One in a series of occasional articles exploring the social and political history of states holding major primary elections.
COLOMA, Calif. - It all started here, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. Down a slender rocky trail bordered by brambles and blackberries is a dirty creek, only a few feet in width, unremarkable in every way, leading, like a hundred other nameless arms of water, to the South Fork of the American River. But on the morning of Jan. 24, 1848, a craftsman named James Wilson Marshall put his hand into the cold flow and removed some mysterious metal flecks.
The flecks were gold, and the discovery, at the site of one of John A. Sutter's sawmills here in the gnarly green hillsides of California, began an American river of a different sort, a mad, manic, and miraculous flow of people into a faraway territory occupied mostly by Indians, owned technically by Mexico, and destined to be a place that is uniquely American. That American river still flows, and today, more than a century and a half later, it is the artery of a nation.
The gold rush led miners, outlaws, speculators, dreamers, financiers, explorers, and adventurers to bore deep into the hidden veins of California, the state that tonight will award the biggest prize in presidential primaries. And what they found in their explorations would define its politics and mold its character: boundless hopes. Unimaginable riches. Cultural diversity. And a primal affinity for new technologies.
The discovery of gold made California instantly rich. It became a magnet for migrants who hurried West - by foot in small overland parties (vulnerable to bandits, beasts, and braves), by carriage (often wrecked, along with their occupants' hopes, in raging rivers), by the sea (17,000 ships in the first year after gold fever), eventually by rail (in a journey so dusty that passengers were issued brooms). It prompted the ruthless alteration of the landscape. It celebrated the initiative of the individual - but it rewarded the efforts of the corporation.
It set in motion waves of migration, wealth-creation, and change that continue to this day and hour, shaping the state's government, politics - and voter preferences in primaries like today's. The gold rush led to the growth of a finance empire and a rail boom, which led to the endowment of an education empire, which led to the high-tech revolution. From Sutter's Mill to Silicon Valley in five generations; nothing like it has ever happened anywhere, ever.
''California uses the wealth of the last revolutionary change as the venture capital for the next revolutionary change,'' says William B. Fulton, perhaps the best-known urban planner in the state. ''What makes California different from the rest of the West is that the gold rush allowed California to be self-financing. The rest of the West depended on San Francisco, or New York, for capital.''
Western cornucopia
And California sketches the outline of the American Dream - here people speak of California Dreaming, which was a process before it was a lyric - on a canvas that is bigger, richer, gaudier than any canvas any place else. This is a state with 209 active oil fields, 4,856 commercial fishing boats, 847 wineries, and 504 working mines - mines where, geologists believe, 90 percent of the state's gold is still to be discovered.
This is a slice of land that accounts for 158,693 square miles of the American continent (room for 18 New Hampshires), a place so varied that it includes the highest mountain in the 48 contiguous states (Mount Whitney, at about 15,000 feet) and the lowest trough in the continent (Death Valley, at 276 feet below sea level). It created the first nationally accepted bank credit card, passed the first no-fault divorce law (and the first ''Right to Die'' law), was the setting for the first motion picture theater, and was the first place that the tart, alluring loganberry was cultivated.
It produces more goods and services than Canada or Russia. It is high-tech exporter to the nation, and the world. It accounts for more than a half the nation's fruits, vegetables, and nuts, including 91 percent of the grape crop and 72 percent of the lettuce crop, the raw materials of the signature California comestibles: wine and salad. It has 685 radio stations and 90 television stations. It has 34 million people - many of them high-tech workers, cool and edgy in their garage laboratories, their Silicon Valley factories, or, increasingly, in their office suites in San Francisco's Financial District - and millions more who, as Richard G. Lillard put it in ''Eden in Jeopardy,'' are the people who ''chop, trim, thin, girdle, top, stoop, bend, feel, dig, pound, cut, walk, climb, reach up and out, carry, amid heat, dust, cold, rain, mud, insects, from dawn to sundown.''
All that plus one more thing: change.
Mostly, Californians change. They alter their consciousness, and ours. They change our fashions and our workspaces. They change the way we eat (coming soon: kosher burritos), the way we drive (right-on-red started here), the way we work, the way we entertain ourselves, the way we love, the way we fight, the way we think. Isadora Duncan changed the way we dance. Jack London and John Steinbeck changed the way we read. Ronald Reagan changed the way we govern. A new development on Redondo Beach, with 15 detached homes (4 BRs, no garage) built around a rose garden on a concrete slab above a retail development, may change the way we live.
''The rest of the country is always catching up to California,'' says Leonard Pitt, a retired historian at California State University in Northridge. ''The state embraces change because there is no way to stop change here.''
Or growth. Each day the state grows by about 2,000 people, and it is not only the population that grows big; a tree that is known as the General Sherman is 275 feet tall and 103 feet around. San Diego grew more than 1,000-fold in the four decades between 1940, when it was a sleepy Navy town, and 1980, when it emerged as a power center and the base of a politician named Pete Wilson, who served as mayor, senator, and governor and whose crackdown on immigration in 1994 may one day be regarded as the pivotal political move (and most stupendous blunder) of the 20th century.
This wild growth - California grew three times faster than the rest of the nation in the 1930s and 1940s - and the huge wealth it spawned sometimes created a spiritual vacuum, filled by evangelists like Aimee Semple McPherson and Robert P. Schuller, both of whom, it is no accident, had their own radio stations. Drive around Los Angeles today and you will see the St. Vincent de Paul Roman Catholic Church, Hsi Lai Buddhist Temple, Iglesia de Dios Pentecostal Church, St. John's Episcopal Church, the Russian Orthodox Church of the Holy Virgin Mary, the Masid Omar Ibn Ackhattab mosque and the Wilshire Boulevard Temple. In the 3.06 square miles of Jefferson Park alone, there are 96 places of prayer, including 44 Pentecostal churches, two mosques, and places of worship for two new Japanese religions, one for Korean Presbyterians, and one for Rastafarians.
Everything about the state screams new, but in truth California was transformed by both world wars of the 20th century, which provided an economic jumpstart (bringing aircraft plants to Los Angeles, Santa Ana, Santa Barbara, and Burbank and planting suburbs everywhere) and an ideological shock treatment (altering decades' worth of fixed views, particularly about the world outside). A sturdy redoubt of isolationism became, as Earl Pomeroy wrote in a history of the Pacific Slope, ''staging area, training camp, all but battleground, and finally meeting place for the world.''
The face of California changes constantly in part because the faces of Californians have always changed so rapidly. Only three dozen years ago, while the rest of the nation was engaged in a civil rights revolution, Californians voted to repeal fair housing regulations. Those battles seem antiquarian in a place that already is a minority majority state; white non-Hispanics account for less than half the population. A third of California is Hispanic. Only a third of the residents of Los Angeles County are white today; by the year 2040, according to new projections by the State Department of Finance, 2 out 3 Angelenos will be Hispanics.
Many `states of consciousness'
Two generations ago the prevalent California image was of cool movie stars in sunglasses and convertibles, blond surfers on the shore, and John Wayne playing poker in the back rooms of the Balboa Bay Club. No longer. Kevin Starr, who is the state librarian and is regarded as the premier student of the state, says today's California is ''an ecumenical experiment conducted on an unprecedented level.''
Los Angeles is the third-largest Mexican city in the world, the second-largest Korean city in the world, one of the largest Armenian, Iranian, and Jewish cities anywhere. A million Filipinos live in California. Indians from the Asian subcontinent abound. As a result, Californians have what Starr calls ''multiple states of consciousness.'' Sometimes they think in two languages, sometimes more. When a Californian speaks of bilingualism, the logical response is: which two languages?
The great movements of immigrants are from Asia and Latin America, with Latin America accounting for 3 out of 5 new residents of Los Angeles. Southern California's San Gabriel Valley now is the largest suburban concentration of Chinese in the nation, accounting for 158,000 people. In 1960, only 6 percent of the residents of Huntington Park, in southeast Los Angeles County, were Latino. By 1990, the population was 92 percent Latino.
Two late-century political developments propelled Latinos into positions of power. The first was former governor Wilson's crusade against immigration, which emboldened millions of Latinos and sent hundreds of thousands to naturalization ceremonies and voter registration centers. The second was the term-limits movement, which chased entrenched lawmakers out of Sacramento and opened seats in the Assembly and Senate - and chairmanships - to people who otherwise might have tired of waiting. Today Cruz Bustamante is lieutenant governor, Antonio Villaraigosa is House speaker, Richard Polanco is Senate majority leader, and two Latinos are among the leading candidates in the mayoralty election in Los Angeles - a city Westbrook Pegler once called ''that big, sprawling, incoherent, shapeless, slobbering civic idiot in the family of American communities.''
As a trendsetter, California - which gave the nation political consultants, celebrity politicians and ''reforms'' limiting the power of lobbyists to influence legislation, the power of industry to pollute, and the power of government to tax - has played its role most dramatically in one classic American trend: impatience and disinterest in government.
Nowhere else do so many people live so far from the state capital; 20 million Californians live at least 400 miles from the elegant state house set in the leafy mall in the center of Sacramento. The state government is powerful but remote. This is a state with 52 House seats in Washington (almost certainly 53 after the 2000 census and reapportionment), but only 40 state Senate seats in Sacramento. State senators, ordinarily an intimate link between people and politics, have bigger districts than members of the US House.
Rather than a state in the traditional sense of an American political entity, California seems to be reconstituting itself as a federation of local autonomies. Though the old talk of political dissolution - Northern California, for example, breaking away from Southern California - has all but disappeared, there is a more subtle sense of psychological secessionism.
Progressive history
Even so, California has a distinct political culture, with roots in the progressive movement that brought Hiram Johnson to the fore in 1910 and brought the initiative, referendum, and recall to the state Constitution in 1911. Today, for example, Californians are voting on a ballot question to determine whether the legal word ''marriage'' should be restricted to the formal union of a man and a woman.
Over the years the state has had deep wells of conservatism, symbolized in turn by the rise of William F. Knowland, who ran the Oakland Tribune, was the voice of the right before the television era and served as a senator after World War II; by the popularization of the phrase ''little old ladies in tennis shoes,'' coined by the Democratic operative Stanley Mosk to characterize the voters who carried the GOP primary in 1964 for Barry Goldwater over Nelson A. Rockefeller; and by the emergence of two indispensable parts of the California political persona, Richard M. Nixon and Reagan.
And yet the wells of liberalism are equally deep, symbolized by Upton Sinclair's fabled 1934 gubernatorial campaign that spoke of ending poverty in California; the Free Speech movement in Berkeley in 1964 and 1965 that launched an era of student protest; the growth of flower power and the drug culture in San Francisco at the end of the 1960s; the celebration of gay life in the 1990s, and the presence, today, of two Northern California women in the Senate, Dianne Feinstein of San Francisco and Barbara Boxer of Marin County, both of whom scored 100 percent in the Americans for Democratic Action vote ratings last year.
''This is a big place and a microcosm for the nation, and so it's possible to get hippies in the streets at the same time as you have Ronald Reagan in the governor's office,'' says Fred Smoller, a political scientist at Chapman University in Orange County, the heart of the new conservative movement. ''People go to the extremes here because of a lack of stability, a lack of history. The transient nature of the place lends itself to extremes.''
But the transient nature of the place is what makes California California - a place that John Gunther, in the very first paragraph of his monumental 1947 survey of the United States, referred to as a being ''at once demented and very sane, adolescent and mature.'' The state remains the ultimate destination for the new start.
Indeed, today the import of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 isn't the disaster it wreaked but the opportunity it offered. A newspaperman, Frank Leach, said he ''saw the debris of wrecked chimney tops sailing past our bedroom windows.'' There would be new chimney tops soon, and they would be higher. That, too, is the California way. So many people responded to the lure of the new start that in the Great Depression the state Legislature actually tried to close the state's borders. It didn't work. Between 1920 and 1940, the population of California grew from 3.4 million to 6.9 million.
California dreaming deferred
Not all the fresh starts work out, of course. Lower middle class migrants often have been unable to buy a home, often are wiped out first in the boom cycles, and often feel the most threatened by new immigration, competition, and the property taxes that climb inexorably with the increase in home values. ''This part of California is always as big as the positive California Dream,'' says Philip J. Ethington, a University of Southern California historian. ''Everybody dosn't make it, and even those who make it feel uncertainty.''
That accounts for the sense of desperation that is entwined with the dream of California.
''California,'' Joan Didion wrote 35 years ago, ''is a place in which a boom mentality and sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work out here, because here, beneath that immense, bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.''
But California never runs out of ingenuity. Southern California, founded on real estate speculation and good weather, always offers something new, whether movies, the aircraft industry, or merely the sense of the new. Northern California now thrives on the newer new thing, the Internet, which is reshaping the economy and the psychic landscape of San Jose and the Silicon Valley in ways that cannot yet be calibrated.
But not so far out of memory are some of the troubling events of the 1990s - biblical curses like an earthquake, drought, floods and fires, social failures like race riots and gang warfare, political failures like the drive to purge immigrants, an economic crisis that led state revenues to fall by 40 percent. It was so bad that, in 1991, U-Haul reported that there were 10 percent more one-way rentals out of California than into the state.
''We suddenly had a sense of the tragic side of life,'' says Starr, the chronicler of the California story. ''The unbridled optimism suddenly was gone. People expect Massachusetts to be smart and colorful, but nobody expects it to be utopian. People expected California to be utopian.''
And it wasn't. The great horizons were cloudy, and not only with smog.
Yes, people still have huge hopes and they still make gobs of money. They still even put pineapple on their pizzas. But California, shaped by a gold rush, molded by Americans' dreams and the American Dream, punch drunk on optimism, is a lot more sober now. That's new, too.
