California Quotes

“Wilde stepped off the train in Oakland wearing a Spanish sombrero, a velvet suit, a puce cravat, yellow gloves, and buckled shoes, and wended his way across the bay to the Bohemian Club, where he is reported to have drunk his hosts under the table.”
― Kevin Starr, California: A History

“There has always been something slightly bipolar about California. It was either utopia or dystopia, a dream or a nightmare, a hope or a broken promise— and too infrequently anything in between.”
― Kevin Starr, California: A History

“Thus a pattern of migratory labor grew up in California—starting with the wheat ranches—in which large numbers of migrant workers would converge on an area at harvesttime, perform the work, then move on to another crop. It was a world of single men, bunking in barracks while on the job, then shoving off, their belongings and bedrolls slung across their shoulders. Photographs from the 1880s and 1890s reveal these men to be predominantly whites and Chinese. Photographs from the early 1900s show that Japanese and East Indian workers were now in the fields. Photographs from the 1920s show even further diversification: Filipinos, especially on the Monterey Peninsula; African Americans in the southern San Joaquin; Mexicans throughout Southern California, including the newly irrigated Imperial Valley.”
― Kevin Starr, California: A History

“By 1870, San Francisco, with a population of 149,473, was the tenth largest city in the United States, a remarkable development for a city that did not formally exist in 1846.”
― Kevin Starr, California: A History

“But the real impetus behind dividing California came from the fact that the state was truly two, and perhaps even four, distinct places: the urbanizing Bay Area and the mining districts; the Far North (one breakaway effort had called for the creation of the state of Shasta in that region); the Central Valley; and a sparsely settled Southern California, significantly Mexican, where ranch life and agriculture predominated.”
― Kevin Starr, California: A History

“Between September 1850 and September 1851, the homicide rate in the city of Los Angeles and its suburbs spiked off the graph at 1,240 per 100,000, which remains the all-time high homicide rate in the annals of American murder. If California ever had anything resembling the Wild West—meaning cowboys and shoot-outs—it was Los Angeles County in the early 1850s; until, that is, the formation in 1853 of the Los Angeles Rangers, a permanent posse that would in the course of one year capture and execute more than twenty alleged miscreants.”
― Kevin Starr, California: A History

“San Francisco averaged a homicide rate of 49 per 100,000 between 1849 and 1856, six times the 1997 homicide rate”
― Kevin Starr, California: A History

“All told, some $594 million in ingots—the equivalent of $10 billion in 2001 dollars—would over the course of the next decade be leaving the goldfields of California for the eastern United States.”
― Kevin Starr, California: A History

“The gold of California was not under private ownership. It belonged to everyone, provided one could find it, lay legal claim to it, extract it, and get it safely to one or the other of the many assay centers that were now springing up where nuggets could be weighed, valued, and melted into ingots for shipment to San Francisco and New York.”
― Kevin Starr, California: A History

“Had the mission system proved successful—and by the 1830s it had had more than sixty years to do so—a steady stream of Hispanicized Native Americans should long since have been transferring into the civil population of California. This never happened. Either the Indians died off, or they became permanently missionized (which is to say, wards of the Franciscans), or they fled into the interior. Mission culture remained volatile”
― Kevin Starr, California: A History

“Native Americans considered the grizzly another kind of human being, a creature from the mythic past, a survivor from the dawn of creation.”
― Kevin Starr, California: A History

“These trees (Sequoia sempervirens) and their first cousins (Sequoiandendron giganteum), flourishing in some thirty-five groves in the Sierra foothills, were the most ancient living entities on the planet, some of them four thousand years old.”
― Kevin Starr, California: A History

“(completed in 1952) in Menlo Park, and this imprimatur had great effect, for Sunset was playing an important role in defining the design and lifestyle of postwar suburban California. Nevertheless, modernism—as represented by the works of Gardner Dailey and Joe Esherick— continued to characterize high-end architecture in California through the rest of the century.”
― Kevin Starr, California: A History

“California, Royce noted, was a promise, but it was also a struggle for redemption in the face of failure.”
― Kevin Starr, California: A History

“The world was still rushing in—legally and illegally, as it turned out—not to escape reality in California, to bask in the unearned increment, but to struggle competitively in a society that had only recently begun to internalize in its myth of itself what the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno called the tragic sense of life.”
― Kevin Starr, California: A History

“Disneyland is a text through which we can look back and reexperience the hopes and fears, the beliefs and illusions, of a postwar generation in the throes of creating the place we know as suburban Southern California.”
― Kevin Starr, California: A History

“What would they find? A better life? Or the same dreary, grinding poverty that had motivated their immigration in the first place?”
― Kevin Starr, California: A History

“What kind of world would this postrailroad era be for California, now that it was less than a week’s journey from the East Coast?”
― Kevin Starr, California: A History

“Already the respective roles of the Big Four had asserted themselves. Huntington would take care of lobbying in Washington, Stanford would see to the state government, Crocker would supervise construction, and Mark Hopkins would keep the books. Increasingly, Theodore Judah, the chief engineer of the Central Pacific, was finding himself odd man out as his four associates squeezed and resqueezed the project for every penny it was worth. When the Big Four awarded the construction contract to a dummy corporation which they owned, Judah bowed out with a $100,000 payment and an option to buy the company back for $400,000, if he could raise the money in the East. Sailing in October 1863 for New York, where he hoped to raise money from Cornelius Vanderbilt, Judah contracted typhoid fever crossing the Isthmus of Panama and died in New York, four months short of age thirty-eight, and a mere four days after the first rails had been laid in Sacramento.”
― Kevin Starr, California: A History

“Raising a mere $15,800 in cash, the Big Four, as history would know them, formed an enterprise that over the next decades would earn them $200 million in profits.”
― Kevin Starr, California: A History

“Incorporated in June 1861, the Central Pacific Railroad of California was the result of conversations that had begun a year and a half earlier between Judah and four Sacramento businessmen: Collis P. Huntington and his partner Mark Hopkins (hardware), Leland Stanford (groceries), and Charles Crocker (dry goods).”
― Kevin Starr, California: A History

“the murder rate in the mines was horrendous—an annual rate of 506.6 homicides per 100,000 population in Sonora, for example, in 1850–51, which is fifty times the national homicide rate of 1999.”
― Kevin Starr, California: A History

“This interpretation of the Gold Rush as a fun-filled and affirmative adventure survived through numerous celebrations, including the 1949 centennial. It lingered in the movies (Gabby Hayes playing the comic prospector) and continues to sustain the ongoing revelry of a flourishing antiquarian drinking fraternity, the Ancient Order of E Clampus Vitus, founded in 1857 and revitalized in 1931 by historian Carl Wheat, which places plaques at historic Gold Rush sites before adjourning to a nearby saloon.”
― Kevin Starr, California: A History

“Such a hope, such a psychology of expectation, fused the California experience irretrievably onto a dream of better days: of a sudden, almost magical, transformation of the ordinary. Ironically, such an expectation was also reprising the dreams of the Spanish conquistadores, explorers, and maritime adventurers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Spanish quest for El Dorado was now being Americanized with its psychological and mythic hold as powerful as ever.”
― Kevin Starr, California: A History

“Theirs was, rather, a more narrowly focused life, anchored in and structured by Franciscan piety and the immediate challenges of missionary life. Some of these missionaries were, by the standards of any age, admirable men. Others were narrow-minded, even bigoted, regarding Native Americans as little more than children. All of them were leading lonely, isolated lives in a frequently forgotten place.”
― Kevin Starr, California: A History

“From the beginning, American California was caught in a paradox of reverent awe and exploitative use.”
― Kevin Starr, California: A History