California

California. America's most populous state, with some 32 million people in 1996, and the third largest in area (almost 160,000 square miles), California displays enormous variety in climate and landscape, from the Mojave Desert in the south to the Sierra Nevada Mountains in the central region to a thousand‐mile‐long Pacific coastline. This natural diversity is matched by California's complex human history. The first migrants arrived between thirty thousand and fifteen thousand years ago, likely crossing into North America during the Ice Age. The explorer Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo sailed along the Southern California coast in 1542. Sir Francis Drake may have landed near present‐day San Francisco in 1579. The Spanish explorer and administrator Gaspar de Protola established small colonies beginning in 1769. Beginning with San Diego (1769), Franciscan missionaries, initially led by Junípero Serra, founded twenty‐one missions along the Pacific coast. With Mexican independence (1821), California became a Mexican possession. The Mexican government secularized the missions in the 1830s, theoretically freeing California Indians from the missions' control.

Anglo‐Americans came in large numbers by the early 1840s, mostly to farm in the north. Some settled in the community surrounding the Austrian John Sutter's ranching, farming, and lumber enterprises along the American River in the Sacramento Valley. By the mid‐1840s, they clashed with the dominant Mexican or Spanish ranching class, the “Californios.” The Anglo‐Americans' Bear Flag Revolt (1846) established a short‐lived California Republic. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) following the Mexican War transferred California, with the rest of the Southwest, from Mexico to the United States.

The 1848 discovery of gold in Sutter's millrace made California famous, but the gold rush also brought violence, a gender ratio heavily skewed toward men, and discrimination against foreigners and people of color. Nonetheless, the gold rush hastened California's entry into the Union as the thirty‐first state (1850). Under the Compromise of 1850, California joined as a free state.

With gold and population growth came urbanization, especially of San Francisco, whose expansion the 1906 earthquake and fire only briefly interrupted. The Central Pacific Railroad, built largely by Chinese labor, completed a transcontinental link in 1869. The economically vital tourist market initially consisted of wealthy easterners attracted by the state's climate and natural beauty. The conservationist John Muir campaigned for Yosemite National Park (established 1890) and founded the environmentalist Sierra Club in 1892. The expanding citrus economy of the late nineteenth century lured settlers to Southern California and provided capital for urban and industrial growth. By the early twentieth century, Southern California's oil and its film industry, centered in Hollywood, stimulated the state's economy.

Racism and discrimination stain California's history. The Foreign Miners' Tax of the gold rush era was accompanied by violence against Chinese, Mexicans, and Indians. California's congressional delegation strongly supported the federal Chinese exclusion law enacted in 1882. The state's 1913 Alien Land Act prohibited noncitizens from owning farmland. The Great Depression of the 1930s exacerbated social tensions and brought violence against Mexican farmworkers trying to unionize. The novelist John Steinbeck chronicled the plight of California's Dust Bowl migrants in The Grapes of Wrath (1939). In Southern California, Mexican and Mexican American workers faced forced repatriation. World War II brought the incarceration of Japanese Americans, Los Angeles riots targeting Mexican Americans, and discriminatory hiring practices against African Americans and other minorities.

World War II and its aftermath also launched a period of booming prosperity, population growth, and economic diversification. Aircraft manufacturing, shipbuilding, and armaments manufacturing all surged during the 1940s. A swelling postwar migration to Southern California produced the burgeoning subdivisions and proliferating freeways that became synonymous with the region. Tourism increased with the 1955 opening of Disneyland in Anaheim, near Los Angeles. San Francisco, meanwhile, became not only a mecca for the 1950s Beat poets and the 1960s counterculture, but also headquarters for such corporate giants as the Bank of America (founded by A.P. Giannini as the Bank of Italy in 1904). Beginning in the 1970s, “Silicon Valley” south of San Francisco emerged as a leader of the computer industry. Post–Cold War military spending cuts brought a downturn, but recovery was swift, and as the 1990s ended, California enjoyed global economic power.

With population growth came increasing political clout. The California senator Hiram Johnson was a Progressive Era luminary. The former California governor Earl Warren served as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1953 to 1969. Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan, both Californians, occupied the White House much of the time between 1969 and 1989. By 2004, California had fifty‐three congresspersons, far more than any other state. With a richly diverse population of Hispanics, African Americans, whites, and Asians, California epitomized both the problems and the promise of a multicultural, multiethnic society as the twenty‐first century began.

In 2003, facing mountainous state‐budget deficits, Californians again lived up to their reputation for maverick political behavior by removing Democratic governor Gray Davis in a recall election and choosing the body‐builder and Hollywood action‐hero Arnold Schwartzenegger, a Republican, in his place.
See also Asian Americans; Depressions, Economic; Disney, Walt; Hispanic Americans; Immigration Law; Indian History and Culture; Railroads; San Francisco Earthquake and Fire; Spanish Settlements in North America.

Bibliography

Kevin Starr , Americans and the California Dream, 1850–1915, 1986.
Albert Camarillo , Chicanos in California: A History of Mexican Americans in California, 1990.
Norris Hundley Jr. , The Great Thirst: Californians and Water, 1770s–1990s, 1992.
William Deverell and Tom Sitton, eds., California Progressivism Revisited, 1994.
Richard Candida Smith , Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry, and Politics in California, 1995.

William Deverell

; Updated by

Paul S. Boyer