The future was once so bright before the politicians ruined her!

Editors note: If you would like to contribute a piece of history to this article please email it to me and I will add it on.  I hope to get many more stories put in this article that details California-thanks!  Paul Smith

When I was a kid some of my friends would tell me tales of their parents or of themselves taking a trip to California.  I grew up in Michigan and those that could speak about California were treated like royalty with all the stories they came back with.  Disneyland, San Francisco, Redwood trees, coastlines, oil, crops, Hollywood… it was like California was some mystical place that very few had seen.  No one in my area ever came from California to live in Michigan, so it was even rarer to speak to someone that visited.  California had a real charm for us mid-westerners.  Once, when I was maybe eight, a kid told me a story about a tree so big you could drive a car through it!  I demanded pictures to prove it in which he had none and I interrogated him long and hard to explain to me in great detail…  how a tree could be so large that you could drive a car through it!  I never did believe him.  It is safe to say I do now!

So let me give you some history of California and take you back to the beginning… to that time when California was still innocent.  A time that held so much hope and promise for those of us that came here.  A time when just the hope of a better life caused an entire country to send its best and most hopeful here.  And then decide for yourself if California still has the same awe and respect of the country and of its people.  If not, I hope you will get involved in the 2010 elections and use your vote to change California back to the way she used to be!  The following I got with a little help from my friend Dan Devine who does the Frommer’s travel guides.  I keep a version on my nightstand and I flip through it ever so often. 

I Dreamed of California!

Datelines

1542  Juan Cabrillo enter San Diego Bay and become the first documented European visit.

Sir Francis Drake

1579   Sir Francis Drake drop anchor in S.F. Bay and claims it for Queen Elizabeth the 1st

1602   Spanish explorer Sebastian Vizcano sails up the coast and names many areas

1777   Monterrey named capital of the Spanish territory

1791   Los Angeles founded

1804   Spain divides Baja California from what we call California

1821   Spain grants independence to Mexico and California

1836  Governor Juan Alvarado declares California a free and sovereign state

1846   The Bear Flag Republic is proclaimed and Ca. is drawn into the Mexican-American war

1847   Yerba Buena renamed San Francisco

Sutter Mill where Gold was discovered!

1848   James Marshall discovers gold

1849   The Gold Rush is in full swing, San Jose becomes the state capital

1850   Becomes the 31 state

1854   Sacramento becomes the capital

1862  First telegraph line established from New York to San Francisco

1867   Anti-Chinese demonstrations

Promotory Point in Utah

1869   The transcontinental RR completed

1873   University of California at Berkeley opens and first cable car appears in S.F.

1879   USC founded

1881   LA Times is produced

1906   Earthquake decimated S.F.

1911   Hollywood first film studio is built

1915   1st phone call from S.F. to New York

1922   The Hollywood Bowl opens

1924  First airmail flight made between S.F. and New York

1936   The S.F. Oakland Bay bridge opens

Golden Gate. I think the toll is $5.00 now

1937   The Golden Gate Bridge opens

1955   Disneyland opens

1960   Candlestick Park opens

1972   BART opens

1984   Los Angeles hosts the Olympic Games

1991   Fires rip through Berkeley/Oakland hills and destroys 2,800 homes

1992   Los Angeles experiences the worst race riots in modern American history leaving 50 dead, hundreds hurt

1993   6.2 earthquake strikes

 

 

Famous Californians

Martin Sheen had a big role in Coppola's movie

Francis Ford Coppola   (b. 1939)  Filmmaker who is know for Apocalypse Now and The Godfather series.

Joe DiMaggio   (b. 1914)   One of baseballs greatest players.  Began his career with the S.F. Seals and later married Marilyn Monroe

William Randolph Hearst   (b. 1863)  Famous for his opulent lifestyle and his castle at San Simeon in addition to the newspapers he printed

Janis Joplin   (b. 1943)  One of the charismatic rock-and-roll voices.  She got her start in S.F.

Orville Redenbacher  (b. 1907)   Resident of San Diego he developed a hybrid yellow pooping corn in 1952

Jonas Salk   (b. 1914)  Developed the polio Vaccine in 1953

Who can forget this?

Dr. Seuss  (b. 1904)  wrote children’s books including The Cat in the Hat and How the Grinch Stole Christmas

Geography, History and some Politics

California is 1,200 miles long and 350 miles wide and is the western most contiguous state.  A succession of coastal mountain ranges runs from the Oregon border at the north to Oxnard with is 45 miles south of Los Angeles.  Most pf the population lives between these mountains and the ocean.  Down the middle if California runs the most fertile farming regions in the country… until the last few years.  Anyone following the political climate knows that lawmakers have turned off the water to this region.

The History

No much is left to mark the existence of the West Coast Native Americans.  Estimates of about 1/2 a million inhabited California before the Europeans settled in the 1600′s.  European colony expansion and the Catholic ministries zeal prompted Spain to claim Alta (California) as her own.  In 1769 Father Junipero Sera took 300 soldiers and clergy and began forging a path from Mexico to Monterrey.  Missions or forts were established in San Diego and by 1804 a chain of 21 missions all within one days walk were established on the Camino Real road all the way to Sonoma.

During that time thousands of native American Indians were converted to Christianity and or forced into labor or died with disease brought over by the Europeans.  Not all the natives were appreciative of there new settlers and burned many of the missions down causing them to be re-built with red fire-proof tile roofs.  Most settlements had no more than 100 occupants and in 1812 Spain’s sovereignty was compromised by the Russian Fort at Fort Ross, 60 miles north of S.F.  The British and the Hudson Bay Trading company also took claims in California and in 1821 Spain gave back Mexico and California to its local leaders.  The missionary lost much of their land that went to the wealthy Californios aka Mexican immigrants. 

 In 1820 Americans began to make there way to California via the three month trip around the Cape Horn.  By 1830 settlers piled into California and in 1843 Marcus Whitman, who was a missionary, helped blaze the Oregon trail.  Over the next few years daring settlers made the trip to California over the Sierra Nevada’s via the Truckee pass near Lake Tahoe.  The US Government got into the act and extended its rights down to the Rio Grande.  Now here is some trivia.  In 1846 President James Polk offered Mexico $40 million for California and New Mexico.  Polk annexed Texas which caused the Mexican-American war, in which the US took everything anyway.

Gold and the unique statehood clause.

1948.  The non-Native population stood at 7,000.  That year gold flakes were discovered in the American River.  By 1850 the population was 92,000.  In 1850 California was admitted to the Union.  The state constitution contained some noteworthy features at the time.  To protect miners, slavery was prohibited.  To get women to move to California, it became legal for women to own property separate of their husband.  By 1870, 90% of the natives had been wiped out or moved to a ‘reservation’.  Today they are called Indian Gambling Casinos.  If alcohol was the curse of the Indian, gambling is now the curse of the pale-face!

When the railroad was completed the trip from the East to California took five days.  So I get a tad testy when someone tells me it will take four weeks for shipping.  Bologna! 

 First Transcontinental Railroad 

The First Transcontinental Railroad is the popular name of the U.S. railroad line (known at the time as the Pacific Railroad) completed in 1869 between Council Bluffs, Iowa/Omaha, Nebraska (via Ogden, Utah and Sacramento, California) and Alameda, California. By linking with the existing railway network of the Eastern United States, the road thus connected the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of the United States by rail for the first time. Opened for through traffic on May 10, 1869, with the driving of the “Last Spike” at Promontory Summit, Utah, the road established a mechanized transcontinental transportation network that revolutionized the population and economy of the American West.

Authorized by the Pacific Railway Act of 1862 during the American Civil War and supported by U.S. government bonds and extensive land grants of government owned land, it was the culmination of a decades-long movement to build such a line and was one of the crowning achievements of the presidency of Abraham Lincoln, although completed four years after his death. The building of the railway required enormous amounts of money and feats of engineering and labor in the crossing of plains and high mountains by the Union Pacific Railroad and Central Pacific Railroad, which built the line westward and eastward respectively.

The transcontinental railroad is considered one of the greatest American technological feats of the 19th century—surpassing the building of the Erie Canal in the 1820s and the crossing of the Isthmus of Panama by the Panama Railroad in 1855. It served as a vital link for trade, commerce and travel that joined the eastern and western halves of late 19th century United States. The transcontinental railroad quickly ended most of the far slower and more hazardous stagecoach lines and wagon trains that had preceded it. The railroads led to the decline of traffic on the Oregon and California Trail which had populated much of the west as they provided much faster, safer and cheaper (7 days and about $65 economy) transport east and west for people and goods across half a continent. The sale of the railroad land grant lands and the transport provided for timber and crops lead to the rapid settling of the supposed “Great American Desert”. The main workers on the Union Pacific were many ex-army veterans and Irish emigrants while most of the engineers etc. were ex-army men who had learned their trade keeping the trains running during the Civil War. The Central Pacific, facing a labor shortage in the labor short West, relied on Chinese laborers who did prodigious work building the line over and through the Sierra Nevada mountains and then across Nevada to a meeting in Utah.

Pacific Railroad Bond, City and County of San Francisco, 1865

The building of the railroad was motivated in part to bind the eastern and western states of the United States together. The Central Pacific faced with the prodigious feat of building a road over the Sierra Nevada mountains started work in 1863.  The Union Pacific company faced with the competition for workers, rails, ties, railroad engines and supplies by the needs of the American Civil War didn’t start construction till July 1865.  Completion of the railroad substantially accelerated the populating of the West while contributing to the decline of territory controlled by the Native Americans in these regions.  In 1879, the Supreme Court of the United States formally established, in its decision regarding Union Pacific Railroad vs. United States (99 U.S. 402), the official “date of completion” of the Transcontinental Railroad as November 6, 1869.

The Central Pacific and the Southern Pacific Railroad combined operations in 1870 and formally merged in 1885.  Union Pacific originally bought the Southern Pacific in 1901 but in 1913 was forced to divest it; the company once again acquired the Southern Pacific in 1996.  Much of the original right-of-way is still in use today and owned by the Union Pacific.

 Collis Huntington, a hardware merchant, heard Theodore Judah lecture at the St. Charles Hotel in Sacramento in November 1860, and he invited Judah to his office to hear his proposal in detail.  Huntington was to change Judah’s strategy of finding several investors and instead sought to raise the money from three partners who initially invested $1,500 each and form a board of directors: Mark Hopkins, his business partner; James Bailey, a jeweller; Leland Stanford, a grocer, future governor of California, and founder of Stanford University; and Charles Crocker, a dry-goods merchant and eventual owner of Crocker Banks.  The investors became known as the The Big Four and their railroad was called the Central Pacific Railroad. Each were eventually to make millions of dollars off their continuing investments and active management and control of the Central Pacific Railroad (CPRR).

Six years after the groundbreaking, laborers of the Central Pacific Railroad from the west and the Union Pacific Railroad from the east met at Promontory Summit, Utah.  It was here on May 10, 1869 that Stanford drove the The Last Spike (or golden spike) which is now on display at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, that joined the rails of the transcontinental railroad.  In perhaps the world’s first live mass-media event, the hammers and spike were wired to the telegraph line so that each hammer stroke would be heard as a click at telegraph stations nationwide—the hammer strokes were missed, so the clicks were sent by the telegraph operator. As soon as the ceremonial spike had been replaced by an ordinary iron spike, a message was transmitted to both the East Coast and West Coast that simply read, “DONE.”  The country erupted in celebration upon receipt of this message. Travel from coast to coast was reduced from six months or more to just one week.

Needing rapid communication, as the railroad was built they built telegraph lines along side the railroad rights of way. Since these lines were much easier to protect and maintain than the original First Transcontinental Telegraph lines which went over much of the original routes of the Mormon Trail and the Central Nevada Route though central Utah and Nevada, they soon became the main telegraph lines and the earlier lines were mostly abandoned.

 

 Growth and Industry

Los Angeles started growing in 1911 when the film industry started shooting in the warm climate and found cheap labor.  As a side note, I learned only last week that California is the only state in the country that allows porn to be produced.    When WW II started California become a hotbed of industry.  Shipyards, munitions, airplanes, new freeways and suburbs were developed.  S.F. became the artistic/drug center that led to the 1960′s flower children, the summer of love, Vietnam war protests in 1967 and racial tensions.  In 1968 MLK was killed and the Watts section of L.A. became pretty much became  a war zone.  The 1970′s gave rise to the ‘new age’ movement that in the 1980′s turned into the environmental movement.  Property values soared and many become stinkingly rich.  Silicon Valley become the address to have as a computer manufacturer and business flourished.  Right up to the time of the recession in the 1990′s.

Politics

Democrat Jerry Brown succeeded Republican Ronald Reagan and California gained a reputation of being very progressive in areas of pollution, renewable energy, and the protection of its coastline.  S.F. became the hotbed of the gay rights movement, alternate lifestyles and the swinger movement.    As a side note when I went to Cancun in 1990  everyone had to announce what city you were from at the Club Med.  When I said Sacramento, the ‘G.O.’ asked how far it was from S.F.  When I told him about 90 miles he promptly replied, “Oh, you must be gay then!”  Republican Pete Wilson followed as governor, then Republican George Deukmejian.  Democrat Grey Davis got in and was then re-called during the energy crisis and Arnold Schwarzenegger got elected.

The Initiative Process

 On October 10, 1911, by way of a special election called by Governor Hiram Johnson, the initiative process was established in California by a margin of 168,744 to 52,093 votes cast for Senate Constitutional Amendment (SCA) 22. South Dakota was the first state in the nation to establish the initiative process (1898). Utah, Oregon, Montana, Oklahoma, Missouri, Michigan, Arkansas, and Colorado followed thereafter, preceding California, respectively.  The contents of the 1911 constitutional amendment, and all other issues relating to voting, initiatives, referendum and recall, can be found under Article II of the California Constitution.

Prior to 1911, citizens in California voted only on measures and acts that were placed on the ballot by the Legislature.  The approval of the initiative process in 1911 provided two methods by which a citizen could place a measure on the ballot.  The first method, the direct initiative process, allows a citizen the option to bypass the Legislature and go straight to the public in an effort to place an issue of interest on the ballot for voter approval or rejection.  The process adopted in 1911, which is still in use today, requires the proponent to obtain an official title and  summary of the proposed initiative from the Attorney General. Upon obtaining a title and summary, the proponent of an initiative is permitted to circulate the petition for 150 days.  During the course of the 150 days, the proponent must gather a requisite number of signatures of registered voters who support the initiative.  If a citizen circulates an initiative petition with the intention to revise a California statute, the number of signatures gathered must equal 5% of all the votes cast for the office of Governor in the last gubernatorial election. If the initiative proposes an amendment to the California Constitution, the number of signatures gathered must equal 8% of all votes cast for the office of Governor in the last gubernatorial election.  Once the proponent of an initiative gathers the requisite number of signatures during the 150-day circulation period, the petition must then enter and pass a random or a full signature verification process, or both, before it is finally placed on the ballot to be accepted or rejected by voters.

The second method, the indirect initiative process, allowed a citizen to appeal directly to the Legislature in order to place a measure on the ballot. However, in 1965, the Constitution Revision Commission recommended that the indirect initiative process be revoked due to its lack of use.  In 1966, citizens approved Proposition 1A, which accordingly revoked the indirect initiative process.  When in use, in order for an indirect initiative to be considered by the Legislature, the initiative petition had to be signed by a number of registered voters equal to 5% of all votes cast for the office of Governor at the last gubernatorial election. The signed petition was then submitted to the Secretary of State who subsequently transmitted the petition to the Legislature.  The Legislature then had 40 days to enact or reject the initiative, or to amend it. In the event that the Legislature enacted the initiative as it was written, it became law.  If the Legislature failed to enact, reject or amend the initiative within 40 days, the Secretary of State then placed it on the ballot for voter approval or rejection at the next election.  Unless the text of an initiative measure states otherwise, an approved initiative goes into effect the day after the election and is not subject to a Governor’s veto, nor may it be amended or repealed by the Legislature without a vote of approval of the electors.  Should two conflicting measures be approved by voters in a given election, the measure receiving the largest affirmative vote will prevail.

INITIATIVE SIGNATURE VERIFICATION PROCESS

Once the Attorney General has issued a title and summary, an initiative proponent has 150 days to circulate his or her petition within all counties of California. At the end of the 150-day circulation period for an initiative, each petition section must be filed with the county elections office in the county where it was circulated.  Only the signatures of voters who are registered in the county where the initiative petition was circulated are counted as valid. Each county has eight working days to conduct and report a raw count of signatures on the petition.  If the amount of petition signatures accumulated in all counties does not reach the numeric threshold, the initiative fails.  If the number of signatures reported by each county reaches the requisite number of signatures, the Secretary of State directs each county to conduct a random sample of all gathered petition signatures.  Prior to 1976, the signature verification process consisted of a manual comparison between each signature on the initiative petition and the signature as it appeared on the individual’s voter registration card. 

Currently, the process of signature verification is done by a computer generated random sample.  For each county, a computer program produces a list of random numbers that correspond with the signature numbers on a petition. Within 30 working days, each county must check and verify a random sample of at least 500 or 3% of all petition signatures, whichever is greater, and report the number to the Secretary of State.  If the projected validity of all randomly verified petition signatures is 110% of the original amount required, the initiative qualifies for the ballot without further verification. However, if the projected validity of signatures gathered falls between 95% and 110%, each signature must be individually verified.  If the total falls below 95%, the initiative fails.

Architecture

California reflects several diverse influences including, Spanish Villa, Mexican Haciendas,Victorian structures in S.F., art deco in Los Angeles and then good old concrete staring in the 1960′s.  Glass and steel dominated buildings in the 1980′s and gave communities that sleek look.

Cultural and Social Life

The coastal areas have created one of the most expensive real estate in the country.  The wealth is staggering to say the least with every ocean side community claiming fame to expensive homes, high class restaurants headed by famous chefs and every nick knack store you can imagine.  All high priced and trendy.  The population went from 10.5 million in 1950 to 25 million on 1990.  Few ever found gold, but the mystique of California still lived on as the place to find your dreams.

Today, California is broke, controlled by big unions, unemployment is at 12.2% and has no hope of ever climbing out of this mess.  In 2010 we will elect a new Governor and hopefully some new legislators.  I sincerely hope that in the coming years someone will re-capture the vision of California and lead her back to the promise that she has always had.  I refuse to believe this is the end of the line for California.   Please join me in sending a message to Sacramento and to Washington DC and vote for California!  Find a new candidate to support this time.  We can’t change the past few years, but we can damn sure change the future.  The power is in your hands.

The Paul Smith for Congress website is www.PaulSmithforCongress.org 
Republican Candidate for the 5th Congressional District (Sacramento)