For nineteenth century Americans, California promised unimagined opportunities if you worked hard and treated others fairly. To historian and philosopher Josiah Royce, California was also a crucible wherein those principles were sorely tested.
In California: A Study of American Character, Royce argued that the acquisition of California was an unacknowledged act of conquest rather than a generous act of liberation, an uncomfortable fact that said much about the American character.
The discerning reader has seen in the foregoing something more than a study of individuals. These hostile undertakings and these intrigues are as characteristic as they were fateful. The American as conqueror is unwilling to appear in public as a pure aggressor; he dare not seize a California as Russia has seized so much land in Asia or as Napolean, with full French approval, seized whatever he wanted. The American wants to persuade not only the world but himself that he is doing God service in a peaceable spirit, even when he violently takes what he has determined to get. His conscience is sensitive and hostile aggression, practiced against any but Indians, shocks this conscience, unused as it is to such scenes.
Royce believed that California entered the union under conditions that needlessly alienated the Californio population, setting the stage for decades of ill will between Anglo and Hispanic, ill will that could have—and should have—been avoided had some American leaders acted more wisely.
"James and Josiah Royce," photographed by Peggy Royce, 1903. Larger.
California's mythic promise has attracted a diverse and sometimes individualistic population. In the opinion of one California native, however, Californians pay a high price for their freedoms.
A general sense of social irresponsibility is, even today, the average Californian's easiest failing. . . .
His training at home gives him a very curious union of provincial prejudice with a varied, if not very exact, knowledge of the sort of things that are in the world. For his surroundings since infancy have been in one sense of a cosmopolitan character, while much of his training has been rigidly or even narrowly American. He is apt to lack a little, moreover, complete devotion to the life within the household, because, as people so often have pointed out, the fireside, an essential institution of our English race, is of such small significance in the climate of California. In short, the Californian has too often come to love mere fullness of life, and to lack reverence for the relations of life.
Josiah Royce spent most of his professional life at Harvard, as one of America's preeminent philosophers.
The Feud of Oakfield Creek, bookjacket, 1887. Larger.
Leading capitalists in nineteenth century San Francisco took special pride in the mansions they built. But though such places and their furnishings stood as monuments of accomplishment, they could also be hollow reminders of empty lives.
In Feud of Oakfield Creek, philosopher, historian, and one-time novelist Josiah Royce paints a portrait of Alonzo Eldon, a wealthy California businessman whose colorful past life—and incomparable dwelling—give him little pleasure in his present without the company of his family.
He owned. . . a vast mansion on the great hill in San Francisco; he had filled it with rare and curious things, and he had so well known how to choose advisors that his rare and curious things were much finer than the architecture of his house would have led you to suppose. But this prodigious house itself was usually a solitude; not as vast, indeed, as the one Alonzo loved to tell about when the pioneer mood was upon him, but nearly as lonesome. Alonzo had a great deal of respect for that mansion. He was very proud of it; but he lived in one corner of it
Josiah Royce published Feud of Oakfield Creek in 1887. His only novel, it drew on real California land disputes in order to illustrate his beliefs in social responsibility and the importance of community.
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