Perhaps more than any other state, California is indelibly associated with what has been called “agribusiness” or “industrial agriculture.” The state’s specialty crops, propelled by powerful marketing organizations, have in many cases established such dominance that growers in other states have resigned themselves to local and niche markets. Georgia peach growers, for example, were national leaders at the start of the twentieth century, but are increasingly turning to local retail and mail-order gift baskets in order to boost revenue.
California’s dominance has had a seamy underbelly, however, one well documented by journalists, labor historians, and others horrified at the working conditions of California’s migrant laborers. Carey McWilliams’ 1939 Factories in the Field set the tone of righteous indignation for this brand of polemical history, a pattern that, according to historian David Vaught, has gone unquestioned for some 60 years.
In Cultivating California, Vaught asks if we even know what “industrial agriculture” means. By examining California specialty-crop growers “in the full context of their culture” (3), Vaught aims to carve out a kind of middle ground, demonstrating that some growers understood themselves neither as simple family farmers, nor as industrialist agribusinessmen, but as horticulturalists. These men were committed to “small, virtuous communities and economic development” (10). Cultivating California is a history of labor relations, but Vaught insists that such relationships be “analyzed in their agricultural context” (9). Fresno raisin-growers and Davisville almond-growers had different labor problems and proposed different labor solutions, differences that had a lot to do with their horticultural ideals.
To make his argument, Vaught follows four specialty-crop communities—Fresno raisins, Davisville almonds, Newcastle deciduous fruit, and Wheatland hops—chronologically through four periods of development. The first period, comprising the first two chapters, chronicles the crops’ commercial emergence from about 1875 to 1900. The horticultural settlement of each region except for Wheatland was accompanied by high rhetoric about the “pleasant and profitable” (44) way of life horticulture represented, as well as deeply frustrating experiences in managing labor. Chapter Three explores this continuing contradiction from 1900 to 1910, as growers adopted more progressive marketing techniques but remained dependent on the labor of Chinese and Japanese immigrants. The third period (Chapter Four) takes us up to World War I, introducing the Progressive state as a major influence in agricultural labor relations. Here Vaught reminds us that, unlike many farmers, California’s horticulturalists were anti-statist, resenting the intrusion of agricultural professionals into what they regarded as their areas of expertise. In Chapter Five, Vaught explains how this conservatism was transformed by the patriotic fervor and labor shortages engendered by World War I: “Without a pang of conscience,” he concludes, “growers now turned to translocal institutions and organizations, including the state, to control their ‘bugbear’ of labor” (186).
A couple of limitations detract somewhat from the book’s argument. First, a broader context could underscore the significance of these California specialty crop growers. It would be particularly interesting to trace the connections between the rhetoric of California growers and eastern contemporaries like Liberty Hyde Bailey and predecessors like A.J. Downing. What is the genealogy of the horticultural ideal that is so central to Vaught’s argument? Second, the organizational and governmental chaos of California’s Progressive era, which makes up so much of Chapters Four and Five, can bewilder at times. A more forceful articulation of what his study contributes to our understanding of “the roots of the states’ farm labor relations” (2) could have alleviated the confusion somewhat. Beyond a more complete picture of growers themselves, how does Vaught hope clarify the history of labor relations? Presumably, it is in tracing the transformation of specialty-crop growers from anti-statist yeomen to government-dependent labor lords with a powerful legislative lobby (Chapter Five), but this is never spelled out.
Still, Cultivating California succeeds admirably in setting apart California’s horticulturalists from other farmers and, more generally, emphasizing the diversity of California agriculture. He does this primarily by including the story of hop production in Wheatland, a choice that seems odd at first since hops were different in almost every way from California’s other specialty crops. But Vaught must refute McWilliams, who relied on the story of a 1913 labor riot on a Wheatland hop farm to argue that the farm worker unrest of the 1930s extended back into the nineteenth century. Hop producers are foils for Vaught’s real subjects, the growers of fruits and nuts. And despite the continued labor problems of the last sixty years, Vaught maintains a remarkably sympathetic posture toward these growers for whom the “moral responsibility” to farm still looms as large as the profit motive (191).
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