that seems not all that unmanageable. But every vineyardist’s harvest occurred at virtually the same time as every other vineyardist’s harvest. Thus, an estimated 18,000 workers were needed to pick and pack the 70 million pounds of raisins by 1900—all of them temporary workers, hired at the season’s beginning and dismissed at its end. Few chose to endure the conditions that boosters never mentioned: no job security; temperatures soaring over 100 degrees; dry, dusty, and shadeless terrain; and with the work itself, constant stooping or squatting. The work attracted only those with limited options, and from the very outset, they were largely Asian immigrants—first Chinese and by the turn of the century, Japanese. Both gravitated toward the opportunity for vineyard work, which paid $1.00–1.25 a day (Chan 1986; Iwata 1992; Vaught 1999).
The system of labor organization enhanced their value even more, for it was contractors who solved growers’ supply and recruitment problems. Most were well-connected local merchants who could secure large numbers of harvest workers from Sacramento, Stockton, and San Francisco with just a few hours’ notice. They quickly learned to seize the moment and assert their bargaining power. By 1900, it was clear that Japanese contractors, not farmers, controlled the labor market. Their favorite strategy was to withhold the labor of their workers at the height of the harvest and demand a higher rate. Farmers had little recourse. Individual efforts to try and replace striking workers invariably failed because contractors, tightly organized as they were, rarely infringed on each other’s territory. And since anti-Asian sentiment prevailed in California cities, growers’ dependence on Japanese labor damaged the reputation of their communities and their enterprise (Hallagan 1980; Chan 1986; Iwata 1992; Vaught 1999; Street 2004).
Between 1880 and the early 1900s, specialty-crop agriculture became the state’s leading industry, with varying patterns of settlement but with similar community idealism and labor problems as in Fresno. Orange groves spread through the upland valleys of southern California, lemons along the coast (Guerin-Gonzales 1994; Orsi 1995; Sawyer 1996; García 2001 ; Sackman 2009). Wine grapes flourished in the valleys north of the San Francisco Bay (Carosso 1951; Olmstead and Rhode 2008; Cinotto 2012; Briscoe 2017; Conaway 2018). Deciduous fruit and nut orchards took root in the Bay Area, the Sacramento Valley, and the northern San Joaquin Valley (Scheuring 1983; Starr 1985; Stoll 1998; Vaught 1999; Tsu 2013). After 1900, with advances in irrigation and refrigeration, lettuce, melons, berries, tomatoes, dates, and other crops spread along the Pajaro and Salinas rivers and into the deserts of the Imperial and Coachella valleys (Nakane 1985; Wells 1996; Andrés 2014; Ivey 2007; Flores 2016). By the early twentieth century, California had become the nation’s most diverse agricultural region and its leading producer of wine and table grapes, raisins, winter vegetables, lemons, almonds, walnuts, tomatoes, sugar beets, plums, prunes, and apricots (Scheuring 1983; Starr 1985).
During this time, many of these producers, in a manner closer to an industrial model, organized powerful cooperatives to market and brand their crops. Founded in 1893, the California Fruit Grower’s Exchange (Sunkist) became the first successful cooperative, followed by groups of raisers of walnuts, almonds, deciduous fruit, raisins, dairy cattle, poultry, and other products. These organizations limited production, regulated prices, adopted grading standards, and took charge of packing and marketing in order to eliminate middlemen. For most Americans, the taste of California came via Sunkist oranges, Sun Maid raisins, and Blue Diamond almonds. And, as an added dividend, it was the same clever marketing that persuaded Americans that fruit was an everyday food, not a luxury saved for birthdays and holidays (Erdman 1958; Blackford 1977; Street 1979; Woeste 1998; Orsi 1995; Vaught 1999).
Like raisins, cotton, California’s most profitable crop by 1950, benefited from the San Joaquin Valley’s favorable environmental conditions. The Pacific Ocean and the state’s two principal mountain ranges—the Coast Range on the west and the Sierra Nevada on the east—protect the valley (and most of the state) from extreme temperatures and snow, creating mild winters, rainless summers, and long growing seasons. Rain rarely falls between May and October—perfect for raisins, which are dried on trays between the vineyard rows over a 2-week period in late September/early October; and perfect for cotton, where wet leaves and bolls can destroy a crop or result in a severe grade loss, and where muddy ground keeps tractors and mechanical pickers out of the fields. Environmental conditions kept the San Joaquin Valley free of bollworms and weevils, and for the variety of other pests that attacked cotton, ranchers had DDT and a number of other lethal chemical agents (Bakker 1971; Turner 1981; Musoke and Olmstead 1982; Clough and Secrest 1984; Kirby 1987; Olmstead and Rhode 2008).
Also like raisins, cotton depended on irrigation, particularly on the west (read dry) side of the valley. An abundance of water comes from the major rivers cascading down from the high Sierra (which boasts the nation’s deepest snowpack), most of them damned by the New Deal’s Central Valley Project, one of the most complex and massive water transfer systems ever built, which brought over a million acres of San Joaquin Valley land under irrigation with taxpayer-subsidized water. In addition to increasing usable acreage, irrigation allowed growers to water the crop in measured amounts at just the right time to avoid incidents of insufficient or excessive moisture. These conditions also greatly reduced weeds, which were controlled relatively easily with tractor-drawn cultivators rather than a year-round workforce as in the South. The controlled environment also reaffirmed growers’ decision, along with the crucial roles played by the state legislature and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), to create and maintain a one-variety community throughout the entire San Joaquin Valley. The medium staple Acala cotton adapted to local environmental conditions, and its across-the-board adoption prevented contamination with inferior varieties and assured local gins of a uniform-quality raw material (Turner 1981; Musoke and Olmstead 1982; Kirby 1987; Olmstead and Rhode 2008).
Early on, cotton also shared the problems of an extremely labor-intensive crop, with Mexican nationals and Mexican Americans having replaced Asian workers in the 1920s. Prior to mechanization, most cotton in California was picked on a piece-rate basis by seasonal laborers under a contract system void of paternalism. Efforts to unionize workers led to frequent, widespread, and often violent disputes, most notably the San Joaquin cotton strike of 1933 involving many thousands of pickers for almost a month. Few ranchers intended to yield to worker unions, so they looked to mechanization as their solution, which they achieved en masse and at enormous cost savings over hand-picking by the late 1950s (Daniel 1982; Musoke and Olmstead 1982; Weber 1994).
Adding up the favorable environmental conditions, irrigation benefits, grower unity, generous governmental assistance, and mechanization, the production numbers alone speak volumes. In terms of acreage, California ranked fourteenth out of fifteen cotton-producing states in 1919, ninth by 1949, and second by 1959. With regard to bales produced, California moved from tenth place in 1929 to fifth place in the late 1940s, and was second only to Texas in 1959. From 1925 to 1959, California production increased 900 percent, while over the same period, total US production declined by 15 percent. In the new cotton kingdom of the San Joaquin Valley, growers achieved yields three times those of the traditional cotton-growing areas in the South, making California one of the top cotton-producing states in the nation (Musoke and Olmstead 1982).
One particular cotton rancher is the subject of a romping good read—Mark Arax and Rick Wartzman, The King of California: J.G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire (2003)—by far the best-selling book on any aspect of California agriculture over the last decade. As the title implies, journalists Arax and Wartzman seek to reveal the secrets of James Griffin (J.G.) Boswell (and, later, his son Jim), the biggest farmer in California, if not the United States and possibly the world. A slave-owning family from Greene County, Georgia, where Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, the Boswells migrated to California in the 1920s. En route, as Jim liked to tell it, they passed up the lush Mississippi, Colorado, and Imperial valleys for “a god-forsaken salt lake in a place called Corcoran” in the lower San Joaquin Valley, 50 miles south of Fresno.
This was Tulare Lake, one of America’s biggest, but with no outlet to the sea on the dry west side of Kings County. Over time, and sparing no expense or hubris, J.G. drained it, planted field after field in Acala cotton, controlled flooding and irrigation by lobbying
