firm, purchased more and more land, and battled the labor unions, “the reclamation boys in Sacramento and Washington,” and the “enviros” from seemingly everywhere. The end result was a “company” (they abhorred the word “plantation”) of 200,000 acres, give or take a few thousand, or, as the authors put it, “the equivalent of more than ten Manhattan Islands.” Along the way, Arax and Wartzman manage to weave in a cast of characters from Father Serra to Cecil B. DeMille to Charles Manson—a veritable Who’s Who of California history (Arax and Wartzman 2003).
As drama, The King of California is positively gripping. The narrative is tight, brilliantly conceived, fast-paced, and, simply put, nearly impossible to put down. The 430 pages of text go by in a flash. Every last rhetorical device seems to work, from sprinkling in a few of the King’s words here and there (no one had ever interviewed him before), to pointing out that growing a T-shirt takes 257 gallons of water, to quoting Winnie-the-Pooh on the issue of flooding. The real villain of the story, it turns out, was not so much Boswell himself but the government. Though not always in his back pocket, the federal government was always there when he needed it most—on the labor front, building dams, protecting his water rights from the 160-acre limit imposed by the Reclamation Act of 1902, and paying him millions upon millions of dollars in crop subsidies. The hero, in many ways, was the environment itself. Nature, for example, seemed to lure Boswell and other cotton farmers into a false sense of security, waiting for periods of 15–30 years before unleashing a “flood of the century” to refill the lake and drown the crops. And no matter how much Boswell spent on fertilizers and pesticides (upwards of $30 million a year), the cotton and bugs in the field found all sorts of ways to defy him. So effective are Arax and Wartzman that, by the end, it becomes almost impossible to criticize the book without appearing to be a mouthpiece or an apologist for the King (Arax and Wartzman 2003).
But criticize we must. Grower-state relations, as portrayed in this book’s account of Boswell’s life, are highly oversimplified, if not sensationalized. Arax and Wartzman take their cue from Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (1985), and Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water (1986). The Kings River was a “river of empire,” they insist, and the scheme to dam it part of the larger “hydraulic society” of twentieth-century America. In this view, the federal government, and indeed all levels of government, acted as a monolithic bloc and, moreover, simply as an extension of the capitalist system. The workings of government and the political process, however, were often considerably more mundane. A number of histories, chief among them Donald J. Pisani, Water, Land, and Law in the West: The Limits of Public Policy, 1850–1920 (1996), and Pisani, Water and American Government: The Reclamation Bureau, National Water Policy, and the West, 1902–1935 (2002), have demonstrated persuasively that water policy itself was actually constrained by competition among Western states, interagency rivalries, constant conflict between Congress and executive agencies, and any number of other forces dating back well into the nineteenth century. Good history, the point being, does not always make good drama, and vice versa.
In the end, the King himself may have had the last laugh. Americans, historians and nonhistorians alike, love to see the world in dichotomies—rural/urban, agricultural/industrial, agrarian/capitalist, frontier/factory. No one understood this better, or took better advantage of it, than Boswell. He wore blue jeans and cowboy boots, drove a pick-up-truck, and described himself as “a boy from a Georgia cotton patch” while living in a mansion in San Marino and sitting on the boards of directors of Cal Tech and Safeway Stores. He could be whatever he wanted to be, whenever he wanted to be it—including the voice of agrarianism. Arax and Wartzman fall right into his trap. They rely on their readers’ desire to picture the farmer as continuing in the tradition and glory of Jeffersonian virtue in order to horrify with their crack investigative reporting. Bad growers. Bad government bureaucrats. The unintended result is to make Boswell a sympathetic figure and evoke admiration for his grit and persistence. Jeffersonian agrarianism lives on in California, albeit in mysterious ways (Arax and Wartzman 2003).
As a coda, among the most intriguing books in California’s agricultural history in recent years, particularly for its historiographical contributions, is Matt García, From the Jaws of Victory: The Triumph and Tragedy of Cesar Chavez and the Farm Worker Movement (2012). García brings a fresh, balanced, much-needed, and much-welcomed historical approach to the golden age of the United Farm Workers, now half a century in the past. The timing is no accident. Histories of Chavez and the United Farm Workers (UFW) have long been the domain of participants-activists (e.g. Dunne 1967; Taylor 1975; Meister and Loftis 1977; Majka and Majka 1982; Ross 1989; Griswold del Castillo and Garcia 1995). Generally, when a new generation of historians emerges, García’s included, past and present begin to disengage. The new historian’s world becomes too remote from past events to dictate, in any direct sense, his or her understanding of those events. At this point, the past can then be understood on its own terms, a lost world to be recaptured in the historian’s imagination and diligence in the archives.
This is exactly what happened with the New Deal. Once occupying a place of honor in liberal historiography, the New Deal began to come under attack in the 1970s from the left. It became seen as less liberating and more of a straitjacket for the labor movement and a tool of contemporary anti-union employers, a trend that reached fever pitch in the 1980s when Christopher Tomlins described the Wagner Act itself as a “counterfeit liberty.” By turning the study of employer–laborer–state relations on its head (indeed, every which way), Tomlins and his cohorts rejuvenated New Deal historiography, breaking the heroic mold that it once took (Tomlins 1985).
García’s book follows a similar trajectory. While he offers numerous rich and revealing revisionist insights, his most significant contribution concerns UFW–state relations, which, even at the height of the union’s influence were much more complicated than recognized in previous books. Most end in 1975, when the union’s greatest achievement, the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act, was passed by the state legislature. It guaranteed all farm workers in the state what the Wagner Act had omitted 40 years earlier—full legal rights to collective bargaining—and was trumpeted by Chavez as farm labor’s Magna Carta.
By the time Chavez died in 1993, however, UFW membership and bargaining power had declined dramatically. Part of the reason was internal. Chavez insisted that the union be run democratically—that is by the members themselves. But UFW members often lacked the experience, bureaucratic expertise, and language proficiency to address nuts and bolts union matters effectively. External politics played an even more damaging role. The Agricultural Labor Relations Act set up a five-member board appointed by the governor to oversee and enforce the law’s provisions. As long as a sympathetic governor like Jerry Brown was in office, the board tended to rule in favor of the UFW. But when Republicans took over in 1982 for an extended period, the board became far more sympathetic to grower interests. As early as 1986, in fact, Chavez wanted the whole law dismantled. Allying the UFW’s interests to politics, he discovered, was indeed very much of a double-edged sword (García 2012 ).
By the end of the twentieth century in California, it needs to be asked in closing, had the Jeffersonian intellectual tradition completely given way to Hamilton’s vision of an aggressive, expanding commercialized agriculture? Not if we listen to Victor Davis Hanson, a fifth-generation raisin grower in Fresno County in the 1980s and 1990s. In the raisin industry, remarkably little had changed since early in the century. Ninety-five percent of the country’s (and half the world’s) production still occurred within a 50-mile radius of the city of Fresno. Production remained small in scale, with vineyards averaging about 50 acres, and the labor process, with trays of hand-picked grapes drying in the sun, remained unchanged as well. These “family farmers,” as they were often called, employed at least 50,000 workers every harvest. Indeed, of the 250 crops grown in the San Joaquin Valley, raisins were still the most labor-intensive. The vast majority of pickers were hired through contractors and paid a piece wage, and 98 percent were Mexican immigrants. The system of labor had worked so well that growers over the decades had shown little interest in mechanizing. Picking machines have begun to appear in recent years
