California farming differed from tilling in the Midwest and elsewhere in the United States. For one thing cultivation here took place on huge tracts of land, owing to the state’s tradition of Spanish grants that through lawsuits, sales, and coercion wound up mainly in the hands of white American growers. This is somewhat in contrast with the Great Plains region, where more modest family-owned farms prevailed at least into the early 1900s. Also, the state’s farms were distinct in their production of seasonal, specialized crops (see Chapter 7). In the Midwest, on the other hand, farms were more likely to produce a greater variety of crops.
As a result of these salient characteristics of California agriculture, the state’s farm workers had been employed for shorter periods of time and received lower pay than their counterparts elsewhere in the nation. Agrarian toilers in California had also been more migratory and non-white than field workers in most other states. In succession, Chinese, Japanese, Asian Indians, Mexicans, and Filipinos worked the orchards and fields of the Golden State. Until more recent times, this labor force, drawn mostly from the Pacific Rim, has been non-unionized. The chronic poverty experienced by California’s farm hands has occasionally led to violent clashes with their employers and law enforcement agents.
Given the abject conditions of farm labor, from the 1880s most of the jobs went to cash-needy, highly mobile immigrant workers. In that decade the Chinese predominated among the seasonal hands in California’s fields. One and two decades earlier they had built many of the levees protecting farmland in the Sacramento Valley. As mechanization costs rose for growers, especially on wheat farms, employers kept wages low in order to offset their increasing equipment expenses. In such circumstances, the Chinese were thought to be ideal laborers because of their stamina, organization, and reliability. Chinese cooks received higher wages than their fellow field workers, and in some instances served as account managers and advisers to employers. During the 1880s, the bumper harvests of the state’s wheat fields, sugar beet farms, and orchards were made possible by their highly productive, low-cost labor. According to the Pacific Rural Press (July 30, 1881): “It is difficult to see how the present fruit crop, which is bringing such fine prices, or the immense grape crop now ripening could be handled at all without Celestial [Chinese] aid.” With the passage of the 1882 exclusion law, opposed by many large growers who panicked at the thought of losing their cheap workforce, the influx of Chinese ended rapidly, and most of those in the rural areas moved into towns and cities.
“Japanese Rapidly Supplanting Chinese,” announced the Sacramento Bee on May 20, 1891. “They are more Tractable and Find Life Luxurious on a Dollar a Day” The news coverage was half-right - Japanese field workers indeed began replacing their Asian brethren in the 1890s. The Japanese, however, were less tractable than other field hands and initiated work stoppages to obtain higher pay. Growers occasionally brought in white strikebreakers and fired the troubling Japanese crews. The economic depression of the 1890s led to staggering job losses for whites. They directed much of their fury at these Pacific-crossers from Asia, some of whom were beaten and forced from their farm jobs
By itinerant, unemployed Anglo-Americans, sometimes referred to as “fruit tramps.” Through organizing, aggressive negotiating, and outworking their competition, Japanese farm workers earned an average of $427.18 (without board) in 1912. They had become the highest-paid field hands in the state. With their earnings, Japanese workers pooled their resources to lease or buy their own farms. Caucasian growers responded by joining with urban labor unions to block what the Sacramento Bee characterized in 1905 as dozens of “little brown men [Japanese] crowding out white laborers and getting hold of ranches.”
Two new groups of alien migrant workers entered California’s agricultural labor force in the 1910s. Asian Indians tilled in the Imperial Valley. Below the border, a revolution in Mexico (1910-20) led to many of its peasant families fleeing northward into the American Southwest and California. They were the forebears of Mexican American writer Victor Villasenor, whose book Rain of Gold (1992) recounts the trials and triumphs of these border-crossers as they sought field and other work to support their families. As with the various ethnic work groups that preceded these refugee arrivals, the state’s labor unions considered them ineligible for membership.
The fact that California’s urban labor unions ignored the plight of farm workers literally left the field open to overtures from radical organizers whose revolutionary doctrines were sure to inflame employers and conservative rural populations. Seeking to unionize the state’s desperate, disenfranchised field workers, the Chicago-based Industrial Workers of the World, known variously as the IWW and Wobblies, sent representatives into farming areas. They preached the overthrow of capitalism “through any and all tactics.”
The volatile mix of inhumane working conditions and Marxian socialist union organizing was a sure recipe for the explosion of violence that rocked the farmland just outside of the town of Wheatland, located just southeast of Marysville, in early August 1913. Ralph Durst, a major hop (an ingredient in beer) grower in the state and owner of a large ranch near Wheatland, advertised throughout California and beyond the state for pickers. Some 2,800 mostly alien job-seekers arrived; yet Durst needed only half that many. The oversupply of labor lowered wages to 75 cents a day. Ten percent of that paltry amount was held back by Durst to cover workers’ purchases of over-priced food and other essentials from the ranch store. Eight filthy outdoor toilets were provided to accommodate the throng of men, women, and children. Durst failed to supply drinking water, and would not allow workers to rent a water wagon. To quench the laborers’ thirst in the more than 100-degree Fahrenheit heat, he arranged for one of his relatives to sell watered-down lemonade for 5 cents a glass.
Amid these barbarous conditions, the angry toilers decided to take matters into their own hands. About a hundred of them were IWW members. Their leaders organized a protest meeting, demanding water, sanitary facilities, and higher wages. Durst made a few concessions before ordering several IWW organizers off his property and calling in a sheriff’s posse of deputies. A day later, August 3, the tension led to a riot when the assembled workers refused to disperse and a deputy fired his weapon in the air to calm the crowd. About 40 shots ensued, fired by both workers and lawmen. When the bullets stopped flying, four people lay dead - the district attorney of Yuba County, a deputy, and two workers.
In the wake of the melee, two of the IWW organizers were tried for murder, on the theory that their incendiary speeches led to the shooting that caused the deaths. They were convicted of conspiracy to murder the district attorney. Durst, whose exploitative treatment of the workers set the stage for the violent outburst, went unpunished.
The Wheatland tragedy drew public attention to the travails of migrant labor. Progressive Era reformers soon afterward took the first steps to improve conditions for California’s field workers.
SUMMARY
California in the late 1800s and early 1900s, as earlier, was closely connected to the rest of the nation. Consequently, the anti-railroad politics, municipal corruption, and labor strife that characterized the nation at large played out in the Golden State as well. The gunfight at Mussel Slough, the scandalous revelations in the Colton letters, the Southern Pacific’s attempt to discount its debt to the federal government, and that railroad’s efforts to monopolize the maritime trade of southern California ignited and fueled a firestorm of public anger. Much of that anger first erupted in San Francisco, the so-called “Queen City of the Pacific.” A socialistic third party, the Union Labor Party, formed there, intent on securing government ownership of the city’s utility companies. San Francisco political boss Abraham Ruef seized leadership of the ULP and proceeded to line his pockets and those of city and county officials with money he extorted from local utility companies.
San Francisco’s colossal 1906 earthquake devastated much of the municipality while exposing the rampant corruption of its government. Out of the rubble emerged a movement to prosecute the city’s corrupt officials and rebuild both the infrastructure and reputation of the Pacific Coast’s leading city. Bustling Los Angeles had big plans of its own to become a commercial force in the state. Entrepreneur Phineas Banning helped see to it that a harbor would be built in San Pedro that would one day eclipse San Francisco’s maritime supremacy.
In the late 1800s and early 1900s labor and capital battled each other in the state’s leading cities and farmlands. Mirroring workers’ struggles to organize in Chicago and New York, toilers in San Francisco and Los Angeles campaigned for collective bargaining rights. San Francisco quickly became home to the most powerful labor union movement in the western United States. In 1891 that city’s maritime workers founded the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific, which, under Andrew Furuseth, unionized dockworkers and seamen along America’s entire West Coast and beyond, demonstrating the reach of Greater California. Men and women in the state’s factories formed separate unions. Organized labor fought the admission of low-wage Asian immigrant workers into the state. Los Angeles, due to the efforts of Republican leaders Harrison Gray Otis and Henry Huntington as well as the Merchants and Manufacturers Association, was the state’s center of anti-union activity. Labor elements were involved in the bombing of the Los Angeles Times building in 1910. Agricultural workers suffered the worst conditions of employment, leading to the Wheatland riot of 1913.
REVIEW QUESTIONS
• Why was so much public anger aimed at the Southern Pacific Railroad, which had brought economic growth to California? How did Collis Huntington fit into the rising discontent of Californians?
• Why did a major struggle develop in the 1890s over where a harbor would be located in Los Angeles? What was Senator Stephen M. White’s role in that struggle?
• What was Abraham Ruef’s role in the political scandals that rocked San Francisco in the early 1900s?
• What working conditions led to the formation of maritime unions in San Francisco? How did Andrew Furuseth go about addressing those conditions, and how did he view Chinese seamen?
• What circumstances led to the Wheatland riot of 1913?
FURTHER READINGS
Walton Bean, Boss Ruef’s San Francisco: The Story of the Union Labor Party, Big Business, and the Graft Prosecution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968). The transformation of an idealistic, scholarly sophisticate into a big city boss and his influence on San Francisco politics is told with skill.
Sucheng Chan, Asian Californians (San Francisco: Boyd & Fraser, 1991). The subject matter is treated with attention to the role and treatment of Asian women in the state.
Daniel Cletus, Bitter Harvest: A History of California Farmworkers, 1870-1941 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). The author traces the state government’s response to the Wheatland tragedy, noting how the 1913 Commission on Immigration and Housing took the first halting steps by investigating and documenting farm workers’ miserable living conditions.
Daniel Cornford, ed., Working People of California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). This anthology of gendered writings focuses on urban and rural labor, skilled and unskilled toilers, and the dynamics of race within the working class.
Ira B. Cross, A History of the Labor Movement in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1935). This is a dated though still useful survey of the state’s labor history.
William Deverell, “The Los Angeles ‘Free Harbor Fight,’ ” California History, 70 (Spring 1991), 12-29. Without defending the Southern Pacific Railroad, the author critiques the widely accepted view that the opponents of a Santa Monica harbor were virtuous paladins of the public interest.
Philip Ethington, The Public City: The Political Construction of Urban Life in San Francisco, 1850-1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). Highly conceptual, this work analyzes how group identities of race, class, ethnicity, and gender shaped San Francisco’s “public sphere.”
Philip Fradkin, The Great Earthquake and Firestorms of 1906: How San Francisco Nearly Destroyed Itself (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). With detail and compelling logic, the author argues that unprepared San Franciscans and their municipal government were partially to blame for the extent of the ruins caused by the great temblor of 1906.
Michael Kazin, Barons of Labor: The San Francisco Building Trades and Union Power in the Progressive Era (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1989). The volume narrates how building trades organizers, working with other union leaders and San Francisco officials, built the strongest labor movement in any American city.
Carey McWilliams, Factories in the Field: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). This is a paperback reprint of a classic work recounting the struggles of various ethnic groups of farm workers to redress the harsh labor conditions imposed by corporate agriculture in the state.
Ernest Marquez and Veronique de Turenne, Port of Los Angeles: An Illustrated History from 1850-1945 (Santa Monica, CA: Angel City Press, 2007). The photographs, captions, and narratives contained in this volume chronicle the rise of the Port of Los Angeles to world-class stature.
Gerald D. Nash, “The California Railroad Commission, 1876-1911,” Southern California Quarterly, 54 (December 1962), 287-305. The author attributes the ineffectiveness of the Railroad Commission to the inexperience of its members as much as to the machinations and influence of the Southern Pacific Railroad.
Spencer Olin, California Politics, 1846-1920: The Emerging Corporate State (San Francisco: Boyd & Fraser, 1981). In covering the rise of California as a corporate state, the author makes a case for not viewing the Southern Pacific Railroad as the sole embodiment of the money power that shaped politics from statehood through the Progressive Era.
Jean Pfaelzer, Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans (New York: Random House, 2007). Drawing on well-documented cases, this book describes in vivid detail the lawful and unlawful means used by whites, assisted at times by African Americans, to drive the Chinese out of towns, cities, and farmlands in California and the Pacific Northwest.
Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971). Focusing on labor’s crusade against Asians, the author locates the roots of the state’s anti-Chinese movement in Civil War-era Southern white racism against blacks.
Robert J. Schwendinger, Ocean of Bitter Dreams: Maritime Relations between China and the United States, 18501915 (Tucson, AZ: Westernlore Press, 1988). This is a highly authoritative work that integrates maritime, diplomatic, and Chinese American history.
David F. Selvin, A Place in the Sun: A History of California Labor (San Francisco: Boyd & Fraser, 1981). This reliable, brief survey offers a point of entry into subject matter that is receiving increasing attention from historians.
Tom Sitton, “The Bannings on the Magic Isle: Santa Catalina Island, 1892-1919,” California History, 87 (December 2009), 6-23. Santa Catalina’s turn-of-the-century development as a “pleasure island” and sport fisherman’s paradise, under Banning family ownership, is chronicled in this article.
Tom Sitton, Grand Ventures: The Banning Family and the Shaping of Southern California (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library Press, 2010). This work traces the important business activities of Phineas Banning and his sons in spurring the growth of southern California’s maritime economy and philanthropic endeavors during the decades before and after 1900.
Errol Wayne Stevens, Radical L. A.: From Coxey’s Army to the Watts Riots, 1894-1965 (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009). The author argues that much of Los Angeles’ history since the depression-ridden 1890s has been shaped by conflict between right-wing business interests and left-wing unionists, socialists, communists, and ethnic minorities.
Grace Heilman Stimson, Rise of the Labor Movement in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1955). A bit dated, this book remains the most comprehensive and in-depth history in print of Southland labor conditions and union organizing.
Richard S. Street, Beasts of the Field: A Narrative History of California Farmworkers, 1769-1913 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004). As a study of California field labor during the lengthy time span covered, this copiously cited and engagingly written book is unmatched.
Hyman Weintraub, Andrew Furuseth: Emancipator of the Seamen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959). This well-researched biography acknowledges Furu-seth’s white racism while crediting him for steadfastly working to improve employment conditions for sailors.
9
World History
