5.6 KiB
California State University Monterey Bay
SBS 385 Environmental History of California
California: A History (Starr 2005)*
Chapter 6: The Higher Provincialism: American Life in an Emergent Region
In 1908, Josiah Royce (born in Grass Valley, CA), the Harvard philosopher extolled regional life as something profoundly serving the human need for community. Americans needed such a personalized connection more then ever, now that the United States was becoming an international empire. Americans could discover what it meant to be an American when they discovered their American identity in a localized context. Royce’s favorite province for analysis was California, specifically its topography and climate. California promoted simultaneously an independence of mind, individualism, and open simplicity of manner. California was a prism through which the larger American identity, for better or worse, could be glimpsed. For instance, Gold Rush communities were largely male, by turns good-humored or violent.
Samuel Clemens, working in San Francisco as a newspaper reporter, would reinvent himself as Mark Twain – canny, observant as to social types and distinctions, writing a mixed insider/outsider point of view. The success of his books (The Celebrated Jumping From of Calaveras County and Other Sketches in 1876 and Roughing It in 1872) turned him into a national figure.
Clarence King’s Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada (1872) represents a high point in the frontier genre of geological description and the mountaineering memoir. The writings of King and other geologists of the California Geological Survey established a record of accurate and well-written scientific fact, focusing on the history of the Sierra Nevada and its creation through catastrophe and its storage of geologic time, evoking the seas, convulsions, lava, and glaciers that created the Sierra in eons past.
William Randolph Hearst, scion of mining millionaire George Hearst, a U.S. senator, was editor and publisher of the San Francisco Examiner. He pioneered journalistic techniques – featured writers, columns, crusading editorials backed by vivid cartoons, coverage of society, the sporting world – that he would soon take national.
California supported art from the frontier days onward, and by the 1870s had firmly established itself as a center for landscape painting. There was plenty to paint in California, with an emphasis on such signature places as Mount Shasta, Mount Tamalpais, the Yosemite Valley, Clear Lake, the Napa Valley, and the oak-dotted hills of the East Bay. Likewise did photography flourish and early experiments in high technology would bring into being Silicon Valley and the world it revolutionized.
In the 1870s, adobe gave way to brick and wood; candles and kerosene were replaced by gaslight; streets were paved and tracks laid for horsedrawn streetcars; police and fire departments were organized; a lending library was established; a city hall, county hospital, opera house, and theater opened, as Los Angeles made the transition from Mexican to American city.
The opening of the transcontinental railroad route into Southern California precipitated the brief but transforming “Boom of the Eighties” that finalized the Americanization of Southern California. Middle and upper middle class migration for reasons of health, tourism, winter sojourn, or permanent residence. The perception of Southern California as Spanish Colonial daydream helped establish an expanded metaphor of Mediterraneanism in terms of climate and terrain and many parallels to Mediterranean Europe with comparisons to Spain, Italy, and Greece. Such an interplay of metaphors helped Southern California develop their built environment in a manner akin to a stage set.
As the 20^th^ century dawned, the population of California stood at 1.5 million, quite a small figure for such a vast state. Nearly half this population lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, compared with 18,000 people living in San Diego. The railroad constituted the predominant public works infrastructure of California in the 19^th^ century. The railroad linked the state, shipped the freight, owned and developed the land, founded the cities of the interior, and controlled the political machines of San Francisco and Los Angeles. The railroad was the primary fact and symbol of industrialism, hence the commanding icon of modern life.
Already, sentiment was building for a better governance of this emergent society. California continued to require a makeover of its public culture, and reforming its architecture, town planning, business culture, and politics. The decade of the 1880s was of a generation of pre-Progressive and Progressive reformers who set about the business of trying to make California worthy of its geographical grandeur. University students were encouraged to practice high thinking and the strenuous life, to pursue high-minded, evolution-friendly theism whose matrix and primary symbol was California as natural place. The Golden Gate Kindergarten Association incorporated in 1884 in San Francisco became the model for free public kindergartens in the U.S. and abroad.
At 5:12am on Wednesday April 18, 1906 the Pacific and North American tectonic plates suddenly sprang from nine to twenty-one feet past each other along the 290 miles of the San Andreas fault. The Great Earthquake and Fire had ended the second phase of California’s development, its High Provincial years of regional achievement and contentment. Ahead lay the challenge and task for the next era: the creation of an infrastructure that would make possible a mega-state.