Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and The World, Malcolm Harris, c. 2023

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and The World, Malcolm Harris, c. 2023.

This book inspired me to re-read the history of California. Along the way, I learned a lot of new words, and a lot of new jargon. 

Book for the weekend. Just arrived. Amazon. Published 2023. 

Author's bio. Something tells me this will be a history of Palo Alto of which few are aware. LOL. 

The author appears to be a bit farther to the left than Nancy Pelosi, and a bit crazier than Hunter S Thompson. This should be fun! 

Introduction and first few pages of chapter 1: really, really good writing. I'm impressed.

Chapter 1.1
To Whom Time Is Money

Dates:

• 1789: George Washington inaugurated as first US president; beginning of French Revolution/ 
• '49ers: 1849: gold discovered
• 1859: Nevada, silver discovered
• 1869: Transcontinental Railroad completed
• 1889: North and South Dakota statehood
• 1899 -- three wars --
• Spanish-American war: ends; Treaty of Paris
• Philippine-American war begins
• Second Boer War in South Africa begins 
• 1919: end of WWI; Treaty of Versailles signed 
• 1969: first man on the moon; Bruce graduates from high school
• 1929: the Great Crash
• 1939: Germans invade Poland; generally considered to be the start of WWII
• 1949: The Third Man released in Britain 
• 1989: fall of the Berlin Wall; generally considered the end of the Cold War 
• 1999: eve of the "Y2K" problem 

Ohlone Indians.
General John C. Fremont
San Francisco Bay: South Bay
the short-lived Bear Republic -- p. 12 - 13
Johann Sutter, p. 19 -- Sacramento Valley, via Vancouver, Hawaii; from Europe
introduced the concept of time to the Indians; the bell;
1848: James Marshall, working for Sutter, found gold
Andres Castillero; land grant to an ancient cinnabar (mercury ore) mine

Mercury helps isolate gold by forming an amalgam, a mixture where mercury dissolves gold from crushed ore. After mixing the finely powdered ore with mercury, the amalgam is heated, which vaporizes the mercury and leaves behind the gold. This process, often called amalgamation, was historically used to separate gold from other materials.

The practice of using mercury to isolate gold is not attributed to a single discoverer, as the technique was developed independently in different cultures. The Incas in the Andes used mercury amalgamation to refine gold for centuries before its use in Europe, and the technique was also known in ancient Greece. However, the large-scale industrial use of mercury amalgamation for ore processing began with Bartolomé de Medina in 1554 in Mexico for silver, a process later adapted for gold. 

explanation of how the '49ers affected the Alta California Indians way of life as opposed to the Spanish and the Mexicans.

"placer" (river bottom sand / sandstone) first mention, p. 17, along with jumping claims

the quick history of California statehood; via compromise to balance Texas; 

The Compromise of 1850 was a legislative package that addressed the issue of slavery after California applied for statehood as a free state, which threatened the balance between free and slave states. The compromise admitted California as a free state, established a Texas-New Mexico boundary, and organized the Utah and New Mexico territories under popular sovereignty, while also abolishhing the slave trade in Washington, DC, and enacting a stricter Fugitive Slave Act.

 1850: the Foreign Miners' Tax Act, p. 17.

Interesting, bottom of page 18 and top of page 19: Louisiana senator Judah P Benjamin. Connects with Fremont.

The story of how Americans literally took all this land from Mexico without any formal treaty. Of course, that begs the question, how did Spain, and then Mexico, acquire this land in the first place?

Plantation economy, p. 19. 

Bottom of page 19: capitalist work around the world.

"The Age of Empire was dead." p. 20.

"Beginning in the 1840's the whole world became a British colony." -- p. 20.

British economic system -- need to quote -- genericity -- not in the dictionary -- p. 20. Even Google Gemini cannot answer the question.

Amadeo Giannini, The Bank of Italy / Bank of America. Story begins on page 33 -- but his story begins a page or two earlier.

Chapter 1.1 completed. An incredible chapter. 

Chapter 1.2
The Combine
Leland Stanford 

Lelad Stanford: a slacker. Born, 1824, Albany, NY. The fourth of seven sons.

Grandfather, Lyman Stanford, fortune with a shop near a toll-road stop along the  Erie Canal. 

Eldest brother, Josiah, Jr, first of the sons to go out west; was a forty-niner. Wow. Made him money selling shovels, not panning for gold.

Leland was the last brother to get out to California.

Michigan City --> Michigan Bluff (Placer County). Wiki. 

Midway between Sacramento and Reno. The town was founded by gold miners. Mining began in earnest in 1853, and town was shipping $100,000 in gold per month by 1858. Leland Stanford ran a store in the town from 1853 to 1855. After hydraulic mining was banned, the town entered decline. The town is now registered as California Historical Landmark #402.

Leland started a tavern.

Rose to governor for one two-year term.

Moved to Sacramento.

The Associates: Leland Stanford and three fellow shopkeepers. Associates were abstemious.

Luck: Leland was GOP, and Abraham Lincoln had just been elected president.

1859: New-York Tribune founding editor and leading Republican Horace Greeley -- went out to California via Yosemite. Became huge railroad proponent.

Story of the transcontinental railroad.

Sierra Nevadas.

The Gadsen Purchase.

Theodore Judah: railroad engineer from Troy, NY.

The Associates raised a piddly $20,000 to execute Judah's plan.

Leland: governor, 1861 - 1863. Called himself governor for the rest of his life.

Civil wars at that time: China, Mexico, US, and the beginnings of Japan.  

1862: Pacific Railway Act -- chartered the Union Pacific to build west from the Missouri River (ultimately from Omaha, NE) and the Central Pacific to build to the east until they met somewhere in the middle.

1864: the Pacific Railway Act of 1864. 

1869: Ogden, Utah. Central Pacific meets the Union Pacific. Laid telegraph lines at the same time!

Money from around the world poured into the railroad scheme. 

Global financial upset things, 1873.

Railroads folded. Central Pacific survived; owners -- the Associates-controlled railroad subsume the Central, earning the budding monopoly the Combine (combined the Central Pacific with the Southern Pacific). 

The Combine was an octopus: timber, communications, wine, mining, large commodity farmers, fruit growers, stage coach lines, and wheat exporters. Frank Norris and the Associates: 1901 novel, The Octopus. Wiki. The Octopus and the Story of California.

Then the story of The Octopus, 1880s fictionalized account, Mussel Slough, an irrigation ditch in California's wheatful Central Valley. Leland Stanford was a very, very bad man. Makes me think of Noah Cross in Chinatown. 

Then several pages on joint-stock ownership. Fascinating. Need to read again and again.

Sailed  .... skipped ahead.

Chapter 1.3Blood That Trots Young
Horse Power -- The Palo Alto System -- Edward Muybridge (Helios) and the First Movie -- Leland Stanford, Jr. -- Founding Standford University

Will do notes later, perhaps. the subheadings for this chapter gives one a good start on this chapter.

Other names, etc:
the trotting horse: Electioneer
Stanford: moves from Nob Hill, San Francisco
1876: from Nob Hill to a 650-acre farm, Mayfield Grange in Santa Clara County off the train tracks south of the city. 
Stanford renamed the area Palo Alto for the big tree next to the tracks.
Leland, Jr, born 1868, p. 65.
"unsupported transit," p. 71
Muybridge
Marey: pp. 71 - 73
see note re: Muybridge, begins bottom of p. 73.

The School of Sorrow
the story of Leland DeWitt Stanford, p.79; born in Sacramento in 1868.
"as a son of nearly peerless wealth" -- p. 80   

 

Lelad Standford: and then he was dead, p. 82. March 13, 1884 -- two weeks before his 16th birthday. Typhoid, Greece --> Italy.

Announces university, 1887.

Two years later, Leland Stanford, dies. 

 

Section II
1900 - 1945

Chapter 2.1
Local Ghosts

Battle for LSJU (Leland Stanford Junior University) -- The Almost Certain Murder of Jane Stanford --  Earthquake Federal Telegraph

1889: Leland Stanford dies.

Stanford University president Jordan vs Jane Lathrop Stanford (p. 89, fourth line). From then on, author used JLS, first use p. 90. Could be wrong but it appears that way. 

Other People's Dreams: p. 94. The murder of JLS and the earthquake, 1906. Destroyed much of Stanford's personal and public real property. 

1905: Jane Stanford poisoned; survived, January 14; fled to Hawaii; poisoned second time; died, February 18. 

1906: earthquake.

The Age of Synergy -- p. 97.

P. 98: "West Coast Met." -- what does that refer to -- google West Coast Metropolitan.

First full paragraph p. 98 is the best one paragraph summary of the start of Palo Alto and Stanford University.

In 1909, recent Stanford graduate Cyril Elwell turned to [President of Stanford] Jordan and the civil engineering department head, C. D. Marx, to help him start a West Coast wireless telegraph and telephone company based on a license Elwell acquired to use French transmission technology. 

The men jumped at the opportunity, and Jordan invested $500 of hismoney and wrangled more San Francisco capital. 

In 1911, the Federal Telegraph Company (FTC) completed the first transmission between California and Hawaii. 

Stanford integrated its first tech start-up with the school's facilities, giving FTC access ot the campus's high voltage laboratory for testing in exchange for some donated equipment. Elwell had the foresight to take his transmitter to Washington, where he wowed navy officials with his machine's long range and silent operation. The officials ordered ten of them on the spot, but more important, they developed immediate brand loyalty, signing up FTC for incrasingly big projects whether they matched the firm's existing capabilities or not. 

When America entered World War I, contracts and jobs flooded into Palo Alto,where FTC built a new, larger factory. Over the course of a decade, the rural univerity town became a regional center for the new radio industry. 

AI prompt: 

In the 2023 softcover edition of Malcolm Harris' "The History of Palo Alto, p. 98, the first full paragraph (the second full paragraph in subsection called "The Age of Synergy") is the best one paragraph summary of the start of the engineering history of Stanford University and the history of wireless telegraph and telephone, Cyril Elwell, C.D. Marx, the TFC, and the first transmission between California and Hawaii. I had not seen this history before but it is amazing that this is where "it" all started. It could have been almost anything else but it was 1909, Stanford, and wireless telegraph. 

What follows is amazing. 

ChatGPT reply: transcribed elsewhere.

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Chapter 2.2

Bionomics --Making Me -- Lewis Terman and His Intelligence Quotient -- Finding Genius in California -- The Raisin Ku klux Klan -- The International-Radial-Communist Anarchist Club 

Getting started.

Vernon Kellogg. Wiki. 

Jordan (school president) and Kellogg were popular professors.

Bionomics: Leland Stanford and Charles Marvin -- history

Eugenics

Essentially horse breeding --> great men (intellectual strength).

White male.

Illinois student Ellwood Patterson Cubberley, p. 102, and then another Hoosier student, Lewis Terman, p. 103.

Alfred Binet "intelligence test," p. 103.

Evolved: a Stanford-Binet test.

Military testing --> school testing --> A-E which evolved to A-F.

Taller students at Stanford --> longer beds needed.  Sports, p. 109. Similar to horse breeding. Discover bright students as early as possible (genes won't change) and grab them to give them a head start. 

Football: the Stanford man.

"Today the Bay Area teams have left the Ivies far behind, but it wasn't a smooth ride."

Stanford and Berkeley initiated a fierce rivalry, imitating Harvard and Yale on the East Coast. 

Pop Warner, p. 110.