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
the critical question behind Carey McWilliams’ Factories in the Field, which constitutes a kind of opening salvo in the increasingly interesting field of California agricultural history (4). The answer, in his view, was straightforward: the farmers had been replaced by industrial capitalists who presided over vast, mechanized, “artificial” but extremely profitable agricultural systems. McWilliam’s goal was to illuminate the “hidden California” of land monopolization and racist labor exploitation, which he denounced as a “mechanism of fascist control” (9).
Writing as a journalist in the midst of 1930s labor unrest, McWilliams painted a stark, simplified picture of “unbroken continuity of control” (7). By 1860, the best agricultural land was in the hands of a few, a land grab that fixed the “irrational character of California agriculture” (21). Vast bonanza farms producing wheat gave way to slightly smaller but more intensive fruit farms by the 1870s, which in the 1890s yielded to extensive sugar beet cultivation—the apex of the factory model and its “colonial economy” for McWilliams (97). California growers actively sought vulnerable sources of labor, looking successively to Chinese, Japanese, south Asians, Armenians, Mexicans, dust bowl migrants, and Filipinos. In each case, the pattern remained the same: growers exploited one group until they began to organize or exhibit other mutinous behaviors, and then found another group
In each case, too, the negative consequences were many: vigilantism, race riots, social maladjustment, tenant farming, and absentee ownership. When ill-treated workers rebelled against the low wages or poor working conditions, such as in the Wheatland Riot of 1913 or the Cannery and Agricultural Workers’ Industrial Union (CAWIU) strikes of the early 1930s, growers responded with “farm fascism”—espionage, political control, vigilantism—to keep their “Gunkist Oranges” and other products going to market (249). To McWilliams’ dismay, government efforts to intervene invariably went awry: either they ended up supporting growers’ interests or their alternative proposals (such as the land settlements at Delhi and Durham) became symbols of failed socialism and state planning (210). Even the New Deal interventions of the 1930s—labor camps and relief agencies—represented not solutions but “demonstration[s]” of what could be done (303).
Yet McWilliams ends in an oddly hopeful stance. The Dust Bowl had sent a stream of refugees familiar with the ways of democracy who would not tolerate the conditions that foreign immigrants had endured. A “day of reckoning approaches,” McWilliams predicted (306). He was convinced that the reckoning would involve the organization of workers and, ultimately, land redistribution (325).
Because his text was not annotated, McWilliams’ sources are hard to pin down. It is clear from his bibliography, however, that they were mostly journalistic and governmental. In any event, the real value of McWilliams’ work is not its nuanced attention to details, but in its moral passion. Not only did Factories in the Field stoke controversy in its day, it has continued to inspire research into California’s agricultural and labor history.
The historian who follows McWilliams’ path most directly is Cletus Daniel, whose Bitter Harvest represents a more scholarly retelling of McWilliam’s story. Daniel maintains McWilliam’s astonishment at the lack of family farms, absence of agrarian idealism, and pursuit of profit at any cost. By the early twentieth century, he charges, “family farming survived only as a marginal appendage of a rural economy dominated in fact and in spirit by agribusinessmen as singleminded in their pursuit of profits as the most unwavering urban capitalist” (43). This single-minded pursuit translated into a belief that industrial agriculture was impracticable without a “captive peasantry”—and since growers could not exploit white workers while upholding democratic ideals, they turned to people who were already victims of “de facto social disaffection and racial discrimination”: Chinese, Filipinos, Mexicans, Japanese, and others (61).
Ironically, this subjugation of labor occurred in an era of Progressive and New Deal reforms that improved the lot of industrial workers. While Daniel concedes the New Deal as a “watershed” in “industrial power relationships”, he argues that its earlier efforts were based on the progressive idea of “harmonious relations between labor and capital,” an assumption that class conflict was not inherent in capitalism (168). The early reforms of the New Deal—in particular, the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933—consequently failed to recognize the “independent spirit of authentic unionism” (172). Labor became a “dependent class” (168). While industrial labor organizations successfully fought for a revision of the NIRA in the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, the “antiunion momentum” of the early New Deal remained in effect for agricultural workers (174).
Thus, even though activists organized farm labor strikes with surprising success in the 1930s, policy shifts in the Communist International and federal neglect left farmworkers powerless. Even the noble efforts of McWilliams, Steinbeck, and Senator Robert LaFollette to raise “public awareness” were to no avail, for, as Daniel notes, “to illuminate social and economic injustice was not to redress it” (283).
Daniel’s primary concern is not agricultural conditions, or the yeoman farmer ideal, but labor relations. California’s commercial growers, he says, saw the farm laborer “more an expendable commodity than a human being; more a cog than a productive partner” (69). Class conflict thus takes center stage in Daniel’s account, somewhat to the detriment of other explanations. Racism, for example, was for Daniel merely a means of labor control. In discussing growers’ use of Chinese labor, Daniel contends that “the attachment of farm employers was not to a distinct national group but to those characteristics of powerlessness that the Chinese revealed in a greater degree than had any other group of farmworkers” (67). Other scholars have found that the relationship was a little more complex.
One scholar who has uncovered a more complicated story is Sucheng Chan. In This Bittersweet Soil Chan demonstrates convincingly that Chinese immigrants were much more than cheap labor. They were also “suburban agriculturalists,” who, by combining production and marketing of vegetables, pioneered the vertical integration of truck farming (87). They were “intimately involved at every phase” of land reclamation and potato cultivation in the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta (170), setting an important pattern of race and class relations in California agriculture with the “symbiotic” relationship they developed with landowners in that area (189). The immigrants in Chan’s account also belie portrayals of docility with what she calls their “great entrepreneurial drive” (406).
According to Chan, the story of Chinese farmers also expands current scholarship on Chinese-Americans and the Chinese Diaspora. Contrary to the popular conception of Chinese immigrants residing in urban “Chinatowns”, in the nineteenth century most Chinese lived and worked in rural areas. This fact made for an altogether different experience: social stratification within Chinese communities, interactions with whites, and power concentrations all varied with the geographical setting.
Thus, This Bittersweet Soil aims to show “how the physical imperatives of agricultural production in California molded a set of social relations that in turn affected the manner in which that production has been organized” (xvi). This theme can perhaps best be seen in the example of Chinese “Potato Kings”, who pioneered potato and bean specialization not because of any cultural attachment to the product but because of natural and economic conditions: potatoes and beans were the most profitable crops available, and the fungus-prone, peaty soil of the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta meant that potatoes had to be rotated out of cultivation every few years. Leasing made more sense than owning land in this case, since short-term cultivation produced the highest returns. In this way, Chan contends, “the social ecology” of the community “aligned according to the contours created by nature”—not that environmental conditions predetermined the Chinese experience in America, but that Chinese immigrants interacted with their new settings in more varied ways than we have supposed (224).
Chan’s research was extraordinarily labor-intensive and exhaustive, relying especially on census manuscripts and lease records from county archives in California. As Chan describes in her preface, her narrative was “wrung painstakingly out of the chronological and spatial patterns” revealed by her information (xviii). “Wrung” turns out to be an apt description, as the narrative tends to be sacrificed to quantitative precision and the sheer weight of all her accumulated information.
Still, her work is pathbreaking. If nothing else, it illustrates how an entire group of people—Chinese truck farmers, tenants, and other non-laborers—can be excluded by a lack of (or lack of creativity in interpreting) sources. In many ways This Bittersweet Soil constitutes an extended essay on methodology, demonstrating what can be drawn from dusty archives with diligence and quantitative insight.
As Chan shows, Chinese farmers and workers reclaimed much of California’s land through drainage and irrigation projects. The larger story of water management in California, however, falls to Donald Pisani. In From the Family Farm to Agribusiness, Pisani tells the historical fate of the small farmer in California from the banks of the irrigation ditch. What role did irrigation play, Pisani wants to know, in the transformation of California agriculture from the wheat boom (1850-1890), through the horticultural small farm phase (1880-1920) to the age of the “factories in the field” lamented by McWilliams? Pisani’s answer, in brief, is that although irrigation started as a “tool of social and economic reform”—a way to subdivide the great grain estates into horticultural homesteads—it ended up as an “ally of land concentration” (xi).
Irrigation is often taken for granted in the history of California agriculture. First there were wheat farms, the story goes; then farmers irrigated their lands and transformed them into marvelous horticultural cornucopias. Using a wide range of sources—federal and state government documents, newspapers, and some archival collections—Pisani complicates this story considerably. The irrigation of California’s fields, he finds, was a slow, conflict-ridden process. Not only did growers and capitalists struggle with engineering challenges, they also had to contend with a prejudice against irrigation as a primitive, Hispanic, unnecessary or even dangerous method (64). The first irrigation proposals in the mid-nineteenth century were “wild and impractical”, later projects were marred by regional hostilities, corrupt governance, poorly-run businesses, and fears of monopoly power (79). For Pisani, the dominant theme of western irrigation history is not smooth progress but the “persistent mismanagement and ineffectiveness of both private enterprise and government in regulating the use of water” (xi). Presumably Pisani would prefer a kind of federalism: a combination of centralized planning with democratic, locally-controlled irrigation districts of the sort he describes as “significant institutional innovation[s]” in Chapter Nine (281).
After a series of fits and starts, Pisani argues, Progressive reformers of the early twentieth century seized upon irrigation “as a way to return to a more homogenous, virtuous, middle class society” (440). Under the sway of these reformers, California increased its irrigated land some 400 percent between 1910 and 1920, and founded two irrigation colonies in an attempt to create a prosperous yeomanry ex nihilo. By the 1920s, however, the piecemeal manner in which irrigation had been pursued by state and local governments and private enterprises hit a developmental wall. Without a comprehensive plan and massive investment, irrigation in California could go no further. The remedy would take the form of the Central Valley Project of 1933 and the State Water Plan. As centralized decision-making became necessary, the influence of the wealthy and powerful grew. This centralization led, in Pisani’s words, to the “growth of agriculture as a business and disappearance of farming as a way of life” (451). Why “business” and “way of life” farming are mutually exclusive Pisani does not explain.
For all its attention to the details of irrigation policy, Pisani’s tale concludes rather starkly. Ultimately, he concludes, irrigation was not fit to create a more just social order in California, because “urbanization, farm mechanization, the soaring price of land and water, and other trends could not be reversed” (452). This denial of historical contingency is a rather disappointing way to end an otherwise carefully crafted study.
If Pisani’s eyes are on the ditches of California agriculture, Steven Stoll’s are on the environmental and social consequences. The Fruits of Natural Advantage chronicles the rise of fruit farming in California, but what Stoll wants to describe is much larger. In California, he argues, “a new tillage” arose as the state emerged as “the ultimate city-serving countryside” (1, xii). California growers imported “industrial methods and assumptions” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and agriculture has never been the same since (xii). Thus a discussion of California agriculture positions Stoll to comment on the perils of monoculture more generally, along with the promises of sustainable farming. “We can resolve to mend the countryside,” Stoll concludes, “as one of many other ways to mend the world” (185).
Stoll outlines the principle characteristics of California’s broken countryside in his preface. California agriculture was (and remains): industrial, implying a division of labor between owners and workers and interdependence between regions, businesses, government, and individuals; specialized, organized around single cash crops; and most importantly, intensive, that is, rather than seeking new lands, growers applied capital and technology to “rend every possible dollar” from existing land. To be profitable, intensive agriculture required a set of structures—cheap, seasonal labor, scientific research, and marketing associations—that the growers obligingly developed and maintained. In this way, Stoll contends, “intensive cultivation became the very engine of industrial agriculture in California” (xiii).
Like many historians of California agriculture, however, Stoll begins with the turn-of-the-century debate about the future of farming and rural life in America. Using Liberty Hyde Bailey and Edwin G. Nourse to represent the two options available to the agricultural sector, Stoll suggests that the rapid industrialization of agriculture was not a foregone conclusion at the close of the nineteenth century. Bailey and the Country Life Movement offered a vision of modernized agriculture that prioritized rural community life ahead of increased production. The triumph of Nourse’s concept of agriculture that only served “the industrial expansion of the U.S.” was, according to Stoll, a deliberate rejection of Bailey’s vision (14). California’s “orchard capitalists” chose economic growth in the form of intensive, specialized agriculture; The Fruits of Natural Advantage catalogues the social and environmental consequences of that decision.
These “orchard capitalists” remain, as Stoll puts it, “in the middle of change” throughout his story (xii). Their desire for “picturesque comfort” and investment capital “drove a wedge between labor and ownership” and introduced class conflict from the very beginning (40, 35). Their readings of environment conditions—imaginary “natural advantages”—created California’s unique specialty-crop landscape (2). Their need to cultivate consumption transformed fruit into a standardized, “finished product with a brand name, a wrapper, and an attitude” (85). Their “radical simplification” of the environment provided the conditions for an explosion of pests and the corresponding chemical and biological “solutions” (94). Their specialization produced dramatic seasonal fluctuations in labor demand and the ubiquitous “fruit tramp” (125). And ultimately, as the labor unrest and agricultural distress of the 1920s and 1930s attested, the growers found that the “elements of a flourishing agriculture remained beyond their reach” (179). In Stoll’s view, it was the growers who made the countryside industrial.
If there is one glaring weakness in Stoll’s account, it is this monolithic characterization of the growers’ perspective. On this point, David Vaught’s Cultivating California provides a helpful corrective. Frustrated with the “reductionist cultural materialism” of historians—including Cletus Daniel, Donald Pisani, Sucheng Chan, and probably Steven Stoll as well—who follow Carey McWilliams in portraying growers as mere profit-seekers, Vaught posits a kind of compromise between the family farmer and the agribusinessman: the horticulturalist (8). Many of California’s fruit and nut growers sought “small, virtuous communities and economic development,” says Vaught, and there is no reason to assume that these two goals were mutually exclusive (10). As his study demonstrates, the label “grower” could encompass more than one set of values and behaviors. The almond growers of Davisville, for instance, shared few cultural assumptions with the hop growers of Wheatland.
Central to the culture of California’s first-generation horticulturalists was what Vaught terms a “horticultural ideal” (10). In developing the values and practices necessary to raise specialty crops like raisins, almonds, peaches, and other fruits, these growers believed they also provided “the prescription for a healthy and prosperous society” (51). They hoped to “avoid the evils of industrial capitalism without foregoing its economic benefits,” envisioning communities where “educated, land-owning families lived on small, orderly, and prosperous orchards or vineyards in close proximity to one another” (53). They sought a place in between the industrial city and the isolated countryside.
Vaught’s rendition of California agriculture, then, roots the transformation of the countryside in this unique cultural vision of the horticulturalists. He describes how growers were troubled by their persistent reliance on a “poor and largely transient” labor pool, arguing that labor relations stemmed not from a desire to exploit but to nurture their communities (68). The marketing cooperatives that play such a large role in Stoll’s and Victoria Woeste’s studies (see below) emerge in Vaught’s as a way for growers to “detach themselves . . . from the business end of their enterprise” and focus on farming (96). Even the famous Wheatland riot of 1913 earns a reconsideration in Vaught’s account: hop-grower Ralph Durst, we learn, was not the malevolent capitalist portrayed by McWilliams and others, but an employer surprised by the unhappy coincidence of an unusually low demand for labor and an extraordinarily large supply of workers (see Chapter 4).
Ultimately, grower-state relations proved to be more important than labor relations in determining the shape of California agriculture. By the end of World War I, growers had learned to depend on the state and other “translocal institutions” to control their labor and marketing problems (186). As a result, Vaught laments, “growers’ primary frame of reference shifted away from their local communities to a variety of impersonal, centralized institutions” (190). Nonetheless, the “moral responsibility” to farm has continued to loom large for many growers, according to Vaught, who concludes that today the “horticultural ideal . . . remains very much alive” (191). In this sense, his ending point differs little from Stoll and others: he is none too pleased with the transformation of California agriculture. But unlike Stoll, Vaught seems determined to absolve the (small) farmers of responsibility for California’s agricultural transgressions, mostly by demonstrating their noble ideals. One wonders precisely what difference it makes to recognize these good intentions—if they were only paving stones on the road to environmental and social perdition.
Good intentions are also central to Victoria Saker Woeste’s tale of California agriculture in The Farmer’s Benevolent Trust, but Woeste describes the unforeseen consequences of such intentions in a more compelling fashion. A remarkable combination of legal, business, and agricultural history, Benevolent Trust demonstrates the importance of the cooperative model to the American agricultural system and, in turn, the importance of small growers to the cooperative movement. Cooperation in the raisin industry was, as she says, “built on the backbone of thousands of small farms” (11). Contrary to the dominant interpretation of California agriculture—including McWilliams, Daniel, Pisani, Chan, Stoll, and Sackman—Woeste argues that vast “industrial” farms were not as prevalent in California as they seemed to be. High-value horticultural crops made small-scale farming profitable, and since the success of the California Associated Raisin Company in California depended upon universal participation, small growers actually “held the balance of power” in such organizations (38). “Cooperation,” Woeste notes, “inverts the usual relationship of majority to minority; its logic requires the participation of all its constituents or else it will fail” (58). Embodying this logic were the “night riders,” who violently coerced growers—especially those of Japanese or Armenian descent—into joining the cooperative.
In prose that models clarity and grace, Woeste describes how farmers responded to the “farm problem” of the late nineteenth century by joining “the traditional ideology of cooperation with the economic and legal powers of the business corporation,” thereby organizing their economic activities, “redefining their relationship to the market,” and “simultaneously exploit[ing] and undermin[ing] the myth of the Jeffersonian agrarian farmer” (1). Across the nation in the late 1800s, rural interests complained that the nation’s agricultural sector was at the mercy of transportation and marketing monopolies—the dreaded “middlemen” of the new industrial economy. To defend their distinctively rural way of life, Woeste argues, farmers believed they needed “the forms and practices of industrial business” (36).
The most outstanding example of this farmers’ paradox, according to Woeste, was the California Associated Raisin Company (CARC), later known as Sun-Maid. A case study of this organization’s evolution lies at the heart of Benevolent Trust (Chapters 6 through 8). With its capital stock corporate structure, its centralized authority, and its coercive and controversial techniques for insuring participation, the CARC “undermined the cultural ideal of American farming” (138). By 1918, the CARC controlled 90 percent of the raisin crop, had increased prices and grower profits, and had forced the packing house “middlemen” out of business. State and federal concern with the CARC’s monopoly powers led to a Department of Justice prosecution of the CARC, which was ultimately ineffective. Meanwhile, belief in the unique position of farmers in the industrial economy—a residual agrarian idealism—yielded the Capper-Volstead Act of 1922, which effectively enshrined in law the CARC’s belief that monopoly and the cooperative ideal were “thoroughly compatible” (162). When it came to agricultural cooperatives, then, government was profoundly conflicted.
Ultimately, Woeste argues, growers—not governmental agencies—destroyed the raisin trust by refusing to curb their production in the years after World War I. “Organized, profitable marketing was impossible,” according to Woeste, unless the cooperative could also control production. Thus, the marriage of monopoly and the cooperative ideal “required precisely the cooperative spirit that Sun-Maid boosters proclaimed with their words and undermined with their deeds” (189). The inability to act like a true monopoly by fixing prices and limiting output ultimately rendered the cooperative movement ineffective in fundamentally altering power relations in the marketplace.
Woeste uses dry sources—census data, court cases, records of government agencies, and published government documents—to great effect. Indeed, one of her chief arguments is on legal theory: she employs what she calls a more “flexible” notion of functionalism/pluralism. At times, law represented a way for marginalized people to acquire and defend their rights; at other times, elites used the law to discriminate against, say, the Chinese. The dominant theme, for Woeste, is more of “the vagaries, the unintended effects and consequences, of recourse to law” (235). The raisin farmers who organized a cooperative in early twentieth century California both established and (ultimately) undermined their position through law.
California agricultural history has long fought over the nature of industrialized agriculture and the more or less imaginary presence of the sturdy yeoman. The genius of Benevolent Trust lies in Woeste’s ability to fit the cooperative movement into the larger story of the American agricultural economy in a way that makes its importance obvious. So this is how the small farmer coexisted with industrialized agriculture, the reader realizes: within a cooperative. It is a little like discovering that the missing piece of a vexing puzzle was all along hidden under the table—or the law library, as it were.
Woeste demonstrates the logic of the agricultural cooperative in a careful, even-handed manner that is hard to argue with. But the “now what?” question remains: in the end she only suggests that “even a disappearing farm . . . maintains a hold on the public imagination” (238). While Stoll indicates the kind of moral lessons contemporary readers are to draw from history—at the risk of seeming partisan in his efforts—Woeste excels at analyzing an historical problem. The two works present a striking example of an important debate over the uses of history. Should the historian be a prophet, using the past to seek justice in the present, or an educator, explaining the past to make better sense of the present? Although Stoll’s treatise makes for a more compelling story, it seems heavy-handed at times. Woeste’s research may prove more useful in the long run.
Representing an entirely different approach to California agriculture is Douglas Sackman’s Orange Empire. Although ostensibly a history of southern California’s citrus industry, Orange Empire is at heart a story about stories—the tales that the Sunkist cooperative told to create their economic empire. It was through “images and stories,” Sackman argues, that “the landscapes of production and consumption were colonized and connected” (115). Thus the transformation of southern California’s landscape for horticultural production was “underwritten by a vision of the proper arrangement of nature,” an ideology of “Mother Nature’s unique beneficence,” when in fact it was a more of a conquest (24). This sleight of hand also characterized the citrus industry’s advertising, which represented oranges as pure nature, “stored-up sunshine.”
Another of these stories was the agrarian myth of farming as a way of life, which growers employed to compensate for the fact that their “managerial role alienated them from nature.” They claimed to love the land, or they thought of themselves working alongside their workers to cultivate it. As a result, the workers “were naturalized as part of the landscape.” Like soil, climate, and moisture, labor became for the growers a “gift of nature” (121). Their own “agrarian dreams” ignored by growers, farm workers were kept in their marginalized position, according to Sackman, by a “set of stories” that turned “human beings into field workers” (135).
The agrarian ideal resurfaces in Sackman’s account in the challenge mounted initially by Upton Sinclair’s End Poverty in California (EPIC) campaign, and later by a group he calls the “agrarian partisans” (Dorothea Lange, Paul Taylor, Carey McWilliams, and John Steinbeck) against “the ideology of the [agribusiness] growth machine” (183). The opponents of agribusiness charged it with antidemocratic methods (or even, as we have seen in McWilliams’ case, with fascist techniques) that kept workers from enjoying the fruits of their labor. While Sinclair called for recognition of usufruct for all, the agrarian partisans used the “American exodus” of dust bowl refugees to show an agrarian ideal turned on its head. Meanwhile, Sunkist responded by characterizing Sinclair and others as communist crackpots intent on destroying American democracy. In each case, the body of the yeoman farmer was the battleground.
Sackman’s conviction that images, stories, and ideologies shape power relations might place Orange Empire in the historiographical company of empire studies more than California agricultural history. However, he makes a valiant effort to connect his discussions of myth and symbol to actual people, events, and environmental conditions. His description of the “shop floor” of an orange orchard, for example, surpasses even the labor historians’ descriptions of workers’ day to day exertions (see Chapter 4). But there is something vaguely troubling about his reliance on cultural theorists like Michel Foucault. By describing labor relations and business practices in ways that the participants would not have recognized—Progressive social welfare projects as “bio-power” (155), for example, or the citrus industry as a “colonizer” of nature (59)—Sackman moves the lived experience of historical actors into a realm of abstraction that seems unnecessary. This story about stories constitutes an intriguing effort to apply some sophisticated theory to the history of California agriculture, but lacks the explanatory power of Woeste’s or even Stoll’s work.
For some seventy years now, California has provided fertile ground for the historiography of industrial agriculture. The state has offered the source material for approaches that run the methodological gamut—cultural history, legal history, business history, labor history, environmental history, immigration history, ethnic studies—to say nothing of journalistic exposés like Factories in the Field, and more recently, Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation (2001) and Michael Pollan’s The Ominivore’s Dilemma (2007). If this interest in industrial food systems and the disappearing family farm endures, California’s story will be retold for years to come. It certainly ought to be. The history of California agriculture illuminates the historical path taken by Americans (and the rest of the world) to our present ways of production and consumption.
But to say that California’s history illuminates the history of industrial agriculture is not to assert that it also wholly represents that broader story. As Cindy Hahamovitch suggests in The Fruits of Their Labor: Atlantic Coast Farmworkers and the Making of Migrant Poverty, 1870-1945 (1997), there remains an eastern story to be more fully unfolded. And as food production systems stretch across the globe, transnational histories—such as John Soluri’s Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States (2005)—should become more common as well.
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Books Reviewed:
Chan, Sucheng. This Bittersweet Soil: The Chinese in California Agriculture, 1860-1910. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.
Daniel, Cletus E. Bitter Harvest: A History of California Farmworkers 1870-1941. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1981.
McWilliams, Carey. Factories in the Field: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in California. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1939.
Pisani, Donald J. From the Family Farm to Agribusiness: The Irrigation Crusade in California and the West, 1850-1931. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
Sackman, Douglas Cazaux. Orange Empire: California and the Fruits of Eden. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004
Stoll, Steven. The Fruits of Natural Advantage: Making the Industrial Countryside in California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
Vaught, David. Cultivating California: Growers, Speciality Crops, and Labor, 1875-1920. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.
Woeste, Victoria Saker. The Farmer's Benevolent Trust: Law and Agricultural Cooperation in Industrial America, 1865–1945. (Studies in Legal History.) Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1998.
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