The American Historical Review THE MEETING OF THE AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION IN CALIFORNIA F 'OR several years, indeed during most of the period since the establishment of the Pacific Coast Branch in 1903, the members of that branch urgently invited the American Historical Association to hold one of its regular meetings somewhere upon the Pacific Slope. Great as were the attractions, the difficulties, especially in the case of meetings held at Christmas time, seemed insurmountable. Accordingly the Pacific Coast members, three years ago, took advantage of the approach of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition to invite the Association to hold an additional or intercalary meeting in California in the summer of 1915. The invitation was gratefully accepted. Mr. Rudolph J. Taussig, president of the Academy of Pacific Coast History and secretary of the exposition, was made chairman of the committee of arrangements, Professor E. D. Adams of Stanford University (whose place was later taken by Professor Frederic L. Thompson of Amherst College, temporarily resident at Berkeley), chairman of the committee on programme. The date set was July 20-23. Officials of the University of California, of Stanford University, and of other Californian institutions, co-operated heartily with those named, in making the meeting successful; but no doubt all who labored for its success would unite in declaring that it owed more of its form, merit, and interest to the endeavors of Professor H. Morse Stephens, of the University of California, president of the American Historical Association, than to those of any other individual. Those who remember the meeting of July, 1893, held at Chicago during the time of the World's Fair, will not need to be told that a meeting held under such circumstances cannot be expected to have the same character as one that might be held in cloistered seclusion at some tranquil time and place. It was difficult for audiences to be prompt, difficult sometimes for them to resist the surrounding attractions affeekposition. The programme was broken, a little more largely than is usual, by defaults and alterations. Circumstances required the exercises to be held in too many different places the Philippine Islands Building, the Oregon Building, the Calitofia Building, the Argentine Building, at the exposition, the Fairmont Hotel and the hall of the Native Sons of the Golden West in San Francisco, the buildings of the University of California at Berkeley, those of Stanford University at Palo Alto-places, in some instances, separated from each other by long suburban or urban journeys. But on the other hand there were compensations, more than ample, for all these minor and inevitable infelicities. No one had expected or desired the occasion to reproduce in full detail the typical meeting of the Association, and all attempt to do so was frankly abandoned. There was no business session, nor any attempt to transact business. The attendance (registration about 150) was mainly of members dwelling in the western half of the United States, though with a fair sprinkling of eastern members. The programme made no effort to cover the whole field of human history, but, with excellent judgment, substituted for the usual miscellany a body of papers all having the common trait of relating to the Pacific Ocean or to Panama. This appropriate limitation gave unity to the whole occasion, and the exceptional interest which resulted from it was one of the distinguishing marks of the California meeting. Other distinguishing characteristics were supplied by the local environment and by the resident friends of the Association. It was difficult to take other than a hopeful view of the status and progress of history, in the sparkling air and under the bright sky of California, in sight of the Audacious Archer and the other artistic triumphs of the exposition, under the live-oaks of the Berkeley campus, or in the impressive cloisters of Palo Alto. The great war, which in the East oppresses the heart with incessant pain, was visibly three thousand miles farther away. The local members of the Association welcomed all comers with Californian openness of hand and mind. The general receptions at the California Building, at the house of President Wheeler, and at the hall of the Native Sons, the luncheons at the two universities, the afternoon hour at the beautiful country house of Mr. and Mrs. Crocker, and on the final day the hours of exquisite pleasure spent under the hospitable roof of Mrs. Hearst at her hacienda at Pleasanton, made a sum total of social pleasure which can hardly have been equalled at any previous meeting, and which certainly could never be paralleled at any meeting held in the East in December. By association with the meetings of the American Asiatic Association and of the Asiatic Institute, the meeting was made a part of a Panama-Pacific Historical Congress; but the present report is confined to the proceedings of the Historical Association. Those of the two organizations which preceded were not in the strict sense historical, though they dealt with themes which have great interest. for every historian; for instance, the proceedings of the Asiatic Institute consisted of discussions of "The Pacific as the Theatre of Two Civilizations" and "The Pacific as the Theatre of 'the World's great Hereafter "", by ex-Secretary Bryan, ex-President Taft, Chancellor Jordan, and others. Even in the case of the papers read before the Historical Association, the fullest sort of summary is rendered less necessary, and the defects naturally attending one auditor's report will be made less of an evil, by the fact that a volume commemorative of the occasion and containing the full text of most of these papers is expected to be published before long. It will certainly be a notable volume, for the papers, besides the unity of theme and effect which has been spoken of above, were in general of marked excellence. Four general papers of distinguished value marked the evening sessions: the address of Professor Stephens, president of the Association, on the Conflict of European Nations in the Pacific Ocean; that of Señor Don Rafael Altamira y Crevea, professor at Madrid, and representative of the Spanish government on this occasion, on Spain and the Pacific Ocean; that of Hon. John F. Davis, president of the Native Sons of the Golden West, on the History of California, and that of Mr. Taussig on "The American Interoceanic Canal; an Historical Sketch of the Canal Idea". At the conclusion of Mr. Taussig's clear and valuable review of the long process by which the great historic event now being celebrated had been brought about, Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, an ex-president of the Association, being called upon by the president gave an extended and most interesting narrative of the course of action. through which, as president of the United States, he had secured to it the opportunity to construct a Panama Canal under purely American control; his speech gave to the programme a dramatic conclusion not foreseen. The main purpose of Professor Stephens's presidential address was to show how the development of efforts for the control of the Pacific had followed the course of European politics. This was done with a characteristically wide view over the fields of modern European history. Regular communication, it was pointed out, and systematic exploration and development, and all the problems of the Pacific, begin with the first advent of the Europeans, with the arrival of the Portuguese at Malacca in 1509 and in China, and with the simultaneous Spanish discoveries of Balboa. The first great landmarks are the expedition of Magellan and the Spanish occupation of the Philippines, begun in 1565, the latter an event of capital importance, which the institution of the Manila galleon connected closely with the history of Mexico. Another stage was marked by the absorption of Portugal into Spain in 1580. The English and Dutch resistance to the Hapsburg power is reflected in Drake's voyage and in other events, but the commercial endeavors of those powers were turned rather toward India, eastern Asia, and the Malay Archipelago, from which however the Dutch developed the earlier explorations of the South Pacific. The Spanish monopoly in the Pacific, assailed by the English and Dutch in the early seventeenth century, and under Louis XIV. by those French attacks which Dahlgren has recently described, was revived after the treaty of Utrecht, but once more assailed by the English in their struggle against exclusion from Spanish America, culminating in the war of 1740. Anson's incursion into the Pacific and capture of the Manila galleon marked a fresh era, showing that the Spanish power in the Pacific was vulnerable, that that ocean need no longer be regarded as a Spanish lake. English statesmen began to cast their eyes upon it. Draper's occupation of Manila in 1762 was a preliminary sign. From the time of Peter the Great the monopoly began to be threatened by Russia. Spain answered by renewed efforts, northward from New Spain, westward from Peru. The legajo in the Archives of the Indies which relates to the Portolá expedition is entitled 'Papers relating to the Russians in California". But the answer came too late, and the Nootka Sound convention of 1790, ending Spanish monopoly, ended an epoch in the history of the Pacific. Already the first real trade across the Pacific-in furs from the Northwest Coast to China--had been begun; but the suspension of European activity of this sort from 1789 to 1815 gave the United States the chance to supplant Europe in the trade. In a similar manner, the effects of Spanish American independence, of the American acquisition of California, of the foundation of British Columbia and the confederation of Canada, of the rise of Japan and Australia, and of the war of 1898, were sketched in their large outlines, the problem of the conflicts between America and Asiatic powers remaining as the chief problem of the twentieth century. 66 |
