2. Chapter 9 Chapter 9: War and Peace Garrison State and Suburban Growth Seized as an act of war in 1846, governed by the military until 1850, California remained closely connected to the military through the rest of the nineteenth century. The Spanish-American War of 1898 formally established the United States as an Asia-Pacific power. In 1914 the Navy established its Pacific Fleet, supported by a growing naval presence in San Diego.
3. Chapter 9 The Second World War formally began on September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland. The attack on Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7, 1941, took all the force from the America First movement. The attack on Pearl Harbor threw California, indeed the entire Pacific Coast, into a panic. Ever since the early 1900s, a sector of California had been at war with the state’s Japanese immigrants. The White California movement was gaining strength, and in 1913 the legislature passed the Alien Land Act prohibiting Japanese immigrants form owning land in the state.
4. Chapter 9 This toxicity, this racism, while not universal in California, nevertheless tainted a portion of the population, including elements of the Progressive upper middle class, through the 1930s. By December 9, 1941, some five hundred issei were in federal custody on Terminal Island in Los Angeles Harbor. During World War II, California witnessed the triumphs of industrial culture and, simultaneously, the deep fissures-the barriers of race, class, and gender-that divided American society. In post WWII era, taxpaying Californians bought into a program that was most fully articulated by UC president Clark Kerr in his Godkin Lectures at Harvard. In the decade following the war, the University of California transformed itself from a first-rate regional university into a first-rate world university.
5. Chapter 13 Chapter 13: Arnold! Stewardship or Squandered Legacy? Despite its reputation for radicalism and eccentricity, California was for its first 110 years a predominantly Republican state. Using a recall provision approved by the voters in January 1911 during the Progressive era, the anti-Davisites began in January 2003 to circulate a petition to put a recall measure before the voters in the fall. On July 23, 2003, the recall petition had qualified for the ballet. The following October, Davis was recalled, and Schwarzenegger was overwhelmingly elected governor with 48.6 percent of the total votes cast.
6. Chapter 13 Largely through Schwarzenegger’s leadership, voters approved a cap on spending, the creation of a reserve fund, and a bond issue to deal with the shortfall without collapsing social programs to a draconian degree. The governor also launched a comprehensive review of state operations with an eye to harmonizing programs and revenues. Schwarzenegger had already edged himself into the front ranks of notable governors of California since 1850.
7. Chapter 13 The fact that Arnold Schwarzenegger was an immigrant spoke for itself. He was leading an immigrant state. Across the long years of California’s existence in modern times-under the jurisdictions of Spain, of Mexico, and of the United States-there have been cruelties, injustices, and mistakes aplenty. There has also been an equally sustained persistence of a place, a society, in which the best possibilities of the American experiment can be struggled for and sometimes achieved.
