1.
California Dreams
When the news of the discovery of gold in California reached the East, thousands of young men, singly or in companies, boarded ships for Panama and westward or set out on the arduous cross-country journey. These were the famous Forty-Niners. Not far behind them were Protestant ministers, acting as missionaries to those who had left civilization and religion behind. The young men were starry-eyed about the riches that awaited them in the gold mines; they hoped to make their fortune and return home unbelievably wealthy. The missionaries were starry-eyed too, not so much for wealth (though some did try their hands at mining) as for the opportunity of spreading Christianity and civilization to the far reaches of the continent. Like the circuit riders and the frontier pastors who had been migrating west for decades, the California ministers felt that they carried their treasure—Christianity—with them; and they wanted to make sure that it became firmly established in their new location.
New England ministers cherished the idea of remaking California in the image of their homeland. Their tradition had taught them to see New England as a great Puritan city on a hill, toward which all the world would look for an example of a perfect civilization. By replanting their faith—now a considerably modified version of their ancestors' religion—they hoped to establish California as a center of civilization as well. Joseph A. Benton, the "father of California Congregationalism," expressed the sentiments of many New Englanders:
We are here, in the Providence of God, to establish and mature . . . the same institutions—to rear and perfect the same fabric of government—to extend the sphere of the same civil rights and social order—to diffuse the blessings of the same benign and holy faith—and to hallow in memory and observe the same secular and religious festivals, as have been the strength, and glory, and beauty of the land of our Fathers and the places of our birth.
Benton envisioned a California cultivated like New England, with marshes drained, farm houses dotting the valleys, and blossoming flowers in what seemed to him the arid waste around San Francisco Bay. When that vision was fulfilled, he believed, then everyone would come to California: "The world's centre will have changed.—This will be the land of pilgrimage, and no man will be thought to have seen the world till he has visited California!"[1] William Pond, another Congregationalist minister, prophesied that "the time was surely coming when not New York but California would be the 'empire state' in our Union—no one with open eyes can doubt it."[2]
Nor were the powerful New England Congregationalists the only ones to have a dramatic vision of California and its future. James Woods, a pioneer Presbyterian of the Old School, echoed Benton's and Pond's perceptions of the significance of California:
Unparalleled in the history of the world is the march of progress in California . . . . Instead of being a remote, and almost unknown, and uncared for portion of the globe, with but a few scattering and degenerate sons of Spain, and a few enterprising adventurers, and a few tribes of wretchedly degraded Indians, it now in the short space of two years has become a central spot of earth, where almost all nations of the world have their representatives congregated.[3]
S.D. Simonds, a Methodist minister, proclaimed that "California is the New World of the Nineteenth Century, and her influence will be lasting as her majestic mountains . . . and more precious than the gold of her quartz and placers."[4] Similarly, Darius Stokes, a leading black minister of the African Methodist Episcopal church, spoke of California as destined to be the next great "world emporium." He warned, however, that the churches must ensure the progress of religion and morals, especially freedom from oppression for blacks, along with the temporal and material achievements of the age.[5] Another Methodist, Lorenzo Waugh, as he settled in Petaluma, extolled California as a new Eden[6] —and quickly set about organizing a temperance crusade.
None of the ministers, of course, saw California as perfect; it had to be made Christian. Many worried about the temptations that stemmed from the focus on gold and wealth and from the fast-paced life of adventurers. Others were concerned about California's cosmopolitanism and the lack of unity among the population.[7] On the whole, however, ministers came to the Golden State with high hopes
and a strong drive to make California a fine Christian state. An essay in the Congregational Quarterly of 1861 argued that the New England influence would turn the trick:
A single family of genuine Puritan substance . . . is a germ, around which a whole flood of miscellaneous population will take form. . . . the innate validity of this element molds the rising communities of the West, and unconsciously fashions all after the ideas with which it comes charged.[8]
Laymen also thought it likely that California would be transformed into a replica of the East. A farmer writing to the American Agriculturist in 1849 declared, apparently with some ambivalence, that "California will soon be California no longer. The hordes of emigrants and adventurers . . . will speedily convert this wild, cattlebreeding, lasso-throwing, idle, bigoted, bull-baiting race, into an industrious, shrewd, trafficking Protestant set of thorough-going Yankees."[9]
What did it mean for Anglo-Protestants of the nineteenth century to be making California a Christian state like Massachusetts or some other place east of the Mississippi? The ministers possessed a fairly clear image of themselves and their role in such an enterprise: they were shapers of society; the churches were its pillars.[10] Leaders of each denomination saw themselves as cooperating with others, but they did not necessarily view themselves as parts of a grand alliance. The Presbyterians and Congregationalists cooperated most closely, as they had in the eastern states. For seventeen years one major newspaper served them both—the Pacific , sponsored by the Congregational churches—which claimed it was "the organ of no Sect or Party."[11] By 1868, however, the Presbyterians had decided to publish their own paper, the Occident , which clearly supported their denominational "sentiments and aims" while maintaining harmonious relations with other Christians.[12] The Methodist paper, the California Christian Advocate , never wanted to be other than Methodist, stating clearly in its first issue, "We cannot claim to be Union." The Methodists held that each denomination ought to be itself, and believed that differences "in names, and modes, and governments, and beliefs" would not necessarily lead to strife among Christians.[13]
A gentle and courteous denominationalism, rather than a united front, was the implicit rule. Writers for the popular Protestant media did not generally refer to themselves as evangelicals, but simply as Christians. Some of the ministers brought this attitude with them
from the East; they knew of the efforts at union and the difficulties that had been encountered. Anglo-Protestant opinion at midcentury generally favored acceptance of differences within the framework of a general common purpose. By 1867, the California Christian Advocate could cite with approval Henry Ward Beecher (a Congregationalist) to the effect that harmony among differences was the state most desired.[14] Each denomination had a fairly clear sense of itself. The Methodists' peculiar mission, said Bishop E. Thompson in his speech to the California Conference in 1867, was to awaken spiritual life and lead "to the high places of religious experience" while encouraging a life of self-denial and constant prayer.[15] The Presbyterian Occident saw its church's purpose as helping to build society and strengthen the churches.[16] The Baptists saw themselves as enforcing a clear standard of church discipline and doctrine as well as general social morality.[17] Moreover, the situation in California reinforced this attitude. Bishop Thompson summed it up:
The Pacific coast is the theological equator. As early as the last century, the Latin and Greek churches met in the valley of the Sonoma. . . . Monotheism in its four forms; Judaism, in its orthodox and heterodox schools; Christianity, in its Latin, Greek, and Protestant churches; Deism, . . . from that of the devout and considerate Herbert, to that of the blaspheming Paine; Polytheism, in its different shapes; and defiant Mormonism, with its polygamous practices and cruel spirit, meet here. Hence, we should be especially on our guard, doctrinally. . . . we are in danger of, first, liberalism, then indifferentism, finally skepticism . . . . The Christian faith should be clearly defined; and while its minor points are but little insisted on, its essential doctrines and full experience should be steadily, fully, and uncompromisingly, though charitably, maintained.[18]
The pluralism of California made it essential for each denomination to have a clear sense of itself, to oppose "Romanists," Mormons, and other suspect groups, and at the same time to be charitable, as Christians, toward other denominations.
In daily life, the role of the Protestant ministers was to guide the people in devotion and morality. They would raise up churches where the Word would be preached. The people would not only attend services, but also keep Sunday apart as a day of worship. They would pray daily, alone and with their families. The population in general would abstain from vice, especially liquor, gambling, and worse sins. People would respect order and government while guard-
ing against corruption and bad influences. Church members would organize to correct social abuses, help the needy, and support missionaries to bring into the fold those who had not received the gospel. They would be educated in secular knowledge in common schools and religious colleges, which would also inculcate a Christian spirit at all levels.
That kind of society was, of course, an ideal seldom realized even in the East. Anglo-Protestant ministers did not seem daunted, however, by any differences they found in their new environment. They set about creating the institutions and movements that they believed would be pillars of California society as they had been of the eastern branch of the Protestant empire. Churches were the most obvious of these institutions, and the buildings rose rapidly. In 1850, only two years after the great migration began, Protestant churches in California had "sittings," that is, seats in the churches, for twelve thousand people, or 13 percent of the population. San Francisco, though it had the greatest proportion of non-Protestants, boasted twenty-two Protestant churches by 1852, and many of these by 1860 had attracted well-known ministers from the East. Whether church membership matched the growth in buildings and ministers' salaries is another question; unfortunately, membership figures are not available for the early years. Nevertheless the clergy clearly had some support, both for churches and for the other staple of Anglo-Protestant culture, the printed word. Every denomination established one or more newspaper, and by 1860 the largest, the Pacific , had a circulation of four thousand, while the California Christian Advocate was sent to nearly two thousand in the state.[19]
Other activities soon followed the building of churches. Anglo-Protestant concern for social and moral order found expression in a crusade, beginning in 1851, for a strong state Sabbath law. By 1855 the legislature passed a mild law banning noisy amusements, and by 1858 a stricter law was approved, forbidding businesses to be open on Sunday. Other reform organizations were created to propagandize against liquor, gambling, and prostitution, and to aid sailors and orphans. Temperance was one of the more popular causes: Lorenzo Waugh's Bands of Hope, established to involve young people in the anti-liquor movement, spread throughout the towns of California. Ministers were instrumental in convincing San Franciscans to set up free elementary schools, and they themselves frequently established high schools (the first public high school was not founded un-
til 1875). Denominations founded seminaries—Baptist, Congregational, Methodist, Presbyterian—and eventually some created colleges: the College of California (later the University of California, Berkeley) was founded by New England Congregationalists and Presbyterians, and the University of the Pacific by the Methodists. In all, sixty church-sponsored schools were founded between 1850 and 1874.[20]
Finally, the Anglo-Protestant clergy often appointed themselves watchmen over government. When in 1856 conflict erupted in San Francisco over alleged government corruption, ministers generally supported the Vigilance Committee, a businessmen's organization that took the law into its own hands, claiming to restore order and honest government. Whether support of the vigilantes was the most honorable of causes is debatable, but the alliance with the mercantile community clearly showed that Protestant ministers had become part of the network of social power in early California.[21]
Josiah Royce, a Harvard philosopher and California native, recalled that in those early years community spirit was at least as well represented by the churches as by the saloons. That may say more for the saloons than the churches. But early California has so often been portrayed as wild country, dominated by men lusting for pleasure and wealth, that we should consider the force of Royce's observations. "There was from the first," he wrote, "the characteristic American feeling prevalent that churches were a good and sober element in the social order, and that one wanted them to prosper, whether one took a private and personal interest in any of them or not."[22]
Yet the end of that statement presents the other side of the coin. Royce portrays a society where people wanted churches to support order and community spirit, but did not always take a "private and personal" interest in them. Royce believed, indeed, that many church members who would have been devout back East were quite "cold" in California; they had a "distrust toward enthusiasm." His observations agree with evidence from other sources; enthusiastic religion did not succeed, and people often did not make strong personal commitments to the churches. Camp meetings with their more emotional religious style did not fare as well in California as on earlier frontiers; nor did urban revivalists. Californians participated in the nationwide "lay revival" of 1858, but comment on the movement is infrequent in the annals of the time.[23] Ministers' complaints must be taken with a grain of salt, but many of their comments support this
general impression. Presbyterian pastor Albert Williams bemoaned the fact, not that people ignored religion entirely, but that less than half the "professors of religion" (in other words, those who had been converted) would admit it openly.[24] Another minister observed in 1880 that the secular press in California, unlike the Eastern press, seldom reported religious news.[25] People gave freely of their wealth, but expended their personal energy on other things.
Thus even as church membership grew, there was little of what Royce called "enthusiasm." By 1871 the Pacific Methodist , the organ of the Southern Methodist church, had acknowledged that "business Christianity"—that is, the support of the church as an institution—was as good as or better than contemplative and joyous camp-meeting Christianity.[26] Such a remark is as startling in its context as the famous turnaround of Lyman Beecher, who, after fighting tooth and nail to keep the Congregational church established, decided after defeat that voluntarism was better. In California, though, society was electing "business Christianity" and condemning enthusiasm. If a prominent person took an unusual religious position, he was open to ridicule. For example, when the well-known editor Mr. Owen of the San Jose Mercury joined the Disciples of Christ, the Petaluma Crescent , far away at the opposite end of the Bay, declared him a "Campbellite" and heaped scorn on him:
We expect soon to hear of his cultivating a pig-tail and preaching Confucius and rats, or else advocating Mohammedanism in San Jose. But the world should be lenient with Owen; he is as crazy on religion as a bedbug that has filled itself from the body of a benzine-saturated individual.[27]
We may reasonably suspect some personal animosity between the two editors. Still, if one's neighbors were watching so closely for signs of religious eccentricity, there must have been considerable pressure to be reserved about one's religious interests and commitments.
Ministers often blamed this situation on competition from secular and material pursuits. As Baptist minister O. C. Wheeler wrote, it was extremely difficult "to get a man to look through a lump of gold into eternity."[28] Secular entertainments made matters worse; one minister reported that his revival camp meeting had to compete with a circus. Mexican fiestas and bullfights were often held on Sundays; gambling houses and saloons were often the only places where single men might meet women. Methodist street preacher William Taylor
believed that despite people's open and generous temperaments, California was still "the hardest country in the world in which to get sinners converted to God."[29]
Do secularism and materialism provide an adequate explanation for Californians' reluctance to get involved in the churches? California was an unusual society in many ways; gold was not the only factor. The population, for example, in 1850 was made up almost entirely of men (about 90 percent), and most of them were between the ages of twenty and forty years. By 1860 more women had arrived, but it was not until after 1870 that the sexes approached equality in numbers. Most men came to California with the intention of leaving soon; they were called "argonauts," from their eagerness to gather the golden fleece and return home. Few had economic security; many had sold all their possessions to finance the trip west. Some, especially from New England, had come in "companies" that provided temporary economic and social support. But early California in general was not a stable society of householders and their families; rather, it was a collection of independent individuals trying to become self-made men.[30]
Cultural variety was much greater than on earlier frontiers. California already had an established culture, the Spanish-Mexican one that had begun some seventy years before. Native Americans, largely assimilated or dispersed, made up a small part of the population. When the gold rush began, people from many different backgrounds flocked to the region, and not only from the United States. Besides American Jews, Catholics, blacks, and white Protestants, there were men from France, Germany, England, Ireland, and other parts of Europe, plus a large population of Orientals, mostly Chinese. Protestants were a minority, and they did not have the advantages of earlier settlement, a firm attachment to the land, or special connections, which might have made them more resistant to the unsettled life and new wealth of the region. By about 1870 California began to look more like the rest of the country in its ethnic balance, but between 1850 and 1870 the gold region and its cities, including San Francisco, were among the most cosmopolitan areas in the world.[31]
As a state, an organized society, California was barely formed. In contrast to earlier additions to the Union, which tended to grow gradually before being admitted to statehood, California became one of the United States while still in its infancy as a society. Laws of property and juries to settle disputes had to be created on the spot
during gold rush times. Mining camps were flourishing towns one year and ghost towns the next. Those who decided to settle on the land were likely to be involved for years in disputes over former Mexican holdings and competing claims to the land. The land and its settlements were unstable; community, law, and tradition had to be created virtually from scratch. That was not the case on earlier frontiers, where families generally traveled west together, where the next frontier adjoined the former, and where there was immediate permanent settlement. Californians, on the contrary, were intensely aware of the distance from their former homes and families and of the difference in the lives they had to live. They were thrown back on their own resources time and again. They gained a reputation for independence and were proud of it.[32]
This was not the sort of society that Anglo-Protestant ministers had grown up in and been trained to serve. As Kenneth Janzen has argued, the New England tradition demanded a culturally homogeneous, theologically versed, responsible body of householders. Kevin Starr has observed, similarly, that the radically new situation of California simply could not be regulated by the forms and procedures of a New England parish[33] —or, we might add, an Ohio village or Virginia plantation. Methodists and Baptists might seem to be better suited, as they were on other frontiers, to a loosely structured society than were the Congregationalists and Presbyterians; they did not require such high standards of theological education, and they were flexible in licensing preachers and serving new congregations. But in place of education they expected higher "enthusiasm." They, too, assumed a society of householders with relatively stable occupations, a society with mutual obligations, interlocking interests, ties of tradition, and bonds of affection.
Even the theologies of the Anglo-Protestant churches presumed the social elements they had left behind in the East. If a minister was conservative, he preached a strongly orthodox doctrine of sin and guilt, which meant that a person had to repent and be forgiven and saved through Christ's sacrificial atonement, or else be damned. This theology was based on a legal model—a sinner was like a guilty criminal—which assumed clear obligations and definitions of right and wrong. But Californians had no commonly accepted obligations: laws were in flux, different groups had different customs, and any moral code could appear to be merely a private opinion.
On the other hand, a more liberal minister might de-emphasize
guilt and damnation, preaching instead the love of God in Christ. In the mid-nineteenth century liberal ministers would usually liken Jesus to an intimate friend or loving parent, especially a mother who would give her all in loving self-sacrifice for her child. God's love was like a mother's love; in response, a person should turn to God, or "rest in the arms of Jesus." The model of divine-human relations here is the ideal family, which Californians no longer had. The social context—thousands of independent, striving, mostly single men—was not suited to the theology that was heard even in the more liberal churches.[34]
Anglo-Protestant thought, then, was something of an anomaly; yet in such a structureless society, churches were one of the few sources, or at least reminders, of morality and order. Thus people supported them, though without "enthusiasm."[35] But we still have not explained the lack of susceptibility of Californians to revivalist religion. It may be true that Californians had left home and mother, society and legal traditions; but had they also left behind their emotions? Would we not expect that out of revivalism, which so often prospers in a society in flux, a new tradition of emotional religion might have emerged?
Under other circumstances, that might have happened. But Californians of the 1850–1870 period had learned to associate religious or political enthusiasms with factionalism, sectarianism, divisiveness, and even violence. Most of the men in California had been born in the East or Midwest between 1810 and 1830. They grew up during or shortly after the Second Great Awakening, the greatest period of religious excitement in the United States since colonial times. In its aftermath reform crusades, utopian ideas, and new sects mushroomed all over the Northeast, and religious schisms appeared in the South as well. Religious enthusiasm often resulted in acrimonious debates within and among churches and reformers, or persecution of fringe groups like the Mormons. One of the worst examples within mainstream Protestantism was the debate, which sometimes erupted in mob violence, between radical abolitionists and anti-abolitionists in the North; the abolitionists were directly influenced by revivals and religious enthusiasm.
Politics was also heating up during the same period, with popular heroes like Andrew Jackson and popular issues like the movement against the Bank of the United States creating enormous political ex-
citement. Then, in the 1830s, there emerged the specter of civil war. In 1832 South Carolina precipitated the nullification crisis, which could have led to secession and war. After that, the nation's leaders were preoccupied with the struggle to preserve the Union. By the 1850s many people were advocating stricter social control and were accusing any enthusiasts, whether political or religious, of being extremists or fanatics.
Under any circumstances it would have been natural for men in their twenties and early thirties to rebel against the tendencies of their parents—in this case to turn away from religious enthusiasm. That reaction would be even more pronounced under the threat of war, and still more in a section of society that was highly disorganized. It is in this light that we can understand the slogan of the San Francisco Vigilance Committee of 1856: "No creed. No party. No sectional issues." It meant: no religion, no politics, no war. Unity in the nation and social order in California seemed to depend on controlling factors—especially emotional enthusiasms—that could give rise to factionalism and divisiveness. Furthermore, Californians were familiar with another kind of emotional derangement: one of the early institutions of the state was the insane asylum at Stockton. While many stories about its inhabitants implied that the lust for wealth had driven them crazy, there were occasional accounts of an overzealous religious person or false Messiah who ended up there.[36] In every realm, from the national to the local to the mental, order was too fragile to allow the exploration of deep religious emotions. The lack of religious enthusiasm in Protestant California was an intense response to the sense of fragmentation in American society in the period.[37]
Lower levels of emotionalism went hand in hand with the gentle denominationalism espoused, as we noted earlier, by the clergy. Most denominations showed declining interests in tests of orthodoxy, while their parishioners showed a growing indifference to actual church membership. As we will see in a later chapter, there was a brief spate of heresy trials; but interdenominational fighting among Protestants was rare. By 1869 the Presbyterian Occident observed that denominational differences were no longer a reason for churches to attack one another. While criticizing the Unitarians for having no binding creed and the Universalists for abandoning certain biblical doctrines, the Occident also declared that soon all the de-
nominations would say simply, "We are Christians."[38] Unity and tolerance were becoming the watchwords of California religious attitudes, and would remain so for many decades to come.
Thus far the religious experience of the Californians whom Anglo-Protestant ministers hoped to reach appears merely negative. There was no enthusiasm, no sectarianism, little commitment to religious institutions. Churches were supported only for instrumental reasons, such as their support of social order; ultimately there was a resigned tolerance, since nothing else was possible. But in fact the immigrants from the East, sons and daughters of old Protestants, were developing their own sense of identity, their own mythology, outside the traditional churches. Clerics saw no unity among the people, no common bonds. (As the Rev. Albert Williams asked, "Can settled, fixed purposes coexist with the manifold interests, aims, and projects of communities without any seeming bond of union?"[39] From his eastern Protestant perspective, the answer would be no.) But Californians considered themselves a unique community despite their diversity. Years later Royce observed, "How swiftly, in that country, the Californians of the early days seized upon every suggestion that could give a sense of the unique importance of their new provincial life." They tended, he said, "to idealize whatever tended to make [their] community, and all its affairs, seem unique, beloved, and deeply founded upon some significant natural basis."[40] Indeed, the attempt to forge an identity out of California experience led eventually to the development, among a significant number of white Protestant Californians, of an alternative to the Anglo-Protestant religious tradition.
Before identifying that alternative, however, we must understand better how ordinary Californians viewed themselves in those first crucial years. One of the unique elements they idealized was their recent social experience—the gold rush itself. In descriptions of those times we find repeatedly an exaltation of democratic values, generosity and sharing during hard times, and noncompetitiveness. We know that in fact there was a great deal of competition, claimjumping, theft, and outlawry in the mining areas, but people preferred to remember the brighter side. They cherished the fact—which must at first have been a shock—that they could not tell a person's status or occupation by his dress or appearance.[41] People of all backgrounds mingled together: a former attorney and a factory worker, a grocer and a medical doctor, would all be knee-deep in
mud, panning gold from the same stream. Further, the ups and downs of gold rush economics meant that people could be enormously wealthy and liberal with handouts, or find themselves struggling to make a meal together. James Woods recalled being overwhelmed by a "donation party" for his family, in which goods were piled high around his home by generous neighbors; while miners remembered sharing bits of food they had scrounged to make a holiday dinner.[42] Such stories helped create images of democratic values, generosity, shared joys and hardships, and generally the plenitude of California itself.
Some Californians also cherished an idealized memory of the pre-Anglo past. Legends of the Californios—the Spanish-Mexican landowners—supported the mythical image of the gold rush. The Californios, it was said, were known far and wide for their generosity and hospitality. They supposedly lived a life of leisure, not unlike the genteel Southern plantation owner, but without the negative side of slavery. Later, white Californians romanticized the mission era, when, it was said, gentle Franciscan fathers tenderly took degraded Indians under their wings. Ultimately California took on the coloring of an exotic Mediterranean country, a perfect Greece or Italy. Such images ignored large chunks of reality: the destruction of Native American cultures, evidence of violence and poverty among Californios, the impact of urban economics on the region after Anglos arrived. But the legends in many ways were more powerful, reinforcing the idea of a society gentle and genteel, open and hospitable, intimately related to the land and the climate. Kevin Starr has suggested that the image of California as Mediterranean "encouraged new attitudes toward work and leisure and what was important to live for. As a metaphor, it stood for a culture anxious to foster an alternative to the industrial ethic."[43] Of course, the very people who created that metaphor were deeply implicated in urban industrial and commerical society. Yet the metaphor indicates that some of them, at least, yearned for a different way of life, even more than did their eastern countrymen.
Together with generosity and gentility went that open-minded tolerance mentioned earlier, which gradually became a universalistic belief that all religions were different aspects of a fundamental truth. Not only other Protestants were tolerated: any tradition could be viewed as a sincere attempt to find God or as a source of universal wisdom. This attitude grew very strong in the latter part of the nine-
teenth century; but even in the early years it is evident in Protestant attitudes toward Roman Catholics and Asians. There were, of course, many Protestant clerical pronouncements against "Romanism"; but at the popular level there was far less tension between Protestants and Catholics then there had been in the East. Some prejudice emerged in the 1850s during the Vigilante episodes of San Francisco, when mostly Protestant merchants allied against Irish Catholic elements they believed to be corrupt. For generations, too, there was discrimination against Mexicans. The latter, however, was clearly a racial rather than a religious prejudice; although the Catholic church was sometimes criticized for not educating the Spanish-speaking well enough, both Indian and Hispanic Mexicans were generally regarded as lower-class citizens because of racial qualities rather than religious heritage. On the positive side, many Protestants sent their children to Catholic schools, because in the early years they were often far better staffed. This encouraged more positive interaction and lessened the friction between the two groups.
Asians, especially the Chinese, suffered from prejudice and outright persecution, especially during times of economic depression or high rates of immigration. At these times Chinese competed with Americans as a cheap source of labor in the mines or in building the railroads. During intense periods of persecution and legislation against the Chinese, everything about their religion and culture came in for criticism. They were regarded as idol-worshippers and as conceited people who believed their civilization was the highest in the world.[44] Many Protestants, however, while viewing the Chinese as rather strange, also saw them as bearers of a great, ancient tradition. As early as 1852 the Pacific announced in a surprised tone that the Chinese were showing themselves to be self-respecting human beings who cared about justice and morality and deserved to be treated justly and humanely.[45] One Protestant clergyman, the Rev. A. W. Loomis, wrote a book on Confucianism that was favorably reviewed by the Occident and frequently mentioned in clerical circles with high praise; while the Rev. William Speer expended great efforts to convince California Protestants that the Chinese and American empires could interact to their mutual benefit. Thus the clergy encouraged an openness that never appeared in their writings on Roman Catholicism. Of course, Protestants still regarded Chinese and other Pacific peoples as targets for missionary work;[46] but at least among
the educated populace an interest in understanding other peoples sowed the seeds of positive attitudes toward other traditions.
Many white Californians of Anglo-Protestant background were developing a new picture of themselves as expansive, open, social beings, unique in their potential for development, searching for the best and truest as they moved vigorously into the future. They found in their natural environment a reflection of those same traits. The pages of California's magazines for the first half-century and more were filled with glorious descriptions of a wondrous, grand, and healthy environment. The Geysers (a natural hot springs), Yosemite, the Pacific coast, the southern deserts—nature in California seemed unique, and each new scene seemed to demand that a person experience life more fully. Methodists holding their camp meeting conferences in the countryside appreciated that, as S. D. Simonds put it, the meetings could bring together such congenial spirits, "the lovers of God and the lovers of nature."[47] Even New Englanders, on occasion, forgot their urge to remake California into Massachusetts and admired the distinctive beauty of the state. One article in the New Englander of 1858 argued against civilizing California too much:
Culture improves nothing. California was finished as a world of beauty, before civilization appeared. The magnificent valleys opened wide and clean. The scattered oaks stood in majesty, here and there, and took away the nakedness. Civilization comes, cuts down the oaks for firewood, fences off the plains into squares, covers them with grain or stubble, scatters wild mustard over them, it may be, and converts them into a weedy looking desolation. . . . There is never to be a lawn, or a neat grassy slope, as with us, because there is no proper turf.[48]
Some were so awed by the natural wonders that they made the land an allegory for their spiritual understanding. The Occident in 1868 printed a sermon, preached by Henry M. Scudder after his vacation in the Sierras, that was essentially a meditation on the life of the soul as like a mountain stream.[49] Even the most conservative churchmen sometimes translated the beauties of California into religious terms—or, one might equally well argue, allowed their religious sensibilities to be transformed by their California experience. One of the most remarkable examples comes from the California Sketches of O. P. Fitzgerald, a Southern Methodist pastor. He ends the book with a poem he wrote in the Russian River Valley, describ-
ing what was virtually a mystical experience of viewing Mount St. Helen at sunrise. Seeing the light at the top and orange-tinted clouds beneath the summit, he proclaimed its "glory supernal," and went on:
O glory yet greater! The white, silent mountain,
Transfigured with sunrise, flames out in the light
That beams on its face from its far-distant fountain,
And bathes in full splendor its East-looking height.
My soul, in that moment so rapt and so holy,
Was transfigured with nature and felt the deep spell;
My spirit, entranced, bent meekly and lowly
With rapture that only an angel could tell.
When the night mists of time around me are flying,
When the shadows of death gather round me apace,
O Jesus, my Sun, shine on me when dying,
Transfigure my soul with the light of thy face![50]
Fitzgerald, experiencing nature as transformative, prayed that Jesus might bring such transformation at the moment of death, like a sunrise for the soul on the way to the life beyond the grave. In that kind of experience Fitzgerald, though an orthodox Protestant pastor, was a forefunner of the many Californians who would turn to nature as a spiritual resource and mode of understanding the divine.
Thus many Protestants in California experienced some transformation, through nature or their new society or both. Some saw their society as the epitome of democracy; others felt themselves to be natural aristocrats—without any slaves or oppressed workers. Some saw their new home as a land of plenty, while still others felt transported into other dimensions by the sight of a sunset over the Pacific. All these experiences blended in the popular tradition, as Californians described themselves to each other and to their acquaintances back home. Even while building an urban industrial society, they were creating a myth of their state as a very different kind of society—a leisured, elegant life in glorious natural surroundings, a non-competitive society without hierarchy, whose people, through the bounty of the land and the generosity of all, were supplied with everything they needed, both physically and spiritually.
However fantastic the myth, in light of reality, it is in striking conflict too with traditional Anglo-Protestant images of the good life. Midcentury Protestants back East were still dedicated to the Puritan
ideal of hard work, with economic reward as a blessing from God, not a natural gift of the land. They accepted, implicitly, if not explicitly, the necessity of fair competition and the ideal of material progress. A leisurely society would seem merely a collection of idlers. The Mediterranean image might cause a Yankee to shudder, for it could mean Catholic oppression or Southern decadence. As for nature, the beauties of God's creation were private experiences confirming God's wisdom and goodness; one could not build on them a public consciousness and a sound Christian civilization.[51] Protestant ministers might understand some of the yearnings that were emerging among many new Californians, but they were not likely to sympathize deeply with all the new experiences their fellow statesmen cherished. They offered, with pride, the image of an orderly, morally conscious, democratic society, and invited other Californians to participate in building it. For the most part they could not integrate into this image the unique California dreams that were emerging from the people's reflection on their own experience.
Neither traditional religious enthusiasm nor traditional religious order were at the core of what white Californians from the East now wanted. There were, however, other elements in American religious traditions that could appeal to them. Openness and tolerance, independence in religious thinking, and reflection on the beauties of nature were characteristic of one tradition that had already emerged as a kind of counter-culture to mainstream Protestantism: namely, the New England tradition that led from Unitarianism to Transcendentalism. Early in the American period of California, a minister of that lineage came and captured the hearts of the people: Thomas Starr King. King was a legend in his own time as an orator and political hero; but what we will explore is the deeper basis of his popularity. In his famous speeches that stirred the multitudes during the few brief years he was a Californian, he articulated California dreams. His presence and preaching helped set the tone for the future of alternative religion, as we will see in the next chapter.