Understanding Of California's Past

Political Stability

California was finding itself not only one of the most technologically sophisticated societies in the world - possibly the most advanced! - it was furthermore finding itself one of the most democratically stable. This political steadiness, really, was in numerous ways the base of California's technological and financial ascendancy. Such political steadiness had not habitually been the case. It had, in detail, been hard-won in the Progressive era and thereafter. The formation of California as an American state in 1849-1850 was a bright example of opportunity statecraft as a lifetime of Forty-Niners put apart their choices and shovels and contacted in Monterey to preliminary a constitution in both English and Spanish. Overnight, California created itself as an American state. By the late nineteenth 100 years, although, certain flaws were progressively apparent in the political organisations and practices of the state. Already, in 1878, the California Constitution had been considerably re-written to contend with an era of communal readjustment and strife that had conveyed the Workingmen's Party into power in Sacramento. This action, although, shortly disintegrated of its own heaviness and contradictions, whereas it did in numerous ways foreshadow the communal popular main heading of twentieth-century, not less than post-New Deal, politics. By the turn of the 100 years, it was evolving progressively apparent that California, along with remainder of the territory, was in need of political reform. Such restructure shortly came as the Progressive action was cleared into power in Sacramento in the election of 1910. (Moratto, pp.12-20)

 

Technological Changes

Central as well to the California equation was technology. American California itself started with the expertise of the Gold Rush. This expertise of land and water action was moved to farming reasons, and by the 1870s agriculture had restored excavation as the lead component in the finances of the ...