Everywhere the deepest mark of the workers’ power was on display: deserted fields helplessly guarded by frustrated farmers who had no one to pick their crops. When three strikers were shot and killed, their compañeros held mass funerals, which even former strikebreakers attended. In a large caravan after the murders, strikers openly displayed their guns, and the Mexican consul reported that workers had told him they “were prepared to die fighting for their rights.”8
Official government sources reported that nearly 50,000 people struck in the California fields in 1933, about 25 percent of farm workers then in the state. By way of comparison, in 1937, at the apex of strike activity among industrial workers, only 8 percent of the workforce went on strike. The big industrial strikes were more successful than the farm workers’, for industrial workers not only won higher wages but also secured union contracts in major industries, while most—but not all—of the farm worker strikes were settled without workers winning recognition of their unions. But farm workers did not strike in vain. More than 80 percent of the twenty-five strikes officially recorded in 1933, including the peach and cotton wars, won the strikers higher wages, increasing farm worker pay by about 40 percent.9
The great upheaval of the early Depression was not a unique event. Periodically throughout their history, California farm workers have fought vigorously, sometimes in small, local battles unknown to anyone but the immediate participants, and at other times in large campaigns—directed by radical or even openly revolutionary leaders—that have lasted for several seasons. The nature of these fights is rooted in the special character of agricultural production and in the real opportunities that farm workers have encountered in the fields for nearly a hundred years.
Commercial farmers of whatever size have two special vulnerabilities. Although they must work the land much of the year—preparing the soil, planting, thinning, weeding, irrigating, fertilizing—only during the harvest do they produce a commodity. If the harvest is delayed or interrupted by a strike, they cannot warehouse their fields or shut down production temporarily and then work people overtime once the strike is over. If the strike is effective, growers can lose their entire investment in a few weeks or even less, as some fruits and vegetables must be harvested within days of becoming harvest-ready. Also, because the growers’ demand for labor varies greatly during the year, there is not enough work in any particular area to sustain an extensive settlement of agricultural workers. That is why farm towns are small, and growers depend on migrants. But migratory trails are not always reliable, and occasionally enough farm workers don’t arrive in time to work the precious, short-lived harvest.
Time is often on the workers’ side, and they have not hesitated to seize it. Brief harvest walkouts, sit-downs, slow-downs, and stay-at-homes are part of farm worker tradition, weapons used much more regularly by agricultural workers than by industrial workers. When conditions have been favorable, these short strikes and quasi-strikes have been transformed into large, extensive campaigns, like the coordinated shutdowns of the early thirties, or the later battles out of which the UFW emerged.
The pattern of militant farm worker action, significant wage gains, and an ultimate failure to build a lasting union was set nearly a generation before the Depression-era upheaval. Between 1914 and 1917, in a period of overall labor scarcity, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), at times working in tandem with the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM), led a series of walkouts in the California fields, orchards, and vineyards that pushed up wages, forced labor-camp managers to provide better food, and prompted the state of California to build an extensive series of new labor camps, which improved the lives of many migrants. A harvest-time strike in the hops in 1914 doubled piece-rate wages, and by 1917, the average wage of California farm workers had risen to nearly 90 percent of the average wage of California’s city workers.10
Although the major strikes received the most publicity, the Wobblies, or Wobs, as IWW members were called, applied much of the pressure on the growers through smaller on-the-job actions. Using tactics as old as agricultural slave labor, they skipped over fruits and vegetables ready to harvest, worked sloppily enough to ruin some of what they picked, and often labored at so slow a pace that they enraged their overseers and foremen. In 1915, the Wobblies proposed a regular slow-down of fifteen minutes per hour, during which farm workers would neglect their jobs and turn their “full attention” to the cases of two IWW leaders, Richard (Blackie) Ford and Herman Suhr, who had been framed for murder, and for whom the union was demanding pardons. The Wobs also threatened to sabotage the entire 1915 harvest if Ford and Suhr were not freed. In March 1915, E. Clemens Horst, a major California hop grower, and W. H. Carlin, one of the prosecutors who had helped frame Ford and Suhr, both testified in support of a pardon for the two hated agitators—a clear indicator of Wobbly power.
The Wobblies openly advocated acts of sabotage such as burning barns, sheds, and haystacks. Nineteen fifteen and 1916 were bad years for fires in rural California, but none of the blazes was ever pinned on a Wob. One act of sabotage easily traced to the IWW was the popular poster affixed to thousands of California fruit trees with copper nails; the poster warned people not to drive copper nails into fruit trees because it would damage them.
According to the Wobblies, their actions in the fields cost the growers about $10 million a year in lost crops between 1914 and 1917. The U.S. Justice Department, which had its own reasons for exaggerating IWW power, figured the growers’ total loss at a smaller but still significant $15 million to $20 million for the entire period.
As powerful as the movement was, it did not establish a stable union that might have consolidated farm worker victories. That was partly a result of ideological disposition. The Wobblies were anarchists, trying to build an anticapitalist culture among workers rather than a formal union, and even at the conclusion of successful strikes they refused to sign contracts, as they opposed any agreements with the boss class. But the failure to build a regular union was not only a product of IWW ideology. Just as conditions in the fields made growers vulnerable, they also made building a regular union extremely difficult—so much so that it wasn’t even an important goal of most striking workers. Moving from one part of the state to another, working for several employers in any given year, farm workers did not build up a commitment to any particular place or job. Why fight for a contract with an individual boss when you might work for that boss for only a few days, weeks, or months? Workers were willing to fight for an immediate upgrade in wages or working conditions but were less willing to engage in an extended battle for union contracts. For their part growers might grant short-term raises to get the harvest in, but they did not want their periodic vulnerability to be converted into long-term gains for the workers. So the workers fought hard and often, sometimes winning and sometimes not, but they were unable to make their victories stick.
Federal and State power abruptly ended IWW farm worker organizing in 1917, as the United States entered the Great War. The attack on the Wobblies was only partly prompted by the Wobbly opposition to the war; in California it was mostly motivated by IWW’s strength in the fields, where they had about five thousand card-carrying members and many thousands of sympathizers. Raids began at the IWW’s two most powerful farm worker locals, in Stockton and Fresno. They continued until about half the California IWW membership was in jail, with more than a hundred doing hard time in San Quentin.11
Among contemporary farm workers the IWW is forgotten, but what the Wobblies called sabotage—quick harvest strikes, slow-downs, purposely damaging the crop while picking it, burning barns and sheds—reoccurs regularly whenever farm workers do battle. The tactics are linked to the character of agricultural production, and each generation of farm workers is fully capable of figuring out where its leverage lies. Nevertheless, the tactics do have a lineage, and among militant Mexican workers they have long been associated with the name Ricardo Flores Magón.
Flores Magón was the leader of the PLM, a sort of half-sister to the IWW in California. His interest was not primarily California farm workers. Flores Magón was an early opponent of the Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz, and published a weekly newspaper, Regeneración, for which he wrote political and social commentary. He
