A Trip Into the State’s Rowdy Past

With great pageantry, the California Legislature of $1,000-a-plate fund-raisers revisited its ornery origins as the “Legislature of a thousand drinks” Wednesday during a ceremonial session in this onetime state capital.

Trading hokey barbs and generally acting like schoolchildren on a class trip, lawmakers traveled by the busload from Sacramento to Benicia. The tiny waterfront town northeast of San Francisco served as the seat of California government for just 12 months in 1853 and 1854.

Inside the stone masonry Benicia Clocktower, a former U.S. arsenal, and at the wood and brick Benicia Capitol, the current lawmakers celebrated the state’s 150th anniversary and listened as historians regaled them with tales of legislative acts good and bad.

California’s first Legislature, which included six Latinos, immediately gave women the right to own property, something other states took decades to do. However, it also gave men the right to own Indians as slaves, an ugly blot on the record of an otherwise free state.

“You should celebrate your history, even when it doesn’t always paint a rosy picture,” said Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa (D-Los Angeles). “Clearly, the history of California is a history of incongruities.”

No serious business took place Wednesday. But the lower house met upstairs while the upper house met downstairs, as was the custom in the Benicia Capitol. And a group of female legislators, dressed in lacy period gowns, staged a fake women’s suffrage protest on the steps outside, chanting, “We want the vote!” as audience plants suggested that they return to the kitchen.

“When you serve in the Legislature, you should never assume that the way things are is the way they have always been,” said Assemblywoman Sheila Kuehl (D-Santa Monica), sporting a rawhide vest to impersonate “Stagecoach Charlie,” a woman who dressed up as a man to cast a ballot. “It wasn’t too long ago that there were no women in the Legislature.”

In a way, the day’s lack of judiciousness was fitting. California’s first Legislature, plagued by chronic absenteeism, was a rowdy lot of saloon-frequenting characters who bristled with weapons and carved their desks so much that they covered the floor with wood shavings.

Immortalized as the “Legislature of a thousand drinks” after a wealthy member who plied his cohorts with booze to smooth the way for pet votes, it included a convicted murderer and a man who threatened colleagues with a bowie knife during debates.

“These were rough and ready legislators to be sure,” said state Librarian Kevin Starr.

Today’s lawmakers embraced the Benicia opportunity to engage in political slapstick.

Pointing out that the original Legislature--all Democrats and Whigs--contained no Republicans, Villaraigosa remarked that his precursors had been “unusually enlightened.” Assembly Republican Leader Scott Baugh of Huntington Beach retorted that even at that time, Assemblyman Tom McClintock (R-Northridge) had been “calling for the elimination of the horse and buggy tax,” a reference to McClintock’s endless crusade to eliminate the car registration fee.

But it was John Burton, the state Senate’s irreverent president pro tem, whose wit cut the deepest. To howls of laughter, he slammed Gov. Gray Davis, who did not take part in the celebration, suggesting that “King Davis” had not attended because the old buildings lacked room for his royal entourage of trumpeters.