The Conquest of California

3,805 words

California is the jewel in the crown of the American Union. Of all the states it contains the largest economy. Indeed, California’s economy is one of the largest in the world.[1] It enjoys a fantastic climate. Its agribusiness surpasses almost all others and is able produce high value, specialized crops such as almonds and raisins. California wines are fantastic in both quantity and quality. California hosts the American motion picture industry which is unrivaled in the entire world. Silicon Valley drives much of the new information economy. San Francisco Bay is the West Coast’s finest harbor. California turned out to be the ultimate prize won during the Mexican War.

A prize this big is not something that really just falls into the lap of a people, even one as resourceful as the Americans. As a result, it had to be fought for, both capturing the territory, and then keeping it. However, the military operations — with the fighting, maneuvering, and acts of valor — took place within a legal and metapolitical environment. And the metapolitical and legal environment was more important than the fighting itself.

Captain John C. Frémont and the Bear Flag Revolt

In the 1840s, California was still a province of Mexico. It was sparsely settled, highly disorganized politically, and ruled in the name of Mexico by “Hispanics” of white blood, such as Mariano Vallejo (1807-1890).[2] All of Mexico’s provinces north of the current border between Mexico and the United States were either under threat from other powers or had already succeeded from Mexico itself. Texas had broken away in 1836. Around the Great Salt Lake, Mormons were making a self-governing republic of their own. In California, Russians were encroaching from their post at Fort Ross, near San Francisco. Mexican California was very poorly ruled from Mexico City, and Vallejo himself was in favor of US Annexation.

Americans were favoring expansion also. The Democratic Party, a good portion of their Whig rivals,[3] and many of the most prestigious newspapers and cultural creators in the US favored the United States stretching across North America to the Pacific. The concept was famously known as Manifest Destiny. This metapolitical idea focused American efforts to annex California and all that was between the western US and the Pacific coast.

Americans had been visiting San Francisco via their clipper ships at least as early as 1796. They were called “Bostons” by the Californios mainly because the Americans were originating from New England.[4] Later, American trappers were blazing trails from Saint Louis to San Francisco. By 1846 many Americans had settled near Sonoma, California. As the tensions which led to war between the US and Mexico increased, the Mexican Military Governor of Alta California, José Castro, attempted to force all Americans out.

Castro didn’t know what he was in for. The Mexican government, including the government of Alta California was poorly organized, and it was uncertain exactly who was overall in charge. On the other hand, the Americans had no problems organizing.[5] In Sonoma, a group of 30 American men arrested the local leader Mariano Vallejo and proclaimed California an independent republic. They were able to do so because the United States was unofficially backing the American emigrants with a well-armed battalion of soldiers under the command of Captain John C. Frémont.[6] Other columns were headed to California by land and sea. Soon all the places in California were under US control no matter how the Mexican Alta California government was organized and who was really in charge. The US government also sent a large army to attack Central Mexico. With the metapolitical attitudes so powerfully supporting Manifest Destiny everything fell into place. The conquest was legal under the right of conquest and ratified by the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

The Gold Rush I: Mexicans and Indians

It is amazing that the Spanish who originally settled California never discovered gold there when the rest of the Spanish Empire was one great big gold and silver grabbing operation. Gold in the mountains of California had been moving down the waterways to the Sacramento River for centuries due to natural erosion. An American carpenter from New Jersey discovered some gold flakes along a tributary of the American River at Sutter’s Mill in 1848, and his discovery created a “rush” of miners. One of those miners was an ancestor of this author. His adventures getting there and back remain family lore to this day, and one of his female descendants has jewelry made from California gold he found.

Gold however was not the only thing worthwhile in California. The land itself was worthwhile for agricultural pursuits. Additionally, the miners came into increased conflict with the California Indians. The metapolitical idea of Manifest Destiny continued to aid the Americans in California. Many of the miners sent for their families and took up agriculture and speculated in land. However, much of the land was under titles of varying certainty in Mexican and Spanish Land Grants. To manage land conflicts, the US Congresses passed the California Land Act of 1851.

Karen Clay and Werner Trosken write, “Under the act, an individual with a Spanish or Mexican land grant [was required] to submit documentary evidence of their claim to the land commission. The commission would then investigate the claim and issue a decision to the claims validity.”[7] There were the usual channels for appeal through the US Federal Court system. Once the claims were resolved and the property surveyed, the US Government issued a patent. In this way “Indian land” was taken over via a known legal process by the whites. Additionally, the large inefficient Latifundia properties of the Californios were broken up and distributed into the hands of the Americans. This act also allowed the American settlers a way to both self-interestedly get title to land of their own and cooperate with other Americans trying for their own property.

The Americans also had to deal with Indian attacks. Indians attacked and killed miners and stole livestock, food, and other items. My Miner 49er ancestor’s memoirs include a statement that he found it quite physically taxing to stay awake all night to make sure that Indians didn’t steal the horses and/or kill himself and his mates. To manage the threat, the new California state government passed the Act for the Government and Protection of Indians (1850). To put it in simple terms, this allowed the miners to have a free hand in dealing with the Indians. They could raid their villages, use deadly force, and impress Indians as laborers. These are rough methods, but it is certainly better than tolerating the slings and arrows of a savage Stone Age people while wringing one’s hands and talking about a “complex” problem. If one has a race problem, it is better for whites to just take their own side.[8]

Additionally, Mexicans-drawn to the gold fields from Mexico proper — rather than the Californios — did get involved in banditry in the Gold Rush days. Joaquin Murrieta was one famous Mexican immigrant bandit. Joaquin was indeed a real-life person, but it is likely that the person known to the Americans as “Joaquin” was not a one-man show. Instead, he was the personification of several different Mexican bandits. The state organized veterans of the Mexican War into the California Rangers in 1853 to fight the threat. Joaquin’s head ended up pickled in a jar of alcohol.[9]

The Gold Rush II: Not a Chinaman’s Chance

Mexicans and Indians were not the only threat to the white American hold on California. The real threat was from the Orient. In the 1840s the British had established well-ordered ports across Asia, including Hong Kong. At these ports were safe vessels including fast moving steam ships that traveled along secure, British policed sea-routes. In this environment steamship companies advertised heavily for the Chinese to come to America throughout the 1850s and 1860s. Additionally, the United States had rather stupidly entered into the Burlingame Treaty of 1868 which allowed unlimited immigration from China. Therefore, Chinese could be imported to California, by sea, by tens of thousands.

Big corporations and other employers enjoyed hiring Chinese labor. The Chinamen were cheap and comfortable living under the most awful of conditions. In the 1850s, American miners, using the infant metapolitical ideas of the Labor Movement, organized to protect themselves and their territory. First they were able to get a “foreign miner tax”; then there were other laws, racially neutral on the surface, but in fact, aimed at Chinese. Examples of these include laws cutting down on the work-day, and minimum housing space regulations. Sometimes, usually after an incident of violence, groups of whites would be deputized to shoot Chinese, and any charges stemming from the shootings were dropped by sympathetic judges. Denis Kearney, agitated against the Chinese, ending every speech with “And whatever happens, the Chinese must go.” One method to oust Chinese was to target white employers of the Chinese with social shaming. Eventually, whites won a considerable victory with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.[10],[11] Originally the exclusion act was temporary, but it was made permanent in 1892.[12] Notice that it took from 1850 until 1882 to get an overarching law to deal with the problem.

There was also a conflict in the courts between whites and Chinese. The Supreme Court case Chae Chan Ping v. United States,[13] among other things, allowed the US Government to pass laws deporting Chinese despite an earlier treaty allowing for immigration. Court cases generated from the conflict strengthened the hand of the Federal Government in controlling immigration. However, there were some losses, United States v. Wong Kim Ark,[14] ruled that a non-white born in the US from non-Citizen parents was a US citizen.

The important thing to notice here is that the field of law is a battleground just like a Wild West mining camp. Young activist, if you can, study the law! Financially secure activists, support our lawyers! Of course, it isn’t just supporting lawyers on our side. There need to be interest groups to fund strategic, pro-white cases, and most importantly, there needs to be a  metapolitical cultural context that influences judges to rule the right way.

The Yellow Peril & the Rising Tide of Color: The Gentleman’s Agreement, Japanese Internment, and Mexican repatriation of the 1930s.

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was enacted at the start of a new metapolitical idea, “the yellow peril,” which expanded into Lothrop Stoddard’s concept of “the rising tide of color.” The yellow peril idea was very powerful in the United States until around 1992 (I’ll get to that below). It was so powerful that this author recalls family conversations centered upon concerns about Asians from older Pacific War and Vietnam War veterans in his family throughout the 1980s and early 1990s.

The problem with Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was that it only addressed part of the problem. The truth was that the whole of the Oriental world was a threat, and the US Congress had only taken steps to block of immigration from China. Soon Japanese immigration became a problem. Matters were resolved by Theodore Roosevelt with the “gentleman’s agreement.” The Americans agreed to not specifically ban Japanese immigration, but the Japanese government didn’t issue visas to their citizens to go to the United States. Nonetheless, thousands of Japanese had made it to California.

America between the presidencies of the Roosevelts, was led by civically virtuous, level-headed, and progressive people. Although Prohibition was mostly a disaster, it did cut down on drinking in the US, even to this day. In their youth, these Americans quickly won the Spanish American War, then went on to win a nasty insurgency in the Philippine Islands. Using the ideas from the labor movement, this generation cut down on the excesses of big business. They also defeated the anarchist and communist movements and went on to found institutions which continue to thrive today.[15] Most of the state flags were designed and adopted during this time. Additionally, this generation looked racial matters in the eye. They adopted segregation, and great thinkers such as Lothrop Stoddard expanded the idea of the yellow peril in his book The Rising Tide of Color.[16]

Stoddard extensively quotes Californian civic leaders as to how they saw and handled the Asian problem. It is important to note that Rising Tide was a bestseller, and it accurately predicted Japanese imperial aggression two decades prior to Pearl Harbor. After the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, California’s political leadership focused on interning the Japanese on the West Coast. This was done through lobbying. Earl Warren, who later became a Supreme Court Justice, spearheaded the effort. The legal standing to carry out this act was Executive Order 9066.[17] Naturally, a lawsuit against the order arose, and the US Supreme Court ruled in favor of internment in Korematsu v. United States.[18] The courts can be a benefit to white Americans, but only if the right people are judges and the metapolitical environment supports white interests.

However, the Japanese weren’t the only threat to Californians. During the Great Depression, when jobs were scarce, California’s politicians, working in tandem with the US Federal Government, deported Mexicans from California, especially in the agricultural area in the center of the state. This allowed “Okies” fleeing from the horrible conditions of the Dust Bowl to re-start in California working the jobs formerly held by Mexicans.

Zoot Suits & Rodney King

Although more than a million Mexicans were deported in the 1930s, manpower shortages during World War II brought a number of Mexicans to Los Angeles under a wartime guest worker program. These Mexicans blended in with the Hispanics already in the area. Like their bandit forbearers in the 1850s and the low-grade gangsterism and criminality today, the Mexicans of the 1940s engaged in petty crime and acts of intimidation against whites. Their uniform was the “zoot suit.” The jacket was worn long, and the pants were wide in the knees and tapered at the ankles.

Also during World War II, Los Angeles was host to thousands of American sailors, soldiers, and Marines. Many of these servicemen were garrisoned in heavily Hispanic areas of LA. The men would often be robbed or accosted if walking outside the base. For defense, sailors started to sew 13 pennies into their neckerchief so that it could be used as a weapon. Zoot suiters would walk five abreast so that any other pedestrian would be forced to walk around them. Also, zoot suiters would often sucker-punch people while walking. Tensions in LA were raised due to concerns that Mexicans would act as a Japanese-supporting Fifth Column, and there was also a high-profile murder case involving a number of Hispanic zoot suited teens.

Eventually, the servicemen got tired of the situation. With a wink and a nod from their officers, they went into LA and beat up the zoot Suit Mexicans. Those caught wearing zoot suits were stripped, and their clothing was burned. The LAPD didn’t stop the military, instead they arrested the Hispanics after the servicemen were done dispensing their justice. The rioting lasted five days. The military stopped the rioting by making LA off limits. The Los Angeles Police then cracked down hard on anyone with a zoot suit.

Following the Second World War, President Eisenhower ordered Operation Wetback to remove Mexicans from the United States. Additionally, the overwhelming white victory in the Pacific temporarily pacified California’s racial dynamics. However, when ideas and institutions seem to be at their most powerful, the foundations underpinning them have usually crumbled, and new ideas are soon to come.

After World War II there was an increasing call for America to integrate, equalize, and promote America’s troublesome black minority. A new metapolitical idea, that of “Civil Rights” appeared. This idea was promoted by government, media, and all the cultural creators. It was backed by a battery of legislation, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Immigration Act of 1965. Additionally, there was Brown v. Board and a slew of similar cases through the 1970s whose negative effects are universally known and need no further elaboration. If the defenses against blacks are removed, one might as well remove all racial defenses. This legal and metapolitical environment allowed Asians to again immigrate to California and made non-whites, especially blacks beyond criticism. In this new legal and metapolitical environment blacks are given a considerably free hand to participate in violence.

In the early 1990s, Koreans started to make their mark in Los Angeles. When a black girl was killed by a Korean shop-keeper, the media played the shooting again and again on TV. They neglected to show the black assaulting the Korean prior to the fatal shot. When petty criminal Rodney King was beaten resisting arrest, the media played over and over an edited film clip of his beating which left out the part showing King resisting arrest. Black anger in Los Angeles in 1992 was thus whipped into a boiling rage. When the officers were acquitted in beating Rodney King the city exploded into three days of rioting.

The rioting took a curious turn. The focus of Black rage was first Koreans and then whites. Now, California is troubled with racial conflict between two different non-white races. The Rodney King riots took place in a media-saturated global city. The ripples from this riot continue to affect culture in the “Civil Rights” environment. This author believes that the South Korean anti-American riots in 2002 were partially due to a black man being the commander of the 2nd Infantry Division at that time, and Koreans wanted to “get back at the blacks.” Additionally, many white Americans have come to see Asians as an ally against blacks and have dropped the Yellow Peril idea. This is the “whites and Asians” meme that bangs around blogs and newspaper articles. The converse could also be true. This author also wonders if Earl Warren, who was so anti-Asian in California, ruled in Brown v. Board for blacks in part because he felt that blacks and whites were natural allies against Asians.

This whites-and-Asians meme deserves some further remarks. This coalition between two distinct peoples is a mirage created from images from LA news channel helicopters filming the burning city back in 1992. On the surface, Koreans appear to be a model minority, but a deeper look shows considerable differences between us and them. Koreans and other Asians muscle into limited educational spots due, in part, to a culture of cheating.[19] Koreans with American paperwork can import their elderly parents and dump them on SSI. Koreans are engaged in financial swindles and are often involved in organized prostitution.[20] Essentially, Koreans in California fit into the same basic niche as the Chinese. Denis Kearney would understand.

Koreans in LA, and indeed the whole of the United States, are the result of an enormous subsidy provided by whites. South Korea exists because Americans won the Pacific War, fought the Korean War, and continue to defend South Korea’s DMZ border. South Korea’s industry is the result of a favorable tariff network, and this network’s costs are borne by America’s manufacturing sector in the Mid-West. Essentially, Americans pay billions so that Korean immigrants can sell liquor to blacks.

Quo vadis?

California is America’s Kosovo. It is too wonderful a place to not fight for. The big question is how to secure it for future generations of our people. It is pointless to discuss a dubious, violence-filled operation. Military operations are a distant third to the metapolitical and legal environment in which they play out. For now, the war for California is a war of ideas.

Notes

1. http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-california-world-economy-20150702-story.html

2. Mariano Vallejo, a real “white-Hispanic.” Vallejo later became a California State Representative.

3. The Whig Party was disorganized throughout its existence. It was a highly unstable coalition centered on New England. Throughout its life the party had a very difficult time addressing the various challenges of its day. Zachary Taylor, the hero of the Mexican War and eventual President was a Whig, with vague political beliefs.

4. Walker, Dale L. Bear Flag Rising: The Conquest of California, 1846 Forge Books, New York, 2000, Kindle Location 140

5. I don’t believe that white racial consciousness is dead in California despite the “Civil Rights” metapolitical climate. In the following YouTube video, a group of white re-enactors put on a skit telling the story of the Bear Flag Revolt in Sonoma. This is implicit whiteness in action. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIziD70-Ci0&t=618s (Link from 7 July 2016)

6. I always must respectfully pause when various conspiracy theorists assume that the US Government, the institution, not political factions therein such as NeoCons or the Congressional Black Congress is anti-white. Do people really think that the patriotic veterans which populate the different departments joined to damage their own kind? An example of pro-white attitudes peeking through is in the following US Park Service link (7 July 2016). It states, “As American settlers moved into Mexican-controlled California . . .” The words “Mexican-controlled” implies that the Mexican occupation of California was illegitimate. https://www.nps.gov/goga/learn/historyculture/bear-flag-revolt.htm http://www.history.com/topics/bear-flag-revolt

7. Clay, Karen and Troesken Werner, “Squatting and the Settlement of the United States New Evidence from Post-Gold Rush California,” http://www.heinz.cmu.edu/~kclay/papers/squatting.pdf (7 July 2016)

8. https://www.library.ca.gov/crb/02/14/02-014.pdf

9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joaquin_Murrieta His nephew is alleged to be a Mexican bandit also. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procopio

10. Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?doc=47

11. Additionally, the Chinese were involved in a great many criminal activities. The Tongs can be read about at the following link: http://www.unz.org/Pub/AmMercury-1952feb-00093

There is also no real change today. One Chinese gangster in California is “Shrimp Boy” Chow. In 2007, the San Francisco Weekly News ran an article about him “turning his life around.” He claimed to have “left his gangster days behind to help bring peace to Chinatown’s streets.” http://www.sfweekly.com/sanfrancisco/enter-the-dragon-head/Content?oid=2163615 Of course, The Narrative fell apart and he was convicted in 2016 on 162 counts. http://www.newsweek.com/sf-chinatown-crime-boss-raymond-shrimp-boy-chow-found-guilty-162-counts-413338

12. For further reading, I suggest Wolters, Raymond, “Race War on the Pacific Coast,” The Occidental Quarterly, vol. 8, http://toqonline.com/archives/v8n1/TOQv8n1Wolters.pdf Counter-Currents.com also has some excellent material on the situation: https://counter-currents.com/search/?cx=partner-pub-6869576088965779%3A6593200864&cof=FORID%3A10&ie=UTF-8&q=chinese+excusion&sa=Search&siteurl=www.counter-currents.com%2F&ref=&ss=816j123136j7

13. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chae_Chan_Ping_v._United_States#Value_as_a_precedent_for_later_doctrines_in_immigration_law

14. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Wong_Kim_Ark

15. Such institutions include Alcoholics Anonymous and Social Security.

16. Stoddard writes, in The Rising Tide of Color on Page 116, “Indeed, Californian assertions that Oriental immigration menaces, not merely the coast, but the whole continent, seem well taken. This view was officially indorsed by Mr. Caminetti, Commissioner-General of Immigration, who testified before a Congressional committee some years ago: ‘Asiatic immigration is a menace to the whole country, and particularly to the Pacific coast. The danger is general. No part of the United States is immune. The Chinese are now spread over the entire country, and the Japanese want to encroach. The Chinese have become so acclimated that they can prosper in any part of our country…. I would have a law to register the Asiatic laborers who come into the country. It is impossible to protect ourselves from persons who come in surreptitiously.’ (Quoted by J. D. Whelpley, ‘Japan and the United States,’ Fortnightly Review, May, 1914.)” http://www.resist.com/LothropStoddard/Stoddard-RisingTideofColor-2.pdf

17. http://www.archives.gov/historical-docs/todays-doc/?dod-date=219

18. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korematsu_v._United_States

19. http://www.vdare.com/searchs?k=korean+cheating

20. http://www.vdare.com/articles/virginia-tech-massacre-gun-control-or-immigration-control