by
Fred Glass
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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.”
The BTC’s strength, and its generally careful use of that power, ensured mostly harmonious relations with the contractors and continuous work for its members. Over two decades, only a couple BTC-sanctioned strikes lasted longer than a week. From time to time, however, it was forced to demonstrate why agreement with its principles made sound business sense. When McCarthy found that a contractor running a job building a large downtown bank had decided to cast a fancy conference room ceiling in an outside workshop, instead of employing plasterers on site to do it, he pulled all the plasterers off the job and called a meeting with the employer. The contractor threatened to import outside plasterers. The next thing the contractor knew, every worker from every trade on the job—hundreds of card-carrying BTC members—took an unscheduled holiday. The following day BTC plasterers began work on the ceiling on site.
Harriman’s fusion perspective made sense to growing numbers of workers, union leaders, and their sympathizers in the general populace who were tired of the high-handed, antidemocratic, and often corrupt ways of the city elite. He promised to undo the antipicketing ordinance “half an hour” after he was elected and to investigate real estate deals tied to the Owens Valley aqueduct project, from which Otis and his friends had profited enormously. Before the aqueduct was officially begun, and the decision made to conclude it at the outer edge of the San Fernando Valley, Otis’s syndicate had purchased two-thirds of the valley’s land, much of it considered worthless before the arrival of cheap water.
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Charlie Chaplin began working in the motion picture industry in 1913, the same year that Henry Ford introduced the moving assembly line into his first automobile plant. Over the next few years the movie business would come to resemble Ford’s factories in many ways. Film producers rationalized production processes along the lines suggested by Frederick Taylor, who directed an army of stopwatch-wielding efficiency specialists on behalf of American business. Taylor subjected workers to close examination, resulting in the “scientific management” of their time on the job for maximum profit.
The first motion picture studios were not opened in Hollywood until 1911. From the inception of the movies in the mid-1890s production had originated on the East Coast. But poor weather during the long winter months idled the outdoor movie sets and brought exploratory expeditions to Los Angeles beginning in 1906. The advance scouts of the industry were pleased with southern California’s climate and the diversity of the surroundings—urban, rural, and natural—within easy driving distance all year round. But just as important was the economic factor. As film financier Benjamin Hampton put it, “the cost of the lumber was low and the wages of the carpenters and other mechanics was 25 to 50 per cent less than in New York.”
By 1915 film production employed more than 15,000 people, centered in Hollywood but sprawling throughout Los Angeles County. Under open shop conditions, most studio workers had little job security. As on the larger farms in the California countryside, the studio workforce was divided between a small permanent “inside” studio staff and a much larger pool of temporary or casual “outside” labor. When working, the hours were typically long; ten- or even twelve-hour shifts without breaks were common. There was no overtime or vacation pay, no sick leave or pension. The casual laborers would show up at the studio gate in the early morning, and if they were offered work they would work. If there was no work they would move on to the next studio and try their luck there.
“Dust Bowl” migrants (or “Okies”) from the American Southwest left their drought-stricken farms and attempted to settle in the fertile California agricultural valleys. Tens of thousands discovered that the land was already all owned, the available work was poorly paid, and local authorities were unable or unwilling to offer assistance to desperate families.
As the Depression grew worse in the early 1930s, Americans wondered why their government was failing to act to help them and why factories with perfectly good machinery sat silent and shuttered when workers needed jobs.
Still in high school, Dorothy Ray (later Healey) was smart, energetic, and deeply concerned about poverty and injustice. Within a few years she would be organizing farmworkers in California’s central valleys. In 1930 she joined with other young Communist activists on street corner protests against unemployment in Berkeley and Oakland. She later described what she was attempting to do:
Starting with that first big unemployed protest in 1930, we understood that you had to have a daily plan of building a demonstration, and that holding a demonstration could only be part of a larger strategy. You started with small demonstrations in relief offices, or in various neighborhoods around the city, and then built up to a big central demonstration. That’s the way to turn out a mass following, so that you’re not just bringing out your own militants each time. We didn’t organize a demonstration just to express our own outrage at one or another injustice, or, worse, as an occasion for self-display. We brought new people to demonstrations as a way of increasing their knowledge of the power of collective endeavor. . . . And we could see that organization gave them a power that they hadn’t ever had before, and that perfecting that organization was our greatest, indeed our only, hope for success.