The Nature of California

Race, Citizenship, and Farming since the Dust Bowl

Sarah D. Wald

• Editorial: University of Washington Press
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780295806587
• Categoría: Literatur
• Categoría: Nordamerikanische Literaturkritik

The California farmlands have long served as a popular symbol of America's natural abundance and endless opportunity. Yet, from John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and Carlos Bulosan's America Is in the Heart to Helena Maria Viramontes's Under the Feet of Jesus, many novels, plays, movies, and songs have dramatized the brutality and hardships of working in the California fields. Little scholarship has focused on what these cultural productions tell us about who belongs in America, and in what ways they are allowed to belong. In The Nature of California, Sarah Wald analyzes this legacy and its consequences by examining the paradoxical representations of California farmers and farmworkers from the Dust Bowl migration to present-day movements for food justice and immigrant rights. Analyzing fiction, nonfiction, news coverage, activist literature, memoirs, and more, Wald gives us a new way of thinking through questions of national belonging by probing the relationships among race, labor, and landownership. Bringing together ecocriticism and critical race theory, she pays special attention to marginalized groups, examining how Japanese American journalists, Filipino workers, United Farm Workers members, and contemporary immigrants-rights activists, among others, pushed back against the standard narratives of landownership and citizenship.

CHAPTER 1

“Settlers Galore, but No Free Land”

White Citizenship and the Right to Land Ownership in Factories in the Field and Of Human Kindness

DURING THE GREAT DEPRESSION, CALIFORNIA’S FARM-workers went on strike in unprecedented numbers. Nineteen thirty-three was a banner year, with thirty-seven agricultural strikes, including one in which twelve thousand cotton pickers, 95 percent of them Mexican, walked off the job in the San Joaquin Valley in what was the largest agricultural strike in US history to date.¹ Farm owners and California conservatives viewed these strikes as evidence of a communist conspiracy, ignoring the low wages and poor working conditions that fomented the workers’ discontent. They perceived communism as a threat to the American garden that upended the racial logic of land ownership and the natural racial hierarchies of farm labor. They founded organizations such as the Associated Farmers (1934) to fight back. At the same time, communists, socialists, and New Deal liberals joined together in the Popular Front. Many Popular Front participants perceived the vigilante violence that labor organizers faced and the strategies the Associated Farmers implemented as evidence of fascist organizing.²

Despite the political gulf between the Popular Front and the Associated Farmers, advocates for both sides often turned to land ownership as the crux of California’s “farm labor problem.” Right-wing authors such as Ruth Comfort Mitchell and M. V. Hartranft believed white citizens deserved to own land in California and considered white Dust Bowl migrants to blame for their landlessness. In contrast, farmworker advocates such as John Steinbeck, Paul Taylor, and Carey McWilliams believed large land owners were bringing fascism to the United States by undercutting white domestic workers with “imported” nonwhite foreigners. They promoted collective land ownership by Dust Bowl migrants as one possible solution.

Unfortunately, rising concern for white Dust Bowl migrants often subsumed the agency and labor activism of Mexican, Filipino, Japanese, and Chinese workers. In focusing on white Dust Bowl migrants’ right to settle in California, some Popular Front advocates obfuscated nonwhite and non-citizen workers’ claims to property and civil rights. Surprisingly, Carey McWilliams’s Factories in the Field (1939) participated in this trend. Scholars have rightfully acknowledged McWilliams as one of the leading antiracist voices of the twentieth century and as a stalwart advocate for noncitizen workers’ rights.³ Thus is it particularly telling that while Factories affirms white Dust Bowl migrants as the legitimate owners of California’s lands, it portrays nonwhite and noncitizen farmworkers as pawns of fascist owners, a depiction that historian Sucheng Chan has refuted.⁴ The structure of McWilliams’s nonfiction narrative relies on the opposition between the fascist reality of capitalist land monopolization and the democratic potential of citizens’ collective ownership efforts, which McWilliams terms “colonization.” McWilliams envisions white workers as collective owners of California’s farmlands, but does not depict the same possibility for nonwhite or noncitizen workers.⁵ In this way, Factories directly contradicts the activism in which McWilliams engaged and the other articles he published in this period. How do we make sense of the problematic racial politics of land ownership that emerge in Factories?

Factories’ engagement with the desirability of white Dust Bowl migrants’ land ownership allowed McWilliams to refute the logic around citizenship and land ownership deployed by the Associated Farmers. Conservative novelist Ruth Comfort Mitchell’s Of Human Kindness (originally published in 1940) captures the Associated Farmers’ approach to farm ownership. It reaffirms the myths of the frontier, Manifest Destiny, and Jeffersonian democracy by rendering California as a domestic garden in which hierarchies of race and class are naturalized and threats posed by nonwhite workers are neutralized. The novel implies that when properly contained, nonwhite, noncitizen workers do not threaten the ability of white citizens, including Dust Bowl migrants, to attain the American dream by climbing the agricultural ladder to profitable land ownership.

What is at stake for both McWilliams and Mitchell is the legitimacy of California’s current landholding class. Both leverage the assumed validity of white farmer-citizens as land owners to make their points. Mitchell depicts California’s agricultural owners as farmer-citizens who will allow other properly trained white citizens to join their ranks. McWilliams depicts them as fascist un-Americans, and does so by revealing the ways they keep other white citizens from climbing the agricultural ladder. White citizens’ right to own land operates as the assumed truth that both Factories and Of Human Kindness stake their larger claims around. Consequently, both works, intentionally or unintentionally, reify the relationship between white citizenship and agricultural land ownership.

In other venues, McWilliams actively agitated for nonwhite and non-citizen workers’ full inclusion. Yet in Factories the popular presumption of white citizens as farm owners and nonwhite noncitizens as alien farmworkers played too great a role in shaping the cultural logic in which the monograph intervenes. Land ownership’s centrality to the overarching structure of Factories ultimately prevents the work from endorsing the full humanity of nonwhite and noncitizen workers in the ways that McWilliams’s other writings do. In this context, Factories appears less representative of McWilliams’s personal politics and more indicative of the problematic racial politics circulating around land ownership in California during the Great Depression.

“AGRICULTURAL PEST NO. 1”

While John Steinbeck and Dorothea Lange may be among the best remembered of California’s agrarian partisans today, in 1939, the Associated Farmers singled out Carey McWilliams as “Agricultural Pest No. 1.”⁶ After the near-simultaneous publication of Factories, Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, and Lange and Paul Taylor’s American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion in 1939, McWilliams took to the airwaves and lecture circuits. He chaired the Steinbeck Committee to Aid Agricultural Workers while Steinbeck, who McWilliams never met, remained conspicuously absent from the public debate.⁷ McWilliams’s writings and activities on behalf of migrant farmworkers led to his appointment as commissioner of Housing and Immigration (1939–42) by New Deal governor Culbert Olson. It also led to Republican governor Earl Warren’s campaign promise to fire McWilliams from his government post. Political writer Mike Davis called McWilliams “the California left’s one-man think tank during the New Deal era,” while cultural historian Michael Denning referred to McWilliams’s writings as “one of the major intellectual accomplishments of the cultural front.”⁸ Yet significant analysis of McWilliams’s contributions has been undertaken only recently, and literary interpretation of his works is nearly nonexistent.⁹

The ideological disjuncture that emerges in Factories is most apparent in the context of McWilliams’s personal history. McWilliams began his professional career as a lawyer who socialized in California’s bohemian circles. During the 1930s his practice moved to the left through his involvement with the American Civil Liberties Union and labor law. The subjects of his writing shifted from artists and literature to social injustice.¹⁰ In 1939, he published Factories in the Field, which exposed the “hidden history” of California’s agriculture, followed by Ill Fares the Land (1941), which considered the causes and consequences of agricultural industrialization on a national scale.¹¹

Factories was written during a transformative period for McWilliams’s political perspectives, from what McWilliams viewed as his political awakening in the 1930s to his growing comprehension of a “racial revolution” during the 1940s.¹² McWilliams credits his post as California’s chief of the Immigration and Housing Commission and the national scope of his research for Ill Fares the Land for his growing awareness of racial injustice. His deepened attention to race appears in works published after Factories, including Brothers Under the Skin (1943), Prejudice: Japanese Americans, Symbols of Racial Intolerance (1944), and North from Mexico: The Spanish Speaking People of the United States (1948). McWilliams participated actively in the campaigns he wrote about, including chairing the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee (1942–44).¹³ Consequently, it is important to read Factories not as representative of McWilliams’s politics as whole but as capturing a particular moment in his political transformation.¹⁴ Moreover, the racial politics embedded in Factories departs from the racial politics in McWilliams’s other writings and activism of the period. The narrative structure and racial logic in Factories contrast with McWilliams’s dedicated antiracism and antinativism. Factories reflects the depth of American agrarianism’s racial assumptions about who should own land rather than McWilliams’s personal beliefs. Its focus on land ownership overdetermines its racial politics.

As scholars have long recognized, Factories positions land ownership at the root of California’s ills.¹⁵ According to McWilliams, California skipped the stages of development from frontier to Jeffersonian democracy that typified US expansion. Instead, the Spanish colonial system and Mexican rule created large land holdings.¹⁶ As he summarized it, “The ownership changed from Mexican grantee to American capitalist; the grant, as such remained.”¹⁷ Consequently, no place remained in the newly American California for ordinary white US citizens to find open land to conquer and settle, preventing the emergence of small farms. McWilliams writes, “There were at all times settlers galore, but no free land.”¹⁸ Only corrupt capitalists and corporations who manipulated the system to gain control over and expand existing monopolies benefited from the US conquest of California. Thus, McWilliams criticizes the “robber barons” that benefited from the Mexican-American War without problematizing Manifest Destiny or the United States’ landgrab from Mexico.¹⁹ Factories emphasizes that California’s agricultural industry developed its exploitative conditions because of this oligarchic ownership of land. As McWilliams writes, “The character of farm ownership, established at the outset, is at the root of the problem of farm labor in California.”²⁰

McWilliams contends that a new system of land ownership is necessary to improve farmworkers’ lives. He introduces this claim in the second chapter of Factories, “Empire and Utopia.” This chapter contrasts two economic models: monopolization and colonization (McWilliams’s term for collective ownership). As he tells it, “The two stories represent a conflict between two types of development, between land development under capitalism and land development under socialism.”²¹ According to McWilliams, land development under socialism (utopia) leads to US settlers’ successful settlement of land, while land development under capitalism (empire) leads to the importation and exploitation of migrant laborers.

In McWilliams’s view, land monopolization requires robbing settlers of their land, a process in which the indigenous peoples of California are notably not mentioned. McWilliams’s “empire” belongs to Lux and Miller, a corporation formed by Charles Lux and Henry Miller.²² McWilliams asserts that Lux and Miller consolidated their land by “brush[ing] [small settlers] aside like flies” (McWilliams, Factories, 32). Settlers’ dispossession was crucial for the corporation’s expansion. We are told, “It is apparent that if Miller had used a shotgun instead of the courts, his methods [of land acquisition] could not have been more ruthless, or essentially more illegal, than they were” (37). The government facilitated this land fraud, as “Miller and Lux never had the slightest difficulty in getting special acts passed by the Legislature validating their countless thefts” (32). The state and the capitalists colluded to steal California’s lands, and “the early settlers had been squeezed out” (36). Without settlers, vast holdings of California land were without laborers, necessitating an exploited migrant labor stream. Capitalists such as Lux and Miller recruited “tramps” and “hobos,” or landless men (36). In McWilliams’s view, Miller and Lux’s “empire” exemplified the way in which monopolistic land ownership prevented settlers from claiming land in California and generated the pattern of migrant labor exploitation.

In contrast, McWilliams’s “utopia” is the socialist-inspired Kaweah Cooperative Colony. McWilliams reclaims Kaweah as an alternative model in which settlers were actually allowed to settle land in California. Kaweah establishes that socialism allows technological achievement, artistic expression, and a stable society without economic collapse. According to Factories, Kaweah colonists committed no crimes, published a weekly magazine with an international readership, and constructed a model road all while the colony remained economically stable (43). McWilliams decries Kaweah’s failure as being the result of state repression. As he writes, “The creation of the Miller and Lux empire was furthered at every step in its development by the State and the agencies of the State; the Kaweah experiment was consistently opposed, and finally, stabbed in the back by the State” (39). It is murderous government corruption, rather than the failure of socialism, that prevents utopia from developing in the Golden State.

Starting with the Kaweah experiment, Factories makes clear that the solution to California’s farm labor ills is collective rather than individual land ownership. McWilliams devotes significant sections of Factories to describing technological changes in agriculture that require capital investments prohibitive of a Jeffersonian model. The road construction and irrigation projects undertaken at Kaweah would be unattainable for individuals. A functional agricultural infrastructure requires government cooperation and community collaboration. Thus the industrialization of agriculture leaves open only two achievable possibilities for California land ownership: monopoly and collectivism. Each contains its own consequences for the state’s social relations. Land monopolization requires exploited farm laborers. Collectivism requires settlers. It is in the contrast between these two models of agricultural land...