[...] Shelgrim presents himself as a bundle of social forces, the embodiment of impersonal currents—and he is, but not of the currents he claims. Because it wasn’t demand for wheat that built the speculative railroad lines. Supply and demand determine commodity prices—though not nearly so directly as we’ve been led to believe—and if someone orders a loaf of bread, you can’t tell the hungry customer to hold on while you build a railroad, a farm, a mill, and a bakery. Capital and capitalists built the lines, under logic much closer to “If you build it they will come” (or even “There’s a sucker born every minute”) than to “Give the people what they want.” As Richard White explains in his book Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of America, many if not all of the railroads were nonsensical from a consumer supply-and-demand perspective. The impersonal drive animating those big men in suits wasn’t the people’s hunger for bread; it was capital’s hunger for profit.

[...] Financiers wanted a way to access the potentially unlimited western gains they read about. Like the forty-niners who chased easy, transformative wealth, speculators were looking to get their hands on yields that weren’t yoked to the magnitude of the investment, all without having to do any actual work. Here again is the real impersonal demanding force that built the West—not hunger for bread but hunger for increased profits. Of course they could buy businesses, or invest in founding their own firms the way the Associates themselves had, but ownership was so restrictive. Converted to productive capital, money ceased to be liquid; it was tied up in machinery and other concrete assets. To make the best use of the opportunities to finance settlement in the fourth quarter of the nineteenth century—in California in particular, but also throughout the colonized world—capital needed a middle road between a bonded loan and a partnership, an instrument with the tradable liquidity of the former and the speculative upside of the latter. The answer was the joint-stock corporation.

Away from the Associates, Stanford came into his own in Palo Alto. Never all that interested in railroads (or really anything in particular), he finally found something worth his time: horses. The nouveau riche hobby of breeding racehorses captured his attention in a way that other business didn’t. What with the care Stanford lavished on Leland Jr. and the trotters, his partners among the Associates despaired of getting him to fulfill even his official duties, never mind add any value to their common enterprise. By that time he had plenty of cash secured, and the Stanfords invested it in land and luxuries. The ranch became the Palo Alto Stock Farm, a place where Stanford could see to the rearing and training of his horses (as well as his son). He poured money into the farm, hiring dozens of workers to equip the stables, including his elite chief trainer, Charles Marvin. The project grew massive, and he kept acquiring land to expand his now beloved Palo Alto tract. By the end of the 1880s, the stock farm boasted nearly 800 horses and a staff of 150 spread over 11,000 acres, the largest and finest institution of its kind in the world. Shipping horses back and forth to the West Coast from the farms of Kentucky and the markets of New York might have been a prohibitive expense for most, but not for Stanford the railroad man. He had a custom railcar built for his fine equine cargo.

When it came to translating bionomic insights into eugenic policy, California was ahead of the curve. Chinese exclusion made the country’s racial health a question of border security, and the West was the edge of whiteness. At the same time, agricultural employers in the West needed a regular (though not constant) supply of labor, preferably with high skills and low wages. The Southern Pacific Railroad’s strategy of importing vulnerable workers from abroad became integral to California’s particular mode of production. Growers paid their workers by race, segregating them according to pseudo-scientific ideas about capacity and the intricate matrix of legal rights allotted to Americans by race, ethnicity, gender, immigration status, and national origin. When new profit opportunities arose, growers gathered foreign laborers; when the profit rates attenuated, the state expelled them. For example, in 1897, soon after Californians embarrassed the nation by forcing Chinese exclusion and abatement, a new American sugar duty (secured by a new American sugar trust) boosted West Coast sugar beet production, and the trust began importing Japanese agricultural workers by the tens of thousands.vii These skilled gardeners transformed the industry, making the regional beet business the nation’s most profitable, and since beet labor was seasonal, the surplus of cheap skilled harvest labor made the further spread of off-season intensive (and expensive) crops such as strawberries possible. The value of California cropland exploded.

By 1907, the Japanese workers, who had just recently commanded the lowest field wages of any ethnic cohort, became the highest paid and began accumulating their own plots, which they made considerably more productive. However, as soon as they started getting their own land, “the Japanese ceased to be desirable aliens,” writes Carey McWilliams in his masterly study of California agriculture, Factories in the Field.33 As the most productive proprietors, small Japanese farmers could pay more than white farmers to buy and lease land, and the industrial growers began to resent the challenge to their position. The old fears that Chinese and Japanese workers would “under-live” Americans morphed into a new anxiety about being outbid.viii San Francisco exclusionists attempted to segregate Japanese children out of the city’s schools, causing an international crisis necessitating the intervention of President Theodore Roosevelt, who got the school board to back down and negotiated a deal with the Meiji emperor to confine the immigration of Japanese laborers to Hawaii. “The infernal fools in California, and especially in San Francisco, insult the Japanese recklessly, and in the event of war it will be the Nation as a whole which will pay the consequences,” Roosevelt told his son, presciently, but California’s Anglos kept pushing.34

The 1924 Immigration Act struck a delicate balance between racial and national distinctions—between admitting the workers American capitalists needed and avoiding the “racial indigestion” Cubberley observed. The law instituted a quota system, ranking Europeans by national-racial preference and admitting them accordingly, concocting a finely tuned racial diet for smooth white assimilation. Countries with racially unassimilable populations were assigned the minimum quota of 100 souls, but there remained a problem. What stopped a person of Chinese descent from immigrating through Mexico or Canada, which, along with the rest of the Western Hemisphere, were exempt from quotas? What stopped 100,000 of them? The 1924 act solved the problem by banning the immigration of anyone who was racially ineligible for citizenship—that is, Asians. “Congress thus created the oddity of immigration quotas for non-Chinese persons of China, non-Japanese persons of Japan, non-Indian persons of India, and so on,” writes Mae Ngai in Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America.45 West of the Ural Mountains, people could become Americans, and it was up to the nation’s scientists and policymakers to cook up the right ratios. The law separated whites into national groups, but only in order to incorporate them in proper proportion as white Americans. Black Americans secured their citizenship by force in the Civil War, and so the bill’s logic required the annual admission of 200 black Africans: 100 each from the free nations of Ethiopia and Liberia. As for the rest of the racially undesirable world, European colonialism ensured that the most desirable whites—defined as desirable in large part thanks to their success in colonization—controlled those quota slots.

California’s growers were still dependent on low-wage nonwhite workers, especially with the labor demand crunch of World War I, which meant they had to get by on loopholes. Fearing the quota consequences, growers began importing Filipino workers in large numbers starting in 1923, and they attracted over 30,000 workers to the state by the end of the decade.46 As American nationals (the Philippines was a U.S. territory at the time), Filipinos were entitled to travel freely within the American empire; as phenotypically distinguishable from whites and Mexicans, they could be relegated by growers to a lower wage tier. It didn’t seem to hurt that most Filipinos spoke English and were familiar with American customs and culture. With racial wage scales came a segregated production process: lower-wage Mexican and Filipino workers were overused in the fields, while higher-wage whites worked in the packing sheds and canneries. In the beginning, the Filipino immigrants worked for the lowest wages and under the worst conditions—their pay documented at under $10 a month—but the young Filipino men proved more assimilable in practice than growers and policy makers imagined. With their fluent English and American nationality, Filipino immigrants felt entitled to interact with white women, whether on the beaches or at the taxi dance halls, where (still relatively scarce in the state) women danced one-on-one in exchange for ticket vouchers. Under the law, the Filipino men weren’t wrong; though California had banned marriages between whites and “Negroes and mulattoes” since 1850, adding “Mongolians” in 1905, Filipinos were “Malay” under the original eighteenth-century racial typology.47 California, having relied on the broad stretch of the Asiatic Barred Zone to exclude South Asians up to that point, did not include them in the anti-miscegenation statute. But in 1933, as Filipino farmers posed an increasing sexual threat to white men (and as they organized for higher wages), the state added “Malay” to the rule.

The first revolutionary party to form in California during the twentieth century was called the Social Revolutionary Party, and the society it sought to overthrow was Japan’s. Its founder was Kōtoku Shūsui, a Japanese left-wing writer and organizer who came to the States in 1905 after being released from jail amid a nationalist crackdown in his home country. His 1901 pamphlet Imperialism: Monster of the Twentieth Century, written in conversation with both Western and Eastern thinkers and history, is one of the world’s earliest and most coherent analyses of the phenomenon; Kōtoku had it pegged.xi A translator of The Communist Manifesto and cofounder of the Social Democratic Party in Japan—based on the German party of the same name and banned immediately—Kōtoku was relieved to find that Japanese leftists had more breathing room in the Bay Area than they did at home. It was a crucial time in the development of the world’s revolutionary political tendencies, and Kōtoku quickly came to reject ineffective parliamentarianism and embrace bomb-throwing anarchist insurrectionism as the only solution to the problem of empire. The Social Revolutionary Party wasn’t based on the Germans, it was based on the Socialist Revolutionary Party of Russia, whose members, called SRs, sought the overthrow of the czar and the redistribution of royal land.

Kōtoku didn’t become an anarchist in California—he thanked the emperor’s jail for that—but his politics were further shaped there, and as the acknowledged leader of the Japanese ultra-left in the United States, he had his own serious impact on the development of the racially integrated West Coast labor movement. The California trade unions continued to exclude nonwhite workers, limiting their potential impact in the state. As a result, Kōtoku found his friends in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), or Wobblies, a revolutionary coalition of unions open to all laborers, which was founded the same year he arrived, 1905. Like the ultra-left factions in Germany and Russia, their idealized tactics were the general strike and the bomb, but the IWW was more like a militant labor union with big dreams than a revolutionary conspiracy. They scrapped with hired thugs at mines and sawmills throughout the West in particular. Compared to the craft workers of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), IWWers were rough-and-tumble, noted for getting in fights, moving around, and changing their names to escape bad reputations. The West, where they were strongest, was considered the country’s backwater at the time, but the West was also closest to the Eastern Hemisphere, and the internationalist dissidents who made their way to the coast even temporarily, like Kōtoku—who was only in the country for eight months total—pulled still-emerging California into the global class struggle.

When Jordan met Lala Har Dayal in 1911, I suspect what most impressed the president was the line in the twenty-seven-year-old’s résumé about studying Sanskrit at Oxford, along with his salary requirements as an instructor of Indian philosophy: $0. FACULTY ELECTS A HINDU, announced the New York Times, elevating the story to a national one because Har Dayal was “perhaps the first Hindu professor to hold a position in an American college.”58 (The vast majority of so-called Hindus in California were Sikhs from the Punjab region, where British commodity wheat made the agricultural system fragile and nearly two million people died of starvation in the mid-1870s.) Har Dayal’s background was exceptional for a California East Indian: he was a highly educated young man from a Hindu family, another aspect of his credentials that must have attracted the elitist Jordan. What his new employer probably didn’t know is that he bailed halfway through his Oxford scholarship to be a radical writer-editor and spread hard-line Indian nationalism. Politically, he swam in the same ultra-left streams as Kōtoku Shūsui did, reading Karl Marx and the Russian anarchists, including Peter Kropotkin (whom he met when he was at Oxford) and especially Mikhail Bakunin. Har Dayal weaved together atheism, Buddhism, and Marxism into a single practice, one that involved personal asceticism and social extravagance. After spells in France, Algeria, Martinique, and Hawaii, and after an attempt to return to India, he came to the Bay Area, which was a center of East Indian labor on the West Coast as well as a global nexus for radical thought. The Stanford gig was little more than a cover, and Har Dayal used the position to gather the Palo Alto community’s revolutionaries into what he called the Radical Club, or, in its full glory, the International-Radical-Communist Anarchist Club. Not exactly the “Indian philosophy” Jordan had in mind. As connected and experienced an intellectual as the ultra-left had on the West Coast, Har Dayal became secretary of the Oakland IWW.

By the time he went solo, Hoover was less an engineer than what we might recognize today as the head of a private equity firm.11 He had a few stakes in genuinely productive mines, and new techniques for processing mine tailings for their base metals led to novel Westralia revenue, but finance ruled the world now. He found that rationalization and efficiency were good ways to attract capital, but the ultimate results didn’t always correlate with his gains. Hoover didn’t have to invest a ton of money or reorganize production in order to prosper on a new project. He just had to convince other financiers that something previously uninvestable was now a good bet; then he could sell them his stake at a profit and do it again. Instead of South Africa and Westralia, his five offices were in San Francisco, New York, London, Paris, and Petrograd. In the years following settlement of the Russo-Japanese War he advised both the Russian czar and Japanese capital on carving up the Siberia-Korea-Manchuria nexus, but he spent most of his time in the world’s Paper Belt, traveling between his five offices and Belgium, where a spike in rubber prices combined with the Crown’s superexploitation of African slave labor on the Congo plantations enriched King Leopold II and his affiliated financiers.

The Chief’s primary stated goal was to lower the price of wheat in the face of intense global demand, which he did by setting the price lower, enraging farmers. The processors, however, had nothing to complain about. For them Hoover used a “cost-plus” formula, paying contractors an agreed-upon percentage above their costs rather than setting a price.iii He earned the ire of staple-farmer populists, the loyalty of the processing industries, and the admiration of anyone who believed what was printed in the corporate press. America won the war, and the boys came home with an appreciation for canned food and candy. Rather than scale down mass production when soldiers went back to their local food systems, the processors plowed their wartime profits into advertising designed to convince the country that processed foods from national companies were better and safer.