East Coast Americans warring over 1619, 1776 should see 1848 out West

America, in your polarizing debate over which year marks the real beginning of the U.S. — 1619 (slavery’s arrival) or 1776 (Declaration of Independence) — you’ve got the dates all wrong.

For all the differences they express in school boards and on cable TV, partisans of 1619, who see America as founded on slavery, and 1776, who tout the whitewashed nonsense that America was founded on freedom, share a common prejudice: East Coast bias. The New York Times’ 1619 Project, as first published in 2019, gave California just three cursory mentions. The Trump administration’s 1776 report, supposedly devoted to American greatness, didn’t mention America’s greatest state even once.

So, instead of looking back to the 17th-century Virginia colony or to an 18th-century country with as many people as today’s Riverside County, the nation should gaze West toward reality. Like a party that only truly starts when the coolest kid saunters in, the United States didn’t get rolling until California arrived in 1848.

Indeed, two 1848 events — California’s Gold Rush and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo — essentially re-founded the United States with different peoples, borders and aspirations.

The Gold Rush drew not pious Puritans but unrefined fortune-seekers, from Asia and Latin America and other parts of the world, who transformed a slow, plodding country into an impatient, volatile one.

The Gold Rush, wrote historian H.W. Brands in “The Age of Gold,” was “one of those rare moments that divide human existence into before and after.” While “the old American dream … was the dream of the Puritans, of Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard, of Thomas Jefferson’s yeoman farmers: of men and women content to accumulate their modest fortunes a little at a time, year by year by year, the new dream was the dream of instant wealth, won in a twinkling by audacity and good luck.”

Gold mining, requiring more capital and mechanization, hastened the arrival of the Industrial Age, and of the giant financial institutions that rule us to this day. In Europe, Karl Marx, having released his manifesto in 1848, noted California’s creation of a “new stage of development” and began writing “Das Kapital.”

The second great event of 1848 — the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, ending war between Mexico and the U. S. — brought California, New Mexico, Nevada, and parts of Arizona, Utah, Wyoming, and Colorado into the union. The treaty also made official the 1845 annexation of Texas, the only state with credible pretensions as a California rival.

This historic land grab all but negated the country’s founding fairy tale of underdog colonists overthrowing the British tyranny. In 1848, America was founded again on imperialism and conquest. The treaty, ending what Ulysses S. Grant called “the most unjust war ever waged against a weaker nation by a stronger,” established a pattern of expansion by bullying militarism.

It also launched a new era of American horrors.

One irony of the 1619 Project is that, by focusing so extensively on slavery, it lets the nation off the hook for the full scope of its awfulness. 1848 was the beginning of California inventing rationales as diverse as its people to justify their imprisonment, en masse. This period saw the invention of Chinese exclusion, the revocation of the citizenship rights of Mexican American, and a government-directed genocide against California’s Indigenous peoples — whose population fell from 150,000 in 1848 to 30,000 by 1873 and 16,000 by 1900.

California’s defenders have long pointed to its ban against slavery in its 1850 constitution, 15 years before the United States prohibited slavery in 1865. But many horrors of the 19th-century West have never gone away. Mass incarceration remains a fact of life. The powerful police and sheriff ’s departments that originated in that era still do violence, often with impunity, to people of color. Violence and hatred against people of Asian heritage is on the rise again. The Southern border is still militarized, and it is still used as an excuse to deny the rights of migrants and their loved ones. And wage slavery is as 21st-century as an Amazon warehouse.

Contemporary politics, which now obsess the country, are also rooted in 1848. California and Texas are, of course, the two giants that determine much of what passes for governance in the U.S. these days. They also represent the giant industries — technology and energy — that both empower and threaten human civilization.

In 1619, this wasn’t even a country. In 1776, we were inventing a myth, rather than a nation. 1848 was the year that the United States became an oversized monster — the land that we love and love to hate.