State’s 150th Birthday No Different From 149th

There was wild celebration in the streets when news of California’s statehood reached San Francisco in 1850.

There was a six-hour parade, a 42-foot-high birthday cake and five days of Hollywood Bowl pageantry when California celebrated its centennial.

Saturday, when California turns 150, there will be scattered local observances and living-history encampments on the Capitol grounds in Sacramento. The U.S. Postal Service is issuing a commemorative stamp.

And that’s about it.

Blame it on political lethargy, the unruly sprawl of California, the state’s indifference to yesterday: The sesquicentennial has pretty much been a bust.

The big state with an even bigger ego, the place that has left its cultural handprints all over the globe, couldn’t manage a decent birthday bash.

“I’m so disappointed over what we did not do,” said Peter Blodgett, a history curator at the Huntington Library in Pasadena.

It can be argued, of course, that to largely ignore such a milestone is sooo very West Coast. Let them fuss over history back East. Here, in the birthplace of virtual reality, the moment reigns.

It did from the beginning.

The state’s birth was swift and premature, induced more by the opportunism of the Gold Rush than idealism.

California was a vast piece of sparsely settled real estate snatched from Mexico when the 1848 discovery of gold lured tens of thousands of fortune seekers into its hills.

Young men came from Chile and China, Mexico and Massachusetts, from France and Ireland.

They weren’t settlers. They didn’t bring their wives. They weren’t planning on staying. They wanted to scoop up gold and go back home. There was ethnic brawling and lawlessness in the mining camps.

Not even a territory, California was governed by the U.S. military--something the Americans pouring into the gold fields did not like. There was agitation for self-rule.

So, in 1849 the military governor called a constitutional convention in Monterey. Forty-eight men gathered for six weeks to draw up the blueprint for a new state.

Six were native-born Californians; most of the rest were citizens of the United States. Debates were held in English and Spanish. Inexperienced in such matters, the delegates borrowed heavily from other state constitutions.

They argued about boundaries, slavery and suffrage. Their decisions shaped not only California, but the rest of the nation.

In choosing to be a free state, California poured fuel on the slavery debate that would within a decade rip the country apart.

In choosing to confine the vote to adult white males--but at the same time stipulating that state documents and laws be printed in English and Spanish--the Constitution’s authors demonstrated an ambivalence about the state’s ethnic mix that continues to this day.

Indeed, Blodgett suggests that one of the things that undermined this year’s sesquicentennial celebration was uncertainty about how to celebrate an event that had less than wonderful consequences for many groups.

During the early decades of statehood, californios were trampled on, Native Americans decimated, nonwhite immigrants disenfranchised.

Today there is a sensitivity to that complexity that did not exist 50 years ago, when the state population was much whiter, fraternal organizations stronger and world views simpler.

To mark the 1950 centennial, 125,000 Southern Californians crowded into the Hollywood Bowl over five consecutive nights to hear actor Lionel Barrymore narrate what the Los Angeles Times called a “monumental spectacle that captured the majestic sweep of history.”

In San Francisco, about 300,000 people turned out for a centennial parade of 75 floats, nearly 100 marching units and 28 bands. At the city’s civic center, a huge birthday cake was lit with 100 candles.

This time around, neither San Francisco nor Los Angeles planned any observance for Saturday, the 150th anniversary of California’s admission to the Union.

The state sesquicentennial celebration, originally conceived as three years of grand events to commemorate the discovery of gold, the 1849 Gold Rush and 1850 statehood, turned out more like a homemade video than the big Hollywood production envisioned.

A tall ships race last summer attracted about a third of the boats planners once predicted. Funding for major activities failed to materialize amid political squabbling and lack of interest that continued from the administration of Gov. Pete Wilson into that of Gray Davis.

“We always found Sacramento very uncooperative from the very beginning,” said John M.W. Moorlach, Orange County treasurer and a member of the sesquicentennial’s fund-raising foundation.

There was even a last-minute scramble for money to pay for this weekend’s historical fair in Sacramento.

The director of the state Department of Parks and Recreation--which organized the event with a private group, the Native Sons of the Golden West--was lobbying for $895,000 in state appropriations into the final hours of the Legislature’s session last week. The funding was approved just before adjournment.

“We don’t celebrate too much out here, do we?” said Doyce Nunis, distinguished professor emeritus of history at USC. “Maybe we’re too laid-back.”

To a degree this has always been true. Though San Franciscans festively greeted reports that President Millard Fillmore declared California the 31st state on Sept. 9, 1850, the vote 10 months before by Californians to approve a state Constitution and send it to Congress drew a relatively paltry turnout of 13,000 voters.

“It started out people were only concerned about themselves,” Nunis said. “We still have low voter turnouts.”

Even the decision to make California a free state, he said, was motivated more by self-interest than altruism. The miners and rancheros did not want competition from slave labor.

There are other contemporary echoes of early California, particularly the rise in foreign-born residents. Today about one in four Californians was born outside the United States, a proportion closer to that seen in 1850 than in 1950.

“We’re going back to what we were,” Nunis said.

That mix is perhaps a factor in the state’s inability to do much about its 150th anniversary, some believe. There is no unifying, monolithic California identity. The blond beach girl image is these days more a fiction of “Baywatch” than a reflection of reality.

But however conflicted California’s sense of self may be, there is much to commemorate, Blodgett said.

The Gold Rush was a defining moment in the nation’s history, a remarkable, virtually overnight influx of people from every quarter of the world.

It gave birth to a state perpetually poised to take advantage of the moment. California had ample sunshine when the movie industry needed it, oil when the automobile age devoured it, vast farm acreage when the country’s population exploded, and the brainpower to engineer a computer revolution.

It became the repository for the nation’s dreams and nightmares, a place that embodies the extremes of the American experience, both wonderful and horrible.

“I think the biggest frustration that I and fellow board members experienced was that we were doing this out of love and passion,” said Stockton attorney Donald Geiger, president of the Sesquicentennial Foundation.

“We wish [the sesquicentennial] had gone better for everybody in the state. But it didn’t. So you just need to pick up and go on.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

California Landmarks

One hundred and fifty years after it was admitted to the United States, California is studded with landmarks--from Spanish missions to gold mines to water routes--reflecting a ceaseless pursuit of growth.

*

State flower: California poppy

State animal: California grizzly bear (extinct since 1920s)

State motto: Eureka (I have found it)

State tree: California redwood

State bird: California valley quail

*

Population

1850: 93,000

1900: 1,485,0001950: 10,586,000

1999: 33,145,121

*

Sources: “The California Missions,” Sunset Books; “Peace of Mind in Earthquake Country”; “California, A History”; California Statistical Abstract, 1999; Information Please Almanac; U.S. Census Bureau; California Dept. of Conservation, Division of Mines and Geology; U.S. Department of Agriculture; “Historical Statistics of the United States.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

150 and Counting Some major events that have helped shape California history:

1848 James Marshall discovers gold on the banks of the American River at Coloma.

1850 California is the 31st state admitted to the Union.

1852 Peace treaties are signed between California Indians and the federal government, but are never ratified.

1856 The Sacramento Valley Railroad, the first railroad in California, is opened, with Sacramento and Folsom as its terminals.

1860 Pony Express begins mail delivery, from Missouri to Sacramento.

1864 Yosemite Valley set aside as a public trust.

1868 University of California chartered.

* John Muir, pioneer of the U.S. conservation movement, arrives in California.

1870 Golden Gate Park founded in San Francisco.

1872 California Stock Exchange Board is organized.

1876 The railroad line linking San Francisco to Los Angeles is completed.

1878 Frenchman Paul Masson settles in California and later establishes vineyards and winery.

1879 A new California Constitution is ratified.

1880 University of Southern California opens.

1886 State Normal School, forerunner of UCLA, founded in Los Angeles.

1890 First Tournament of Roses in Pasadena.

* Congress passes laws establishing Yosemite, Sequoia and General Grant (later Kings Canyon) national parks.

1891 Leland Stanford Jr. University opens.

* Throop University founded. Later renamed Throop Polytechnic Institute and then the California Institute of Technology in 1920.

1892 Sierra Club founded.

1905 Salton Sea is created when the Colorado River breaks through dikes and sends its entire flow into a salt sink.

1906 San Francisco earthquake and Great Fire.

1907 “In the Sultan’s Power,” the first dramatic film ever made entirely in Los Angeles.

1911 Bear flag adopted as state flag.

1913 Los Angeles Aqueduct completed from the Owens River to Los Angeles.

1928 First frog jump contest at the Calaveras County Fair and Jumping Frog Jubilee.

1932 Los Angeles hosts the Olympic Games.

* Largest recorded wildfire in the state burns 220,000 acres in Ventura County.

1933 Construction begins on the Golden Gate Bridge.

* Long Beach earthquake kills 115 people.

1936 San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge opens.

1942 Executive Order 9066 allows the relocation of Japanese Americans to internment camps.

1950 Earl Warren elected California governor for an unprecedented third term.

1953 California redwood is designated the state tree; grizzly bear named official state animal.

1955 Disneyland opens.

1958 Brooklyn Dodgers move to Los Angeles and the New York Giants to San Francisco.

1964 UC Berkeley Free Speech Movement.

1965 Watts riots.

1966 Cesar Chavez forms the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee, leads march from Delano to Sacramento.

1966 Black Panther Party formed in Oakland.

1967 Ronald Reagan sworn in as governor.

* “Summer of Love”

1968 Robert Kennedy assassinated at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.

1969 Oil spill off Santa Barbara sparks opposition to oil drilling and prompts

the state’s environmental movement.

* Followers of Charles Manson commit the Tate/La Bianca murders.

1971 Sylmar earthquake kills 58 people.

1973 Tom Bradley elected first black mayor of Los Angeles.

1974 Symbionese Liberation Army kidnaps Patricia Hearst.

1975 Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme attempts to kill President Gerald Ford in Sacramento’s Capitol Park.

1977 Rose Bird appointed California chief justice--first female justice on state Supreme Court.

1978 California voters approve Proposition 13, slashing property taxes.

1980 Willie Brown becomes first black speaker of the Assembly.

1981 Aerial spraying of pesticides used to stop spread of Mediterranean fruit fly.

1984 Olympic Games held in Los Angeles.

1989 Loma Prieta earthquake causes collapse of the Nimitz Freeway and part of the Bay Bridge.

1991 Oakland hills fire kills 25 people, destroys 3,000 structures.

1992 Los Angeles erupts in riots after police officers in Rodney King beating are acquitted.

1994 Northridge earthquake kills 57 people.

2000 U.S. Census reports new estimates showing that whites now make up less than half of California’s population.

Compiled by MALOY MOORE / Los Angeles Times

Sources: Times archives, Encyclopedia of California, Facts About the States, California Dept. of Forestry, “From Wilderness to Empire: A History of California,” by Robert Glass Cleland and Glenn S. Dumke, San Francisco fire photo courtesy of the Associated Press

Statehood Events

To mark the 150th anniversary of California’s statehood, free screenings of the IMAX Theater film “Adventures in Wild California” are being offered around the state Saturday. The film highlights the characters, places and events of the state’s history. Theaters in Southern California providing screenings about every hour:

Los Angeles

California Science Center IMAX Theater, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. (213) 744-7400

Santa Clarita

Edwards IMAX Theater, 10 a.m. to 9:40 p.m.(888) 332-4629

Ontario

Edwards IMAX Theater, 10 a.m. to 9:40 p.m. (888) 332-4629

Irvine

Edwards IMAX Theater at Irvine Spectrum, 10 a.m. to 9:40 p.m. (888) 332-4629

San Diego

Reuben H. Fleet Science Center IMAX Theater, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., (619) 238-1233

In addition, there will be three days of events and entertainment starting today at State Capitol Park in Sacramento. Proceedings will begin with a ceremony at 11:50 a.m. today at the Capitol that Gov. Davis will attend. For event information, call (888) 831-8585.

Source: Governor’s office