Part 14
The _chef-lieu_ of the valley is San José. It may interest Easterners to know that Don Caspar de Portola and his men, marching up from the south in their search for the lost Bay of Monterey, had looked down from the valley’s mountain rim upon the spot where the city now stands four years before the Boston Tea Party; while that indomitable Franciscan, Father Junipero Serra, had established the great Mission San José, and was hard at work Christianising and teaching the Indians of this region before the ink was fairly dry on the Declaration of Independence and while the three thousand miles of country which lies between the valley of the Santa Clara and the valley of the Connecticut was still an unexplored wilderness. The last time that the gentlemen with the census books knocked at San José’s front doors they reported that the city had forty thousand people, and it keeps agrowing and agrowing. It has about four times as many stores as any place of its size that I can recall, but that is because the local merchants depend on the trade of the rural rather than the urban population, for the hardy frontiersmen who rough it in this portion of the West run in to do their shopping by automobile or trolley-car or else give their orders over the telephone. There are two things about the city which I shall remember. One is the street-cars, which have open decks forward and aft, with seats running along them lengthwise, on which the passengers sit with their feet hanging over the side, as though on an Irish jaunting-car. In pleasant weather the display of ankles on the street-car makes them look, from the sidewalks, like moving hosiery advertisements. The other municipal feature which riveted my attention was a sort of attenuated Eiffel Tower, sliced off about half-way up, which straddles the two main streets of the city at their intersection, and from the top of which a powerful search-light signals to the traveller on the valley highroads, to the shepherd on the mountains, to the fisherman on San Francisco Bay: “Here is San José.”
If there is anywhere a royal road to learning, it is the fifty-mile-long one which meanders up the Santa Clara Valley, for there are more schoolhouses scattered along it than there are milestones, and they’re not the little red schoolhouses of which our grandfathers brag, either. Every time our motor-car swung around the corner of a prune orchard we were pretty certain to find a schoolhouse of concrete, usually in the overworked mission style of architecture, with roses and honeysuckle and wistaria clambering over the door. The youngster who wants to travel the royal road to knowledge can commence his journey in one of the concrete schoolhouses at Gilroy, which is at the southern portal of the valley; the second stage will take him up to the great high school at San José, which is so extensive and handsome and completely equipped that it would make certain famous Eastern colleges feel shamefaced and embarrassed; the final stage along this intellectual highway is only eighteen miles in length and ends at Palo Alto, amid whose live-oaks rise the yellow towers and red-tiled roofs of that great university which Leland Stanford, statesman and railway builder, founded in memory of the son he lost, and which he endowed with the whole of his enormous fortune. He gave the eight thousand acres of his famous stock-farm for the purpose, and to-day white-gowned “co-eds” wander, book in hand, where the paddocks once stood, and spike-shod sprinters dash down the track, where the great mare Sunol used to put close on half a mile a minute behind her spinning sulky wheels. It is one of the great universities of the world, is Leland Stanford, Jr., and, with its cloistered quadrangles, its wonderful mosaic façades, and its semitropical surroundings, certainly one of the most beautiful. It stands, fittingly enough, at the valley’s northern gateway and at the end, both literally and metaphorically, of the royal road to learning; so that the valley-bred youth who passes through its doors with his sheepskin in his pocket finds himself on the threshold of that great outside world for which, without leaving his native valley, he has been admirably prepared.
Speaking of roads, they have built one running the length of the State and, therefore, of the Santa Clara Valley, which would cause Mr. John MacAdam, were he still in the land of the living, to lift his hat in admiration. It is really a restoration of El Camino Real, that historic highway which the Spanish conquistadores built, close on a century and a half ago, for the purpose of linking up the one-and-twenty missions which the indefatigable Padre Serra flung the length of California as outposts of the church, and which did more to open up the Pacific Coast to civilisation and colonisation and commerce than any undertaking save the construction of the Southern Pacific. Were this highway in the East I am perfectly sure that they would cheapen it by calling it the Shore Road or the State Pike, but it speaks well for California’s appreciation of the picturesque and the appropriate that she has decided to cling to the historic name of El Camino Real—the Royal Road—the King’s Highway.
Although the Santa Clara Valley, properly speaking, ends at Palo Alto, the ultrafashionable colonies of Burlingame, San Mateo, and Hillsboro may, for the purposes of this chapter, at least, be considered as within its compass. These are to the Pacific Coast what Lenox and Tuxedo are to the Eastern world of fashion: places where the rich dwell in great country houses set far back in splendid parks, with none but their fellow millionaires for neighbours and with every convenience for sport close at hand. Full of colour and animation are the scenes at their ivy-covered stations when the afternoon trains from San Francisco pull in; for here, at least, the motor-car has not ousted the horse from his old-time popularity, and the gravelled driveways are alive with tandem carts and runabouts and spider phaetons, with smart grooms in whipcord liveries and leather gaiters standing rigidly at the heads of the horses. Probably the finest examples of architecture in California are to be seen in the neighbourhood of Burlingame and San Mateo, the only other communities which can rival them in this respect being Montecito, near Santa Barbara, Oak Knoll, outside of Pasadena, and Hollywood, a suburb of Los Angeles.
The East and, for that matter, all of the rest of America owe California a debt of gratitude for her development of a native domestic architecture. The first true homes for folk of real culture but moderate incomes were produced on the Pacific Coast. In the type of house that abounds to-day in California comfort, tradition, and art have been skilfully and interestingly combined. Based on the old missions, which in their turn drew inspiration from the ideals of the Spaniard and the Moor, modern Californian architecture has nevertheless made servants, not masters, of those traditions. Though drawing from the romantic background of the conquistadores and the _padres_ the sturdy spirit, the simple lines, and the practical details of the old frontier buildings, the main virtue of these Californian homes is that they possess a definite relation to the soil and climate and the habits of the people. But, though back of each design lurks the motive of the Spanish missions, there is no monotony, no sameness; but, on the contrary, a remarkable variety of design. Each possesses the characteristic features of the Californian home: the low, wide-spreading roof lines, the solid walls, generally of concrete or plaster, the frank use of structural beams, the luxurious spaces of veranda and balcony, the tiled terraces and pottery roofs, the cool, inviting patios, and the quiet loveliness of the interiors. It is true, of course, that many house-builders have been unable to resist the temptation of Colonial, Norman, Dutch, and Tudor, but, as their culture increases, Californians are fast realising that an architecture designed for inhospitable climates is utterly incongruous in California’s semitropical surroundings.
It rained one of the days that I spent in San José, and my genial host was so apologetic about it that I actually felt sorry for him. Though rain is seldom unwelcome in a horticultural country, the residents don’t like to have it come down in bucketfuls when visitors whom they are anxious to impress with the perfection of their climate are around. They are as proud of their climate in the Santa Clara Valley as a boy is of “his first long pants,” and to back up their boasts the residents carry in their pockets the blue slips of the Government Weather Bureau’s monthly reports to show the stranger. I’m not fond of figures, unless they happen to be on cheques drawn in my favour, but I was impressed by the fact, nevertheless, that in 1913 the valley had only fifty-eight cloudy days, sixty-four which were overcast, and two hundred and thirty-four in which there was not a cloud to dim the turquoise of the sky. Carrying my investigations a little further, I found that during the greater part of February, which is the coldest month of the year, the mercury remained above 55, only four times dropping as low as 33, while there were only four days in August when the thermometer needle crept up to 79, and once in the same month it fell as low as 42, thus giving a solar-plexus blow to the idea stubbornly held by most Easterners that in summer California is an anteroom to Hades.
To this unvarying geniality of the climate and to the careless, happy-go-lucky, pleasure-loving strain handed down from the Spanish and Argonaut pioneers are due the invincible gaiety and the passionate love for the out-of-doors which are among the most likeable characteristics of the Californians. One of the first things that strikes an Eastern visitor is the fact that the Californians can always find time for amusement, and they enter into those amusements with the enthusiasm and the whole-souled gaiety of children. On the Pacific Coast recreation is considered quite as important as business—and business does not suffer, either. There is about these Californian merrymakings an abandon, a joyousness, a childlike freedom from restraint which is in striking contrast to the restrained, self-conscious pleasures of the older, colder East. To the colourful _fiestas_ of the Spanish and Mexican eras may be traced the out-of-door festivities which play so large a part in the life of the people on the Pacific Coast, such as the midwinter Tournament of Roses at Pasadena, the Portola Festival with which the San Franciscans celebrate the discovery of San Francisco Bay, the Feast of the Blossoms held each spring in the Santa Clara Valley, the Battle of Flowers which, until very recently, was a feature of life at Santa Barbara, but which, for some unexplainable reason, has been abandoned, the Rose Festival at Portland, the Potlatch at Seattle. Under much the same category are the classic plays given in the wonderful Greek Theatre at the University of California, the sylvan masks produced by the colony of authors and artists at Carmel-by-the-Sea, and the Bohemian Club’s celebrated Grove Play.
No account of Californian festivals is in any way complete without at least a brief description of the last named, which is characterised by a beauty of production and a dignity of treatment that make it in many respects an American Bayreuth. For forty years the Bohemian Club of San Francisco has gone into the California redwoods each summer for a fortnight’s outing. This famous club, founded in 1872 by a coterie of actors, newspaper men, and artists, now has a membership of upward of thirteen hundred, representing all that is best in the art, music, literature, drama, and science of the West. No one may become a member who has not achieved a distinction of sorts in one of these fields, the anticommercial spirit which animates the club being aptly expressed by the quotation at the top of its note-paper: “Weaving spiders come not here.” The Bohemian Grove, which consists of about three hundred acres of forest and contains some of the finest redwood giants in California, stands on the banks of the Russian River, ninety miles to the north of San Francisco. The stately redwoods stand in a gentle ravine whose floor and slopes in the rainless midsummer are bright with the canvas of the club encampment, which resembles a sort of sylvan Durbar; for the camps, many of which are elaborately arranged and furnished, are made of canvas in the gayest colours—scarlet and white, green and white, blue and yellow—with flags and banners and gorgeous Oriental lanterns everywhere. Here, during the first two weeks in every August, congregate close on a thousand men who have done things—authors of “best sellers,” builders of bridges and dams and lighthouses and aqueducts, painters whose pictures hang on the line at the Paris Salon or on the walls of the Luxembourg, composers of famous operas, writers of plays which have made a hit on Broadway, presidents of transcontinental railway systems, celebrated singers, men who have penetrated to the remotest corners of the earth—wearing the dress of the woods, calling each other “Bill” or “Jim” or “Harry” as the case may be, and becoming, for the time being, boys once more. A steep side of the ravine forms the “back-drop” of the forest stage, the spectators—no woman has ever taken part in the play or witnessed an original performance—sitting on redwood logs under the stars. The Grove Play is an evolution from a simpler programme, which was originally known as “High Jinks.” It is now a serious composition, with music, largely symbolical in character, created entirely by members of the club, in which many artists of international fame have taken part, always in the amateur spirit.
But to return to our Valley of the Santa Clara. In the Panhandle of Texas a ranch usually means anywhere from five thousand acres upward of uncultivated land; in the Santa Clara a ranch means anywhere from five acres upward of the most highly cultivated soil in the world. East of the Sierra Nevada, where scientific fertilisation and intensive cultivation are still wearing short dresses, five acres are scarcely worth considering, but five acres in California, properly planted and cared for, ofttimes supports a family in something akin to luxury. I had pointed out to me in the Santa Clara Valley at least a score of small holdings which yield their owners annually in the neighbourhood of five hundred dollars an acre. All of these hardy pioneers have telephones and electric lights and electric power for pumping and daily newspaper and mail deliveries. When they have any business in town, instead of going down to the corral and roping a bronco, they either stroll through the orchard and hail an electric car or they crank up the family automobile.
While I was in the Santa Clara Valley I asked a number of those questions to which every prospective home seeker wants to know the answers. I found that improved land, planted to prune, apricot, or peach trees old enough to bear, can be had all the way from four hundred to seven hundred dollars an acre, according to its location. At a conservative estimate this land, so I was told by a banker whose business it is to lend money on it (and you can trust a banker for never being oversanguine), can be depended upon to yield an income of from one hundred to three hundred dollars an acre, it being by no means an unusual thing for a well-managed ranch to pay for itself in two or three years. I found that a ten-acre orchard—which is quite large enough for one man to handle—could be had for five thousand dollars, the purchaser paying, say, two thousand dollars down and carrying the balance on a mortgage at seven per cent, which is the legal rate of interest in California. The local building and loan associations would lend him two thousand dollars to build with, which he could repay, at the rate of twenty-four dollars a month, in ten years. Two thousand dollars, I might add, will build an extremely attractive and comfortable six-room bungalow, for the two chief sources of expense to the Eastern home builder—cellars and furnaces—are not necessary in California. Such a place, provided its owner has horse sense, is not afraid of work, and knows good advice when he hears it, should yield from fifteen hundred to two thousand dollars a year, in addition to which the whole family can find ready employment, at excellent wages, in the orchards or packing-houses during the fruit season. For this work a man receives from two dollars to two dollars and a half a day and can count on fairly steady employment through at least eight months of the year, while many women and girls, whose deft fingers make them particularly valuable in the work of wrapping and packing the finer grades of fruit, can earn as high as twenty dollars a week during the busy season. This work, I might add, attracts an altogether exceptional class of people, for university and high-school students and the wives and daughters of small ranchers eagerly avail themselves of this opportunity to add to their incomes, the fruit orchards, during the picking season, looking less like a hive of workers than like a gigantic picnic among the shaded orchard rows, in which the whole countryside is taking part.
The air in the Santa Clara Valley is said to be the clearest in the world, though they tell you exactly the same thing at Colorado Springs, and in the Grand Cañon of Arizona, and at Las Vegas, N. Mex. The Santa Clara air is clear enough, however, for all practical purposes. In fact, its extraordinary clarity sometimes lends itself to extraordinary uses. I have a friend whose residence is set on a hillside high on the valley’s eastern rim. One day, idly scanning the distant landscape through his field-glasses, he noted that the field hands employed on the ranch of a neighbour on the opposite hillside, twenty odd miles away, knowing that they could not be observed by their employer, were loafing in the shade instead of working. My friend called up his neighbour by telephone and told him that his men were soldiering, whereupon that gentleman rode up the hillside and gave his astonished employees such a tongue-lashing that when the six-o’clock whistle blew that night they had blisters on their hands.
Lack of labour is one of the most serious problems with which the fruit-growers of California have had to contend, though it is believed that this will be remedied, in some measure at least, by the flood of European immigration which will pour through the Panama Canal. Twenty years ago the labour problem was solved by the Chinaman, who was the most industrious and dependable labourer California has ever had, but with the agitation which resulted in closing our doors to the Celestial most of the Chinese in California entered domestic service and now command such high wages—fifty dollars a month is the average wage of a Chinese house boy or cook—that only the well-to-do can afford to employ them. Time and again I have heard clear-headed Californians of all classes assert that the admission, under certain restrictions, of a hundred thousand selected Chinese would prove an unqualified blessing for California. The relentless war waged by California—or, rather, by the labour element of California—against the admission of Chinese immigrants was based on the difference in the standard of living. The yellow man could live in something very akin to luxury on about a tenth of the ration required for a white man’s support. In other words, the Chinaman could outstarve the white man; therefore the Chinaman must go. And there has never been any one to take his place.
Outside of the Pacific Coast the impression seems to prevail that the Chinaman’s place has been taken by the Japanese. This is not so. To begin with, Japanese labour is not cheap labour. The Japanese do not work for less pay than white men, unless it be temporarily, so as to obtain the white man’s job. Japanese house cleaners and gardeners demand and receive a minimum wage of thirty-five cents an hour, and in California, where most people of modest means are compelled to do their own housework because of the scarcity of and exorbitant wages demanded by domestic servants, housewives are thankful to get Japanese by the day at any price. Their standard of living is as high as that of other nationalities; much higher, in fact, than that of peoples from southern Europe. There is no pauperism among them and astonishingly little crime. They dress well, eat well, spend money lavishly for entertainment. But the Jap, unlike the Chinaman, “talks back.” He is not in the least impressed by the American’s claim of racial superiority. In fact, he considers himself very much better than the white man and, if the opportunity presents itself, does not hesitate to say so. He is patronising instead of patronised. He has proved that he is the white man’s equal in every line of industry and in some his superior. Three times in succession a Japanese grower has virtually cornered the potato crop of the Pacific Coast. The Japanese has driven the Greek and the Portuguese out of the fishing industry, in which they believed that they were impregnably intrenched. As a result of these things he steps off the sidewalk for no one. He knows that back of him stands a great empire, with a powerful fleet and one of the most efficient armies in existence, and he takes no pains to disguise this knowledge in his relations with the white man.
To tell the truth, the prohibition of land ownership, the segregation of school children are but pretexts put forward by a jealous and resentful white population to teach the yellow man his place. The assertion that Japanese ownership of land is a menace to white domination is the veriest nonsense, and every Californian knows it. There are ninety-nine million acres in California and of this area the Japanese own or lease barely thirty thousand acres, or _twelve hundredths of one per cent_. The fifty-eight thousand Japanese in California form but two and one half per cent of the total population. These figures, which are authoritative, are not very menacing, are they? The bulk of the Japanese reside in Los Angeles County and in the delta of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers, where they work gigantic potato fields and truck-gardens and asparagus beds. Now, Los Angeles, mind you, has never demanded Japanese exclusion. Protests poured into Sacramento from the white settlers of the delta country against the passage of the anti-alien land laws. Why, then, you ask, does the entire Pacific Coast, including British Columbia, exhibit such intense dislike for the Jap? Because, as I have said, he has shown that he can beat the white man at his own game; because he is not in the least meek and humble as befits an alien and “inferior” race; because he believes in his heart that in an armed conflict Nippon could whip the United States as thoroughly as she whipped China and Russia; because, as a result of this belief, he perpetually swaggers about with his hat cocked on one side and a chip perched invitingly on his shoulder; because, in short, his very manner is a constant irritation to the Californians. And until the status of the Japanese upon the Pacific Coast is definitely and finally established by international treaty this irritation may be expected to continue and to increase.
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