The Last Gilded Age

Early in the 19th century, Washington Irving created a hoax around a fictional old Dutchman named Diedrich Knickerbocker. Irving went so far as to advertise for information on Mr. Knickerbocker’s whereabouts, teasing the public with the prospect of publishing the Dutchman’s abandoned manuscript: A History of New-York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty. New Yorkers seemed to accept the joke with good humor and Washington Irving became famous. A fictional history, properly played, was as good as the real thing. After all, the need for provenance, a history to call one’s own, runs deep.

By the end of the century, this preoccupation with finding one’s roots had become an obsession. My earlier post on H. H.  Bancroft touched on one entrepreneur who rode this crest (alas, with less humor than Washington Irving.) In California, almost every county had its own local history, usually written by local notables, giving their friends and themselves voluminous homage for their civilizing influence during the period following statehood in 1846. These county histories stood side by side more focused autobiographies by early pioneers: usually white immigrants from the East, but also a few from the Mexican families that met them.

In fifty years, the state had gone from the fledgling western anchor of Manifest Destiny to a world-class economic center. This evolution was based first on the precious metals of the Gold Rush and Nevada silver mines, then on the agriculture of its Central Valley. The magnitude of these events swept along the egos of those who witnessed them first hand and left a hole to be filled.

More often than not, these histories and biographies portray a quest that characterizes the heroic nature of the state where men (most visibly, but women, as well) looked back at what they’d done and tried to fashion it into a proper monument to their fame–in the classical sense of carving out a niche in the pantheon of future memories. And if the truth must be massaged a little to insure its presentability on this altar to the ego, such is truth’s nature. Washington Irving understood this better than most.

Now, the media has changed. Books have been supplanted (in popular consciousness, at least) by the digital editions of fame, often nearly as fleeting as the electrical energy that heralds them. But that merely changes the venue, not the game. In a contemporary quest to enter the pantheon, enter the late, great CEO of Ebay and her brain sibling who parachuted nicely from Hewlett-Packard. These ladies are determined to buy their way into household word-dom much as their forbearers in California’s last Gilded Age. I suppose if Leland Standford, former governor and founder of the Farm, could do it, it must be OK for Meg and Carly. So far, the tales they’re spinning about their own accomplishments are reviving memories of Washington Irving.

More later . . . ever hear of the Gold Bugs?

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The Devil in California

Mount Diablo is a forlorn place with bone-freezing winds on desert-like slopes. Situated twenty-five miles due east of San Francisco, it was aptly named by the Spanish: a devil of a mountain. Its altitude put it in the cartographer’s list of holy places because it stands out as a marker, sometimes viewable for hundreds of miles, which was useful in those days before satellite imaging, GPS devices, and smog that now shelters Central California most of the year. I’ve never thought much about it because to me it is merely the high point in one of several geological wrinkles that run north and south, separating San Francisco Bay from the Central Valley. The mountain has little to recommend itself beside its historical usefulness in mapping the region. But every so often it makes its way into the news in a way that encapsulates the cultural forces working within California, forces that mirror our tectonic liabilities. Some people don’t like the mountain’s name. The pagans among us enjoy its irreverence, and realists enjoy its accuracy in labeling, but Bible thumpers slap the calf skin ever so much harder about the profane implications of this naming. Devil mountain. Can devil worship be far behind? One such individual wants to change its name to Mount Ronald Reagan.

California has been a prized destination since travelers from Asia crossed the Bering Straights ice bridge and discovered the region’s hospitable coast and valleys. Several millennia later, Francis Drake found the coast too foggy to locate a passage to the interior, but the Spanish moved north from Mexico and built a fort at the mouth of San Francisco Bay. Then gold seekers came from all directions creating a mix of expectations that still roils the state, pitting Coast and Mountains with the Great Central Valley in between.

When the quartz dust settled and the muddy runoff from the placer mining turned pale, the state was left with pockets of diversity that would be the envy of any world-class metropolis. It boasted immigrants from the far corners of the globe of every ethnic, racial, and religious persuasion. However, unlike Manhattan, where proximity forced the new faces from Ellis Island to get along, California has its insular acreage, its size. It’s a big place where people can cling to their own kind and shun the rest. But not completely. It seems to be the nature of these outposts of solitude to evangelize and reshape the world to their view of things. They produce individuals who would change the world to counter their own dark imaginings. The gentleman from Oakley, the latest would-be name changer, wants to trade a benign ancient devil for a twentieth century one: a faux cowboy who served as spokesman for the economic policies that devil us today. I’ll take the devil I know, thank you, and cherish my fantasy that Mr. Reagan had been satisfied with hawking appliances on GE Theater.

A post script to this little morality play: the name-change issue seems to be fading from view. Too many devil worshipers, I guess. But our would-be name changer attracted enough attention to earn a seat on the county’s Drug Advisory Board. He touted his experience as a recovering addict as qualification for such a post and the Contra Costa county supervisors evidently agreed. One might wonder if their adroit political move reflects California’s answer to the age-old problem of conflicting agendas: give the malcontent a venue where he can’t hurt anyone.

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No Queers in California

Hubert Howe Bancroft popularized California history in an era when our nation was looking for its roots. New York had Washington Irving to eulogize their Knickerbockers; we have HHB. He’s probably the most cited source for anything historical, pre 1900. The University of California has honored his memory with a new incarnation of a library devoted to research of all things historical in California. I spent considerable time in the earlier building, but a few years ago it had to give way to U.C. Berkeley’s main library renovation. Like the previous library, this monument to provenance is the place where history undergrads are sent to get tangible proof of just how important their school (and the library itself) is in the pecking order. Stanford, eat your heart out. Gaze at the Sir Francis Drake’s plate while you wait for the attendant to let you in; pencils only; post-it notes will get you yelled at, if not ejected; keep quiet; absorb the majesty.

Mr. Bancroft ran an enterprise in the 1880s and 90s called the History Company. It was located in San Francisco on Market Street. He was a collector of information, part gadfly, part P. T. Barnum. He established his fame in the epidemic of regional histories that were produced throughout the country during the late 19th century. His output was prodigious, with multi-volume sets covering a good part of the western North American continent — California being the centerpiece with seven-plus volumes spanning the eras from creation to 1890.

But having read most of this set on my state’s history, thousands of pages occupying a generous foot of space on my bookshelf, I discovered something of note. There were no homosexuals in California. I didn’t go looking for this; it just jumped out at me. HHB reported on everything else, so they must not have arrived.

HHB might be forgiven by virtue of the fact that the term homosexual appeared timidly on the scene in Europe in the 1860s and didn’t come into common usage until well into the next century. But the usual products of obfuscation are likewise absent from his works. The closest report I found of variant sexual behavior was an incident in the early 1800s where an Indian girl turned in a boy to the local padre. Something to do with a donkey. Boy and animal were ritually dispatched, and their remains cleansed with a little fire. Given such consequences, I suppose it’s no wonder anything without procreative justification has been expunged from the record. But does that mean there were no queers? How did we get from a neutered 19th century to our flamboyant Sodom by the Bay that’s noted for attracting immigrants like Harvey Milk — and the derision of a flag-waving heartland? This gap in the history begs filling. Maybe it wasn’t quite as sexless as HH would have it.

Scans of Bancroft’s Works can be found at:

http://www.1st-hand-history.org/Hhb/HHBindex.htm

The work these people have done is a Herculean accomplishment almost as ambitious as Mr. Bancroft’s. Visit with a large hard drive.

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