Lecture of 10/11

California Grows Up, Part 2

[Note: Ask a student to share the links for the replacement readings on Chinese Exclusion and Law and Race in California.]

What happens after the Gold Rush?

It ends, and people from all over the world are here! Very, very diverse. Chinese laborers especially building the railroads, the Sacramento levees.

Washington badly wants to bind Cali into the union; hence funding for railroads.

Central Valley is now becoming the world's breadbasket: wheat is the main crop, because flour can be shipped all over the world.

California attracts its share of monomaniacs: e.g. Theodore Judah, a surveyor, who is obsessed with building a railroad through the Sierras. Goes to SF millionaires: Lick says no. Sacramento says yes! Stanford, Huntington, Hopkins, and Crocker. Corrupt businessmen.

Crocker (the engineer) needs labor, which is scarce and expensive. So he imports from South China. Coolies, i.e. indentured servants, who must earn enough to pay their way home.  "Crocker's Monkeys," say the editorial cartoonists.

Incredibly dangerous work (black powder blasting); nobody knows how many died. Great time pressure to meet the Union Pacific, in Promontory, Utah, in 1869,

SF in the 1860s may have more newspapers than anywhere else in the world. Notable: the Overland Monthly. Henry George (!) writes the first article: What the Railroad Will Bring Us.  (Prosperity, he hopes.) But most of the profit goes to the Big Four. Who build enormous, hideous mansions on Nob Hill; when a neighbor won't sell, Crocker builds the "Spite Fence" to block his light and view.

The Big Four are plutocrats, with all the problems that implies.

To win a bet, Stanford finances the first time-photography study of a horse galloping; leads to motion pictures, perhaps. So some benefits to this wealth. But mostly not: extreme concentration, which leads to excess at the top, and not enough in the middle and the bottom.

!n 1879, George's opinion had changed, and he wrote Progress and Poverty, recommending a single tax on land, as a way of breaking up the concentration of wealth. The problems of Cali are the world's problems, he claimed.  This very accurate analysis is still having trouble gaining traction: but modern economists like Michael Hudson have built upon George's work.

Early stirrings of "nature shows God's grandeur" philosophy: Thomas Starr King gives that sermon in 1860, partly out of worry that Americans are losing their religion: he thinks that Romantic nature philosophy misses something essential about religion: "there are no Yosemites in the soul."  But people misinterpret the message, and move towards a vague pantheism.

Cali inspires Ambrose Bierce to compose the Devil's Dictionary. Stealin Lanford, Callous Huntington, etc. Greed, corruption, everywhere.  Heads to Mexico in 1911 to get away, vanishes. It's dirty out there!

Rail trusts exert monopoly power and charge monopoly prices. Lots of editorial cartoons--in the Wasp.  The Railroad Octopus! Has all Cali in its tentacles.

In Postwar depression, Chinese are scapegoated; anti-Chinese sentiment grows rapidly.