1900s (decade)

The 1900s decade in the Salinas Valley was a hinge point, a time when the old world of homesteaders and hand-forged dreams gave way to the new world of automobiles, agribusiness, and global war. It was an era defined by a restless, forward-looking energy that both exhilarated and exhausted its inhabitants, a decade that reshaped the valley's soul as surely as the railroad reshaped its landscape.

The Fever of the Future

The dominant mood of the 1900s in the Salinas Valley was a collective, almost feverish, preoccupation with what was to come. Men rarely met without discussing the valley's future, which they envisioned as "paralyzing in its grandeur." This was not mere conjecture but a certainty, a shared dream that promised to flood the land with contentment. A man bringing his family down from a hill ranch in a rough drag would set his heels and think, "When the roads come in—then will be the time." Another, surveying his grove of live-oak trees, would calculate the fortune to be made when the railroad built a branch line. They prophesied about ditches that would carry water, deep wells with steam engines, and even, as one crazy man suggested, a way to get a peach to Philadelphia fresh. The future was a limitless boundary, and it would be so grand "a man wouldn't have room to store his happiness." This optimism, however, was a direct response to present lack; the harder the present, the more glorious the imagined future. Samuel Hamilton, with his characteristic insight, saw the flaw in this vision, wondering whether people would actually be happy when all that came, remembering a rich and handsome cousin in Ireland who shot himself on a silken couch.

The Rise of Business and the Automobile

The decade saw the solidification of a new kind of power in the valley, embodied by Will Hamilton. Will, who had little imagination but great energy, was a conservative who avoided revolutionary ideas. He was one of those individuals "truly beloved of the gods," for whom money-making seemed effortless. He took over a bicycle-and-tool shop for a bad debt, and when a few rich people bought automobiles, his mechanic worked on them. Pressure from a determined poet named Henry Ford led Will to accept the southern half of the valley as his exclusive Ford area, and within fifteen years the valley was "two-deep in Fords and Will was a rich man driving a Marmon." The automobile itself became a symbol of the new age, a complex and often baffling machine. When Adam Trask bought a Ford, the process of learning to drive it was a ritual of magic and frustration, requiring a litany of steps—"Spark up—gas down, switch over to Bat"—that had to be chanted in unison. The arrival of the car changed the very rhythm of life; the postmaster complained that men, who used to come for their mail once a week, now came every day, sometimes twice, just to have an excuse to drive.

The Shadow of War

The decade culminated in the First World War, a conflict that initially seemed distant but soon reached into every home. The war years were wet years, and many blamed the strange weather on the firing of the great guns in France. The nation slid imperceptibly toward war, frightened and attracted. The initial bravado—the belief that one American was worth twenty Germans—was shattered by the reality of casualties. The dreadful telegrams began to arrive, and it was "everybody's brother." The war brought out both the best and the worst in the community. There was heroism, as some men enlisted who could have avoided service, and there was cruelty, as seen in the treatment of Mr. Fenchel, the German tailor whose accent suddenly made him a target. A mob of about thirty men tore down his white picket fence and burned the front out of his house. The war also created economic opportunity; British purchasing agents roved the country, buying food and cloth, and the price of beans soared, creating a fortune for those, like Cal Trask, who were shrewd enough to speculate.

The End of an Era

The decade also marked the passing of the old guard. Samuel Hamilton, the comical genius and inventor, died in 1912, and his death seemed to signal the end of a certain kind of innocence and possibility. His son Tom, unable to bear the weight of his own perceived failures, took his own life shortly after. The old institutions of the valley also began to fade. The Nigger, who ran the Long Green whorehouse with a dark and awful dignity, died, and her funeral was a somber, austere affair. The somber mystery of connection she represented was gone forever. The decade closed with the Trask family in crisis: Adam Trask, broken by his son Aron's enlistment and death, suffered a stroke, and the family was left to navigate a new, uncertain future in a world that had irrevocably changed.