California Dream

Diverse perspectives have led to its use in rhetoric to both promote California and to criticize the policies of the state government in Sacramento.

[2] Regardless of its specific origins, California came to be perceived as a place of new beginnings, where hard work and good luck would be rewarded by fame and fortune.

Farmers,[6] oil drillers,[7] filmmakers,[8] aerospace corporations [9] and tech entrepreneurs have each had economic booms in California after the Gold Rush had ended.

"[10][11] As historian Kevin Starr has pointed out, for many if not most migrants to the "Golden State", reality did not reflect the ideals of the California Dream.

Beginning in the late 19th century, California promised the highest possible standard of life for the middle class, and indeed for skilled blue collar workers and farm owners.

Poverty existed, but was concentrated in camps of migrant farm workers, as made famous in John Steinbeck's 1939 novel, The Grapes of Wrath, where the Joad family, driven out of Oklahoma by the Dust Bowl, searches in vain for the California Dream in the southern Central Valley.

It meant many good jobs, excellent roads, plentiful facilities for outdoor recreation, and schools and universities that had achieved worldwide acclaim by the 1940s.

James M. Cain, an eastern writer who visited California, reported in 1933 that the archetypal Californian "addresses you in easy grammar, completes his sentences, shows familiarity with good manners, and in addition gives you a pleasant smile.

The phrase has been used to describe Californians' struggles to find a suitable location in the state to achieve success, in 2017, when the cost of living in places like the San Francisco Bay Area were prohibitive.

For the 2015 film San Andreas, singer songwriter Sia recorded an orchestral version that was used during a montage as a massive earthquake destroys many landmarks across California, transforming the song into a lament about grief and catastrophe.