Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
advice of crusading magazine and newspaper editor Horace Greeley to 'Go West, young
man.'
Sneakily, much of the land granted to railroads was flipped and sold in big lots to specu-
lators who also acquired, with the help of corrupt politicians and bureaucrats, a majority of
the farmland intended for new settlers. A major share of agricultural land was consolidated
in the hands of a few city-based landlords, establishing the still-existing pattern of industri-
al 'agribusiness' (rather than small family farms) dependent on large-scale irrigation pro-
jects and cheap migrant farm labor.
LA had other natural resources waiting to be exploited, albeit hidden underground. In
1892 a flat-broke mining prospector and real-estate speculator named Edward Doheny dug
a well near downtown LA that would change Southern California forever. Inside of a year,
Doheny's well was producing 40 gallons of 'black gold' (oil) daily, and SoCal's oil in-
dustry was born.
The Academy Award-winning 2007 film There Will Be Blood, adapted from Upton Sin-
clair's book Oil!, depicts a fictional California oil magnate based on real-life SoCal tycoon
Edward Doheny.
Labor & Military Might
The Great Depression saw another wave of immigrants, this time of American farm famil-
ies who were fleeing the Dust Bowl on the drought-stricken Great Plains. At the end of
Route 66 in the promised land of California, they often found social discrimination and
only scant pay and deplorable working conditions on company-owned farms, as fictional-
ized in John Steinbeck's harrowing Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath .
Outbreaks of social and labor protest led to the rapid growth of the Democratic Party in
California, as well as growing trade unions for blue-collar workers.
Many of California's Depression-era public works projects, which were sponsored by
the federal government, have had lasting benefits for residents and tourists alike, including
the restoration of historic Spanish missions and improvements to highways and public
parks. But it was really California's cutting-edge aviation industry - pumped up by billions
of dollars from federal military contracts - that helped boost the state out of the Great De-
pression.
 
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