In the age of the movies and television, it's probably difficult to understand that there was a time when the cultural commentators of the nation took it very much for granted that American culture originated in the East and was taken West by steamboat and stagecoach and clipper ship and transcontinental railroad. If anyone brought culture to the East Coast, it was European immigrants and travelers. So it is probably a surprise to that notion that as early as 1880, one of the arbiters of that culture had been born in Grass Valley and educated in California. In fact, Harvard University recruited him from the just founded University of California at Berkeley to fill in for William James who was taking 1882-1883 as a sabbatical year; Royce moved his family East and spent the next three decades in the Philosophy Department at Harvard.
William James and Josiah Royce at Chocorua, New Hampshire, 1910, photograph taken by James's daughter, Margaret Mary James.
Royce is best known as a philosopher:
Josiah Royce (1855–1916) was the leading American proponent of absolute idealism, the metaphysical view (also maintained by G. W. F. Hegel and F. H. Bradley) that all aspects of reality, including those we experience as disconnected or contradictory, are ultimately unified in the thought of a single all-encompassing consciousness. Royce also made original contributions in ethics, philosophy of community, philosophy of religion and logic. His major works include The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885), The World and the Individual (1899–1901), The Philosophy of Loyalty (1908), and The Problem of Christianity (1913). Royce's friendly but longstanding dispute with William James, known as “The Battle of the Absolute,” deeply influenced both philosophers' thought. In his later works, Royce reconceived his metaphysics as an “absolute pragmatism” grounded in semiotics.
We're more concerned with two other books he wrote:
California from the Conquest in 1846 to the Second Vigilance Committee in San Francisco [1856]: A Study of the American Character (1886), Boston: Houghton Mifflin; and
Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems (1908), New York: Macmillan. Yes, the first book is indeed the first academic history of California. Royce argued in the book that the conquest of California was the original sin of American history in California, because what was taken by force (as a consequence of the Mexican war and a few battles) was on the verge of being peaceably surrendered. His starting point, 1846, represents the Bear Flag Revolt in Sonoma County, in which,
according to the History Channel,
a small group of American settlers in California rebelled against the Mexican government and proclaimed California an independent republic. The republic was short-lived because soon after the Bear Flag was raised, the U.S. military began occupying California, which went on to join the union in 1850. The Bear Flag became the official state flag in 1911.
Here's the original Bear Flag:
Remarkable story. This is an 1890 photograph of the Flag as it was shown at the San Francisco Historical Society. The flag was destroyed by fire in the 1906 Earthquake. Some critics say the bear looks like a pig.
And here's the 1911 flag:
The legislature that gave us this is the same legislature that gave us initiative, referendum and recall. Thanks a lot.
But I digress. The Vigilance Committees (strictly local to San Francisco) are interesting. The First Committee (1851) was organized to reduce crime in the city, as people took the punishment of criminals into their own hands with a number of lynchings. Here's the History Channel again on the Second Committee:
In 1856, a rigged election put an Irish-Catholic politician named James P. Casey on the city board of supervisors. James King, a crusading editor of the Daily Evening Bulletin, accused Casey of being involved in criminal activity in the city. On May 14, 1856, Casey confronted King in the street and fatally wounded him with a Colt navy revolver.
The next day, angry San Franciscans created the second vigilance committee. This time, however, they could not claim that the city government was not enforcing the law--the sheriff had already arrested Casey and put him in the county jail pending trial. Acting more like a raging mob than an instrument of justice, 500 vigilantes surrounded the county jail and removed Casey from the sheriff's custody on May 18. After a short but reasonably fair trial, they hanged him.
Some historians have argued that the second vigilance committee was less interested in suppressing crime than in attacking its political enemies. Casey's election signaled a shift in power to the dominant faction of recently immigrated Irish-Catholic Democrats. The vigilantes, who were largely native-born Protestants, reasserted their control by arresting and exiling their political opponents from the city. As before, they hanged
So that's the scope of Royce's history. Kevin Starr is MUCH more interested in the second book,
Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems because one of the chapters in it is titled "The Pacific Coast: A Psychological Study of the Relations of Climate and Civilization." In the chapter we read this week, Starr argues that California
was in the process of fostering a Higher Provincial version of American civilization that promoted simultaneously an independence of mind, individualism and open simplicity of manner (snip) together with a mild and nurturing climate.
This, Starr observes, made California, for Royce, a prism through which to observe the larger American identity. And here Royce constructed a meme that has been picked up by other observers of California but usually by observers from the inside. The most celebrated statement along these lines was made by the poet and critic Wallace Stegner in a 1967 issue of the
Saturday Review of Literature:
If the history of America is the history of an established culture painfully adapting itself to a new environment, and being constantly checked, confused, challenged, or overcome by new immigrations, then the history of California is American history in extremis.
Or, even more simply, What America is, California is, in spades. And that's because of the Gold Rush!
So that's what Royce brought to the party. This was constructed the way I find myself forced to construct my lectures for each class period of my California History and Western Civ courses at this point: a lot of block quotes from easy to access sources. The difference is that I did more editing of the sources I pasted in for this diary ; in the classroom, I edit on the fly. I'm afraid that this will be my last history diary for quite a while too, as I realized on Wednesday night and early Thursday morning, every class period in these courses takes between 4 and 5 hours to put together, and that's 20 hours a week. I should be writing my California History classes for next week tonight, but I'm doing this instead. I can't do that any more, so I'm putting this series on hiatus until January. You'll still have the full scope of California History, though, because I'll be teaching it again in the spring semester.