Golden California

I. Life in CA contained all that the modern world had to offer—a great cosmopolitan city, comfortable travel, a high standard of living, colleges,
and accomplished painters and writers.
A. Yet CA was still remote from the rest of the US.
Creating a California Culture
I. What Ca’s yearned for was a cultural tradition of their own.
A. There was a movement to restore missions. Many communities began to stage Spanish fiestas, and the mission style of architecture
enjoyed a great vogue among developers.
B. In its Spanish past CA found the cultural traditions it needed.
Land of Sunshine
I. All this enthusiasm was strongly tinged w/commercialism. And so was the 2nd distinctive feature of CA’s development.
A. The southern part of the states was neglected, thinly populated, and too dry for anything but grazing and wheat growing. What it did have,
however, was sunshine.
B. At the beginning of the 1880s there burst upon the nation amazing news of the charms of Southern CA. This publicity was mostly the
work of the Southern Pacific Railroad, which had reached Los Angeles in 1876 and was eager for business.
II. When Santa Fe arrived in 1885, a furious fare war broke out, and it became possible to travel by train from Chicago or St. Louis to Los
Angeles.
A. Thousands of people, mostly Midwesterners, poured in; a real estate boom developed, along w/the frantic building of resort hotels.
B. Southern CA established itself as the land of sunshine and orange groves. It had found a way to translate climate into riches.
The Great Outdoors
I. That CA was specially favored by nature some CA knew even as the great stands of redwoods and sugar pine were being hacked down, the soil
depleted by wheat crops, the streams polluted, and the hills torn apart by mining.
A. Environmentalists such as John Muir spoke out against this process, leading to the creation of CA’s national park system in 1890. Another
effect was the creation of the Sierra Club, which became a powerful voice for the defenders of CA’s wilderness.
II. Champions of CA’s wild lands won some battles and lost some. Advocates of water-resource development insisted that CA’s irrigated
agriculture and cities could not grow w/o tapping the snowpack in the Sierra.
A. By the turn of the century, Los Angeles faced a water crisis that threatened its growth. The answer was a 238-mile aqueduct to the
southern Sierra, tapping the waters of the Owens River.
B. Local residents and preservationists protested but could not prevent the damming up of the Owens Valley.
C. More painful was the defeat suffered John Muir and his allies in their battle to save the Hetch Hetchy gorge north of Yosemite.
III. When the development stakes became high enough, nature lovers like John Muir generally failed. Even so, something original and distinctive
had been added to CA’s heritage—the linking of a society’s wellbeing w/the preservation of its natural environment.
The Farmer’s World
I. W/the settlement of the Great Plains and the Pacific Slope, the regional patterns of American agriculture became well defined.
A. Wheat growing, which had shifted steadily westward w/the frontier, finally settled on the Great Plains, where European strains produced a
better bread flour.
B. On the wheat-producing Columbia plateau in the Northwest, Spanish and Australian varieties did best.
C. In the Midwest the main crop was corn—feed to the nation’s livestock.
D. North of the corn belt, dairy farming stretched from MN to NY and NE.
E. In CA wheat growing had given way by 1990 to orange groves, vineyards, and vegetable crops.
F. Cotton dominated southern agriculture, spreading westward during the last 1/3 of the 19th century from the old cotton kingdom.
The Business of Agriculture
I. In certain grain-growing areas, such as CA’s central valley until the 1890s, farmers might be large-scale and even cooperate operations. In the
south after Reconstruction, the typical farmer was a tenant or sharecropper.
 A. Elsewhere, and most commonly, farmers owned their land. Deeply rooted in American tradition, Thomas Jefferson’s ideal of a country of
independent, family farmers was enshrined in the national policy of providing land from the public domain for homesteaders.
B. In an age of corporations and other large-scale enterprises, farmers succeeded as did no other group in retaining the forms of economic
independence.
C. But their function took them far from the self-sufficiency of Jeffersonian America. They were not yeoman farmers but commodity
producers in the modern economic order.
II. General farming, in which no crop represented as much as 40% of a farm’s total product, was still common; and so was subsistence farming in
the hilly and infertile areas of NE and the southern Appalachians.
A. But a cash crop was what farmers wanted, and that preference led to the remarkable regional specialization of American agriculture.
III. Specialization in cash crops was one sign of the commercial leanings of American farmers. Another was their attitude towards land.
A. Americans had little of the passionate identification w/the soil that tied European peasants to their inherited plots.
B. Farmers saw their acreage as a commodity. In frontier areas, where the value of newly developed land increased rapidly, they anticipated
as much profit from the land’s value as from their crops.
C. Farmers also borrowed money. In boom times they rushed into debt to buy more land and better farm equipment.
D. They relished the innovations of the industrial age, especially the railroad, and supported whatever incentives might be necessary, such as
the public purchase of railway bonds, to lure a line to their towns.
IV. The bedrock of farmers’ commercial identity was the knowledge that they stood at the center of a vast and complex network of trade and
industry.
A. A sophisticated array of commodity exchanges determined prices and found buyers throughout the country.
B. Vast processing industries turned wheat into flour, livestock into dressed meat, and fruits and vegetables into canned goods. Entire rail
systems, port facilities, and fleets of ships were devoted to moving the products of American farmers.
C. This activity gave farmers access to expanding urban markets in the US and overseas.
Farmers in Distress
I. Somehow, this triumph of American agriculture as a productive system didn’t translate into good times for farmers.
Farm Life
I. The grievances of farmers stemmed partly from the harshness of rural life. Mechanization didn’t reduce the work load on farmers b/c crop
acreage tended to increase in step w/more efficient planting and harvesting machinery.
II. For women, too, farming demanded unrelenting labor, despite the fact that they often didn’t work in the fields.
III. Children also pitched in w/the farm chores and fieldwork.
A. Farm children in 1900 attended school only 2/3 as many days as city children, and they left school at an earlier age.
IV. Farm families may have accepted how hard they labored, how wives and husbands were worn out, how childhoods were sacrificed, for the
living they wrested from the soil. Harder to swallow was the widening gap b/w life in the country and city.
A. Hardest to bear was the sense of isolation. Farm life everywhere tended to be narrow and circumscribed.
V. When farmers formed organizations, they provided for social activity first of all.
A. The National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry became the social center for farm families through its fraternal ceremonies and dances,
picnics, and lectures.
Economic Problems
I. The hunger for social activity cemented organizational ties, but what drove agrarian movements was the farmers’ economic grievances.
A. The basic problem was that farmers remained individual operators in the economic world that was becoming highly organized.
II. One answer was cooperation. Cooperatives had first appeared before the Civil War, mostly as stores and creameries.
A. The Grange took up the cooperative idea in a big way by purchasing in bulk from suppliers and by setting up cooperative banks, insurance
companies, grain elevators, and processing plants.
B. Private business fought back hard and generally got the better of the poorly managed Grange cooperatives. Most of them eventually
failed.
C. The cooperative idea, however, was highly resilient and would be revived by each successive farmers’ movement.
 D. The farmers’ hostility to middlemen also left as a legacy the great mail-order house of Montgomery Ward, which was founded in 1872 to
serve Grange members.
III. The power of government might also be enlisted to do for farmers what they could not do for themselves. The Grange in the early 1870s
encouraged independent political parties that ran on antimonopoly platforms.
A. It pushed through Granger laws regulating grain elevators, fixing maximum railroad rates, and prohibiting discriminatory practices against
small and short-haul shippers.
B. Constitutional difficulties arose over the question of whether the states were exceeding their police powers when they tried to regulate
interstate commerce.
C. In Wabash v Illinois, the Supreme Court decided that they were, voiding an Illinois railroad law and putting the Granger agenda in
jeopardy. By then, however, a movement had started for federal regulation of the railroads.
D. The Interstate Commerce Act created the Interstate Commission—the 1st federal regulatory agency—and made railroad regulation a
permanent part of national public policy.
IV. Farmers turned to cooperatives and government regulation out of a deep sense organizational disadvantage. But that disadvantage didn’t really
account for the unprofitability of farming in this period.
A. Manufacturers and banks lacked the degree of market control ascribed to them by angry farmers.
B. The mortgage companies actually could not rig credit markets in the western states; their interest rates matched those in the rest of the
country.
C. Manufacturers could not establish a relative price advantage over agriculture. In fact, the wholesale prices of all commodities fell at a
slightly faster rate than did farm prices during those years.
V. The impact of the general fall in prices did not have dire consequences for certain kinds of farmers, however.
A. The crops of cotton and wheat farmers were subject to the wider, more unpredictable price swings of the international commodities
market.