There is only one person more obsessed than I when it comes to the memory of Don Andrés Bermúdez: his son, Andrés Junior. Junior lives with his family in the place where he came of age, a spacious ranch home his father acquired in 1993, on the outskirts of Winters, California, in the western Sacramento Valley.

In a nod to his Catholic upbringing, Junior crosses himself when he passes the town cemetery, where his father is buried. He bought the burial plot adjacent to his father’s, so that he can be as close to him as possible.

It’s easy to understand the devotion. Bermúdez, the “Tomato King,” who died of cancer in 2009 at just 58, willed himself from undocumented field worker and ranch hand to naturalized U.S. citizen; from successful farmer and labor contractor in California to pathbreaking congressman and migrant politician in Mexico.

In 2001, he made history by being elected mayor of his hometown of Jerez, in the state of Zacatecas, which has sent over half a million people to the U.S. over the last half century. Bérmudez is believed to be the first U.S. immigrant to win a mayoral election in Mexico. His first victory was overturned—because his primary residence was in the U.S.—but he won again in 2004 after his binational residency was established, then left that post to run for federal congress in Mexico City two years later. There, Bermúdez championed migrant causes, including allocating greater federal resources for the repatriation of paisanos who died in the U.S.

I am writing a biography of Bermúdez, and I am drawn equally to this complex and contradictory figure by his larger-than-life character—in his signature all-black cowboy ensemble—and by the unprecedented transnational movement he ignited. Bermúdez gave migrants a voice in the politics of their homeland. He also reproduced the strongman tendencies and political bossism he fought against, not to mention machismo.

He is both rule and exception: so much like millions of fellow Mexican migrants who anonymously toil in this country, but also remarkable for transcending strictures of citizenship and borders. Tracing his California path through rural swaths of the state is a reminder of how Bermúdez, and others, have made it their home while maintaining lifelong ties to their ancestral motherlands.

And so I take the 99 Highway to Porterville, where the Bermúdez clan’s U.S. trailblazers first arrived in the mid-20th century as part of the Bracero program, which brought hundreds of thousands of guest workers from Mexico to the fields of California. Fiddling with the radio dial, I’m as likely to hear conservative Christian propaganda as I am to stumble over country music or a Mexican station with Mixteco programming.

In Porterville, I meet a group of Bermúdez’s first cousins and contemporaries. Their aging bodies and visible ailments—strained backs, aching knees—are a testament to lifetimes of physically taxing work in the fields.

We sit in their back patio under a light drizzle and talk. Like any good transnational testimonio, the assembled elders start by honoring their elders, the patriarchs who first came to the U.S. They left rough upbringings in the scattered ranchos of the Zacatecas mountains, where they migrated seasonally between their native El Cargadero and Cueva Grande, tending drought-stricken land and famished dairy cows.

After stints in construction jobs in L.A., these pioneers eventually landed in the Central Valley. They worked the crop circuit up and down rural California, picking grapes, peaches, apricots, plums, strawberries, cherries, oranges, and olives. Labor contractors murdered workers for their paychecks. The migra launched raids that sent them scattering through orchards “like deer.”

When Bermúdez followed these forbears, arriving in town in his late teens in 1969, he did what the rest of the single migrants did, his cousins tell me: worked, drank, smoked, dated. You couldn’t tell, in Porterville, that his trajectory would be any different.

And so I head to Winters, a small town of just over 7,000, the place where Bermúdez’s path diverged from other young undocumented migrants’ stories. After his stint in Porterville, Bermúdez briefly returned to Mexico to marry and start a family. He then moved them to the U.S., choosing Winters for yearlong agricultural work—more appealing for a new father than following the crop circuit. A local white rancher named Tufts saw in Bermúdez a swift English learner and a hard worker, consistently the fastest picker on his crew. He invited Bermúdez and his young family out of the subsidized housing they lived in on the other side of town and into a trailer home on the ranch property.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the flow of migrant workers into California was plentiful, and Bermúdez, now bilingual, struck out on his own and began recruiting laborers for the U.S. Forest Service. By the 1990s, he returned to Winters a wealthy man and ventured into tomato growing—this time, as his own boss. He got involved in every stage of production, from sowing to transplanting, even innovating a technique that would earn him the “Tomato King” moniker, adapting agricultural machinery for a greater yield. He supplied Ragu, Morning Star, Del Monte, and Campbell’s.

In Winters, memories of the man in his “Tomato King” prime abound. Driving through the quaint town with Junior, he’s quick to point out McArthur Street, where his father bought his first property. Where he leased land to grow tomatoes. The exact spot where he got pulled over for driving under the influence, or where he broke out into a brawl. The Buckhorn, his favorite bar to rub elbows with the region’s white farmers. Rotary Park and the Winters Community Center where he hosted the Fiesta Mexicana and delivered impromptu speeches. The place where he threw epic parties for hundreds of his workers, many from his hometown of Jerez.

Most dream of a return. But Bermúdez actually managed to go back—and to take an unlikely and unprecedented leap into the Machiavellian world of Mexican politics. His critics will insist that Bermúdez was drawn by the allure of power; still, as a mayor and congress member, he battled the establishment by giving migrants a voice. “I am here to represent my people,” he once told me. He always told elite politicians that “to do away with migration, they need to have been migrants themselves. Nobody can do away with that which they have not felt.”

Death brought Bermúdez back, again, to the U.S. In the five years that I’ve been researching my book, I’ve grown close with the Bermúdez family; on another recent trip to Winters, I attended a rosary for Andrés Junior’s maternal grandmother, who died last year; Bermúdez jokingly called her his favorite suegra (mother-in-law) in an unabashed reference to his infidelity and cheating ways.

The family buried her just a few yards away from Bermúdez, where the entire nuclear family has plots. To paraphrase the migration scholar Osman Balkan, the interred bodies serve as anchors, investing the soil with political meaning for their relatives and survivors.

In death, as in life, Bermúdez has imbued this corner of California with his legacy—one that stretches to Zacatecas, and beyond.

The post In Search of the ‘Tomato King’ appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

He had nearly died on the summit of that mountain the night before. A fierce blizzard had set in after he and mountain guide Jerome Fay reached it. A blinding deluge of snow obscured their route back, making a descent impossible.

They survived by lying on their backs, just below the summit, on a bank of “fumaroles,” fissures of hot gases escaping from the depths of the volcanic mountain.

As Muir later described it, the two men suffered “the pains of a Scandinavian hell, at once frozen and burned.”

But they survived, and by 4:00 the next afternoon had returned to the hotel and tavern operated by Justin Hinckley Sisson at the base of the mountain, near the present-day town of Mount Shasta.

Muir probably didn’t waste much time before collapsing in his bed. It was Sisson’s daughters who welcomed him back the next morning by spreading wildflowers on it.

I call this mountain region my home and enjoy exploring its trails—and its history of fascinating characters like Muir and Sisson, and stories of courage, near-death, and resourcefulness under extreme conditions. It is like reading one long adventure novel with a thin plot.

Justin Sisson himself was a notable figure, a native of Connecticut, a college-educated schoolteacher who reinvented himself when he came out West, becoming a proficient hunter, fisherman, and mountain guide—and successful innkeeper. “He knew more of the secrets of Mount Shasta than any living man,” said the San Francisco Chronicle in his 1893 obituary.

Sisson’s hotel is long gone, but you can follow the route Muir and Fay took up the mountain to the place, still known as Horse Camp, where they dismounted from their horses and continued on foot toward the summit. If you keep going to the top, you can see those fumaroles, but be aware that the weather up there can change drastically from one hour to the next. You don’t want to spend the night on them.

Recently, I did a walk on another historic trail, the one used by the horse-drawn freight wagons that supplied Sisson with the wines, liquors, and other items from San Francisco that kept his tourist mecca stocked and well-lubricated. (As many as 70 guests at a time could be accommodated in his dining hall.)

The route we followed is still known as the Sisson-Callahan Trail. Back in the freight-hauling days, it was a spur of the main wagon route that ran from the Bay Area to Oregon. The 55-mile spur started at a tiny outpost, a hotel and store, run by a rancher named M.B. Callahan.

I hiked the Sisson end of the trail, the last 10 miles, with a friend from Redding, Todd Holbrook, a search-and-rescue guy who has spent the last couple of decades finding lost hunters and hikers in the wilderness. As it turned out, we needed his skills to get us through a few places where the trail disappeared in the tall grasses of lush meadows.

For the most part Sisson’s trail goes through the canyon carved by the North Fork of the Sacramento River. Much of the trail runs high above the streambed, but there are also some stretches where it drops down right alongside the stream. Use your imagination, and you can picture thirsty horses straining at their reins, slurping a welcome drink after the long pull from Callahan.

Trails like this one, and the route up to the summit, offer us a fourth dimension, that of time and past human experience, whether it’s Muir’s near-death on the Mount Shasta summit or the more prosaic tradition of hauling goods along what is now a scenic hiking trail.

Muir’s account of his night on Mount Shasta, published in 1877 by Harper’s New Monthly magazine, is more than a great adventure story. By enriching his tale with the graceful touches of a poet and philosopher, Muir made it an adventure story for all time, embedded forever in the fourth dimension of our mountain region.

Those stories take us to the very beginnings of recreational tourism, still a vital engine for California’s remote regions, including ours. If you were to do more time-traveling and planted yourself in front of Sisson’s Hotel in 1870 to watch the decades pass, you would see the rough narrow road in front of you become a stagecoach route, with passengers dropped off right at the front door. A few decades later they’d be getting off at a nearby railroad station.

Today the original site of the old hotel is sandwiched between a two-lane frontage road known as “South Old Stage” and Interstate 5. Tourists nowadays flock to the half-dozen motels and many Airbnbs on the other side of the freeway, some of them grabbing ice picks and following the path of John Muir and Jerome Fey toward the summit.

On that night atop Mount Shasta, lying on a bed of hissing gases, Muir calmly drew out his magnifying glass and examined the “exquisitely perfect” rays of the snowflakes on his sleeve.

His thoughts soared beyond the pain and suffering of a “Scandinavian hell” and out into celestial regions that distracted and comforted him with their dazzling beauty. Despite the swirling snow above him, he had a good view of the night sky and marveled that “the mysterious star clouds of the Milky Way arched over with marvelous distinctness.”

“Every planet glowed with long lance rays like lilies within reach,” he noted.

The post Where I Go<span class="colon">:</span> Hiking the Mountain That Almost Killed John Muir appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The Republicans who want to remove Gavin Newsom from office say the governor and his party have ruined California. The Democrats who defend the governor claim that Republicans are determined to seize control of California, so they can reverse its Democratic policies and transform it into a Trumpian nightmare. #KeepCaliforniaBlue is their war cry.

But these pro- and anti-recall messages fundamentally mislead, because they ignore the peculiar and poorly understood reality: Our state is both blue and red. California governance is a thoroughly bipartisan affair … with one important caveat. Our state today is governed both by living Democrats and dead Republicans.

Those living Democrats you know; they occupy most state offices, elected and appointed. But they don’t govern with a free hand. They labor under a complicated and often dysfunctional governing system constructed over more than a century of Republican rule.

Almost every significant feature of our state—from the agencies that regulate us to the formulas that dictate our local government services, our budgets, and our taxes—were created by Republican officials and voters who have shuffled off this mortal coil.

Given the constant talk about California being the bluest of blue states, people can be forgiven for not knowing that this state is a Republican project. California and the GOP were launched by the same man, John C. Fremont, at roughly the same time. The Republican Leland Stanford linked California to the country by the railroad and established the private university that educates an outsized portion of our governing elites.

Our complicated system of powerful and independent commissions and agencies was produced by progressive Republicans in the early 20th century, and expanded upon by Republicans from Earl Warren to George Deukmejian. As governor, Ronald Reagan, with a boost from President Richard Nixon, established our regime of environmental regulation. Reagan, with his presidential amnesty, also set the template for today’s more welcoming California immigration regime.

But those are just the things that dead Republicans might brag about, if they were around to brag. There’s bad stuff, too. The housing policies that drive homelessness, the systems that can’t pay unemployment, our faltering and incendiary electricity system, and the Prop 13 tax system that distorts democracy and public investment in today’s California are all poorly constructed Republican inventions. They’re also currently being poorly managed by Democrats. But, to be fair to the living, it’s not easy to run a system when you need to hold a séance to communicate with its creators.

The recall is itself a product of this bipartisan collaboration across the River Styx. The recall is a tool of our system of direct democracy, first advanced by the Republican governor Hiram Johnson in 1911, and used aggressively ever since by the GOP. And Newsom’s use of California’s nearly dictatorial gubernatorial authority in emergencies—which has fueled the recall backlash—is the result of efforts by generations of Republican governors, most recently Pete Wilson and Arnold Schwarzenegger, to enhance the power of the office.

The resulting ironies run deep, all the way to the molten core of the recall. The Republican candidates are calling California a failure, even though the state is mostly of their own making. And Democrats are defending a California governing system as their progressive model, even if it isn’t theirs, or particularly progressive.

If you internalize these ironies, you’ll understand that it may not matter much whether the recall succeeds or not. And that’s not just because any Republican who takes the governor’s office this fall is all but certain to be replaced by a Democrat in the fall 2022 elections.

(The recall’s one great potential impact would come in Washington, D.C. If 88-year-old U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein—whose outdated political positions often seem to occupy the netherworld between living and dead—should die during a short Republican governorship, her replacement would flip the 50-50 U.S. Senate to the GOP.)

The recall is a paradox: a contest to rule a state that no one person or party can rule. Whatever the result, living Democrats will still dominate public office in California—they hold three-quarters supermajorities in both houses of the legislature, as well as every other significant arm of state power. And the dysfunctional governing system, willed to us by dead Republicans, will remain firmly in place.

What really needs to be recalled is not one politician, but that system. Perhaps this recall will inspire Democrats, finally, to stop accepting governance by ghosts and to join with independents and some Republicans in creating what California desperately needs: a new, modern state constitution that gives democratic power to us, the living.

The post Does the Recall Matter if Republicans Already Run California? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

It’s preposterous to think that William Randolph Hearst needed a second summer retreat to get away from the ultimate California retreat, his castle at San Simeon.

It strains credulity to imagine a party-throwing media tycoon building a super-quiet, Bavarian-style village along a remote river on Mt. Shasta’s southeast slope.

And the longstanding tales—offered by visitors and residents, including Hearst’s longtime companion, Marion Davies—of Wyntoon as even more beautiful, comfortable, and magical than Hearst Castle are simply unbelievable.

If a place like Wyntoon really existed, wouldn’t every Californian know it? Wouldn’t millions of visitors from around the world have toured the Bavarian village? How could such a place remain hidden in the anonymity of the North State wilderness, in an age when even Yosemite requires a reservation? Yet Wyntoon, allegedly, persists as a strictly private retreat, visited only by generations of Hearst family members during the summer months.

To believe Wyntoon is real is to accept that California, full of so many wonders, also has its own Brigadoon—the invisible Scottish village, in the Lerner and Loewe musical, that appeared for only one day every 100 years. And you have to ask yourself: just how many rich and magical places can one state contain?

To be fair, there is enormous documentary evidence of Wyntoon’s existence—books, papers, photographs, public records—in the material about Hearst and his properties. I’ve been obsessively reading everything I can about the man as Zócalo Public Square moves into a historic Hearst property, the Herald Examiner building in downtown L.A.

But the Wyntoon stories in this published record seem more the stuff of myth than anything else.

This mystical village supposedly sits along bends of the McCloud River, on more than 60,000 acres of land where Siskiyou and Shasta Counties meet. The histories claim that the place was used as a fishing and hunting resort in the 19th century, until Hearst’s mother Phoebe, after visiting the land, acquired an interest.

There, the story goes, she built a giant Gothic German castle, where her grandchildren—William Randolph Hearst’s children—loved to visit her.

When she died, she left Wyntoon to her niece, infuriating her relentlessly acquisitive son, who had only received San Simeon, a Mexican ranch, a Butte County orchard, and millions of dollars in other properties and securities. Hearst—who reportedly wanted Wyntoon both as a place to store his European art and, yes, as a summer retreat from his summer retreat—battled his cousin for six years before she surrendered and sold it to him.

Here’s where the tale jumps the shark. After the castle at Wyntoon burned down in the winter of 1929–1930, Hearst planned to build an even larger castle, using materials from a monastery in Spain that he had acquired and dismantled. But money grew tight in the Depression, and his go-to architect, Julia Morgan, sold him on creating a Bavarian village instead, with large guest houses built from local stone and wood along the river and around a grass clearing.

Morgan, who designed more than 700 California buildings and was constantly working on other Hearst properties, including San Simeon, somehow found the time to supervise Wyntoon. She managed every little bit of its design and construction, from the steep roofs to the landscaping. Fittingly, the guest houses—with names like Cinderella House, Fairy House, and Bear House—were decorated with murals of fairy tale scenes.

The apparent myth then takes a Hollywood turn. After Pearl Harbor spurred concerns about coastal bombings, Hearst closed San Simeon and moved to Wyntoon. Historians want us to believe that prominent people, rarely seen that far north in California, visited: among them Clark Gable, Louis B. Mayer, the Lindberghs, and Joe Kennedy and his young son Jack, who recklessly swam in the McCloud’s 44-degree water.

“There was a calmness about it that really appealed to me,” Davies wrote of the retreat in that era, according to David Nasaw’s magnificent biography of Hearst. “Our happiest times, I think, were at Wyntoon.”

We are also supposed to believe that Wyntoon was so calming that it inspired the rough-and-tumble tycoon to write a poem, “The Song of the River.” Even in the 21st century, Hearst newspapers reprint this ode to the North State’s wonders on the anniversary of his death.

The snow melts on the mountain
And the water runs down to the spring,
And the spring in a turbulent fountain,
With a song of youth to sing,
Runs down to the riotous river,
And the river flows to the sea,
And the water again
Goes back in rain
To the hills where it used to be.
And I wonder if life’s deep mystery
Isn’t much like the rain and the snow
Returning through all eternity
To the places it used to know.

Here’s something even more incredible about Wyntoon. Seven decades after Hearst’s death, his family—in an era when old newspaper families have lost their properties and empires—keeps control of the property through the privately held Hearst Corporation. The family has supported local firefighters and free health clinics, and developed a sustainable logging program that protects the land from fire and produces revenue.

Yes, a few important outsiders—legislators, Cal Fire, the forest service, local law enforcement, philanthropists—say they have been allowed in (and insist the place is real), but otherwise, it’s just family sharing in Wyntoon’s wonder. While money can buy anything in America, a family member says the place is not for sale at any price, or ever.

Does any of that seem remotely real to you?

Me neither. When I was visiting the nearby town of McCloud, I tried to get to Wyntoon, and couldn’t. The road is blocked by a gate—four miles away from the supposed location. All the paths through the woods are closed and forbidding. Local kayakers say you can see Wyntoon’s guest houses by going down the rocky river—but by that point, you’re so cold and wet, you might be hallucinating.

I want to believe that the legend is real. Perhaps the fact that Wyntoon seems a fiction is actually a form of protection for a special place that would be overrun if the public ever got access. Perhaps, it should be comfort enough to know that such a heavenly spot might actually exist. But as a journalist, I try to see things for myself before I believe them. And so, I am waiting on the Hearst family for my invitation.

I should be free Labor Day weekend.

The post Searching for William Randolph Hearst’s Mystical Mountain Retreat appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

How many times have I thought of the moment when idle banter between the two sisters turned to confused silence, then concern, then fear? Hundreds, easily, probably thousands. I have wondered over and over again what Alice said to her sister as the sun cast its waning light across that little kitchen. “Where did Kathy go?” “Where’s Kathy?” “Now where has Kathy run off to?”

As a historian, my job is to try to assemble the fragile, fragmentary puzzle pieces of the past. Establish chronology, narrate change, assess cause and effect: bring the past into conversation with the present. It is endlessly fascinating work—a strange, heady mix of expertise and fool’s errand. But I have never worked on a project that has occupied my thoughts or my dreams in any way close to the way the Fiscus story has.

What is it about this story, of a tragic death from seven decades ago, that I cannot shake? It is a type of haunting. Proximity surely has something to do with this story’s hold on me. I study the American West, especially of California, and this is fundamentally a California story—although it very quickly reverberated from the town of San Marino across the nation and the world. Its California-ness feels very close to me, and to what I think and write about in my work. There is also proximity by way of chronology. I tend to work in the 19th and 20th centuries. Those hundred years between the Civil War and my birth in 1962 feel familiar. I spend a lot of time contemplating them.

Compared to most of my work, this episode feels nearly contemporary; 1949 is only 13 years before I was born. I know plenty of people born well before 1949. It just wasn’t that long ago. The sheer closeness of the events in this story, in both time and place, is part of what intrigues me.

But who am I kidding? “Intrigues me” is not the half of it. This story obsesses me. The roots and persistence of that obsession raise questions that I cannot easily answer.

Fatherhood is part of it. My wife and I have two children. Our son, John, is in high school. His sister, Helen, is a university student. They are young adults, but I still worry about their safety as they venture out and about—driving, cycling, camping, rock climbing—just being who they are and doing what they do.

On a weekend afternoon more than a decade ago, I asked my daughter, who was 7 or 8 at the time, if she would help me with a project. Could she cut a circle from a sheet of construction paper? Helen said yes. She liked craft projects with paper and scissors. I told her that the circle needed to be 14 inches in diameter, and I held my hands that far apart.

Helen went out back to the playroom and returned with a sheaf of construction paper. She sat on the floor of our living room, right by the big front window. She tore out a purple piece of paper and quickly figured out how to complete her task, maybe with a little help. She marked two cardinal points on the paper north and south, fourteen inches apart. Then two more, east and west, likewise fourteen inches apart. With a pen, she drew a circle connecting all four points. She then carefully cut the circle from the paper and held it up. “Like this?”

I remember the moment as if it were yesterday. From where I write this, I can look to our living room where Helen proudly held up the purple circle in the light of that big window.

I caught my breath. It is one thing to know how small 14 inches is. It is something else entirely to see it, especially once we had taped it to the hardwood floor.

The circle is the shape and diameter of the old well that 3-year-old Kathy Fiscus fell into late that April afternoon in 1949.

A tube of rusted metal, just over a foot in diameter. A circle of purple construction paper a lifetime later.

The post The Kathy Fiscus Tragedy Transfixed the World. Seven Decades Later, I Can’t Let It Go appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Enter Southern California, with its abundant sunshine, fresh air (at least, at the time), deserts, and mountains. Seen as “a natural sanatorium,” by 1911, there were around 23 long-term health clinics in Southern California. As the sanatoriums matured, so did their design. Renowned architects of the early 20th century became involved in the crusade, including Alvar Aalto, who designed Paimio Sanatorium, a tuberculosis clinic in Finland, and a special chair known as the “Paimio scroll chair,” which “allowed patients to recline while slim back-slats provided cooling and hand grips helped in getting up.” The chair was a hit not only in clinics, but soon found its way into many of the modernist homes that became popular in California in the mid-20th century.

One such home was the Health House, an iconic building designed by Richard Neutra for Dr. Philip Lovell, a New York transplant-turned-naturopath who advocated for natural cures and wrote about them in a Los Angeles Times column called “Care of the Body.” The house, with its outdoor sleeping porches, abundant vegetation, and expansive windows, embodied the values Lovell championed. Neutra described the home as a “machine in the garden,” and it would come to exemplify the architectural movement known as California Modernism.

Some California sun seekers immersed themselves in nature itself. William Pester, born in Germany in the late 19th century, ventured into the California desert, making a hut from palm fronds and wood. Kilston writes that he was long-haired, richly bearded, and “wore homemade sandals and often nothing else.” Pester believed that the troubles and sicknesses of mankind came from a departure from nature, and so, this “Hermit of Palm Canyon,” as he came to be known, sought refuge from the modern world in the desert around 1906. He foraged for food, lived simply, and was one of the first “back to nature” enthusiasts in California. When tourists caught wind of Pester, his first instinct was to retreat farther away, but he soon capitalized on their curiosity and sold postcards with his image on one side and his guidelines for healthy living on the reverse. Pester and his contemporaries—a group known as the Nature Boys—were prototypes of the hippies of the 1960s.

The profound influence of these sanatoriums, health-conscious design, and the lifestyle of the likes of William Pester continue to resonate in present-day Southern California. Sun Seekers highlights these lesser-known characters and stories and traces the evolution of Southern California’s health-focused culture, recycling trend after trend—from holistic celebrity doctors to restaurants promoting “living” foods. So while the mythos of Southern California shape-shifts, the belief that the land and climate is a cure-all continues nonetheless.

The post Chasing the Sun’s Medicinal Rays appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

If you’re a Californian who doesn’t know the name Josiah Royce, shame on you. And shame on the schools, libraries, and intellectuals who have allowed us to forget the greatest thinker the Golden State ever produced.

When he is remembered, Royce—born in 1855 in a Grass Valley mining camp, raised in San Francisco, and educated at UC Berkeley where he was one of the first graduates—is often described as a once-famous philosopher. But that doesn’t do justice to a man whose groundbreaking work ranged over ideas as big and wide as his home state itself.

Moreover, his writing—if we would only read it—offers astonishingly fresh wisdom for Californians facing problems from discrimination to housing to the power of Facebook.

Royce was the sort of scholar who learned Sanskrit so he could study early Buddhist texts. He wrote important books and papers on the scientific method, religion, psychology (even serving as president of the American Psychological Association), insurance, race relations, and social ethics. He published literary criticism, came up with concepts of global peace that inspired the League of Nations, and identified important foundations of logic, mathematics, and cybernetics.

Perhaps most significant to Californians, he authored a history of California that was ahead of its time in focusing on the role of women, and demonstrating how the state was built on the exploitation of non-whites. California’s story also deeply informed his most important philosophical work—on how communities, and our loyalty to communities—shapes individuals.

“My earliest recollections include a very frequent wonder as to what my elders meant when they said this was a new community,” he would recall of Grass Valley, where he lived during his early childhood, watching it develop from a camp into a town, with a local government, schools, taverns, churches, and newspapers.

“I strongly feel that my deepest motives and problems have centered around the Idea of the Community, although this idea has only come gradually to my clear consciousness,” he wrote as a professor at Harvard University, where his colleagues included William James and George Santayana, and his students included T.S. Eliot and W.E.B. Du Bois. “This was what I was intensely feeling, in the days when my sisters and I looked across the Sacramento Valley and wondered about the great world beyond our mountains.”

In 21st century California, Royce’s intense focus on local community feels very new again—speaking deeply to our obsessions with health, inequality, equity, and politics in the places where we live.

Royce’s 1886 history, California: A Study Of American Character, described Californians as careless, hasty, and blind to their social duties, but also “cheerful, energetic, courageous and teachable.”

We were too individualistic, he argued, and failed to understand the ways in which communities shape us. “Individuals without community are without substance, while communities without individuals are blind,” he wrote.

And he was deeply critical of how the Americans settling California discriminated against foreign immigrants, warning: “You cannot build up a prosperous and peaceful community so long as you pass laws to oppress and torment a large resident class of the community.”

But Royce was most distressed by the American Californians’ treatment of the Californios and the Native Americans (including, in his account, everything from land theft to lynchings), thus producing a “disaster to them” and a “disgrace and degradation to ourselves.” This criticism of the American conquest of California—“one of the least credible affairs in the highly discreditable Mexican War”—cost him friendships. But he published his book anyway, as a warning against America’s imperialist tendencies.

Around the time when American historians were discussing Manifest Destiny and the closing of the frontier, Royce was having none of it. “The American as conqueror … wants to persuade not only the world but himself that he is doing God service in a peaceable spirit, even when he violently takes what he has determined to get,” Royce wrote, adding his hope that “when our nation is another time about to serve the devil, it will do so with more frankness, and will deceive itself less by half-conscious cant.”

When California did advance, he wrote, it was because people worked together to build genuine communities. His philosophy was one of “loyalty” to community first—“My life means nothing, either theoretically or practically, unless I am a member of a community,” he wrote. He also said: “I never felt a feeling that I knew or could know to be unlike the feelings of other people. I never consciously thought, except after patterns that the world or my fellows set for me.”

And he criticized the heroic individualism he saw championed by the likes of Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and ultimately developed a metaphysics that conceived of reality as infinite community of minds. Such a community may sound something like Facebook, but Royce warned specifically against exploiting social connections to pursue great fortunes.

“We are all but dust, save as this social order gives us life. When we think it our instrument, our plaything, and make our private fortunes the one object, then this social order rapidly becomes vile to us; we call it sordid, degraded, corrupt, unspiritual, and ask how we may escape from it forever,” he wrote. “But if we turn again and serve the social order, and not merely ourselves, we soon find that what we are serving is simply our own highest spiritual destiny in bodily form.”

Royce died in 1916, but he is not totally dead. UCLA’s Royce Hall is named for him. There is an international society of Royce scholars, and Grass Valley has hosted a play in his honor. Cal State Bakersfield philosophy professor Jacquelyn Ann K. Kegley still teaches Royce in her contemporary philosophy course, and says, “when students read him, they become very intrigued about his communal approach.”

And Royce’s early judgments of California and its people still influence the skeptical way in which we see each other—and the sense that we might better address our problems if we could somehow come together.

“A general sense of social irresponsibility is, even today, the average Californian’s easiest failing,” he wrote in 1886. “In short, the Californian has too often come to love mere fullness of life and lack reverence for the relations of life.”

The post California, Don’t Let Your Greatest Thinker Die appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In May 1872, after suffering through another extremely cold, damp winter, a group of 150 middle-class neighbors from Indianapolis, Indiana, decided to leave home. The group included lawyers, doctors, journalists, and teachers, many of whom were looking for a more equable climate to alleviate ailments from asthma to tuberculosis. Led by Thomas Balch Elliott, a former Army surgeon and prominent businessman, the neighbors pooled their resources and hired Elliott’s brother-in-law Daniel Berry to go west and find land for a colony.

This is the story of that colony, and how it eventually became the small but world-famous city of Pasadena.

The Indianans’ search occurred within the post-Civil War wave of expansion. In the hopes of populating the West with white, small-scale farmers, the U.S. government, via the Homestead Act of 1862, allotted private 160-acre parcels to homesteaders in the West. By the 1870s this vision, reinforced by reports of lush landscapes and thriving new agricultural and urban economies, prompted many to move west in search of social mobility and wealth, purchasing lands that held histories they often knew nothing about.

In 1872, after considering several sites, the Indianans decided that Southern California would be the best place to build their own colony. They instructed Berry to seek a location with a good climate, fertile land near an abundant water source, and the opportunity to build small, individual homesteads.

By August 1873, Berry’s travels had taken him as far south as Cajon Ranch in San Diego and eastward to Rancho Santa Anita in the San Gabriel Valley. He was taken with the amount of tillable land and access to plentiful water, and excitedly wrote Elliott about the abundant fruit trees and expansive orange groves.

Despite his enthusiasm, Berry faced a financial obstacle. The colony had authorized him to pay no more than $5 per acre, but these beautiful and fruitful lands were priced at about four times that much. Undeterred, Berry sought to convince Elliott and the Indiana Colony to increase the budget. They refused, and Berry continued north into the San Fernando Valley, where the land was more reasonably priced but lacked a reliable water source.

In September 1873, Berry trekked east to Rancho San Pascual. The rancho land might have felt new to Berry, but it had a long, rich history. Known as Hahamog’na, this was the ancestral land of the Tongva people. By the time of the Spanish conquest of the region in 1771, the Tongva had a thriving society with its own culture, economy, labor practices, and principles of land use. Spanish rule brought with it a mission institution that imposed religious conversion and assimilation intended to eradicate indigenous culture. Franciscans at the San Gabriel Mission took possession of Tongva lands and sought to develop them according to Spanish ideals.

For over 60 years, missionaries controlled the thousands of acres that would eventually become Rancho San Pascual. Shortly after Mexican independence, the Mexican government issued the 1834 federal secularization order that emancipated mission Indians and allowed civilian settlers access to former mission lands. This ushered in California’s period of ranchos, but former San Gabriel Mission Indians were rarely allowed to access these lands. Throughout California’s Mexican period from 1821-1848, the region’s former mission lands—about 13,000 acres in all—were consolidated into Rancho San Pascual and managed by various owners who competed for control.

In 1840, California ranchero Manuel Garfias took over San Pascual but he would prove to be its last Mexican owner. After the Mexican-American War, new land laws followed in 1848. Garfias was dispossessed of his rancho, which passed into American hands. By the 1870s the new owner, Benjamin Davis Wilson, a former mayor of Los Angeles and state legislator, began selling parcels to interested parties with the help of his business partner John S. Griffin.

Daniel Berry, working for the Indianans, visited San Pascual in 1873. Mesmerized by its beauty, Berry wrote Elliott detailing the fruit orchards, richness of the soil, wonderful air quality, warm climate, and vast acreage. Over the next few months, Berry sought to convince Elliott that the colony had to increase its investment to $10 per acre. After receiving countless letters detailing everything from the region’s lifestyle to the health benefits of the climate, Elliott finally agreed to let Berry offer $15 per acre.

The colony was on its way to acquiring its new home when the financial Panic of 1873 struck, decimating members’ savings and causing many of the original would-be colonists to back out of the endeavor. Berry requested $1,000 for a deposit from the remaining members. To his disappointment, the colony only approved $500. Months passed, and the Indiana Colony collected only $200 of the promised $500.

Berry organized a group of Southern California investors, as well as some from as far away as Cincinnati and Boston, to provide the remaining capital. Together they established the San Gabriel Orange Grove Association (SGOGA) with an individual buy-in of $250. Berry’s group of investors raised a sum of $25,000 and then invited Elliott and the 15 remaining members of the Indiana Colony to join them in their venture. Elliott, not wanting to miss out on acquiring San Pascual, gathered $3,000 from the colonists to supplement the amount already collected. A series of convoluted transactions followed, and the Indiana Colony finally had its land.

During the winter of 1873-74, Elliott and the 15 colonists migrated to their new home. On January 27, 1874, the colony was formally established. Land allotments were distributed, and colonists began cultivating wheat and barley, at first without success. But the colonists pressed on, expanding into grapes and citrus trees. Supported by wealthier members, the Indiana Colony moved towards bringing a steady water supply into their community, building a three-mile pipeline by May 1874.

Before the end of 1874, the colony had grown by some dozen families and added a tract of about 2,500 acres to its eastern boundary, but colonists were concerned that the place still did not have a formal name. In his letters to Elliott, Berry often referred to the settlement as the Indiana Colony or Muscat. The former referenced the colonists’ origins and the latter the Muscat grapes that grew in the region. Although he used Muscat, Berry thought the word sounded too much like muskrat and encouraged Elliott to find a name that could convey the land’s beauty.

After the consideration of various names, they chose Pasadena.

There are several stories of the name’s origin. Some contend that one of the colony’s founders, Calvin Fletcher, was said to have inquired from local historian Hiram Reid if there was a Spanish name that captured the ranch’s landscape. Reid related to Fletcher a conversation in which former rancho owner Manuel Garfias referred to the ranch as la llave del rancho, the key to the valley, because of where the rancho sat in relation to the larger acreage—at the top of the valley, at its very crown. Fletcher who was unable to pronounce the phrase, simply extrapolated its meaning and brought that to Elliott for consideration.

The second story, which is the one more accepted as part of local folklore, states that Elliott asked a friend who had formerly been a missionary among the midwestern Ojibwe (then called Chippewa), to translate the Spanish phrase la llave del rancho into an “Indian word of pleasant sound” that would mean “the key to the ranch.” With an element of imperialist nostalgia for a place they themselves had transformed, the word they settled on was Pasadena. (The town is still known as the Crown City, the “crown” of the San Gabriel Valley.)

During the 1870s, citrus groves, grape vineyards, and homesteads replaced the cattle grazing lands of the Mexican rancho period. The bustling community boasted a church, a general store, school, mail service, and a stagecoach route. By the 1880s, Pasadena was one of California’s greatest fruit-growing districts. On March 24, 1880, the community celebrated its first citrus festival to highlight its thriving agricultural production. As the settlers’ crops grew, Pasadena’s reputation grew as well. The completion of the Los Angeles and San Gabriel Valley Railroad in 1885 accelerated delivery of oranges to other parts of the region and the country. Aside from expanding trade routes, the railroad ushered in a momentous land boom that drew speculators and would-be settlers into the area, changing Pasadena forever.

An influx of visitors during the mid-1880s prompted the growth of a tourist industry catering to this affluent clientele. Soon resort-style lodgings such as Raymond Hotel, with an estimated cost of $200,000, provided a destination for the wealthy visitors who wintered in Pasadena. Many residents invested their money into tourist-oriented businesses such as restaurants, banks, and shops. The community was incorporated as the City of Pasadena in February 1887 during this period of unprecedented growth.

Eventually, the land boom collapsed. Stalled subdivisions, vacant storefronts, and dry and abandoned groves were the physical markers of the economic bust. Not to be defeated, Pasadena’s residents moved to rebuild their homesteads, often citing the Indiana Colony’s goal of creating a stable community of small-scale farmers.

The early years of the 1890s brought another land boom. Once again, the economy exploded with the capital of wealthy easterners who sought land for their winter homes. This time residents proceeded more cautiously, choosing to exploit the city’s reputation for majestic, Edenic landscapes, succulent fruits, and beautiful blooming roses in the middle of the winter.

In January 1891 Pasadena held its first Tournament of Roses Parade, complete with flower-decorated horse-drawn floats, ostrich races, and displays of oranges and other fruits. This parade would become an annual New Year’s tradition, famous across the United States, drawing participants and spectators from around the world. The event, and the moment of its inception, defined Pasadena through its climate, natural beauty, and especially its pioneer history, harkening back to the Indiana Colony that was built on Tongva land, former mission territory, and a Mexican rancho.

The post Pasadena, California, Was Born in Indiana During the Cold, Damp Winter of 1872 appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I was a volunteer in that campaign, and got to see firsthand how the campaign, and its aftermath, would influence Starr’s career—and by extension Californians’ understanding of themselves.

Starr came to the 1984 race with a decade-long involvement in city government and journalism. He was born in San Francisco and spent part of his early life in a Catholic orphanage in Ukiah, after his parents divorced and his mother had a nervous breakdown. He served in the U.S. Army after graduating from the University of San Francisco in 1962, and then received a doctorate in American literature from Harvard in 1969. He became an aide to San Francisco Mayor Joseph Alioto in 1973, and over the next 10 years his career advanced rapidly, first as the appointed city librarian, and later as a popular columnist with the San Francisco Examiner, and university faculty member. The initial volume of his now famous multi-volume history of California, Americans and the California Dream, 1850-1915, was published in 1973, followed by his only novel, Land’s End, in 1979.

In 1983, he was approached by people active in San Francisco’s business community, Catholic community, and neighborhood organizations to run for supervisor. It was not a tough sell. As his wife Sheila has noted, “He had thought about running for office for some time, and all that he could accomplish as an elected official.” 

He got off to a fast start. Within a few months he had received the endorsements of former mayors Alioto and George Christopher, and state legislative leaders Leo McCarthy and Lou Papan, and had raised $40,000. On January 4, 1984 Examiner columnist Bruce Pettit published a positive column, “Why Starr Seeks S.F. seat,” in which Starr’s role as a centrist was emphasized. “People do not want to live in a city where there is constant conflict,” Starr was quoted as saying. “Elected officials have the duty to harmonize, but lately they have pitted left against right, the neighborhoods against downtown, and labor against management.”

Starr also opposed the proposal to make the salary for Supervisors, then part-time at $23,924, into a full-time position and stated: “There should be no full-time living out of what should be a deed of public service.”

The official campaign kickoff was held at the Gift Center Pavilion at 8th and Brannan streets on March 15, 1984 before an overflow crowd of more than 250 people paying $150 per ticket. Starr followed this up with an immersion into the retail politics of the city, enthusiastically passing out leaflets on street corners and at Muni bus stops, attending the nightly bingo games, and appearing at neighborhood “meet and greets” hosted in the homes of supporters. Readers of the Jewish Bulletin were greeted by an ad at the Passover holiday, “Passover Greetings from Kevin Starr,” in which Kevin was identified as an “Honorary member of Congregation Magain David Sephardim,” a synagogue in the Richmond district.

But as the campaign progressed into the summer, it became clear the city was becoming a different place from the familiar one that Starr grew up in, and even from the San Francisco to which he had returned from academia in 1973. Identity politics had long been part of the civic culture of San Francisco, as it was in other major cities. But by 1984, identity politics had come to assume a central role.

More than 20 different Democratic clubs that were largely based on ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation had come into existence. There were good reasons for this. The city’s gay and lesbian community had been shut out of most elected and appointed offices for years (Harvey Milk, the first openly gay elected official had only been elected in 1978). The first Asian American Supervisor, Gordon Lau, had won office only in 1977. In this new political universe, Starr had no natural politically active base. Only the Wallenberg Jewish Democratic Club, among the major clubs, endorsed his candidacy. 

The power of identity politics was just one piece of a shifting political culture with which Starr had to contend. Despite the city’s influential bohemia, local politics previously had been rooted in a middle class, centrist orientation. The emerging political culture in 1984 was one increasingly unmoored from the middle class or taxpayers or private businesses.  No one embraced this new culture more cleverly than a young assemblyman, Art Agnos. With his eyes on higher office, Agnos went around the city denouncing amorphous “downtown interests,” or “the wealthy,” and promising new government programs and spending for each group.

Throughout his campaign, Starr was both mystified and angered by what he considered to be a pandering attempt to divide the city by race, gender, or economic status. When the various Democratic clubs sent out questionnaires asking for support for their advocacy or projects, campaign volunteers would urge Starr to play ball. But Starr always refused to tell these groups what they wanted to hear. He saw San Francisco through the lens of a “civic culture” by which race, gender, and economic status were secondary to San Francisco as a greater entity.

In the fall, after the Democratic Club endorsement season, Starr’s campaign seemed to regain its balance due to two dynamics: endorsements from the city’s two largest newspapers, and an active street presence from volunteers who had come to the campaign since Starr announced. On election day, Starr and his advisors thought he had a good chance to finish in the top six; six of the 11 Supervisor seats were up for election in 1984. But it was not to be. By the time most of the votes were counted the following morning, Starr had finished in seventh place, just out of the running. He would receive more than 90,000 votes, but fell well behind the sixth-place finisher, Carole Ruth Silver who had more than 125,000 votes.

In a letter to supporters following the election, Starr wrote, “I worked hard, raised sufficient funds, attracted a large group of committed volunteers … The voters, however, had other ideas.” 

Starr did not immediately withdraw from local politics and government. In 1989 he became active in a campaign to oppose a new city-funded ballpark, being pushed by Agnos, who in 1987 was elected mayor. Starr believed that city funds should not be used for sports facilities, and authored a pamphlet arguing that such funds could be put to better uses. On November 6, 1989, the day before the election (which saw the ballpark proposal defeated), Agnos and his campaign operatives struck back. The San Francisco Chronicle carried a front-page story in which Starr was accused of taking funds from a Sacramento developer for the pamphlet, without proper disclosure. The District Attorney became involved. The grand jury found no basis for indictment. But the incident ended Starr’s local political participation.

It also launched Starr into a different career, no longer tied to San Francisco. In 1989, he became Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Southern California (USC). He and his wife Sheila kept their apartment in San Francisco, but increasingly spent time in Los Angeles, and later in Sacramento, when Starr was appointed California State Librarian in 1994.

Starr served as State Librarian through 2004. For a decade in this position he traveled throughout the state lecturing and holding town meetings at public libraries. He would go to small branch libraries in Shasta, Merced, Oceanside, and Glendale. At each he would greet patrons, extol the role of the public library in a democracy, and urge local investment and support for library upkeep and development. He found a political role—in meeting Californians, inspiring them, achieving important library improvement projects—initially denied him in San Francisco. In the end, he accomplished far more in this role than if he had been elected Supervisor in 1984.

The post Why California’s Greatest Historian Couldn’t Get Elected in San Francisco appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This month, as California celebrates Admission Day—a legal holiday in honor of our officially joining the United States on September 9, 1850—we should give ourselves an overdue present:

A founding story of our statehood starring someone we can be proud of, both as Californians and Americans.

Even after 166 uneasy years in the American empire, the state of California doesn’t have a pithy origin story it can share with other states in an elevator. Like too much else in California, the narrative of our statehood is sprawling and complicated; it’s usually vaguely explained as a product of the Mexican-American War and the Gold Rush and the collisions of people that ensued from those two events. That narrative leaves us too much on the periphery of the country, and of U.S. history. And it also leaves us without a hero who can tie the story of our statehood together; the closest thing we have is John C. Fremont, a U.S. senator and the 1856 Republican nominee for president, whose main talents were for insubordination and losing money.

Fortunately, more recent scholarship suggests that California could cut through its obscure early history in a Shermanesque way. Yes, that’s right: William Tecumseh Sherman—the Civil War general best known for his decisive march through the South (and for refusing to run for president after the war despite his popularity)—offers Californians a compelling but overlooked protagonist in the tale of becoming a state, one who puts us closer to the center of American history.

Unfortunately, Sherman’s military exploits have long overshadowed his earlier time in California—which was formative both for the state and for the man himself. Fortunately, a magisterial new biography from Auburn historian James Lee McDonough shows just how entwined Sherman was with California’s statehood prospects. In the process, McDonough demonstrates that California’s statehood should not be seen as a singular event but rather as part of the difficult and bloody rebirthing of the United States in the mid-19th century.

As a Californian, Sherman would serve again and again as a stabilizing figure during great volatility—war, the Gold Rush, and financial and political crises.

Originally from Ohio, Sherman arrived in California as a soldier in January 1847. He thought he would achieve military glory in the Mexican-American War, but, stationed in Monterey, he never saw action. Frustrated, Sherman threw himself into the civic life of the state. He met almost everyone of note, visited missions, unsuccessfully hunted grizzly bears, patronized the local arts, opened a store in Coloma (to supplement his meager Army wages), and spent as much time with the state’s women as possible.

“Some of them are quite pretty, amiable, and have good minds which, if cultivated, would make them above the average,” he wrote, in McDonough’s account.

Throughout his initial three-year stint in California, Sherman traveled widely. He was an early surveyor of the Sierra Nevada, and traveled by boat and on horseback between Northern California and Los Angeles, (where, he wrote, “the climate was so moderate that oranges, figs, pomegranates, etc. were generally to be found in every yard or inclosure.”). During the Gold Rush, he spent considerable time among the miners, reporting to the federal government on the gold and the people who were seeking it, tracking down soldiers who deserted to the fields, and getting to know John Sutter, who unsuccessfully sought the U.S. Army’s help in keeping gold prospectors from overrunning his lands.

Of the Gold Rush years, McDonough writes, “The experience taught him a fundamental lesson about life itself, as he viewed deplorable changes wrought in the lives and values of men and women, many of whom quickly succumbed to raw, irrational, even barbaric impulses of greed.”

In 1849, Sherman was the U.S. military’s representative at the California convention, which produced the state’s first constitution. In 1850, California entered the Union as a free state, part of a famous compromise in the long run-up to the Civil War. That same year, Sherman went east to marry his Ohio sweetheart. By 1853, he had resigned from the Army and was back in San Francisco to establish a bank for the firm of Lucas, Turner & Co. There he became a significant figure in the growth and travails of California’s first great city, overseeing the construction of the bank at the corner of Montgomery and Jackson Streets, one of the rare buildings to later survive the great 1906 earthquake.

Sherman’s conservative management of his growing bank made him an outlier in the wildly unregulated and corrupt financial sector of 1850s San Francisco. McDonough recounts—with new details—how Sherman’s care forestalled banking panic; in 1855, even as Wells Fargo and other banks closed during a bank run, Sherman’s bank stayed open and calmed the city.

He did this all at personal cost. San Francisco was so expensive (some things don’t change) that even a banker couldn’t afford to live there; he went deeply into debt. His wife, not without reason, considered the city “thoroughly wicked” and begged him to leave. He suffered from terrible asthma that was aggravated by San Francisco’s wet weather. And he was bitterly criticized by the press in 1856 when he opposed the Committee of Vigilance that had lawlessly seized control of the city, banished some enemies, and hanged others.

Sherman also formed a low opinion of the state’s democratically elected politicians. (Sherman preferred the company of women and his Army buddies). He particularly disdained Fremont; Sherman knew him through his California years as a military commander (who had declared himself military governor of California, only to be deposed), as a politician, and as a troubled businessman, and correctly judged him to be untrustworthy and self-destructive in all contexts.

“I have seen Fremont several times since 1847,” he wrote as Fremont ran for president in 1856, “and regard him as a small man out of whom to make a president. If he is qualified, anybody may aspire to that office.”

After another financial panic, Sherman would have to shut down his bank in 1858, though he was scrupulous, selling his own property so that depositors could be made whole. Having invested eight years and most of his money in California, he left the state that summer, but often would confess a desire to return (even in letters written at the height of the Civil War).

“If I had no family I would stay in California all my life,” he wrote in one letter. Alas, he would come back only as a visitor.

Sherman’s view of California, formed in that founding period from 1847 to 1858, still resonates. He loved the natural beauty of the place and the adventurous culture of its people. But he was distressed by its volatility, its boom-and-bust economy, and he learned to distrust its democratic spirit, since that could curdle so quickly into mob rule.

“Sherman’s lack of patience with democratic republican government… emerged full blown during the Californian years,” writes McDonough, adding: “He beheld a society dramatically transformed, in an amazingly short period of time. It was not a pretty sight.”

California, McDonough shows, helped convince Sherman that humans needed a strong hand—and that authorities should deal forcefully with those who might step out of line. It would of course be the South that would feel the full force of Sherman’s conclusion. And after the war, Sherman would often argue for order and calm in the face of chaos (as after President Garfield’s 1881 assassination) by pointing to the panic, vigilantism, and greed he witnessed in the Golden State.

Sherman became Sherman in California. And California became the state of California in his years there. After 166 years, isn’t it time we adopted a founding narrative that is more Shermanesque?

The post How William T. Sherman Helped Create California appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.