Page:California a guide to the Golden state-WPA-1939.djvu/109

Rh the number of wage earners and industrial plants soared dizzily. Between 1910 and 1920 the assessed value of real and personal property doubled. The opening of the Panama Canal in 1914, celebrated the following year by the Panama-California Exposition at San Diego and the Panama-Pacific International Exposition at San Francisco, seemed to promise unlimited growth of California's maritime trade. The reform movement was soon forgotten. In southern California the unexpected plea of guilty by J. B. and J. J. McNamara, on trial in 1911 for the dynamiting of the Times building, had crushed the labor movement and turned the tide of a municipal election against the socialist candidate. When the bombing of San Francisco's Preparedness Day parade July 22, 1916, was followed by the swift arrest of labor organizers Thomas Mooney and Warren K. Billings, the voices raised in protest were drowned out by the clamor of war-era patriots. The period of repression continued into early post-war years, when the newly passed criminal syndicalism law was invoked against members of the I. W. W. and other nonconformists.

The westward moving hordes of forty-nine were as nothing to the new influx of settlers whom California welcomed in the 1920's, as prosperity, unrestrained, reached giddy heights. The high-pressure efforts of boosters and promoters were devoted to making prosperity and California synonymous in the public mind. Its harbors, its oil wells and factories, its movie studios, its orange groves and irrigation projects, its booming real estate subdivisions all helped to renew its association in people's thoughts with the El Dorado of the Argonauts. The cities around San Francisco Bay advanced as maritime and manufacturing centers and the new metropolis of the south, Los Angeles, surrounded by fast expanding suburbs, as a manufacturing, oil-refining, fruit-shipping, and movie-making center. By 1930 the population of California had grown to 5,677,251—an increase of 65 per cent in 10 years, greater than in any other State in the Union during the same period. The increase gave it sixth place among the States in population.

And again the bubble burst. The newcomers who had thronged in by the hundreds of thousands the—wage earners and farmers, the small investors and businessmen, the elderly retired people—found themselves in the same situation as those who had come before them: jobless, their savings exhausted, their businesses bankrupt, their farms foreclosed, or their investments wiped out.

As they had done in the 1900's and earlier still in the 1870's, the people turned to politics. Of the State-wide political movements that began to follow close on one another throughout the 1930's, the first was the EPIC movement, which rallied around the "End Poverty in California" (EPIC) plan presented by Upton Sinclair when he consented in August 1933 to run for the gubernatorial nomination on the