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A state of the western United States on the Pacific Ocean. It was admitted as the 31st state in 1850. The area was colonized by the Spanish and formally ceded to the United States by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848). California is often called the Golden State because of its sunny climate and the discovery of gold during its pioneering days. Sacramento is the capital and Los Angeles the largest city. Population: 36,600,000.
Californian Cal'i·for'nian adj. & n.
For more information on California, visit Britannica.com.
California, whose name derives from a fifteenth-century Spanish romance, lies along the Pacific Coast of the United States. Formidable natural barriers, including the Sierra Nevada and the Cascade Mountains to the east and the north and the Sonoran Desert to the south and southeast, isolate it from the rest of the continent. Streams plunging down from the mountains form the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers in the Great Central Valley, while coastal ranges divide the littoral into isolated plains, valleys, and marine terraces. The state contains a wide variety of ecologies, from alpine meadows to deserts, often within a few miles of each other. San Francisco Bay, near the center of the state, is the finest natural harbor in the eastern Pacific.
The first known people came to California thousands of years ago, filtering down from the north in small bands. In the varied geography, especially the many valleys tucked into the creases of the coastal mountains, these early immigrants evolved a mosaic of cultures, like the Chumash of the southern coast, with their oceangoing canoes and sophisticated trading network, and the Pomo, north of San Francisco Bay, who made the beads widely used as money throughout the larger community.
Spanish California
Spain claimed California as part of Columbus's discovery, but the extraordinary hardships of the first few voyages along the coast discouraged further exploration until Vitus Bering sailed into the northern Pacific in 1741 to chart the region for the czar of Russia. Alarmed, the viceroy in Mexico City authorized a systematic attempt to establish control of California. In 1769, a band of Franciscan monks under Fray Junipero Serra and a hundred-odd soldiers commanded by Gaspar de Portola traveled up the peninsula of Baja California to San Diego with two hundred cattle. From there de Portola explored north, found San Francisco Bay, and established the presidio at Monterey. Spanish California became a reality.
Spanish policy was to Christianize and civilize the Native peoples they found. To do this, Serra and his followers built a string of missions, like great semifeudal farms, all along what came to be called El Camino Real and forced the Indians into their confines. Ultimately, twenty-one missions stretched from San Diego to Sonoma. The missions failed in their purpose. Enslaved and stripped of their cultures, the Native people died by the thousands of disease, mistreatment, and despair. From an estimated 600,000 before the Spanish came, by 1846 their population dropped to around 300,000.
The soldiers who came north to guard the province had no place in the missions, and the friars thought them a bad influence anyway. Soldiers built the first town, San Jose, in 1777, and four years later, twenty-two families of mixed African, Indian, and Spanish blood founded the city of Los Angeles. The settlers, who called themselves Californios, planted orange trees and grapevines, and their cattle multiplied.
In 1821, Mexico declared its independence from Spain, dooming the mission system. By 1836, all the missions were secularized. The land was to be divided up among the Natives attached to the missions but instead fell into the hands of soldiers and adventurers. The new Mexican government also began granting large tracts of land for ranches. In 1830, California had fifty ranches, but by 1840 it had more than one thousand. Power gravitated inevitably to the land holders. Mexico City installed governors in Monterey, but the Californio dons rebelled against anybody who tried to control them.
When the Swiss settler Johann Sutter arrived in 1839, the government in Monterey, believing the land was worthless desert and hoping that Sutter would form a barrier between their holdings and greedy interlopers, gave him a huge grant of land in the Sacramento Valley. But in 1842, when a band of nineteen American immigrants came over the Sierras, Sutter welcomed them to his settlement and gave them land, tools, and encouragement. John Charles Frémont, a U.S. Army mapmaker, on his first trip to California also relied on Sutter's help. Frémont's book about his expedition fired intense interest in the United States, and within the next two years, hundreds of settlers crossed the Sierras into California. Many more came by ship around Cape Horn. By 1846, Americans outnumbered the Californios in the north.
The U.S. government itself had long coveted California. In 1829, President Andrew Jackson tried to buy it. When Mexico indignantly declined, American interest turned toward taking it by force. The argument with Mexico over Texas gave the United States the chance. In May 1846, U.S. forces invaded Mexico. On 7 July 1846, Commodore John Drake Sloat of the U.S. Navy seized Monterey, and Frémont raised the American flag at Sonoma and Sacramento. The Spanish period was over; California had become part of the United States.
The Americans Take Over
Signed on 20 May 1848, the Treaty of Guadeloupe Hidalgo officially transferred the northern third of Mexico to the United States for $15 million. Because of the gold rush, California now had a population sufficient to become a state, but the U.S. Congress was unwilling even to consider admitting it to the Union for fear of upsetting the balance between slave and free states. In this limbo a series of military governors squabbled over jurisdictions. Mexican institutions like the alcalde, or chief city administrator, remained the basic civil authorities.
Yet the American settlers demanded a functioning government. The gold rush, which began in 1848 and accelerated through 1849, made the need for a formal structure all the more pressing. When the U.S. Congress adjourned for a second time without dealing with the status of California, the military governor called for a general convention to write a constitution. On 1 September 1849, a diverse group of men, including Californios like Mariano Guadeloupe Vallejo, longtime settlers like Sutter, and newcomers like William Gwin, met in Monterey. The convention decided almost unanimously to ban slavery in California, not for moral reasons but for practical reasons: free labor could not compete with slaves. After some argument, the convention drew a line along the eastern foot of the Sierra Nevada as the state's boundary. Most important, the convention provided for the election of a governor and a state legislature in the same statewide polling that ratified the constitution itself on 13 November 1849. On 22 April 1850, the first California legislature elected two U.S. senators, gave them a copy of the constitution, and sent them to Washington, D.C., to demand recognition of California as a state.
Presented with this fait accompli, Congress tilted much in favor of California, but the issue of slavery still lay unresolved. Finally, Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky cobbled together the Compromise of 1850, a law that gave everybody something, and California entered the Union on 9 September 1850.
The state now needed a capital. Monterey, San Francisco, and San Jose all competed for the honor. General Vallejo offered to build a new capital on San Francisco Bay and donated a generous piece of his property for it, but the governor impetuously moved the state offices there long before the site was ready. In 1854, citizens from Sacramento lured the legislature north and showed the politicians such a good time that Sacramento became the capital of California.
After the Gold Rush
Before the discovery of gold, hardly fifteen thousand non-Indians inhabited California. By 1850, 100,000 newcomers had flooded in, most from the eastern United States, and the 1860 census counted 360,000 Californians. These people brought with them their prejudices and their politics, which often amounted to gang warfare. In San Francisco, Sam Brannan, who had become the world's first millionaire by selling shovels and shirts to the miners, organized a vigilante committee to deal with rowdy street thugs. This committee reappeared in 1851, and in 1856 it seized power in the city and held it for months, trying and hanging men at will and purging the city of the committee's enemies.
A Democratic politician, David Broderick, a brash Irish immigrant with a genius for political organization, dominated the early years of California politics and represented the state in the U.S. Senate. In Washington, his flamboyant antislavery speeches alienated the national Democratic leadership, and he was on the verge of being run out of the party when he was killed in a duel in 1856. At Broderick's death, his followers bolted the Democrats and joined the young Republican Party, sweeping Abraham Lincoln to victory in 1860 and electing Leland Stanford to the governorship. Republicans dominated state politics for decades.
San Francisco was California's first great city, growing during the gold rush from a tiny collection of shacks and a few hundred people to a thriving metropolis of fifty thousand people. The enormous wealth that poured through the city during those years raised mansions and splendid hotels and supported a bonanza culture. Writers like Bret Harte and Mark Twain got their starts in this expansive atmosphere; theater, which captivated the miners, lured international stars like Lola Montez and impresarios like David Belasco. By 1855, the gold rush was fading. Californians turned to the exploitation of other resources, farming, ranching, whaling, and manufacturing. In 1859, the discovery of the Comstock Lode in the eastern Sierra Nevada opened up another boom.
The state's most pressing need was better communication with the rest of the country, but, deeply divided over slavery, Congress could not agree on a route for a transcontinental railroad. With the outbreak of the Civil War, the slavery obstacle was removed. In 1862, Congress passed a railroad bill, and in 1863 the Central Pacific began building east from Sacramento.
The Era of the Southern Pacific
In 1869, the Central Pacific Railroad, building eastward, met the Union Pacific, building westward, at Promontory Point, Utah. The cross-country trek that had once required six grueling months now took three days. The opening of the railroad and the end of the Civil War accelerated the pace of economic and social change in California. A steady flood of newcomers swept away the old system of ranches based on Spanish grants. A land commission was set up to verify existing deeds, but confusion and corruption kept many titles unconfirmed for decades. Squatters overwhelmed Mexican-era land owners like Sutter and Vallejo. The terrible drought of the 1860s finished off the old-timers in the south, where cattle died by the thousands.
The panic of 1873 brought on a depression with steep unemployment and a yawning gap between the haves and the have-nots. A laborer might earn $2 a week, while Leland Stanford, a senator and railroad boss, spent a million dollars in a single year to build his San Francisco mansion. Yet as the railroad was vital to the growing country, labor was vital to the railroad. In 1877, railroad workers gave the country a taste of what they could do in the first national strike, which loosed a wave of violence on the country. In San Francisco the uprising took the form of anti-Chinese riots, finally put down by a recurrence of the vigilante committee of the 1850s, which raised a private army, armed it with pick handles, and battled rioters in the streets.
But labor had shown its strength. In San Francisco its chief spokesman was Denis Kearney, a fiery Irishman who in 1877 formed the Workingmen's Party, which demanded an eight-hour day, Chinese exclusion from California, restraints on the Southern Pacific Railroad, and bank reform. The sudden vigorous growth of the Workingmen's Party gave Kearney and his followers great clout in the 1878 convention, called to revise the state's out-grown 1849 constitution.
The new constitution was not a success, especially because it failed to restrain the Southern Pacific Railroad. The Southern Pacific controlled the legislature and many newspapers. Where it chose to build, new towns sprang up, and towns it by passed died off. The whole economy of California passed along the iron rails, and the Southern Pacific took a cut of everything. The railroad was bringing steadily more people into the state. The last Mexican-era ranchos were sold off, and whole towns were built on them, including Pasadena, which arose on the old Rancho San Pascual in 1877. This was a peak year for immigration, because the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad had finally built into Los Angeles, giving the Southern Pacific some competition. The resulting fare war reduced the ticket price to California to as low as $1, and 200,000 people moved into the state.
Immigration from Asia was a perennial political issue. Brought to California in droves to build the railroad, the Chinese were the target of savage racism from the white majority and endless efforts to exclude them. Later, the Japanese drew the same attacks. Meanwhile, the original people of California suffered near extinction. White newcomers drove them from their lands, enslaved them, and hunted them like animals. The federal government proposed a plan to swap the Indians' ancestral lands for extensive reservations and support. The tribes agreed, but Congress never accepted the treaty. The government took the lands but supplied neither reservations nor help. Perhaps 300,000 Native Americans lived in California in 1850, but by 1900, only 15,000 remained.
Progressivism
The entrenched interests of the railroad sparked widespread if fragmented opposition. Writers like Henry George, in Progress and Poverty (1880), and Frank Norris, in The Octopus (1901), laid bare the fundamental injustices of the economy. Labor organizers took the struggle more directly to the bosses. Activists, facing the brute power of an establishment that routinely used force against them, sometimes resorted to violence. In 1910, a bomb destroyed the Los Angeles Times Building, and twenty people died. The paper had opposed union organizing. In 1905, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) began to organize part-time and migrant workers in California, especially farm workers. This struggle climaxed in the Wheatland riot of 2 August 1913, in which several workers, the local sheriff, and the district attorney were killed. The National Guard stopped the riot, and the IWW was driven out of the Sacramento Valley. In 1919, the legislature passed the Criminal Syndicalism Law. Syndicalism was an IWW watchword, and the law basically attacked ideas. Protesting this law, the writer and politician Upton Sinclair contrived to be arrested for reading the U.S. Constitution out loud in public.
Nonetheless, the government of corruption and bossism was under serious assault. The great San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906 only postponed the graft prosecution of the mayor and the city's behind-the-scenes boss. Grassroots progressives in Los Angeles helped build momentum for a statewide movement that swept the Progressive Republican Hiram Johnson to the governorship in 1910. In 1911, Johnson and other progressives passed a legislative agenda that destroyed the political power of the Southern Pacific and reformed the government, giving the voters the referendum, recall, and proposition and providing for direct primary election of senators with an allowance for cross-filing, by which a candidate could run in any or all party primaries. Cross-filing substantially weakened both parties but generally favored the better organized Republicans, who remained in control of the state government.
The Rise of the South
In 1914, the opening of the Panama Canal and the completion of the harbor at San Pedro made Los Angeles the most important port on the Pacific Coast. The southland was booming. Besides its wealth of orange groves and other agriculture, southern California now enjoyed a boffo movie industry, and vast quantities of oil, the new gold, lay just underfoot. The movie business took hold in southern California because the climate let filmmakers shoot pictures all year round. In 1914, seventy-three different local companies were making movies, while World War I destroyed the film business in Europe. The war stimulated California's whole economy, demanding, among other goods, cotton for uniforms, processed food, and minerals for the tools of war. Oil strikes in Huntington Beach and Signal Hill in the early 1920s brought in another bonanza.
All these industries and the people who rushed in to work in them required water. Sprawling Los Angeles, with an unquenchable thirst for water, appropriated the Owens River in the eastern Sierra in 1913. In 1936, when the Hoover Dam was finished, the city began sucking water from the Colorado River and in the 1960s from the Feather River of northern California. San Francisco, also growing, got its water by drowning the Hetch Hetchy Valley despite the efforts of John Muir, the eccentric, charismatic naturalist who founded the Sierra Club.
The boom of the Roaring Twenties collapsed in the Great Depression of the 1930s. Thousands of poor people, many from the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma and Arkansas, drifted into California, drawn by the gentle climate and the chimera of work. John Steinbeck's Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939) described the Okies' desperation and showed a California simmering with discontent. At the same time, utopian dreams sprouted everywhere. People seemed ready to try anything to improve their lives, and they had a passion for novelty. Spiritual and dietary fads abounded, and the yawning gap between the wealth of some and the hopeless poverty of so many spawned a steady flow of social schemes. Among others, Sinclair and the physician Francis E. Townsend proposed elaborate social welfare plans, which pre-figured social security.
More significant was the return of a vigorous labor movement, particularly in San Francisco's maritime industry. The organizing of Andrew Furuseth and then Harry Bridges, who built the International Longshoreman's Association, led to the great strike of 1934, which stopped work on waterfronts from San Diego to Seattle, Washington, for ninety days. Even in open-shop Los Angeles, workers were joining unions, and their numbers made them powerful. As part of his New Deal for bringing back prosperity, President Franklin Roosevelt supported collective bargaining under the aegis of federal agencies like the National Labor Relations Board, and instead of radical outsiders, labor leaders became partners in the national enterprise.
World War II
In 1891, Japanese immigration to California began to soar, and the racist exclusionary policies already directed against the Chinese turned on this new target. In 1924, the federal Immigration Act excluded Japanese immigration. The ongoing deterioration of Japanese-American relations ultimately led to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 and U.S. entry into World War II. In 1942, thousands of Japanese American Californians, most of them U.S. citizens, were forced into concentration camps.
The war itself brought California out of the depression. Defense industries surged, including shipbuilding, chemicals, and the new aircraft industry. California had been a center of airplane building since the early start of the industry. Lockheed and Douglas Aircraft plants had been building warplanes for other nations as well as for the United States since the beginning of the war in Europe, and with U.S. entry into the conflict, production surged. Douglas Aircraft alone built twenty thousand planes during the war.
The state's population continued its relentless growth. Thousands came to California to work in the defense industries, and thousands more passed through the great naval base in San Diego, the army depot at Fort Ord, and the marine facility at Camp Pendleton. In April 1945, the United Nations was founded in San Francisco. World War II brought California from the back porch of America into the center of the postwar order.
Modern California
In 1940 the population of California was 6,907,387; in 1950 it was 10,586,223; and in 2000 it was 33,871,648. In part this growth was due to a nationwide shift from the Northeast to the so-called Sunbelt, but also, especially after 1964, when the new federal Immigration Law passed, immigrants from Asia and South America flooded into California.
This extraordinary growth brought formidable problems and unique opportunities. The economy diversified and multiplied until by 2000 California's economy was ranked as the fifth largest in the world. Growth also meant that pollution problems reached a crisis stage, and the diversity of the population—by 2000 no one ethnic group was in the majority—strained the capacity of the political system to develop consensus. Yet the era began with one of the most popular governors in California history, Earl Warren, so well-liked that he secured both the Republican and the Democratic nominations for governor in 1946 and received 92 percent of the votes cast. He gained an unprecedented third term in 1950. In 1952, President Dwight Eisenhower appointed him chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, and Warren's opinions and judgments helped liberalize politics and made the African American struggle for social justice a mainstream issue.
California emerged from World War II with a huge production capacity and a growing labor force. The aircraft industry that had contributed so much to the war effort now turned to the production of jet planes, missiles, satellites, and spacecraft. Industrial and housing construction boomed, and agriculture continued as the ground of the state's wealth, producing more than one hundred cash crops. In 1955, Disneyland, the first great theme park, opened, reaffirming California's corner on the fantasy industry.
The opening of the Golden Gate Bridge in 1939 had signaled the state's increasing dependence on automobiles, fueled by an abundant supply of gas and oil and by Californians' love of flexibility and freedom. Highway projects spun ribbons of concrete around the major urban areas and out into the countryside. Los Angeles grew more rapidly than any other area, increasing its population by 49.8 percent between 1940 and 1950. Above it, the air thickened into a brown soup of exhaust fumes.
Population growth changed politics as well. In 1958, after decades of Republican control, the Democrat Edmund Brown Sr. took advantage of his opponents' divisions and, in a vigorous door-to-door campaign, won the governorship. California's political spectrum included extremes at either end. On the right, the John Birch Society incorporated all the paranoia of the postwar anticommunist crusade, and on the left, the free speech movement at the University of California demonstrated many young people's anarchistic defiance of authority. Throughout the rest of the century, political consensus and civility itself were often out of reach.
In 1962, Governor Brown campaigned for reelection against Richard M. Nixon, who, two years before had lost the U.S. presidency to John F. Kennedy. Brown won, sending Nixon into what seemed a political grave. But California's needs and priorities were changing, and steadily growing diversity meant sizable blocs developed behind a variety of conflicting philosophies. No politician could accommodate them all, and many, like Nixon, chose to exploit those divisions.
On 11 August 1965, the discontent of the poor African American community of Watts in Los Angeles exploded in one of the worst riots in U.S. history. Thirty-four people were killed, hundreds were wounded, and $200 million in property was destroyed. Watts inaugurated years of racial violence. An indirect casualty was Governor Brown, who lost the 1966 gubernatorial race to the former actor Ronald Reagan. Reagan came into office announcing his intentions to restore order, to trim the budget, to lower taxes, and to reduce welfare. In actuality, he more than doubled the budget, raised taxes, and greatly increased the number of people on the dole. Nonetheless, Reagan's personal charm and optimism made him irresistible to voters suffering a steady bombardment of evil news.
In 1965, the dissatisfaction of rebellious youth found a cause in the escalating war in Vietnam. Demonstrations featuring the burning of draft cards and the American flag spread from campuses to the streets. By 1968, it seemed the country was collapsing into civil war, and the country was obviously losing in Vietnam. Also in 1968, U.S. voters elected Nixon to the presidency, but his flagrant abuse of power led to his forced resignation in 1974.
Bruised and self-doubting, California and the rest of the nation limped into a post–Vietnam War economic and political gloom. In 1974, Edmund G. Brown Jr. was elected governor of California. Brown, whose frugal lifestyle charmed those tired of Reagan's grandiosity, talked of an era of limits, supported solar and wind power, and appointed a woman as chief justice of the state supreme court. At first, like Reagan, Brown enjoyed a steadily rising population and government revenues in the black. Then, in 1975, Proposition 13 and an accelerating recession derailed the state economy. Proposition 13, which rolled back and restricted property taxes, was a rebellion by middle-class home-owning Californians against apparently limitless state spending. The proposition was one of the tools Hiram Johnson had added to the California constitution in 1911. Although long underused, it has become a favorite tool of special interest groups, who have placed hundreds of propositions on state ballots calling for everything from exclusion of homosexuals from the teaching profession to demands that the government purchase redwood forests and legalize marijuana. Many propositions have been overturned in the courts, yet the proposition is uniquely effective in bringing popular will to bear on policy. Beginning in the 1970s, propositions helped make environmentalism a central issue in state politics.
George Deukmejian, a Republican, became governor in 1982. A former state attorney general, Deukmejian appointed more than one thousand judges and a majority of the members of the state supreme court. Continuing economic problems dogged the state. Revenues shrank, and unemployment rose. The Republican Pete Wilson, elected governor in 1990, faced this sluggish economy and an ongoing budget crisis. One year the state ran for sixty-one days without a budget, and state workers received vouchers instead of paychecks.
In 1992, Los Angeles erupted in another race riot. The sensational media circus of the O. J. Simpson murder trial in 1995 exacerbated racial tensions further, and Wilson's efforts to restrict immigration, especially the illegal immigration through California's porous border with Mexico, aroused the wrath of liberals and Latinos.
Fortunately, the state's economy was climbing out of the prolonged stagnation of the 1980s. Once again California was reinventing itself. Shortly after World War II, Stanford University had leased some of its endowment lands to high-technology companies, and by the 1990s, the Silicon Valley, so-called for the substance used in computer chips, was leading the explosively expanding computer and Internet industry. The irrational exuberance of this industry developed into a speculative bubble, whose bursting in 2000 precipitated the end of the long boom of the 1990s.
The 2000 census confirmed California's extraordinary diversity. Out of a total population of 33,871,648, no single ethnic group held a majority. Whites, at 46.7 percent of the total, still outnumbered any other group, but Latinos now boasted a healthy 32.4 percent, Asians amounted to 10.9 percent, and African Americans totaled 6.7 percent. Significantly, 4.7 percent of the state's residents described themselves as multiracial. But perhaps the happiest statistic was the jump in the number of Native California Indians, who had been nearly wiped out at the beginning of the twentieth century, to more than 100,000.
Bibliography
Beck, Warren A., and David A. Williams. California: A History of the Golden State. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972.
Pomeroy, Earl S. The Pacific Slope: A History of California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Utah, and Nevada. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1973.
Rolle, Andrew F. California: A History. Rev. 5th ed. Wheeling, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1998.
Soule, Frank, et al. Annals of San Francisco. New York and San Francisco: D. Appleton, 1855.
Starr, Kevin. Americans and the California Dream, 1850–1915. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.
———. Embattled Dreams: California in War and Peace, 1940– 1950. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
—Cecelia Holland
Facts and Figures
Area, 158,693 sq mi (411,015 sq km). Pop. (2000) 33,871,648, a 13.8% increase since the 1990 census. Capital, Sacramento. Largest city, Los Angeles. Statehood, Sept. 9, 1850 (31st state). Highest pt., Mt. Whitney, 14,491 ft (4,417 m); lowest pt., Death Valley, 282 ft (86 m) below sea level. Nickname, Golden State. Motto, Eureka [I Have Found It]. State bird, California valley quail. State flower, golden poppy. State tree, California redwood. Abbr., Calif.; CA
Geography
Ranking third among the U.S. states in area, California has a diverse topography and climate. A series of low mountains known as the Coast Ranges extends along the 1,200-mi (1,930-km) coast. The region from Point Arena, N of San Francisco, to the southern part of the state is subject to tremors and sometimes to severe earthquakes caused by tectonic stress along the San Andreas fault. The Coast Ranges receive heavy rainfall in the north, where the giant cathedrallike redwood forests prevail, but the climate of these mountains is considerably drier in S California, and S of the Golden Gate no major rivers reach the ocean. Behind the coastal ranges in central California lies the great Central Valley, a long alluvial valley drained by the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers. In the southeast lie vast wastelands, notably the Mojave Desert, site of Joshua Tree National Park.
Rising as an almost impenetrable granite barrier E of the Central Valley is the Sierra Nevada range, which includes Mt. Whitney, Kings Canyon National Park, Sequoia National Park, and Yosemite National Park. The Cascade Range, the northern continuation of the Sierra Nevada, includes Lassen Volcanic National Park. Lying E of the S Sierra Nevada is Death Valley National Park. The drier portions of the state especially are subject periodically to large, wind-driven fires; in certain hilly areas sometimes devastating mudslides occur, particularly in the rainy season after large fires.
Sacramento is the state capital. The largest cities are Los Angeles, San Diego, San Jose, San Francisco,
Economy
California has an enormously productive economy, which for a nation would be one of the ten largest in the world. Although agriculture is gradually yielding to industry as the core of the state's economy, California leads the nation in the production of fruits and vegetables, including carrots, lettuce, onions, broccoli, tomatoes, strawberries, and almonds. The state's most valuable crops are grapes, cotton, flowers, and oranges; dairy products, however, contribute the single largest share of farm income, and California is again the national leader in this sector. The state also produces the major share of U.S. domestic wine. California's farms are highly productive as a result of good soil, a long growing season, and the use of modern agricultural methods. Irrigation is critical, especially in the San Joaquin Valley and Imperial Valley. The gathering and packing of crops is done largely by seasonal migrant labor, primarily Mexicans. Fishing is another important industry.
Much of the state's industrial production depends on the processing of farm produce and upon such local resources as petroleum, natural gas, lumber, cement, and sand and gravel. Since World War II, however, manufacturing, notably of electronic equipment, computers, machinery, transportation equipment, and metal products, has increased enormously. Defense industries, a base of the economy especially in S California, have declined following the end of the cold war, a serious blow to the state. But many high-tech companies and small low-tech, often low-wage, companies remain in S California, in what is said to be the largest manufacturing belt in the United States. Farther north, “Silicon Valley,” between Palo Alto and San Jose, so called because it is the nation's leading producer of semiconductors, is also a focus of software development.
California continues to be a major U.S. center for motion-picture, television film, and related entertainment industries, especially in
One of the state's most acute problems is its appetite for water. The once fertile Owens valley is now arid, its waters tapped by Los Angeles 175 mi (282 km) away. In the lush Imperial Valley, irrigation is controlled by the All-American Canal, which draws from the Colorado River. In the Central Valley the water problem is one of poor distribution, an imbalance lessened by the vast Central Valley project. Cutbacks in federally funded water projects in the 1970s and 80s led many California cities to begin buying water from areas with a surplus, but political problems associated with water sharing continue. California's failure to develop a long-term plan to end surplus withdrawals from the Colorado led the federal government to stop the release of surplus water to the state in 2003.
Government, Politics, and Higher Education
The state's first constitution was adopted in 1849. The present constitution, dating from 1879, is noted for its provisions for public initiative and referendum—which have led at times to difficulties in governance—and for recall of public officials. The state's executive branch is headed by a governor elected for a four-year term. California's bicameral legislature has a senate with 40 members and an assembly with 80 members. The state elects 2 senators and 52 representatives to the U.S. Congress and has 54 electoral votes. In the 1980s and 1990s, California elected Republican governors—George Deukemejian (1982, 1986) and Pete Wilson (1990, 1994)— before the Democrat Gray Davis was elected in 1998 (and reelected in 2002). In 2003, Davis was recalled and Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected to succeed him; Schwarzenegger was reelected in 2006. In 1992, California became the first state to simultaneously elect two women to the U.S. Senate—Democrats Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein.
Among the state's more prominent institutions of higher learning are the Univ. of California, with nine campuses; the California State University System, with 23 campuses; Occidental College and the Univ. of Southern California, at Los Angeles; Stanford Univ., at Stanford; the California Institute of Technology, at Pasadena; Mills College, at Oakland; and the Claremont Colleges, at Claremont. After a period from the 1960s through the 1970s when the state's well-financed public institutions were the envy of the nation, California's colleges have been forced to retrench by tax-cutting initiatives.
History
European Exploration and Colonization
The first voyage (1542) to Alta California (Upper California), as the region north of Baja California (Lower California) came to be known, was commanded by the Spanish explorer Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, who explored San Diego Bay and the area farther north along the coast. In 1579 an English expedition headed by Sir Francis Drake landed near Point Reyes, N of San Francisco, and claimed the region for Queen Elizabeth I. In 1602, Sebastián Vizcaíno, another Spaniard, explored the coast and Monterey Bay.
Colonization was slow, but finally in 1769 Gaspar de Portolá, governor of the Californias, led an expedition up the Pacific coast and established a colony on San Diego Bay. The following year he explored the area around Monterey Bay and later returned to establish a presidio there. Soon afterward Monterey became the capital of Alta California. Accompanying Portolá's expedition was Father Junipero Serra, a Franciscan missionary who founded a mission at San Diego. Franciscans later founded several missions that extended as far N as Sonoma, N of San Francisco. The missionaries sought to Christianize the Native Americans but also forced them to work as manual laborers, helping to build the missions into vital agricultural communities (see Mission Indians). Cattle raising was of primary importance, and hides and tallow were exported. The missions have been preserved and are now open to visitors.
In 1776, Juan Bautista de Anza founded San Francisco, where he established a military outpost. The early colonists, called the Californios, lived a pastoral life and for the most part were not interfered with by the central government of New Spain (as the Spanish empire in the Americas was called) or later (1820s) by that of Mexico. The Californios did, however, become involved in local politics, as when Juan Bautista Alvarado led a revolt (1836) and made himself governor of Alta California, a position he later persuaded the Mexicans to let him keep. Under Mexican rule the missions were secularized (1833–34) and the Native Americans released from their servitude. The degradation of Native American peoples, which continued under Mexican rule and after U.S. settlers came to the area, was described by Helen Hunt Jackson in her novel Ramona (1884). Many mission lands were subsequently given to Californios, who established the great ranchos, vast cattle-raising estates. Colonization of California remained largely Mexican until the 1840s.
Russian and U.S. Settlement
Russian fur traders had penetrated south to the California coast and established Fort Ross, north of San Francisco, in 1812. Jedediah Strong Smith and other trappers made the first U.S. overland trip to the area in 1826, but U.S. settlement did not become significant until the 1840s. In 1839, Swiss-born John Augustus Sutter arrived and established his “kingdom” of New Helvetia on a vast tract in the Sacramento valley. He did much for the overland American immigrants, who began to arrive in large numbers in 1841. Some newcomers met with tragedy, including the Donner Party, which was stranded in the Sierra Nevada after a heavy snowstorm.
Political events in the territory moved swiftly in the next few years. After having briefly asserted the independence of California in 1836, the Californios drove out the last Mexican governor in 1845. Under the influence of the American explorer John C. Frémont, U.S. settlers set up (1846) a republic at Sonoma under their unique Bear Flag. The news of war between the United States and Mexico (1846–48) reached California soon afterward. On July 7, 1846, Commodore John D. Sloat captured Monterey, the capital, and claimed California for the United States. The Californios in the north worked with U.S. soldiers, but those in the south resisted U.S. martial law. In 1847, however, U.S. Gen. Stephen W. Kearny defeated the southern Californios. By the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), Mexico formally ceded the territory to the United States.
The Gold Rush
In 1848, the year that California became a part of the United States, another major event in the state's history occurred: While establishing a sawmill for John Sutter near Coloma, James W. Marshall discovered gold and touched off the California gold rush. The forty-niners, as the gold-rush miners were called, came in droves, spurred by the promise of fabulous riches from the Mother Lode. San Francisco rapidly became a boom city, and its bawdy, lawless coastal area, which became known as the Barbary Coast, gave rise to the vigilantes, extralegal community groups formed to suppress civil disorder. American writers such as Bret Harte and Mark Twain have recorded the local color as well as the violence and human tragedies of the roaring mining camps.
Statehood and Immigration
With the gold rush came a huge increase in population and a pressing need for civil government. In 1849, Californians sought statehood and, after heated debate in the U.S. Congress arising out of the slavery issue, California entered the Union as a free, nonslavery state by the Compromise of 1850. San Jose became the capital. Monterey, Vallejo, and Benicia each served as the capital before it was moved to Sacramento in 1854. In 1853, Congress authorized the survey of a railroad route to link California with the eastern seaboard, but the transcontinental railroad was not completed until 1869. In the meantime communication and transportation depended upon ships, the stagecoach, the pony express, and the telegraph.
Chinese laborers were imported in great numbers to work on railroad construction. The Burlingame Treaty of 1868 (see Burlingame, Anson) provided, among other things, for unrestricted Chinese immigration. That was at first enthusiastically endorsed by Californians; but after a slump in the state's shaky economy, the white settlers viewed the influx of the lower-paid Chinese laborers as an economic threat. Ensuing bitterness and friction led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (see Chinese exclusion).
A railroad-rate war (1884) and a boom in real estate (1885) fostered a new wave of overland immigration. Cattle raising on the ranchos gave way to increased grain production. Vineyards were planted by 1861, and the first trainload of oranges was shipped from Los Angeles in 1886.
Industrialization and Increased Settlement
By the turn of the century the discovery of oil, industrialization resulting from the increase of hydroelectric power, and expanding agricultural development attracted more settlers. Los Angeles grew rapidly in this period and, in population, soon surpassed San Francisco, which suffered greatly after the great earthquake and fire of 1906. Improvements in urban transportation stimulated the growth of both Los Angeles and San Francisco; the advent of the cable car and the electric railway made possible the development of previously inaccessible areas.
As industrious Japanese farmers acquired valuable land and a virtual monopoly of California's truck-farming operations, the issue of Asian immigration again arose. The bitter struggle for the exclusion of Asians plagued international relations, and in 1913 the California Alien Land Act was passed despite President Woodrow Wilson's attempts to block it. The act provided that persons ineligible for U.S. citizenship could not own agricultural land in California.
Successive waves of settlers arrived in California, attracted by a new real-estate boom in the 1920s and by the promise of work in the 1930s. The influx during the 1930s of displaced farm workers, depicted by John Steinbeck in his novel The Grapes of Wrath, caused profound dislocation in the state's economy. During World War II the Japanese in California were removed from their homes and placed in relocation centers. Industry in California expanded rapidly during the war; the production of ships and aircraft attracted many workers who later settled in the state.
Growing Pains and Natural Disasters
Prosperity and rapid population growth continued after the war. Many African Americans who came during World War II to work in the war industries settled in California. By the 1960s they constituted a sizable minority in the state, and racial tensions reached a climax. In 1964, California voters approved an initiative measure, Proposition 14, allowing racial discrimination in the sale or rental of housing in the state, a measure later declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1965 riots broke out in Watts, a predominantly black section of Los Angeles, touching off a wave of riots across the United States. Also in the 1960s migrant farm workers in California formed a union and struck many growers to obtain better pay and working conditions. Unrest also occurred in the state's universities, especially the Univ. of California at Berkeley, where student demonstrations and protests in 1964 provoked disorders.
Republicans have generally played a more dominant role than Democrats in California politics during the 20th cent. From the end of World War II through the mid-1990s alone, five of the seven governors were Republicans, starting with Earl Warren (1943–53). Ronald Reagan, a former movie actor and a leading conservative Republican, was elected governor in 1966 and reelected in 1970; he later served two terms as U.S president. The two Democrats were liberals Edmund G. (Pat) Brown (1959–67) and his son Jerry Brown (1975–83). In the late 1970s, Californians staged a “tax revolt” that attracted national attention, passing legislation to cut property taxes.
During the 1970s and 80s California continued to grow rapidly, with a major shift of population to the state's interior. The metropolitan areas of Riverside–San Bernardino, Modesto, Stockton, Bakersfield, and Sacramento were among the fastest growing in the nation during the 1980s. Much of the state's population growth was a result of largely illegal immigration from Mexico; there was also a heavy infux of immigrants from China, the Philippines, and SE Asia.
Population growth and immigration contributed to growing economic pressures, as did cuts in federal defense spending; meanwhile, social tensions also increased. In Apr., 1992, four white Los Angeles police officers were acquitted of brutality charges after they had been videotaped beating a black motorist; the verdict touched off riots in South-Central Los Angeles and other neighborhoods, resulting in 58 deaths, thousands of arrests, and approximately $1 billion in property damage.
In addition to periodic heavy flooding and brushfires, earthquakes have caused widespread damage in California. In Oct., 1989, a major earthquake killed about 60 people and injured thousands in Santa Cruz and the San Francisco Bay area. In Jan., 1994, an earthquake hit the Northridge area of N Los Angeles, killing some 60 people and causing at least $13 billion in damage.
In a backlash against illegal immigration, California voters in 1994 approved Proposition 187, an initiative barring the state from providing most services—including welfare, education, and nonemergency medical care—to illegal immigrants. Federal courts found much of Proposition 187 unconstitutional; the appeal of their rulings was dropped in 1999, at a time when the state's economy had rebounded and a Democratic administration was in Sacramento.
In late 2000, California began experiencing an electricity crisis as insufficient generating capacity and increasing short-term wholesale prices for power squeezed the state's two largest public utilities, who, under the “deregulation” plan they had agreed to in the early 1990s, were not allowed to pass along their increased costs. As the state worked to come up with both short-term and long-time solutions to the situation, consumers experienced sporadic blackouts and faced large rate hikes under the terms of a bailout plan. The crisis was severe enough that it was expected to slow the state's economic growth. Evidence subsequently emerged of both price gouging and market manipulation by a number of energy companies.
The economic downturn in the early 2000s resulted in enormous budget shortfalls for California's state government, and made Governor Gray Davis increasingly unpopular. A recall petition financed mainly by a Republican congressman who withdrew from the subsequent election led to a vote (Oct., 2003) that removed Davis from office. The actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, was elected to succeed him. The year the state experienced devastating wildfires in the greater San Diego area; the area was again hit with particularly dangerous wildfires in 2007.
Bibliography
See L. Pitt, The Decline of the Californios: A Social History of the Spanish Speaking Californians, 1846–1890 (1967); R. Kirsch, West of the West: Witnesses to the California Experience, 1542–1906 (1968); R. J. Roske, Everyman's Eden: A History of California (1968); C. A. Hutchinson, Frontier Settlement in Mexican California (1969); W. Bean, California: An Interpretive History (2d. ed. 1973); M. W. Donley, Atlas of California (1979); D. W. Lantis, California: Land of Contrast (3d ed. 1981); C. Miller and R. S. Hyslop, California: The Geography of Diversity (1983); T. H. Watkins, California: An Illustrated History (1983); J. D. Hart, A Companion to California (1984); T. Muller, The Fourth Wave: California's Newest Immigrants (1985); A. F. Rolle, California: A History (4th ed. 1987); P. Schrag, Paradise Lost (1998).
State in the Far West bordered by Oregon to the north; Nevada and Arizona to the east; Baja California, Mexico, to the south; and the Pacific Ocean to the west. Its capital is Sacramento, and its largest city is Los Angeles.
Local Time: Aug 28, 3:52 PM
The California wine industry is said to have started during the period from 1769 to 1823 when the Franciscan monks began planting vineyards as they worked their way from southern to northern California establishing their missions. Unfortunately, the grape they planted was the mission, which produces wines of poor to medium quality. It wasn't until about 1830 that Jean-Louis Vignes began to import higher-quality vitis vinifera grapevines. In the 1850s and 1860s, agoston haraszthy expanded the effort by trying to determine which grape varieties would work best in various locations in the state. To this end, he imported thousands of cuttings of about 300 different grape varieties. In addition to planting these vines in sonoma county, he sold cuttings in various parts of the state, primarily in the San Francisco Bay and Los Angeles areas. The California wine-producing industry went through numerous ups and downs over the next 80 years, but the phylloxera infestation in the 1890s and prohibition from 1920 to 1933 severely curtailed wine business growth. The industry continued to grow sporadically from 1933 on, but most of the production was fairly ordinary wine from the giant central valley. At the time, most wines were made from grapes like thompson seedless, Emperor, and Flame Tokay, which could also be used for table grapes or raisins. This trend began to change in the 1960s when Joe Heitz started Heitz Wine Cellars in 1964, Dick Graff established Chalone Vineyard in 1965, and Robert Mondavi left the family (Charles Krug) winery and established his own in 1966. At that time, the boom for quality wine took off, with dramatic increases in acreage allotted to grapes like cabernet sauvignon and chardonnay. In the year 2000, the California Department of Food and Agriculture estimated that there were about 568,000 acres of wine grapes planted. Chardonnay is the most widely planted white wine grape, with over 103,000 acres, followed by French colombard, with less than half that amount. (This compares with a 1959 total of about 80,000 acres for all of California's wine grapes.) After Chardonnay and French Colombard, the white grapes in order of total acreage are chenin blanc, sauvignon blanc, riesling, gewürztraminer, pinot blanc and muscat. The most widely planted red grape (with about 70,000 acres) is Cabernet Sauvignon; zinfandel has about 50,000 acres. These two varieties are followed in order of total acreage by merlot, pinot noir, rubired, barbera, grenache, syrah, ruby cabernet, carignane, petite sirah and cabernet franc. At this writing, California produces about 90 percent of the wine made in the United States. Although it now competes favorably in producing some of the world's finest wines, it also still produces plenty of ordinary wine with over 70 percent of California wine production coming from the hot Central Valley. Much of this wine is still undistinguished, although the quality is higher than in the past because of modernized equipment and better crop selection. For fine California wines, the climate of the cooler growing areas along the coast is best. Because of this, the napa valley has become one of the premier wine-producing areas in the world. But it is not alone in the production of fine wine, as evidenced by other areas of the north coast in the counties of lake, sonoma, mendocino, solano and sonoma. As the California wine industry continues to grow, other quality viticultural areas are being discovered, including numerous locations in the central coast region and selected areas in the sierra foothills. In an effort to define growing areas around the state, California uses a system known variously as degree days, heat summation method, Winkler Scale, and Regions I-V (see climate regions of california). California has almost ninety american viticultural areas (ava); however, this system is still in its infancy, and there are myriad issues yet to be resolved. As California growers and winemakers understand more about the elements of what the French call terroir petitions are being submitted for subsections of larger AVAs to further define the areas where wines are produced.
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