by
Fred Glass
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The People’s Store was a major Times advertiser. The unions pressured the store to withdraw its advertising from Otis. Supporters operated picket lines proclaiming a “secondary boycott” during all store hours, turning sympathizers away from patronizing the place. (A secondary boycott tries to halt commerce with another business that has trade with the original offending business.) From time to time, individuals went in to fill up shopping carts with goods. At the checkout counter they would ask the clerk, “Does this store advertise in the Times?” At that point they would exit, leaving the full shopping cart to be unloaded back on the shelves.
The store owner, his profits eroded by the secondary boycott, was persuaded to try sitting Otis down to talk with the printers. Otis could not afford to ignore one of his main sources of advertising income. He compromised, allowing a few union printers back to work—but as individuals, without a union contract. He also promised to eventually hire more union men. The printers agreed to end the strike and boycott, believing it would only be a matter of time before they could reorganize the Times completely.
sick
In California Debs brought the Southern Pacific and Santa Fe workers out on strike after the companies fired boycotting trainmen. Public support for the striking ARU members was initially high, despite some newspaper coverage—echoing the railroads’ assertions—that portrayed the strikers as violent and obstructing the U.S. mails (which was sent across country by train at that time).
In fact, the ARU had offered to keep the mail flowing, so long as Pullmans were uncoupled from the trains. Notwithstanding the press distortions—particularly by the Los Angeles Times—most people understood it was the companies’ decision to insist on running the Pullmans that was holding up their mail. One prostriker newspaper even scoffed that the lack of train service “was done in the interests of Pullman, so that by inconveniencing the public in a most distressing way sympathy may be withheld from the strikers.” Otis’s paper predictably editorialized that “This is not a dispute between a railroad company and its employees, but between the great masses of law-abiding citizens on the one hand and a small faction of lawless men on the other.”
Following the advice of the GMA, they prevailed upon the Los Angeles district attorney to request permission from U.S. attorney general Richard Olney to prosecute the strikers for conspiracy. Olney, a former railroad lawyer and GMA member, was pleased to grant permission. The companies then persuaded a friendly judge in Los Angeles to do two things. On June 29, he summoned a grand jury to determine whether the striking workers were guilty of conspiracy for obstructing mails and interstate commerce. And the following day he issued an injunction which directed workers to end the strike or resign.
Olney authorized sending federal troops to Los Angeles, despite the nearly complete lack of violence among the highly disciplined strikers. According to one of the soldiers, they were not enthusiastic at their assignment, “this idea of shooting down American citizens simply because they are on a strike for what they consider to be their rights. . . . All of the boys are against it from first to last, and many are in sympathy with the strikers.” The heavily armed troops were deployed to escort strikebreakers, run trains, and intimidate strikers.
Debs and several other national leaders of the ARU had been arrested and charged with conspiracy during the last days of the strike. His conviction, reduced to the single charge of contempt, put him in jail for a few months. Thus it was a shock when a half-dozen local ARU leaders in Los Angeles were found guilty of conspiracy, fined, and sentenced to eighteen months in prison—courtesy of the same judge who had issued the injunction against the strikers.
ah so that's why he was there!
Few workers believed that the strike had represented a “conspiracy” by the ARU. Rather, it had become painfully clear that if a conspiracy existed, it was among the railroads and various branches of government, which combined powers to force the strikers to their knees. Many workers, having believed in the neutrality of the government in conflicts between labor and capital, were disillusioned. They saw that the money and organization of the employers far outweighed democratic principle in the actions of Attorney General Olney, who authorized the conspiracy arrests and trials, and President Grover Cleveland, who ordered federal troops to aid the railroads.
While never a majority of the farm labor workforce in California, Chinese immigrants, for a time, predominated in several important crops and provided the bulk of workers in some counties. Growers praised them for their sober and industrious habits, much as Charles Crocker had for their work on the Central Pacific Railroad, and for doing work that white men preferred not to at wages whites refused to accept. Between 1860 and 1890 Chinese farmworkers assisted in the beginning of many specialty crops, enabling important sectors of California agriculture to get started. They also contributed the hard labor for numerous heavy rural construction projects, and became famous for their tolerable cooking in an occupation better known for its hazard to palate and health alike.
In Sonoma one hundred Chinese were working for pioneering winemaker Agoston Haraszthy as early as 1857, and their role in the development of that county’s wine industry cannot be overestimated. They cleared the land and put hundreds of thousands of grape vines into the ground for their employer. They pruned the plants, picked the grapes, dug wine cellars, constructed press houses, and worked the vats. Haraszthy kept careful notes on their speed at these tasks, and their work rates and wages became the industry standards. Hired by other wine grape growers in the area as well, by 1869 the Chinese had planted most of the area’s 3.2 million vines, in the process helping Sonoma to rival Los Angeles as the state’s premier wine growing center.
At its peak in 1909, Japanese farm labor furnished the bulk of agricultural workers on the large farms in the state, and dominated the field in berries, grapes, vegetable cutting, asparagus, and sugar beets. The 30,000 Japanese workers represented over 40 percent of the total farm labor force.
Few, however, worked on the giant wheat farms, where decades of tradition and a declining market share created local cultures of racist exclusion.
European slave traders brought rum—distilled molasses, itself a byproduct of sugar production—to Africa. In the eighteenth century, slave merchants could purchase an African adult for about 120 gallons of rum, and a child for 80 gallons. Hundreds of thousands of slaves were brought to sugarcane plantations in the New World, where they produced sugar for Europe’s ravenous sweet tooth, and more molasses, which was distilled into rum, to be traded for more slaves.
Inspired by the French and American revolutions, the half-million sugar plantation slaves of St. Domingue (later Haiti) overthrew their French colonial masters in 1791 with an armed revolt, and abolished slavery early in the nineteenth century, establishing the first free black republic in the world. Slowly the rest of the European sugar producers moved from a slave-based workforce to wage labor. It wasn’t until 1888 that the last link between slaves and sugar production was broken when Brazil outlawed slavery.
The unchanging dark secret hidden within the clean white crystals is that sugar has always been the product of extensive amounts of cheap labor. Mindful of what happened to their French competitors in Haiti, the British rulers of Guyana in the West Indies, after abolition of slavery in 1838, imported three thousand contract laborers per year from India to ensure a steady supply of workers and, not coincidentally, to divide the workforce between Africans and Indians and thereby make it more difficult for them to organize resistance to the plantation owners. Large numbers of unorganized workers and low wages made and kept sugar cheap and profitable.
Claus Spreckels was known as the “sugar king” due to his control over most of the sugar production in the western United States. Encouraged by passage of higher import tariffs on European sugar by Congress in 1897, the king quickly expanded his empire. That year Spreckels bought up thousands of acres in the Salinas Valley on behalf of his Western Beet Sugar Company. He paid for building the largest beet sugar refinery in the world, Factory Number 1, which opened in 1899 near Salinas, in the company town of Spreckels. Factory Number 1 soon processed one-quarter of all beets in California.
To feed the factory, growers in the Pajaro and Salinas valleys cultivated tens of thousands of acres of sugar beets. Some owned their land. But Spreckels also leased his land in ten- and twenty-acre parcels to tenant farmers, who, guaranteed an annual buyer for their crop, obligingly planted beets.
Meanwhile the WACC attempted to recruit more workers from Los Angeles and San Francisco. The company paid their railroad fare to Oxnard. But like the San Francisco iron molders who, during their 1864 strike, learned of their employers’ long-distance scab recruitment and shipped organizers to meet and reason with them, the JMLA sent groups of strikers up the tracks. They boarded the train along the way, and as one newspaper reported, “by the time these men reached Oxnard they were on the side of the union.”