Orange Empire: California and the Fruits of Eden (review)

Those who can remember a time before and just after World War II in Southern California recall pastoral acres of trees in neat rows—"It was all groves as far [as] the eye could see." What they visualize is the landscape of the highly complex and influential citrus industry, here dubbed in Douglas Cazaux Sackman's masterful new book the "orange empire."

An empire it was, carefully planned and scientifically managed. By 1910, Southern California's citrus-fruit production spread over a hundred thousand acres throughout Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, and Ventura counties. Representing nearly ten thousand farms and employing over twenty thousand laborers, it attained hegemony by the 1920s, and in 1930 the highly organized citrus empire grossed more than $100 million. In flowing, lyrical prose, Sackman powerfully lays bare the imperial transformation of the Los Angeles basin at the hands of citrus industrialists, and details subsequent challenges to the order.

Sackman presents Orange Empire in a tripartite narrative form. First, in "Fabricating Eden," he chronicles the creation of the citrus belt, populated by growers who colonized the land and established a race- and place-based hierarchy. Luther Burbank and scientists from the U.S. Department of Agriculture transformed citrus fruits for market, and their desires to alter and control nature are here nicely exposed by Sackman, as are their eugenics-based hopes to perfect the human race. Sackman reveals these so-called sun-kissed fruits, promoted as pure products of nature, to be mass-market commodities resulting from a high degree of scientific manipulation.

"Work in the Garden," Sackman's second section, reveals whose hands did the work that made the citrus empire, and just what backbreaking labor it was. His detailed depiction of actual citrus production is top-notch, although he occasionally misses an opportunity to engage the topic from the vantage point of labor. Rather, he sticks to his organizing thesis, empha-sizing the orange as artifact as he details its journey from tree to market: "Between the packing house and the grocery store, the magical transformation of nature into commodity had been laboriously accomplished. Workers put their bodies on the line to make the oranges' journey out of nature as smooth as possible, . . . they helped make the orange that would match consumers' fantasy" (p. 152).

Sackman then turns to the defenders of labor and of a more socialized form of agriculture, first to Upton Sinclair and then to activists, writers, and artists he dubs "agrarian partisans" in the last and longest "Reclaiming Eden" section. Delving into Sinclair's 1934 gubernatorial campaign in California, the author recounts his framing and defeat by Republicans banded together and led by none other than the Orange "Emperor" C. C. Teague, long-time president of the California Fruit Growers Exchange (known by the trademark "Sunkist"). But the agrarian partisans succeeded where Sinclair failed in publicizing the violence and moral bankruptcy of the large growers, symbolized by the soulful though pointedly political photographs of Dorothea Lange and the activist pens of Paul Taylor, Carey McWilliams, and of course John Steinbeck, whose 1939 The Grapes of Wrath, that "gut-wrenching, myth-breaking novel," depicted the wanton destruction of surplus oranges while people starved (p. 262).

Orange Empire joins the work of other historians who have shone their investigative light on the citrus belt, most notably in monographs by Matt Garcia and Gilbert González, and others of us who have produced shorter pieces in journals and anthologies such as the spring 1995 citrus issue of California History. Sackman provides a rewarding blend of cultural and agricultural history, but expect an emphasis on the former. One caveat: for historians whose interest lies in particular locales, when Sackman crosses the Tehachapi range and travels north in the great Central Valley for the last portion of Orange Empire, the argumentative force wanes as the narrative drifts away from the landscape he so eloquently depicts earlier in the book. This does not diminish the brilliance...