American History Hit - The Origins of California

Episode Date: September 15, 2025

How did California become the Golden State? It's a story that includes conquistadors, missionaries, gold miners, railroad builders and tourists, to name a few.Don is joined by Michael Hiltzik, author of 'Golden State: The Making of California', to explore the history of the home of one in eight Americans.Produced by Sophie Gee. Edited by Tim Arstall. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.American History Hit is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries, with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. A black bear roams through the wooded mountains of Southern California. Thick fur, broad-shouldered, immensely strong.

It trundles through canyons and pine forests on its daily quest for food. Buries, acorns, insects, eggs, nothing is off limits to this survivor. With long claws and a nose seven times sharper than a bloodhound, the bear wanders free disregarding boundaries. He is the monarch of the mountains. Other creatures, fierce and fragile, animate the vast Californian wilderness. Condors soar on silent wings casting shadows on the desert floor. Antlered elk taller than men move with stately calm through coastal forests.

In arid grasslands, coyotes track their prey. People live here too. Oh, lots and lots of people. But it is the bear, muscular, adaptable, singularly resourceful. That is California's emblem. emblazoned right on its state flag, the proud symbol of strength, independence, and resilience. Right here in the 31st state of the United States of America. Hey there, it's Don here. Glad you dialed up another episode of American history hit.

Thanks for listening. California, you need only say the word, and a panorama of awe-inspiring images is conjured. Sun-drenched coastlines, endless highways, towering redwoods, magnificent deserts, dreamscapes that could make an ad executive salivate. And if natural beauty isn't enough, then how about economic power? The Golden State has been selling what it makes and grows for generations with supreme success. If California was its own country, its GDP would rank fifth in the world behind only the U.S., China, Japan, and Germany. Life on the left coast has always seemed bigger, riskier, richer than most anywhere else.

from gold to grapes, from aerospace to algorithms. California defines the American impulse to innovate, expand, and reinvent, sometimes the very person you are. To dig down into the early history of this fabled land of milk and honey, we're joined by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Michael Hilsick, whose remarkable new history, Golden State, the making of California was released earlier just this year. Greetings, Mr. Hilsick.

We might make a lot of people on the East Coast jealous today. I should know I'm from New Jersey. The West is the best, according to Jim Morrison. I bet he was talking about California. A history of the 31st state in book form is a daunting task. What spurred the project? Part of what spurred it is that I am a California now. I was born on the East Coast.

I was educated in the East Coast, and I moved here in 1981. And I've just come to love and respect this state. And also, of course, over the last few years, California has really taken a place. as a leading factor in American politics. And I just thought that 30 years after the last major one-volume history of California, it was a good time to take another look and take another run at this subject. We could go all the way back to the early man's arrival on the west coast of North American continent 12,000 years ago,

some claim a lot earlier. Fascinating fact, indigenous societies thrived in this part of the world. By the time of first contact with Spanish explorers in the 1530s, there were about 300,000 indigenous people already living in California, 13% of the entire native-born population of North America, already the place to be in the 16th century. That's a lot of people over the 1500s. That's right. That was a huge population. There were a lot of tribes, and they lived, for the most part, peaceably with one another. I mean, there were conflicts now and then, mostly prehistoric economic conflicts, but they bartered with each other.

they shared, they traded, they lived together. This conversation, of course, we have to contain ourselves and order this kind of into three parts. Spanish, California, Mexican California, and then American California. That's kind of the broadest outline of what this history involved. So let's start with Spanish California. When did the Spanish first come to California, and was it by land or sea? Well, it was by sea, and it was really sort of in the mid-16th century, Spanish conquistadors.

Cortez was the major personage who came. to what became California around that time, and he was here looking for gold and jewels. They thought it was an island, really, right? Baja, I suppose, made it seem that way. This was 40 years after Columbus, and they were really just figuring out the lay-la land. That's right. Basically, there was not a lot of map-making that went on in that period. And yes, for the longest time, they thought Baja was an island.

And, in fact, the Spanish maps continued to show. California as an island, even long after it was widely known that it was not an island that the exploration had been of a peninsula and then of a coast. I think it might be a kayaking trip I did in the Gulf of California that would have suggested this to the Spaniards. I mean, everything is so big. I can't imagine being a European arriving here and trying to grasp this new place that they were looking at. It's just extraordinary. The tribes in this area, you mentioned already, very peacefully settled. What accounts for the different culture in the West?

The tribal California, let's say, it was, to a great extent, agrarian, but there was also a lot of livestock raising in that period of time. But it was more or less a sedentary group of tribes. They grew their own food. They hunted rabbits. This is sort of a cliche. But they lived on the land, and they lived in the territory. that they found and they exploited what they needed.

And they were not trading with outsiders. They were trading with each other. It's also the topography, as I understand. I mean, you have very forbidding mountains there, not too far from the coast. Then deserts in the south. You end up with populations that can't move around like they might have in the Midwest and so forth. Plus the bounty is good. There's harvest.

There's fishing. The closeness and proximity and all that topographical factor makes warfare really an untenable. thing, isn't it? Well, that's right. These were not tribes that were ranging far and far to expand their territory. They lived in territories where they had lived for many generations. And in the areas where they were neighbors with other tribes, that's where they might have had conflicts that would lead to violence. 135 different native dialects. I'm amazed the more I do this podcast, how often old culture, ancient culture, speaks through to the modern age. It's really, really an extraordinary factor. 1542, the mainland is reached by Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo,

who journeys up as far as modern Santa Barbara. How does the name California come to pass? You know, nobody is really 100% sure about that. I mean, there have been theories over the millennia. Some thought that it derived from some Greek vocabulary, some thought Latin. the most persistent theory goes back to a series of written sagas about a mythical character named Andean and his son Esplandia. And one of these books depicted a war in which a queen Calafia, whose territory was known as California, basically affiliated herself with the Spanish jests, so to speak, that predated the first arrival. of the Spanish in what we now know of as California. And somehow that name got attached to a small part of what we now know of as California.

Though it's unclear how well the conquistadors knew this book or these books, how well their crewmen knew these books. But these books were certainly known to Servantes, who put them into Don Quixote. In fact, Don Quixote fed himself on these exploits. And there's a scene in Don Quixote. in which these books are burned by Don Quixote's neighbors to try to wean him from these myths that he had really deepended into. This land is so far afield from where they have developed colonies. They don't really colonize, the Spanish, they don't really colonize California until the late 1700s, which is quite amazing.

Is it missionary work that really triggers the effort, or was it the search for gold? Well, it was the search for gold and rumors and stories of cities of gold, man of gold in Spanish, that would be El Dorado. And the Spanish came here basically in search of these riches. That really started the Spanish explorations. And there was a long period of really about 140 years in which the Spanish lost interest in the West Coast of the Americas. But then they came back and they really started exploring and basically moving up the coast and into the heartland more seriously, as you said, in the 1700s. Right. It is the mission system that really ends up reshaping this land and the culture that's there, the native culture.

This was, I guess, a tried and true system from South America, I suppose. Yeah, well, it started really. It was the Spanish court that actually brought the missionaries into California. And it started with the Jesuits. The Jesuits came to California and along the east coast of Baja, they started setting up missions. Then the Jesuits fell into disrepute in the Spanish court. and the responsibility for developing California was given over to the Franciscans. And it was the Franciscan missionaries that really did take on the mission, so to speak, of civilizing California, civilizing the tribes. And their notion was, we're going to bring Christianity to these heathens and these pagans, really.

And that was a big part of that period of California history. I suppose we should define it. When I say mission system, it's, you know, within a day's ride of each other are these missions that, well, I guess it would be longer distances than that come to think of it. You have San Diego and Santa Barbara, San Francisco eventually. These are all churches, essentially, missions and communities around these churches that are set up as bases. I guess forts were also involved, obviously. There was a military aspect of this. Well, there was a military aspect. The military, the Spanish military, was for a time happy to have the missionaries

take on the task of basically exploiting the tribes for labor and for economic development. So that's what happened. The missions were basically economic features of the landscape. The missionaries would bring tribal members into their missions, into their territories, and they would put them to work, raising crops and raising livestock. Now, the original natives were not entirely happy about that, and there were any number of, rebellions by tribes' people who, they had come under the lash of the missionaries and then of the Spanish military. So they would rebel, they would be punished, they would be executed, they would be basically manipulated for decades. Was there a larger plan articulated as to what this mission would accomplish?

Was this the building of a nation? No, I don't think it was the building of a nation as such. It was really just exploiting the original natives for labor. And the agricultural development was really to make the mission self-sustaining. But the underlying search really always was for material riches. Yes. Those converts, those indigenous people who had been converted, were required to live within this walled mission, which was a whole enclosure that was more than the church itself.

It was a whole settlement. And they were taught Spanish, their religion, the skills for physical labor. All of this is part of this community building, I suppose. It's a nice word for it. And it remains in place until the system is abolished in 1834. That's how modern this gets, right? I think that's true. I think the difference between Spanish, California and Spanish-Mexican California, it can be a little vague, but yes, eventually the Mexican settlers wanted to be independent or they wanted to have their own representation. So, that's what happened. By that time, Cortez had long been back. He had gone back to Spain,

you know, his era and ended. And what we now know of is California was basically being run first out of Mexico and then out of Monterey, which became sort of the governing seat of Mexican California. Starting around the early 1800s, around 1808 specifically, life really changes in the Western Hemisphere. The Spanish colonies all throughout this area from North America, Central, and down to south are pushing back against Spain. This is the time of Simone Boulevard, the whole reason we have the Avenue of Americas in New York City, which is to say this anti-colonial movement that takes place in the early 19th century. Mexico becomes independent in 1821.

How did the policies around land, trade, and the missions shift at this time as a new society begins to emerge in California? The Spanish court was operating at long range. Obviously, not only were they far from the East Coast of North America, but they were even farther from the West Coast. So the Spanish population on the West Coast just felt themselves neglected. They really wanted to be self-governing, and that's eventually what happened. Yeah. These missions become replaced at this point by ranches, essentially.

An entirely unique culture is rising. You can trace this back if you're driving around L.A., for example. you see all these names, La Sienega and Labreya. All of these are references to these former rancheros that these early Mexican Californians began to create. And they in turn become more connected to foreign merchants and trappers and explorers. The whole place becomes more globalized, doesn't it? Well, that's true. And I think you have to keep in mind as well that for the Spanish, and that is the Spanish Mexicans, they were concerned about the incursion into their lands by explorers and exploiters from other countries, particularly Britain, France, and Russia.

So they thought that being self-governing would basically help them to preserve their economic opportunities on this territory. Under independent Mexico, California, as you say, opens to foreign trade and settlement. This begins this movement towards a sort of diversity in California. I'm generalizing, of course, but you have a definite thing happening because of its proximity of the Pacific Ocean, essentially. The naturalized foreigners who are converted to Catholicism can now own land, and governors were encouraged to make outright land grants. But this was beyond the native population, so to speak, the Mexican and California population, wasn't it? Well, the Mexican population in California, really, they were in control for a long period of time.

The tribes, of course, were not treated as factors. The original natives were basically overrun. The population of native tribes fell from 300,000, as you said, when the Spanish first arrived to 150,000 or less, and that's because the settlers brought disease, the mission practice of basically bringing all of their laborers into close quarters on the mission. premises fostered the spread of disease. The punishments helped basically reduce these populations.

So I think you can't say that the Spanish intended to reduce the population of natives, but that was certainly the outcome. The appearance of smallpox and syphilis really debilitated the original occupants or the original human occupants of this land. And what happens in California is reflecting a worldwide movement, a secularization. First of all, we're moving. moving into the mercantile era as people are realizing that making money can be quite a cause in their lives. And so that is reflected in the way that Mexico is operating in California. And so that parting ways with the Franciscan missions and that sort of lifestyle is replaced by this trade and these merchants and so forth that's happening. And this is sort of going hand in

hand with the spreading West, the manifest destiny cause of America. So there's Americans coming in as well. This is all becoming quite a brew, isn't it? Well, it is. And, the American settlers, that is, settlers and colonists who came from the East and the Midwest, and their numbers grew so great and so quickly that they became a real concern for the Mexican Californians. And we began to see conflicts between the Mexicans and the Americans as the American settlers began to think of themselves as an outpost of the United States of America. And they began to agitate for military assistance and then ultimately for annexing. by the federal government and then statehood.

Yeah, there's a lot of commonality between what's happening in California and what happened in Texas, isn't there? There's a lot of things in common. That's exactly right. And the Mexican authorities, after the annexation of Texas, they saw the incursion of settlers from the east of the United States as sort of an advanced vanguard to do what happened in Texas to California. And that's why there was so much concern when the level of colonialization began to grow and settlers began to come in great numbers. It's an incredible theme to follow when you realize, I mean, we take it for granted now, California and Texas being part of the United States, but to look at manifest destiny through

the lens of Mexican California is a fascinating shift and really, you know, reorient you as to how this continent was Americanized, as we're so used to it now. And all this sort of happens in the early tens and 20s of the 1800s. When we come back, we'll talk about that American chapter of California. So, Michael, the American incursion, we'll call it, of Mexican California really begins in, as I said before, 1810s into the 20s. And a lot of that has to do with the theme we're even used to today. Advanced settlements, illegal settlements, perhaps. people coming in and setting up and then making like they're at home.

That's right. And the more American settlers ended up in California, the more they agitated for the annexation. And they weren't concerned about how that would happen. If it took military action, that was fine with them. They would have, I think, preferred, or at least the real incumbent settlers would have preferred for it to happen peaceably. President Polk, who came into office, basically around this period. He wanted to annex California, and he had a plan to do it peacefully. And as we know, that didn't really happen the way he anticipated. We ended up with the Mexican War. And it was the Mexican War that really resulted in the annexation of California. And that's the 1840. So we're talking about a 20-year period of this settlement and various events that reflect this increasing Americanization that happens, which is largely driven by commercial interest. And also, we need to, really nail down what has happened with these lands because that's really what defines the whole shift. You had these mission lands that were originally, obviously Spanish. Those are commercialized and begin to get granted. Ranges become part of life. And then those break down. And we end up in a

classic real estate situation, don't we? Well, that's right. And, you know, an interesting fact is that the Mexican land grants, these were land grants, basically to settlers, became a factor in the development of California for close to 60, 70 years. And I think we still see Mexican land grants being brought into play in real estate transactions in California, even somewhat to this day. But it was noticed by observers from the United States that the system of Mexican land grants was basically going to interfere with the American development of California. Horace really wrote extensively about this. And he said that, you know, you have to do something about these Mexican land grants because they are obstacles to the development of this new territory. By 1843, California's population includes fewer than 100,000 Native people, as you mentioned, that has dropped down for all those usual reasons.

Around 14,000 other permanent residents, approximately 2,500 foreigners, non-Hispanic white people. of those, about 2000 had immigrated from the United States by 1840s. So you don't need to remember the numbers. Just know that prior to the Mexican-American War, there's a whole lot of different people who are living in California. And that has a lot to do with the push for war. We've planted ourselves there. Back in Washington, those under the Polk administration are saying, geez, this is already happening. Why don't we just tip this over? And that essentially, becomes the movement that enables the Mexican-American War to happen, right? Well, that's right. And I think one of the telling episodes of this period is the so-called Bear Flag Revolt. And the Bear Flag Revolt was basically a gang of settlers who had started out centered around what is now Sacramento and what was then Sutter's sport. Johan Sutter had established it. And this group of settlers decided that they wanted to establish the California Republic. And what they were going to do was they were going to ride about 50 miles west to

Sonoma, where, as far as they knew, there was a garrison of Mexican soldiers, and they were basically going to invade the garrison and take it over and then basically declared the California Republic. As it happened, they did that. They got to Sonoma, and what they discovered in Sonoma, was that it was such a quiet place that the commandante had sent the garrison home two years earlier. So there was basically nobody to fight. But anyway, they arrived. They placed the commandante in custody. The commandante was there with a small group of family members and some other Mexican settlers. And then the invaders basically painted a flag, basically on a piece of linen. They painted what they said was a grizzly bear. They put a red star on it and the words

California Republic, and they ran it up the flagpole and the square. And that flag, the bear flag, as it was known, the features of that flag are still features of the California state flag, although they've been dressed up and they've been modernized and they've been basically redesigned. And that's the flag that we've got. But it started out as this sort of shred of a flag in in 1846. And you can have a nice dinner, a half a block away from that very building in Sonoma today. It's all right there. The Mexican-American War, of course, we have covered this, and we're not going to go into detail here. There's an episode of American History hit, which delves deeply into this. It's episode 130. Encourage you to listen to it, President James Cave Polk lies,

warmongering, and the myth of success. And that title suggests why we're not going to talk about it, because there's so much that happens in that short period of time that, you know, you know, is the reason that we have another third of this country after it's over, which is by 1848. In California, how much of the action of that war happens there? Little or none, right? Well, there wasn't much of it, for the most part, when American forces were battling Mexican forces, the American forces just won handily. They outmanned the Mexican. There were one or two places where the Mexicans actually prevailed. There was the so-called Battle of San Pasquan, which is down around present-day San Diego, in which the American soldiers had to be rescued by the American Navy,

which had to send basically troops up there to relieve and basically be sieves group of American military. But, yeah, the Mexican War, it was clear that the United States was going to prevail as it did, and this ended in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which basically annexed Spanish West of North America to the United States. I always wonder about the gold rush and how strangely coincidental it was with the Mexican-American War. It happens, of course, in 1848 or 1849, more famously, but the gold is discovered in 1848. How aware were the Americans of gold's, you know, availability in California? Some of the Americans were aware that there was some gold, but they didn't find it until James Marshall found it at a place known as Sutter's Mill. And this was a place not far from Sutter's Fort where Sutter basically wanted to establish a grain mill and a lumber mill.

And he thought that was going to make his fortune. Marshall was out there building the mill. And in a sluice way one morning, he saw a glint in the water, picking up. it up and realized it was gold, and then brought it to Sutter and said, you know, I have this great discovery. The gold were started among Californians in 1848, and then it spread nationwide and, in fact, globally in 1849, when President Polk announced to the world that gold had been found in California. Whoops.

And that jolts the place. By 1860, you know, just before the Civil War, California's population has reached 308,000 people nearly triple what it was in 1847. You can't overstate the effect of the gold rush on the western United States, really, but certainly California. It was transformative. And in my book, I talk about how you can really divide California history in this period into the pre-gold rush and the post-gold rush periods. A big part of that is how much gold was found, which is an extraordinary, not only that, but also silver. I mean, it's an outrageous wealth that is tapped into as a result of that rush. And therefore, of course, we're going to make it a state, claim this place and make it official.

Let's talk about statehood and how California was made official at this point. August 1848, the treaty ending the war transfers California to the U.S., but it leaves governance unclear. Talk to me about the nitty gritty of how they created a state out of this. The settlers, the American settlers in California in this period, really felt themselves neglected. They had to pay duties on goods that they imported, but they didn't have any voice in Washington. So they really started agitating. And there was this sequence of military governors who were basically appointed by the federal government, who ran California.

And finally, there was one of these governors who said, you know, if we don't do anything, we're going to have so many settlers here that are discontented, that they may declare themselves an independent country. So we better do something. And he basically ordered on his own authority, and it may have been questionable authority, a constitutional convention for California and with delegates to this convention. They included settlers. They included native, Mexican-born, Spaniards, and even some representatives of the tribes. They basically went out and they wrote a constitution, a state constitution in 1849, even though California was not a state.

and they then established a state legislature, even though California was not a state. The major goal of the state legislature was to appoint senators who could go to Washington and agitate for statehood. And that's exactly what happened. The extraordinary fact is that even then, it's huge. You know, California is over 800 miles long. Back in those days, I mean, with transport and all the rest of it, it's impossible, I would think, to manage this. a landmass that large, and yet they bite it all off and try. Although during the Constitutional Convention, there was a long debate over where should

the boundaries of the state of California be? And it was concerned that if the boundaries encompassed too large a territory, then there would be real problems over slavery policies. So they parroted it back in order to reduce the prospects that the debate over slavery in Washington would interfere with their desire for statehood. And they mapped out territory that's exactly the territory that we see today in the state of California. Now, at that point, California was really northern California. It was mostly the Bay Area and some of the coastal zone coming down toward a past Monterey and towards Santa Barbara. But there wasn't much of Southern California that had a voice in what was going on. Well, there was.

was no water. Why would you want to live there? That was the... Exactly. Water policy then as now is one of the great conflicts of California politics and always has been and probably will be at least for decades to come. That ban of slavery was fateful. A fall of 1849, those delegates that are meeting in Monterey, right, during that constitutional invention of sorts is when they choose to do that. How were they on that side of it? What were the forces that were. work that we're calling that shot. Well, it's well known that in that first constitution,

slavery was banned. That's often misinterpreted as basically a moral position. In fact, slavery was banned because the gold prospectors and the whole gold economy had a lot of delegates to their constitutional convention. And they were concerned that 49ers or Argonauts, as they were known, then, would come into the gold zone with slaves. And this would give them basically a leg up on prospecting and extracting gold from the landscape. So at the same time that the Constitutional Convention banned slavery, it also banned the import of freemen into California. And obviously it banned the import of slaves. It was an economic choice that was being articulated.

September 9, 1850, President Millard Fillmore grants California statehood. This creates a whole new kind of governance, obviously, which is lucky because there's a lot of lawlessness out there at that time. And San Francisco has a strong desire to control this. They create what's called a vigilance committee. And thus we begin the prison system in California, I suppose, right? Well, sure. The committee of vigilance, as it was known, basically was the creation of business interests in San Francisco. And their concern was that post-Goldworth San Francisco was a violation.

place and essentially a lawless place. And to the extent there was law enforcement, it was incredibly corrupt. So the business interests basically created their own rump law enforcement group. And this was the vigilance committee. They went out there. They basically cleared the ruffians out. They imprisoned wrongdoers offshore in ships and then deported them as far as they could. They cleaned out San Francisco pretty well, although there had to be a second committee of vigilance down the line. And then the third committee, even further than that, just to maintain peace and order in the Bay Area, which was the center of California at the time. The next gold rush really is the railroad. When the railroad comes to California, you begin to see real estate getting carved up like crazy.

And that is the beginning of large-scale farming, the Central Valley. It is also eventually the beginning of Southern California because they extend this railroad down from San Francisco towards what becomes Los Angeles, only possible because of that railroad. It's a huge transformation that has everything about the modern world perfectly teed up for the time of that development. It really is that kind of alignment, isn't it? The stars are aligned. Well, that's very well put. Basically, the impetus for the railroad started around the time of the Civil War because the, you know, Union was concerned that California was so distant from the governing center of the United

States, they were afraid that it might well join up with the Confederacy. And that would be a big problem. And that was why the first laws that were passed to essentially subsidize the construction of a transcontinental railroad were passed under Lincoln. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Now, at the same time, civic and business leaders of California, and once again, we're still talking about San Francisco, they understood that for further development to basically meet their ambitions to turn San Francisco into a world-class city, it needed access to markets in the Midwest and the east. And the only way to get that access was through a railroad. So they were agitating for the construction of a railroad, just as the federal government was

showing an interest in the construction of the railroad. And that's one we finally got the transcontinent, Rural Road, the Union Pacific, which ran from Omaha to the Rockies, and then the Central Pacific, which ran not from the Pacific Coast, but from Sacramento. And it ran east, and those two lines met at Promontory Summit, Utah in 1869, and that was the first France Continent Railroad, and that was a great achievement. In San Francisco, the driving of the Golden Spike was greeted with the church bells, the city hall bells rang. The newswire services had sent telegraphers up to promontory

so that they could deliver real-time notification that the Golden Spike had been driven and that we now had a single line running from the Mississippi all the way to California. Yeah, it's so interesting. At the same time, you have the advent of professional tourism. You know, like this idea that you should go somewhere comes with both the steamboat earlier back east,

but also the railroad. And California is just the perfect, glorious destination for so much of this. And you end up with these gigantic hotels that are built. And the terminus of so many of these railroads are tourist destinations. It plants the seeds for everything that comes afterwards. It's extraordinary. It amazes me as a big fan of California myself, how much we see the microcosm of America within those state borders.

That's what's so incredible about. the history of the state and the economy of it, really. It has everything there. Right. Well, we're flashing forward a little bit, but as I wrote in my book, basically, California today is seen by the right wing, by Republicans, as an outlier, you know, a wild, liberal place. But the fact of the matter is that today, one out of eight Americans lives in California. And the way I put it is, California really is America. And to understand America, and you really need to understand California.

And if you want to understand California, it helps to understand America. This is very much a part of the nation and a driver of politics and economics nationwide. The undeniable potency of that state, economically, politically, everything about it, necessitates the pushback against it by anyone who is opposed to values of people that are living there. And the reality of the place, really, that it is such a cultural, mix. But that's what's so important to recognize, and we can wrap this up on this note, I think, is the diversity was always there. The sense of California was always there after the Mexicans and traded over to the Americans. What we have today was basically already in the cards

for all the obvious reasons and less obvious. But it's all in your book, Golden State, the Making of California, written by our guest today, Michael Hiltzig, who was a very, very accomplished journalist and author. So thank you very much, Michael. You're making me want to go back to California. and visit my sisters, who were very smart and moved there. Right. Well, thanks for having me. This has been a great fun and a great time. Thanks for listening to this episode of American History Hit.

As you've made it this far, why not like and follow us wherever you get your podcasts? American History Hit, a podcast from History Hit.