"Manifest Destiny" and the Founding of the UC

In 1868, the founders of the College of California in Oakland opted to transfer its location to a rural site five miles north of the original campus, in part to escape from the “brutalizing vulgarity” of the former town.  The founders christened this new location “Berkeley.”(9, 10)

The name was chosen in homage to the British philosopher and cleric George Berkeley, who is perhaps best known for his 1726 poem America: A Prophesy (11). The poem is widely credited with inspiring the doctrine of “Manifest Destiny,” the concept that the U.S. had a divinely inspired mission to expand to the edge of the Pacific, bringing enlightenment and “democracy” to the “savages” of the West.  Much of this inspiration was based on the poem’s final stanza:

George Berkeley

"Westward the course of empire takes its way;
The four first acts already past.
A fifth shall close the drama with the day;
Time's noblest offspring is the last."(12)

In Exterminate Them: Written Accounts of the Murder, Rape, and Slavery of Native Americans During the California Gold Rush, 1848-1868, Clifford E. Trafzer and Joel R. Hyer sums up the impact of “Manifest Destiny” on the indigenous people of California and other regions in the Western U.S.:

"Nothing even remotely similar to the mass murder and cocomitant gut-wrenching vortex of population decline seen in this period has ever been recorded in United States history. This is not to dismiss the traumatic removal, aggressive military assaults, and dispossession of Cherokees during the 1828 Georgia Gold Rush in their beloved homeland. Nor does it trivialize the devastating effects of the 1876 Black Hills gold discovery in the sacred Black Hills of the Dakotas. Even the Alaskan Gold Rush at the turn of this century fails to provide a comparable example of territorial loss or a comparable body count."(13)

By the time the UC was well-established, the worst period of Native American genocide was over.  The United States had conquered the West.  The comparatively few Native American nations that still existed as coherent entities were relocated to remote “reservations” – properties that were regarded at the time as having little economic value.(14)  The native population of California was reduced from an estimated 100,000 in 1848 to roughly 20,000 in 1900.(15)

The Native Americans did not go extinct, however, nor did near-perpetual U.S. exploitation of them cease.  Most of the barren enclaves selected for reservations were actually quite rich in valuable minerals and ores.  For instance, private mining interests began gold-mining operations on Western Shoshone land in Nevada following the American Civil War (1861-65), while providing virtually no compensation to the land’s inhabitants. Today, nearly 10 percent of gold on the world market comes from these illegal mines, enriching the corporations that own them, while providing few, if any, material benefits to the native Shoshones.(16)

The UC played little direct role during in indigenous colonization this period, which lay the foundation for Native Americans' current state of “radioactive colonization.”  However, it is worth noting that the campus at Berkeley lived up to its namesake’s prophecy in other ways.  As Darwin BondGraham explains in the essay “Who Rules the University?"

“As a school for the advancement of mechanical arts, agriculture, and mining, Berkeley excelled in educating several generations of miners and engineers who transformed the western landscape, and amassed fortunes in the process.  Early UC graduates went on to mine precious metals from the hills of Nevada to South America, to exploit mineral deposits throughout the Pacific Basin, to engineer massive water projects… The engineers and entrepreneurs educated at Berkeley in these early days were the vanguard of American capitalism’s colonization and transformation of Latin America, Asia, and the Western North America.”(17)

Many of the UC's most influential figures made no attempt to hide the university's true purpose. As UC political science department founder Bernard Moses explained in the early-1900s, UC students were trained overtly “for domination in economic affairs,” and the destiny of UC graduates was to be “the missionaries of a mechanical regeneration.”  Indeed, the campus at Berkeley boasted the largest school of mining in the world in the early-1900s.  Following the Spanish-American War -- in which the US acquired the new “trust territories” of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines -- UC President Benjamin Ide Wheeler created a four-year course in sugar technology specifically “to fit men for the management of beet sugar ranches and factories in America or plantations [in] our new colonial possessions.”  Meanwhile, he ordered the creation of a new Department of Naval Architecture to design better freighters and battleships to serve in wars of conquest in the Pacific.

The true role of the UC, as Regent Jacob Reinstein put it prior to the Spanish-American War, was to be a “national school of ‘arms and the man’ at the western gateway of the Republic.”  In short, the Regents’ subsequent management of the nation’s nuclear weapons laboratories was not a significant departure from its traditional mission: to support the imperatives of American empire, wherever those may lead.(18)

One way in which these imperatives led following World War II was toward far greater colonization of Native North America.  In fact, the territories of indigenous communities soon become areas of strategic importance to all the nuclear powers.  Not only were these lands increasingly exploited for their mineral wealth, but also for military bases, military tests, and nuclear tests.(19)

Navigation

Introduction
Part 1 - "Manifest Destiny" and the Founding of the UC
Part 2 - Los Alamos, Livermore, and the Nuclear Testing Regime
Part 3 - Uranium Mining, the UC, and the "Privatization of Genocide"
Part 4 - Ending Nuclear Nolonization
Appendix "A" - Indigenous Nations Who Inhabited Present-Day UC Lands
Appendix "B" - Additional Reading and Resources
Works Cited