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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.
Bibliographical Essay
The richness and complexity of the history of agriculture confound attempts at generalization. While this chapter highlights a vast body of secondary literature, its aim is to be suggestive and informative rather than comprehensive.
Despite the crop’s prominence, there is only a fragmented history of wheat farming in California in the secondary literature. Historians have examined in considerable detail the development of the wheat belt on the western edge of the Midwest, from the Dakotas down to Kansas and into northern Texas, particularly in the 1880s. But for much of that decade, no state produced more wheat than California. Nearly all the state’s famous valleys—not only Sacramento and San Joaquin, but also Napa, Sonoma, Santa Clara (now Silicon), Salinas, San Fernando—were planted in wall-to-wall wheat at the time. Moreover, California began establishing its reputation as the “granary of the world” as early as the late 1850s, a full generation before wheat gained prominence on the Great Plains. Yet, two of the best books covering California’s wheat era—Michael J. Gillis and Michael F. Magliari, John Bidwell and California (2003) and Donald J. Pisani, From the Family Farm to Agribusiness (1984)—address the subject in considerable depth, but only as a secondary issue.
Much of the literature draws from the traditional themes of agricultural history—production, distribution, technology, and government policy. In this regard, there is no shortage of secondary sources. The three classic articles published by Rodman Paul (1958a, 1958b, 1973) and the three less well-known but equally valuable by Morton Rothstein (1963, 1969, 1975) provide an abundance of sources, information, and interpretations. Rothstein’s short study, The California Wheat Kings (1987) and Gilbert C. Fite, The Farmers’ Frontier (1966), chapter 9, should be consulted as well—along with a number of master’s theses and doctoral dissertations from the 1950s and 1960, all of which are frequently cited in these sources. Rarely cited but very informative is Forest G. Hill, “Place of the Grain Trade in California Economic Development” (1954). On technology, see Alan L. Olmstead and Paul W. Rhode, “An Overview of California Agricultural Mechanization” (1988), Reynold M. Wik, Steam Power on the American Farm (1953), and Wik, “Some Interpretations of the Mechanization of Agriculture in the Far West” (1975). And on labor in the wheat fields, see Richard Steven Street, “Tattered Shirts and Ragged Pants” (1998) and Mark Wyman, Hoboes, Bindlestiffs, Fruit Tramps (2011). See also the innovative work on bound Indian labor in the early statehood period in the two articles by Magliari (2004 and 2012) and especially Stacey L. Smith, Freedom’s Frontier (2013).
Land policy in particular has drawn considerable scholarly attention. No one has understood California’s highly complex land system better than Paul Wallace Gates, whose many penetrating essays on the subject have been collected in one volume, Land and Law in California (1991). Gates’s California Ranchos and Farms (1967) is also very useful. Pisani has deepened our understanding of several of Gates’s main themes in two pathbreaking articles of his own: “Squatter Law in California, 1850–1858” and “Land Monopoly in Nineteenth-Century California,” both in his Water, Land, and Law in the West (1996). Also valuable are Christian G. Fritz, Federal Justice in California (1991), Ellen Liebman, California Farmland (1983), M. Catherine Miller, Flooding the Courtroom (1993), Richard H. Peterson, “The Failure to Reclaim” (1974), and David Vaught, After the Gold Rush (2007).
For a few others, the primary objective has been to write “new” rural histories—that is, books and articles that examine wheat farmers in their social and cultural contexts. Much of what we know about farm life in California during this period comes from contemporary