Yes, sun food costs more, but the reasons why it does only undercut the charge of elitism: cheap food is only cheap because of government handouts and regulatory indulgence (both of which we will end), not to mention the exploitation of workers, animals and the environment on which its putative "economies" depend. Cheap food is food dishonestly priced -- it is in fact unconscionably expensive.

This is long, but not as long as his book.

Peon.

The word is used today casually, as in, "You don't want to be a peon do you? Go to college!" Or, "You work for the State Department?" "Yes, but I'm just a lowly peon, filing reports."

But peonage--debt servitude--is a real labor arrangement, and southern white landowners have used it for most of the twentieth century. Peons were kept against their will at a job by (often inflated) debts to their employers. Sometimes the employer would pay a fine to get a black person out of jail, on the condition that the convict work for him to pay off the debt. Other times immigrants were lured to the South (or to California, it seems) by promises of steady, well-paying employment, only to find that they incurred debts in their passage, accommodations, and supplies that they could never pay off. Most Southern states had laws that made it lawful to imprison and fine someone who broke their labor contract by fleeing, and since local law-enforcement often did the planters' bidding, they would simply turn over the captured laborers to their employers to do with them as they wished.

Peonage was little more than slavery; indeed, Pete Daniel argues, slavery set the stage for peonage: "An economy based on labor-intensive agriculture and extractive industries, a large African-American population, and a heritage of slavery, violence, and discrimination furnished a context for the continuation of slavery in another guise" (ix). They were, Daniel says, the poorest of the poor, existing "at the core of concentric circles of oppression, their entire world circumscribed by exploiters" (19).

The Shadow of Slavery draws primarily on Justice Department records of peonage complaints and prosecutions to paint a detailed portrait of southern involuntary servitude. Again and again, the institution survives public exposure by northern periodicals and legal attacks by U.S. attorneys and civil rights workers. Even the great flood of 1927, though exposing the system of radical inequality and oppression that dominated the Mississippi Delta, failed to raise enough public outcry over peonage to stop it. As late as the 1960s, peonage continued. Why? Acquiescent communities. Obsequious law-enforcement officials. Powerful planters. Powerless workers. Peonage survived in part because, Daniel writes, "The idea was unbearable and consequently unthinkable. Its stench of medieval bondage or Latin American oppression created security for it" (171). But it also survived because local custom allowed gross inequalities of power to persist.

Inequality this great--once indebted, poor blacks and immigrants had virtually no recourse, legal or otherwise--corrupts both the victims and victimizers. I don't believe in absolute equality for all people. Some people will be richer, some will be poorer. But a system like peonage takes advantage of the sinfulness of human hearts. When given the opportunity, people will exploit one another. It seems like our job--government and citizen alike--should be to make that a lot harder.

I wonder where the Christians were in this story. At one point, Daniel mentions a 1939 condemnation of peonage by the Georgia Baptists--was there more activity like this (181)? I fear the answer must be, not much, or there would have been a much bigger stink over the institution. As it was, peonage remained mostly invisible.

I also wonder if something like peonage continues to exist? Daniel makes the interesting observation that "Migrant workers . . . have replaced sharecroppers on the bottom rung of the southern agricultural ladder," citing a 1983 hearing before the U.S. House committee on Labor Standards that "produced vivid accounts of migrant abuses, including peonage" (xi).

A church with its imagination alive to the Old Testament ethical injunctions with regard to land and debt should not have ignored peonage systems. We should be advocates for debt-relief and (more) even distribution of resources.

Finally, a parting shot. This kind of evidence is why I cannot agree when someone says, "Slavery ended almost 150 years ago; we don't owe them [African-Americans] anything." The simple fact is that slavery did not end 150 years ago.

Very moving.

Matt Garcia engages a number of historiographies with this study: Chicano/a studies, labor history, (sub)urban history, agricultural/environmental history, and California history. And as he makes clear in his introduction, he means his work to be intensely theoretical. Following Robin D.G. Kelley's Race Rebels, Garcia wants to broaden the definition of politics to include domestic life and popular culture; although few of his characters engaged in labor strikes or overt political protests, he sees their actions--developing their separate colonias, going to dance halls, acting in plays, and writing newspapers--as inescapably political.

To make this argument, he draws on Antonio Gramsci's concept of "wars of position" to describe the resistance strategies of his Mexican and Mexican American workers. Rather than wage a "war of maneuver" on their employers/oppressors, workers in L.A.'s citrus belt attempted to build "counter-hegemonic alliances" with other oppressed groups. Chicana lemon packers, for example, could petition for better treatment or wages as women, workers, or Mexican-Americans (6).

Less central to his argument, but to my mind more interesting, he employs Edward Soja's Postmodern Geographies to argue that landscapes are anything but neutral. Rather, "their form and process of creation often possess keys to understanding the type of social relations that exist within a given society" (4).

Garcia aims to do all this by telling "how the formation of the citrus empire and its attendant worker settlements laid the foundation for the expanded and segmented landscape known as 'Greater Los Angeles'" (5). Like others, he describes the Jeffersonian ideals of the citrus growers, observing their delight in creating a society that was both rural without being backward and urban without being congested. In this sense, he follows journalist and activist Carey McWilliams' work very closely (McWilliams quotes are the epigraphs for each chapter).

Though the story is familiar, Garcia's treatment is refreshingly detailed, especially in his narration of George Chaffey's Ontario settlement, a magnificent attempt to unite ten-acre family farms with the latest technology to build communities. In contrast to other agricultural industries in the midwest and elsewhere, which were being consolidated into larger and larger farms-and perhaps, too, in contrast to the pellagra-ridden, share-cropping South--the "citriscape" promised a civilized future for America. This vision often aligned with eugenicist views of the era. As one commentator put it, the most pressing problem of the time was "how to rearrange our social and economic system so that more of the superior member of our race will stay on the land" and reproduce (34).

This hope for civilization was, of course, undercut by citriculture's reliance on foreign (dirty!), cheap labor, who contrary to American rags-to-riches mythology, would never enjoy the "ideal country life" themselves. As Garcia rightly notes, very few agrarians of the time recognized that Jefferson's vision "promoted material equality and discouraged social stratification" (21). What happens, then, when living the agrarian ideal demanded that others remain as a permanent, nomadic, laboring class?

Actually, the life cycle of most citrus ranches meant that year-round labor was the rule. And so permanent settlements of Mexican American farmworkers developed throughout Southern California, some founded by citrus growers in an attempt to control and Americanize their employees, others springing up through the immigrant community's own efforts. The latter became the basis for Los Angeles' famously "polynucleated" landscape, a city of suburbs if there ever was one.

Garcia celebrates these semi-autonomous colonias (which often boasted their own churches, locally-owned stores, and mutual aid societies) as he celebrates Chicano handiwork throughout the book. The efforts of whites to "uplift" the foreign newcomers, on the other hand, he typically condemns as misguided at best, oppressive at worst. Imperfect as these efforts at intercultural understanding were, however, in the end Garcia holds them up as models for our disintegrating, identity-politics world.

For me, the takeaways of the book are two: first, that immigrant farm labor stories must be set carefully in their geographical contexts. Where are the immigrant communities located? How are they arranged differently than owner-sponsored housing? How do immigrants and laborers view the landscape differently than owners? Presumably they see fruit trees somewhat less romantically. But you should find out if you can.

Second, the immigrant labor force can be very differentiated and complex. In the citrus groves, there were Mexican Americans, braceros (contract workers), and undocumented workers; in the packinghouses, women labored under male supervisors. They did not necessarily share much beyond the shop floor.

The owner of the oldest black-owned peach orchard in the South (the nation) is also a writer. Her books, Clover and Her Own Place draw on her agricultural vocation. In Clover, the peach orchard weaves in and out of the story.

Clover is the daughter of the newly married widower Gaten Hill. Hill dies in the beginning of the novel, leaving Clover alone with her new (white) stepmother Sara Kate, and her uncle Jim Ed and aunt Everleen. It is a story of coming to terms with death and abandonment, as well with the racial and cultural differences between her and Sara Kate. But Round Hill, SC is peach country, and the orchard business remains a backdrop throughout.

At her father's funeral, for example, Clover describes the strangeness she feels for her new stepmother and goes off on a tangent about farmworkers:

She's been my stepmother for almost four days now and all I know for sure about her is, she's not a Mexican. I can spot a Mexican a mile away. Every summer if there's a big peach crop the migrant workers flood Round Hill. We have peaches, but not enough to need Mexicans.
Chase Porter brings them in all the time. He couldn't get al those peaches picked without them. He's one of the biggest peach growers in South Carolina.

This Chase Porter and his relationship with Clover's family creates an intriguing window into the world of peach growers, large and small. He turns up later in the book as a suitor for Clover's white stepmother Sara Kate, and he has a reputation for great benevolence as the leading peach man in the area (even though Clover's uncle Jim Ed interprets his advances as pure greed. "A white man," he says, "never gets enough land or money" (137).

The Hills appear to get most of their money through their peach stand, and Clover spends most of her summer days there with her aunt and uncle, where all kinds of people stop for peaches.

Jim Ed is so worried about this peach crop I don't want to put another frown on his face. It wouldn't have any place to go, anyhow. His face is all filled up. A late spring freeze caused the peaches to have split-seeds. That means that once the seed of a peach freezes, the peach will split wide open as soon as it starts to get ripe. When customers complain about the way peaches look, Aunt Everleen will tell them right quick, "That's the Lord's work." It's a real slow day at the stand. Everleen jumps to her feet when a brand new pickup pulls up. "I see you have Elberta peaches on your sign," he says. "Yes, we do," Everleen brags. "It's the finest canning peach there is. Del Monte cans Elbertas. Says so right on the can." "Oh, I was wanting some to eat," the customer says. "It's the finest eating peach there is," Everleen put in quickly She rubs one on her big fluffy shirt, and takes a big bite. "This is truly the best peach I ever tasted." She stuffs the money he gives her into her pocket. He is a physicist down at the nuclear plant. I put his peck of peaches in his truck.

Clover is a very funny book, not least because of the culinary differences between Sara Kate and the Round Hill black community. Sara Kate cooks vegetables in water, without a speck of grease, and makes watery grits. She even puts jello on the turnip greens. After lunch one day, Clover narrates,

Sara Kate finally offers iced tea and cookies. I don't have to see them to know she will get those fancy paper doilies and those fancy, high-priced cookies that don't taste worth a dime. That woman can spend more in a grocery store than anybody I've ever seen in my life. And we still never have anything good to eat.

"To understand the motives and behavior of Third World Workers--either on their home turf or as immigrant recruits to more developed metropoles--we need to fit them into a global political economy of competitive markets, changing technology, and a managerial logic of labor control. Yet we must also recognize them as agents who continue to draw on local wisdom in advancing the interests of family, friendships, and community even in a faraway land." (5)

So in the case of the Morganton Maya, Aguacatecos and Chalchitecos found a new unity; immigrants thought of themselves nationally, linguistically, or by municipality, but also found themselves categorized as Hispanics, and so learned that identity. Meanwhile, Morganton changed in its religious institutions, educational and other social services, and in the kind of activism expected of workers. And the immigrants' home communities in Guatemala changed, too, becoming more Americanized, sometimes more prosperous, sometimes more corrupt socially.

This is an exhaustive (the number of interviews Fink conducted is dizzying) look at the growing phenomenon of the "nuevo new south" as it appeared in Morganton, North Carolina. And though Fink is primarily concerned with the ramifications for the labor movement, he is not blind to the importance of religion in the lives of his subjects, or to the culture of the South.

A result perhaps of my southern upbringing, the role of labor unions has been somewhat lost on me until recently (despite the fact that I somewhat reluctantly joined the Kroger union for part of a summer). So for me, the most interesting chapter was Chapter Six ("Changing Places") which describes the cultural adjustments of the immigrants and their senders. Some were "birds of passage" who identified almost entirely with their home country and planned to return there once they had enough money. Others (especially children) assimilated into the host culture. Others developed a kind of transnational identity, using the tools of the global economy to cultivate a pan-Mayan movement.
The intertwining themes of globalization and community receive their fullest treatment here.

In general I wanted to know more about the attitudes of local citizens, especially about the racial and cultural dynamics. What about the rednecks and African-Americans? What did they think about this union idea? Did they think the Guatemalans were especially equipped for unionization?

I also wanted to know more about immigrants attitudes to their physical environment: the land, the climate, the mountains, the agriculture. Did many of them try to plant gardens? Would they if given the opportunity?

The idea that the Guatemalan Maya reacted differently to poor working conditions of the global economy because of their communal, traditional wisdom, which had in turn been shaped by the global economy -- this is fascinating, and important. Understanding the home places of the new immigrant labor pool could help us engage it more thoughtfully.

The Hand That Signed the Paper Felled a City

The hand that signed the paper felled a city;
Five sovereign fingers taxed the breath,
Doubled the globe of dead and halved a country;
These five kings did a king to death.

The mighty hand leads to a sloping shoulder,
The finger joints are cramped with chalk;
A goose's quill has put an end to murder
That put an end to talk.

The hand that signed the treaty bred a fever,
And famine grew, and locusts came;
Great is the hand that holds dominion over
Man by a scribbled name.

The five kings count the dead but do not soften
The crusted wound nor pat the brow;
A hand rules pity as a hand rules heaven;
Hands have no tears to flow.

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

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.

***
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.

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

Today I want to trace the features of the “yeoman farmer” ideal and the influence it has had on American life. This ideal is important to understand because industrialized agriculture is often understood as the very opposite of the yeoman ideal. For our purposes, we will start with Thomas Jefferson’s version of this ideal, because it has shown remarkable staying power. The point is not really to talk about Jefferson, or the eighteenth century (this is, after all, a mostly twentieth-century course), but to outline an ideal that has taken hold of the American imagination. Increasingly today, even when talking with non-historians, you will hear references to it, to “yeomen” or “agrarians” or even “family farms”—all (whether acknowledged or unacknowledged) references to Jefferson. What was this “yeoman farmer” ideal? I will make four points here.

First, and most obviously, the yeoman was close to the land. He (for as an ideal, the yeoman farmer was almost never female) tilled the soil with his own labor and the labor of his family. He had a connection with the earth that city people and manufacturers did not have.

Second, Jefferson’s yeoman was independent. He provided some or most of his subsistence. He was not a tenant or an agricultural worker, working for wages or a share of the crop. He was not wealthy either. He was, to use our terminology, solidly middle class. In some respects Jefferson defined the yeoman in opposition to the great planters of the South, who owned slaves and vast estates, and were more occupied with managing labor than cultivating the earth.

Third he was literate, informed, and moral. He might be familiar with the classics, but he was at least a reader of newspapers and aware of politics. And because he was moral, he could be counted on to see through the deception and corruption of urban politics. For this reason, Jefferson (and many agrarians since) saw the yeoman farmer as the crucial building block of American democracy. Without landowning self-sufficient farmers, the nation could succumb to corrupt absolutism.

Fourth, I want to point just briefly to a couple of ways the agrarian ideal informed policy in the nineteenth century. The Homestead Act of 1862 essentially gave away 160 acres of western land to anyone who would improve it and remain on it for five years. You can see that one of the intentions here was to fill the West with yeoman farmers. Incidentally, it failed on this account: only 80 million of the 500 million acres distributed went to homesteaders. The Dawes Commission of 1893 also paid homage to the independent farmer: it proposed to reorganize Indian reservations as individual homesteads, thereby transforming the Indians into good yeomen. This, too, failed.

We will be discussing the “industrialization” of agriculture in this course, so in closing, I offer a quick overview of what I take to be the major features of industrialized agriculture: mechanization, standardization, distant (national or international) markets, specialization (monocropping), large chemical and/or fossil fuel inputs, and wage labor.

II. From Crop to Commodity

As the 1862 Homestead Act might suggest, the yeoman farmer was the one who was supposed to settle the western frontier. But this frontiersman was an economic creature; markets drove the settlement of former Indian lands in the West. To discuss the frontier and the standardization of agricultural products, let’s take a look at Chicago. The fastest-growing city in the country in the late nineteenth century, Chicago and the grid of land settlement in its vast hinterland (stretching as far away as Minnesota) “turned the prairie into a commodity”, to use William Cronon’s phrase. Farmers plowed the plains and fed the metropolises. The industrialization of farming first appeared in the late nineteenth century on the Great Plains and in California, due primarily to two factors: mechanization, and standardization.

The first, mechanization is probably the most familiar to you. This is the story of John Deere and his steel plow, Cyrus McCormick and his mechanical harvester. Wheat was relatively easy to grow with fresh soil, needing little maintenance beyond planting and harvesting. In the case of the wheat farms of California and the Great Plains, mechanization made it possible for fewer people to farm much larger pieces of land. There are stories of fields so expansive that after working through one plot, a plow team would camp out at the far end of the field before returning the next day.

The second way that western agriculture industrialized was through standardization. Some form of standardization characterized nearly every agricultural product, but grain provides an extreme example. In order to understand the transformation involved here, we must take note of “the seemingly unremarkable fact that shippers loaded their grain into sacks” initially. After harvesting his wheat, the farmer delivered it in a sack, on a wagon, over seasonal roads, to the river. The farmer bore the responsibility of getting it sold in Chicago (though he might pay someone else to do it); the grain bore the imprint of his farm. He might get a higher or lower price depending on its quality. And humans labored to load and unload sacks. Relatively speaking, getting one’s grain to market was an arduous but personal process.

As Chicago’s hinterland grew more and more grain, railroads changed the way it was shipped. Instead of sacks, the grain was loaded directly into railcars along with grain from other farmers. This method was simpler not only for loading, but also for unloading: in Chicago, steam-powered elevators lifted the grain into vast warehouses. The sack of grain had become a golden stream. Soon elevator receipts were as good as cash, and then better than cash, as Chicagoans learned how to make money off of grain futures, founding the Chicago Board of Trade. Suddenly, grain had been transformed. As environmental historian William Cronon put it, “To understand wheat or corn in the vocabulary of bulls, bears, corners, grades, and futures meant seeing grain as a commodity, not as a living organism planted and harvested by farmers as a crop for people to mill into flour, bake into bread, and eat.”

But the increasing dominance of urban capitalists in this industrialized agriculture and the fierce droughts of the late nineteenth century led to a kind of farmers’ revolt: the Populist movement. Populism’s influence peaked in 1892, when the People’s Party presidential nominee James B. Weaver won over a million votes. Although the Populist movement had fragmented and melted into the Democratic Party by 1896, their “ agrarian statist agenda”—federal regulation of railroads and other monopolies, federal credit for farmers, and agricultural extension agents, helped set the stage for the Progressive reforms of the early 1900s. Feeling hard-pressed by monopoly capitalism, these erstwhile self-sufficient yeomen turned to the government to defend their interests. As we will see, this agrarian statism would prove to be a significant development in the industrialization of agriculture.

III. The Subversion of the Ideal: Intensive Monocropping

I want to start today with a man named Johann Heinrich von Thünen. This nineteenth century German geographer theorized how agriculture works economically and spatially by imagining a generic city on a featureless plain. This “isolated state,” von Thünen thought, would be surrounded by successive rings of agricultural systems, which owed their location to land and transportation costs. Thus, agriculture nearest the city involved intensive dairy farming and market gardening, then extensive grain growing, then open range livestock raising, then forestry, and finally, hunting and fishing. This makes sense, right? The heavier products are grown very intensively (close together, in small patches) very close to the city. A farmer here needs high-value crops, because land rent is so high. Wheat farmers and cattle ranchers, in contrast, need less profit per acre, but they need to grow it in larger quantities to make it worth shipping.

Brooklyn, New York, was once the nation’s most productive farmland. Surprising as it sounds, Brooklyn was—at least in the warmer months—essentially New York City’s backyard garden from the 1870s until the 1910s. By the 1870s, New York (and other urban areas) were so densely populated that people could no longer grow gardens in their yards, or keep pigs in the streets. So places like Brooklyn took up the slack, meeting urban demand with 60-acre farms that led the nation in yield per acre. New York City and Brooklyn shared a symbiotic relationship: the dung of the City’s mighty horse fleet (over a million pounds a day) fertilized Brooklyn’s fields, which yielded the produce that New Yorkers desired. Brooklyn seems to have fit von Thünen’s pattern perfectly.

What von Thünen did not anticipate, however, is the efficiency of railroads and the advent of the refrigerated rail car, which together effectively collapsed time and space. Soon Brooklyn’s agriculture gave way to the city we know today, and the growing of fresh produce spread south, to New Jersey, the Delmarva peninsula, Georgia, and Florida. There was increasingly a national market for almost all agricultural goods, not just wheat, corn, and livestock.

But the rule of distant markets—and the industrialization of agriculture as a whole—reached its apex in California. One could hardly get further away from the population centers of the Atlantic coast, and yet California has led U.S. production of some agricultural product from the 1860s until the present. California, in the words of historian Steven Stoll argues, became “the ultimate city-serving countryside.” Because the agricultural and economic systems pioneered in California have come to characterize American agriculture as a whole, we will spend a lot of time discussing the Golden State.

Industrialized California agriculture implied a thorough division of labor; interdependence between regions, businesses, government, and individuals; specialization in single cash crops; and, most importantly, intensification. Rather than extending their holdings by seeking new lands (which had been the general practice in the U.S.—think pioneers and the breaking of the plains), growers applied capital and technology to “rend every possible dollar” from existing land. Although incredibly productive, industrial agriculture also required a series of supporting structures—which California growers and all levels of government obligingly developed and sustained in the early twentieth century. High yields translated into a need for massive quantities of short-term labor, and as we will see, growers worked to ensure a ready supply of exploitable workers. The danger of overproduction led growers to form marketing associations that created demand through advertising. Monoculture along with exotic botanical imports effectively laid out a feast for a variety of pests and diseases; growers, in response, lobbied for breeding and chemical research programs through the USDA and local universities. The cultivator that emerged in California in the twentieth century was the agribusinessman (a term coined in the 1950s), seemingly far removed from the yeoman farmer ideal.

The federal government proved a powerful ally of industrial agriculturalists in the West and the South alike. The U.S. Department of Agriculture was created in 1862 as a cabinet level agency; the Morrill Land Grant Acts of 1862 and 1890 created agricultural and mechanical colleges (like the University of Georgia) throughout the nation; the Hatch Act of 1887 created a system of agricultural experiment stations; and the 1914 Smith-Lever Act created the cooperative extension service, which in theory placed a USDA agent in every farming county across the nation. The twentieth century has seen an agricultural version of the “iron triangle”, in which agribusiness interest groups provide funding and votes for congressmen and women, who in turn pass legislation favoring the USDA, who then pursues agribusiness-friendly policies. This “iron triangle” is reinforced by a revolving door of employment: the lobbyists, educators, and USDA bureaucrats who maintain the system have often been the same people.

IV. The Subversion of the Ideal: Labor in Industrialized Agriculture

Perhaps nowhere was the state more active in supporting industrial agriculture than in its adjudication of labor relations. And, some have argued, nowhere was agriculture more industrial than in its labor relations: “it was the experience of becoming employers, more than changes in methods, markets, and crops,” historian Cindy Hahmovitch contends, “that made a business of farming.”

The farm labor problem reached epic proportions in California. 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.

At least it came as a shock to a group of middle-class reformers. For novelist John Steinbeck, journalist Carey McWilliams, photographer Dorothea Lange, and economist Paul Taylor (among others), this “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. The dust bowl migrants were mostly of European descent, the seeming progeny 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 was what McWilliams called “the hidden California.” Rather than farms, the state’s agricultural enterprises were “Factories in the Field,” especially in the way they structured labor relations. Not only were farm workers prevented from becoming independent yeomen, the landowners likewise subverted the yeoman ideal by using violent “farm fascism” to control labor and produce their “Gunkist Oranges”, to use McWilliams’ vivid language.

The dust bowl migrants received the most national attention for their plight, but they represented just the latest in a series of labor pools that formed what one historian has called the “unhappy fraternity” of powerlessness, bound together by “occupational immobility.” Chinese immigrants dominated the California agricultural workforce until the 1880s, then Japanese immigrants until the early 1900s, then Mexicans and Filipinos through the 1930s.

In this way the industrialization of agriculture became an important “pull” factor for Asian and Mexican immigrants. But because these foreigners did not fit the vision of what America ought to be—that is, of European derivation—U.S. government officials sought to restrict their entry. The first tactic was to block certain groups altogether, starting with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and continuing with the 1907 Gentlemen’s Agreement with Japan, in which the Japanese promised to keep laborers from emigrating. But the Johnson Reed Act of 1924 introduced a new system of quotas based on national origin, creating the notion of illegal alien: “simultaneously a social reality and a legal impossibility,” to quote a prominent immigration historian. During World War II, the federal government addressed labor shortages by introducing the Mexican bracero (guest worker) program, which fashioned a state-sponsored “transnational Mexican labor force”—a kind of “imported colonialism.”

Whatever color they were, farmworkers in industrial agriculture were always among the most vulnerable, oppressed people in the nation. In part this was the responsibility of the landowners, who generally exploited farm labor whenever possible; in part labor unions were at fault for ignoring farmworkers or using ill-advised organizational methods. But as historians have pointed out, the state also played a key role. After the Civil War, the USDA effectively “became the mouthpiece of the nation’s most reactionary farmers” (primarily “white southern men”). Through labor allocation systems, control of federal relief funds, and outright strikebreaking, the USDA helped remake the U.S. in the South’s image, using “intimidation and coercion” to maintain a pliable workforce. The 1935 Wagner Act, for example, which granted labor unions the right to organize, explicitly excluded farmworkers. Without a means of organizing their own protests, farmworkers suffered an extreme disadvantage in improving their working and living conditions. “Farmworkers struggled without federal sanction,” Hahamovitch argues, “and as a result they were fatally weak.”

V. The Present: Food Riots, the Countercuisine Critique, and Industrial Organic

Though I am running out of space and time, I would like to conclude our discussion with a nod to present concerns with food production. How does the rise of the organic food, for example, relate to industrial agriculture? In the last twenty years, sustainable, chemical-free, humane food production has moved from critiquing to manifesting industrial capitalism. Just go into a Whole Foods supermarket and buy a half gallon of Horizon Organic Milk—made by agribusiness giant Dean Foods with non-petroleum-based inputs, but using essentially industrial methods. Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma is a very useful text for discussing this “industrial organic” agriculture.

One other recent phenomenon deserves attention. What do food riots have to do with industrial agriculture? Don’t we need more industrial-scale food production in order to feed the world’s hungry? There is a fair argument to this effect, but it is also worth pointing out that industrial agriculture created many of the conditions for rising food costs. By yoking agriculture to fossil fuels, industrial methods have grafted it into the global economy. Suddenly a war in the Middle East can translate into higher prices for rice in Haiti. In addition, the exportation of industrial agriculture to developing nations—the so-called “Green Revolution” of the latter twentieth century—may have increased production, but at the cost of undermining local food systems. The Green Revolution has thus made developing nations more vulnerable to the vagaries of global capitalism.

The way we get food has changed fundamentally over the last hundred years, and this transformation has formed an integral part of modern U.S. history. It is apparent, I hope, that understanding the history of industrial agriculture also helps to make sense of the present.

NOTES:
Steven Stoll, Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002), 8.
James Cobb, Seminar in U.S. History, 15 April 2008.
“Homestead Act (1862)”, accessed on 4/30/08 at http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=31
See Deborah Fitzgerald, Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003).
Wlliam Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991), 102.
Cronon, 107.
Cronon, 146.
Elizabeth Sanders, The Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 174.
Cronon, 48.
Shane Hamilton, “Market Gardening, Or Why New Jersey is Called the ‘Garden State’”, Food and Power Lecture, 4 February 2008. See also Marc Linder and Lawrence S. Zacharias, Of Cabbages and Kings County: Agriculture and the Formation of Modern Brooklyn (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999); and Cindy Hahamovitch, The Fruits of Their Labor: Atlantic Coast Farmworkers and the Making of Migrant Poverty, 1870-1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).
Steven Stoll, The Fruits of Natural Advantage: Making the Industrial Countryside in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), xii.
Ibid., xiii.
See Stoll, The Fruits of Natural Advantage; Douglas Sackman, Orange Empire: California and the Fruits of Eden (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); and Victoria Saker Woeste, The Farmers Benevolent Trust: Law and Agricultural Cooperation in Industrial America, 1865-1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
See Stoll, The Fruits of Natural Advantage.
Shane Hamilton, “Pork Politics, Pork Population”, Food and Power Lecture, 26 March 2008; and “Every Farm a Factory”, Food and Power Lecture, 5 March 2008. See also Fitzgerald, Every Farm a Factory.
Hahamovitch, 36.
John Steinbeck, “Starvation Under the Orange Trees”; Sackman, 267-277.
Carey McWilliams, Factories in the Field: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in California (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1939), 3.
Ibid., 249.
Cletus Daniel, Bitter Harvest: A History of California Farmworkers 1870-1941 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1981), 71.
On the use of different groups of immigrants in different periods and for different crops, see David Vaught, Cultivating California: Growers, Specialty Crops, and Labor, 1875-1920 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).
Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). On the construction of the United States as a racialized nation, see Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).
Ngai, 4.
Ibid., 128, 129.
Hahamovitch, 81.
Ibid., 112.
Ibid., 13.
Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (New York: Thomas Gale, 2006). See especially Section II and Chapter 9 for a discussion of industrial organic agriculture.

For too long, agricultural history has told the stories of commodity production alone. Scholarly treatments of the Columbian Exchange, meanwhile, have focused only on the organisms that traveled from place to place during the age of European exploration. According to Judith Carney, these are the blind spots that Black Rice aims to remedy. Carney’s story pairs consumption with production and knowledge systems with the seeds that crisscrossed the Atlantic.

Carney’s primary purpose may be “to place ingenuity in its proper setting”, to restore Africans to their rightful place in Atlantic history (8). And she spends a number of pages—perhaps too many, considering her emphasis on skills over seeds—carefully tracing the African origins of American rice. But one of her most significant innovations is her treatment of rice production as a knowledge system. Before the ascendance of mechanized crop production, Carney writes, “agriculture represented repositories of cultural knowledge built from generations of observation, trial, and error. Agriculture has long provided the tissue linking culture to environment, cultural identity to food” (136). The story of rice, then, must include not only its botanical heritage, not only cultivation techniques, but also how people processed and prepared it. For the Africans who carried rice cultivation to the Americas, rice was equally a crop and a food. Production and consumption were joined in a way that gave rice a long future as a staple. The West African cropping systems, to use modern parlance, were entirely sustainable.

Even given the possibility that Carney exaggerates the ecological appropriateness of African rice cultivation, it is hard to disagree with her argument that plantation economics profoundly disrupted this dynamic. This was especially the case in the processing rice, which in the colonial period had to be accomplished manually with mortar-and-pestle. The enormous scale of global consumption increased the demand for labor, transforming rice milling as “the echo of cultural identity” into “inhuman . . . labor”; mechanization of the process further eroded the cultural meaning that had been attached to processing rice (124). Commercial agriculture stretched the limits of both land and labor in the lowcountry, in part because an indigenous knowledge system for South Carolina rice was not allowed to develop gradually. The social and ecological limits went unrecognized.

I wonder if something similar may have happened in the peach industry. Peaches were not essential to the American diet, as rice was to Africans, but they played a role similar to that of apples described in Michael Pollan’s Botany of Desire: hog fodder, brandy, and, occasionally, human food. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, increasing anxieties about the sustainability of cotton production and the example of the California fruit industry led more and more southern (particularly Georgia) farmers to try peaches. Increased railroad efficiency and the refrigerated railcar made northern markets more accessible, and peach production rose precipitously: from 2.7 million trees in 1890 to 12 million in 1910. Much of this increase, I suspect, comprised growers who were new to peaches and had not grown them for local consumption (some had never grown anything before). These growers got into the business for the promise of large profits. The knowledge system required to grow peaches successfully was not given time to evolve gradually.

The result, unsurprisingly, was boom and bust agriculture. Georgia growers overproduced, stretching the limits of the northern markets and making themselves vulnerable to problems like San Jose Scale, plum curculio, and brown rot. Production peaked in 1928 at 10 million bushels, declined, and finally settled into a more even pattern after World War II. The growers in the business today are mostly long-time family enterprises—the ones with the knowledge system to grow peaches reliably.