Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
with violent strikebreaking tactics and legal action against the unions'
leadership (Daniel 1982, ch. 7; Starr 1996, ch. 6).
Thus, at the onset of the Great Depression in the 1930s, the relationship
between industrial agriculture and farm labor had a paradoxical quality,
where stability and change were both present. Growers had been farming
niche market crops for decades, and the industrial character of California's
agriculture was relatively set by 1930. At the same time, growers and farm-
workers were locked in a confl ictual relationship that frequently brought
protest and violence to California's farming communities. As the labor
historian Ernesto Galarza notes, “The more [California agriculture] changed,
the more it became the same thing” (1964, 107). One ethnic group was
exiled only to be replaced by another; one union was destroyed and
another rose to take its place. The constant was confl ict, as growers strug-
gled to maintain their control over labor relations, and workers and union
organizers tried to change them. Each group saw the labor conditions of
agricultural workers as a problem, but each defi ned the problem in differ-
ent terms and proposed incompatible solutions.
For growers, the problem was often defi ned in terms of control. Tying
into the anti-Communist movements of the 1930s, the farm industry
blamed Communist “agitators” for disrupting the relationships that growers
had established with particular groups of workers. Thus, labor problems
were defi ned through factors deemed external to the farm industry and its
labor relations. By framing labor confl ict in this way, growers could portray
the labor system as orderly, except for these external infl uences, and argue
for its continuation. While, ostensibly, growers could have looked back at
decades of confl ict and envisioned a new way of organizing their relation-
ships with farm labor, their actions repeatedly suggest a more conservative
maintenance approach to labor relations. When faced with a direct chal-
lenge to their power, growers almost always adopted organizational strate-
gies to preserve the existing labor system. For readers familiar with the
history of factory- and mine-based labor confl icts during this same period,
these strategies will sound very familiar. Beginning in the 1930s, the farm
industry adopted organizational and public relations tactics that had been
developed in confl icts between industrialists and factory and mine workers.
This continuity was highlighted when the U.S. Senate investigated viola-
tions of U.S. workers' rights to free speech and assembly during strike
actions of the late 1930s and early 1940s. Commonly called the La Follette
