History 696 |
Web Review Essay |
All of these websites celebrate the Gold Rush as a pivotal event in the history of California, with three of the sites created exclusively as part of the Gold Rush Sesquicentennial. They all suggest that the events of the Gold Rush and the mindset that caused it have shaped the history of the State and continue to define the modern California. This is not all positive with each site pointing to the challenges California faces today; challenges especially unique to California as the challenges resulted from the influence of the Gold Rush itself.
The theme of the “legacy” unites all four of these websites; sometimes explicitly and sometimes just hinting. The PBS site is very clear in the notion that the place California is today—entrepreneur-friendly and a free market for ideas and capital—was born in the Gold Rush and that the Gold Rush was an early embodiment of this capitalist ideal. While the other sites suggest the open and free nature of California both in the past and present, none do so with such an economic slant and such little acknowledgement of the consequences of such conditions. It would be interesting to know if this is because the PBS site is sponsored by Wells Fargo and how much of their corporate ideology was then reflected in the site as either specified in the terms of the agreement or for some other reason.
By way of contextualizing the capitalist argument, the PBS site suggests that the Gold Rush was deeply related to the American Dream, and in truely innovative California fashion, reinvents it. Not only does this reconceptualization of the American Dream allow for the overriding desire for economic gain at any cost; it addresses the issue of diversity as part of the reach of the Dream. The PBS site points to the presence of cultural and ethnically diverse miners, including Native Americans, Latinos, and Chinese, as proof of the legitimacy of invasive mining culture and mechanical techniques.
Included in the mining culture was, as the other sites explained, discrimination and racism; factors that the PBS site minimizes. In reference to Native populations, PBS suggests that after contact, fear was replaced by optimism and friendliness, but then later states that Native Americans were “almost immediately annihilated” without any explanation.1 This California mining society that “annihilated” the Native Americans is also described as the “ultimate melting pot”2 of diversity that was so open and free that “although there were ethnic skirmishes, most of these new residents [Chinese and African-American miners] thrived” and were free from discrimination.3 Not only does this diminish the realities of discrimination, but is very inconsistent with previous content pertaining to the Native American population.
Instead, the PBS site heralds the Gold Rush as a time directed by the lessons of supply and demand to create a California based on “pure freedom and a pure free market.”4 This new California is bold, opportunistic, and entrepreneurial and saw its biggest changes via technological innovations that improved profits and caused the first environmental disasters. However, California attitudes toward exploitation have changed while retaining a free market: a near-perfect capitalist system that is responsible for constant economic advancement from aerospace to Silicon Valley technologies.
The Oakland Museum site and the Sacramento Bee newspaper site also emphasize the creative spirit alive in California, but take a less utopian capitalist view. The Oakland Museum Gold Rush exhibit site commemorates the Gold Rush and is positive in that respect, but it also emphasizes the costs of the legacy of the opportunistic California. The main argument is that being a land of open opportunity has many challenges and costs, namely environmental degradation and lingering racial tensions that are as real today as they were in 1848. Like the miners trying to extract the maximum amount of resources from the land, entrepreneurs in modern California have not escaped the mentality that the environment is an obstacle to be overcome by exploitation. The “Yankee ingenuity, [an] aggressive attitude of man vs. nature”5 that is responsible for the practice of environmental disrespect that plagues California to this day is the same characteristic that supposedly embody the PBS site’s idea of the near-perfect modern California. While the narrative of the PBS site is comfortable with the idea that environmental exploitation has been overcome, the Oakland Museum site remains critical of the (mis)uses of the environment in California.
Again, unlike the PBS site that suggests that the modern California was and remains the ultimate melting pot, the Oakland Museum site acknowledges the existence of remaining tensions. These conflicts are not new, but existed during the Gold Rush with discrimination building with the decrease of gold resources. This conflict occurred not only among individuals but became part of a pseudo-legal practice of vigilante enforcement of “laws” against people of color. Despite a legacy of subjugation and the resulting reduction of the Native American population and remaining discrimination against Chinese-Americans, African-Americans, and Latinos, the Oakland Museum site suggests that the forces that encouraged diversity are still an important and positive influence in California society today.
The Sacramento Bee Gold Rush commemoration site takes a similar tone. Like the other sites, the Bee site claims that California was born with the Gold Rush and the spirit that defined the Rush—adventurous, inquisitive, inventive, and acquisitive. Though the tone of the site is positive and designed to present general information to coincide with renewed interest in the Gold Rush for its 150 th anniversary, it does acknowledge the exploitative beginnings of the Gold Rush and therefore the state of California. Though it does not address the continued influence of exploitation like the Oakland Museum site does, the Bee site seeks to remind its visitors of the cost of the Gold Rush and its enduring character.
The Bee site also addresses the question of the American Dream, as one that opens the land to diverse groups with the promise of freedom and economic gain. The most important lesson from the Gold Rush, however, is that of disillusionment; hard work did and does not always mean success. Further, the Bee suggests that this hard lesson is not without cost either. The cost is both environmental, like the Oakland Museum argues, but also social; that it is economic failure and disappointment that leads to the most pernicious forms of discrimination and social othering. Despite these challenges that remain today, the Bee site states that from the time of the Gold Rush, the Dream has made California the most racially and ethnically diverse place on Earth and that the questioning of the American Dream has taught Californians that failure is not only acceptable, but necessary for making California the most risk-taking society in the nation. This is certainly a bold and arguable assertion, but reiterates the main idea of diversity that runs through all the sites studied here.
Diversity is the primary theme of the California History Online Gold Rush site and although it does not link directly to the legacy argument, many elements are the same. That is, the site explains in-depth the Gold Rush experiences of the various immigrant and Native groups as part of the shaping of California consciousness. In this way, the policies, both legal and social, that guided miner interactions and the later development of the State still exist today. Though the site does not focus solely on diversity and racial tensions, many of those themes inform the Gold Rush narrative across the whole site.
Unlike the other sites that present discrimination as a general concept of life during the Gold Rush and today, the California History Online site distinguishes between a social mindset and formalized legislation. For example, in early California, government was divided into hundreds of mining districts that were “democratic bodies, but…commonly excluded African Americans, Asians, and Latinos.”6 The California Historical Society site also explains how “the process of extermination [of Native Americans] went forward with the financial support of the local, state, and federal governments…legalized and subsidized murder on a mass scale.”7 Though the overall tone of the California History Online was less biased when compared to others on the Gold Rush, it often makes a much more persuasive case for its argument through an extensive collection of very specific evidence. Whereas the word “extermination” or “genocide” would have seemed out of place on the other sites, the information provided on the California History Online more than justifies stronger language.
Along with strength of evidence, the California History Online Gold Rush site stands out because it is the only site of this collection that attempts to put the Gold Rush and the social issues it led to in a broader context. The legacy of the Gold Rush not only included a before-unknown level of diversity and allied tensions, but also the issues of statehood. The main issues that drafters of the California constitution faced—no slavery and property rights for married women—were highly controversial and marked the first time a state had been created with such laws in place. These issues which defined the State of California to the rest of the nation were, as the California History Online site suggests, directly related to the Gold Rush and the volatile social conditions it brought.
1 http://www.pbs.org/goldrush/collision.html
2 http://www.pbs.org/goldrush/allabout.html (see description of “Collision of Cultures)
3 http://www.pbs.org/goldrush/collision.html
4 http://www.pbs.org/goldrush/goldcountry.html
5 http://www.museumca.org/goldrush/fever19.html
6 http://www.californiahistory.net/goldFrame-diggings.htm
7 http://www.californiahistory.net/goldFrame-diversity.htm