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Journal of Interdisciplinary History 31.4 (2001) 661-662



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Book Review

Cultivating California:
Growers, Specialty Crops, and Labor, 1875-1920


Cultivating California: Growers, Specialty Crops, and Labor, 1875-1920. By David Vaught (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999) 280 pp., $38.00.

Cultivating California veers from the conventional approach to labor studies by reversing the central players in the examination of agricultural labor in California at the end of the nineteenth century and during the early twentieth century. Vaught privileges a cultural examination of growers, rather than that of labor, in his generally successful examination of the tortuous path taken by specialty crop growers to meet their harvest labor demands. Vaught examines four crop regions of northern California--peaches, raisins, almonds, and hops. His purpose is to dispel what he considers the myth of a centralized and monolithic agriculture throughout the history of California agriculture and of labor relations supposedly shaped by monolithic agriculture. Vaught points out that the misrepresentation originated with Carey McWilliams and his contemporaries writing during the Great Depression. Futhermore, this error has more or less informed scholarship and conventional wisdom ever since. Vaught reasons that McWilliams' political activism, rather than a detached research, colored his oft-cited work Factories in the Fields (Santa Barbara, 1971; orig. pub. 1935). The author therefore directly challenges [End Page 661] the McWilliams thesis that California agriculture has been shaped by the "factories in the fields" model since the nineteenth century.

Vaught succeeds in showing that the claims of monolithic agriculture are wide of the mark; at least he makes us aware that not all growers had the same problems in growing, harvesting, harnessing labor, and marketing. Vaught is more concerned with the claim that the "factory" model has operated throughout the history of California agriculture. He contends that it may have dominated during the post-1920 period but not before. Growers harbored tendencies to think locally rather than statewide and were unable, or unwilling, to act in concert and inform public policy. The author succeeds in marshalling arguments and evidence for pointing out that the small- to medium-sized growers that he studied celebrated their strong penchant for independence rather than consolidated political action. However, evidence for the factory model does not necessarily turn on whether or not growers acted in concert, but on whether the forms of capitalist production were similar across various locales and periods. For example, the period that Vaught studies evinces the very ingredients that suggested the factory model to McWilliams. The private ownership of capital; the use of modern machinery for processing; labor intensive or socialized production; migratory, cheap labor; and growers' strong desire to control labor are found in both epochs.

Vaught also maintains that the infamous Wheatland Strike of 1913 was not rooted in the mistreatment of labor, as has been alleged. He finds that circumstances beyond the control of the demonized hop ranchers were the real culprits. However, bad press or not, the world of the specialty crop grower began to unravel during the World War I. Racial hysteria and ensuing legislation thinned the ranks of their Chinese and Japanese laborers. Growers then turned to tenant arrangements with the Japanese. Vaught's detailing of how the growers became largely absentee landlords is a valuable contribution to the literature. Finally, after loud grower demands for Federal action and relaxing of immigration restrictions, Mexican immigrants became the major source of cheap, migrant, flexible labor. Vaught, however, does not reveal whether the federal 1917 contract-labor program benefited growers.

Gilbert G. Gonzalez
University of California, Irvine.

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