"Historical Souvenir of San Francisco, Cal.," engraved illustration featuring the Palace Hotel published by C.P. Heninger, 1887. Larger.
The virtues of life on the small family farm are loudly celebrated in much California writing. However, when small family farms are swept away by land monopolists, some writers have leapt to the defense of the rural yeomen.
One of these writers was Henry George, a self-taught economist whose analysis of the effect of land monopolies made him world-famous. In an 1871 pamphlet "Our Land and Land Policy," George describes the ills derived from having too much land in the hands of too few farmers.
"Panorama of Beach and Cliff House," American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, 1903.
And there is another type of California farmer. He boards at the San Francisco hotels,
and drives a spanking team over the Cliff Houseroad; or, perhaps, he spends his time in the gayer capitals of the East or Europe. His land is rented for one-third or one-fourth of the crop, or is covered with scraggy cattle, which need to look after them only a few half-civilized vaquereos; or his great wheat fields, of from ten to twenty thousand acres, are plowed and sown and reaped by contract. And over our ill-kept, shadeless, dusty roads, where a house in an unwonted land-mark, and which run frequently for miles through the same man's land, plod the tramps, with blankets on back—the laborers of the California farmer—looking for work, in its seasons, or toiling back to the city when the plowing is ended or the wheat crop is gathered. I do not say this picture is a universal one, but it is a characteristic one.
Henry George's image on a cigar box, date unknown. Larger.
Californian's anticipated great benefits from the completion of a transcontinental railroad, but, as one writer keenly observed, there was "another side."
That writer was Henry George, who ennumerated a long list of railroad benefits but worried that commerical opportunity would favor those who already had a stake in the place, dividing rich from poor and harming the social community that he felt was California's greatest strength.
"The ceremony for the driving of the golden spike at Promontory Summit, Utah on May 10, 1869," photograph by Andrew J. Russell, 1869. Larger.
. . . the potent charm of California, which all feel but few analyze, has been more in the character, habits and modes of thought of her people--called forth by the peculiar conditions of the young State—than in anything else. In California there has been a certain cosmopolitanism, a certain freedom and breadth of common thought and feeling, natural to a community made up from so many different sources, to which every man and woman had been transplanted—all travellers to some extent, and with native angularities of prejedice and habit more or less worn off. Then there has been a feeling of personal independence and equality, a general hopefulness and self-reliance, and a certain large-heartedness and open-handedness which were born of the comparitive evenness with which property was distributed, the high standard of wages and of comfort, and the latent feeling of every one that he might "make a strike," and certainly could not be kept down.
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