Factories in the Field
The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in California
Carey McWilliams
[Chapter II from the book published by Little, Brown
and Company, Boston, 1939]
LAND MONOPOLIZATION I. The Gold Rush Ends
BY 1860 the gold rush was at an end. To be sure, mining remained
active; claims were discovered; a king's ransom continued to pour into
San Francisco. But after 1860 the business of mining became not any
man's game but the prerogative of those with fortunes large enough to
enable them to battle in the arena of the Titans - Sharon, Flood,
Tevis, Ralston, Sutro. As a consequence something of a recession set
in and thousands of "miners" - mostly Eastern and Middle
Western farmers - began to look about for land. The population of the
State had increased from 92,000 in 1850 to 380,000 in 1860, and an
active demand for locally grown food products had arisen. Later, in
1869, the transcontinental railroad was completed and farming for
out-of-State shipment became feasible. Many of the Forty-Niners began
to realize that California was primarily an agricultural state, a
farming territory of vast potentialities. Few of them realized,
however, the extent of the State's agricultural resources. Few of them
realized, for example, that, in the San Joaquin Valley and the
Sacramento Delta, they gazed upon lands of almost fabulous fertility,
lands that, in truth, can only be compared with those of the Nile
Valley and the other great river-valley gardens of the world. But,
beginning with 1860, the expatriated Easterners and Middle Westerners
began to leave the creek beds and badly scarred hillsides of the
Mother Lode and to look about for farms. There was land to burn:
untenanted, undeveloped, unoccupied. From 1860 to 1870 the settlers
were engaged in the business of trying to occupy this land, of
attempting to find farms. But, with a great wave of indignation, they
began to discover, by 1870, that, just as they had been pushed out of
the Mother Lode by a few mining barons, so they were being excluded
from the great farming empire that was California. In 1863 Hittell
pointed out that of 39,000,000 tillable acres in the State,, only
1,000,000 or less were in cultivation. Part of this tillable acreage
was not readily accessible; it was subject, also, to other drawbacks;
but the richness of the general farming domain was echoed in every
survey of the period. Yet, as early as 1860, the good lands were
pre-empted. What had happened to the land during that feverish decade
from 1850 to 1860? What forces blocked its settlement and improvement?
2. Grants That Float
In a remarkably shrewd tract published in 1871, Henry George referred
to the Mexican land grants in California as "a history of greed,
of perjury, of corruption, of spoliation and high-handed robbery for
which it will be difficult to find a parallel." The statement is
conservative. Through the instrumentality of the Mexican land grants
the colonial character of landownership in Spanish-California was
carried over, and actually extended, after the American occupation. By
the terms of the cession of California to the United States it was
provided that previously issued Mexican land grants would be
respected. Under Spanish rule only about thirty land grants had been
made, but, in 1846, when the United States took possession, over eight
million acres of California land were held by some eight hundred
Mexican grantees. The connivers, Mexican and American, had rushed
through huge grants on the eve of American occupation. Most of these
grants were vague, running merely for so many leagues within certain
natural boundaries, and, in the confusion of the period, they were
imperfectly registered. Many of the grants had never been surveyed,
and thus the bars were down for all manner of fraud. Speculators
emerged from dusty archives with amazing documents. The grants,
purporting to be conveyed by these documents, assumed all sorts of
fantastic shapes - for the purpose of roping in the improvements of
settlers and the best land. George described one of these grants as
looking, on the map, like a tarantula. For thirty years the land
titles of the State were involved in litigation, both in the State and
Federal courts, over disputes which arose in connection with these
grants. The owner of the grant, usually by assignment from a Mexican
settler who had sold an empire for little or nothing, would sit idly
by while settlers entered upon the grant and made extensive
improvements. He would then come forward with his grant, usually
forged, ask for its confirmation, and then evict the settlers.
Although most of these grants were known to be fraudulent, and have
since been acknowledged as such, the majority of them were confirmed
by the courts.
The brigandage was, indeed, awful to behold. John Charles Fremont,
patron saint of California, had a Mexican grant re-surveyed in such a
manner that It included, within its bounds, the valuable Ophir mine
upon which an English company had spent over $100,000 for improvements
after repeated assurances from the owner of the grant that no claim
was made to the mine. A survey of Los Nogales grant was made in 1861,
under a decree for one league of land and no more, but a new survey
was immediately pushed through for 11,000 acres. In surveying grants
after the American occupation, the surveys were habitually for an area
vastly in excess of the original grant and the courts frequently
confirmed the survey for an area which included the mysterious
accretion. In Santa Barbara one Jose Domin- guez sold a Mexican grant
for one dollar. A speculator later petitioned Congress in the name of
Dominguez - although Dominguez swore he never signed the petition - to
confirm the grant for 208,742 acres (the celebrated Los Prietos Y
Najalayegua rancho case). This was a typical California bargain of the
time: one dollar for 208,742 acres of land. At one time a rake by the
name of Limantour, under the guise of a bogus Mexican grant, laid
claim to the entire city of San Francisco and came very nearly making
his claim good. In court decisions, Government reports, and later
investigations the story of these Mexican grants has been told in
detail and the processes by which most of the grants were validated
have been repeatedly denounced as fraudulent,1 yet the monopolistic
character of land ownership in California today is, in large part,
based upon these very grants.
LAND MONOPOLIZATION 15 The point about the Mexican land grants is,
however, not that settlers were swindled and huge profits made, but
that the grants were not broken up. These vast feudal holdings, which
should have been purchased by the Government and held as part of the
public domain, were never disrupted. Some of them are intact to this
day. The ownership changed from Mexican grantee to American
capitalist; the grant, as such, remained. This factor has had
important social consequences in California. In 1919, ?. J. Ghent made
a survey of large landholdings in Southern California and found that "the
dominant form of large holdings is the tract which has held the
greater part of Its boundaries undisturbed from Mexican times . . .
the large holdings in Southern California are an inheritance from
Spanish-Mexican times." In almost any direction, then, that the
prospective farmer turned in California in i860, he ran into a Mexican
land grant. The State was covered with them: vast principalities, ,
embracing millions of acres of the best lands in the State (the bona
fide grants alone embraced between nine and ten million acres), with
water, timber, and excellent resources, miniature self-contained
empires. The monopolization of land in California through the medium
of the forged, bogus, or "floating" Mexican land grant was,
moreover, but one of the means by which ownership was centralized and
the settler excluded. 5. The Railroad Grants By 1870 the railroads
held some 20,000,000 acres of land in California. This land was
granted, of course, in the form 16 FACTORIES IN THE FIELD of alternate
sections of Government land along the various rights of way, but the
justification, if any, for the grants was very slight, for, in most
cases, the Government had made actual cash subsidies to the railroads
in amounts that were more than adequate for all purposes. Here, again,
the uncertainty of the grant opened the door to the grossest fraud.
Settlers would occupy and improve land only to discover that it was
located on one of the unsurveyed alternate sections belonging to the
railroad. In fact, the railroad actually encouraged such mistaken
settlement, for the purpose of appropriating the improvements. In one
famous instance, the Mussel Slough affair, the settlers rebelled
against the railroad and something very like civil war resulted. In
1871 a group of settlers, at the direct invitation of the Southern
Pacific Railroad, settled in the San Joaquin Valley. Their occupancy
was known to the railroad. Once the land was sufficiently improved,
however, the Southern Pacific stepped in and claimed the land and
ordered a wholesale eviction of the settlers. A fight occurred, as a
consequence, at a place called Mussel Slough, in which seven men were
killed: five ranchers and two deputy marshals. Seventeen leaders of
the Settlers Land League, an organization formed to protect the rights
of the settlers, were indicted and convicted, although they had no
participation in the fight whatever, their "guilt" being
that of "conspirators." On one petition sent to President
Hayes in Washington asking for a pardon for these men, 47,000 names
appeared, yet, as one of the leaders remarked at the time, "not
one of these petitions was considered any more than if it had been a
piece of blank brown paper." And, of course, the railroad, which
had promised in its prospectuses to sell the land to the settlers for
$2.50 an acre, if they would come to the San Joaquin Valley and
improve the land, forced these same settlers, in the long run, to pay
a hundred times this amount and then, as a final irony, robbed them,
by exorbitant freight rates, for the next fifty years. This story is
part of the social history of California and is chronicled in Frank
Norris'
The Octopus, which follows, in fairly close detail, the
history of the struggle against the Southern Pacific in California.2
There is no more shameful chapter in the history of corporate
swindling in the United States than this story. For every dollar that
the Southern Pacific took from the settlers on its lands, it took a
thousand dollars from the people of the State. It took the
Californians fifty years to break the dominance of the Southern
Pacific over the State Government, and one of the important props, at
all times, of the railroad's great power was its landownership within
the State. The Ghent survey, above referred to, shows that in 1919 the
Southern Pacific was still the chief landowner in the State, owning
2,598,775 acres in Southern California alone, including 642,246 acres
in one county.
It did not take the settlers long to discover, in 1860, that
approximately 16 per cent of the entire area of land owned by the
Government in California, which would otherwise have been open for
settlement, had been given to the railroads, and that, if they wished
to settle on this land, they would have to buy it from the railroads,
at the latter's terms, or else move on.
4. Land speculation
The process of land monopolization in California was given early
.impetus by a carelessly conceived State land policy, by the wholesale
corruption of State land officials, and through the instrumentality of
so-called "scrip locations."
The management of State lands was notoriously wasteful after the
admission of California to the Union. For example, the Federal
Government granted to the State about 3,381,691 acres of swamp land;
and, in addition, about 7,421,804 acres of general Government land
within the State. "These large donations," wrote George, "have
proved an evil rather than a benefit to the people of California; for
in disposing of them, the State has given even greater facilities for
monopoly than has the Federal Government." The grant of swamp
land was vague: it depended upon the nature of the land, i.e. whether
it was in fact swamp land. Speculators purchased swamp land from the
State for virtually nothing - a dollar an acre and less - nor was
there any limitation on the amount of swamp land one man might
acquire. By 1866 most of this swamp land had been given away, yielding
the State practically nothing, and by this means speculators were able
to monopolize thousands of acres of the most valuable lands in
California, and, of course, to rob settlers.
The greediness of these speculators almost exceeds comprehension. For
example, one of them contended that Sierra Valley in Plumas County, in
the heart of the Sierra Mountains, was "swamp" land.
Similarly a beautiful 46,000-acre tract near Sacramento was seized
upon as falling within this classification, and, in respect to general
lands donated by the Federal Government, the State was a party to the
grossest frauds worked on settlers by a small group of speculators.
One member of this group acquired title to the town of Amador, and all
improvements, including the valuable Keystone Mine, because of
technical deficiencies in the State act which were in large part
attributable to the administrators of the act. Open brigandage was
frequently practised. In Lake County one firm seized 28,000 acres of
Government land, open by the laws of the United States to pre-emption
by actual settlers, enclosed it by a board fence, and held it by armed
force until the compliant State courts upheld Its title. In less than
a decade most of the Government land had been given away, including
all of the swamp lands, some of which are today the most valuable
farming properties in the State. In the course of a few years, it
became apparent that ownership of this vast domain had become
concentrated in the hands of a few large speculators. In the whole
sickening story of land fraud in the United States there is no more
sordid chapter than the methods by which, in less than a decade,
California and its settlers were robbed of millions of acres of
valuable land, land intended for individual settlement, for homes and
farms. By 1871 George could write that "the land of California is
already to a great extent monopolized by a few individuals, who hold
thousands and hundreds of thousands of acres apiece. Across many of
these vast estates a strong horse cannot gallop in a day, and one may
travel for miles and miles over fertile ground where no plough has
ever struck, but which is all owned," and "on which no
settler can come to make himself a home, unless he pays such tribute
as the lord of the domain chooses to exact.
5. Who Got the Land?
Who were the beneficiaries of this largess? In 1871, 516 men in
California owned 8,685,439 acres of land; in Fresno County, 48 owners
had more than 79,000 acres each. Sixeen men in California each
controlled 84 square miles of land. By taking the Government grant
away from his own railroad company and then transferring the road
itself to another concern, minus the grant, McLaughlin of the Western
Pacific Railway managed to grab about 400,000 acres for himself.
William ?. Chapman, the celebrated "scrip land speculator,"
acquired some 350,000 acres by buying Half Breed scrip, issued by the
Government in exchange for Indian lands, which gave the holder the
right to select lands elsewhere in the Government domain; some of this
scrip was purchased by Chapman, and others, on the basis of $.50 and
$1.25 an acre. In 1871 it was revealed that ex-State Surveyor General
Houghton had emerged from office with 350,000 acres of land. Ex-United
States Surveyor General Beale had about 300,000 acres, a large part of
it being the famous Tejon Ranch now owned by Mr. Harry Chandler,
publisher of the
Los Angeles Times. Miller and Lux, of whom more later, owned
450,000 acres in 1871. Other individual listings in the 1871 report of
the Board of Equalization are: Bixby, Flint & Co., 200,000 acres;
George ?. Robert & Co., 120,000 acres; Isaac Friedlander, 100,000
acres; Throckmorton, 146,000 acres; the Murphy family, in Santa Clara,
150,000 acres; John Foster of Los Angeles, 120,000 acres; Thomas
Fowler, 200,000 acres in Fresno, Tulare, and Kern Counties; Abel
Stearns, of Los Angeles, 200,000 acres. "Our land system,"
said Governor Haight,' "seems to be mainly framed to facilitate
the acquisition of large blocks of land by capitalists or corporations
either as donations or at nominal prices." Nor does the brief
listing of holdings which I have given include the enormous railroad
grants. The fact that a few individuals swindled the State out of most
of its best land for nominal prices would, of Itself be interesting
but not particularly significant, if these holdings had ever been
broken up and sold. But such has not been the case. The huge holdings,
acquired in the manner I have indicated, are in most cases, still
intact. In 1919, W.J. Ghent, in the survey mentioned above, found that
in Southern California most of the large holdings were still
concentrated in a few hands. Paul Taylor, writing in 1935, states
that, "Of all farms in the United States whose product is valued
at $30,000 or above, nearly 37 per cent are found in our own State.
California has within its borders 30 per cent of the large-scale
cotton farms of the country, 41 percent of the large-scale dairy
farms, 44 per cent of the large-scale general farms, 53 percent of the
large-scale poultry farms, and 60 per cent of the large-scale fruit
farms of the United States."
The ownership patterns established by force and fraud in the decade
from 1860 to 1870 have become fixed; the social structure of the State
is, in large part, based on these patterns. California more than once
has been referred to as a colonial empire, and, by and large, the
description is accurate. The irrational character of California
agriculture -- its topheaviness and lack of balance; its social
irresponsibility (of which more later) - may be traced to the fact
that the lands of the State were monopolized before they were settled,
that a few individuals and concerns got possession of the agricultural
resources of the State at the very moment when the State was thrown
open for settlement and that the types of ownership thus established
have persisted. The ownership itself has changed, but the fact of
ownership remains. The character of farm ownership, established at the
outset, is at the root of the problem of farm labor in California and
has long been recognized, guardedly, as the key issue involved. "In
California," wrote Walter V. Woehlke, in Sunset Magazine,
October, 1920, "the safety valve of free land or cheap land
became useless long before it quit functioning in the other Far
Western states. Wheat and cattle barons controlled the bulk of the
fertile land in large tracts having acquired their principalities
through purchase of the old Spanish grants or through evasion of the
laws protecting the public domain." The land barons refused to
sell, in many cases, and thus there was developed "a class of
landless tenants and drifting homeless farm laborers before the last
of the Dakota and Nebraska homestead land had been pre-empted."
The process of land monopolization in California, wrote one observer,
was achieved with "peculiar directness," not by evolution or
change in the forms of ownership, but at the outset, by acquisition.
What were the immediate consequences of the process of land
monopolization in California? Certain social consequences have at all
times been apparent. In the first place, there is the ugly fact of
expropriation. Literally thousands of settlers were robbed of their
lands by trickery of one kind or another; and the improvements which
they had made were appropriated, and they themselves were forced out
of ownership, either to become tenants or to move on. The hardship and
havoc worked in this manner is reflected in the bitter landlaw reform
agitation of the seventies. If 600 men," wrote an editorial
writer in the Sacramento Union, "out of 600,000 own half
the land in this State, refusing to partition it out and sell it at
reasonable rates, and conspiring from year to year to prevent its
being taxed so as to yield its share of the burdens of government,
nothing is clearer to our minds than that the 599,400 of landless
citizens and small and overtaxed farmers have the right to lay such
taxes upon the estates of the land monopolists as will compel them
either to support the Government or to divide up and sell their vase
estates." Provisions along this line were actually written into
the "radical" constitution of 1879, but were soon nullified.
Nor were the great estates ever taxed: forty ranchos in San Diego,
including over 600 000 acres of land, were taxed for years at
seventy-five cents an acre. The whole problem can be summarized in one
statement: In 1870, 1/500 of the population of California owned one
half or more of the available agricultural lands of the State.
Although the squatters and settlers protested and even rioted, they
accomplished little.3 "There is no state in the Union,"
wrote George, "in which settlers in good faith have been so
persecuted, so robbed, as in California Men have grown rich, and men
still make a regular business of blackmailing settlers upon public
land, or on appropriating their homes, and this by power of the law
and in the name of justice." It was not by chance that Henry
George and his single-tax theory made their appearance in California.
George knew something of land monopolization, and its social
consequences, from firsthand observation.
Another consequence should be noted. The growth of the State, its
prosperous settlement, was seriously retarded by monopolization. After
i860, and for years, residents complained of a "general
stagnation" which had set in, robbing the great decade,
1850-1860, of its exceptional promise. Had there been any measure of
democracy in land settlement, the brisk movement of '49 would have
continued through the century. But a kind of dry rot set in after
1860. "The whole country is poverty-stricken," wrote one
observer; "the farmers are shiftless, and crazy on Wheat. I have
seen farms cropped for eighteen years, and not a vine, tree, shrub or
flower on the place. The roads are too wide, and are unworked, and a
nest for noxious weeds. The effect of going through California is to
make you want to leave it, if you are poor and want to farm.
'Californians," wrote Charles Howard Shinn, "were once the
most magnificently liberal race of men on earth; now they are
determined to become the most miserly." A blight had fallen on
the State, the blight of monopolization.
Moreover, the wasteful character of California agriculture, a
character which it still retains, was fixed by reason of the pattern
of landownership. "California," wrote George in 1871, "is
not a country of farms, but a country o plantations and estates.
Agriculture is a speculation."
"California," wrote William Godwin Moody in 1880, "is
noted for its great farms of tens of thousands of acres, and the great
extent of Its acres cultivated by tenantry." In 1871 George
called attention to the typical California tenant- overworking the
land, hiring cheap labor, neglecting the property, living in a hovel;
and also to the California farmers, the lords of California, lords as
truly as ever were ribboned Dukes or belted Barons," who resided
in San Francisco hotels and drove "spanking teams over the Cliff
House road," and who spent most of their time in Europe. Nor has
the pattern changed to any considerable extent. If anyone thinks the
problem of migratory farm labor in California is a new problem, let
him consult Henry George! Migratory labor, it has been said, is a
result of the character of California agriculture, but the character
of California agriculture is, in turn, a consequence of the type of
land! ownership in California.
But listen to George (he is speaking of the farm laborers of
California of 1871, the progenitors of the hordes of migratory workers
today): "And over our ill-kept, shadeless dusty roads, where a
house is an unwonted landmark, and which run frequently for miles
through the same man's land, plod the tramps, with blankets on back,
the labourers of the California farmer, looking for work, in its
seasons, or toiling back to the city where the ploughing is ended or
the wheat crop is gathered. No one knows who these tramps were; they
became a fixture of the California landscape and were accepted and
taken for granted. Were they squatters or the sons of squatters? They
came back year after year, these "blanket" or "bindle"
stiffs, to work in the fields, and, after the season was over, they
obligingly disappeared -- into the flophouses of San Francisco - to
come back next season like so many ragged crows.
I could write a volume on the complacent acceptance of this army of
workers - it has always been of army proportions - by the
Californians. A theory was evolved at an early date to rationalize the
existence of these countless tramps: They were "tramps,"
shiftless fellows who actually preferred "the open road" and
the jolly camaraderie of the tramp jungle to a settled and decent
life; chaps who adored lice and filth and vermin, and long marches (in
pre-hitchhiking days) through scorchingly hot valleys, and the drizzle
and cold of early fall rains. There was nothing you could do with
these insouciant and light-hearted boys: you couldn't even pay them a
decent wage for they would "drink it up right away." As for
providing them with shelter or a bed - why, they loved the open air
and would rather die than take a bath. The attitude I describe is not
obsolescent: Responsible farm groups in California, at meetings which
I have attended, have protested the installation of private privies
and showers in labor camps on the ground that they are a needless
luxury for the farm laborer.
Nor was Henry George the only observer to note the phenomenon of the
California tramp. I quote from Stephen Powers' travel book, Afoot
and Alone (1872): "One of the notable phenomena of California
is the multitude of its tramps, the so-called blanket men. I seldom
met less than a dozen or fifteen a day." Later he writes: "I
did not see ten honest, hard-fisted farmers in my whole journey. There
are plenty of city-haunting old bachelors and libertines, who own
great ranches and lease them; and there are enough crammers of wheat,
crammers of beans, crammers of mulberries, crammers of anything that
will make their fortune in a year or two, and permit them to go and
live and die in 'Frisco. Then, for laborers, there are runaway
sailors, reformed street thieves, bankrupt German scene-painters, who
carry sixty pounds of blankets, old soldiers who drink their
employers' whiskey and fall into the ditch which they dug for a fence
row; all looking for jobs." Powers, moreover, took a look into
the future: "It is not unlikely," he wrote, "that
within two centuries California will have a division of population
something like that of ancient Greece, to-wit: merchants, artisans,
and many great lords of the soil, in the cities; and in the country a
kind of peasantry of goatherds, shepherds, tough, little black-
haired, lazy farmers, and the like, to whom the cities will be
unwelcome resorts." The details of the description are
inaccurate, but the fact of the division - "great lords of the
soil" on the one hand and "a kind of peasantry" on the
other - is sound, and it has been achieved, not in two centuries, but
within the last fifty years.
FOOTNOTES
- See Fraudulent California Land Grants, 1926, by Clinton
Johnson;, Report of the Commissioners of the General Land Office,
1885.
- See, also, a forgotten novel of California life by Josiah
Royce: The Feud of Oakville Creek.
- For a rather romantic version of the squatter riots, see a
novel by Charles Duff Stuart, Casa Grande, 1906
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