped into a post–Vietnam War economic and political gloom. In 1974, Edmund G. Brown Jr. was elected governor of California. Brown, whose frugal lifestyle charmed those tired of Reagan's grandiosity, talked of an era of limits, supported solar and wind power, and appointed a woman as chief justice of the state supreme court. At first, like Reagan, Brown enjoyed a steadily rising population and government revenues in the black. Then, in 1975, Proposition 13 and an accelerating recession derailed the state economy. Proposition 13, which rolled back and restricted property taxes, was a rebellion by middle-class home-owning Californians against apparently limitless state spending. The proposition was one of the tools Hiram Johnson had added to the California constitution in 1911. Although long underused, it has become a favorite tool of special interest groups, who have placed hundreds of propositions on state ballots calling for everything from exclusion of homosexuals from the teaching profession to demands that the government purchase redwood forests and legalize marijuana. Many propositions have been overturned in the courts, yet the proposition is uniquely effective in bringing popular will to bear on policy. Beginning in the 1970s, propositions helped make environmentalism a central issue in state politics.

George Deukmejian, a Republican, became governor in 1982. A former state attorney general, Deukmejian appointed more than one thousand judges and a majority of the members of the state supreme court. Continuing economic problems dogged the state. Revenues shrank, and unemployment rose. The Republican Pete Wilson, elected governor in 1990, faced this sluggish economy and an ongoing budget crisis. One year the state ran for sixty-one days without a budget, and state workers received vouchers instead of paychecks.

In 1992, Los Angeles erupted in another race riot. The sensational media circus of the O. J. Simpson murder trial in 1995 exacerbated racial tensions further, and Wilson's efforts to restrict immigration, especially the illegal immigration through California's porous border with Mexico, aroused the wrath of liberals and Latinos.

Fortunately, the state's economy was climbing out of the prolonged stagnation of the 1980s. Once again California was reinventing itself. Shortly after World War II, Stanford University had leased some of its endowment lands to high-technology companies, and by the 1990s, the Silicon Valley, so-called for the substance used in computer chips, was leading the explosively expanding computer and Internet industry. The irrational exuberance of this industry developed into a speculative bubble, whose bursting in 2000 precipitated the end of the long boom of the 1990s.

The 2000 census confirmed California's extraordinary diversity. Out of a total population of 33,871,648, no single ethnic group held a majority. Whites, at 46.7 percent of the total, still outnumbered any other group, but Latinos now boasted a healthy 32.4 percent, Asians amounted to 10.9 percent, and African Americans totaled 6.7 percent. Significantly, 4.7 percent of the state's residents described themselves as multiracial. But perhaps the happiest statistic was the jump in the number of Native California Indians, who had been nearly wiped out at the beginning of the twentieth century, to more than 100,000.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Beck, Warren A., and David A. Williams. California: A History of the Golden State. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972.

Pomeroy, Earl S. The Pacific Slope: A History of California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Utah, and Nevada. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1973.

Rolle, Andrew F. California: A History. Rev. 5th ed. Wheeling, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1998.

Soule, Frank, et al. Annals of San Francisco. New York and San Francisco: D. Appleton, 1855.

Starr, Kevin. Americans and the California Dream, 1850–1915. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

———. Embattled Dreams: California in War and Peace, 1940– 1950. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Cecelia Holland

See also Alcaldes ; Asian Americans ; Bear Flag Revolt ; Chinese Americans ; Frémont Explorations ; Gold Rush, California ; Golden Gate Bridge ; Hollywood ; Japanese American Incarceration ; Japanese Americans ; Los Angeles ; Mexican-American War ; Mission Indians of California ; Proposition 13 ; Railroads ; Sacramento ; San Diego ; San Francisco ; San José ; Silicon Valley ; Watts Riots .