Between 1929 and 1935 a series of spectacular strikes broke out among laborers in the California farm valleys. As McWilliams wrote: “Never before had farm laborers organized on any such scale and never before had they conducted strikes of such magnitude and such far-reaching social consequence.” In a time of common desperation the desperation of the farm laborers had reached an unbearable pitch. Repeatedly, rhythmically, explosively the strikes went on and on, gathering speed, force, and numbers. One was stifled and two broke out; fifty people were jailed and a hundred took their places; men were shot on the picket lines and wives and children were soon standing where the men had fallen. The farm laborers had become, seemingly overnight, what human beings become when they are ready to die rather than go on living as they have lived: a unified people, steel snaking down through their souls, dry-eyed fury filling their faces, a power of organized defiance. Thousands of that vast, ragged army of America’s most disinherited workers surged onto the picket lines, transformed from enduring silents into striking workers, sustaining and urging each other on with the raw eloquence that comes to those whose social sense of self is sudden, direct, overwhelming. And sustain each other they surely needed to do, for the terror and violence that accompanied the farm valley strikes was almost unimaginable. Strike leaders were beaten, jailed, and killed. The towns, owned by the farm combines, were filled with armed vigilantes. The press, the clergy, and the courts were unified in their outrage against the farm workers. It was years and years of wholesale arrests, scares, beatings, and killings.