Witnesses to the Struggle

Imaging the 1930s California Labor Movement

Anne Loftis

• Publisher: University of Nevada Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780874174403
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In this groundbreaking interdisciplinary study, Loftis examines the artists who put a human face on the farmworkers' plight in California during the Great Depression, focusing on writer John Steinbeck, photographer Dorothea Lange, sociologist and author Paul Taylor, and journalist Carey McWilliams. Loftis probes the interplay between journalism and art in the 1930s, when both academics and artists felt an urgent need to be relevant in the face of enormous misery. The power of their work grew out of their personal involvement in both the labor struggles and the hardships endured by workers and their families. Steinbeck, Lange, and the other artists and intellectuals in their circles created the public images of their times. Works such as The Grapes of Wrath or Lange's Migrant Mother actually helped mold public opinion and form government policies. Even today these works remain icons in our shared perception of that era. Loftis helps us understand why this art still seems the truest representation of those desperate times, three-quarters of a century later.

1

SHADOWS IN THE LAND OF SUNSHINE

If the Great Depression of the 1930s was a time of trial for millions of Americans, it was also an intensely creative period for the artists and social scientists who recorded it. Focusing on one state, California, this book explores the correlation between the economic and political upheavals that transformed the lives of ordinary citizens and the efforts of professional observers to put those changes into a historical—and occasionally an ideological—context.

“There has never been a time,” Malcolm Cowley wrote, referring to the country at large, “when literary events followed so closely on the flying coattails of social events.”¹ The term literary has to be expanded, however, for in addition to novelists, poets, and critics there were economists, painters, photographers, film makers, and musicians interpreting what was happening, following the journalists, radio announcers, and newsreel cameramen who dispatched the first reports from the scene.

To a surprising degree, this heterogeneous group of observers found a connection through social values that they shared. The realism and documentary expression that characterized the art of the depression decade grew out of a sense of personal involvement in the problems of society. The message conveyed by those who recorded what was taking place was: “We are here. We are witnesses”—and, by implication, “We care.” Looking back on that era from the vantage point of a quarter century, the journalist-historian Carey McWilliams quoted a letter that his contemporary John Steinbeck sent to a student magazine at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1936. In it, Steinbeck said of young writers: “The ones capable of using their eyes and ears, capable of feeling the beat of the time, are frantic with material.”²

Among the social upheavals that gripped California during the depression decade, problems related to farm workers attracted particular attention. In addressing the subject, Steinbeck and McWilliams shared common ground with the economist Paul Taylor, the photographer Dorothea Lange, and a number of other interpreters who were less well known. Although (except for Taylor and Lange) they worked independently, they traveled along parallel lines—literally and figuratively.³ Their work was so closely tied to current events that they seemed to be scarcely conscious of what had come before.

Farm workers in California had been overlooked in earlier decades. This was a consequence of their mobility—their work on short-term jobs, their frequent travel from place to place—and their anomalous status. Farm work in the past had been a fallback occupation of the resident unemployed as well as an entry-level opportunity for new arrivals. It was in this second category, as the 1930s commentators noted, that the workers played a significant role in the history of the state by revealing the disparities in its social structure. The waves of people coming from Europe, Asia, Latin America, and from other parts of the United States to make a fresh start in one of the richest agricultural regions of the world encountered barriers that seemed to deny the egalitarian promises of the frontier.

Small farming and homesteading had figured in the settlement of Washington and Oregon, where rainfall was more abundant. In California, which had an annual six-months’ drought, a very different pattern of land-labor relationships had evolved. It dated from the Hispanic era when a small population was engaged in cattle raising on large tracts of land. Most of the physical labor was performed by descendants of the Indians who had been pressed into servitude by missionaries and soldiers establishing settlements along the coast in the late eighteenth century. The pattern of large landholdings continued after the American acquisition of California, although the use of the land changed. Cattle ranches and vaqueros gave way to bonanza wheat-growing enterprises that provided employment during the brief harvest season for some among the thousands of newcomers from all over the world who arrived during the gold rush.

In agriculture, as in the gold camps, ethnic identity was a factor in individual progress. Whereas the white ex-miners who became wheat harvesters were free agents who could—and did—quit their jobs at will, the Chinese laborers who left railroad construction to build levees in the Sacramento Delta were indentured to fellow countrymen who had subsidized their travel to the New World. There were later well-publicized instances in which European immigrants who arrived penniless became leaders in fruit growing and viticulture, but among the so-called racial minorities such success was less common. A few East Indians and Chinese became growers, but only the Japanese as a group made the transition from hired labor to entrepreneurship despite formidable legislative barriers raised against them. Their success was confirmed by the naming of a Japanese “potato king” in the tradition of the Caucasian “grain king” associated with the international wheat trade. The promotion of successful growers to the status of royalty was an indication of the attitude in the state toward large-scale enterprise.

Human relationships on the land had been recorded by English-speaking observers in California from the time that Richard Henry Dana described life in the Hispanic settlements in Two Years Before the Mast (1840). Although Dana’s account was in part critical, its chief effect on readers in his native Massachusetts and other parts of the eastern seaboard was to arouse their curiosity about a little-known place on the other side of the continent. The gold rush stories of Bret Harte and Mark Twain had a similar impact on armchair travelers. Avid for reports from Eldorado, they ignored the authors’ social criticism.

An extraordinary instance of misinterpretation involved the Indian-rights advocate Helen Hunt Jackson and her 1884 novel Ramona. She had turned to fiction to dramatize the campaign—set forth in her 1881 tract A Century of Dishonor—to win retribution for native tribes from the U.S. government. She succeeded to some degree in her cause, but the unanticipated impact of Ramona, which describes the relationship of Indians, Mexican landowners, and rapacious Anglos in Southern California, was to stimulate the cult of the romantic Hispanic tradition that appealed to tourists. For many years after Jackson’s death, her best-selling novel was exploited by local-color propagandists.

In its ultimate commercial expression, the semifictional California of the “Land of Sunshine” and the “Italy of America” posed a challenge for serious critics. In one instance, a 1923 history called California the Wonderful, the instincts of a social reformer warred with the booster’s impulse. The author was Edwin Markham, a teacher and poet (best remembered for his poem “The Man with the Hoe”) who had worked in his youth on ranches in the interior valleys. He condemned the monolithic enterprises of the “wheat barons” and empathized with their “labor vassals.” As a replacement for corporate agriculture, he proposed a “co-operative commonwealth,” an expansion of the small, sporadic, and relatively short-lived communal-farming experiments in California in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.⁴

Markham looked forward to a time when government-subsidized irrigation projects would lead to the cultivation of a variety of fruits and vegetables on moderate-sized tracts of land. His blueprint was accurate in one respect. The importation of cheap water brought about a shift from extensive to intensive agriculture, leading to the production of over two hundred different farm commodities in the state. But high capital costs and the need to connect with distant markets discouraged individual farming on a small scale. The historical reality was closer to the vision of the popular novelist Harold Bell Wright, who publicized the impact of the Colorado River irrigation project in his 1911 best-seller The Winning of Barbara Worth, set in the Imperial Valley.⁵

Edwin Markham followed in the tradition of several earlier dissenting writers. The significance of land use in human history was the passionate concern of Henry George, a former reporter and editor of Californian magazine. He devoted years of labor and sacrifice to writing his book Progress and Poverty (1879), in which he examined the paradox that as civilization advances, “want increases with abundance.” His frame of reference was far-reaching in its scope, global in its scale, but his personal observations in California contributed to his thesis that an increase in wealth was accompanied by a commensurate inequality in its distribution.⁶ His solution to the problem, a single tax on land, was too controversial to win strong support, but the book, which became a best-seller, won him a reputation as a reformer and champion of workingmen and ethnic minorities.

Henry George’s views on land monopoly and human relations in California were shared by Josiah Royce, a Harvard philosophy professor who was born in Grass Valley in the Sierra foothills in 1855. In 1886 he published a critical study of interpersonal conflicts in his native state beginning with the American conquest and continuing through the gold rush that had brought his parents and thousands of other new settlers to the West Coast. As a member of a younger generation, Royce cut through the pieties and the legends that surrounded these events to examine the motives and actions of the participants. The fact that the book is opinionated adds to its authenticity. In a burst of emotion Royce condemned “the fearful blindness of the early behavior of the Americans in California toward foreigners” as “something almost unintelligible”—and then proceeded to analyze and explain it.⁷

Both Henry George and Josiah Royce attacked the railroad monopoly that exerted disproportionate power over the state legislature. The most effective writing on this subject, however, was done by the novelist Frank Norris, who was, like Royce, a graduate of the University of California. In The Octopus (1901), Norris described the warfare between wheat farmers and the Southern Pacific in the San Joaquin Valley. In McTeague (1899), he evoked the materialistic, chaotic atmosphere of post–gold rush San Francisco. In his subjects and in his style of romantic realism, he was influenced by Emile Zola.

Norris’s work made an impact on Jack London (1876–1916), who combined an enthusiasm for socialism with a passion for red-blooded adventure. An inveterate traveler and foreign correspondent, he found material for his writing in his trips to the Alaska Klondike and the Orient and his experiences sailing in the Pacific and tramping around the United States and Canada. When he was still in his twenties, he went to England and disguised himself as a derelict to gather material for a study of the indigent, published in 1903 as The People of the Abyss.

In going abroad, London overlooked a similar situation in his own backyard. A survey taken just before the turn of the century reported 40,000 single men holed up in the ten- and fifteen-cent lodging houses and cheap hotels south of Market Street near the San Francisco waterfront, which had been the locale of some of London’s early activities and writings.⁸ Many of these men were miners, woodcutters, and fruit pickers who had come to the city during the winter layoff.

In the decade before the First World War, workers in these occupations made up the membership of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the unorthodox union of the unskilled which challenged the craft-oriented American Federation of Labor (AFL) and called strikes and work stoppages in mines, lumber camps, and ranches throughout the West. Most of the actions of the IWW were condemned by government representatives and the press, but one dramatic incident, the 1913 Wheatland hop-field riot in the Sacramento Valley, was credited with opening up “a narrow window of public and academic interest in the problems of migratory labor.”⁹ The interest was stimulated by the reforms of the Progressive Republican governor, Hiram Johnson. It proved to be ephemeral, however, and all but disappeared after the IWW, which opposed the U.S. entry into the war, was suppressed through federal espionage and sedition acts and the criminal-syndicalism laws enacted in twenty-one states, including California.

The revival of interest in farm workers during the Great Depression was part of a national focus on “the common man hero, the forgotten American.”¹⁰ It was encouraged directly by the insurrectionist ideology of the left and indirectly by the reformist philosophy of the center. On a political level, the new Democratic administration in Washington brought benefits to workers as well as relief to the unemployed. Labor legislation led to an unprecedented increase in organizing, which challenged the dominance of the craft unions that excluded unskilled workers. The time was ripe for protest, even for farm workers, who were not covered by the laws.

In 1933, strikes against the state’s agricultural industry were led by a new generation of radical organizers and were supported by a coalition of Marxist intellectuals and nonaligned liberals. This alliance was cemented several years later during the controversy over the newly arriving dust bowl migrants, who for a brief time transformed the agricultural landscape of the state. Year by year the battles between workers and growers and their partisans intensified until at the end of the decade the furor on the West Coast reached a crescendo that reverberated in the halls of Congress and the White House. California led the nation in the number of farm strikes in the 1930s. At least 140 were recorded, involving over 127,000 people.¹¹

The interpreters who brought this story to the attention of the public did not at the time think of themselves as a group. Yet they gave a collective strength to the voice of dissent that in the past had been raised by lone individuals within the state. They had, furthermore, a common perspective. They looked from a nontraditional viewpoint at a situation that had been ignored. In the process they exploded the image of California as a second Eden.

Fired by a spirit of urgency, Steinbeck in 1938 told his literary agent, Elizabeth Otis, “I’m trying to write history while it is happening and I don’t want to be wrong.”¹² But he and the other interpreters were also trying to affect history. They believed that reporting would stimulate action, that revelation would lead to reform. From the perspective of sixty years, this is a premise that raises a number of questions. Some are about the outcome: Did exposure of abuses bring about reform? There are also questions about methods, about the techniques by which these artists and investigators forged a common ground. Did they tell the truth, or did they create propaganda? Would their art have been better if it had been less polemical, or was their vision inseparable from their involvement in the events?

This book is written in the hope that an examination of the record may supply answers that are relevant for later interpreters in our time.

2

THE STRIKES, THE PARTISANS, AND THE PRESS

During the 1920s the California farm labor scene changed. Workers began to travel from harvest to harvest by automobile, bringing their families. The number of white “fruit tramps,” who had been the mainstay of the IWW, declined. More of the single men in the fields were recently arrived immigrants.

A small number of Sikhs from the Punjab region of India worked in irrigated agriculture in the Imperial Valley. Some of their countrymen were drawn to the Marysville-Yuba City area of the Sacramento Valley. Working in the asparagus fields in the Sacramento Delta or in the lettuce industry in the Salinas Valley were a larger number of young men from the Philippines, who were among the more than 31,000 of their fellow islanders who arrived in California between 1920 and 1930.

The introduction of cotton as a major crop, first in the Imperial Valley and later in the San Joaquin Valley, attracted a few black as well as white pickers from the South, some of whom came in answer to advertisements from growers who were themselves originally southerners. In the beginning, many of these pickers returned to their home states at the end of the season. Later, more of them began to stay year-round on the West Coast, mainly in the cotton-growing counties. Like the East Indians and the Filipinos, they were a small minority among California farm workers.

The Mexicans, who outnumbered all the other groups, were not definitively associated with any particular crop or region. They traveled the length of the state from one job to another. In the winter months, if they were not working in the Imperial Valley or the Coachella Valley, they gravitated to Los Angeles or other urban areas or they returned home; in the first two decades of the twentieth century it was relatively easy to cross the border in either direction. The Mexican workers engaged in very little strike activity in California until 1927, when they formed the Confederación de Uniones Obreras Mexicanas, which had twenty locals. The followin...