The Fruits of Natural Advantage: Making the Industrial Countryside in California 9780520920200

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The Fruits of Natural Advantage

The Fruits of Natural Advantage Malcing the Industrial Countryside in California

Steven Stoll

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORi"\lIA PRESS Berkeley / Los Angeles / London

University of Califc)rnia Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, Calit()fnia University of Calit()fnia Press, Ltd. London, England © 1998 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in- Publication l)ata Stoll, Steven, 1966The huits of natural advantage: nlaking the industrial countryside in Calitornia / Steven Stoll. p. cnl. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-520-21172-3 (cloth: allc paper) 1. Fruit industry-Calit()rnia. 2. Fruit-Calit()rnia-Marketing. 3. I-Iorticulture--Calit()rnia. 4. Agriculture- Econonlic aspectsCalif()rnia. 1. Title. HD924-7·C2S73 1998 33 8.1 '74'09794--dc21 97- 27015 CIP

Portions of chapter 4- are reprinted frOIl1 Steven Stoll, ""Insects and Institutions: lJniversity Science and the fruit Business in Calif()rnia," AlJricultural History 69 (spring 1995): 216---39, by pernlission. Printed in the lTnitcd States of Anlerica 9

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'I'he paper used in this publication Ineets the lllininlunl requirelllents ofAnlerican National Standards t()r Int()rnlation Scicnces--Pernlanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.4-8-1984.

For Sara

Song ofSongs 6 -7

The real farmer is said to adhere too closely to the ways ofhis father. He plods. The city man lvho goes to the country lvould correct all this by overturning it. He sees revolution in everything. L. H. Bailey, ""The Collapse of Freak Farn1ing" (1903)

As population increases) as the prices of agricultural products advance) as agriculture becomes more intensive and commercialized) the use of the land must be fitted to the geographic conditions Jvith greater care and precision. Oliver E. Baker, ""The Increasing In1portance of the Physical Conditions in Detern1ining the Utilization of Land for Agriculture" (1921)

The climate) seasons and soil of California differ so materially from those of other regions) in almost every particular) and are so diverse) even in different parts ofthe State) that in many operations Jve are compelled to deviate from old established rules) and frame a system of our OJvn. California Horticulturist and Floral Magazine (NoVe111ber 1870)

Contents

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

IX

PREFACE

Xl

ACIZNOWLEDGMENTS

XVll

PROLOGUE: IN THE RAIN'S SHADOW

I.

The Conservation of the Countryside The Rural Question Why Regions Specialize Relative Advantages: California's Wheat Bonanza

7 8 16

25

2.

Orchard Capitalists

32

The Irrigated Landscape Takes Shape Growers Reading the Environment Relative Advantages: New York's Frost Econon1ies of the Packinghouse

33 35 4-6 52

55

3·

Organize and Advertise When Merchants Ruled the Trade Cooperative Corporations VB

64 74-

viii

CONTENTS

A Deal in Pears From Overproduction to UnderconsulTIption The Market Makes a Landscape 4. A Chemical Shield

Single-Crop Ecology Mixing Chemicals State Business: Orchard Police and Biological Control Scientific Authority Industry Leads to Excess 5· White Men and Cheap Labor

A Season's Labor All at Once Confusion over Exclusion Sleeping on the Roadside "Our Work for Our Wages" Importing a Workforce

79 81 88

94 95 99 102 107 113

124126 133 137 142 147

6. Natural Advantages in the National Interest

155

The Contradictions of Growth Shifting Scale Orchard Culture in American Culture

156 162 173

EPILOGUE: RESTLESS ORCHARD

181

NOTES

187

BIBLIOGRAPHY

239

INDEX

263

Illustrations

Photographic plates following page 93.

Figures Charles Collins Teague 2. Harriet vVilliarrls Russell Strong 3. Packinghouse 4. Auction house 5. Pron10ting pears 6. Spray chemicals 7. Portrait of labor: Asian fruit pickers 8. Portrait of labor: White European fruit pickers 9. Orchard hOlne, 1890S 1.

Maps Map 1. California's coast ranges and the Sierra Nevada enclose the Central Valley Map 2. Relative advantages, 1880s: California and the \vorld's wheat trade Map 3. California's lnarket cities in 1924 Map 4. Colony lands: Fresno County IX

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Preface

I wrote this book to teach n1yself son1ething about agriculture and to revisit a fe\v mysterious relics froln my childhood. Like any other California kid, I saw the most familiar buildings and open spaces fold up into dirt lots, soon to be replaced by tedious fabrications of fran1e and stucconever as interesting or as beautiful as what was there before. There caIne a time, \vhile I was still young, \vhen I realized that this furious trend called "development" had been under \vay for many years and that, not long before, the place where I lived had looked very different than it did to me. Alfalfa and orange trees once clain1ed the soil under the sidewalk in the neighborhood \vhere I gre\v up, but not a patch of cultivated land remained in the 197os. Ahvays thro\vn for a loss by places neglected and things weathered, I learned to keep an eye out for fragments from the past. On travels to the suburban edge I caught sight offields and orchards and paid close attention. Though I gave no particular n1eaning to that inland space between Los Angeles and San Francisco or to the irrigated desert near Riverside and San Bernardino, \vhat I saw of these places put me into a creative confusion about my place in the world: trees in patterns, smudge pots on the roadside, pickers in hats with sacks and trays, packinghouses with corrugated steel roofs. I'm still searching for SOInething in these places-still thro\vn for a loss by fragn1ents in the landscape-though I ask different questions about th~In no\v. Perhaps I am in1pressed \vith such things because I aln not fron1 rural folks. No one in my family o\vns a farn1 (although I have a \vay\vard cousin in Vennont \vho raises organic vegetables); in fact, I an1 reasonably sure Xl

xii

PREFACE

that if I could trace my fan1ily lines back three centuries, sorting through a lineage ofmerchants and maybe a few rabbis, there would not be a peasant farmer in all ofGermany or the Russian En1pire with one ofmy names. The name Neuburger, from my mother's side, translates to "new city dweller," suggesting a narrative in which Iny last farn1ing relatives lost their property in the Bavarian countryside during some hateful uprising and moved to neighboring to\vns (like Neuburg?) where they entered urban occupations. The name they took an1id the violence ofthose events cut their ties with the countryside and expressed their optimism for life in the medieval city. That city made them no promises, and they never returned to the countryside, although that choice is now open to me. This book is my attempt to fathon1 the ll1ysteries of the countryside. It is a story of California, its lowlands and foothills, coastal plains and valleys, and how a class of entrepreneurs used these places for the intensive cultivation of fruit. Through this narrative the reader will visit vineyards and packinghouses; meet state bureaucrats, merchant capitalists, and university scientists; and walk through wholesale markets and neighborhood groceries to better observe a natural environment being fixed into a worldwide economy. The setting is always somewhere between the soil and the shopping cart, where migrant workers cut the stems and stacked the boxes, where agents of the experiment station tested insecticides on infested orchards, where producer-owned corporations graded the perfect pear and advertised it to people who had never grown one themselves. This is also a book about American agriculture in the twentieth century. The fruit business in California eInerged during a time of public apprehension about the capacity offarll1ers to feed the people who lived in cities. California became the ultimate city-serving countryside, and its rise marked important changes in the process and purpose of farming. When fruit growers found ways to sell the most delicate crops to consumers on the far side of North America they redefined the limits of agriculture as a commercial enterprise. They helped to establish industrial methods and assumptions in the Ainerican countryside. A capitalistic class of fanners--fruit growers-are the central actors in the story I tell. I am concerned with their goals and ideas, the plants they selected to cultivate, the landscape they influenced, the organizations they founded, and their relationship with harvest workers. The growers stood in the n1iddle ofchange, leading and following in different situations, den1anding or reacting at different tin1es, and usually causing the very problems they tried to solve. 1~here is no way to understand industrial agriculture in California \vithout thein. C:hinese, Japanese, Ar-

PREFACE

Xlll

nlenian, and Mexican growers cultivated orchards all across California, but white (European and Anglo-American) growers never invited thenl to the annual conventions to voice their opinions. Since I am interested in the formation of an industry, I depend on these conventions and follow the activities of their foreinost participants-the leading fruit growers in California. Because these people so often experienced the same problems and sought the same kind of help, I often refer to them as a singular entity. Before I begin I need to define a few key terms, part ofthe conlmon language that an author must establish with a reader. The following pages make frequent mention of four \vords: intensive, extensive, specialized, and industrial. Intensive cultivation is the application of capital and technology to increase yields on existing land. It is opposed to extensive cultivation, or the increase in yields through the application ofnew land with existing methods. The connection between high technology and intensive farming is not as obvious as it may seein. When Hidatsa and Mandan women on the banks of the upper Missouri River planted corn, beans, and squash in the same space, they saved moisture, replenished soil fertility, reduced damage from insects, and thus practiced a form of intensive cultivation. On the other hand, when farmers from Virginia to Illinois purchased McCormick reapers in the 1850S they used the latest industrial technology for extensive ends. In the economic interdependence and labor relations they brought, machines certainly represented industrialism come to agriculture, but they did not represent intensive cultivation, and the difference is critical. In the hands of nineteenth-century farmers, reapers and combines only nlagnified the number ofacres a sodbuster could bust. These inventions resulted in more land under cultivation, faster exploitation, and all kinds of other changes in work and rural life, but they did not nlanifest a new relationship between agriculture and land-only a Inure extensive one. Intensive cultivation Inade gro\vers rend every possible dollar from their orchards while maintaining thenl in a high state of cultivation. ~ro get the nl0st out ofvaluable acres and high transportation costs, gro\vers needed an entire series of institutions to keep the fruit business profitable. I \vill argue throughout this book that intensive cultivation becalue the very engine of industrial agriculture in California. The second term is specialization. Specialization, othenvise kno\vn as monoculture or single-crop farming, is the central concept of the follo\ving narrative. Historians of agriculture and regional development

xiv

PREFACE

often use specialization to describe a complex of crops-like corn and hogs-to which farmers adjusted their cultivation. A farm may be said to be "specialized" when a group ofclosely associated animals and plants makes up a significant portion of its output. A farm in the corn belt, for example, might have a few dairy cows, a chicken coop, a field of oats, and a kitchen garden and still derive most of its income frotn corn and hogs. l Specialization in California ll1eant son1ething else. As a region, California looked like one big diversified farm-almost every fruit (except bananas), vegetable, grain, and domestic animal could be found on a farm somewhere in the state. Individual orchards, however, tended to grow one or only a few varieties with no grains, no animals (a few horses before the automobile and perhaps a dairy cow), and no kitchen garden (this varied with place and time). Technical though this may sound, the single crop is an enormous event in the history of the North American environment. Intensive specialization meant the cultivation of certain crops to the exclusion of all others. The expense of production and marketing required growers to use the natural environment to maxitnum effect, often leading them to put in only those crops that \vould yield in a particular locality better than in any other. The single crop represented a new conception of arable land, a new relationship between farmers and the people who lived in cities, a new intensity in cultivation. Once growers installed the single crop in the landscape, they realized its n1any insecurities and moved to protect it with all the scientific, comn1ercial, and political power that they could gather. Specialization, along with the convulsions it caused, is the subject of this book. Specialization implies our fourth key word: industrialization. The single crop represents a division of labor and also a high degree of interdependence between regional economies, business firms, governn1ent agencies, and individuals-all characteristics of industrial production. Most of all, specialized crops illustrate the separation between production and consumption, the complete cotnn1ercialization of farming. 2 They have no other purpose but to feed the greater economy and the balance of foreign trade. I also take industrial to mean a routinized process, bound by expensive inputs, invested with capital, and operated by workers. In yet another sense, fruit gro\ving became an industry, tneaning that it joined a cotnplex of institutions all engaged in different facets ofthe satne product. Just as auton10biles required glass, rubber, steel, and assembly, fruit called for pesticides, marketing networks, governn1ent regulation, and labor. These things becan1e essential to the production

PREfACE

xv

and sale of fruit and brought the California countryside deep into the sphere of American capitalism. Finally, I call fruit growing horticulture, or the cultivation of flo\vering plants. The term ordinarily describes the work ofgardens, but it serves to distinguish fruits and truck crops from wheat and corn. My apologies to gardeners who would like to keep the word sheltered fron1 the din of big business. I employ the \vord from time to time, though I also use agricultu7;4e as a general term that includes fruit growing (its strict definition is the cultivation offields ). Growers often called themselves "horticulturists" to distinguish themselves from other farmers. I use the term, along with vineyardist and orchardist, simply to add variety to my prose. Before I enter into the elements of the argument, I should inform the reader of the subjects that this book does not treat. The Fruits of Natural Advantage is not a social history of rural life in California, nor does it detail the formation of towns or the day-to-day passages of rural life. I have little to say about two other subjects often associated \vith the industrial countryside in the Far West: irrigation and railroads. Fruit is mostly water, so the delivery of moisture to places where rain seldom fell made the business possible. Water influenced where people settled to farm and it caused high land prices. Water is that thing without which there could be nothing. That said, the subject of water is unimportant to the events I describe. Indeed, after landowners and private water companies established a system of canals and ditches beginning in the 1880s, and after the legal battles over how rivers would be apportioned reached a fragile resolution late in the same decade, growers rarely \vorried out loud about irrigation until the 1920S. I will make the same argument for why I pay almost no attention to railroads. Though without them there could not have been a COlnn1ercial agriculture on the scale that gro\vers contemplated, outside of an occasional resolution for lower rates and faster service, and after refrigeration became functional over long distances, transportation did not command debate when fruit gro\vers assembled. As in the case of irrigation, I simply assume the railroad's in1portance and concentrate on other subjects. My subject is agriculture itself, defined as a set ofpractices to luanipulate plants in environn1ents, and how a certain manner ofcultivation enabled gro\vers in California to join a distant economy. Finally, I consider my subject to include irrigated fruit-growing \vherever it appeared, follo\ving the assumption that the similarities benveen localities are n10re important than their differences. The events that con-

xvi

PREFACE

cern Ine happened all over California for the same reasons in each place. The central chapters ofthis book trace events in roughly the same period, 1880 to I930-the fifty years between the California wheat boom and the rural depression that merged into the Great Depression, beginning with the crash in commodity prices following World War I. Each ofthe key institutions central to industrial farming in California had come into being by the end of this half-century. What follows is the story of a rernarkable and disturbing rural world. It is a history that is never as simple as farms turning into factories, a history in which big changes unfold from srnall details. Some advice for reading: I(eep a close eye on the trees and vines. Notice the social and economic implications of the crop system, ho\v patterns on the ground make other patterns. As much as this book asks questions about events in California, it also asks questions about the many \vays in which economies, people, and environments meet in the act of cultivation.

AclGlovvledglllents

I needed all kinds of help to write this book. I made several attempts to study my subject up close. I visited the orange grove and packing facilities owned and operated by Mr. T. H. Wilson and his three sons. They gave me a brieftutorial in pesticide-free horticulture and explained to me \vhy their fifty-five acres in Riverside County turn out such excellent citrus. This brief inland excursion, in addition to trips with Sara to observe pears along the Sacramento River and raisins on the Fresno plains, sums up my experience with agriculture. I learned the details of my subject by digging in the library. And because everything came new to me, I never tired of the details (though I have tried not to encumber the text with too many of them). If I had discovered a lost economy once conducted on another planet I would not have studied it with more energy. My enthusiasm was not enough to get me through, however. I am grateful for the financial support of the Huntington Library and Yale University for two Mellon Foundation fello\vships that made it possible for me to investigate California agriculture during the early stages of my dissertation research. A Whiting Fellowship in the Humanities, generously provided by the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation and awarded by the faculty of Yale University, sustained my project in its final year. In California, talented and knowledgeable people helped Ine at every turn. Over the course of my two years in Berkeley Robert Middlekauff offered solid advice and the best companionship. Wilbur Jacobs and John Whalenbridge asked all the right questions about this project early on. Hal Barron once suggested that the book rrlight be called (with XVll

XVlll

ACIZNOWLEDGMENTS

apologies to Eugene Genovese) "The World the Growers Made." Thanks also to Donald Pisani for reading the n1anuscript with care and to Bob Smith. I am especially indebted to Martin Ridge for his generosity and good humor. I have had the pleasure to kno\v great keepers of books. At the Bancroft Library Walter Bren1 gave n1e a quiet place to stack my books and answered n1Y n10st urgent inquiries. Mary Morganti suggested ho\v I might approach the Chevron Corporation for pern1ission to read the records of the California Spray-Chemical Company. Many thanks also to Bill Roberts, Franz Enciso, and Dave Rez. Richard agar helped with photographs. Thanks also to the reference staffs of the Bio-Sciences Library at DC Berkeley and the Giannini Foundation for Agricultural Economics, and a note of gratitude to Peter Blodgett at the Huntington Library in San Marino for his relnarkable kno"-Tledge of its collections. At Yale I depended on the Sterling Memorial, Seeley G. Mudd, and Cross Campus libraries. I am ever indebted to the good-natured George Miles at the Beinecke Library. My intellectual debt to the faculty and students of Yale University is beyond calculation. Howard Lamar and William Cronon helped to shape the content of the dissertation that became this book. Howard never ceased in his encouragen1ent for the project and remained available even while serving as president of Yale University. He is a mentor and friend of remarkable generosity. Howard's open door in the Hall of Graduate Studies and his fantastic knowledge created a spirited con1munity ofstudents of the West. Bill is a constant inspiration, and he exen1plifies all the ideals of university life: great scholarship, wise counsel, generous teaching, and the highest standards of university citizenship. No one could ever hope to have more generous mentors. John Mack Faragher joined my dissertation comn1ittee on short notice and gave me invaluable comments and \varm encouragement. He has since become a great colleague. Other colleagues at Yale also contributed to this book: Jon Butler, James Scott, Charles Remington, Carol Rose, David Weiman, and especially Robin Winks. Robert Johnston read the manuscript and offered valuable advice. I also acknowledge the help and companionship of Randy Anderson, Edward Balleisen, Ben Carton, Roland Clements, IZelly Ditn1ar, IZurk Dorsey, Maia Gahtan, Elnily Greenwald, IZristin Hoganson, Gunther Peck, and Frank Rocca. Leif Haase read the entire manuscript and gave me soaring encouragement along with superb comments. At the Bancroft I learned from Steven Hackel, Michael Gonzolaz, David Igler, and

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