352 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 36 illus., 7 tables, 1 map, append.,
notes, bibl., index
$55.00 cloth
ISBN 0-8078-2658-8
$19.95 paper
ISBN 0-8078-4983-9
Published: Fall 2001
Add
to cart
View
cart
Checkout
|
A World of
Its Own
Race, Labor, and
Citrus in the Making of Greater Los Angeles, 1900-1970
by Matt
Garcia
Copyright
(c) 2001 by the University of North Carolina Press. All
rights reserved.
Chapter 1.
The Ideal Country Life: The Development of Citrus Suburbs in Southern California
This citrus belt complex of peoples, institutions, and relationships has no parallel in rural life in America and nothing quite like it exists elsewhere in California. It is neither town nor country, neither rural nor urban. It is a world of its own. Carey McWilliams, Southern California Country: An Island on the Land
Citrus fruit has always possessed a unique status among the many crops that make up California's vast agroecosystem. While wheat, cotton, and grapes have had their images tarnished by revelations of labor exploitation, grower vigilantes, and absentee landlords, citrus has usually escaped such criticism. Even today, the image of the orange evokes a vision of prosperity in abundance. Witness the opening monologue to the recent 1950s/noir genre film L.A. Confidential in which actor Danny DeVito uses the citrus groves as a metaphor for the wealth of Southern California. While flashing images of women swimming through a pool full of oranges, DeVito entices the American public to come to Los Angeles where "the orange grove stretches as far as the eye can see, there are jobs aplenty, and land is cheap."
Such depictions are consistent with those conceded by even the most strident critics of California agribusiness. Carey McWilliams, a prolific and insightful writer on the subject, acknowledged the seemingly impenetrable aura possessed by the orange tree and its grower when he wrote: "With its rich black-green shade, its evergreen foliage, and its romantic fragrance, it is the millionaire of all the trees of America. . . . The aristocrat of the orchards, it has, by a natural affinity drawn to it the rich and the well-born, creating a unique type of rural-urban aristocracy. There is no crop in the whole range of American agriculture the growing of which confers quite the same status that is associated with ownership of an orange grove."[1] In spite of his criticism of growers and their exploitation of minority laborers, McWilliams could not help but appreciate the citrus farms because "they have contributed as much, perhaps, as any single factor to the physical charm of the region."[2]
The image or "look" of citrus has contributed to the mystique surrounding the fruit. Numerous writers and scholarsLos Angeles boosters and debunkers alikehave identified the orange, and to a lesser extent the lemon and grapefruit, as "a symbol of California's call to civilized rural life."[3] Crate labels produced by the industry's marketing cooperative, Sunkist (the metonymic alias for the California Fruit Growers Exchange), perpetuated these images by integrating scenes of the California Spanish Missions with contemporary views of the linear citrus orchard. Through the "semiotics of selling," historian Douglas Sackman has argued, Sunkist recreated the nature of oranges to increase their consumption and sales throughout North America during the first half of the twentieth century.[4] Advertisements of the "sun kissed" orange came to represent a number of ideas, including health, wealth, and the achievement of the American dream.
These images, however, concealed more than they revealed. In an attempt to get behind "the orange curtain," this study focuses on the reality of citrus farming, in particular, the labor that produced the sweet fruit, idyllic landscape, and phenomenal profits. Although analyzing the "semiotics of selling" contributes to an overall understanding of the citrus industry, I am not concerned with the refashioning, repackaging, and re-presenting of citrus fruits by marketing agencies and advertisers. Rather, I am interested in the labor choices made by citrus ranchers, as well as the recommendations offered by citrus industry leaders, government officials, and community representatives. Integral to this project is a consideration of how labor transformed the "landscape"both physically and culturallyof a region that experienced intensive citrus cultivation. Since citrus grew throughout California during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I have limited my survey to that portion of Southern California regarded as the "most highly developed and largest contiguous citrus area in the state."[5] This region, referred to by Carey McWilliams as "the citrus belt," stretched sixty miles eastward from Pasadena, through the San Gabriel and San Bernardino Valleys, to the town of Riverside.[6]
From the beginnings of the industry in the 1870s to the height of citrus production in the 1920s, industry and government literature depicted citrus ranching as an ideal occupation for eastern and midwestern investors. The warm, dry climate of Southern California, the availability of land, and the profitability of citriculture offered an attractive alternative to potential transplants nearing retirement, or those simply tired of cold weather and hard work. State and local government agencies, industry spokespeople, and the Southern Pacific Railroad Company produced pages and pages of promotional literature espousing the virtues of owning and operating a citrus farm in the Southland. For example, A. J. Cook, State Commissioner of Horticulture, published California Citrus Culture in 1913, a manual explaining to "the novice" the essential ingredients for a profitable citrus farm. Cook assured potential investors that a small orange grove of from ten to forty acres "[could] be cared for by its owner with very slight aid from others, and thus the greatest handicap in agricultureinability to secure laboris solved."[7] Moreover, Cook emphasized that the labor, "never too arduous and uniform the entire year through," promised health, vigor, happiness, and comfort "to the owner of a citrus grove that is properly located and well cared for."[8]
Promoters of citriculture often argued that citrus possessed a natural affinity for Southern California's environment. According to one writer, "the same amount of well-directed industry upon a small area of land will produce more return [here] than in almost any section of the United States." He attributed this condition to nature, suggesting that "the difference between this and many parts of our land is that [here] nature seems to work with man, and not against him."[9] Indeed, writers often projected the image of the yeoman farmer as the ideal citrus rancher and the foundation for a new and improved society in the far West.
Such visions conformed to the agrarian or pastoral myth associated with agricultural development in North America. Developed by Thomas Jefferson and Norman cartographer St. John de Crèvecoeur in the eighteenth century, the agrarian philosophy rested on the idea that American society would expand indefinitely westward. Thomas Jefferson advocated the development of agrarian communities because he believed that agriculture constituted the most virtuous of human endeavors and would strengthen the moral and democratic character of the nation. In his famous Notes on Virginia, Query XIX, Jefferson articulated this philosophy: "Is it best then that all our citizens should be employed in its improvement, or that one half should be called off from that to exercise manufactures and handicraft arts for the other? Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue."[10]
Jefferson acted upon this belief by prescribing a plan of orderly agricultural development in the frontier regions of his home state of Virginia. He advised that no more than ten people settle within a square mile, that primogeniture be abolished, and that education and government facilities be made conveniently accessible to all citizens. The Virginia legislature ultimately rejected Jefferson's original homestead plan, but his ideas significantly influenced land use patterns in the state and he successfully established one of the first public universities in the union.[11] Although regarded as utopian by critics, the philosophy developed into an "ideal" for Western conquest and settlement in the subsequent century.
In his classic study, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth, Henry Nash Smith argues that Americans often idealized Jefferson's concept of the agrarian community without observing why he cherished the philosophy. On the most basic level, the agricultural settlement was universally recognized as the line separating civilization from savagerythe domestication of the "Wild West" and the creation of a "civilized" and "productive" society. Yet Jefferson valued the tight-knit, agrarian settlement not so much for what it contributed to the American economy, but rather for the guiding principles it provided Americans. Jefferson believed that the ideal agricultural communities promoted material equality and discouraged social stratification. Notwithstanding his narrow focus on white, landowning, male suffrage, Jefferson's key contribution to American political thought was his emphasis on the creation of a nation based on family farmers-proprietors who performed all of their own labor. He believed such investments would lead to a populace deeply committed to participatory democracy and the creation of institutions that protected their interests. The equitable distribution of land and the common purpose of farming suggested a process of horizontal, or "even" development that Marx and his followers would later render as incompatible with a capitalist system. In fact, American settlement patterns during the nineteenth century contributed to the critique of Jefferson's philosophy as utopian. Ultimately, argues Smith, "the equalitarian overtones of this ideal were by no means acceptable to the country as a whole," and the "deeper belief in social stratification" prevailed.[12]
Americans' misinterpretation of the agrarian tradition generated important contradictions. The philosophy's implicit dependence on "nature" as the great equalizer conflicted with the notion of dominance inherent to capitalist societies. How could one adhere to the agrarian philosophy and accept social stratification if "labour in the earth" produced a more equalitarian society? This contradiction led Smith to conclude, "the capital difficulty of the American agrarian tradition is that it accepted the paired but contradictory ideas of nature and civilization as a general principle of historical and social interpretation."[13] Equally important (though not considered by Smith): What if the labor that produces this virtue is performed by someone other than the farmer? Indeed, as historian Jack Kirby argues, there is no place in Jeffersonian agrarianism for nonfamily labor, the likes of which came to be employed on American farms during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Consequently, today we often speak of this tradition not as the "agrarian philosophy," but rather the "agrarian myth."[14]
Americans "resolved" the contradiction between nature and civilization by redefining the relationship of humans to the natural world. In The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, Leo Marx argues that prior to the industrial revolution, early capitalism in America developed vis-à-vis "geographic nature" rather than against social forms (such as feudalism), thus making "the relation between mankind and the physical environment . . . more than usually decisive." By the mid-nineteenth century, however, the predominance of technology produced yet another interpretation of the agrarian, or "pastoral" ideal. Rather than define nature strictly as external to human beings, Americans began to see technology, the natural world, and people as part of a universal nature. According to Marx, a "rhetoric of the technological sublime" assimilated technology into the natural world, while a "rhetoric of the nature sublime" "humanized" nature. By the end of the nineteenth century, Americans saw themselves sharing a common destinyuniting technology and nature to "[create] a society in the image of a garden."[15]
Los Angeles boosters embraced the concept of the garden as an accurate depiction of Southern California. The Southern Pacific Railroad Company, a major landowner in California and the primary transporter of citrus fruits, used "garden" tours of the region to lure midwesterners and easterners westward. Advertising "the way through the wonderful fruit and flower garden of Southern California," the company's tourist magazine The Inside Track characterized "citrus land" as one integrated landscape of cities, orchards, and mountains where residents lived in harmony with their environment. Tourists experienced a symphony of colors and aromas traveling eastward along the snow-clad peaks of Mount San Antonio, Mount San Bernardino, and Mount San Gorgonio. As the train coursed through the "orange belt" of the San Gabriel and San Bernardino Valleys, tourists witnessed the bright green of alfalfa fields and grape vineyards, the silver and gray of alluvial sands, the golden brown of mountain walls, and the sweet smell and deep green of orange groves. Passengers ended their trip in the archetypal citrus colony, Riverside, possessing "all the advantages of an unsurpassed rural district and a model city."[16]
Although Southern Pacific promotional writers advanced an idyllic image of the landscape, the trip reflected a pattern of economic, social, and cultural development unique to the region prior to World War II. Los Angeles depended heavily on agriculture and industry in its "hinterlands" as a foundation for its economy. In addition to oil, citrus formed, to quote historians Ronald Tobey and Charles Wetherell, "the engine" of a regional economy. Between 1899 and 1937, the multibillion-dollar citrus industry in Southern California grew at a rate unparalleled by any agricultural product in the world, and unequaled by most other industries in the region. In 1913, ranchers received almost $40 million in return on their investment, paying out approximately one-third of this total in transportation cost. By 1930, citrus growers in the five counties of Southern CaliforniaLos Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, and Venturagrossed a phenomenal $144.6 million. As a point of comparison, the area's combined manufacturing wages earned in the movies, oil, and aircraft industries totaled $196 million. Moreover, land under citrus cultivation in Southern California increased from 83,600 acres in 1903 to more than 329,700 in 1944. Although the initial investment required a substantial amount of money and patience (trees did not bear fruit of marketable quality until five years after planting), the payoff was potentially very high. For example, the owner of an average, fully productive, debt-free ten-acre grove in 1929 earned $2,800four times the per capita income of Americans.[17]
Urban planners, geographers, and historians studying Los Angeles have commented on the unique structure of Southern California society. Dispersed economic development mitigated the formation of a city organized around a downtown district. Los Angeles's dependence on citrus and oil during its formative years significantly shaped what today many scholars regard as a "polynuclear" metropolis.[18] While oil drilling and refining spurred urban development south of Los Angeles towards San Pedro, the establishment of citrus cities throughout the San Gabriel Valley expanded the metropolis eastward.[19] In Los Angeles County, towns varying in size from Pasadena to Pomona and Ontario served as nuclei for local control and community development throughout the region. Although the California Fruit Growers Exchange (CFGE), the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, and the Southern Pacific Company influenced the expansion of the citrus industry from their offices based in Los Angeles, growers successfully organized local clubs, grower associations, water companies, and chambers of commerce that decentralized this agriculture-based economy. According to famous Los Angeles lover and historian Reyner Banham, this spatial arrangement resembled an "instant townscape" seventy square miles wide rather than a traditional city.[20]
In analyzing the roots of Los Angeles's postmodern geography, urban theorists and historians have debated its cause and effect. While most scholars interpret Los Angeles' development as haphazard and random, state and metropolitan officials, investors, and city boosters prior to World War II celebrated the settlement patterns and eclectic economy of Southern California. For example, in Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth-Century Metropolis, Greg Hise demonstrates that urban planners and real estate developers intentionally "planned dispersion of jobs, housing, and services" throughout the metropolitan landscape beginning in the 1920s. Similarly, historian Virginia Scharf called 1920s Los Angeles a "great, diffuse urban agglomeration" that "would prove to be the prototype for twentieth-century American cities."[21] Contrary to the city/suburb dichotomy subscribed to by traditional urban theorists, Los Angeles officials and investors embraced "suburbanization" as urbanization.
The Southern Pacific, CFGE, and real estate developers were not alone in their enthusiasm for Los Angeles' unique landscape. The Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce (LACC), the agency responsible for organizing the city's economic growth, acknowledged the importance of agriculture to the regional economy. The LACC aggressively promoted agricultural development in the county by publishing literature that compared the Southland to the most productive regions of the Mediterranean. In 1907, the agency strongly endorsed a bond issue that supported the construction of the L.A. Aqueduct and advocated the use of this water partly for the expansion of fruit and vegetable farms. Not exclusively committed to the growth of industry, the LACC pushed an agenda that balanced manufacturing with agriculture on a regional level. Beginning in 1888 and extending throughout the 1920s, the LACC published the booklet Los Angeles: The City and County in which author Harry Ellington Book outlined the various economic opportunities available to newcomers throughout the Southland. In his section on San Gabriel Valley, Book referred to the citrus belt as the "The Ideal Country Life" and appealed to a "back to the land" sentiment popular among Americans at the turn of the century. According to Book, "in no other section can an acre of land be made to yield products of so great value." Highlighting its unique blend of rural and urban characteristics he added, "here may be found beautiful rural homes, whose owners are within touch of social life, and enjoy the best features of the city and country combined."[22]
By 1918, the agency maintained a department entirely devoted to agriculture and allied industries. Headed by the indefatigable George Pigeon Clements, the department quickly grew into one of the most influential government agencies in California and the West, influencing farm operations from Fresno to the Mexican border. Clements believed that the prosperity of a great city or metropolis depended on its ability not only to feed itself, but also to dominate regional, and if possible, national markets. Southern California possessed an environment unusually endowed with rich agricultural land that allowed it to achieve these two objectives. In a 1924 article for the Los Angeles Examiner, Clements boasted that Los Angeles had become "the perishable fruit and vegetable garden of the United States" through the combination of water reclamation and a total use of "the most valuable acreage on the Western Hemisphere." "Los Angeles must depend upon the husbandman for her food," he wrote, "and every acre of ground must be made to bear its full burden to this end." Given the extensive agricultural development accomplished during the first two decades of the twentieth century, Clements assured readers that "there is no longer any back country; the city's sphere of influence has brought the so-called back country to constitute a part of itself."[23] During the 1920s and 1930s, Clements downplayed suburban/urban distinctions and made farming in Southern California the business of the LACC and the city. He took particular interest in the citrus industry, frequently speaking at local grower association conferences, coordinating meetings between ranchers, and representing their interests in Congress and the California State Assembly.
Government agencies interested in improving citrus yields and increasing profits also contributed to the success and importance of citrus in the first three decades of the twentieth century. The State Commission of Horticulture and the University of California invested in the industry by supporting scientific studies of geography and fruit. From the fruit-growing "boom" of the 1880s to the turn of the century, farmers used a costly process of trial and error to determine the most appropriate places to cultivate citrus. By 1910, geographers' surveys of the land eliminated much of the risk and helped the industry realize its full potential in the coastal portions of Southern California, particularly the Los Angeles basin. Studies conducted at the University of California's Citrus Experiment Station established in Riverside in 1913 revealed that the proximity of farms to mountains and foothills determined the type and quality of citrus. In Los Angeles County, the San Gabriel and San Bernardino mountains provided a necessary watershed and windbreak, as well as the right combination of soil and climate. Since most water runoff occurred below ground level in detrital cones, farmers planted citrus crops in the porous alluvial soils beneath the towering Sierra Madre range of the inland valley and along the slopes of the coastal mountains.
Climate was the principal environmental factor that made Southern California an ideal location for the commercial production of citrus fruits. Low-lying fog and cool breezes from the Pacific Ocean chilled the coastal plains and made frost a constant concern for farmers. Off the valley floor, foothills rose above the onshore flow of heavy, moist air providing warmer conditions more favorable to citrus. Higher up the mountain soil became too rocky for agriculture and the threat of frost increased during the chilly winter months. Consequently, farmers planted citrus fruits in thermal "belts" ending sixty to one hundred miles east from Los Angeles.[24] Researchers discovered that the hardiness of oranges, lemons, and grapefruits varied according to climate and soil types as one ascended from the valley floors. Ranchers planted oranges and grapefruits at lower levels because of their greater tolerance for cold weather, while frost-sensitive lemons grew at slightly higher elevations where mostly warmer air resided.
Among oranges, Valencias and Washington navels occupied different places in the citrus belt. Since Valencias possessed seeds and were used primarily for juice, farmers cared more about their quantity than quality. Consequently, ranchers grew Valencias near coastal ranges and further down the inland valleys. In the interior, a combination of dry desert breezes, low atmospheric moisture, and the threat of high-elevation frost produced oranges of higher sugar content with a deep reddish-orange hue. Farmers took advantage of such conditions by planting the seedless navel in these districts. Regarded as the sweetest eating-orange and the "autocrat of the price list," the navel thrived in a narrow belt that extended along the San Gabriel Valley's inner-mountain foothills from Pasadena to San Bernardino and Redlands.
Zones of agricultural production produced not only profits, but also an aesthetic quality to the landscape unparalleled by any other farming region in the United States. The variety of crops generated a diversity of textures and colors that impressed visitors and attracted investors and newcomers. Appreciating the "visible tokens of invisible soil and climatic variations," Carey McWilliams described a typical view of the San Gabriel Valley prior to World War II: "Alfalfa, grain, sugar beets, and other crops not injured by frost, are planted in the lowlands; farther up the slopes appear the belts of grapes and fruit crops, still higher, and usually in the form of a dark-green horseshoe curve around the rim of the valleys, is the orange belt; and, still higher on the slopes, are the zones of lemons and avocados."[25]
The physical landscape contributed substantially to the social organization of the citrus belt. In the coastal regions of Orange and Los Angeles Counties, Valencia groves predominated. Since the Valencia typically grew on large commercial farms that contributed to lower population density and fewer townships, a "rural coloration" characterized development in these areas. In the inland district of the Washington navels, however, growers engaged in more intensive farming. Ranchers raised navels in clusters since these oranges tended to be more sensitive to soil and climatic variations. Initially, the high-yielding ten-acre farm referred to by various promotional writers predominated in these areas, producing greater numbers of residents and more townships, including Pasadena, Monrovia, Duarte, Azusa, Glendora, Covina, San Dimas, Pomona, Claremont, Upland, and Ontario. Often, groves came right to the doorsteps of growers' homes.[26]
Since residential districts preceded or simultaneously developed with the groves, these communities exhibited an eclectic mix of urban and rural characteristics. Often, these "colonies" coalesced around the cultural and/or religious backgrounds of settlers. For example, in 1873, D. M. Berry of Indianapolis organized fifty families from his home state into the Indiana Colony of California. This group constituted the original members of the San Gabriel Orange Grove Association that founded Pasadena. Further east, members of the Church of the Brethren founded the town of Lordsburg (renamed La Verne), and Mormon missionaries organized the colony that became San Bernardino. Even "secular" colonies prided themselves on their high degree of homogeneity. Congregationalists in the town of Claremont tended to dictate the morals of that community, while city officials throughout the citrus belt enforced strict temperance laws. These culturally homogeneous communities eased the transition into a new environment for many migrants, and perpetuated the illusion that the small town of the Midwest and East could be recreated in Southern California.[27]
Investors found that by organizing into blocks, they could more easily control resources. Land purchases by groups rather than individuals allowed migrants to place more acreage under citrus cultivation, thereby transforming the environment more rapidly and radically. Strength in numbers also permitted them to form irrigation districts or companies that controlled local water resources. George Chaffey, for example, established the town of Ontario in 1882 by purchasing land, founding a colony, and organizing the San Antonio Water Company. Chaffey harnessed water flowing out of the San Antonio Canyon and built delivery systems that made the valley below blossom into one of the richest citrus- and grape-growing regions in California. His experiments in hydroelectric power provided Ontario all the amenities of a big city, including well-lit streets and eventually an electric car that carried residents from the citrus heights to downtown. In 1903, the U.S. government honored Ontario by selecting it as the standard of American Irrigation Colonies. Federal engineers constructed a miniaturized version of the "model colony" for exhibition at the St. Louis World's Fair held the following year.[28]
Ontario epitomized the social and spatial organization of most citrus belt towns. Distinguished by a strict adherence to a set of ideals determined by its founders, colonies reflected the combined influence of agrarian social theory and scientific management. In planning his colony, Chaffey followed four fundamental principles: "1) [equal] distribution of water to each [share]holder . . . irrespective of his distance from the source; 2) construct a main thoroughfare from one end of the settlement to the other and lay it out in such a way that it will be a thing of beauty forever; 3) provide a college for the agricultural education of the people of the colony and for the general education of their children; and 4) secure the best possible class of settlers by a reversionary clause in the deeds to each allotment forbidding absolutely the sale of intoxicating liquor."[29] Seeking to set a new standard for agricultural communities, Chaffey subdivided the best land of his 2,500-acre tract into 10-acre lots, each one possessing a street or avenue frontage. Streets led directly to a town site comprised of 640 acres, one-half of which was deeded to trustees as a free endowment for the Chaffey Agricultural College.[30]
Chaffey's plan to place an imaginary grid upon the land and map out a complete vision of society reflected the Jeffersonian philosophy of settlement. Chaffey believed that through careful planning, he could promote republican and Christian values, educate citizens about advancements in agriculture, and elevate the general level of society. For Chaffey, success depended on access to government and education and the fair and equitable distribution of natural resources. The settlement of families on small, ten-acre farms ensured a manageable population density, while well-planned roads made downtown available to everyone. Last, the linearity of the community conformed to Victorian standards of beauty and attracted more investors to the town. Reyner Banham admired Ontario for initiating a pattern of "urban" development for greater Los Angeles. He wrote: "the general impression is that the citizens of Ontario built a 'garden city' and left out the 'city' part, urban homesteaders imposing their ideal of suburbs without urbs on the pattern of Greater Los Angeles almost before it had begun to take shape, a portent of the way the whole metropolis would grow."[31]
As David Roediger demonstrates in his book Wages of Whiteness, this "settler ideology" depended on racialized notions of land use that rationalized the dispossession of natural resources from Native Americans. During the early days of the republic, white imaginations of improvident Indians represented the polar opposite of Anglo-Saxon industriousness. As Anglo settlers moved into the West during the nineteenth century, Mexican, or "Iberian/Spanish" settlers also served as a counterpoint to "hardworking whites." The settler ideology held that "lazy" Native Americans and Mexicans had failed to 'husband' or 'subdue' the resources God had provided and thus should forfeit these resources. Spanish missionization and Anglo campaigns to eradicate and marginalize California Indians reduced the size and strength of Native American opposition to settlement schemes. Rather than seeing native peoples as a threat to his vision, Chaffey perpetuated an American tradition dating back to the American Revolution by drawing upon the mythical/historical Native American male as a symbol of the new colonies' "independence." Chaffey christened his first colony Etiwanda as homage to an Indian Chief his uncle Benjamin knew in Canada, and named Ontario after his former Canadian home, a name derived from the Indian nation that inhabited the land prior to European settlement. These names served as a magnet for Canadian and eastern white settlers, but also displaced the history of Southern California Gabrieleno Indians with references to idealized and romantic visions of "noble savages" from the Northeast.[32]
More often "colonists" like Chaffey confronted mestizo and Californio (elite, landholding Mexican) families that still occupied, if not owned, the land. White migrants to California celebrated their "Iberian" predecessors for engaging in agriculture and livestock raising, but faulted them for the modest scale of their enterprises. Newcomers judged Californios' dependence on cattle raising as a failure to realize the potential value of California land and a critical reason for their financial demise during the second half of the nineteenth century. Cattle raising symbolized "fixed wealth," while land ownership and development represented regenerative wealth that would escalate property values. Contrary to the "pastoral" economies of the Spanish and Mexican era, Chaffey envisioned a fully irrigated California, producing commercial fruits and vegetables that would integrate the state into a national and global economy.[33]
Native Americans and Californios, therefore, served as a foil to Chaffey's foresight and ingenuity in the popular accounts and contemporary opinions of Ontario history. As Chaffey biographer J. Alexander writes, upon Chaffey's first visit to the "García Ranch" situated on the "Cucamonga Plain," he saw "lying at his feet a colony settled by prosperous people setting a standard of comfort formerly deemed unattainable by ordinary people, extracting a generous living from a soil thought by generations of Spanish proprietors to be incapable of settlement" [italics added]. In contradistinction to native and Mexican settlers who had inhabited the region for hundreds of years prior to white settlement, Chaffey himself reflected: "from the plateau at the foot of the mountain I obtained a bird's-eye view of the whole area I proposed to acquire, and while I was standing there looking at it, I saw what Ontario was to and did become." In an account that includes a trip down "El Camino Realthe Spanish King's Highway of the Mission Era," Alexander reports that Chaffey "clinched on the spot" a deal to buy 1,000 acres with water rights from the "easy-going" Portuguese seaman, Captain García.[34] According to Alexander, García had "dabbled in irrigation in a small way," but relied primarily on sheep ranching as his main source of income, a business commonly pursued by Californios, Portuguese, and Basque immigrants prior to the settlement of citrus farmers. To whites, these practices constituted a more wasteful use of land than cattle raising since most saw goats and sheep as small, "scrubby" animals that possessed even less market value than steer and cows.[35] Chaffey's land acquisition and subdivision plans, therefore, represented the dawning of a new era in Southern California in which the random, "pre-capitalists" practices of Native Americans, Californios, and non-Anglo predecessors would be replaced by orderly, commercial agriculture.
The family run, ten-acre farm also served as a response to populism of the 1880s and 1890s. The inter-racial alliances and tenant class solidarity that characterized pre-1890s populism contrasted with Chaffey's vision of "whiteness" and agrarian democracy, and constituted a real, if distant, alternative to the "model colony." Chaffey's emphasis on the development of small, owner-operated, high-yielding farms eliminated the practice of tenant farming, and more importantly, sharecroppers themselves. By basing the colony on the equal distribution of land among financially independent, white property owners, poor whites and African Americans would not find a place in the community.[36]
Chaffey reflected the values prevalent among Americans as they approached the turn of the century. Unlike Jefferson, Chaffey saw his scheme as a money-making venture. Settlers received property not by rights of citizenship, but rather through investment. Second, Chaffey's love of engineering fueled his interest in the development of cities. Not merely an irrigationist, Chaffey sought ways of converting hydraulic energy into electricity on a massive scale. His success in providing electrical power to Ontario attracted the attention of federal, state, and local planners, and launched his career as an ingenious and revolutionary mercenary city planner. In 1882, Los Angeles officials hired Chaffey to organize the Los Angeles Electric Company, the electrical parent to the gigantic Los Angeles Gas and Electric Corporation. He made Los Angeles the first city in the United States, if not in the world, to be lighted exclusively by electricity. In 1885, the Victorian Irrigation Company wooed Chaffey away from Southern California to establish the town of Mildura in Australia.[37]
Uniting agriculture with technology to build better communities constituted an important organizing principal for city planners and investors in Southern California at the turn of the century. By World War I, communities throughout the citrus beltfrom Pasadena, to Ontario, to Riverside and Redlandsenjoyed a higher standard of living than most Americans. Yet, citrus belt residents measured success not merely by the size of their bank accounts, but also by the predominance of luxuries and benefits not typically afforded to farming communities. Following the tenets of the City Beautiful Movement, investors and city planners believed that the construction of luxury hotels, banks, theaters, mansions, churches, and colleges served as a testament to the affluence of citriculture and the intelligence of the citrus grower. A. J. Cook expressed the belief held by many citrus growers when he wrote: "We all love and are ennobled by our environment where loveliness is dominant; and so it follows that citrus fruit growers will be generally marked by refinement and culture."[38]
Throughout the citrus belt, city elites "beautified" their cities with tree-lined streets and neighborhood parks. George Chaffey set the standard with his carefully designed Euclid Avenue, a double-drive, two-hundred-foot-wide boulevard marked out by four rows of eucalyptus, pepper, and palm trees with a strip in the center for trolley tracks. To advertise Ontario's irrigation system, Chaffey built a large fountain at the intersection of Euclid and the Pacific Electric and Southern Pacific railways that spouted water every time a passenger train passed through downtown. Similarly, Pasadena growers flaunted their wealth by constructing elaborate rococo-style mansions along Orange Grove Avenue near the heart of town. In Riverside, as early as 1895, residents boasted the highest per capita income in the United States.[39] To exhibit the community's affluence, city planners enforced zoning laws and implemented architectural design standards based on Mission Revival and Victorian styles. Between 1890 and 1930, citrus money transformed Riverside into one of the most ornate and lush built-environments in Southern California: the "English garden" meets the "desert oasis." The twin references of "Spanish" California and Victorian England, common among architecture throughout the region, served as "a visual sampling of power, of displaced wealth and command" unifying a narrative of conquest, past and present. Citrus belt residents celebrated the Spanish for subduing nature and native populations and saw themselves as the new Anglo-Saxon "conquistadores," remaking the Southern California environment into a productive and congenial landscape.[40]
The conditions of the "citriscape" stood in stark contrast to the state of agriculture across the rest of the United States. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, government officials, reformers, and commentators lamented the decline of the family farm in North America. Multi-acre, bonanza farms on cheap Western grasslands relied on machinery and inexpensive transportation to out-produce and out-price small farmers. Many filed for bankruptcy. Those who attempted to hold on found labor excruciatingly painful as competition increased the rate of production. Not surprisingly, children of these families grew up disliking rural life and committed themselves to the pursuit of nonagricultural work. Progressive reformers known as "Country-Lifers" organized a movement to address the needs of agrarian communities and attempted to forestall the flow of small farming families to overcrowded cities. President Theodore Roosevelt supported their efforts by organizing the Country Life Commission, but the appeal of rural life continued to wane.[41]
The displacement of families from agricultural lands also concerned a growing American eugenics movement that debated the effects of migration on the U.S. "racial stock." Most European and American eugenicists believed that humans inherited intelligence and talents, and that acquired characteristics could not be passed on to future generations through hereditary lines. Charles Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton, an English statistician, defined the dream of the movement when he wrote: "If a twentieth part of the cost and pains were spent in measures for the improvement of the human race that is spent on the improvement of the breed of horses and cattle, what a galaxy of genius might we not create."[42] Experimentation in botany and biology for the purpose of improving dairy and produce yields generated intense interest in the eugenics movement among American scientists. In 1906, the American Breeder's Association formed a Committee on Eugenics to study the heredity of the human race and to identify those blood lines that they believed would improve the American stock.
Composed of an eclectic group of scholars, including biologists, geneticists, geologists, and sociologists, this body of scientists deviated from Galton's vision in important ways. Luther Burbank, a California botanist who genetically engineered numerous "hybrid" plants, fruits, and vegetables, disputed the notion that acquired characteristics could not be passed to future generations. In his own treatise on the subject, The Training of the Human Plant, Burbank explained his understanding of the connection between environment and heredity as follows: "Environment is the architect of heredity; . . . acquired characters are transmitted . . . all characters which are transmitted have been acquired, not necessarily at once in a dynamic or visible form, but as an increasing latent force ready to appear as a tangible character when by long-continued natural or artificial repetition any specific tendency has become inherent, inbred, or 'fixed,' as we call it."[43] Burbank, therefore, advocated the Lamarckian theory that genetic traits, little by little, could be enhanced through good nurturance and constant attention to quality. At the other end of the spectrum, the most dominant American eugenicist, Charles Davenport, granted only token importance to the role of environment in determining a person's makeup, and expressed the belief that single genes determine such characteristics as laziness, musical ability, and creativity.[44] This diversity of opinion concerning the influence of environment on human evolution inspired private and public debates that transcended the narrow focus on "blood" and genes. In America, such debates peaked around World War I, argues Richard Hofstadter, when "[eugenics] had reached the dimensions of a fad."[45] The dramatic movement of people to and within the United States during this period influenced eugenicists to consider the impact of rural to urban migration on the future of America.
In 1916, the California Citrograph published the extracts of an article written by eugenicist O. F. Cook that perhaps articulates the principal concerns of many citrus families. Cook, a scientist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, described the dilemma facing American society in general, and agricultural communities specifically:
If the time has really come for the consideration of practical eugenic measures, here is a place to begin, a subject worthy of the most careful studyhow to rearrange our social and economic system so that more of the superior members of our race will stay on the land and raise families, instead of moving to the city and remaining unmarried or childless, or allowing their children to grow up in unfavorable urban environments that mean deterioration and extinction.[46]
Cook sounded the concern that "the best of the rural populations" had been drawn to the city by modern luxuries and conveniences. Consequently, the most intelligent and productive members of American society abandoned "normal development" under an agrarian way of life. As Cook explained, "agriculture is not only the basis of our civilization in the mere economic sense of affording food to support our physical existence, but in a still more fundamental, biological sense. It is only in an agricultural state that the human individual attains a normal acquaintance with his environment and a full endowment of intellectual and social faculties of this [white] race."[47]
Cook prescribed two solutions to this dilemma. The immediate solution entailed the reversal of "the present tendency for the better families to be drawn to the city and facilitate the drafting of the others for urban duty."[48] He also advised against "eugenics regulations" such as sterilization, and claimed that "sanitary precautions" of the states "which are hygienic, but not eugenic" did not interfere with "the natural agencies" that would eliminate "undesirable lines of descent."[49] In other words, Cook espoused the belief that nonwhite people would eventually become extinct through natural selection.
For Cook and other proponents of "reverse migration," the call for "better families" to return to the farms did not mean an abandonment of the modern technologies that had lured these people to the city in the first place. Rather, the "enlightened eugenic standpoint," a Lamarkian strain endorsed by Burbank and other "liberal" eugenicists, required born-again horticulturists to harmonize agriculture with industry to create more productive farms and more tolerable living conditions for the farm families. California citrus growers fashioned themselves as the vanguard of these ideas and the purveyors of the most successful and civilized society in human history. The editor's introduction to Cook's article makes this point explicit: "California is in a class by itself, without a peer. Here, the rural life has reached its highest development. The farm has no terrors, when combined with all the advantages of the cities. Good roads and public utilities have taken the sting out of rural life. The only noticeable difference between life on a farm or orchard in Southern California and that in the city is the difference in elbow room."[50]
In Southern California, a return to the farm did not require a choice between the luxuries of the city and the social and biological advantages of an agrarian life. Carey McWilliams would later describe the "typical citrus-belt town" as "really neither a town nor a city, but a suburban shopping district."[51] This model of agrarian development seemingly addressed liberal eugenicists' and Country-Lifers' concerns about rural decline by uniting Jefferson's homestead plans with modern technology.
Yet, much of what Los Angeles boosters, the LACC, the Citrograph writers and government officials celebrated as unique about the citrus belt was actually either an exaggeration or in a state of transition during the first two decades of the twentieth century. In spite of pronouncements that the average citrus farmer earned a handsome and sustainable profit margin by working his own land, many ranchers depended on some form of hired help from the beginning. In districts near the Sierra Madres, land had little value until large boulders and sediment were cleared from the soil. In Claremont, for example, the millionaire citrus rancher Lee Pitzer began his orange empire on thirty acres with the assistance of Sikh workers. He paid a team of between ten and fifteen Sikh men $25 to $50 per acre to haul away rocks "so heavy that they would break the wagons down." Sikh men also built canals, homes, and dormitories with the leftover rocks, and according to Upland rancher George H. Whitney, "[laid] out the groves" in the area. Another rancher, Paul Naftel, remembered that "quite a number of Japanese pick[ed] oranges when we first come [sic] out here [in 1910]." Russell Pitzer, cousin of Lee Pitzer, admitted to using "cheap" labor, but proudly asserted, "they were native Americans [white] . . . I never had any Japanese or Hindus [Sikh]." Although labor conditions varied from ranch to ranch, Chinese, Sikh, Japanese, Mexican, Filipino, and white workers labored in the citrus groves of the San Gabriel and San Bernardino Valleys.[52]
Prior to the war, most farms had not yet grown to unmanageable sizes and labor needs could be met with a mixed labor force of family and hired help. Many citrus farms consisted of between ten and thirty acres and were still in the "experimental" stage. Clifford Pitzer recalled that in 1903 his father "started the experiment [with] only two ten-acre pieces of citrus [land]." Five years later, Pitzer had "a nice producing grove and built a home on it." By 1917, Pitzer owned 175 acres of land from which he shipped approximately 300 boxes of fruit per year. The increase in production required Pitzer to employ farmhands, most of whom the packinghouse furnished.
Ranchers preferred to hire white workers to maintain the racial homogeneity of their communities, but low wages in agriculture across the nation discouraged many from seeking work on farms. In her book The Fruits of Their Labor: Atlantic Coast Farmworkers and the Making of Migrant Poverty, 1870-1945, Cindy Hahamovitch reveals that beginning in the 1870s, urban industrial wages rose while agricultural wages experienced a precipitous decline. According to Hahamovitch, mechanization of farm operations eliminated the need for year-round labor and made agricultural work primarily seasonal, migratory, and cheap. The nineteenth century trend toward a concentration of industrial production in cities also reduced the number of small industries in country towns where farmworkers formerly supplemented their incomes with part-time work. By the first decade of the twentieth century, these conditions produced poverty among Italian immigrant and black migrant farmworkers who accepted these jobs to avoid starvation.[53]
In the citrus belt, conditions differed from those extant on the Atlantic Coast or even in the nearby San Joaquin and Imperial Valleys. In his book The Lie of the Land, Don Mitchell argues that growers in the San Joaquin and Imperial Valleys kept wages and housing costs low by maintaining labor surpluses and keeping workers on the move.[54] Although labor migrancy occurred among workers in the Los Angeles basin, citrus laborers tended not to move around as much and often covered less territory when they did. Due to the unique geography and climate of the citrus belt, citrus growers grew a variety of fruit with harvest cycles that alternated throughout the year. J. B. Culbertson, the manager of the Limoneira citrus ranch in Santa Paula in Ventura County, noted that "the citrus grower has a different problem" than other farm owners. He continued, "his harvest season is almost continuous the year through and his other labor needs fit into the picking cycle to make possible steady, annual employment for much of his help."[55] In the San Gabriel and San Bernardino Valleys, Carey McWilliams observed that Mexican laborers "are not migratory workers, but settled residents of the areas in which they are employed (only 17% of the labor supply is non-resident)."[56] Claremont grower Russell Pitzer confirmed this observation, stating, "orchard work, such as picking, was done by people who lived here as far as possible." He added that limited labor migration between Los Angeles and Orange County districts covered bountiful navel and Valencia seasons.[57] The development of towns and local industry also diversified the economy in Southern California so that many laborers could find part-time work away from the orchards when harvest cycles dipped below their peak levels. No such opportunity existed for farmworkers in the rural districts of the Central Valley of California or the Atlantic Coast.
Although technology affected labor in the packinghouses with the addition of conveyor belts, forklifts, and fruit-washing machines, selective harvesting and marketing mitigated the impact of mechanization on the labor demands of the industry. Pickers chose fruit based on color and size and rarely "cleaned" a tree, since citrus fruit did not ripen after being picked. Asked whether mechanization would help solve labor "problems," Clifford Pitzer answered: "I don't see how they could ever pick lemons with mechanical harvesting of any type because . . . with lemons you are picking every six weeks the year around, and it is a very selective deal."[58] Growers felt compelled to employ a constant supply of pickers and packers to maintain a strict screening process and uphold the high standards advertised by the California Fruit Growers Exchange.
Citrus workers suffered the consequences of depressed agricultural wages since ranchers tended to value their workers according to the standards set by agriculture across the country, especially in California. Each year the state Chamber of Commerce gathered farm owners of various crops to discuss, among many issues, wage levels. Growers undertook such measures to prevent the creation of labor surpluses in high-paying districts and shortages on lower-paying farms. Agreements not to compete for labor depressed wages, ensured the presence of workers during harvests, and minimized conflict among growers.[59]
Comprehensive records of wages paid to citrus workers begin in the late 1910s and 1920s, a period in which packinghouses and local grower associations functioned as the main clearinghouse for labor. During the 1920s in western San Gabriel Valley, ranchers relied on the San Gabriel Farm Labor Association (SGFLA) to find and contract fruit pickers. The organization's board of directors, composed of the most prominent growers from various local exchanges, met regularly to establish wage rates, picking quotas, and hiring policies for the area. The SGFLA governing board divided workers by staggering wages per hour according to their seniority and the type of fruit picked: 36 cents for experienced orange pickers and 30 cents for inexperienced; 28 cents for all pickers of seedlings; and 25 cents for lemons.[60] Employers further complicated wage levels by varying the standards by which they paid their employees. As historian Gilbert González demonstrates, workers were rarely paid solely on the basis of hours worked. Rather, employers implemented several systems, including payment by boxes picked (a box equaled a full picker's canvas bag weighing fifty pounds); a straight day's salary for a nine-hour day; or a combination of a box rate with an hourly rate.[61]
Many growers' associations paid on a quality-quantity system whereby a picker earned a base wage and a bonus on boxes picked over a certain amount. Under this system, supervisors closely monitored the incoming boxes, looking for "defective" fruit. If, for example, more than 4 percent of the fruit was deemed defective, associations paid the picker only the base salary. Conversely, a picker who limited the amount of defective fruit in his box earned a "bonus" that could boost his per box rate by as much as 3 cents a box. Since base salaries often constituted a wage well below subsistence level, this system encouraged pickers to maintain an eye on the quality as much as the quantity of their pick. Additionally, some growers implemented a "season bonus system" whereby employers paid workers their weekly base salary, but waited until the end of the lemon, grapefruit, navel, or Valencia harvest to add up bonus totals. A 1921 California Citrograph article reported how the system worked: "at the end of the season a bonus is paid to all the men who are still with the crew, providing the quality of their work is satisfactory."[62] Growers used such payment methods to discourage laborers from seeking alternative employment during downturns in the picking cycles.
Wage levels also fluctuated according to the changing racial composition of citrus picking crews. In 1919, racially mixed, Mexican/white picking crews working for the SGFLA-affiliated Pasadena Orange Growers' Association (POGA) "averaged" $3.25 per day and earned a base salary of $19.50 for an eight-hour, six-day work week, though totals and hours varied according to the season. As Mexicans and Filipinos came to dominate the labor pool, growers lowered wages. By the 1923-1924 season, wage rates earned by picking "gangs" dropped to 25 cents per week, or approximately $30 biweekly before deductions for gloves and cash advances for living expenses. By 1928, growers denied Mexican and Filipino employees "advances" on their paychecks and lowered their wages to between $21 and $30 per every two weeks, an average that remained consistent during the Depression.[63]
Conditions of the labor market augmented racial prejudice to heighten race-consciousness among Southern Californians. The employment of Asian and Mexican workers in low-paying agricultural jobs simultaneously reinforced the "nonwhite" status of these immigrants, and perpetuated a dual labor system that restricted the mobility of ethnoracial minorities to higher-paying, skilled positions.[64] Consequently, as citrus production grew, so too did the numbers and importance of Mexican and Asian workers to the local agroeconomy. Upland grower and board member of the San Gabriel Valley Labor Associations, Wiley W. Mather, remembered: "We used to have some Hindus [Sikhs], we used to have men with turbans and there would be quite a mixture, Maylays [Filipinos] and of course a lot of Japanese people and Chinese and I remember lots of different people . . . different races, you know."[65] Census data from 1900 to 1930 reveals that "non-white" citrus belt populations including Chinese, Japanese, Indian, and "non-black others" increased apace with the expanding "white" population (see Tables 1 and 2 in Appendix). Mexican totals are much more difficult to come by because the U.S. Census Department did not institute a consistent method of counting them during this same period. Nevertheless, during the decades from 1910 to 1930 (the period of greatest emigration from Mexico to the United States up until that time), the total numbers of Mexican-born Mexicans in select citrus belt towns reveals similar if not more dramatic increases (see Table 3 in Appendix). Although Mexican and Asian populations represent just a small fraction of the total population during this period, statistics do not fully communicate the centrality of these workers to the local economy.
Rancher George Whitney recalled one Japanese immigrant in particular, Mr. Jigahara, who invented a tool crucial to the founding of citrus groves in the San Gabriel-San Bernardino Valley: "he invented the 'Jigahara Digger,' which is still used in getting boulders out of the ground because, as you know, the land around here is filled with those big round boulders!" Jigahara lived a solitary life on Whitney's ranch, converting an old cow barn into a little cottage where he maintained a "library with several hundred books" and wrote extensively in his native language. Although other Japanese immigrants regarded him as a well-known philosopher and poet, the white majority saw him as an enigmatic Buddhist "loner" who "hoed weeds" in exchange for his modest house.[66] Jigahara died in Upland largely forgotten by a white community whose success in agriculture depended on his genius.
Mexican workers also joined the labor force, immigrating to the area in significant numbers beginning around 1910. For example, Emilio Valadez arrived in Upland in 1907 as a solo (single Mexican male immigrant) railroad worker, but quickly found employment in the burgeoning citrus industry. Based on his mule-driving experience in Mexico, Valadez began as a teamster for local citrus rancher Charlie Ford. By 1916, he had earned enough money to liberate his wife and children from the tumult of the Mexican Revolution and brought them to Upland. As one of the first Mexicans in the area, Valadez ascended to the rank of foreman for another grove owner, Royal Miller, and built homes for many Mexican families who continued to come to the citrus belt.[67] The inroads of immigrants like Valadez and Jigahara laid the foundations for the growth and regeneration of Japanese and Mexican communities.
From the turn of the century until World War I, ranchers used white, minority, and family workers to address the labor needs of the citrus farm and to maintain the outward appearance of a new agrarian society. The beginning of hostilities in Europe in 1914, however, placed new pressures on the citrus industry that threatened to expose ranchers' growing dependence on nonwhite labor. Although the war benefited growers by cutting off competition from citrus producers in Europe, farmers had difficulty adjusting to these new demands due to transformations in the labor market. As war-related manufacturing and construction in and around Los Angeles developed, local white workers increasingly chose industry over agriculture. Moreover, the recruitment of white men for military service precipitated an acute labor shortage in the United States that agribusiness spokespeople labeled a "crisis" by 1918. These conditions generated discussions published in the California Citrograph that revealed racial and gender hierarchies prevalent within citrus communities.[68]
During the formative years of citrus farming, white women and children contributed significantly to the labor conducted on most Southern California farms. Women frequently picked and packaged citrus fruit for distribution, while young men helped their fathers till the soil and plant the trees. By the time of World War I, however, the Country Life Movement significantly transformed the role of women and children on citrus farms. A greater division of labor within the agrarian household confined the majority of women's activities to the cultivation of home and hearth and the education of children. Although white women continued to work in packinghouses, men believed their primary obligation was to the maintenance of the household economy. Rather than protest, many agrarian women embraced the separate sphere promoted by advocates of the Country Life Movement as one way to expand their freedom. Sole responsibility of the home granted women greater control over their own lives, while educational duties provided them leadership positions within the community.[69]
Growers regarded the creation of the Woman's Land Army to harvest agricultural crops as a temporary measure for the war, but not a permanent solution to the labor shortage problem.[70] The employment of women through the Woman's Land Service of Southern California and of high school-age boys through the Boys Working Reserve precipitated greater awareness of the hardships of agricultural work and prompted agrarian reformers to back fair wage standards, better working conditions, and strict child labor laws.[71] In addition, the citrus industry used prescriptive literature recommending child and women's labor to obscure from the public eye a growing dependency on foreign-born workers.[72] In the growers' culture, white women, especially growers' wives and daughters, belonged first and foremost to the domestic sphere.
White male citrus growers punctuated this point in 1919 when editors at the California Citrograph employed "Bungalow Mistress" Miss Peggy Jeans to write a regular column outlining the role of white women in the citrus belt. Entitled "At Home with the Citrus Grower," Jeans's columns explained the proper etiquette for women, defined the "instinctive" differences between the two sexes, and lauded the values and benefits of domesticity. According to Jeans, women of the citrus belt possessed just enough country in them to engage in horticulture, but neither the interest nor the instinct to manage a cash crop. Women were expected to tend to the garden surrounding their homes and cultivate a livable environment, as Jeans's first article demonstrates:
Even as the mistress of the house is responsible for its order and beauty within, so in many instances is she responsible for its exterior beauty. A man's garden is apt to be practical, with the emphasis on vegetables and produce; it is the woman that fusses with the flowers and makes her garden a place of beauty. The gardening instinct lives strongly in woman,a survival perhaps from the days of savagery when man's contribution to the home was the spoil of the hunt; and his spouse was persuaded,if necessary by his club,to hoe the corn and raise the family garden. Or woman's fondness for her garden may be Eve's love for her first dress pattern.[73]
Jeans's articles reflected the tenets of the Country Life Movement that also recommended women stay at home in order to educate young children. In a section of her regular page entitled "For the Little Folks," Jeans explored the interests of citrus belt youths and informed women on how to raise their children.[74]
Although some early twentieth century feminists believed that the Country Life Movement contributed a degree of autonomy and authority to farm-based women, the circumscribed roles of white women and children also conformed to the eugenicist's vision of a properly ordered society.[75] According to Cook, "little children not only do not need to be sent to school, but are much better off, educationally and otherwise, if allowed to stay at home."[76] Cook encouraged children not to go to school before the eighth or ninth year, and suggested that women provide their sons and daughters the necessary education and socialization to function in agrarian communities. Cook recommended that home education be conducted "out-of-doors" and stress the human accomplishments of domesticating plants and animals. Moreover, eugenicists, Country-Lifers, and citrus belt writers encouraged growers to employ their children, especially sons; however, such work experience prepared young men not for manual labor, but rather for the management of the farm. According to experts, farm work built character and intelligence in youths, but was not intended to develop an inexhaustible supply of labor.[77]
Restrictions on white women's roles, the limits placed on child labor, and the desire to create a painless society for the white family conflicted with the citrus ranchers' need for manual laborers. The preference of many single, white male workers for urban industrial jobs and the conscription of young men for World War I further hampered growers' ability to secure a dependable labor source. Many growers preferred to hire married men rather than single male workers.[78] In his 1919 address to the Lemon Men's Club, Charles C. Teague, owner of the Limoneira Ranch in Santa Paula and future president of the CFGE, expressed the prevailing belief among growers that "the man of family through necessity is more stable and dependable than the single man, and will not travel around so much seeking that which he may find."[79] J. B. Culbertson outlined the advantages of employing "the man of family," when he wrote:
Taken as a class the married man is more dependable than his bachelor brother. He is more willing to do a full measure of work each day, . . . and is more disposed to apply the same principles of thrift and industry to his employer's interest that he would apply to his own. On the average he is an older man with more mature judgement and, given an opportunity to live in respectable quarters with good school facilities, steady employment and a wage that will enable him to save something above his living expenses, he is the ideal workman in agriculture.[80]
Married men represented the perfect model of social order in the citrus belt, and conformed to a society organized around the agrarian family.[81] Similarly, Paul Taylor, researching farm labor conditions in northeastern Colorado, found that sugar beet growers during the early 1920s established a resident supply of Mexican workers by appealing to Mexican families.[82]
Advocates for the employment of married men also believed that the responsibilities of family life made the worker less susceptible to the appeals of organized labor. The fear of strikes and labor protests constantly shaped the citrus growers' employment and managerial strategies. Such fears were not unfounded. Grassroots labor protest and union organizing took place in the citrus belt, especially during the second decade of the twentieth century, when radical labor unions such as the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) aggressively sought to organize agricultural workers. During the 1917 picking season, Mexican and Sikh workers from Riverside to Claremont initiated a strike for a wage increase from 22 cents to 25 cents per hour, or $2.25 to $2.50 per week. Citrus growers complained about "the way in which the foreigners have been acting" and promised to replace them with "all Americans," but conceded defeat within a few days.[83]
Encouraged by their victory, workers again organized to challenge depressed citrus wages in 1919. This time, however, citrus growers were prepared. In March, the California Citrograph reported that a group of "alleged IWW and Russian Bolshevik agitators" operating out of the San Dimas Canyon in eastern Los Angeles County attempted to stage a strike. Labor leaders sent a formal letter to the Charter Oaks Citrus Association demanding an increase in wages from $3 to $4 a day, while organizers rallied workers in the groves of Azusa, Duarte, Monrovia, Upland, La Verne, Pomona, and Glendora.[84] An overwhelming response by white citrus belt residents stymied the organizing drive and successfully averted a strike through extralegal actions. The Citrograph writer reported:
The citrus communities have always been rather free from troubles of this character as the towns are made up largely of people who have an interest in the industry and who have homes and families there. . . . As a result of this feeling a party of about 400 residents of Covina, Azusa, Glendora, Charter Oak, La Verne and Claremont met in the Dequesne packing house at Charter Oak and decided to hire a truck, load the disturbers into it and carry them out of town. This plan was carried into effect and 31 were carried to the outskirts of Los Angeles, from whence they had come, and left there.[85]
Citrus growers commonly exercised such vigilante-style tactics to snuff out labor organizing in the citrus belt. Carey McWilliams, while recalling another labor incident in Orange County in 1936, remembered his "astonishment in discovering how quickly social power could crystallize into an expression of arrogant brutality in these lovely, seemingly placid, outwardly Christian communities."[86]
Rather than eliminate "foreigners" from the workforce, citrus ranchers organized clubs to enforce their vision of society and to solve the "problems" facing the industry. Citrograph writers, for example, credited the American-Latin League with solving labor crises during World War I and "creat[ing] a better understanding between the employer and employee." Headed by influential citrus growers, the organization also included other employers of Mexican laborers in Southern California as well as an Argentine general manager, Dr. J. Z. Uriburu, who served as translator. The group resembled an employer's union and focused on issues other than wages, such as housing, health, and education to reach "a closer contact and more sympathetic relation generally with the aim of elevation and education of foreign labor."[87] Other clubs, like the all-male Lemon Men's Club, provided forums for citrus growers to share political, social, and economic objectives and forge "class collectivity."88 V. V. LeRoy, secretary of the Claremont club, explained the virtues of forming such organizations when he wrote:
The farmer will not take the time enough from his work to keep an organization alive and the politician well knows it, but the labor unions make themselves felt because they stick together. Politically the farmer is numerous enough to elect a large minority of legislatorsgenerally he allows a small organized bunch of hangers on to select some failure of a lawyer for a candidate, and the farmer trots right up to the polls and votes for him. Why should the Citrus Grower organize Clubs? Because the Citrus Growers to my mind have the biggest men with the largest brain power among them, of any soil tiller in the world. Because in a large way, to save their industry from destruction, they have organized and successfully conducted the biggest and best marketing exchange in the world, and have held together; which is more than can be said of many farmers associations.[89]
Citrus growers organized these clubs to oppose labor unions, but also to establish consensus on issues affecting the political, social, and economic life of the citrus belt. Furthermore, citrus growers depended on both the California Citrograph and local newspapers to report news and information, which ensured a spirit of cooperation and cohesiveness.
World War I initiated public discussions concerning labor shortages in the pages of the Citrograph and at the meetings of citrus clubs and associations that lasted throughout the 1920s. Citrus ranchers responded to the crisis as most other California farm owners did: they employed more nonwhite, immigrant laborers. Western farmers understood the "racial" implications of such practices, and shared public concerns about race mixing and a developing "race problem"; however, the expansion of markets and the inability to harvest crops adequately and in a timely fashion determined labor policies. Outside of citrus, agribusiness rationalized the dependence on Mexican and Asian laborers by claiming that workers were not permanent but seasonal, and thus temporary, employees.[90] Citrus ranchers could not make such claims. Since labor demands existed throughout the year, citrus industry spokespeople and advocates used racial (and to a lesser extent gendered) arguments about the character of foreign workers to justify labor practices, adjust to changes in public opinion, and influence popular thinking on race-related issues. As the number of laborers increased, ranchers attempted to marginalize non-European cultural influences through residential and educational segregation. Historian Gilbert González stated the practice of the citrus growers plainly when he wrote: "the industry divided minority and majority, at work, in residence, recreation, religion, education, and politics."[91]
Dependence on any hired help, particularly nonwhite labor, posed unique and important challenges to citrus belt communities. From the CFGE organ the California Citrograph to the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce to the State Horticultural Office, citriculture advocates described citrus farming in Southern California as one of the highest forms of civilizationan "Ideal Country Life." Much of this had to do with the perception that one male farmer with perhaps nominal support from his wife and children could maintain a highly profitable farm and retire comfortably. While some ranchers began as lone "experimenters," many depended on some form of hired help to prepare the land and pick the crops. Stories of pioneer farmers risking everything they owned to begin citrus ranches obscure the role of Asian and Mexican workers in establishing the citrus industry in Southern California. Additionally, local and statewide government agencies provided crucial scientific support, while the California Fruit Growers Exchange handled marketing and pricing duties that substantially increased profits and production.
In spite of these realities, boosters and residents clung to an agrarian myth that served as the intellectual foundation of most citrus belt towns. Few acknowledged the contradictions raised by the employment of hired help: If labor in the earth" inspires virtue, but someone other than the "farmer" performed the labor, who is then virtuous? Ranchers ignored this conundrum since profits, rhetoric, and material trappings shielded them from dealing with such questions. The employment of technology in the service of ranchers and the construction of a congenial and attractive landscape and built-environment placed cognitive distance between the farmer and what Raymond Williams has called "the curse of labour." The celebration of a balanced rural-urban development and of man's ability to manipulate nature served to exract this "curse" by concealing the existence of laborers: the thousands of Native American, Chinese, Sikh, Japanese, Filipino, and Mexican workers who figured prominently in the establishment and maintenance of the citrus industry from its inception in the 1880s to the boom years around World War I. In their "absence," citrus ranchers claimed exclusive credit for beginning a new agrarian society organized around citriculture.[92]
Increases in the number of semipermanent and permanent farmworkers in Southern California during and after World War I threatened to reveal the existence of laborers and expose the agrarian ideal as a myth. The fact that most of these workers were nonwhite further complicated the situation since citrus belt residents valued the racial and cultural homogeneity of their communities. During the 1920s, growers and industry spokespeople responded by imposing racial and gender hierarchies in hiring that established Mexican male workers as the preferred laborers among the many racial minorities who worked the groves prior to World War I. New strategies of social control and segregation accompanied these decisions and precipitated debates within these communities over the treatment of workers. The continued growth of citrus townships attracted residents not directly involved in the citrus industry. These people, labeled the "inbetween element" by Carey McWilliams, occasionally expressed positions contrary to those held by ranchers. Finally, workers, as their settlements grew and their numbers expanded, refused to live according to the prescribed social conditions determined by the grower elite. The following chapter examines the changes in the racial makeup of labor populations, and explores the contests over control of public space and culture among growers, residents, and workers during the peak years of citrus production in Los Angeles Countythe 1920s and 1930s.
A World of Its Own | Home
|