Despite the hard times of the 1870s and 1890s, California’s spectacular economic growth from statehood to the early 1900s nurtured an equally impressive cultural maturation. A wild and often lawless frontier society developed into a more civil, cosmopolitan one. By the turn of the century the state’s writers, artists, and educational institutions would attain national and, in some instances, international recognition.
Mark Twain, born Samuel L. Clemens, was a transitory figure in the state’s literary coming of age. In 1864 Twain entered California from Nevada, where two years earlier he had begun his writing career as a reporter and then editor for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. One of the most original and critically acclaimed American authors of his time, he elevated the quality of California writing to a higher tier of satire and irony, exemplified in such works as The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches (1867). The late 1860s found him reporting from the Sandwich (Hawaiian) Islands, “the loveliest fleet of islands. . . anchored in any ocean,” voyaging to the East Coast to give popular lectures on his Pacific travels and other western topics, returning to California and Nevada briefly, and then leaving the Golden State for good.
Ambrose Bierce, like Twain a member of San Francisco’s literati, was the most caustic of the state’s writers, gaining him the nickname of “The Wickedest Man” in the city. Embittered by an unhappy childhood, his anger was poured out in venomous attacks on the Southern Pacific Railroad. In The Devil’s Dictionary, he cynically defined truth as “An ingenious compound of desirability and appearance.”
Rejecting cynicism, a number of talented political and environmental activists contributed their writings to the promotion of various causes. Henry George, Frank Norris, Helen Hunt Jackson, Charles Fletcher Lummis, Mary Austin, Jack London, John Muir, and Gertrude Atherton constituted a pantheon of reform-minded author luminaries that could be matched by few other states. All were well recognized far beyond California, and some were known internationally.
One of the most original social thinkers in the country, Henry George attributed the rise of wealth for the few and poverty for the many to the inequitable distribution of land. As populations increase, so do land values. The possessors of huge undeveloped holdings, like the Southern Pacific, unjustly received the unearned increment from rising real-estate prices. If governments would tax this unfair windfall, railroads would be incentivized to sell their unused acreage thereby spreading the wealth. This was the single-tax theory George espoused in his 1879 treatise, Progress and Poverty. This was the policy that when adopted would usher in “the Golden Age. . . the culmination of Christianity. . . .” Such were the views of a millennial-minded reformer who, on the other hand, vehemently opposed unions and characterized the Chinese as “utter heathens, treacherous, sensual, cowardly and cruel.”
From his four years at the University of California at Berkeley, where he read the gritty, realistic fiction of Emile Zola, Frank Norris developed an interest in dramatizing the plight of the dispossessed in his own fiction writing. While sharing Henry George’s contempt for the Chinese, Norris’s national reputation derived largely from his publication of the propa-
Gandistic novel The Octopus, a Story of California (1901). The novel spoke to the public’s deep-seated anger toward powerful trusts, in this case the Southern Pacific Railroad, which he portrayed as a heartless exploiter of San Joaquin Valley wheat growers (see Chapter 8). Norris wrote five other novels, among them McTeague (1899) and The Pit (1903).
Helen Hunt Jackson, Charles Fletcher Lummis, and Mary Austin advocated for Indians, while Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton sympathized with Californios dispossessed of their lands. Though living in Colorado, Jackson researched the treatment of California’s mission Indians and wrote A Century of Dishonor (1881), a government-commissioned Report on the Conditions and Needs of the Mission Indians (1883) with Abbot Kinney, and Ramona (1884), a popular novel romanticizing Indian life in Mexican California. Lummis, as noted, was a Los Angeles resident and similarly studied and defended Native American rights while venerating Spain’s legacy in the Southland. As editor of the Land of Sunshine magazine, he recruited articles from the gifted Mary Austin. She wrote The Basket Woman (1904) and numerous other accounts of California and southwestern Indians. Ruiz de Burton, the state’s first published Latina writer, authored The Squatter and the Don (1885), a novel depicting the struggles of a cultivated Mexican landowner in dealing with vulgar Anglo squatters as the don’s nameless and poorly paid Indian ranch-hands looked on.
Jack London, a one-time oyster pirate on San Francisco Bay and later University of California at Berkeley dropout, became the world’s most highly paid and well-known author. The setting for nearly all of his many books was the Pacific Basin. Though an avid socialist and political propagandist, his best-selling works centered on the struggle of men and dogs against such forces of nature as blizzards, scorching heat, and towering waves. The Call of the Wild (1903), a novel about a San Francisco dog that adapted to the Alaskan wilderness, was his most popular book. Infatuated by his reading of Herman Melville’s South Sea tales, London taught himself sailing and voyaged aboard the schooner Snark with his wife Charmian. They stopped in Hawai’i, Bora Bora, Tahiti, the Marquesas Islands, Australia, and other exotic Pacific archipelagos. His near-death encounters and exhilarating experiences became material for his gripping and lyrical travelogue, The Cruise of the Snark (1911).
Josiah Royce and Hubert Howe Bancroft advanced historical studies in California. Though a philosopher by profession, graduating from the University of California and then completing a Ph. D. at Johns Hopkins University at age 23, Royce authored the influential California: A Study of American Character: From the Conquest in 1846 to the Second Vigilance Committee in San Francisco (1886). In this historical work Royce emphasized California’s progression from a lawless mining frontier to a civil society built by pioneer settler families. Far more engaged in history than was Royce, Bancroft, a San Francisco bookseller and amateur scholar, traveled from California to Alaska buying books, manuscripts, and maps dealing with Pacific slope history. He then assembled a team of assistants to compose what became a 39-volume history of the Pacific Coast from California to Alaska. Seven of the tomes focused on California’s past. Bancroft then sold his large collection of materials to the University of California, where it formed the nucleus of Berkeley’s famed Bancroft Library.
As Half-Dome has towered over Yosemite Valley, so has the visage of John Muir hovered over the mighty Sierra, his beloved “Range of Light.” From wood cutting and sheep herding,
Figure 7.4 Jack and Charmian London aboard Snark. Courtesy of the Department of Geography, UC Berkeley.
Muir moved on to mountaineering, environmental preservation, fruit farming, and nature writing. Though he explored glaciers along the Pacific Rim from California to Alaska, and then toured Australia, New Zealand, and Asia, much of the time he lived in and for the Sierra, with regular stays at his family home in the Bay Area town of Martinez. Muir campaigned successfully for the establishment of Yosemite National Park in 1890 (it had been a state park since 1864). Next, in San Francisco he and a cluster of hiking Berkeley and Stanford professors founded the Sierra Club in 1892. They elected Muir president. The San Francisco-headquartered organization aimed at conserving the Sierra and other Pacific Coast wilderness areas. Today it is national in scope.
Gertrude Atherton, a suffragette and author of 34 novels, epitomized the writer as cosmopolitan. San Francisco born and raised, she lived in New York City and London, and traveled in France and Germany before returning home to the City by the Bay. While in France, Atherton finished the first of her several novels set in California, Los Cerritos (1890). The Californians (1898), a later novel about man versus woman and restrictive Spanish
Mores, won acclaim. The heroines in her works were often independent-minded women who challenged social conventions.
The doings of all these authors and much else were covered by the leading California newspapers of the day. The San Francisco Examiner was founded in 1863 and later sold to George Hearst, who in 1887 turned it over to his son William Randolph Hearst, whose nationwide chain of papers would soon become known for journalistic sensationalism. In 1865 brothers Charles and Michael deYoung started the forerunner of what three years later became San Francisco’s Morning Chronicle. With the help of writers Bret Harte and Mark Twain, the paper soon enjoyed the widest circulation west of the Mississippi. The other leading paper of the period, the Los Angeles Times, was founded in 1881. Three years later Harrison Gray Otis bought the publication, building it into a powerful morning daily by the end of the century.
Painters and photographers, working in California, produced high-quality, nationally esteemed art in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. William Wendt’s seascapes and landscapes, particularly his oil painting Old Coast Road (1916), sited in Laguna Beach, has since become a classic. Similarly, the notable works of Albert Bierstadt, William Keith, and Thomas Ayers exemplify the magnetic pull of California’s Yosemite Valley and other natural wonders on artists of the period. Charles Christian Nahl painted rambunctious historical scenes, such as Joaquin Murieta: The Vaque (n. d.) and portraits. Photographers Carlton Watkins and Eadweard Muybridge excelled in the new art form. What iconic Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove did for painters, it also did for Watkins, as seen in his photographs Vernal Fall (c.1858) and Section of the Grizzly Giant (c.1866, sequoia redwood). These and other Sierra photographs brought Watkins fame in Paris. In addition to receiving notoriety by shooting and killing his wife’s lover and allegedly poisoning her, Muybridge achieved international recognition for his Yosemite and so-called locomotion photographs, the latter depicting running horses.
Schools and colleges, as much as art, reflect the health and maturity of a culture. In this regard, California made tremendous progress during the half-century after the gold rush. The state adopted compulsory elementary education in 1874. Secondary education lagged, as five years later the state boasted only 16 high schools.
To provide for the anticipated crop of future students, the state established “normal schools.” These publicly funded, two-year post-secondary institutions trained teachers for grades one through eight. In 1900 state normal schools were providing teacher education in Chico, Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose, and Santa Barbara.
While pre-collegiate education for students and teachers was off to a slow start, higher learning registered major gains in a matter of mere decades. With few exceptions, California’s leading universities and colleges were located in or near Pacific port cities. The state’s Agricultural, Mining, and Mechanical Arts College was renamed and chartered in 1868 as the University of California. It was initially situated in the East Bay Area city of Oakland and later moved to Berkeley, an adjacent community just to the north. The new institution was named after George Berkeley, an Irish philosopher and bishop. Classes opened in 1869, and women were admitted with no numerical quotas the following year. From modest beginnings as a public, land grant college of applied learning the new public university had skyrocketed to international prominence by the early 1900s.
The University of California’s first law school, Hastings College of the Law, was established in San Francisco in 1878. When two female applicants were rejected for admission, the new school became embroiled in a major controversy. Despite objections from the college’s board of directors that women, because of their gender, were unfit for legal study, Clara Shortridge Foltz and Laura de Force Gordon won admission by triumphing in their 1879 law suit against the board. Foltz, the intellectually formidable mother of five children, thereafter became the first woman to practice law in California and to try cases before the California supreme court. She was also the inventor of the concept and role of the public defender, that is, an attorney employed and paid by the government to defend those too poor to afford private counsel. Both of these Hastings alumnae went on to distinguished careers and leadership roles in the state’s women’s suffrage movement.
Thirty-six miles away from San Francisco in the South Bay Area, Leland Stanford Junior University, named after the deceased only son of the Southern Pacific Railroad magnate, was established in 1891. Well-endowed with railroad money and ably led by biologist and president, David Starr Jordan, Stanford rose to eminence almost overnight. Women and men were to compete on an equal basis for entrance. However, due to the insistence of Jane Lathrop Stanford that female students never number more than 500, it would take decades before the university removed that gender-based admissions barrier.
A host of other fine private colleges and universities also appeared in the state in the latter half of the 1800s and early 1900s. Again, most were in or near Pacific port cities; nearly all had sectarian connections with Protestant or Catholic churches. Methodists founded the College of the Pacific in 1851 in the port city of Stockton. The following year Mills College for women, initially known as the Young Ladies’ Seminary, opened in the port city of Benicia, afterward moving to Oakland. Santa Clara College (later university) was established in the South Bay Area by Jesuit priests and chartered in 1855. In 1879 Methodists founded the University of Southern California in the Pacific port city of Los Angeles. Congregationalists established Pomona (the oldest of the Claremont Colleges) and Presbyterians founded Occidental in 1887 in Eagle Rock, a suburb of Los Angeles. Whittier, a Quaker college, commenced instruction in 1901, while Redlands, a Baptist institution, did so in 1909.
California’s amazing economic and cultural growth took place amid mounting public anger targeting the Southern Pacific Railroad, and increasing labor union activity. These matters await examination in the next chapter.
SUMMARY
California’s economic and cultural growth from the 1870s to the 1920s catapulted it into the front rank of states in an increasingly Pacific-oriented America. The Golden State grappled with its perennial water-distribution problem sufficiently well to become the dominant farming state in the Far West, whose grain and other agricultural exports were shipped throughout the Pacific Basin and beyond. Similarly, in oil extraction, mining, manufacturing, development of its urban infrastructures, and especially its maritime economy Cali-
Fornia led the region, augmenting its status as America’s Pacific Eldorado. Visits to the state by Hawai’i’s King David Kalakaua underscored California’s close economic connection to that island nation that the United States annexed in 1898 to increase the China trade and defend America’s Pacific Coast. California’s role as a training and staging area in the ensuing Spanish-American-Cuban-Filipino War, erupting in that year, was pivotal and determinative. Completion of the transpacific submarine cable in 1903, linking San Francisco to the Far East, was simply the final development needed to render California as America’s Pacific fortress.
California’s unequaled and diversified economic growth, coupled with its new military importance, was matched by a surge in its cultural achievements. The Golden State had become cosmopolitan. Its writers were regionally, nationally, and in a few instances internationally acclaimed. Newspapers flourished, as did scholarship and the arts. Often located in or near Pacific port cities, the state’s institutions of higher education, especially the University of California and Stanford, had gained national prominence by 1900. Smaller institutions, such as Pomona and Occidental colleges, tended to have close Church ties when they were founded.
REVIEW QUESTIONS
• What was the Ontario (California) model of irrigation and electrification developed by George Chaffey? How and when did that model get transplanted across the Pacific in Australia?
• How were California’s agricultural and oil enterprises, often centered in the state’s interior regions, connected to Pacific maritime commerce?
• How was David Laamea Kalakaua, King of Hawai’i, linked to California’s history?
• What was California’s role in the Spanish-American-Cuban-Filipino War, 1898-1902?
• What evidence is there of Pacific Basin ties in the life and writings of Jack London?
FURTHER READINGS
J. A. Alexander, The Life of George Chaffey: A Story of Irrigation Beginnings in California and Australia (Melbourne: Macmillan, 1928). The author makes a strong case for his view that Chaffey’s 11-year sojourn in Australia prepared him for bringing irrigation to California’s Colorado Desert.
Barbara Babcock, Woman Lawyer: The Trials of Clara Foltz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011). Clara Foltz’s brilliant, reform-oriented legal career is detailed in this thoroughly researched and engagingly written study.
John E. Bauer, Health Seekers of Southern California (San Marino, CA: The Huntington Library Press, 1959). This is one of the few in-depth studies of a topic vital to the rise of southern California.
California History, 74 (Spring 1995). The entire issue is devoted to “Citriculture and Southern California.”
Daniel E. Cletus, Bitter Harvest: A History of California Farmworkers, 1870-1941 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). The origins of the ongoing marginalization of California field workers are expertly chronicled in this work.
Edwin T. Coman, Jr., and Helen M. Gibbs, Time, Tide & Timber: Over a Century of Pope & Talbut (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1949). Though celebrating Pope & Talbut’s first hundred years, this pro-company account offers useful material on California lumbering.
Bruce Cumings, Dominion from Sea to Sea: Pacific Ascendancy and American Power (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). This may be the first study to place California’s development at the center of America’s westward thrust across the continent and into the Pacific Basin.
William Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). The book shows how after statehood an Anglo-dominated Los Angeles at times utilized and obliterated the area’s connections to Mexican places and people.
William DevereH and Greg Hise, eds., A Companion to Los Angeles (Malden, MA: Wiley-BlackweH, 2010). See chapter 12, by David Vaught, for an up-to-date analysis of rural California’s economic and social development.
Glenn S. Dumke, The Boom of the Eighties in Southern California (San Marino, CA: Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, 1944). Though dated, this is still essential reading on the meteoric rise of late nineteenth-century southern California.
William B. Friedricks, Henry E. Huntington and the Creation of Southern California (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1992). This well-researched volume stresses Huntington’s entrepreneurial talents, which were vital in modernizing early twentieth-century Los Angeles.
Norris Hundley, Jr., The Great Thirst: Californians and Water, A History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). This is the most thorough, balanced, and insightful work on the critical subject of water in the state’s history.
David Igler, Industrial Cowboys: Miller & Lux and the Transformation of the Far West, 1850-1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). Through the operations of one powerful company, the author shows how western land and water rights were consolidated and the environment degraded as industrialization advanced in the Far West.
Robert Kelley, Battling the Inland Sea: American Political Culture, Public Policy, and the Sacramento Valley, 18501986 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). Though not the last word on delta hydraulics and public policy, this book is the starting point for any serious exploration of these matters.
Carey McWilliams, Southern California: An Island on the Land (Salt Lake City, UT: Gibbs M. Smith, 1983). In this classic account, the author stresses what he sees as the insularity of southern California up to World War II.
Daniel Meissner, “Bridging the Pacific: California and the China Flour Trade,” California History, 76 (Winter 1997-8), 82-93. This is one of the first studies to link wheat-growing in the Central Valley to the Asian Pacific market.
Richard J. Orsi, “The Octopus Reconsidered: The Southern Pacific and Agricultural Modernization in California, 1865-1915,” California Historical Quarterly, 54 (Fall 1975), 196-220. The Southern Pacific’s role in fostering California agriculture is persuasively presented in this journal article.
Thomas J. Osborne, “Claus Spreckels and the Oxnard Brothers: Pioneer Developers of California’s Beet Sugar Industry, 1890-1900,” Southern California Quarterly, 54 (Summer 1972), 117-25. The largely ignored role of these sugar magnates in shaping California’s agricultural development is highlighted in this study.
Donald J. Pisani, From the Family Farm to Agribusiness: The Irrigation Crusade in California and the West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). The work situates California’s irrigation challenges and agricultural development within a regional economy.
Paul W. Rodman, “The Wheat Trade between California and the United Kingdom,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 45 (December 1958), 391-412. An authority on western economic development details the profitability and market dynamics of California’s wheat trade with Britain.
Douglas C. Sackman, Orange Empire: California and the Fruits of Eden (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). In addition to covering the economics of California’s emergent citrus industry, this work places that industry within a Pacific Basin exchange zone.
David J. St. Clair, “New Almaden and California Quicksilver in the Pacific Rim Economy,” California History, 73 (Winter 1994-5), 278-95. This article traces the uses of and markets for this California-mined substance.
Robert J. Schwendinger, International Port of Call: An Illustrated Maritime History of the Golden Gate (Woodland Hills, CA: Windsor Publications, 1984). Whaling, mining, fishing, shipping, exploring, warring, and more are covered in this volume that clearly shows the global importance of San Francisco’s harbor from precolonization times to the 1980s.
Kevin Starr, Americans and the California Dream, 18501915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). The chapters on selected authors of the period offer insights into how the state influenced their works and, conversely, how their writings both shaped and reflected the elusive California dream.
Kevin Starr, Material Dreams: Southern California through the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). The built environment takes center stage in this account of how hydroelectric works, oil, automobiles, trains, Hollywood, architecture, and USC shaped a “brassy” and somewhat “noisy” component of the California dream.
E. Mowbray Tate, Transpacific Steamers (New York: Cornwall Books, 1986). Replete with photographs, this volume provides a useful overview of West Coast steam shipping throughout the Pacific Basin up to American entry into World War II.
Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). California’s quest for water is viewed within the broader sweep of American empirebuilding in the “hydraulic West.”
World History
