We head up the road this week in the company of historian and journalist Carey McWilliams, revisiting the California dream and its rambunctious, rule-breaking story of innovation. Author of California: The Great Exception, McWilliams was greatly aided early in his career by writers Mary Austin and H. L. Mencken. Once established, he was better known as editor of The Nation, a job he held from 1955 to 1975. Because of his left-leaning views, McWilliams was among those called before the House Un-American Activities Committee during Joseph McCarthy’s reign of political terror.
Here’s another little-known fact: Carey McWilliams’ other regional history book, Southern California Country: An Island on the Land, inspired Robert Towne’s Oscar-winning screenplay for the movie Chinatown.
But back to the gold rush, the democratic event that created the state of California—democratic because the land was in the public domain, and if you could get here, you could keep whatever you found. Most of the wealth the gold rush created stayed in California, because most miners stayed. They stayed, and made a new world here on the far side of the Western frontier.
The equality of opportunity that defined the early “free-mining” years of California’s gold rush, as McWilliams saw it, also created more and lasting equality of opportunity—because California as a political entity was created by the miners themselves, and they demanded that. Having thrown off East Coast rules and power-brokering, the newest Californians wanted to continue to be rambunctious and rule-breaking.
California skipped the “territorial” stage of U.S. settlement, for example, jumping straight into statehood—an exceptional circumstance, caused in large part by the state’s geographical isolation but also by the discovery of gold. The United States was eager to add all that gold to its Treasury.
But those rambunctious new Californians weren’t all that excited about being governed from afar, and they didn’t want statehood—the chance for self-government—to get stalled by territorial battles over slavery, the issue that would soon drive the union into civil war. So in 1850 delegates to California’s constitutional convention, most of them miners and recent arrivals, unanimously declared that “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, unless for punishment of crimes, shall ever be tolerated in this state.” Which meant Congress wouldn’t decide the issue for California.
Yet those early California political leaders, like the general population, were far from unanimous on anything, including the question of slavery. Their personal opinions generally reflected their backgrounds, whether they came from the North or the South. But the miners didn’t want to compete with slave and indentured labor in the gold fields—very practical, self-interested, support for equality in the workplace.
The gold rush itself and its democratic principles attracted people from every state in the union, and from all around the globe—an exceptional circumstance, mixing the multitudes, making Californians diverse before diversity was even devised, “more like America than America itself,” as Carey McWilliams put it.
What makes California most exceptional culturally is its people—including people almost entirely dispossessed by California’s rush for riches, native peoples, the first and original Californians. Next time you’re in Sacramento, dive into the whole story at the California Museum, which bills itself, fairly, as “official home of the California dream.” Always lots of good stuff happening, such as California Time Traveler Camp.
