Making America, Part 3

The economic integration of the continent and the racial ordering of the West

You don’t have to read the other articles before this one, but if you’d like to, here are my essays on Making America, Parts 1 and 2.

---

America’s historical mythology has always been rooted in the northeast. In a sense that’s no surprise, as that’s where the story of the United States began. Following along this historical vector, America’s political and cultural traditions were born in Europe, transplanted to the East Coast, and then exported westward.

But in another sense it’s entirely arbitrary. It just so happened that through centuries of national evolution, the brick-and-mortar institutions at the center of elite cultural production — the brand-name universities, museums, and media companies — remained stubbornly attached to the cities along the Acela corridor, from DC to Boston. Thus, for the same reason we’re indoctrinated from birth to associate Christmas with snow, we look to the historical events of the northeastern states as the catalysts of change and development in America. The things that happened in the South and the West, we unconsciously assume, were either epiphenomena or the reflection of a transitory social stage that eventually gave way to the superior civilizing force emanating from the upper eastern seaboard.

But that’s not the only way to look at the forming of modern America. There is a more geographically expansive perspective, which envelops the continental U.S. as a whole as both the subject and object of change, and which brings into the picture the deep foreign influences of countries beyond just those in Europe.

When you consider the nineteenth century from the viewpoint of the Western states and territories — by which I mean about 60% of the contemporary American landmass — the textbook version of American history remains chronologically the same, but thematically quite different. In the West, the most consequential event in American history, the Civil War, was experienced, at the time, as an almost foreign conflict in a distant land. The U.S. government itself was, in the western mind, something of an abstraction. The lives led by American settlers in the West felt less like those of citizens than those of a kind of U.S. diaspora.

Before the development of the transcontinental railroad, it’s hard to overstate how isolated California, which was the only place in the West with a substantial non-Indian population, was from the rest of the United States. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, California was a far flung and generally neglected outpost of Mexico. By 1850, when it became a U.S. state, it was, to its American settlers, as autonomous and culturally disconnected from the urban civilization emerging on the East Coast as the American backcountry colonies had been from the English landed gentry. The fastest way to get there from the east coast was by ship, either around Cape Horn at the very bottom of the planet, or through Panama, which involved a treacherous and often deadly equatorial land crossing that by itself could take as long as a week. It was faster to get from New York to India, or from California to Australia, than it was to get from one side of the North American continent to the other.

If the Union’s victory over the Confederacy was the seminal event that changed the destiny of the United States forever, not just objectively but in the hearts and minds of Americans along the Atlantic coast from Maine to Florida, it was the discovery of gold that did so in the West. In the decade after 1848, when James Marshall noticed a few sparkling flecks of the metal on John Sutter’s ranch, California’s population exploded. “From that point on,” writes historian Elliott West, “the region would be the most culturally and ethnically mixed part of the nation.”

From Continental Reckoning, by Elliott West

The first to arrive and supplement the sparse population of Indians and Hispanic “Californios” were not Americans but Mexicans, Chileans, Peruvians, Tasmanians, and native Hawaiians. Then came the hundreds of thousands of overland gold seekers from the east along the Oregon Trail, as well as by ship from France and China. After them came the Homestead Act and the transcontinental railroad, which brought not just more Americans but also English, Germans and Scandinavians to both California and the rest of the western states and territories. By 1870, New York, the state with the highest percentage of foreign-born residents on the eastern seaboard, ranked only ninth when you factored in the West. Ahead of it were Arizona, Idaho, Nevada, Wyoming, Montana, California, Utah, and Dakota. “The percentage of immigrants in five Idaho mining towns (68.1 percent),” writes West, “was nearly twice that of Boston and Brooklyn (35.1 percent and 36.5 percent).” San Francisco had the largest per-capita foreign born population of any city in the country.

It would be a monumental mistake, however, to imagine that the West that emerged from this mass migration was a melting pot. Americans are accustomed, with good reason, to thinking of the decades following the Civil War in the former Confederacy as the period of the worst racial violence in our country’s history. It was in fact a sequel. As West writes, “events in the East after 1880 were a reprise of those in California and elsewhere in the West after the U.S.-Mexico War.”

In Gold Rush California, the principal victims were not free blacks, of whom there were but few, but Mexicans and Californios, of whom there were many. In the three decades following the discovery of gold, notes West, the rate of lynchings in California was nine times greater than that of Mississippi from 1880 to 1930. In 1854, the murder rate in Los Angeles, fueled by racial terrorism, was 56 times that of New York City. What emerged from this bloody period was a California and larger western region that was deeply multicultural, but with an uncontested ethnic pecking order. White, Anglo-Americans sat at the top of it.

This would comprise a merely regional subcategory of our national history but for the fact that the Gold Rush catalyzed the economic integration of the entire continent, just as the Civil War reconstituted the political integration of the United States. The real Gold Rush wasn’t from the miners extracting the metal from the creeks and hillsides of the western Sierras, but from the eastern merchants who set up shop in San Francisco, Sacramento and the mountain boom towns to sell those miners everything from boots to chocolates at obscenely inflated prices paid for in gold dust. Gold seekers in California produced little for themselves and consumed vast quantities of food, equipment, alcohol and sex, nearly all of it imported from the east. Then, as placer mining depleted the sources of gold on the earth’s surface, it was replaced by hydraulic mining, which blasted it out of mountains with industrial power hoses. With this shift, labor was displaced by capital. Instead of unskilled workers from around the world, the new mining companies needed huge, expensive machines and the means to finance them, along with the legal basis for exploiting claims, whether found or stolen. Thus emerged the legal and financial services industries of San Francisco that thrive to this day.

With the northeast as the first person narrator of our country’s history, we tend to think of America’s internationalist character as a secondary cultural layer that was placed, especially during the turn-of-the-century wave of migration through Ellis Island, atop a political foundation that is fundamentally Anglo-Saxon. And from that perspective it is not inaccurate. But from the western perspective, which begins at a later date in our history, American internationalism is baked into the dough. From this vantage point, the ancestral nationalism of the New Right feels far less intuitive. Indeed, it feels like a foreign import. In the West, immigration and multiculturalism is not something that happened to us. It is what America has always been.