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

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

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.

Larding the Lean Earth is a provocative work. In part this stems from Steven Stoll’s knack for turning a phrase. His descriptions of soil exemplify this sparkling prose. It is “the living tissue between economy and ecology,” he writes (13), and “the tablecloth under the banquet of civilization: no matter what people build on it, when it moves all the food and finery go crashing” (14). Stoll also takes seriously his role as educator, and the text is pocked with asides to the reader that make his intent clear. Nineteenth-century reformers “knew the stuff [dung] for what it was--” he writes in one example of this technique--“the partially digested wealth of their farms in a form that could be hauled to fields and made to turn another crop” (49). Stoll presents an historical “object lesson” (as he describes his account of South Carolina agriculture), in which he hopes to persuade us of a particular land ethic (121). This ideological commitment is even clearer in the epilogue, when he boldly declares that Amish farming is not anachronistic, but “the future of American agriculture” (216).

In this way, Larding parallels an older, more polemical work, The Unsettling of America, in which Wendell Berry famously laid out his case for the two tendencies in American culture: one rootless, rapacious, always looking for the next field or community to despoil, the other fixed and attentive to developing an intimate, sustainable relationship with the land. Stoll’s work, indeed, can be thought of as a more historically precise case study of Berry’s broader thesis. Perhaps better put, Stoll is drawing from the same deep well of cultural meaning that Berry used to such dramatic effect.

One wonders whether this ideological commitment leads Stoll to exaggerate the importance of improvement and of particular people within the movement. He acknowledges, of course, that the improvers were reaching at best 20 percent of Atlantic Coast farmers. A character like John Lorain, about whom even Stoll knows very little, becomes a heroic combination of democratic sentiment and sustainable agriculture in this story. On the other hand, this forthrightness is refreshing. The reader knows where Stoll stands, and it is in the dung-laced idyll of the ecologically sensitive Amish farmer, not in the cattle factories of industrial agriculture whose stench assaults him “like a wave of heat” (9). Described as it is in Larding, it is hard to disagree with his positive assessment of closed-system agriculture.

Read closely, however, Stoll’s story is infused with more ambivalence than one might expect from the prologue and epilogue. With the possible exception of Lorain, the improvers worked not only for agricultural sustainability but also their own class interests. Their system was not friendly to upward mobility. In order to be practiced on a large scale, it would have required maintaining a sizeable pool of landless labor, enough to cart around three thousand pounds of dung every three days. And as the example of South Carolina demonstrates, the system worked only under certain environmental conditions. Where pasture grasses failed to flourish, so too did convertible husbandry.

Stoll’s greatest success with this book is suggested by his opening conceit: that “what comes out of the other end of a cow opens a dynamic view to the environment” and society (9). This retelling of the antebellum clamor over migration, I think, provides an excellent introduction to what environmental (or agro-ecological) history offers to traditional historical narratives. While undergraduates might get lost somewhat in the numerous improvers, the story itself transfers well to lecture format. It brings home a sense of twenty-first-century loss: abandoned knowledge of soil, dung, plants, animals, and working (as opposed to recreational) relationships with the land.

Perhaps more than any other state, California is indelibly associated with what has been called “agribusiness” or “industrial agriculture.” The state’s specialty crops, propelled by powerful marketing organizations, have in many cases established such dominance that growers in other states have resigned themselves to local and niche markets. Georgia peach growers, for example, were national leaders at the start of the twentieth century, but are increasingly turning to local retail and mail-order gift baskets in order to boost revenue.

California’s dominance has had a seamy underbelly, however, one well documented by journalists, labor historians, and others horrified at the working conditions of California’s migrant laborers. Carey McWilliams’ 1939 Factories in the Field set the tone of righteous indignation for this brand of polemical history, a pattern that, according to historian David Vaught, has gone unquestioned for some 60 years.

In Cultivating California, Vaught asks if we even know what “industrial agriculture” means. By examining California specialty-crop growers “in the full context of their culture” (3), Vaught aims to carve out a kind of middle ground, demonstrating that some growers understood themselves neither as simple family farmers, nor as industrialist agribusinessmen, but as horticulturalists. These men were committed to “small, virtuous communities and economic development” (10). Cultivating California is a history of labor relations, but Vaught insists that such relationships be “analyzed in their agricultural context” (9). Fresno raisin-growers and Davisville almond-growers had different labor problems and proposed different labor solutions, differences that had a lot to do with their horticultural ideals.

To make his argument, Vaught follows four specialty-crop communities—Fresno raisins, Davisville almonds, Newcastle deciduous fruit, and Wheatland hops—chronologically through four periods of development. The first period, comprising the first two chapters, chronicles the crops’ commercial emergence from about 1875 to 1900. The horticultural settlement of each region except for Wheatland was accompanied by high rhetoric about the “pleasant and profitable” (44) way of life horticulture represented, as well as deeply frustrating experiences in managing labor. Chapter Three explores this continuing contradiction from 1900 to 1910, as growers adopted more progressive marketing techniques but remained dependent on the labor of Chinese and Japanese immigrants. The third period (Chapter Four) takes us up to World War I, introducing the Progressive state as a major influence in agricultural labor relations. Here Vaught reminds us that, unlike many farmers, California’s horticulturalists were anti-statist, resenting the intrusion of agricultural professionals into what they regarded as their areas of expertise. In Chapter Five, Vaught explains how this conservatism was transformed by the patriotic fervor and labor shortages engendered by World War I: “Without a pang of conscience,” he concludes, “growers now turned to translocal institutions and organizations, including the state, to control their ‘bugbear’ of labor” (186).

A couple of limitations detract somewhat from the book’s argument. First, a broader context could underscore the significance of these California specialty crop growers. It would be particularly interesting to trace the connections between the rhetoric of California growers and eastern contemporaries like Liberty Hyde Bailey and predecessors like A.J. Downing. What is the genealogy of the horticultural ideal that is so central to Vaught’s argument? Second, the organizational and governmental chaos of California’s Progressive era, which makes up so much of Chapters Four and Five, can bewilder at times. A more forceful articulation of what his study contributes to our understanding of “the roots of the states’ farm labor relations” (2) could have alleviated the confusion somewhat. Beyond a more complete picture of growers themselves, how does Vaught hope clarify the history of labor relations? Presumably, it is in tracing the transformation of specialty-crop growers from anti-statist yeomen to government-dependent labor lords with a powerful legislative lobby (Chapter Five), but this is never spelled out.

Still, Cultivating California succeeds admirably in setting apart California’s horticulturalists from other farmers and, more generally, emphasizing the diversity of California agriculture. He does this primarily by including the story of hop production in Wheatland, a choice that seems odd at first since hops were different in almost every way from California’s other specialty crops. But Vaught must refute McWilliams, who relied on the story of a 1913 labor riot on a Wheatland hop farm to argue that the farm worker unrest of the 1930s extended back into the nineteenth century. Hop producers are foils for Vaught’s real subjects, the growers of fruits and nuts. And despite the continued labor problems of the last sixty years, Vaught maintains a remarkably sympathetic posture toward these growers for whom the “moral responsibility” to farm still looms as large as the profit motive (191).

Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001)

David Vaught, Cultivating California: Growers, Specialty Crops, and Labor, 1875-1920 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999)

Contradictions make good material for history books. Find a group of people experiencing a conflict between two sets of ideals or a collision between their noble intentions and the reality they face, and you have the potential for a good story. These kinds of quandaries may crop up somewhat less commonly as the subjects of popular histories, but academics are beholden to complexity. Like cattle with their egrets, historical traditions are symbiotically accompanied by scholarship that “problematizes” and debunks, frequently by locating contradictions.

Two relatively recent works exemplify this relationship of revision. Gary Gerstle’s American Crucible is a sweeping synthesis of two historical interpretations—America as beacon of democracy and equal opportunity, and America as racial imperialist—and combines them into one quandary-infused narrative. Theodore Roosevelt was just the first of many twentieth-century U.S. leaders who struggled to reconcile what Gerstle terms “civic nationalism” with “racial nationalism.” From the Spanish-American War to the Cold War, Gerstle argues that “these two powerful and contradictory ideals” have decisively shaped U.S. history. Gerstle skillfully keeps the contradiction in play throughout the text, neither condemning nor praising the United States. This attention to complexity is one reason why reviewers have called his work “insightful and nuanced” and “deeply textured.”

David Vaught’s Cultivating California, a tightly focused history of labor relations in California specialty-crop agriculture from 1875 to 1920, is different in almost every way from American Crucible. But Vaught’s raisin, almond, and fruit growers faced a contradiction not unlike that of Theodore Roosevelt and his ideological descendents: they sought a dignified, independent, community-oriented life and business, while depending upon the exploitation of cheap immigrant labor.

In what follows, I consider each work in turn, highlighting its major themes, evaluating its argument, and delineating what I take to be its most important contributions. Without attempting to pronounce a winner, since the books are competing in altogether different races, I will argue that in its narrow scope, mundane subject matter, and attention to detail, Vaught’s study provides a helpful perspective on Gerstle’s argument. While Gerstle soars over the American political and cultural landscape, Vaught digs into the agricultural and economic specifics, providing a view of Gerstle’s synthesis from the ground.

Cindy Hahamovitch’s moral clarity is refreshing. Without pausing to apologize or equivocate, The Fruits of Their Labor exposes the greed, oppression, conflict, and courage that characterized the world of migrant farmworkers along the Atlantic coast from Reconstruction to World War II. Thoroughly engaged in the story—Hahamovitch’s narrative clips along nicely—I was amazed that it had not been told before. If her hope is to convince that the plight of the migrant farm worker was, as she puts it, “a product of a specific and alterable relationship between farmworkers, farmers, and the state,” then she has succeeded (13). I am convinced.

In spite of the depressing plotline, her story is actually quite hopeful—the relationship is “alterable.” In this way The Fruits of Their Labor contrasts strikingly with David Vaught’s Cultivating California, a tale of California specialty crop labor relations from the angst-ridden perspective of the growers. In Vaught’s telling, the growers were much more complex characters, men of ideals, culture, and community who struggled to reconcile their bucolic vision with their need for cheap, seasonal, labor. (Perhaps this difference is due to the different geographic settings, but I think it has more to do with the authors’ predilections.) The reader is left with more sympathy for the growers, but also more pessimism that anything could have been done to right the situation.

Still, Hahamovitch’s explanations are simplistic at times. Her argument that the “experience of becoming employers, more than changes in methods, markets, and crops . . . made a business of farming,” is intriguing, but she fails to give us a sense of this transformation from farmers to businessmen (36). I suspect that it was more complicated than she makes it out to be. Frank Whitehurst alone of all the farmers in the book comes out as a reasonable man, although she concedes that “to make him out to be the only reasonable farmer along the East Coast is unfair” (164). If this is true, his uniqueness in Hahamovitch’s account is striking.

Workers, too, sometimes seem one-dimensional at times. When comparing New Jersey’s reliance on black southern labor in the 1890s and the 1930s, she makes little of the fact that the black southerners were coming from different parts of the South (upper South in the 1890s, cotton belt in the 1930s), and that their different characteristics may have contributed to their different reception in New Jersey. It is only the New Jersey farmers that have changed, taking up “the litany of the New South as their own”—meaning that they now blame blacks for their labor problems (135). (She also does not explain what exactly this has to do with the New South—but perhaps this just reflects my own ignorance.)

Hahamovitch starts off describing farmworkers as “movers, strivers, and self-exploiters” (36). While she demonstrates decisively the first two designations, the last is only implied. Presumably she is referring to the (reluctant) willingness of farmworkers to work for unreasonably low wages and their failure to organize effectively, but she leaves me curious as to what farmworkers contributed to their own exploitation.