HIS 370
Californian History
Yaolee Chen
Final Essay
Robert McCoy
The story of Californian farm workers had
just on its way in the Progressive Era. Since the Progressive Era, the rights
of the farm workers went straight up in California. As early as in the 1870s,
the Chinese had been organizing and fighting for a higher wage and better
working condition for the farm workers in California. The history of California
shows that the farm workers who worked in the fields often were the same people
who had worked in the gold mining during the Gold Rush; and often, they were
the same people who had been sent to build the railroads in the 1860s. Like a
place of sin, the strikers did one thing in common: they disobeyed to the rules
of the growers, and they ignored the orders from the policemen. In a word, they
break the laws. The strikes from Californian farm workers were not the
successful ones in the late-1930s because a newly Farmers Association decided
that syndicalism was a sin. Simply, I have divided the story of Californian
farm workers into three stages: The Early History, The Lettuce Cutters, and the
Cotton Strikes in 1933.
After the transcontinental railways were
completed[a],
fruits and the specialty of crop farming shipped out of California to meet a
greater market outside of California. A greater number of farm workers were,
therefore, needed to work in the fields and orchards. But the story changed in
the 1930s. During the depression decades, the British blue gins companies
purchased less cotton from San Joaquin Valley. The unemployed British peasants
came to Californian for working opportunities. So, the problem in the late-19th
century was the labor shortage; but the problem in the depression decades was
the labor surplus. As the depression, there were fewer job opportunities and
fewer wages paid for the increasing population who came to the California for
works. But the tradition of higher pay and less working hours kept going on.
So, the strikes broke out.
The very early farm workers who did
strikes were the Chinese in the 1870s[b].
They fought for a higher wages and better working condition in the fruit
orchards and sugar beet fields[c].
But their victories were short-lived. The farm owners could easily replace them
with other American labor workers by blaming about that the Chinese farm
workers had taken away the American jobs. Since the Chinese Exclusion Act 1882
to 1887, in 5 years, the Chinese workers in Santa Clara had dropped, from 3,000[d]
people to only 10. The Japanese immigrants came, after 1882, to make up the
labor shortage in California. But, like they did to the Chinese, the
Californians discriminated against the Japanese workers. In 1920, the Japanese
were banned to purchase the lands in California. The voice of the farm strikers
by the late 19th century was not heart. The Chinese and Japanese
strikers did unsuccessfully in California farmlands in the early stage.
Mainly, the Industrial World Workers
attracted the industrial workers, but it promoted the farm workers, also. Eugene V. Debs and the other leaders were
interested in the idea that “letting growers’ crops rot until they paid”, and
they organized the first multinational union, the Industrial World Workers
(IWW) in the 1910s to strike for better wages[e].
But, unfortunately, the policemen in Fresno, Bakersfield and San Diego, and
elsewhere caught many of the leaders of IWW. The reason for such a misfortune
was that the policemen agreed with the growers that the voice of the farm
strikers was not worthy to be heard. The policemen shut down the union halls
and put the union leaders into jails. Nevertheless, the workers of all
nationalities kept join to the IWW. By 1917[f],
the IWW members had increased to more than 10,000 in number.
Among the international workers, the most
active strikers were the Filipino workers. During the Progressive Era, the
Filipino Women were not allowed to come to the US. So many Filipino workers
were young and single men. And the progressive reformers also disallowed the
Filipino workers to contact with women of other races. So the problem of
Filipino workers was created by the shortage of Filipino women. And what made
the Filipinos[g] even angrier
was because that the Filipino workers were often treated like the black slavery
of the pre-1865 period. As for the young Filipino workers, what they could do
was to join into the union organization, like CAIWU[h],
and they often soon became the leaders of the strikers.
The strike by the Filipino lettuce cutter
in Salinas Valley in 1934 was not a successful one. Right after the first
several weeks of effective strike, the grower –shippers agreed to bargain. But
the bosses were the liars. While negotiating its contract with the labor union,
some organized vigilante gangs burned down Filipino labor camps. Two years
later, in 1936, the bosses refused to resign the contract when it expired. The
bosses hired a vigilante army of 3,000, and used police and sheriffs to arrest
and beat the workers. Some field workers also walked out to help the strikers.
But, because of the lack of union organization and the inefficient support from
the field workers, the union was busted in a month. The growers, therefore,
could not hear the voice of the strikers twice.
The rise of Filipino strikers had caught
the attention of the other farm workers, like the Mexican workers[k]
and the Okies[l]. The others
came from Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Texas, seeking for better opportunities in
California also followed the tradition of strike, which had begun in the
Railroad Era. As the depression, the grower slashed wages, dropping down from
$3.50 per working day in 1929 to $1.90 per working day in 1933. To keep the new
immigrants from working in California, the state also required the workers to
have 3-years-residency qualification to apply for the relief programs in
California. As a result, the new immigrants often had no choice but worked in
the fields. In 1933 alone, there were 55 strikes from the farm workers,
fighting for $1.75 per working day. With the help from CAWIU (Cannery and
Agricultural Workers Industrial Union), the followers of Filipino strikers grew
into a great number.
The most unforgettable strike from the
farm workers during the depression was the Cotton Strike in October 1933 in San
Joaquin Valley, near Corcoran in the Central Valley. Among the 1,800 strikers,
three quarters of them were Mexicans, and one quarter of them were whites and
blacks as the price of cotton had dropped from one dollar to forty cents per
one hundred pounds. At first, the
strikebreakers were mocked with shame. The strikers called the strikebreakers, the
little chickens. On the other hand the growers wanted to discourage the
strikers by hiring the policemen to injure or kill the strikers. In this case,
11 strikers were injured, and 2 strikers were killed. For doing so, the growers
thought they have showed off their power and authority to stop the strikers.
Unfortunately, the results ran into an opposite direction. Many of the
strikebreakers, whom once were called the little chickens, joined to the union;
and later, the little chickens did the strikes[m],
too.
Right after the 24 days strikes, the
price of cotton had raised from 40 cents to 75 cents per hundred pounds. The
raising wages were good for the workers, but bad for the growers. At the same
time, the British blue gins companies purchased less and less cotton from the
Central Valley as the depression kept going on. Some cotton growers had to sell
their lands to the large cotton growers. The strikes for the prices of cotton
per hundred pounds caused the anger from the growers. By the end of 1934, under
the principle of criminal syndicalism, the biggest farm corporation, which
named Farmers Association, pressed on the courts and used policemen to arrest
the leaders of CAWIU. And the Farmers Association smashed CAWIU that the union
had committed syndicalism. In the third stage of the story about the
Californian farm workers, the voice of the strikers were heard, but the
strikers were found guilty for violating to the investors’ decision.
Yet, the industrial workers had another
story after CAWIU was smashed. Many of the CAWIU members, who were doing
canneries and packing sheds, joined into the Committee of Industrial
Organization[n]. Within a
year and a half, the members of Committee of Industrial Organization had grown
into a great number; therefore, the organization became independent form AFL;
and, the organization renamed itself Congress of Industrial Organization in
1936. The industrial workers had made
it legal to strike for a higher wage in the late-1930s.
Unlike the industrial workers, after the CAWIU was smashed, the strikers
of farm workers were forced to take a break. The farm workers dared not to do
the bargaining or striking again till after the 1960s[o].
The history of depression shows that the lettuce cutters were busted; and the
cotton strikers and CAWIU went into a silence in the late 1930s. The union
continued to discriminate against Filipinos and the Mexican workers[p].
So, the farm workers did not gain the rights, like other industrial workers
did, in the late 1930s. By the 1960s, the Californian farm workers were
unprotected and unorganized; and the strikers were offended by the growers with
criminal syndicalism.
[a] Camille Guerin-Gonzales, Mexican
Workers and American Dreams: Immigration, Repatriation, and California Farm
Labor, 1900-1939 (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press,
1994) 11
California in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a place where symbols of hope and renewal abounded. It was a land of sunshine, an agricultural paradise, a western frontier where quick fortunes could be made through exploitation of the land for mineral or agricultural wealth. It was a place where the plentitude of resources seemed to guarantee the realization of the American Dream for all who settled there.
[b] Roger
Daniels, Asian America: Chinese
and Japanese in the United States since 1850 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988)
The
initial period of Chinese immigration to the United States can be defined
precisely: although individual Chinese are reported in Pennsylvania as early as
1785, significant migration begins with the California gold rush of 1849 and
ends with the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act on May 6, 1882.
During that period, nearly 300,000 Chinese were enumerated as entering the
continental United States. A little over 100,000 arrived between 1849 and 1870;
another 100,000 between 1870 and 1877; and about 75,000 between 1877 and 1882.
Well over go percent of these Chinese were adult males.
[c] Timothy J.
Lukes, et al. Japanese Legacy:
Farming and Community Life in California's Santa Clara Valley (Cupertino,
CA: California History Center, De Anza College, 1985) 135-136
The return to migrant labor brings full circle our story of the experience of Japanese farmers in California's Santa Clara Valley. As the first Japanese in the valley disembarked from the barge at the landing at Alviso, they were greeted by white landowners with offers of work in their orchards. Sixty years later, as they stepped from the train at the station in Santa Clara, the homecoming Japanese were flooded with requests for their domestic and agricultural labor. Despite the apparent similarity, for the Issei the differences were deep and fundamental. When they first arrived in the valley as migrant laborers, they were young, strong, eagerly anticipating the sojourn. When they returned, they were advanced in years, sapped of their strength, measured in their step. The valley's landscape also had changed. They could not simply begin again.
The
circuit, nonetheless, is consistent with our perspective on Japanese American
history, and with our principal theme of struggle, of oppression and
resistance. It also illustrates the cruel irony of the "model
minority" stereotype. Our journey began with American merchant capital in
1784 when the Empress of China left New York harbor with its cargo of
ginseng. American imperialism during the nineteenth century spread throughout
the Pacific seeking raw materials and commodities, markets, and cheap labor.
Asian workers were transported to Hawaii and the West Coast by way of the
currents charted by those flows of capital and labor.
Thus
around 1895, Japanese migrant laborers were similarly drawn to the Santa Clara
Valley, and gradually replaced their Chinese predecessors. The work force was
divided on the basis of color and ethnicity, as evidenced in the differential
wages paid to whites, Chinese, and Japanese, and by task segregation, which
reserved skilled positions for whites and unskilled work for Asians. Those
tactics of the dominant class point to the exploitative nature of migrant labor
and to the landowners' attempts to reduce the likelihood of collective
resistance by the workers.
The labor shortage following the Gentlemen's Agreement of 1907 and Japanese resistance through strikes and threats of strikes resulted in higher wages and enabled the move into farm tenancy. Japanese "bosses" were in a better position to make that transition to tenancy than their "gang" members probably because they were able to accumulate capital at the expense of the workers. Further, they solved the labor problems of the white landowners, both in terms of securing workers and minimizing discontent. The alliance, then, of Japanese bosses and white landowners revealed an alignment of class interests, and marked the end of the period of migrant labor and the beginning of the period of dependency.
Japanese dependency was compelled not only by Japanese resistance, but also by the advance of capitalism in California agriculture. While the Chinese first labored under a paternalistic order, the Japanese entered during its breakup. This paternalism was evident in the Santa Clara Valley when the Chinese arrived during the early American phase dominated by immense ranches and a landed aristocracy. By 1880, the number of Chinese farm workers had swelled from 104 in 1870 to 689, and they constituted about 48 percent of the agricultural laborers in the county. Besides that dangerous reliance by the growers on a mono cultural work force, the Chinese showed indications of intractable behavior.
[d] Lukes, 19
[e] Philip S.
Foner, The Industrial Workers of
the World, 1905-1917
(New York: International Publishers, 1997) 11-19
Birth of the I.W.W.
By the summer of 1904,
many progressive-minded elements in the American labor and Socialist movements
were convinced of three basic principles: (1) the superiority of industrial
unionism over craft unionism in the struggle against the highly integrated
organizations of employers; (2) the impossibility of converting the
conservative American Federation of Labor into a type of organization which
would achieve real benefits for the majority of workingmen and women; and (3)
the ineffectiveness of the existing organization of the industrial and radical
type to build a movement which would organize and unite the entire working
class. Clearly, in the eyes of these elements, a new organization of labor was
necessary, one that "would correspond to modern industrial conditions, and
through which they (the working people) might finally secure complete
emancipation from wage slavery for all wage workers." It was this
conviction that led to the formation of the Industrial Workers of the World.
One of the men who led the way to this new development was Eugene V. Debs. From the time he had organized the American Railway Union on this basis in 1893, Debs advocated the industrial form of organization. He played a leading part in the formation of the American Labor Union. In 1902, and during the period between 1902 and 1904, his speeches and writings were full of references to the superiority of industrial unionism and the necessity of combining this principle with uncompromising action based upon the class struggle. His most important contribution in this period, and one of his chief theoretical works, was Unionism and Socialism, A Plea for Both, published in, Appeal to Reason in 1904 and reprinted as a pamphlet shortly thereafter.
[f] Guerin-Gonzales, 25
As early as
1910, many U.S. employers had begun expressing their preference for Mexican
workers over other immigrants, as well as over native-born workers, for
seasonal jobs they classified as low skilled. They complained that other
national groups made unreasonable demands for higher wages and better working
conditions. Mexicans, they claimed, would work cheaply and were "birds of
passage" who would not remain in the U.S. permanently.
[g] San Juan Jr.
From Exile to Diaspora: Versions
of the Filipino Experience in the United States (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998) 71
Called "little brown brothers," barbaric "yellow bellies," "scarcely more than savages," and other derogatory epithets, Filipinos as subjects-in-revolt have refused to conform to the totalizing logic of white supremacy and the knowledge of "the Filipino" constructed by the Orientalizing methods of U.S. scholarship.
[h] http://www.californiahistory.net July 21, 2003
Total
Engagement
Historian
Carey McWilliams once characterized the struggle between labor and capital in
California as one of "total engagement." The struggle intensified
during the 1930s as agricultural workers suffered the peculiar agony of
watching food rot in the fields because the crops could not be sold for enough
to pay the costs of harvesting and marketing. John Steinbeck commented:
"There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow
here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all
our success."
Workers
formed new organizations to fight for improvements in wages and working
conditions. Women were especially active in the formation of the United
Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA). The
union's vice president was a gifted Latina organizer, Louisa Morena. Cannery
workers in the thirties routinely worked sixteen-hour days for fifteen cents an
hour. When women cannery workers struck in the Santa Clara Valley in 1931,
police responded by breaking up a mass meeting with tear gas and fire hoses,
Agricultural
workers in the thirties, as in previous decades, turned to radicals for
leadership. The Cannery and Agricultural Workers' Industrial Union (CAWIU),
formed in 1933, was an arm of the Communist party. The union organized strikes
of farmworkers in the San Joaquin and Imperial valleys. Farm owners responded with
repressive local ordinances and acts of violence.
[i] Lloyd H. Fisher, The Harvest Labor Market in California (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1953) ch.2
[k]
Guerin-Gonzales, 77
Because
federal, state, and local authorities refused to recognize that Mexican
Americans and Mexican immigrants were permanent members of U.S. society, people
of Mexican descent were especially vulnerable to governmental programs to
deport and repatriate foreigners as a panacea for economic depression. section
4, titled, "MEXICANS GO HOME!": Mexican Removal Programs during
the Great Depression
[l] Walter J. Stein, Ucapawa California and the Dust Bowl Migration (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973) Ch.8
[n] Guerin-Gonzales, 51
Employers of Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans customarily also employed members of other racial and ethnic groups. They hired workers for specific tasks by racial, ethnic, and in many cases, gender identification. They segregated their workers along these lines and often pitted racial and ethnic groups against one another. The language they used to describe their workers became a justification for discriminating against those of particular ethnic and racial groups.
[o] Guerin-Gonzales,
97
Repatriation
exposed the racial limitations of the American Dream for Mexican Americans, who
found that they were considered foreign in the U.S. no matter how many
generations they had lived in the country. It brought about a crisis of
identity and legitimacy for Mexican Americans, which left a profound legacy for
later generations of Mexicans and Mexican Americans alike. Narratives about
repatriation circulated in both the U.S. and Mexico and were passed on to
children, destabilizing ideas about the American Dream and the possibility of
transplanted Mexicans ever acquiring an American identity. Compounding this,
Mexican American repatriates found they were often considered foreign in Mexico
as well--pochos who were
somewhere between Mexican and American, illegitimate in both cultures.
[p]
Guerin-Gonzales, 111-112
Repatriation began to slow after 1932. During the four-year
period from the beginning of 1929 to the end of 1932, more than 365,000 Mexican
immigrants and Mexican Americans left the United States for Mexico. The number
of repatriates became smaller each subsequent year, though more than 90,000
left in the years 1933-1937 and little return migration took place during the
decade. As a consequence, the Mexican population in California and the rest of
the U.S. dropped for the first time in eighty years. In 1930, before formal
repatriation began, there were approximately 650,000 Mexican immigrants in the
United States, over one-third of whom lived in California. Ten years later, the
Mexican-born population of the United States had decreased by almost half.
Repatriation programs succeeded in reducing the number of Mexicans on relief rolls, although numbers were never large to begin with. The programs did not, of course, end the Great Depression, but they did deflect attention from failed government economic policies. While repatriation had little effect on the course of the depression, it changed the ethnic makeup of California's farm labor force. The removal of Mexicans coincided with a massive in-migration of tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and destitute unemployed workers from drought-stricken areas in the United States, and, by 1936, Anglo workers comprised up to two-thirds of farm labor.