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.”