May 2008 Archives

During the Great Depression, thousands of Midwesterners fled the environmental and social degradation of the Dust Bowl for California. They hoped for a better living in the famously abundant Golden State, but California proved a bitter disappointment. The living and working conditions were miserable, and the migrants’ powerlessness before their agricultural employers made them vulnerable to exploitation and hunger. In the midst of this “Okie” influx, southern California’s citrus growers piled their unprofitable, superfluous fruit into great mountains, doused them with kerosene, and set them aflame. For these refugees, the destruction of food must have been a shock. (see Sackman 276-277).

At least it came as a shock to a group of middle class reformers. For John Steinbeck, Carey McWilliams, Dorothea Lange, Paul Taylor, and others, the “American exodus” of dust bowl migrants was deeply disturbing. In California’s labor camps, these reformers saw not only gut-wrenching deprivation but also the agrarian ideal of an independent yeomanry gone terribly awry. In contrast to Chinese, Japanese, and Mexican immigrants who had long toiled under similar conditions in California, the dust bowl migrants were mostly of European descent, the descendents of America’s great pioneers and the presumptive backbone of American democracy. Rather than finding a land amenable to self-sufficient family farming, the migrants seemed condemned to perpetual wage peonage.

This apparent subversion of the Jeffersonian agrarian ideal–small farms sustained by family labor—has occupied the attention of historians of California agriculture ever since. The journalist McWilliams called the state’s agricultural enterprises “Factories in the Field” in the 1930s, and more recent historians have either confirmed, complicated, or countered McWilliams’ characterization. Without exception, however, these historians have viewed the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries as the most crucial period of transformation in California—and, at least by implication, U.S. agriculture. The nation (and perhaps the world, too) is the inheritor of the social, environmental, economic and cultural trends worked out in California agriculture a hundred years ago.

“Where are the farmers?” This was

I want to stress that “farming matters,” to use the words of historian Steven Stoll. “It is the central biological and ecological relationship in any settled society,” Stoll argues, “and the most profound way that humans have changed the world over the last ten thousand years.” Agriculture has seen many changes since 1865—mechanization, specialization, intensification, the application of biotechnology, the rise of organic farming—all of which can be discussed under the framework of industrialization. With the likelihood of a real energy crisis increasing each year, industrialized agriculture is even more important to understand. It is, in short, a present concern.

In my second half of the U.S. survey, then, the industrialization of agriculture will be a prominent theme. This theme could take the form of one or two lectures, or it may be woven throughout the course in smaller pieces. As a disclaimer, I will simply quote Jim Cobb, who once defined teaching as “seeing how much oversimplification you get away with without misleading anyone.”

I. The Jeffersonian Ideal