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@Burton K Wheeler Do you have JSTOR access? This article by Dorothy Johansen looks at how West Coast states developed different cultural characters. It's a little speculative but might be a good read for your project.

(TLDR: Early settlers' state of origin is important, and so is how the territory was marketed - California was sold as an adventure, the Willamette Valley as a comfortable land of plenty.)
 
Another Jefferson thought is that when the South Pass railroad is completed, Port Franklin becomes Utah's outlet to the sea. That's probably enough to give it a bit of its own 19th-century identity, though I'll have to look into when exactly the Jefferson/Utah connection would work best.

It wouldn't work for the original settlers to be Mormons because in that case the Federal government would be skeptical of giving them their own territory. Also I want the identity to be Quaker-ish, and the attitude Mormons had toward blacks, for one, wouldn't really be compatible.
I might have missed this earlier in the thread, but what’s the racial makeup of Port Franklin?
 
A more rough and tumble mentality is likely to develop a politics somewhat similar to Nevada - much more libertarian than California, both socially and economically.

Also, a community like that so close to the Oregon state line is bpund to attract black people who want the experience of the Willamette Valley, but can't due to Oregon's historic fanatical antipathy to black people.

So I can see Jefferson, despite its status as a frontier western state, to be relatively early in terms of things like civil rights, and might even try to compete with Reno as the divorce capital of America. Probably a lot of vices would be also legal (to attract daytrippers from Portland or even San Francisco).
 
A more rough and tumble mentality is likely to develop a politics somewhat similar to Nevada - much more libertarian than California, both socially and economically.

Also, a community like that so close to the Oregon state line is bpund to attract black people who want the experience of the Willamette Valley, but can't due to Oregon's historic fanatical antipathy to black people.

So I can see Jefferson, despite its status as a frontier western state, to be relatively early in terms of things like civil rights, and might even try to compete with Reno as the divorce capital of America. Probably a lot of vices would be also legal (to attract daytrippers from Portland or even San Francisco).
I like that a lot. Maybe not quite as consciously a vice destination as Nevada, but with Oregon's prickly individualism and without the racism.

The western states were ahead of the curve on women's suffrage, though racial civil rights were a mixed bag. I think if you have a post Civil war black community plus a staunchly Republican government in that era, you'd be more racially progressive than California or Oregon.

It's worth noting that Rogue Valley was probably the most racist part of the state IOTL - there was a lot of pro-Confederate feeling there during the Civil War, mostly due to being settled later by Southern miners rather than Midwestern farmers like the Willamette Valley was, and some towns (Jacksonville and Grants Pass in particular iirc) were sundown towns until recently. You'd have to have your Quakers promote an equivalent of the Applegate Trail vigorously among their own folks to ensure they outnumber Southerners seeking gold.

The Applegates, as prominent Republicans in Southern Oregon, might be important figures in your backstory.
 
Well, there's my initial Jefferson settlers right there. Not exactly sure how I'd have them beefing with Oregon settlers enough to make a separate territory. I'd like to have a few more Republican types in southern Oregon a bit earlier, but the idea of guys who settle in the Tolowa valley and then claim the northern goldfields is pretty much what I'm looking for.

Word. I don't know how in depth you're planning to go with this but there's a family history of the Applegates called Skookum written by one of their great-granddaughters or something that's pretty easy to get ahold of.
 
I mean a Republican political machine is by no means out of the question, San Francisco was considered as a staunchly Republican city until the 60s, and for a considerable period of time in California the Republican primary was seen as the real election, with the Democrats simply also having the GOP nominee as their candidate.

All you need for that situation is a relatively united merchant class plus a Republican monopoly of the local papers.
 
So I was just reading the thread about Upton Sinclair and the EPIC movement and was thinking it might be interesting to see something like that happen within a machine politics movement. I was thinking the Jefferson state machine should be a Republican one like the Philadelphia and Chicago machines were until after WWII, and I'm not sure if any Republican, even progressive ones, could get away with doing something like that. A better model for Jefferson would be Burton Wheeler's (Democratic) Montana political machine of the same era, where Republicans (of the prairie progressive stripe) and Democrats (of the Irish Catholic Blue Labor type) combined to counteract fears of radicalism. Jefferson and Port Franklin have a very large radical movement, mostly Finnish timber workers, so it would make sense for something like EPIC to be imposed there. I think 1933 might be a hair late to make this work, but I suppose if it's a Republican machine, they might be willing to counteract Democrats and Socialists with something inspired by the Progressive party. You'd need a Huey Long-style Republican strongman, probably of Finnish descent just for the hell of it.

Very obviously, the state won't be able to seize enough property to actually solve the Depression, but firms that don't play ball with the machine will be obvious targets. I think the project will only last a couple years but that might be enough to give you a couple large worker-owned enterprises in the city.

As well as EPIC and Wheeler, it might be interesting to look at the Washington Commonwealth Federation, which was essentially a Communist entryist group that amassed enough power to run the state Democratic Party. Could the Republican strongman sell him measures as an alternative to even wilder currents in the Democrats? IIRC the Finns in Grays Harbor were one of the only communities where the Communist Party continued to have a following for a couple years after WWII.
 
There were race riots in Philadelphia as early as 1944 and the party switch came because black people wouldn't support the old machine. Not sure if it was something similar in San Francisco.

Chicago's Republican machine was more complicated, for some reason I thought Cermak was the first Democrat but apparently the parties had switched off since 1876.
San Francisco's switch has to do a lot with splits in the state GOP between moderates and Reaganites, plus the mobilization of the student movement in CA politics as a whole, though the first signs of collapse of the statewide machine was due to Brown Senior winning the 58 election.
 
I've made a lot of progress on this but I'm now at a point where I need to have a map of the city. It doesn't need to be detailed, just a rough idea of where highways, railroad tracks, heavy industry, and so on are, and where neighborhoods are in relation to each other.

I was using Google Maps but I'd rather use something that works more than 1/4 of the time (literally won't even open on my computer for reasons I am not going to bother trying to figure out). I want something as simple as Google Maps' ability to draw shapes on an existing map, not a full-fledged GIS app. I'd like a bit more granular control over the size of the shapes I draw than google gives me.

I also want it to not be web-based because fuck that.

What program lets you draw shapes on a map? Do I just need to print out a map on paper and fucking draw on it? Or do I need to spend hours and hours on QGIS to do this very simple task?

You could take a screenshot, paste it into something like Paint.Net (or even good old MSpaint) and then just draw over that?
 
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