All That Glittered
Save for the Civil War, what occurred after a carpenter glimpsed a flash of yellow 150 years ago was the biggest story of the nineteenth century. RICHARD REINHARDT examines what we think we know (and don’t) about the people who made it happen.
February/March 1998 | Volume 49, Issue 1
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EmailThe brevity of his great adventure, the moisture of his nostalgia, the crudeness of his manners often made the old Argonaut, the self-styled California Pioneer, a target of ridicule. Ambrose Bierce punched holes in his pretensions. Hubert Howe Bancroft, the voluminous and respected historian of early California, criticized his greed, prevarication, and profanity. Novelists discovered him, a parvenu whose red flannel shirt was visible under his starched white collar and black dinner jacket. He appears in Joseph Conrad ( Nostromo ), Ivan Bunin ( The Gentleman From San Francisco ), Robert Louis Stevenson ( The Wrecker ), and Bronson Howard ( Aristocracy .)
But the young Argonaut, the immortal forty-niner, never grows old. Fixed forever in time and place, he pursues his endless search for gold under the blazing artificial sunset of David Belasco’s play The Girl of the Golden West . In the libretto of Giacomo Puccini’s opera, the tenor speaks Italian, doubles as a bandit, and narrowly escapes lynching, but he wears red flannel and blue denim, his name is the impeccably Anglo-American Dick Johnson, and his heart is set on taking home his pocketful of gold.
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Why do we need a national nonprofit membership society for American history?
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“Save America’s Treasures” has been totally eliminated—the largest Federal program supporting preservation of such treasures as the original Star Spangled Banner and George Washington’s tent.
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65% of Americans don’t know what happened at the Constitutional Convention, according to a recent survey by Newsweek.
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The “Teaching American History” grants—the largest Federal program supporting history education—have been completely eliminated.
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Visits to the Top 20 Civil War battlefields have dropped in half from 1970 to 2009 according to official National Park Service statistics.
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40% of Americans can’t identify whom we fought in World War II, according to a recent survey by Newsweek.
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A quarter of Americans believe Congress shares power over U.S. foreign policy with the United Nations, according to a recent Annenberg survey.
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“There is little that is more important for an American citizen to know than the history and traditions of his country,” John F. Kennedy wrote in American Heritage.
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The “We the People Program,” which touched some 30 million students and 90,000 teachers over 25 years, has been completely eliminated.
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Two-thirds of Americans could not correctly name Yorktown as the last major military action of the American Revolution, according to a recent national Gallup survey.
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The National Heritage Areas and Scenic Byways program, the only major Federal program encouraging visits to historic places, has been completely eliminated in Congressional committee.
