6.7 KiB
California State University Monterey Bay
SBS 385 Environmental History of California
Excerpts from California: A History (Starr 2005) CH 5 Regulation, Railroad, and Revolution: Achievement and Turmoil in the New State
Who owned the state, anyway? Very few of the original land grantees had come through the process with their holdings, it was a significant transfer of wealth. The question of land grants – their origins in the Hispanic era, their validity or invalidity, the lives that were made or ruined by titles confirmed or denied – emerged as one of the important themes of 19^th^ century California, a situation that would be compounded when the railroad became the largest landowner. California would remain resistant to small farming. Extensive holdings, together with the quasi-feudal economy they encourage, continued to dictate the structure of agriculture.
Landowners of Southern California argued for a separate territory south of San Louis Obispo while statehood was being debated in Washington DC as an effort to extend slavery to the Pacific Coast. The real impetus behind dividing California came from the fact that the state was truly two, and perhaps even four, distinct places: the urbanizing San Francisco Bay Area and the mining districts; the Far North; the Central Valley; and a sparsely settled Southern California, significantly Mexican. The question of dividing the state, while it has grown increasingly impractical over the years, has never fully gone away.
It was all happening so quickly! Not for California would there be- nor would there ever be, as it turned out- a deliberate process of development. Mining, first gold then silver, paced the foundation and first growth of American California. Agriculture was destined to dominate the next sequence of development. The hinterlands of San Francisco from San Jose to Healdsburg were developing into productive farms, Marin had a thriving dairy industry, and in 1859 people were extolling the future of vinticulture and wine-making. The Gold Rush gave a second wind to the cattle industry.
A number of Hispanic males, displaced by the new order, took to the hills as bandits (or freedom fighters a later generation would write). Prominent Californios maintained their positions, but theirs was, ultimately, a time of gradual decline: a twilight of splendor that, even as it waned, would in the 1880s and 1890s be reappropriated by a generation of Anglo Southern Californians anxious to graft themselves onto the rootstock of a romantic past. As the Civil War approached, Hispanic sentiment was overwhelmingly Unionist, and political sentiment in the state was overwhelmingly pro-Union.
It was national policy to extend the railroad across the continent. The best and winning argument for the project was the outbreak of the Civil War in April 1861. The Union Pacific was to build westward from Omaha and the Central Pacific to build eastward from Sacramento. In return, these two companies would be subsidized by an extensive federal package of loans, bonds, cash payments, and land grants. In 1864, the incentive package was increased to allocation of land grants on alternate sections, forty miles in length, of the entire line which would eventually make the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific, thanks to the federal government, two of the largest landowners in the Far West.
Four Sacramento businessmen, Huntington and Hopkins (hardware), Stanford (groceries), and Crocker (dry goods) were seemingly ordinary men, the Big Four as history would know them. Stanford, serving simultaneously as governor and president of the Central Pacific, broke ground on what turned out to be a six year epic of construction. Huntington would take care of lobbying in Washington, Stanford would see to state government, Crocker would supervise construction, and Hopkins would keep the books.
There were not enough men in California willing to do this sort of backbreaking work at the price Crocker was willing to pay. Chinese were already marginalized out of mainstream employment and eventually ten thousand were employed. They more than proved their mettle against the competing Irish workers of the Union Pacific. The lines connected on May 10, 1869 at Promontory Summit, Utah. What kind of world would this postrailroad era be for California, now that it was less than a week’s journey from the East Coast? California was now joining the national economy, including industrial culture. What would the hundreds of thousands of immigrants find? A better life? Or the same dreary, grinding poverty that had motivated their immigration in the first place?
The decade of the 1870s was not a good time for the nation or for Europe, the worst depression thus far in American history. The president sent federal troops into a number of cities to contain a series of strikes against railroad companies. Marxism was making the transition from theory to practice beginning with the foundation in London in 1864 of the International Workingmen’s Association. The violence of the frontier era had not been banished by the railroad. Far from it: violence seethed beneath the surface, and Chinese became the scapegoats for collapsed expectations.
To understand the growth, one must look at San Francisco from two perspectives. It was the dominant urban concentration on the Pacific Coast, and was also a maritime colony of the eastern US and Europe. As such, it replicated the economic, social, and cultural institutions of advanced urbanism. The city began to fill with unemployed and restless men. Irish born Kearney told crowds that the capitalists of the city were running them into the ground and the Chinese were taking their jobs. Was this street theater or real revolution or both?
The revised state constitution of 1879 dropped Spanish as the second legal language and a strong anti-Chinese immigration statement was adopted. Other provisions included regulation of corporations and establishment of a state Railroad Commission. It was considered a failure in its refusal to take up the issue of land monopoly. California was, for all practical purposes, empty. Where were the flourishing cities and townships, the family farms, the signs of human progress and civility? Instead, one saw endless steppes, an occasional shack housing alien labor. Why was this so? Because so very few people owned most of the land in the state. After all the fuss and bother, the riots and sandlot rallies, the incendiary rhetoric and pickax brigades, the marches and countermarches of state militia and demonstrators, the fistfights and gunfire, the four dead bodies, and the overhauling of the state constitution, California entered the 1880s as a state in which railroads, corporations, and large landowners continued to call the shots.