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David Vaught

There have been many “Wests” in American history. Colonists considered the Appalachians the West; for Jeffersonians, it was the Ohio Valley; for Jacksonians, the Mississippi Valley. The land beyond the Mississippi Valley—the Great Plains—serves as the subject of another chapter in this volume by Thomas Isern (Chapter 6). Heading further westward over the Rockies, past the Great Salt Lake Desert and the Humboldt Sink, we come to the region that remains, the Pacific slope, especially California, where three great eras—wheat, specialty crops, and cotton—have defined much of the state’s agricultural history.

For much of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, Americans held two competing conceptions of the West. According to the Jeffersonian intellectual tradition, each farm family settling in America’s new heartland was to be an island unto itself—producing for its own needs on a modest piece of land and practicing bucolic virtues, free of the corrupting influences of the marketplace and the rude intrusions of industrialization. The second idea, normally associated with Alexander Hamilton and Henry Clay, envisioned an aggressive, expanding commercialized agriculture, in which farmers produced not only for themselves, but for the nation and indeed the world.

For farmers themselves, however, the two conceptions have not necessarily been mutually exclusive. Early in the nineteenth century, many who streamed across the Appalachians to new settlements saw themselves as chosen people carving out an agrarian paradise in the wilderness—as did many others much later in the century in new orchards and vineyards in California. Despite what they may have thought, both groups of farmers very quickly found themselves locked into the advancing market economy. In essence, they had one foot in the Jeffersonian past and the other in Hamilton’s modern economic order, some leaning more one way than the other. In California, where settlement coincided with America’s industrial revolution, farmers retained their predecessors’ agrarian values even as they entered an economic world increasingly dominated by railroads, giant corporations, and, eventually, the government. They were producing for national, even international, markets but still often thinking like family farmers (Rothstein 1969; Vaught 2007).

Farming of any sort—Jeffersonian and/or Hamiltonian—proved difficult in frontier California. Despite an abundance of arable soil, huge masses of land quickly fell into the grasp of powerful landlords who monopolized the countryside at the expense of aspiring settlers. This troublesome issue had its origins in California’s Hispanic past. Under Spanish and Mexican rule, just 813 rancho grantees gained possession of roughly 15 million acres that included much of the prime agricultural lands near the coast and along the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers. The rancheros’ individual holdings were huge. Mexican laws authorized grants of up to eleven square leagues (about 50,000 acres), much larger, needless to say, than the 160-acre homesteads promoted by the United States elsewhere in the West. The American settlers who poured into California following US annexation and the discovery of gold in 1848 greatly resented the presence of these baronial estates. Inflaming their resentment all the more were vague boundary descriptions and imprecise diseños (land-grant maps) that frequently made it impossible to distinguish rancho properties from the public domain. As a result, continuous disputes erupted between rancheros and encroaching settlers who claimed that they were not illegal trespassers but squatters exercising their rights, under the 1841 Prescription Act, to occupy unsurveyed federal land (Gates 1967, 1991; Fritz 1991; Pisani 1996).

As rancheros and squatters disputed claims throughout much of California, the underlying problem of land monopoly only grew worse. Largely because of poor supervision and corrupt administration, federal and state land disposals in California created more empires than homesteads. Nowhere was this more apparent than with the vast landholdings carved out of the public domain by San Francisco speculator William S. Chapman, who amassed 350,000 acres by 1871, and the cattlemen Henry Miller and Charles Lux, whose acquisitions eventually enclosed more than one million acres. Most controversial of all were the immense holdings of the Southern Pacific Company, whose sprawling domain covered well over 11 million acres by 1880 (Bloom 1983; Gates 1991; Pisani 1996; Igler 2001; Orsi 2005; Shelton 2013).

Then, too, was the related and equally complex matter of water monopoly. Despite California’s semiarid Mediterranean climate, the first state legislature adopted the riparian doctrine of water use, an old principle rooted in Anglo-American common law. Landowners with property bordering a river or lake, the doctrine stated, had the sole right to divert the water. Riparian rights, in fact, were seen as part of the title to the land. In the east and other developed regions, it was well-known that the riparian doctrine restricted irrigation and discouraged agricultural growth, especially in dry lands like California. Later in the decade, the state legislature also legalized the Hispanic water doctrine known as “prior appropriation”—which allowed water to be diverted from its natural channel to areas removed from the source on a first-come, first-served basis. Not surprisingly, bitter disputes resulted in endless litigation that were usually, though not always, won by riparians. In this manner, land and water monopoly often became inseparable in frontier California, as land barons like Miller and Lux snapped up strategic riparian lands that gave them exclusive access to vital streams and freshwater lakes (Pisani 1984, 1996; Miller 1993; Igler 2001).

What, then, drove farmers to persist under these conditions? Early on, cattle-ranching proved profitable for feeding miners their beef (Pulling 1944; Gates 1967; Jordan 1993). But the main attraction was the beginning of one of the most extraordinary episodes in American agricultural history—California’s bonanza wheat era. As in the various other American Wests, wheat became a major crop in the new state in the 1850s. Its cultivation flourished on the virgin soils of the frontier, its culture was well-known and inexpensive, and it required only a limited amount of largely unskilled labor. It was not unusual for a first crop to return a sizable profit. Moreover, because bread was central to the American and European diets, wheat invariably brought the best market prices of any grain. Wheat was also nonperishable and could be transported at minimal costs to distant markets in oceangoing ships (Fite 1966; Paul 1973; Pisani 1984; Rothstein 1987; Gerber 1993; Gillis and Magliari 2003; Vaught 2007).

Then, in the late 1860s, several factors coincided to turn what had been a modest output into a bonanza. By then, many of the land disputes that had plagued the state had been adjudicated or settled. After a devastating 3-year drought broke in 1865, California produced three straight bumper crops at the same time that Great Britain and other European nations suffered dangerously deficient harvests. Enterprising grain merchants in dozens of new railroad towns in the San Francisco Bay region, up the Sacramento Valley, and down the San Joaquin and Salinas valleys exploited the opportunity to the fullest, as did farmers, who followed the newly laid Southern Pacific tracks onto flat valley lands. With wheat acreage soaring, a large-scale, highly structured export industry emerged overnight, with “Wheat King” Isaac Friedlander, from his office in San Francisco, assembling an international network of banks, warehouses, shipping companies, and grain sack factories to link wheat farmers with consumers primarily in the United Kingdom, but also in Australia and China. Farmers took great pride in the knowledge that their wheat moved in greater volume over greater distances than any product ever before in human history, with fully three-fourths of every harvest exported to foreign markets. “You had to be a true believer,” wrote historian Morton Rothstein, “to plunge into growing and exporting a bulky, low-cost commodity such as wheat over immense distances with any hope of making a profit” (Hill 1954; Paul 1958b; Fite 1966; Rothstein 1975, 1987; Orsi 2005).

The scale of wheat farming varied widely. The largest and most well-known (but still understudied) grower in the state was Hugh Glenn, who amassed an empire of 66,000 acres in the northern Sacramento Valley, extending some 20 miles along the west bank of the Sacramento River. Glenn employed nearly 1000 laborers, invested more than $300,000 in machinery and draft animals, and produced a million bushels a year by 1880. With so many laborers required to bring in the crop, there was work for anyone who wanted it, usually at comparatively good wages of up to $2.00 a day, plus board. Roughly half the workforce consisted of native-born Americans, the other half immigrants from northern Europe. Unemployed common laborers from Sacramento and San Francisco made up most of both groups. Work on Glenn’s mammoth wheat ranch was exhausting, unpleasant, and very dangerous, especially for those laboring near the thresher, where it was not uncommon to lose a finger, a hand, or even an arm in one of the revolving cylinders (Rothstein 1987; Street 1998; Scheuring 2010).

Many things about late nineteenth century California seem larger than life, but Glenn was hardly representative of all wheat growers. Indeed, small ranches and large estates, the federal manuscript census of agriculture reveals, developed side by side up and down the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys. Those who operated on a smaller scale often became prominent and respected community leaders in the new railroad towns such as Davisville, Vacaville, Santa Clara, and Napa. George W. Pierce of Yolo County, for example, operated his 1200-acre wheat ranch much more like a midwestern farmer—precisely because he was a midwestern farmer—a migrant from Wisconsin, to be precise. Wheat was his cash crop, and it absorbed much of his time and resources, but he did not rely on it exclusively. He also raised alfalfa, barley, grapes, peaches, strawberries, hogs, turkeys, and chickens, and his wife produced butter and eggs—all in substantial quantities for local markets. Pierce knew that his wheat income was subject not only to disastrous droughts and floods, but also world market vagaries. In off years, his family’s other activities had to carry the farm through. He also demonstrated a keen environmental consciousness by fallowing, rotating his crops, and fertilizing on a regular basis. For 10 years, Pierce served as justice of the peace, the township’s most important local official. Though state law limited his jurisdiction to claims of $200 or less, his neighbors invariably turned to him first to settle just about any dispute (Fite 1966; Prescott 1977/1978; Magliari 1992; Vaught 2007).

Virtually all farmers, large or small, made significant contributions to agricultural technology in the age of wheat in California. They were among the first to replace the old walking plow with the gang plow, which had several shares attached to a beam, moved on wheels, and was pulled by a team of horses. At the Glenn ranch, plowing often proceeded with as many as 100 gang plows in echelon formation, each drawn by an eight-horse team. California farmers also used new machines for planting, harrowing, and seeding, many of them developed and manufactured in nearby Stockton. And it was California farmers who ultimately perfected the steam-powered harvesting-threshing combine—machines so large and heavy that they required as many as two dozen horses to move them—and made it popular for the rest of the country. The need for mechanical motive power led directly to the invention of the tractor, first used in the San Joaquin Valley with steam power in 1886. Later, California entrepreneurs would adapt the tractor to the internal combustion engine and develop the “caterpillar” track (Wik 1953, 1975; Olmstead and Rhode 1988).

For most of the second half of the nineteenth century, wheat was California’s largest and most profitable agricultural commodity. But just as California had earned a reputation as the “granary of the world,” with production reaching a peak of 41 million bushels in 1890, the bonanza wheat era ended abruptly. In the late 1880s, other farmers on the Great Plains and in Europe, Asia, and Australia began planting wheat of their own—often using techniques and technology that Californians had perfected earlier. Overproduction, along with 4 years of severe depression in the mid-1890s, glutted world markets and sent wheat prices plummeting. By 1910, California imported most of its wheat from the Midwest (Rothstein 1987; Paul 1988; Rhode 1995; Vaught 2007).

Already underway in California’s farm economy was what economist Paul Rhode has called “one of the most rapid and complete transformations ever witnessed in American agricultural history”—that from wheat to specialty crops. Improved irrigation facilities and rail connections to the east encouraged many farmers—or, more often, their sons, such as George W. Pierce Jr.—to subdivide their fields for more profitable uses—deciduous and citrus fruits; wine, table, and raisin grapes; nuts; winter vegetables; and a host of other specialty crops. Many of these crops were fragile, perishable, and unfamiliar to the state’s farmers. To advance their knowledge, they formed a variety of organizations, some of them state-funded, to establish standards, sponsor innovation, combat disease and pests, and disseminate information in print and in papers delivered at annual fruit growers’ conventions. Indeed, to a much greater degree than their counterparts in the Midwest and the South, Californians were book farmers (Rhode 1995; Vaught 1999; Olmstead and Rhode 2008).

Much of the new production came not from old wheat farms but from planned communities or organized “colonies”—among the most important of which were in San Bernardino, Anaheim, Riverside, and Ontario in southern California, and a number of others near Sacramento. Here, settlers pooled their capital, water rights, labor, expertise, and machinery. Cooperatively, they bought and improved land, developed irrigation, introduced new crops, and provided social and cultural amenities to reduce the isolation of the farm frontier (Starr 1985; Sackman 2009; Sandul 2014).

Similar colonies were established in Fresno—though not by the settlers themselves but by land speculators, two of whom were none other than the notorious William Chapman and Isaac Friedlander. The first to comprehend the obstacles to successful reclamation and settlement in the dry, barren central San Joaquin Valley, Chapman and Friedlander organized a syndicate of San Francisco capitalists to purchase 125 sections (80,000 acres), secure the water rights from the nearby Kings River, and then subdivide it into small irrigation farms. The great irony was that because riparian water rights prevailed, land in the San Joaquin Valley could only be watered by monopolizing it (Clough and Secrest 1984; Pisani 1984; Miller 1993; Vaught 1999).

From this huge block of land, Chapman, in 1875, carved out the first successful settlement, the Central California Colony, 3 miles southwest of the Fresno railroad depot. He started by dividing six sections into 192 lots of 20 acres each and building an intricate system of canals and laterals to supply Kings River water to each tract. The developers laid out 23 miles of roads between the lots, lining them with varieties of fruit trees and naming each avenue after its particular fruit. Lots, water rights included, were priced to sell at $1000 ($100 down, $12.50 per month, and no interest). Buyers were encouraged to cultivate high-value crops—in particular raisin grapes, which thrived in Fresno’s natural environment of hot, dry summer days and cool, moisture-free nights, and the valley’s sandy loams. With crucial assistance from the Southern Pacific Railroad, Chapman promoted the colony in newspapers, pamphlets, and posters throughout the country. The standard pitch began: “Why will you go on year after year planting grain, trusting to the uncertain rainfall, and invariably losing in a dry season the hard-earned savings of several favorable years, when in the Central California Colony, you may secure land and an abundance of water to irrigate it at a moderate price and easy terms of payment?” (Clough and Secrest 1984; Vaught 1999; Orsi 2005).

The colony, an enormous success, served as a blueprint for subsequent endeavors. By 1890, thirty-four similar settlements surrounded Fresno within a 20-mile radius. They varied in area from one to fourteen sections and covered over 50,000 acres. The colonies encouraged the development of small towns—Oleander, Malaga, Fowler, and Selma, for example—with schools, churches, stores, dairies, and social clubs. By the turn of the century, the boundaries between the colonies had become blurred, creating a vast, unbroken region of small farmers—3000 vineyards of 10–40 acres sustained by 5000 miles of irrigation canals and ditches. Their community, the settlers firmly believed, was a virtuous place somewhere between the isolated self-sufficient Jeffersonian rural order and the market-dominated, impersonal industrial city. It was a place where landowning families lived on small, orderly, and prosperous vineyards in close proximity to one another. It thus fostered neighborliness, strong local social and cultural institutions, and economic progress, all in an environment that was aesthetically pleasing as well (Clough and Secrest 1984; Vaught 1999; Woeste 1998).

Not all aspects of the raisin community proved ideal, however. Indeed, labor relations became the Achilles’ heel to the farmers’ dream of a viticultural paradise. Even in the smallest vineyard, they could not harvest their labor-intensive crop without a force of seasonal workers. The scale and scope of the raisin harvest was overwhelming. Typically, a 20-acre vineyard required ten workers for the three-week harvest in mid-September—a demand, if considered in isolation, that seems not all that unmanageable. But every vineyardist’s harvest occurred at virtually the same time as every other vineyardist’s harvest. Thus, an estimated 18,000 workers were needed to pick and pack the 70 million pounds of raisins by 1900—all of them temporary workers, hired at the season’s beginning and dismissed at its end. Few chose to endure the conditions that boosters never mentioned: no job security; temperatures soaring over 100 degrees; dry, dusty, and shadeless terrain; and with the work itself, constant stooping or squatting. The work attracted only those with limited options, and from the very outset, they were largely Asian immigrants—first Chinese and by the turn of the century, Japanese. Both gravitated toward the opportunity for vineyard work, which paid $1.00–1.25 a day (Chan 1986; Iwata 1992; Vaught 1999).

The system of labor organization enhanced their value even more, for it was contractors who solved growers’ supply and recruitment problems. Most were well-connected local merchants who could secure large numbers of harvest workers from Sacramento, Stockton, and San Francisco with just a few hours’ notice. They quickly learned to seize the moment and assert their bargaining power. By 1900, it was clear that Japanese contractors, not farmers, controlled the labor market. Their favorite strategy was to withhold the labor of their workers at the height of the harvest and demand a higher rate. Farmers had little recourse. Individual efforts to try and replace striking workers invariably failed because contractors, tightly organized as they were, rarely infringed on each other’s territory. And since anti-Asian sentiment prevailed in California cities, growers’ dependence on Japanese labor damaged the reputation of their communities and their enterprise (Hallagan 1980; Chan 1986; Iwata 1992; Vaught 1999; Street 2004).

Between 1880 and the early 1900s, specialty-crop agriculture became the state’s leading industry, with varying patterns of settlement but with similar community idealism and labor problems as in Fresno. Orange groves spread through the upland valleys of southern California, lemons along the coast (Guerin-Gonzales 1994; Orsi 1995; Sawyer 1996; García 2001 ; Sackman 2009). Wine grapes flourished in the valleys north of the San Francisco Bay (Carosso 1951; Olmstead and Rhode 2008; Cinotto 2012; Briscoe 2017; Conaway 2018). Deciduous fruit and nut orchards took root in the Bay Area, the Sacramento Valley, and the northern San Joaquin Valley (Scheuring 1983; Starr 1985; Stoll 1998; Vaught 1999; Tsu 2013). After 1900, with advances in irrigation and refrigeration, lettuce, melons, berries, tomatoes, dates, and other crops spread along the Pajaro and Salinas rivers and into the deserts of the Imperial and Coachella valleys (Nakane 1985; Wells 1996; Andrés 2014; Ivey 2007; Flores 2016). By the early twentieth century, California had become the nation’s most diverse agricultural region and its leading producer of wine and table grapes, raisins, winter vegetables, lemons, almonds, walnuts, tomatoes, sugar beets, plums, prunes, and apricots (Scheuring 1983; Starr 1985).

During this time, many of these producers, in a manner closer to an industrial model, organized powerful cooperatives to market and brand their crops. Founded in 1893, the California Fruit Grower’s Exchange (Sunkist) became the first successful cooperative, followed by groups of raisers of walnuts, almonds, deciduous fruit, raisins, dairy cattle, poultry, and other products. These organizations limited production, regulated prices, adopted grading standards, and took charge of packing and marketing in order to eliminate middlemen. For most Americans, the taste of California came via Sunkist oranges, Sun Maid raisins, and Blue Diamond almonds. And, as an added dividend, it was the same clever marketing that persuaded Americans that fruit was an everyday food, not a luxury saved for birthdays and holidays (Erdman 1958; Blackford 1977; Street 1979; Woeste 1998; Orsi 1995; Vaught 1999).

Like raisins, cotton, California’s most profitable crop by 1950, benefited from the San Joaquin Valley’s favorable environmental conditions. The Pacific Ocean and the state’s two principal mountain ranges—the Coast Range on the west and the Sierra Nevada on the east—protect the valley (and most of the state) from extreme temperatures and snow, creating mild winters, rainless summers, and long growing seasons. Rain rarely falls between May and October—perfect for raisins, which are dried on trays between the vineyard rows over a 2-week period in late September/early October; and perfect for cotton, where wet leaves and bolls can destroy a crop or result in a severe grade loss, and where muddy ground keeps tractors and mechanical pickers out of the fields. Environmental conditions kept the San Joaquin Valley free of bollworms and weevils, and for the variety of other pests that attacked cotton, ranchers had DDT and a number of other lethal chemical agents (Bakker 1971; Turner 1981; Musoke and Olmstead 1982; Clough and Secrest 1984; Kirby 1987; Olmstead and Rhode 2008).

Also like raisins, cotton depended on irrigation, particularly on the west (read dry) side of the valley. An abundance of water comes from the major rivers cascading down from the high Sierra (which boasts the nation’s deepest snowpack), most of them damned by the New Deal’s Central Valley Project, one of the most complex and massive water transfer systems ever built, which brought over a million acres of San Joaquin Valley land under irrigation with taxpayer-subsidized water. In addition to increasing usable acreage, irrigation allowed growers to water the crop in measured amounts at just the right time to avoid incidents of insufficient or excessive moisture. These conditions also greatly reduced weeds, which were controlled relatively easily with tractor-drawn cultivators rather than a year-round workforce as in the South. The controlled environment also reaffirmed growers’ decision, along with the crucial roles played by the state legislature and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), to create and maintain a one-variety community throughout the entire San Joaquin Valley. The medium staple Acala cotton adapted to local environmental conditions, and its across-the-board adoption prevented contamination with inferior varieties and assured local gins of a uniform-quality raw material (Turner 1981; Musoke and Olmstead 1982; Kirby 1987; Olmstead and Rhode 2008).

Early on, cotton also shared the problems of an extremely labor-intensive crop, with Mexican nationals and Mexican Americans having replaced Asian workers in the 1920s. Prior to mechanization, most cotton in California was picked on a piece-rate basis by seasonal laborers under a contract system void of paternalism. Efforts to unionize workers led to frequent, widespread, and often violent disputes, most notably the San Joaquin cotton strike of 1933 involving many thousands of pickers for almost a month. Few ranchers intended to yield to worker unions, so they looked to mechanization as their solution, which they achieved en masse and at enormous cost savings over hand-picking by the late 1950s (Daniel 1982; Musoke and Olmstead 1982; Weber 1994).

Adding up the favorable environmental conditions, irrigation benefits, grower unity, generous governmental assistance, and mechanization, the production numbers alone speak volumes. In terms of acreage, California ranked fourteenth out of fifteen cotton-producing states in 1919, ninth by 1949, and second by 1959. With regard to bales produced, California moved from tenth place in 1929 to fifth place in the late 1940s, and was second only to Texas in 1959. From 1925 to 1959, California production increased 900 percent, while over the same period, total US production declined by 15 percent. In the new cotton kingdom of the San Joaquin Valley, growers achieved yields three times those of the traditional cotton-growing areas in the South, making California one of the top cotton-producing states in the nation (Musoke and Olmstead 1982).

One particular cotton rancher is the subject of a romping good read—Mark Arax and Rick Wartzman, The King of California: J.G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire (2003)—by far the best-selling book on any aspect of California agriculture over the last decade. As the title implies, journalists Arax and Wartzman seek to reveal the secrets of James Griffin (J.G.) Boswell (and, later, his son Jim), the biggest farmer in California, if not the United States and possibly the world. A slave-owning family from Greene County, Georgia, where Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, the Boswells migrated to California in the 1920s. En route, as Jim liked to tell it, they passed up the lush Mississippi, Colorado, and Imperial valleys for “a god-forsaken salt lake in a place called Corcoran” in the lower San Joaquin Valley, 50 miles south of Fresno.

This was Tulare Lake, one of America’s biggest, but with no outlet to the sea on the dry west side of Kings County. Over time, and sparing no expense or hubris, J.G. drained it, planted field after field in Acala cotton, controlled flooding and irrigation by lobbying the federal government to build the controversial Pine Flat Dam on the Kings River, vertically integrated his firm, purchased more and more land, and battled the labor unions, “the reclamation boys in Sacramento and Washington,” and the “enviros” from seemingly everywhere. The end result was a “company” (they abhorred the word “plantation”) of 200,000 acres, give or take a few thousand, or, as the authors put it, “the equivalent of more than ten Manhattan Islands.” Along the way, Arax and Wartzman manage to weave in a cast of characters from Father Serra to Cecil B. DeMille to Charles Manson—a veritable Who’s Who of California history (Arax and Wartzman 2003).

As drama, The King of California is positively gripping. The narrative is tight, brilliantly conceived, fast-paced, and, simply put, nearly impossible to put down. The 430 pages of text go by in a flash. Every last rhetorical device seems to work, from sprinkling in a few of the King’s words here and there (no one had ever interviewed him before), to pointing out that growing a T-shirt takes 257 gallons of water, to quoting Winnie-the-Pooh on the issue of flooding. The real villain of the story, it turns out, was not so much Boswell himself but the government. Though not always in his back pocket, the federal government was always there when he needed it most—on the labor front, building dams, protecting his water rights from the 160-acre limit imposed by the Reclamation Act of 1902, and paying him millions upon millions of dollars in crop subsidies. The hero, in many ways, was the environment itself. Nature, for example, seemed to lure Boswell and other cotton farmers into a false sense of security, waiting for periods of 15–30 years before unleashing a “flood of the century” to refill the lake and drown the crops. And no matter how much Boswell spent on fertilizers and pesticides (upwards of $30 million a year), the cotton and bugs in the field found all sorts of ways to defy him. So effective are Arax and Wartzman that, by the end, it becomes almost impossible to criticize the book without appearing to be a mouthpiece or an apologist for the King (Arax and Wartzman 2003).

But criticize we must. Grower-state relations, as portrayed in this book’s account of Boswell’s life, are highly oversimplified, if not sensationalized. Arax and Wartzman take their cue from Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (1985), and Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water (1986). The Kings River was a “river of empire,” they insist, and the scheme to dam it part of the larger “hydraulic society” of twentieth-century America. In this view, the federal government, and indeed all levels of government, acted as a monolithic bloc and, moreover, simply as an extension of the capitalist system. The workings of government and the political process, however, were often considerably more mundane. A number of histories, chief among them Donald J. Pisani, Water, Land, and Law in the West: The Limits of Public Policy, 1850–1920 (1996), and Pisani, Water and American Government: The Reclamation Bureau, National Water Policy, and the West, 1902–1935 (2002), have demonstrated persuasively that water policy itself was actually constrained by competition among Western states, interagency rivalries, constant conflict between Congress and executive agencies, and any number of other forces dating back well into the nineteenth century. Good history, the point being, does not always make good drama, and vice versa.

In the end, the King himself may have had the last laugh. Americans, historians and nonhistorians alike, love to see the world in dichotomies—rural/urban, agricultural/industrial, agrarian/capitalist, frontier/factory. No one understood this better, or took better advantage of it, than Boswell. He wore blue jeans and cowboy boots, drove a pick-up-truck, and described himself as “a boy from a Georgia cotton patch” while living in a mansion in San Marino and sitting on the boards of directors of Cal Tech and Safeway Stores. He could be whatever he wanted to be, whenever he wanted to be it—including the voice of agrarianism. Arax and Wartzman fall right into his trap. They rely on their readers’ desire to picture the farmer as continuing in the tradition and glory of Jeffersonian virtue in order to horrify with their crack investigative reporting. Bad growers. Bad government bureaucrats. The unintended result is to make Boswell a sympathetic figure and evoke admiration for his grit and persistence. Jeffersonian agrarianism lives on in California, albeit in mysterious ways (Arax and Wartzman 2003).

As a coda, among the most intriguing books in California’s agricultural history in recent years, particularly for its historiographical contributions, is Matt García, From the Jaws of Victory: The Triumph and Tragedy of Cesar Chavez and the Farm Worker Movement (2012). García brings a fresh, balanced, much-needed, and much-welcomed historical approach to the golden age of the United Farm Workers, now half a century in the past. The timing is no accident. Histories of Chavez and the United Farm Workers (UFW) have long been the domain of participants-activists (e.g. Dunne 1967; Taylor 1975; Meister and Loftis 1977; Majka and Majka 1982; Ross 1989; Griswold del Castillo and Garcia 1995). Generally, when a new generation of historians emerges, García’s included, past and present begin to disengage. The new historian’s world becomes too remote from past events to dictate, in any direct sense, his or her understanding of those events. At this point, the past can then be understood on its own terms, a lost world to be recaptured in the historian’s imagination and diligence in the archives.

This is exactly what happened with the New Deal. Once occupying a place of honor in liberal historiography, the New Deal began to come under attack in the 1970s from the left. It became seen as less liberating and more of a straitjacket for the labor movement and a tool of contemporary anti-union employers, a trend that reached fever pitch in the 1980s when Christopher Tomlins described the Wagner Act itself as a “counterfeit liberty.” By turning the study of employer–laborer–state relations on its head (indeed, every which way), Tomlins and his cohorts rejuvenated New Deal historiography, breaking the heroic mold that it once took (Tomlins 1985).

García’s book follows a similar trajectory. While he offers numerous rich and revealing revisionist insights, his most significant contribution concerns UFW–state relations, which, even at the height of the union’s influence were much more complicated than recognized in previous books. Most end in 1975, when the union’s greatest achievement, the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act, was passed by the state legislature. It guaranteed all farm workers in the state what the Wagner Act had omitted 40 years earlier—full legal rights to collective bargaining—and was trumpeted by Chavez as farm labor’s Magna Carta.

By the time Chavez died in 1993, however, UFW membership and bargaining power had declined dramatically. Part of the reason was internal. Chavez insisted that the union be run democratically—that is by the members themselves. But UFW members often lacked the experience, bureaucratic expertise, and language proficiency to address nuts and bolts union matters effectively. External politics played an even more damaging role. The Agricultural Labor Relations Act set up a five-member board appointed by the governor to oversee and enforce the law’s provisions. As long as a sympathetic governor like Jerry Brown was in office, the board tended to rule in favor of the UFW. But when Republicans took over in 1982 for an extended period, the board became far more sympathetic to grower interests. As early as 1986, in fact, Chavez wanted the whole law dismantled. Allying the UFW’s interests to politics, he discovered, was indeed very much of a double-edged sword (García 2012 ).

By the end of the twentieth century in California, it needs to be asked in closing, had the Jeffersonian intellectual tradition completely given way to Hamilton’s vision of an aggressive, expanding commercialized agriculture? Not if we listen to Victor Davis Hanson, a fifth-generation raisin grower in Fresno County in the 1980s and 1990s. In the raisin industry, remarkably little had changed since early in the century. Ninety-five percent of the country’s (and half the world’s) production still occurred within a 50-mile radius of the city of Fresno. Production remained small in scale, with vineyards averaging about 50 acres, and the labor process, with trays of hand-picked grapes drying in the sun, remained unchanged as well. These “family farmers,” as they were often called, employed at least 50,000 workers every harvest. Indeed, of the 250 crops grown in the San Joaquin Valley, raisins were still the most labor-intensive. The vast majority of pickers were hired through contractors and paid a piece wage, and 98 percent were Mexican immigrants. The system of labor had worked so well that growers over the decades had shown little interest in mechanizing. Picking machines have begun to appear in recent years and currently harvest about 25 percent of the crop, but they have proven cost-effective only in the largest vineyards (Vaught 1999).

Hanson lived in a world that still had much in common with an earlier time. His very language and attitudes reflected those of his grandfather and his grandfather’s grandfather, who purchased the family’s Selma farm in 1878 at the start of the raisin boom. Hanson unabashedly compared his triumphs and struggles to those of the ancient Greeks and Romans. He described raisin and fruit cultivation with considerable passion and in minute detail, as though he was delivering a paper at a late-nineteenth-century fruit growers’ convention. His anger toward the “company brokerage men” during the “raisin holocaust” of the early 1980s recalled his ancestors’ disdain for the “dreaded middlemen” of the 1890s. Similarly, his disdain of “university tinkerers” knew no bounds, even though Hanson himself taught Greek and Latin at the nearby state college when raisins fell below their living price. When the subject turned to labor, Hanson became defensive and blamed “the union, the government, and the immigration explosion in Mexico” for compounding the problem (Hanson 1996).

Above all, Hanson asserted—with no hint of sentimentality—that fruit growers such as he were “different, vastly different, from almost all other types of citizens,” and indeed embodied the very essence of Western culture. That moral responsibility, he concluded, compelled him to keep farming, though sheer economics often dictated otherwise (Hanson 1996). The Jeffersonian ideal, it would seem, is still very much alive in California agriculture—or, at the very least, continues to provide plenty of food for thought.