CSET Practice Test History Subtest I

From Terror to Triumph: Historical Overview By Ronald L.
F. Davis, Ph. D.

Creating Jim Crow

The term Jim Crow originated in a song performed by Daddy
Rice, a white minstrel show entertainer in the 1830s. Rice
covered his face with charcoal to resemble a black man,
and then sang and danced a routine in caricature of a
silly black person. By the 1850s, this Jim Crow character,
one of several stereotypical images of black inferiority
in the nation's popular culture, was a standard act in the
minstrel shows of the day. How it became a term synonymous
with the brutal segregation and disfranchisement of
African Americans in the late nineteenth-century is
unclear. What is clear, however, is that by 1900, the term
was generally identified with those racist laws and
actions that deprived African Americans of their civil
rights by defining blacks as inferior to whites, as
members of a caste of subordinate people. 

The emergence of segregation in the South actually began
immediately after the Civil War when the formerly enslaved
people acted quickly to establish their own churches and
schools separate from whites. At the same time, most
southern states tried to limit the economic and physical
freedom of the formerly enslaved by adopting laws known as
Black Codes. These early legal attempts at white-imposed
segregation and discrimination were short-lived. During
the period of Congressional Reconstruction, which lasted
from 1866 to 1876, the federal government declared illegal
all such acts of legal discrimination against African
Americans. Moreover, the passage of the Fourteenth and
Fifteenth Amendments, along with the two Civil Rights Acts
of 1866 and 1875 and the various Enforcement Acts of the
early 1870s, curtailed the ability of southern whites to
formally deprive blacks of their civil rights. 

As a result African Americans were able to make great
progress in building their own institutions, passing civil
rights laws, and electing officials to public office. In
response to these achievements, southern whites launched a
vicious, illegal war against southern blacks and their
white Republican allies. In most places, whites carried
out this war in the late 1860s and early 1870s under the
cover of secret organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan.
Thousands of African Americans were killed, brutalized,
and terrorized in these bloody years. The federal
government attempted to stop the bloodshed by sending in
troops and holding investigations, but its efforts were
far too limited. 

When the Compromise of 1877 gave the presidency to
Republican Rutherford B. Hayes in return for his promise
to end Reconstruction, the federal government essentially
abandoned all efforts at protecting the civil rights of
southern blacks. It was not long before a stepped-up reign
of white terror erupted in the South. The decade of the
1880s was characterized by mob lynchings, a vicious system
of convict prison farms and chain gangs, the horribly
debilitating debt peonage of sharecropping, the imposition
of a legal color line in race relations, and a variety of
laws that blatantly discriminated against blacks. 

Some southern states, for example, moved to legally impose
segregation on public transportation, especially on
trains. Blacks were required to sit in a special car
reserved for blacks known as "The Jim Crow Car," even if
they had bought first-class tickets. Some states also
passed so-called miscegenation laws banning interracial
marriages. These bans were, in the opinion of some
historians, the "ultimate segregation laws." They clearly
announced that blacks were so inferior to whites that any
mixing of the two threatened the very survival of the
superior white race. Almost all southern states passed
statutes restricting suffrage in the years from 1871 to
1889, including poll taxes in some cases. And the effects
were devastating: over half the blacks voting in Georgia
and South Carolina in 1880, for example, had vanished from
the polls in 1888. Of those who did vote, many of their
ballots were stolen, misdirected to opposing candidates,
or simply not counted. 

In the 1890s, starting with Mississippi, most southern
states began more systematically to disfranchise black
males by imposing voter registration restrictions, such as
literacy tests, poll taxes, and the white primary. These
new rules of the political game were used by white
registrars to deny voting privileges to blacks at the
registration place rather than at the ballot box, which
had previously been done by means of fraud and force. By
1910, every state of the former Confederacy had adopted
laws that segregated all aspects of life (especially
schools and public places) wherein blacks and whites might
socially mingle or come into contact. 

The impetus for this new, legally-enforced caste order of
southern life was indeed complex. Many lower-class whites,
for example, hoped to wrest political power from merchants
and large landowners who controlled the vote of their
indebted black tenants by taking away black suffrage. Some
whites also feared a new generation of so-called "uppity"
blacks, men and women born after slavery who wanted their
full rights as American citizens. At the same time there
appeared throughout America the new pseudo-science of
eugenics that reinforced the racist views of black
inferiority. Finally, many southern whites feared that the
federal government might intervene in southern politics if
the violence and fraud continued. They believed that by
legally ending suffrage for blacks, the violence would
also end. Even some blacks supported this idea and were
willing to sacrifice their right to vote in return for an
end to the terror. 

In the end, black resistance to segregation was difficult
because the system of land tenancy, known as
sharecropping, left most blacks economically dependent
upon planter-landlords and merchant suppliers. Also, the
white terror at the hands of lynch mobs threatened all
members of the black family–adults and children alike.
This reality made it nearly impossible for blacks to stand
up to Jim Crow because such actions might bring down the
wrath of the white mob on one's parents, brothers, spouse,
and children. Few black families, moreover, were
economically well off enough to buck the local white power
structure of banks, merchants, and landlords. To put it
succinctly: impoverished and often illiterate southern
blacks were in a weak position in the 1890s for
confronting the racist culture of Jim Crow. 

White terror did not end–as some blacks had hoped–with
the disfranchisement of southern black men. To enforce the
new legal order of segregation, southern whites often
resorted to even more brutalizing acts of mob terror,
including race riots and ritualized lynching, than had
been practiced even by the old Klan of the 1870s. Some
historians see this extremely brutal and near epidemic
commitment to white supremacy as breaking with the South's
more laissez-faire and paternalistic past. Others view
this "new order" as a more rigid continuation of the "cult
of whiteness" at work in the South since the end of the
Civil War. Both perspectives agree, however, that the
1890s ushered in a more formally racist South–one in
which white supremacists used law and mob terror to
deprive blacks of the vote and to define them in life and
popular culture as an inferior people.

Surviving Jim Crow

The Supreme Court's sanctioning of segregation (by
upholding the "separate but equal" language in state laws)
in the Plessy v. Ferguson case in 1896 and the refusal of
the federal government to enact anti-lynching laws meant
that black Americans were left to their own devices for
surviving Jim Crow. In most cases, southern blacks tried
to avoid engaging whites as much as possible as the best
means of avoiding their wrath. These efforts at avoiding
whites meant supporting their own schools and community-
based support groups as much as possible. 

In the 1860s and early 1870s, many southern blacks
actually preferred segregated schools, especially their
all-black colleges, as a means of local autonomy and
independence–even though they had little choice in the
matter after 1890. Many of these colleges became the
primary centers of black resistance to Jim Crow, although
their administrators and staff frequently differed over
how best to make their stand. At the primary and secondary
school levels, truly heroic efforts were made by
impoverished black teachers to educate their pupils,
usually in face of white resistance that often included
violence. Whites were generally so opposed to black
education that many states in the South refused to build
black public high schools until the twentieth-century.
Despite the repression, the literacy rate of blacks nearly
doubled from 1880 to 1930, rising from less than 45
percent to 77 percent–an incredible climb from the less
than 7 percent who were literate in 1865. 

Additionally, southern blacks survived the demeaning
character of Jim Crow by organizing self-help associations
that functioned as parallel institutions to those in the
white community, ranging from lodges and social clubs to
life insurance programs and volunteer fire departments. By
1910, a wide range of segregated black institutions in
southern communities served as refuges and safe harbors
from white terror and violence; these social clubs and
lodges enabled a small, middle-class of prosperous black
participants to live in dignity and with self-respect. 

For the vast majority of southern blacks, the terror of
Jim Crow meant that they were forced to live" behind the
veil," in the words of the black intellectual, W.E.B. Du
Bois. In dealing with whites, most southern blacks were
forced to adopt accommodationist and appeasement tactics
that played out in complicated ways across the region.
Scholars refer to these tactics as "dissembling," or a
psychological ploy in which blacks assumed positions and
the appearances of non-confrontation. Sometimes it meant
shuffling and feigning irresponsibility, and sometimes it
meant turning the other cheek and walking away. Almost
always these appeasement stances meant adhering to a
demeaning racial etiquette. 

Black customers were almost never served first in stores
when white customers were present, seldom allowed to try
on clothing in white businesses, and typically forced to
wait patiently to be spoken to by white store clerks
rather than to dare address them directly. Nor were adult
African Americans afforded terms of respect, such as
"Mister," "Mrs.," or "Miss." Instead, they endured words
such as "boy," "girl," "uncle," "auntie," and often
"nigger." 

When among themselves, African Americans resisted these
insults by mocking whites in song, jokes, and stories.
They would even sing these songs of mockery as they worked
when whites were present. This reflected a long history of
"putting on the man, " or playing Sambo, in order to
manipulate white masters and better control the otherwise
powerless situation of their lives in slavery. Tragically,
many southern whites came to expect this type of docile
behavior from all blacks, demanding it during and after
slavery under the threat of violence. This Sambo character
(an innately barbaric, passive, cheerful, childish, lazy,
and submissive black) was commonly accepted as reality in
both the southern and northern states. 

Over time, this Sambo-type image was immortalized in
literature and film of the period, usually in the
character of Uncle Tom, Uncle Remus, Jim Crow and "Old
Black Joe." D.W. Griffith's classic silent film "The Birth
of a Nation," released in 1915, depicts elected black
congressmen during Reconstruction as ape-like characters,
eating bananas on the floor of Congress. This image was
further repeated in white-produced movies with black film
actors often cast as a lazy, submissive, and innately
docile character who spoke in the same manner as did black
slaves when in the presence of their masters or in the
company of whites. That is, taking a posture of docility,
holding their head down, and smiling all the time with
their hat in their hands when talking to whites. In short,
African Americans were forced to assume a multitude of
personalities in order to cope with Jim Crow. 

Resisting Jim Crow

For most southern blacks, Jim Crow was not an easy or
acceptable condition for them to tolerate, nor was it
always possible for them to avoid whites. For thousands
and indeed tens of thousands of African Americans, Jim
Crow was met with resistance and determination to win back
the civil rights that had been stolen from them after
1876. Often this resistance took the form of individual
acts of defiance, and often it took the form of organized
challenges. It is impossible to know, for example, how
many of the nearly 4,000 (recorded) African Americans
lynched (mutilated and burned alive) from 1882 to 1968,
were men and women who had challenged Jim Crow by some
overt act of defiance. Studies by Ida B. Wells-Barnett,
the great anti-lynching crusader in the early twentieth-
century, suggest that most of the lynch victims were
random subjects of white rage. Clearly this was the case
in the bloody urban riots in which mobs of whites swooped
down on black neighborhoods, burning and killing any
blacks who crossed their enraged paths. Numerous victims
were lynched on trumped up charges, such as the case
depicted in Harper Lee's novel, To Kill A Mockingbird. 

It seems quite likely, however, that many of the black
victims of mob violence had affronted whites by some form
of unacceptable behavior that possibly included acts of
defiance. One such case involved Ida B. Wells-Barnett's
murdered friends in Memphis, whose only crime was that of
owning a prosperous grocery store. Almost all blacks knew
that to stand out in anyway as anything but a shuffling
"darkey" amounted to an attack on white supremacy. That is
why even some prosperous blacks in some communities lived
in unpainted houses, owned run-down and unpainted stores
and businesses, and avoided new carriages and automobiles.
More than a few black newspapers editors, church leaders,
and civil rights' advocates narrowly escaped the lynch
mobs, whose members wanted them dead because of their
outspoken defiance of Jim Crow. Ida B. Wells-Barnett had
to flee Memphis, for example, because she dared to speak
out in condemnation of the murders. How many others of the
lynched were men and women like Wells-Barnett will
probably never be known. 

By 1905, the issue of how to most effectively deal with
Jim Crow came to a head in the debate between the
followers of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois.
Washington, who was born in slavery, believed that
accepting segregation for the time being and working hard
at farming and in community-based support groups would
best enable southern blacks to avoid the violence and
terror all around them. He supported and helped found
schools and colleges (Tuskegee Institute), often funded by
white philanthropists, which educated blacks in
agriculture and trained black vocational teachers. Such
tactics, Washington argued, would in time bring a measure
of economic security and eventually a middle-class basis
for challenging disfranchisement and the terror of Jim
Crow. 

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, on the other hand, a
Harvard-educated, New England-born intellectual, found
Washington's appeasement strategy of dealing with whites
unacceptable. Although he clearly understood that blacks
were powerless to end segregation immediately, he strongly
believed that African Americans should insist upon all
their Constitutional rights as American citizens. He
advocated efforts, among other things, to educate a
talented elite of black Americans to lead the masses in
political and economic resistance to Jim Crow. 

Du Bois broke openly with Washington in 1903, with the
publication of his book, The Souls of Black Folk, which
included an essay highly critical of Washington. The split
became nearly irreparable when he founded, along with
William Monroe Trotter (a long-time and vehement critic of
Washington) the Niagara Movement, which advocated vigilant
protest and activism in place of Washington's gradualism
and appeasement. Although the Niagara movement floundered
within a few years, it helped set the state for the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP), an interracial organization that emerged in
1909/1910, and became the principal voice advocating legal
resistance to segregation, disfranchisement, and lynching
in the nation. In the 1920s, it conducted scores of
lawsuits at the local level in defense of black civil
liberties and civil rights, and it also lobbied Congress
to pass a federal anti-lynching bill. Although it never
achieved a federal anti-lynching law, its constant
vigilance and exposure of lynching helped to greatly
reduce the number of incidents by 1940. 

In the 1930s, the NAACP, under its leader Walter White and
the head of its legal department, Charles Hamilton
Houston, began to focus more of its attention on a
campaign to challenge segregation and disfranchisement in
the United States Supreme Court. Ultimately, the
Association's constant agitation, unstinting legal
investigations, and numerous court litigations at all
levels of the legal system resulted in the overthrowing of
segregation in public schools in 1954 by the Supreme Court
in the landmark case of Brown v. the Topeka Board of
Education. This decision not only reversed the Court's
support for the "separate but equal" doctrine, it also
opened the floodgates through which a sea of civil rights
litigation and legislation flowed over the nation in the
1950s and 1960s. 

Joining with the NAACP in contesting Jim Crow in the 1920s
and 1930s were an array of political organizations like
the National Urban League, the National Negro Congress,
and more radical groups such as the Communist Party. In
the latter case, the Communist Party gained significant
support in the black community for its energetic defense
in the 1930s of the Scottsboro Boys by the party's League
of Struggle for Negro Rights. This case, which involved
the trumped up convictions of nine black youths falsely
accused of assaulting two white women, attracted many
unemployed workers to the party in the 1930s. Some rural
African Americans also joined the socialist backed
Southern Tenant Farmers' Union in the 1930s in defense of
their economic rights in the plantation districts of the
South. 

In addition to the organized, political, and personal
resistance to Jim Crow, African Americans attacked white
supremacy in non-political but defiant cultural
expressions. The new musical forms of ragtime and jazz,
presented an in-your-face side of black culture that had
grown up largely in the shadow of segregation and Jim
Crow. The distinctive richness of jazz syncopation and its
adaptation of African and plantation-based rhythms to
European harmony defied white expectations and the
stereotypes presented in the so-called "coon songs" of the
Jim Crow minstrel shows. Both musical forms expressed the
joyful exuberance of a complex and sophisticated black
culture based in the urban centers, especially New
Orleans, of the American South. 

The rural-based blues music of the Yazoo and Texas deltas
spoke more of coping with misery and the "low-down and
dirty" side of living as penniless sharecroppers and field
hands in the Jim Crow South. The message presented by
blues singers in hundreds of southern "juke joints" was
one of desperation, anguish, and perseverance–of a
"lowdown achin' heart disease, like consumption, killin'
by degrees." They sang of a pervasive sadness that was
always present: "I've got the blues before sunrise, with
the tears standing in my eyes, ..." At the same time, the
blues also celebrated the human joys of the black
community, including love, sexual desire, and heroic
actions in the midst of hard times. 

Along side the blues and jazz, a tradition of black
protest literature also shouted loudly in defiance of
white supremacy. This literary movement of resistance had
begun in the previous century but reached its fullest
expression in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Based
in Harlem, New York, which was the "New World" (along with
Chicago) for thousands of black migrants from the South,
the Renaissance featured a "New Negro" poetry and
literature that emphasized self-respect and defiance. Its
greatest artists explicitly expressed the deepest feelings
of African Americans about racism, segregation, and
discrimination. The essays, poems, and novels of the
Harlem Renaissance rejected sentimentality, romanticism,
and escapism to focus directly on the root causes of the
crippling plight of black America: white racism.

Escaping Jim Crow

On a day-to-day level, many southern blacks resisted Jim
Crow by hoping for the day when they could escape the Jim
Crow South–much as their ancestors had used the
Underground Railroad to escape slavery by going to the
North. Thousands of blacks had indeed left for Kansas and
Oklahoma in the 1880s and the 1890s. The movement to
Kansas became known as the "Kansas Exodus," and even today
there exist several nearly all-black towns in the state.
Thousands of other black sharecroppers moved to southern
towns and cities in the 1880s and 1890s. Some African
Americans even tried to establish all-black towns within
the South, like Mound Bayou in the Mississippi delta, in
hopes of completely isolating themselves from whites
altogether while staying in the region of their births.
But the vast majority of black migrants from the South
traveled to eastern and mid-western cities and towns,
beginning in the 1890s. In a three-year span from 1916 to
1919, in what has been called the "Great Migration," over
half a million blacks fled the South. Another million left
in the 1920s. During the Great Depression, when black
sharecroppers were turned off the land, thousands of them
joined relatives and friends in Chicago, Detroit,
Pittsburgh, New York, and Los Angeles. 

Many of these black migrants were pushed out of the South
by a series of natural disasters, such as floods and the
boll weevil scourge which devastated cotton crops from
Texas to Georgia. Other were pulled to the North by the
opportunity for jobs created by the labor shortage during
World War One and the cut-off of European immigration to
the U. S. in the 1920s. But it was also the years of pent
up anger and smoldering rage that propelled southern
blacks to leave the land of Jim Crow laws and lynchings at
their first opportunity. Although escaping to northern and
midwestern cities did bring an end to the most overt forms
of Jim Crow for southern blacks, the North was not a
"promised land," one completely free of racial strife.
Many white city dwellers bitterly resented the influx of
blacks, and violent race riots erupted all over the nation
from 1890 to 1945. Major ones occurred in East St. Louis,
Houston, Chicago, and Tulsa in the years 1917 through
1921. In nearly every case black people defended
themselves and their families against roving mobs of white
racists. 

In the cities of the North, the NAACP and the National
Urban League, both interracial groups, worked to integrate
blacks into the economic mainstream of American life. A
third organization, the largest mass movement among blacks
prior to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s,
the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African
Communities League, was less concerned with integration
than with economic development. An admirer of Booker T.
Washington, the UNIA founder, Marcus Garvey, advocated
self-help and black autonomy over integration. He also
launched a movement to send blacks to Africa that
attracted the interest of thousands of African Americans,
including many who had moved to Oklahoma and Kansas in the
1880s and 1890s. 

Much of the desire to flee the South and to resist
segregation legally and politically had resulted from the
experience of African-American soldiers in World War I.
Young black soldiers home from Europe found Jim Crow
especially grueling, and many of them joined their
neighbors and relatives who had moved to northern cities
during and before the war, enticed by jobs in the war
industries. A similar pattern occurred after World War II,
when over a million and a half African Americans left the
South for eastern and midwestern cities and the west
coast. 

Most importantly, black Americans in the 1940s refused to
accept a segregated military or lack of access by blacks
to government jobs in the war industries. The African-
American leader A. Philip Randolph threatened in 1941 to
lead 50,000 blacks in a non-violent "March on Washington
D.C." to secure fair employment in the war industries.
President Franklin Roosevelt responded by opening the
defense industries to equal employment, monitored by the
Fair Employment Practices Agency. Northern blacks were
attracted to the Democratic Party in the 1930s and 1940s
because of FDR's support for labor, the various welfare
benefit programs that aided impoverished blacks, and
Eleanor Roosevelt's advocacy for civil rights. This switch
in political parties represented a monumental shift from
the party of Lincoln to the party of FDR, and it laid the
political ground for challenging Jim Crow in the 1950s.

The Transition From Segregation to Civil Rights

The new militancy of black Americans in the post war era
ushered in the transition from segregation to civil
rights. The NAACP had supported numerous legal battles
from the 1920s forward–usually local litigation and
investigations of lynching, challenging the unequal
facilities of state institutions and laying down thereby a
body of legal precedent used by the courts in the 1950s.
In 1944, the Supreme Court struck down the white primary,
a measure used to exclude blacks from the Democratic Party
primaries in the South. The number of southern, African
Americans registered to vote rose from 150,000 in 1940 to
more than a million by 1952. 

The transition was complete when the NAACP lawyers
convinced the Supreme Court to reverse the doctrine of
"separate but equal" in education. Other court cases
followed, along with ground-breaking federal legislation,
and waves of protests by black and white activists
determined to implement the Court's rulings and to end
segregation and disfranchisement. This activism became
known as the Civil Rights Movement, and the era is
frequently called the "Second Reconstruction" because it
effectively completed the Civil Rights revolution begun by
Congress and embodied in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth
Amendments passed in the decade after the Civil War. 

This incredibly successful challenge to Jim Crow coincided
with the de-colonization of non-white nations throughout
the world. It was no accident that the great African-
American leader of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s,
Martin Luther King Jr., drew his greatest inspiration from
the non-violent tactics espoused by Mahatma Gandhi, the
leader of India's independence from Great Britain. 

With the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the
Voting Rights Act of 1965, legalized segregation and the
disfranchisement of African Americans was finally ended.
It had taken almost one hundred years of resistance to
terror and discrimination to achieve what had been
promised to African Americans at the end of the Civil War.
The struggle from terror to triumph had not been an easy
victory, but it was a war valiantly fought–and it was a
war in which justice ultimately prevailed. 

In fact, so dead is the historical meaning of the word Jim
Crow that the average college student today is unaware of
its significance. According to a survey of students in
American history classes at a major university, less than
20 percent recognized the word at all. And most of them
have only a vague notion that the word once had something
to do with segregation. 

Yet, if Jim Crow is legally buried, the belief in white
superiority and the legacy of segregation and racial
discrimination still lives on in the hearts, minds, and
actions of many Americans. The recurrent outbreaks of race
riots in American cities are telling reminders that voting
rights and integration of public schools represent only
part of the solution to the problem of race in America.
Indeed, the lack of equal access by African Americans to
adequate and rewarding jobs, quality education, and
affordable housing strongly suggests to many observers
that the spirit of Jim Crow still haunts the social and
economic landscape of the American nation.

The Impact of the Railroad: The Iron Horse and the
Octopus  

The completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869
was a major event in California history. The iron horse
linked California with the rest of the nation and ushered
in an era of economic consolidation. The Californians who
controlled this new technology became the wealthiest and
most powerful men of their generation. The railroad also
stirred intense controversy. It was denounced by its
opponents as a grasping and greedy octopus.  

Early Transportation and Communication The admission of
California to the union in 1850 linked the state
politically with the rest of the nation, but California
remained geographically isolated. 

Several early attempts were made to solve the problem of
isolation. Stagecoaches carrying the overland mail began
crossing the continent to California in 1858. Writer Mark
Twain chronicled the plight of one group of hapless
passengers who accompanied the west-bound mail. Among the
more colorful stagecoach drivers in California was
Charlotte Parkhurst, a tough character also known as
"Cock-eyed Charley." The Pony Express began providing
transcontinental mail service to California in 1860, but
its impact was minimal. Perhaps the most ingenious attempt
to solve the problem of California's isolation was the
introduction of camel caravans across the deserts of the
southwest. Meanwhile, river boats carried passengers and
cargo on the inland rivers of the state. The wires of the
telegraph established instant communication between
California and the rest of the nation in 1861, but the
larger challenge of providing a system of transcontinental
transportation remained unmet. 

The United States Congress in 1857 passed the Overland
California Mail Act. This act offered government aid in
the form of mail contracts to any company that could
provide stagecoach service from the eastern United States
to California. Soon the postmaster general awarded the
first contract to the Overland Mail Company, headed by
John Butterfield of New York. Butterfield's stagecoaches
began carrying passengers and mail across the continent
from St. Louis to San Francisco in 1858. The coaches
crossed 2,800 miles of roads that were little more than
rutted dirt trails. The trip lasted about three weeks.

As Mark Twain once discovered, riding in a stagecoach was
not nearly as much fun as one might imagine. Meals along
the way usually were a combination of beans, stale bacon,
and crusty bread. Overnight accommodations were dirty and
uncomfortable. The ride itself was a bone-jarring, teeth-
rattling, muscle-straining experience. 

Mark Twain One of the many young Americans to cross the
continent in a stagecoach carrying the overland mail was
the writer Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain. He
came to Nevada in 1861 and worked on the Territorial
Enterprise newspaper. Later in 1864 he moved to San
Francisco and began writing for the Golden Era.

"Whenever the stage stopped to change horses, we would
wake up, and try to recollect where we were.... We began
to get into country, now, threaded here and there with
little streams. These had high, steep banks on each side,
and every time we flew down one bank and scrambled up the
other, our party inside got mixed somewhat.

First we would all be down in a pile at the forward end of
the stage, nearly in a sitting posture, and in a second we
would shoot to the other end, and stand on our heads. And
we would sprawl and kick, too, and ward off ends and
corners of mailbags that came lumbering after us and about
us; and as the dust rose from the tumult, we would all
sneeze in chorus, and the majority of us would grumble,
and probably say some hasty thing, like: 'Take your elbow
out of my ribs! –Can't you quit crowding.'"

Charlotte Parkhurst Charlotte Parkhurst was a stagecoach
driver in the 1850s and '60s. She drove a four-horse team
for Wells, Fargo and Company on the road from Santa Cruz
to San Jose. Since the stagecoach companies in those days
hired only men as drivers, she dressed in men's clothing
and applied for the job as "Charley Parkhurst." She wore
gloves (in both summer and winter) to hide her small hands
and pleated shirts to hide her figure.

Apparently no one suspected Parkhurst's true identity. One
of her unknowing companions later said that Charley
Parkhurst "out-swore, out-drank, and out-chewed even the
Monterey whalers." Parkhurst was a tough-looking hombre
with a patch over one eye, blinded by the kick of a horse.
In later years, this colorful character was known as
"Cock-eyed Charley."

When Parkhurst died in 1879, the San Francisco Morning
Call mourned the passing of "the most dexterous and
celebrated of the California drivers, and it was an honor
to occupy the spare end of the driver's seat when the
fearless Charley Parkhurst held the reins."

Pony Express The Pony Express began carrying mail between
California and St. Joseph, Missouri, on April 3, 1860. The
route was nearly 2,000 miles long and service was provided
semi-weekly. In summer, the trip took ten and a half days.

The Missouri freighting firm of Russell, Majors and
Waddell hired eighty young riders to carry the mail across
the continent aboard fleet-footed ponies. The average age
of the riders was just eighteen. The company outfitted
them with revolvers and knives to defend themselves
against any varmints they might meet along the trail,
critters like wolves and mountain lions. The company also
supplied the riders with bibles and prohibited them from
engaging in any "drinking or swearing." The riders wore
close-fitting clothes to reduce wind resistance and on
their ponies were light racing saddles. They carried
leather pouches filled with twenty pounds of mail wrapped
in oiled silk to keep out the moisture. These dashing
young riders sped across the continent at twenty-five
miles an hour, stopping every ten to fifteen miles for a
fresh horse at one of the hundreds of relay stations along
the way. As the rider approached each station, his
replacement mount would be saddled and ready to go. The
rider would transfer his mail pouch and be on his way
again in less than two minutes. The Pony Express delivered
the mail to California far faster than other means. But
the cost was much higher. After only about eighteen
months, the Pony Express went out of business. It ended on
October 24, 1861, the day the transcontinental telegraph
began providing instant communication across the
continent.

Camel Caravans The United States Congress in 1855 approved
a plan to use camels to carry goods across the deserts of
the southwest to California. The plan was the bright idea
of Jefferson Davis, an imaginative young senator from
Mississippi at the time. Davis was convinced that camels–
famous for their sure-footedness in shifting sands and
their ability to endure intense heat–would be an ideal
means of transporting military supplies to California.
After Davis became United States Secretary of War, he
dispatched government agents to north Africa to purchase a
small herd of camels. The camels eventually arrived in New
Mexico where they were assigned the task of transporting
goods over a twelve-hundred-mile desert trail to southern
California. 

On their maiden trek west, the camels averaged twenty-five
miles a day and finished the journey in about fifty days.
The caravan arrived safely in southern California without
losing a single man or beast. Some of the soldiers who
served as camel tenders complained that the rolling gait
of their ungainly mounts made them seasick. Others said
that the camels had extremely rude manners. When angry or
upset, the discomfited dromedaries had the unpleasant
habit of ejecting their cuds into the face of unsuspecting
onlookers! 

Although the camels did well, the government soon lost
interest. In the early 1860s, some thirty-five
decommissioned camels were driven north from Los Angeles
to the army's Benicia Arsenal in Solano County. There they
were auctioned off as government surplus to the highest
bidder. 

River Boats In the years before the advent of the
railroad, the major arteries of inland trade and
transportation in California were the routes of the great
paddlewheel steamers on San Francisco Bay and on the
larger rivers of the Central Valley. 

The magnificent river boats that plied the waters of the
Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers were every bit as
elegant as any that ever paddled their way along the
mighty Mississippi. They were dripping with Victorian
gingerbread, and their staterooms were decked out with
lace and cut velvet. One New Englander was delighted with
the luxury and comfort he found aboard The Senator in
1850: "It was a strong, spacious, and elegant boat. After
my recent barbaric life, her long upper saloon, with its
sofas and faded carpet, seemed splendid enough for a
palace."

Huge profits were to be made, and the competition for
customers between San Francisco and Sacramento was
particularly intense. Rival crews got into fist fights
over who would carry a particular passenger or load of
freight, while captains pushed their boats to the limit,
trying to make the best time. The record from San
Francisco was set in 1861: five hours and nineteen
minutes. Price wars drove passenger fares down from $30 to
$5. One desperate captain even offered to carry folks for
free–just to get their business!

Telegraph The overland mail reached California by
stagecoach in about three weeks. The fleet-footed ponies
of the Pony Express reduced delivery time to around ten
days. But a new technology, the telegraph, promised
instant communication across the continent.

The telegraph is a simple device that sends messages by
electricity. It was developed by an American inventor
named Samuel F. B. Morse. He also developed the Morse
code, an ingenious code that uses dots and dashes to stand
for the letters of the alphabet. Morse sent his first
message from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore, Maryland, in
1844. Telegraph lines soon connected cities throughout the
eastern United States.

Workers began building a telegraph line across the country
in the summer of 1861. It was completed on October 24,
1861. On that historic day, the first telegram was sent
from California to the east. The chief justice of the
California Supreme Court telegraphed President Abraham
Lincoln to declare California's loyalty to the union. Also
on that day the Pony Express went out of business. The
telegraph had rendered its services obsolete. 

The Iron Horse The problem of California's isolation from
the rest of the nation was solved with the completion of
the transcontinental railroad in 1869. The person most
responsible for launching that massive enterprise was a
young civil engineer named Theodore Judah. Judah
tirelessly pursued financial backers for the project and
found them in four ambitious Sacramento merchants, known
in the annals of California history as the Big Four. Judah
also was instrumental in securing government aid for the
construction of the railroad. Building the railroad was a
monumental undertaking. The greatest challenge was laying
rails through the heart of the Sierra Nevada. After six
years of toil, the railroad was completed with the Gold
Spike ceremony at Promontory, Utah, on May 10, 1869. Most
of the construction work on the western portion of the
line was performed by Chinese labor.

The railroad's economic impact on the state was far-
reaching, although not quite what was expected. California
agriculture was among those industries that prospered with
the opening of eastern markets. Perishable farm products
now could swiftly be shipped across the country in
refrigerated rail cars. The completion of rival rail lines
contributed to the boom of the eighties, a rapid expansion
of the population and economy of southern California.

The great wealth produced by the railroad enabled its
owners to become some of California's leading
philanthropic benefactors. The wife of the first president
of the Central Pacific Railroad, for example, became the
mother of a university. Such benefactions were not always
appreciated by those who condemned the railroad as an
octopus strangling California.

Theodore Judah Interest in building a transcontinental
railroad was strong throughout the 1850s. The United
States Congress authorized surveys of several potential
routes but was unable to agree on which route to choose.

Civil engineer Theodore Judah deserves much of the credit
for developing the specific plan that eventually won
Congressional approval. A native of Connecticut, Judah
came west in 1854 to build the first railroad on the
Pacific Coast, a short line from Sacramento to Folsom.
Having completed this modest task, Judah became entranced-
-some would say "bewitched"–by a grand vision: building a
railroad across the continent.

In 1860 Judah made an intensive search for the best
crossing of the Sierra Nevada. He located and surveyed a
feasible route, making detailed notes on the grade and
terrain. Encouraged by his discovery, he drew up articles
of association for the Central Pacific Railroad of
California. After several rejections, Judah in 1860 turned
to four Sacramento merchants for financial backing.
Judah's association with the Big Four proved to be deeply
troubling. He wanted the railroad to be built well; they
wanted it to be built cheaply so that profits would be
high. In October 1863 Judah sailed for New York where he
hoped to find other financial backers who might buy out
the Big Four. During his trip eastward, Judah became
deathly ill with yellow fever. He died shortly after his
arrival in New York. Today a simple monument to Theodore
Judah stands in the Old Town area of Sacramento. Surely
his real monument is the ribbon of iron rails that tied
California to the rest of the nation. 

The Big Four The Big Four were the chief entrepreneurs in
the building of the first transcontinental railroad. They
provided the initial financial backing for the plan
proposed by civil engineer Theodore Judah. As directors of
the Central Pacific and later the Southern Pacific, they
became the wealthiest and most powerful Californians of
their generation. 

Elected president of the Central Pacific was a Sacramento
grocer named Leland Stanford. His gregarious personality
suited him perfectly for this position of leadership. He
was active in the formation of the state Republican party,
and in 1862 he ran successfully for the governorship of
California. Later he served as a United States Senator
from California. Vice President of the newly formed
corporation was Collis P. Huntington, a successful
Sacramento hardware merchant. Huntington's business
practices became legendary. His favorite maxim for setting
prices was "How badly does the customer want it?" Within
the inner circle of the railroad, Huntington was clearly
the dominant personality. In later years he would serve as
president of the Southern Pacific.

Huntington's partner in the hardware business was Mark
Hopkins, elevated to the position of treasurer of the
Central Pacific. Several years older than the other
partners, Hopkins lacked their driving ambition. His
greatest strength was his eye for detail, keeping
meticulous accounts of all financial transactions. 

Charles Crocker, the fourth member of the group, began his
career in California as a seller of dry goods in
Sacramento. As a director of the railroad, his greatest
contribution was his unflagging energy and enthusiasm. He
would serve as overseer of the actual building of the
railroad.

Government Aid The building of the transcontinental
railroad depended upon the entrepreneurial skills of the
Big Four, the hard work of thousands of laborers, and the
generous financial aid of the federal government.

In the fall of 1861 Theodore Judah traveled to Washington,
D.C., as a lobbyist for the newly formed Central Pacific
Railroad. His task was to secure federal aid to help pay
the costs of building the railroad. He was fabulously
successful. 

Congress in 1862 and 1864 passed the Pacific Railroad
Acts. Signed into law by President Lincoln, these acts
provided enormous gifts of land and low-interest loans to
the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads. 

The Central Pacific was authorized to build the western
portion of the transcontinental railroad beginning in
Sacramento, and the Union Pacific was to build the eastern
portion starting in Omaha. The loans were paid out at
varying rates, from $16,000 to $48,000 per mile of track.
The land was doled out in a checkerboard pattern of ten
alternate sections (square miles) on each side of the
track–half the land in a strip totaling forty miles in
width. The railroad thus received from the federal
government a total of 11,588,000 acres in California,
about 11 1/2 percent of the entire land area of the state.
This vast transfer of the public domain made the railroad,
by far, the largest private landowner in California.

Building the Railroad The actual construction of the
transcontinental railroad began on January 8, 1863, at a
grand public ceremony in Sacramento. Governor (and
railroad president) Leland Stanford threw out the first
symbolic shovelful of dirt. From that point forward, the
bulk of the work was performed by Chinese labor. 

Central Pacific work crews had a relatively easy time
laying tracks westward from Sacramento across the
flatlands of the Central Valley. But formidable obstacles
confronted them once they entered the foothills of the
Sierra Nevada. Hills needed to be cut down and valleys
filled in. Enormous wooden trestles had to be built across
deep ravines. Snowsheds were needed along nearly forty
miles of track.

The greatest physical challenge was building the Summit
Tunnel, a passageway through a quarter-mile of solid
granite. Chinese workers drilled holes and packed them
with explosive black powder. The granite was so hard that
sometimes the blasts merely spurted out through the drill
holes without cracking the stone. Progress was measured in
inches a day. Construction of the tunnel began in the
summer of 1866 and took more than a year to complete.

The Gold Spike After more than six years of construction,
the tracks of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific
railroads approached each other just to the north of the
Great Salt Lake. It was there, at a place called
Promontory, that the lines were officially joined in a
famous and colorful ceremony. 

Witnessing the ceremony was a crowd of five hundred
laborers, mostly Chinese and Irish immigrants. Workers
carefully placed a final polished laurel tie on a bed of
gravel. Company officials presented several commemorative
spikes, including one of silver and two of gold. Central
Pacific president Leland Stanford attempted to drive home
the final spike with a mighty swing of his silver-headed
sledgehammer. (Unfortunately he missed on the first
attempt!) 

Telegraphers reported the ceremony to an awaiting nation.
A. J. Russell captured the significance of the moment in
his carefully staged photograph, "East Meets West."
Exactly a century after the founding of the first Spanish
settlements in Alta California in 1769, iron rails now
linked American California to its kindred states.

Economic Impact Californians expected that the completion
of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 would usher in a
new era of prosperity. Those expectations were not
immediately realized. By a cruel paradox, the completion
of the railroad not only failed to bring the expected good
times, it also marked the beginning of a deep and general
depression that continued through the next decade.

California merchants and manufacturers found themselves
suddenly exposed to intense competition from those of
eastern cities. Local merchants had overstocked
merchandise in anticipation of increased demand. Now,
after 1869, they found the market glutted with goods
shipped to California by rail. Nor did land prices rise as
expected. Land values had become overinflated in
anticipation of the completion of the railroad. When the
road was completed, land prices in California actually
fell.

The completion of the railroad released thousands of
workers, most of whom drifted back to the California labor
market. The oversupply of workers depressed wages and
contributed to widespread unemployment.

On the positive side, the railroad did help California
farmers and other producers transport their products to
distant markets. Fruit growers benefited especially from
the development of the refrigerated railroad car that kept
fruit cool and ripe during shipment across the country. 

The Boom of the Eighties

Southern California experienced tremendous growth in the
1880s, stimulated in part by the railroad. The Southern
Pacific was the largest landowner in the state and it took
a leading role in the advertising of California. The
railroad's publicity department flooded the nation with
articles and stories extolling the charms of California's
natural beauty, climate, and romantic heritage. 

The Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad reached Los
Angeles in the mid- 1880s and began a rate war with the
Southern Pacific. Passenger fares from the Midwest to
southern California dropped from $125 to as little as $1.
More than 200,000 newcomers arrived in southern California
in 1887, the peak year of "the boom of the eighties." Real
estate sales in Los Angeles County exceeded $200 million
during a single year. Dozens of towns sprang up. A hundred
new communities with 500,000 homesites were established. 

Chinese Labor Most of the workers who built the western
portion of the transcontinental railroad were immigrants
from China. Letters from California reported that working
on the railroad was hard and dangerous. But immigrants
continued to come, lured by the promise of earning higher
wages than they ever had dreamed of back home.

Once the railroad was completed in 1869, thousands of
workers were laid off. A depression hit California in the
1870s and white Californians blamed the Chinese for the
hard times. Anti-Chinese sentiment led to acts of violence
and the enactment of discriminatory laws in cities
throughout the state. The Workingmen's Party swept to
power in San Francisco, demanding that "the Chinese must
go." Californians in 1879 adopted a new state constitution
that contained strongly worded anti-Chinese provisions.
Three years later the United States Congress passed the
Chinese Exclusion Act, prohibiting further Chinese
immigration. 

Working on the Railroad It was Charles Crocker, one of the
members of the Big Four, who first experimented with
Chinese construction workers on the transcontinental
railroad. The experiment was so successful that railroad
agents soon were recruiting Chinese workers by the
thousands. "Come over and help!" said the recruiting
posters in China. "We have money to spend, but no one to
earn it.

At the peak of construction, the Central Pacific employed
more than 10,000 Chinese laborers. "They are equal to the
best white men," Crocker said proudly of his new labor
force. "They are very trusty, they are intelligent, and
they live up to their contracts."

The Chinese worked under incredibly dangerous conditions–
for a dollar a day–to overcome some of the world's most
extraordinary obstacles to the building of a railroad.
Workers were suspended in wicker baskets over nearly
vertical cliffs in the Sierra Nevada, chipping away with
hammers and chisels to make a ledge for the track. In
unknown numbers, Chinese workers were swept away in
avalanches and rock slides. "The snowslides carried away
our camps and we lost a good many men in these slides,"
reported one railroad official. "Many of them we did not
find until the next season when the snow melted."

Chinese rail workers made one brief attempt to strike.
Near Cisco, in Placer County, thirty-five hundred workers
in July 1867 demanded forty dollars a month and a ten-hour
work day. They gave up even these modest demands when the
Central Pacific cut off the food supply and threatened to
discharge the strikers.

Anti-Chinese Sentiment Thousands of Chinese rail workers
were laid off following the completion of the
transcontinental railroad in 1869. Most drifted back to
crowd the already glutted labor market in California.
Thousands of additional Chinese immigrants arrived each
year during the next decade as California entered a period
of hard times. Unemployment rose sharply and many
businesses failed during "the terrible seventies."

White Californians often blamed the Chinese for the
depressed economic conditions. Anti-Chinese riots broke
out in cities and towns throughout the state, in places
like Auburn, Petaluma, Roseville, Chico, and Santa
Barbara. The worst anti-Chinese riot occurred in Los
Angeles. On the evening of October 24, 1871, an angry mob
looted and burned the local Chinatown, leaving fifteen
Chinese immigrants hanging from makeshift gallows.

Many California cities also passed laws to harass the
Chinese. San Francisco, for instance, passed an ordinance
in 1870 that prohibited anyone form occupying a sleeping
room with less than 500 cubic feet of breathing space per
person. This "health law" allowed the police to make raids
on crowded tenements in Chinatown and roust out any
sleeping Chinese residents who were violating the
ordinance while they slept. The law was vigorously
enforced and soon the jails of San Francisco were so
overcrowded that the city itself was in gross violation of
its own ordinance.

The Workingmen's Party Many white Californians blamed the
Chinese immigrants for the hard times of the 1870s. Groups
of unemployed whites gathered on the "sand lots" of San
Francisco to denounce the Chinese and to castigate the
railroad company that had employed so many of them. Such
meetings occasionally erupted into violence, leaving
Chinese businesses looted and burned.

Unemployed San Franciscans and their allies in 1877 formed
a new political party that would represent their views. A
fiery young Irish American named Denis Kearney emerged as
the leader of the Workingmen's Party of California.
Kearney acquired a large following mainly through his
emotional and melodramatic style of oratory. On one
occasion, he shouted to a crowd that "every workingman
should have a musket."

Fearing that Kearney's speeches would lead to more
violence, the city government adopted a ordinance that
restricted public speaking that advocated violence.
Kearney was arrested but acquitted because no violence had
actually resulted from his speeches. Whatever his speeches
may have advocated, one thing was clear: the leader of the
Workingmen's Party won thunderous applause from his
followers whenever he shouted "And whatever happens, the
Chinese must go!" A New Constitution At the peak of anti-
Chinese sentiment and the rise of the Workingmen's Party,
Californians adopted a new state constitution. Voters in
June 1878 elected delegates to a constitutional
convention; a third of the delegates were members of the
Workingmen's Party. The document the delegates produced
was far longer and more complex than the original
constitution drafted at the Monterey convention in 1849.
It was approved by the voters of California on May 7,
1879.

The new constitution included provisions for regulating
the railroad and other corporations. It also modified the
tax structure to benefit farmers and established a state
board of equalization.

The anti-Chinese provisions of the constitution were long,
elaborate, and emotional. The ban on the public employment
of Chinese was absolute: "No Chinese shall be employed on
any state, county, municipal, or other public work, except
in punishment for crime." The constitution also instructed
the legislature to "delegate all necessary power to the
incorporated cities and towns of this state for the
removal of Chinese without the limits of such cities and
towns, or for their location within prescribed portions of
those limits." Thus California cities were empowered to
exclude Chinese residents or to require them to live in
Chinese ghettos. The presence of Chinese immigrants,
ineligible by race to become American citizens, was
declared "to be dangerous to the well-being of the state,
and the legislature shall discourage their immigration by
all means within its power." Chinese Exclusion 

Anti-Chinese sentiment in California found its ultimate
expression in the Chinese Exclusion Act, approved by the
United States Congress in 1882. The act prohibited Chinese
immigration for ten years. In 1892 the law was extended
for another ten years, and in 1902 it became permanent.
The law was repealed during World War II, when China and
the United States were allied in the struggle against
Japan. 

The exclusion law contributed to an economic and
demographic decline of the Chinese immigrant population.
Boycotts of Chinese-produced goods by white consumers
reduced significantly the economic opportunities for the
immigrants. Most Chinese workers were relegated to the
ranks of common laborers or farm workers. Few Chinese
women lived in California at the time of exclusion, and
thus the immigrant population faced extraordinary
difficulties replenishing itself through natural increase.
The Chinese population in the United States declined from
107,000 in 1890 to just 75,000 in 1930. 

The exclusion law not only made it nearly impossible for
additional Chinese to enter California, it also caused
great hardships for those who were already here.

The Octopus Many Californians in the late nineteenth
century came to believe that the Big Four had accumulated
far too much wealth and power. Angry citizens portrayed
the railroad as a monstrous octopus that was strangling
other businesses and corrupting the affairs of government.
The Big Four's mansions on Nob Hill were denounced as
evidence of their ill-gotten wealth. Political cartoons
showed the Big Four under attack by those who wished to
free the state from railroad domination. Author Frank
Norris criticized the Southern Pacific in his muckraking
novel The Octopus (1901). Embarrassing revelations in the
press alleged corrupt dealings by railroad officials.
Although the railroad suffered a few defeats at the hands
of its enemies, its power remained substantial as
California entered the new century. Scholars today
continue to offer conflicting interpretations of the role
of the railroad in the history of California. 

The Big Four under Attack Following the completion of the
transcontinental railroad, the Big Four established a
virtual transportation monopoly in California and
exercised great political power. Many of their fellow
Californians came to believe that these four railroad
tycoons had amassed too much wealth and power. They
complained that the Big Four's transportation monopoly was
draining the profit from other business enterprises in the
state and that their political machine was corrupting
California government.

Anger against the Big Four was frequently expressed in
contemporary editorials and political cartoons. One of the
most devastating cartoons appeared in the San Francisco
Examiner in 1898. "Highwayman Huntington to the Voters of
California" pictured the president of the Southern Pacific
Railroad as a vicious gunman, complete with skull
cufflinks and a garish diamond stickpin. Collis P.
Huntington was not amused.

The following year, several bills aimed at silencing
offending journalists were introduced in the railroad-
dominated state legislature. One bill effectively banned
the future publication of political cartoons. It
prohibited the publishing of any drawing which reflected
adversely upon the "honor, integrity, manhood, virtue, or
reputation" of any individual. This anti-cartoon bill
became law in 1899 and remained on the books for fifteen
years, a chilling legacy from the era of the Big Four.

Revelations Several embarrassing revelations in the late
nineteenth century provided powerful evidence for those
Californians who believed that the Southern Pacific
Railroad had corrupted state politics. Two of the most
damaging episodes involved the top leaders of the company.

David Colton was the confidential manager of the
railroad's political interests in California. Following
Colton's death in 1878, his widow sued the Big Four for
cheating her out of part of her inheritance. During the
trail, she introduced hundreds of letters between her late
husband and other railroad officials. The letters starkly
revealed the railroad's activities in influencing
elections, reelections, and votes of members of the
California Legislature.

Two members of the Big Four, Collis Huntington and Leland
Stanford, became involved in a public feud in the early
1890s. Huntington publicly rebuked Stanford for using
large amounts of railroad money to secure Stanford's
election as a United States senator. Stanford's private
secretary later published a series of letters filled with
further charges of the wholesale corruption of national,
state, and local officials by the railroad.

Anti-railroad candidates, pledging to end the corruption
of government, won wide support from their fellow
Californians. Adolph Sutro declared himself the defender
of the people against the greed of The Octopus and was
elected mayor of San Francisco in 1894.

Defeats Although the Big Four wielded considerable
political power in the late nineteenth century, they also
suffered several major defeats at the hands of their
opponents.

Collis Huntington, president of the Southern Pacific
Railroad, supported proposals for federal aid to construct
a harbor at Santa Monica where the railroad had exclusive
access. Many of the leading citizens of Los Angeles wanted
the harbor to be built at San Pedro, at a place that was
free of railroad control. Huntington waged his battle
throughout the 1890s but eventually had to concede defeat
when a board of Army engineers approved the building of
the harbor at San Pedro. 

Government aid for the building of the transcontinental
railroad in the 1860s included federal loans of nearly $28
million payable in thirty years. As the loans became due,
Huntington proposed a delay in payment of fifty to a
hundred years. Huntington's proposal created a firestorm
of opposition. When the proposal was defeated by the
United States Congress in 1897, the governor of California
proclaimed a public holiday in celebration.