America’s acquisition of a Pacific empire around 1900 put the nation’s West Coast ports increasingly in the international spotlight. This was particularly true of California’s maritime centers of San Francisco and Los Angeles, with its new harbor at San Pedro. The Panama Pacific Exposition of 1915 heralded San Francisco’s rebuilding after the 1906 earthquake and California’s arrival as a major global player in transoceanic commerce.
Based partially on the state’s growing maritime economy in the latter half of the nineteenth century (see Chapter 7), business leaders had been predicting a rosy future for California and its seagoing commerce. The president of the California State Board of Trade, N. P. Chapman, envisioned a twentieth-century Golden State whose economic growth would be more dependent on its Pacific connections than on its ties to the nation’s interior regions. In an article titled “Greater California and the Trade of the Orient,” appearing in the Overland Monthly magazine in September 1899, he described a state bursting with economic energy beyond its borders and shoreline. Its trade relations would extend in all directions but most prominently toward the Asian Pacific Rim.
Evincing a progressive’s concern for urban infrastructure development by supplying water and electrification for cities and for conserving California’s timber and other resources for efficient use - that is, harvesting and extracting in a sustainable manner - Chapman urged state policymakers to concentrate on supplying China’s teeming population with the state’s products, especially foodstuffs, timber, and manufactures. Readers were urged to
Support California’s China trade, otherwise that commerce would fall to the West Coast “cities of Portland, Seattle, and Tacoma” where “an aspiring and energetic people. . . will not yield us supremacy without a struggle.” Greater California’s northern rivals, he concluded, “are active and aggressive and do not intend that San Francisco shall be the great mart for Pacific Ocean trade on this Coast.”
Chapman’s vision for California’s Pacific maritime commerce became a reality in the Progressive Era and into the early1920s. During that period San Francisco and Los Angeles were among the world’s 13 leading seaports in terms of the aggregate value of trade respectively clearing their harbors. While the seagoing commerce of rival ports in Oregon and Washington grew, the Golden State retained its dominance of coastal and transpacific exchange.
San Francisco’s Panama Pacific Exposition of 1915 celebrated this trade dominance and portrayed it as an engine of California’s economic growth. The completion and opening of the Panama Canal that year was the occasion for holding the international fair. A model of the canal fascinated viewers. Pacific Basin-themed exhibits predominated. Replicas of a Mexican pueblo, a Samoan village, and Chinese and Japanese settlements were featured. China was portrayed as a country ripe for American investment and trade.
Everything about the fair was on a grand scale. Thirty-one nations and many states provided exhibits. The extravaganza ran for nine months and was attended by an estimated 19 million people.
Beyond the glitz and commercialism of the fair, the occasion was notable for the 948 “congresses” devoted to subjects as diverse as engineering, insurance, and the role of the Pacific in world history. Prominent scholars met at a Historical Congress to assess the opening of the Panama Canal against a backdrop of past and present occurrences. Speakers made various remarks linking California and the United States to the Pacific world. One commented that America “became a Pacific Coast power by the annexation of California.” Another presenter celebrated the recent “enormous” growth in North Pacific commerce. Goods from “Japan, China, the [East] Indies], and the Philippines” were shipped across the Pacific to “San Francisco, [the] Hawaiian Islands and through the Panama Canal.” A third speaker observed presciently that in world affairs: “The seat of [American] empire begins to shift from the Atlantic to the Pacific.” As the future would show, California’s trade and coastal military installations would become increasingly important components of a United States Pacific shift.
World History
