In ‘Golden State,’ Michael Hiltzik examines California’s history and influence ...Middle East

As Michael Hiltzik considered writing a new chronicle of California, he examined the region’s past five centuries in search of a fresh perspective.

“I pitched it as a look at what California had taught the world and the rest of the nation and why it remains such a focus of attention and curiosity around the world,” he says on a recent phone call from his home in Seal Beach.

“It had been probably 20 years since the last major one-volume history of California,” Hiltzik says. “I thought that was enough time to allow a brand-new approach.”

“Golden State: The Making of California,” which arrived in stores in February, tells the story of the state from the first European contact in 1542 to the present. Its four parts divide 24 chapters into roughly chronological eras.

Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir at Yosemite’s Glacier Point in May 1903. Despite spending three companionable days touring Yosemite, Roosevelt ended up disappointing Muir by allowing the flooding of the neighboring Hetch Hetchy Valley for a reservoir. (Photo courtesy of National Park Service)

“Golden State: The Making of California” is author Michael Hiltzik’s new history of California over the past five centuries. (Book jacket courtesy of Mariner Books)

The California Republic, or Bear Flag was raised by American rebels over the then Mexican-held town of Sonoma during the Bear Flag Revolt in 1846. Designed by William L. Todd and executed with red paint or berry juice, it bore crude versions of all the elements that remain part of the state flag today. (Image courtesy of California State Library)

“Golden State: The Making of California” is author Michael Hiltzik’s new history of California over the past five centuries. (Author photo by Amy Myers)

A panorama of San Francisco after the earthquake and fires in April 1906. (Photo courtesy of California State Library)

John Charles Frémont was an explorer, soldier and adventurer who involved himself in conflicts between settlers and Mexican Californians prior to the Mexican War. After statehood, he briefly served as one of California’s first two U.S. senators. (Photo courtesy of California State Library)

The first water from the Owens Valley arrives in Los Angeles on Nov. 5, 1913. (Photo courtesy of California State Library)

This 1562 map of the western hemisphere, attributed to the Spanish cartographer Diego Gutiérrez, is thought to be among the first on which the name California appears, attached to a cape at the very southern tip of Baja California. (Image courtesy of the Library of Congress)

James Marshall stands in front of Sutter’s Mill in Coloma where he discovered gold in 1848, triggering the Gold Rush of 1849. (Photo courtesy of Library of Congress)

Union Pacific Railroad owner Edward H. Harriman purchased the Southern Pacific Railroad after the last of its original four founders died and by doing so consolidated his control over railroads in California at the end of the 1890s and into the first decade of the next century. (Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Cigar heir Abbot Kinney dredged canals and imported gondolas to create his “Venice of America” on the Southern California coast in 1905. But by 1925 most of the canals had been filled in. (Image courtesy of Walter von Boltenstern Postcard Collection, Loyola Marymount University)

Wartime hysteria led to the involuntary internment of 110,000 Californians of Japanese descent. The U.S. Army sent them to concentration camps such as Manzanar in the Sierra foothills, the subject of this photograph by Ansel Adams. (Photo courtesy of Library of Congress)

One of many contemporary maps, based on an original by French cartographer Nicolas Sanson in 1650, that depicts California as an island, an error that persisted for more than a century after Spanish explorations proved it wrong. (Image courtesy of Library of Congress)

The Los Angeles Air Meet of 1910 brought 200,000 spectators to Southern California to see aviators from all over the world display their aircraft, seen here in a composite photo by C. C. Pierce. The meet helped California become a leader in the early aeronautics industry. (Photo courtesy of the C. C. Pierce Collection of Photographs, the Huntington Library, San Marino, California)

Collis P. Huntington was one of the four California railroad executives who built the westernmost miles of the transcontinental railroad and founded the Central Pacific Railroad. (Photo courtesy of Library of Congress)

Collis Huntington and Mark Hopkins sold supplies to 49ers as the Gold Rush prospectors were known from this general store in Sacramento, earning the seed money for their investment in the Central Pacific Railroad. (Photo courtesy of Library of Congress)

Charles Crocker was one of the four California railroad executives who built the westernmost miles of the transcontinental railroad and founded the Central Pacific Railroad. (Photo courtesy of California State Library)

Harper’s Weekly, lamenting in 1877 that American Indians were so often depicted scalping, stealing, or hunting, published this sketch by illustrator Paul Frenzeny of a family of Mission Indians in the San Diego area as an exception to the rule. (Image courtesy of Harper’s Weekly, Oct. 20, 1877)

Hop pickers in the Central Valley, led by the Wobblies, went on strike in 1913, launching an era of labor unrest in the burgeoning agricultural region. (Photo courtesy of the Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University)

“Golden State: The Making of California” is author Michael Hiltzik’s new history of California over the past five centuries. (Book jacket courtesy of Mariner Books, author photo by Amy Myers)

Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir at Yosemite’s Glacier Point in May 1903. Despite spending three companionable days touring Yosemite, Roosevelt ended up disappointing Muir by allowing the flooding of the neighboring Hetch Hetchy Valley for a reservoir. (Photo courtesy of National Park Service)

The book opens with the Spanish conquistadors, the Gold Rush, statehood, the era of railroad barons and the early battles over land and water. Its second half includes the rise of Los Angeles and Hollywood, the incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII and the post-war boom. It ends with chapters that cover the ’60s under governors Pat Brown and Ronald Reagan and later crises of racial strife, environmental disaster, and rampant growth.

It’s a remarkable journey through the people, places and events that shaped California, and it underscores the premise of his original pitch: California has kept its place in the popular imagination more consistently than almost anywhere else.

“There’s been this fascination with California even before it was known as California,” says Hiltzik, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and columnist for the Los Angeles Times and author of seven other non-fiction books. “The conquistadors were looking for gold and the passage (to Asia), for the straits of Anián and beyond, as they called it.

“The quest for riches – for wealth – motivated a lot of interest in California in that era,” he says. “And then the fact that it always seemed to be a place apart. A place with great natural beauty, natural wealth.

“It seemed to fascinate outsiders, really, from the 1500s or 1600s right on to the present day.”

The Gold Rush and the completion of the transcontinental railroad, natural beauties such as Yosemite, the rise of the Hollywood dream factories, fruitful agricultural bounties, and the inventive entrepreneurship that led to the birth of Silicon Valley all get their moments in the pages of “Golden State.”

“There were different aspects of California that attracted people from outside of different eras,” Hiltzik says. “But there was always something, and I think there always will be.”

In an interview edited for clarity and length, Hiltzik touched on a variety of topics including the vivid historic personages he encountered in his research, the ways in which California has influenced the nation in ways both positive and negative, and what he thinks about the state’s ability to keep its role in the world’s imagination going forward.

Q: Let’s start with how you decided to do a book on the history of California – not a particularly small topic.

A: Three of my previous books were California-oriented. I’m thinking of Xerox PARC and the beginning of Silicon Valley. My book about Hoover Dam. The dam is on the border between Nevada and Arizona, but it was very much a California (project). And then I wrote about Ernest Lawrence and his remaking of physics at Berkeley.

Q: Starting with that base of knowledge, how did you go about researching the histories that were not part of those books? And where did you go to find it?

A: UC Irvine was sort of my research home for several of my books, because as a resident of Orange County, or resident of California, I could pay for the rights to take books out. And the library at UCI is so good it was rare that I would go looking for something and couldn’t find it. I have friends at the Huntington Library and they were a big help. The Bancroft (Library at University of California, Berkeley) I knew well because Ernest Lawrence’s papers are there.

Then, you know, Kevin Starr‘s books and Carey McWilliams’ books were sort of guideposts to me. As I came to decide on the episodes and the characters I wanted to delve into, I could go to them and use them as sort of tip sheets. I would spend more time with the bibliographies than sometimes the text itself.

So one thing leads to another. I’d start with some archival research and I would find mentions of other things and seek them out. Every book has its own challenges and problems to solve, and in this one, the challenge was being able to fit everything I wanted to write about in the space that the publishers limited me to. I gave them more than they contracted for, but happily almost everything stayed in.

Q: I loved reading the voices of real people quoted from letters, diaries and contemporaneous newspaper accounts. What’s it like to be deep in the history and hear those voices from 100, 150, 175 years or more ago?

A: It brought me into, as you glean, sort of a personal relationship with some of these characters. Some were really entertaining. Some were just instructive. You could get a feel for the conflicts that they were living through within their lives.

I had access through archival books and secondary sources that would reprint primary sources. There’s a really great book that was sort of a compendium of primary materials from the Spanish era, the conquistador era, the Mexican era.

There were any number of memoirs. John Fremont [a U.S. Army officer, explorer, and one of California’s first U.S. senators after statehood] wrote a memoir, and though it’s not always the most trustworthy, his voice is very strong.

Many of those who were in conflict with him wrote their own memoirs as counterpoints to how he had described his role in basically achieving, as he put it, the independence of California. Then some other figures who thought they were the masters of bringing California independence wrote their own memoirs to say, “No, it was me. It wasn’t Fremont.”

I should say, too, that [early California historian Hubert Howe] Bancroft himself, his history of California runs to seven volumes. There’s been sort of a revisionist view of Bancroft, but he basically notated everything that he used, and that was a great source. In Bancroft, his view of California was relevant in terms of how the state’s history was viewed at the time that he was writing.

So yeah, it was great fun. What you want when you’re taking on a project that’s going to take three or four years is for it to get richer as you get deeper into it. And that was the case with this one.

Q: Are there examples of people who surprised you as you dug into the history?

A: The voices of the participants in the Bear Flag Revolt [in which American immigrants overthrew the Mexican government in Sonoma, a precursor to the U.S annexation of California] were fascinating. So many of them went on to make their way in newly independent California between the Bear Flag Revolt and statehood.

[James] Marshall, who discovered gold [at John Sutter’s mill in Coloma, triggering the Gold Rush] and Sutter wrote accounts of discovery. Sutter went on to write about the consequences for him of the discovery of gold. For him, it was not all happy. General [William Tecumseh] Sherman, who was head of the militia for a while in California, wrote a memoir, and that’s very vivid.

It may be that the most striking material I found, which when I talk about it still tends to surprise listeners and readers, was the testimony that was given to a congressional committee that came out here to work out how to relocate and incarcerate the Japanese population in 1942. The attorney general at that time delivered testimony to the committee that was incredibly vivid and really vile in ways. And that was Earl Warren [the future liberal chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court].

Q: After the Gold Rush and the railroad, people started coming to California from all over the world and never really stopped.

A: It’s so big, and it’s got so much weight in terms of politics and culture and economics that its grasp on the attention of outsiders never has seemed to end. I quote Joan Didion saying that those who came to California were not the complacent people. They were those who were looking for something new. They were looking for adventure or they were looking for a way to remake their life, remake their identity.

It was apart from the rest of the county. There it is on the edge, the western edge of America. So it attracted people from the Orient and attracted people from the interior and the East. It always has seemed to have something.

Q: We’ve talked about how California has had this grasp on the popular imagination. As the state turns 175 this year, do you think it will continue to hold that place in the country and world in the future?

A: You know, it’s hard to imagine another state having it. I think I have a line in the prologue that California is one of the few places on earth that’s both a geographic location and a state of mind. And California’s role as a state of mind evolves over the decades, over the centuries.

In fact, when I talk about my initial idea being we’re going to look at what California has taught the nation and the world, sometimes some of what California has taught the outside world isn’t always what we want the outside world to know. We are seen as a beacon of progressive politics now, and we were seen as a beacon of progressive politics in the first decade of the 20th century, but interspersed in there California was a beacon of other things. Of conservatism, of racism.

Will California values continue to be progressive values? Well, they are for now. We don’t know what the future holds, but we’ve given the country Hiram Johnson [an early 20th century progressive governor] and Jerry Brown and Kamala Harris. But also Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon. The Reagan and Nixon years, they basically built their careers on the attraction that California had, but their values were very different from the way we think of California values today.

So I don’t think it will lose its role as an attraction. But what attracts people may be very different as we evolve.

Q: The current Trump administration seems hostile to California for its progressive values, with threats to withhold federal aid to help rebuild after this year’s wildfires.

A: Well, California values are diametrically opposed to the values of Trump and the values of, let’s say, red states. I make the point in the book that red state politicians love to run against California and sort of treat it as the epitome of leftist politics.

At this point, California is determined to protect women’s reproductive health rights, gender rights, LGBTQ rights. And it’s the tendency of conservative politicians and Trump to portray California as un-American or non-American.

The point I make is that one out of every eight Americans lives in California. So in a very real sense, this is America. Other issues that bubble up around the country come to California one way or another and California solutions, because it’s such a big state, become national solutions.

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