[tertiary01]

I believe you can't discount the influence of east coasters such as Barbara Boxer who invaded California and made it much what it is today. But other than that I believe it is the climate that creates the Southern Culture, just like it is the Californian climate that creates the Californian easy living La-La attitude that keeps getting recreated by each new immigrant group. The original La-Las in California were numerous Indian tribes(except for those in the northeastern part of the state).

[Wallace T.]

California, particularly Northern California, has always been culturally distinct from the inland West. San Francisco and Monterrey were influenced by Yankees even before the annexation of California. With its Yankee descended elite, dense urban settlement, mixed European descended working class (with strong Italian and Irish strains), and its status as the principal West Coast port, San Francisco and Oakland far more resembled New York and Boston than Salt Lake City or Denver. San Francisco even had a neighborhood of Irish Americans, many of whom worked on the waterfront, who spoke with an accent reminiscent of New York. Clint Eastwood, who grew up in Oakland, is the great-grandson of a New Yorker who migrated westward in the Gold Rush era and did not return.

However, Midwesterners and Southerners also influenced the state, and in the 1890-1914 period, California politics was affected by both Populism, mostly Southern and lower Midwestern in origin, and Progressivism, with its roots in the Northeast and Upper Midwest. Except for Hawaii, the unions were more powerful in California than anywhere else west of the Mississippi.

While Southern California, specifically Los Angeles, had a large Jewish community from the early 1900s, in part due to the movie industry, they were overwhelmed numerically by successive waves of migrants, mostly from the Midwest, who had converted suburban Los Angeles, especially Orange County, into a conservative bastion. Few of these migrants were drawn by the movie industry, but for employment and business opportunities. John Wayne, born in Iowa, migrated as a child to Southern California with his father, who was seeking employment as a pharmacist.

This migration moved California politics rightward. The same GOP that supported Earl Warren in the 1940s became the party of Ronald Reagan (a native of Illinois) in the 1960s. Reagan's election and the status of California as a Republican bastion on a national level from 1952 to 1988 reflected the strong influence of conservative and mostly Midwestern migrants. Even as late as the 1980s, Rush Limbaugh, a Missourian, used his Sacramento radio station to develop his conservative talk show that he would later carry to prominence in New York.

What tipped California into the liberal camp, perhaps for generations to come, were three shifts in population flow: the end of westward migration from the Midwest as the attractiveness of the South increased, the eastward migration of white Californians, especially conservatives, due to the high cost of living and deteriorating living conditions, and the massive migration of Hispanics, legal or not, into the state. Pete Wilson (a native of Missouri) was probably the last traditional Republican to hold the governorship of California.

The fate of California should be a warning not only to the South but the inland West, even to Mormon majority Utah, that liberals and foreign immigrants can overturn the political and social order in a relatively short time.

[Savage Beast]

You have made a very good point, Tert. If the livin' were not so easy in California, Californians would be far more concerned about the threats that loom over them from all directions.