Southern Pacific RR

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">uber1:</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
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The Great American Railroad War: How<b> Ambrose Bierce and Frank Norris Took On the Notorious Central Pacific Railroad</b>

Dennis Drabelle
Macmillan, Aug 21, 2012 - History - 320 pages

<a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=lSMPBuHcCbUC">https://books.google.com/books?id=lSMPBuHcCbUC</a>
=</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">went after SPRR octopus?</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><a href="https://psmag.com/social-justice/the-corrections-45618">https://psmag.com/social-justice/the-corrections-45618</a></font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" /><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">THE CORRECTIONS</font></font></font></font></div><div>In 1896, William Randolph Hearst unleashed his pit-bull ace reporter, Ambrose Bierce, in the nation’s capital to expose the Railroad robber baron's grip on California’s Legislature. Reforms happened. The state was returned to its people. Trouble is, some of those fixes are bringing California to its knees.</div><div>
</div><div>DENNIS DRABELLE  UPDATED:JUN 14, 2017  ORIGINAL:AUG 28, 2012</div><div>
</div><div>THE MORASS THAT IS CALIFORNIA POLITICS today may have originated in mid-January of 1896, when a middle-aged man boarded an eastbound train in Oakland. With his ex-soldier’s ramrod bearing and his red-gold hair turning gray, the traveler was not likely to have gone unrecognized. He was Ambrose Bierce, the West’s most famous newspaperman, who used his San Francisco Examiner column to skewer fools and rogues, as well as to coin the acerbic definitions later collected in his Devil’s Dictionary. (Example: “PEACE, n: In international affairs, a period of cheating between two periods of fighting.”)</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 51);">Although the conservative Bierce admired businessmen, he was en route to Washington DC to lead a SWAT team of journalists, cartoonists, and accountants in an effort to prevent California’s most powerful corporation, the <b>Central Pacific Railroad,</b> from doing what American capitalists so love to do: obtain a favor from Congress</span>.</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 51);">Bierce was overriding his instincts for two reasons. First, his boss, Examiner publisher <b>William Randolph Hearst, a Democrat, </b>had asked him to go after<b> the railroad, which had long been identified with the Republican Party</b>. Hearst not only paid Bierce a handsome salary but also let him write what he pleased. Bierce couldn’t deny that Hearst had earned the right, for once, to draft him for a pet cause.</span></div><div>
</div><div>Then, too, Bierce loathed dishonesty more than he revered capitalism. Backed by generous federal subsidies, the Central Pacific came into being as a segment of America’s f<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">irst transcontinental line, linking up with the Union Pacific at Promontory Summit, Utah, in 1869. In the process, the <b>Central Pacific’s owner-builders—Collis Huntington, Mark Hopkins, Leland Stanford, and Charles Crocker, known as the Big Four</b>—had each siphoned away a private fortune of about $20 million from the federal pot</span>.<b> By ’96, death had reduced the Big Four to a Big One, but the 74-year-old Huntington was overbearing enough for four. </b>In pitting the pugnacious columnist against the notorious robber baron, Hearst was practically doing Bierce a favor.</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">Huntington couldn’t help but take notice of Bierce’s journey—it had been trumpeted on the Examiner’s front page. But Huntington had deep pockets, a couple dozen lobbyists at his disposal, and the ear of the Republican Party, which controlled both houses of Congress.</span> What’s more, the issues involved were geographically remote and hard to understand: In addition to land, the subsidies had consisted of federal bonds handed over to the railroad to sell as its own certificates.<b> Those bonds—with interest, the tab added up to roughly $75 million—were now coming due, and the Central Pacific sought to postpone repayment to the United States for 75 more years. Huntington reckoned that Congress wouldn’t want to dwell on such distant complexities for long.</b></div><div>
</div><div><b>Out in California, the Progressive movement was making some noise, but Huntington was accustomed to having his way in the Golden State. He saw no reason why it shouldn’t be the same at the national level.</b></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 51);">Huntington was about to learn how mighty the pen can be, and the Progressive movement would take heart from the outcome. Yet given the current state of governance in California, it’s fair to say that the railroad tycoon had the last laugh.</span></div><div>
</div><div>BORN IN 1842, Ambrose Bierce grew up in rural Indiana, where he cultivated a deep love of reading. When the Civil War broke out, Bierce joined the Ninth Indiana Volunteers. He was a distinguished cartographer and<b> aide to a general, until he took a bullet in the head during the 1864 Battle of Kennesaw Mountain</b>. He recovered, and his time in action ended shortly thereafter. After the war, he fetched up in San Francisco, where he tried his hand at writing. Bierce’s Civil War tales exude authenticity because he, almost alone among 19th-century American fiction writers, could draw upon firsthand knowledge of combat. In the 1870s, he found a niche as an elegant gossip columnist, a forerunner of Herb Caen and his “three-dot journalism.”</div><div>
</div><div>In 1887, at a point when Bierce’s career was stagnating, Hearst beckoned. Newly installed as the publisher of a newspaper that his millionaire father had given him as a present, the young mogul wanted to make a splash in journalism, and who better than Bierce to send water flying? <b>At the Examiner, Bierce consolidated his position as the West Coast’s chief scourge of blockheads and knaves, the Big Four very much among them</b>.</div><div>
</div><div>Huntington, Stanford, Hopkins, and Crocker were all Easterners lured by the Gold Rush to California, where they quickly realized that the surest way to succeed was not by prospecting but by<b> selling prospectors what they needed. All four settled in Sacramento, where Huntington and Hopkins met and became partners in a hardware store, Stanford sold groceries, and Crocker peddled dry goods. They also had in common their opposition to slavery, allegiance to the Republican Party, and outsized ambition</b>. In the early 1860s, they saw merit in a scheme proposed by an engineer named Theodore Judah. At the time, everyone paid lip service to the idea of connecting the American West and East by train, but Judah had gone so far as to scout the least troublesome route over the Sierra Nevada.</div><div>
</div><div>Judah died of yellow fever in 1863, but his know-how had helped persuade Congress to subsidize the grand project. The Big Four carried on without him. Stanford was the group’s unctuous figurehead, Hopkins the geeky bookkeeper, <b>Crocker the swaggering construction manager, and Huntington—operating out of New York and Washington—the crafty fund-raiser and influence-peddler.</b></div><div>
</div><div>They entered into a race from opposite directions with the Union Pacific (the more miles of track laid by a railroad, the larger its share of the<b> federal subsidies). On the way, both sets of owners had the same underhanded idea: they should establish a construction firm, ostensibly independent, but in fact owned by them</b>. <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">After steering construction contracts to the new company, they could pay themselves fat dividends on the sly. The Union Pacific came to grief when it was learned that the firm had bribed members of Congress, in what became known as the Crédit Mobilier scandal. Hopkins made sure that the Central Pacific eluded scrutiny—by destroying the company’s ledgers—but his efforts accomplished only so much.</span></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 51);">For a while, the Big Four had a fifth partner, David Colton, who bought his way into the Central Pacific but never paid his full share. After his death in 1878, the surviving partners tried to collect from his widow, who fought back by releasing damning letters to the press. Spelled out for all to read were Huntington’s recommendations that Colton stoop to such methods as bribing state legislatures to enact pro-railroad bills.</span></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">In California, strategic payments gave the railroad such a stranglehold that when a state constitutional convention established a commission to regulate the railroad, the Central Pacific managed to dominate it, too.</span> Nor was the corporate image burnished when three of the Big Four built gaudy mansions on San Francisco’s Nob Hill.[spite fence?]  A magazine cartoonist played upon the company’s growing unpopularity by depicting it as an<b> octopus</b> whose tentacles were squeezing the life out of various sectors of the California economy. (Frank Norris was to borrow that motif for his muckraking novel about a thinly disguised version of the Central Pacific, The Octopus, published in 1901.)</div><div>
</div><div><b>Still, the railroad’s power remained intact. In early 1896, Huntington and his lobbyists sought to punt repayment of the company’s federal debt well into the next century, and few sporting men in Washington would have bet against them.</b></div><div>
</div><div>Once he reached Washington, Bierce set up shop in a hotel near the White House. He faced two challenges. He had to master a wealth of factual, financial, and legal material that Huntington and his minions already knew intimately. And he had to make Easterners care about a subject removed from them by three decades and three thousand miles. Hearst stood ready to bankroll a special Washington edition of the Examiner. Printing it was one thing, however; getting people to read it was another. Bierce’s job was to fill that special’s pages with cogent, sparkling copy.</div><div>
</div><div>He had some advantages, though. He lived in an age when verbal combat was a much-practiced art—words didn’t just ring out; they slapped, kicked, gouged, and pulled hair—and there was no better word warrior than Bierce. Nor, as Huntington’s forces soon discovered, was he slow to take advantage of an opening.</div><div>
</div><div><b>In early February, the Huntington-friendly Washington Post reprinted a telegram in which a number of prominent Californians endorsed the railroad’s bid for debt postponement. </b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">As it turned out, however, some of the nabobs listed as signers had never even heard of the telegram and in fact, their views were quite the opposite. Bierce gleefully devoted several articles to this sloppy work by Huntington’s staff.</span></div><div>
</div><div>Soon he was launching broader attacks. He cited facts and figures, but above all he flexed his rhetorical muscles. Here, for example, is his diatribe against Huntington after the old man testified before a House committee:</div><div>
</div><div>Mr. Huntington is not altogether bad. Though severe, he is merciful. He tempers invective with falsehood. He says ugly things of his enemy, but he has the tenderness to be careful that they are mostly lies.... Mr. Huntington’s rancor blown about in space as a pestilential vapor will outlive all things that be. It is his immortal part.</div><div>
</div><div>Elsewhere in the same piece, Bierce summed up Huntington as “an inflated old pigskin.”</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Before long, le tout Washington couldn’t wait for its daily dose of salty witticisms at Huntington’s expense. Bierce had succeeded admirably in calling attention to the railroad’s scheme. Meanwhile, the California congressional delegation lined up against the railroad, with one exception: a Democratic representative named Grove Johnson, whom Bierce mocked as a hireling of the railroad. At one hearing, Bierce wrote, Johnson “modestly bent his goatlike head and emitted a faint odor of violets.”</span></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">Huntington met with another setback after an anti-railroad senator questioned him at length about how much he’d invested at the dawn of the project. (The idea was to highlight the disparity between how little he had put in, and how much he had taken out.) Lots and lots of money, Huntington replied, the implication being that his great wealth was justified by the risks he’d taken. Then the senator sprang his trap, giving Huntington copies of his Sacramento tax records for the early 1860s. They exposed him as a man of decidedly modest means. “It was obvious that the old man had been caught in rank perjury,” Bierce commented.</span></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 51);"><b>But the Republican majority stuck with Huntington, until he pushed his luck by asking Congress for a second favor—to referee a conflict between Santa Monica and Los Angeles over the location of a deepwater port for Southern California</b>. Huntington favored Santa Monica, and it soon became clear why: he owned land there, and a port would surely multiply the land’s value. Bierce jumped all over this “coincidence,” which, unlike the matter of the Central Pacific’s federal bonds, was easy to comprehend. Bierce’s next story was headlined “Another Thieves’ Scheme on the Pacific Coast.”</span></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 51);">In California, leaders of the state Republican Party took note of Bierce’s scathing and relentless reports. For the sake of its candidates in the upcoming fall elections, the party made a dramatic decision: to break with Huntington and oppose his railroad bill. The national party deferred to its California offspring, and with that—five months after it had started—the game was over. Congress ultimately settled the matter by ordering the Central Pacific to retire its debt within 10 years, and Bierce and Hearst were lauded as giant-killers.</span></div><div><b>
</b></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);"><b>Emboldened by Huntington’s defeat, California Progressives went on to score impressive victorie</b>s, notably the election of their man for governor in 1910. His name was <b>Hiram Johnson,</b> and in a twist that almost defies belief, he was the son of Grove Johnson, the congressman whose steadfast support of the railroad in 1896 had left him odd man out in the California delegation. Governor Johnson pushed through a series of measures to bring railroads under control, as well as state constitutional amendments authorizing the initiative, referendum, and recall.</span></div><div>
</div><div><b>OF ALL THE BIG FOUR'S SINS, the most grievous was its poisoning of the California body politic. The Progressive-era safety valves were put in place to assuage the widespread fear that big money had swamped government and left the normal checks and balances unable to loosen corporations’ grips on the levers of power.</b> A century later, however, the perverse effect of that “cure” has been to hobble the state, which finds itself drowning in deficits, furloughing its employees, beggaring its educational system, and sometimes going for months on end without a budget.[PROP 13 HOWARD JARVIS SWORN NEMESIS OF MTA PROP 49/59]</div><div>
</div><div><b>As they were designed to do, initiatives bypass the normal legislative process by which, as bills are refined and debated, diverse interests get to have their say. Instead, voters are presented with up-or-down votes on what are typically raw and rigid proposals</b>. <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">And in an irony that the Big Four might have appreciated, gathering signatures to put an initiative on the ballot, buying ads to influence voters, hiring lawyers to contest alleged defects in an election—all of these tasks have become so costly that <b>large corporations</b> [GUN TO HEAD SODA TAX] and well-heeled interest groups enjoy a decided advantage whenever a measure touches upon their prerogatives</span>. In 1996, for example, an initiative to establish a no-fault insurance system for motor-vehicle accidents drew the ire of trial lawyers, and they opened their wallets to beat it.<b> In 2005, after a disastrous experiment in deregulation of the state’s electric utilities</b>,<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);"> the utilities poured millions of dollars into defeating an initiative to reimpose strict regulation</span>. Big money, in short, still has California over a barrel, just as it did in the Gilded Age.</div><div>
</div><div><b>The state is a prisoner of its own reforms, especially those traceable to the frustration people felt in the late 19th century over how single-mindedly, and with so little regard for ethics, the Central Pacific worked its will. A healthy representative government should be able to do without the initiative, referendum, and recall. Today it can be argued that California government will never fully regain its health with them.</b></div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>WHILE IRONIC, of course the state’s current troubles can’t be blamed on Bierce or Progressives; they were only trying to save their state. One thing seems clear now, however: among the actors in the 1896 drama, the defeated Huntington is the one who left the deepest, and darkest, imprint on the state.</div><div>
</div><div>This article is adapted from Dennis Drabelle’s new book, The Great American Railroad War: How Ambrose Bierce and Frank Norris Took on the Central Pacific Railroad, published in August by St. Martin’s Press.</div></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">----</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Randolph_Hearst" title="William Randolph Hearst" style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-image="background-image" none="none" background-position="background-position" initial="initial" background-size="background-size" background-repeat="background-repeat" background-attachment="background-attachment" background-origin="background-origin" background-clip="background-clip" text-decoration-line="text-decoration-line" font-weight="font-weight" bold="bold" outline="outline">William Randolph Hearst</a><span style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"> opened a nationwide popular readership for direct election of U.S. Senators in a 1906 series of articles using flamboyant language attacking "The Treason of the Senate" in his </span><i style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">Cosmopolitan Magazine</i><span style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">. David Graham Philips, one of the "yellow journalists" whom President </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Roosevelt" title="Theodore Roosevelt" style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-image="background-image" none="none" background-position="background-position" initial="initial" background-size="background-size" background-repeat="background-repeat" background-attachment="background-attachment" background-origin="background-origin" background-clip="background-clip" text-decoration-line="text-decoration-line" font-weight="font-weight" bold="bold" outline="outline">Teddy Roosevelt</a><span style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"> called "muckrakers", described </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelson_Aldrich" class="mw-redirect" title="Nelson Aldrich" style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-image="background-image" none="none" background-position="background-position" initial="initial" background-size="background-size" background-repeat="background-repeat" background-attachment="background-attachment" background-origin="background-origin" background-clip="background-clip" text-decoration-line="text-decoration-line" font-weight="font-weight" bold="bold" outline="outline">Nelson Aldrich</a><span style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"> of Rhode Island as the principal "traitor" among the "scurvy lot" in control of the Senate by theft, perjury, and bribes corrupting the state legislatures to gain election to the Senate.</span></font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=
senators

<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_R.Bard">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_R.Bard </a> appt patton west pt, rr guy but also farmer?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Putnam_Flint  fruit grower also banker; owen vlly

<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_D.Works">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_D.Works</a> downey
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</font><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><a href="http://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=The_Octopus_and_the_Big_Four">http://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=The_Octopus_and_the_Big_Four</a>

</font><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">In 1859, Theodore Judah convinced four relatively unknown merchants

in Sacramento to invest in his proposed railroad to run from the gold

mines through the treacherous Sierra foothills toward the eastern

seaboard of America. At the time, the investment was a considerable

gamble on something few people thought likely to pay off any time soon.<b>

The four investors--Leland Stanford, Collis P. Huntington, Mark Hopkins

and Charles Crocker</b>--had to wait a few years for the pay-off on their

seed money for Central Pacific.

</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">When the transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869, the

four investors laughed all the way to the bank. They had effectively

laid the groundwork to establish one of the most comprehensive and

oppressive monopolies in American history. The four merchants eventually

dubbed themselves The Big Four and their many-tentacled empire of

railroads and freight lines was renamed Southern Pacific Railroad in

1884, although its detractors preferred to call it the Octopus.

</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b>In 1862, Congress approved the Pacific Railroad Act which awarded

government contracts to two companies--Union Pacific and Central

Pacific.</b> The plan was for the two companies to build toward each other,

from Omaha and Sacramento respectively, until they met. The federal

government had a vested interest in the railroad and it generously

subsidized the Central Pacific Railroad, aiming to get its slice of the

Golden pie to help fund its war against the South. In addition, the Big

Four created their own construction company and charged the United

States inflated amounts to turn a healthy profit while they advanced

their operations.

</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Unfortunately for the Union, the railroad wasn't complete until

long after the Civil War had ended. On May 10, 1869, the fabled golden

spike was driven into the final tie at Promontory, Utah and the United

States eastern and western coasts were summarily linked. The illustrious

golden spike can be viewed today at the Stanford University Art Museum.

</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The landscape of the Bay Area lent itself nicely to exploitation

by the Big Four. With the completion of the transcontinental railroad, a

new era of overland commerce in America had begun, linking the formerly

isolated West Coast with the manufacturing-intensive East Coast.

Central Pacific was the only company that had laid track going east. In

addition, the Big Four started building railroads that linked the Bay

Area with outlying communities that provided raw goods for San

Francisco<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">. The peninsula of San Francisco--insofar as it had no bridges

to the mainland--was an island, for all purposes of trade with the east

coast. Any such commerce necessarily happened vis-a-vis ships and

ferries that ran across the Bay.

</span></font></p><p><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The Big Four eventually exploited this bottleneck by purchasing

the majority of ferry and steamship lines that ran from the East Bay to

San Francisco--the seat of commerce and wealth in California. By the

early 1870s, they had established a de facto monopoly on California

shipping by establishing control in San Francisco, leaving producers and

retailers no option but to meet Southern Pacific Railroad's exorbitant

costs or have their product rot in the warehouse.

</font></span></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">As the name indicates, the Octopus was not popular with the

general public. Although railroad advocates had hyped up the potential

financial gains to be had from the railroad, its actual impact was

resoundingly negative. <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In 1868, <a href="http://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=HENRY_GEORGE" title="HENRY GEORGE">Henry George</a> had written an editorial for the <i>Overland Monthly</i>

predicting a recession for San Francisco once it became directly linked

with the larger economy. He was proven correct. San Francisco suffered

one of the worst depressions in its history when the railroad was

completed. The Big Four, however, did not suffer, as manifested by the <a href="http://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=Crocker%27s_Spite_Fence" title="Crocker's Spite Fence">opulent mansions</a>

that began to sprout up on Nob Hill. Through corruption and force of

momentum, Southern Pacific retained its monopoly on California commerce

into the twentieth-century. Finally, in 1910, San Francisco elected a

reform government that managed to break the stranglehold of the Big Four

and a rival railroad began operating.

</span></font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b>Leland Stanford</b> (1824-1893)

</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Leland Stanford was one of those fabled souls that went West

(young man) and made his fortune. In 1852, Leland came out to Sacramento

to help his brothers run a thriving grocery business. After gaining

control of the grocery, Stanford hit a lucky roll when one of his

customers went belly up and paid off his debt to the grocery with gold

mine stock. Shortly thereafter, the mine went bonanza and Stanford soon

had a small fortune of half a million dollars.

</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">In 1859, Stanford invested in the grand railroad scheme of

Theodore Judah that was destined to make him a wealthy man. When his

investment started reaping seemingly boundless returns, Stanford had a

mansion built on Nob Hill in 1876. Until then, <a href="http://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=Rincon_Hill" title="Rincon Hill">Rincon Hill</a>

had been the site of choice for the well-to-do in San Francisco because

it was more accessible<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">. After the first cable car was installed in 1873

(on Clay street), <a href="http://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=Nob_Hill-Powell_and_Sutter" title="Nob Hill-Powell and Sutter">Nob Hill</a>

became the new hot spot for the moneyed class </span>and Rincon Hill fell from

prominence, destined to become a mere nub holding up the Bay Bridge.

Leland Stanford was the first to lay out his spread on the hill,

followed by his cronies at the Big Four club. The opulent Stanford

mansion burned to the ground in the unremitting San Francisco fire of

Today, the Stanford Court Hotel stands where the mansion was.

</font></p><p><font size="4"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font face="Times New Roman">Stanford used his financial clout to the end of political power.

In the nineteenth-century it was easier to buy a public office than it

is today. Stanford was governor of California for two years during the

Civil War. He became a U.S. senator two decades later by bribing state

legislators to elect him. State senators were not elected by popular

vote at that time.[</font></span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font face="Times New Roman">March 4, 1885 –June 21, 1893;  appt bro in law cal scotus?)
</font></span></font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Leland Stanford also built the now-famous Stanford University in

honor of his only son, who died of typhoid in 1884. The university was

located on his farm in Palo Alto. In spite of the astronomical wealth

Stanford had earned, his<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> university was almost forced to close in 1893

when Stanford died in debt. However, his wife Jane managed to keep it

open.

</span></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Collis P. Huntington & Charles Crocker</b>

</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Huntington and Crocker also followed Leland Stanford up Nob Hill

and planted their own ostentatious mansions<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">. Huntington, however, was in

Washington most of the time, bribing high-level Congressmen to be

favorable to the Southern Pacific in their legislation.</span> Crocker built

not one, but two, mansions on Nob Hill -- one for his son as a wedding

present. He ran into a problem, however, when one stubborn German

undertaker named Nicholas Yung would not sell his property to

accommodate the Crocker spread. <b>Crocker had been able to buy out

everybody on Nob Hill save for this one gentleman.

</b></font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Crocker, enraged, retaliated by building a 40-foot fence around

the back of Yung's house, obliterating sunlight and Yungs nice view of

San Francisco.<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b> The notorious <a href="http://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=Crocker%27s_Spite_Fence" title="Crocker's Spite Fence">spite fence</a></b> became a rallying point for San Francisco citizenry as a symbol of big business oppression of the common man.

</span></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Mark Hopkins</b>

</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Under goading from his wife, Mary, Mark Hopkins commissioned an

excessively elaborate mansion to be built near the Stanford estate. Mary

had a taste for the Gothic and ordered up a host of turrets, spires and

other excessive ornamentation to be built. Unfortunately, Hopkins died

before his fabulous mansion was completed and he never had a chance to

enjoy it. Hopkins' mansion then became the Hopkins Institute of Art and

then burned in the 1906 fire, along with the rest of the Big Four's

mansions. Today, the Mark Hopkins hotel now occupies the site.

</font></p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> Westlands makes this promise despite 52 years of federal research and hundreds of millions of dollars in studies that have failed to come up with a wildlife-safe, effective and affordable solution. It gets better. Westlands also wants forgiveness on an already interest free $489 million capital debt for taxpayer construction of its water delivery system it should have already paid off.</span> But first <b>a little history.</b> After pumping a huge aquifer dry on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley in less than 40 years, the patriarchal families of the West Side, the Giffens, the Harrises, the O’Neills, the Dieners, the Wolfsens and a few others, turned to a<b> folksy tire salesman from Texas named B.F. “Bernie” Sisk. </b>They bankrolled Sisk’s try for Congress and in 1955 he landed in the nation’s capitol. Sisk spent the next five years tirelessly promoting a U.S. Bureau of Reclamation project to bring Northern California <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">(Trinity River) water to western Fresno County</span>. In a speech on the floor of the House of Representatives in 1959, Sisk promised that if the San Luis Unit (which would have been the last major leg of the Central Valley Project begun in the 1930s) was built, there would <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">6,000 family farmers on 100-acre ranches </span>on the West Side and peace and prosperity would prevail. It was the first of many misrepresentations Westlands, or its supporters, would make over the next 48 years. </font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Twenty-five years after Sisk’s promise, in 1984, there were still only 240 growers in Westlands and 40 of them, mostly from the original founding families, controlled over half the land and all the politics in the one-acre, one-vote district. <b>Southern Pacific Railroad, Chevron, and cotton king J.G. Boswell were among the major Westlands landholders</b> </span>who influenced and directed district politics.<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The late Paul S. Taylor, a University of California economics professor who was a well known critic of Reclamation policies in the mid-20th century wrote a 1964 article in which he quoted Alabama Congressman Oscar Underwood’s1902 speech on the floor of Congress, the year the Reclamation program was created to protect and foster family farming: “Federal reclamation began as a program to help ‘farm boys’ who ‘want farms of their own’ to obtain them ‘without being driven into the already overcrowded cities to seek employment.’” Many of the “farm boys” from Westlands would eventually live in multi-million dollar mansions in North Fresno, on the San Joaquin River bluffs or toney Van Ness Extension Avenue, 50 miles from their industrialized farming operations, in a zip code that receives more farm subsidies than any other zip code in America, 93711. The first thing West Side growers did after the water delivery project was approved by Congress in 1960 was to annex another 200,008 acres known as the West Plains Water Storage into the 400,000-acre Westlands, a move a 1978 Congressional Task Force later concluded was unauthorized by Congress.</span> </font></p></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></div></div>