Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Great Depression brought many thousands of homeless farm families to
California from the Great Plains in the aftermath of the Dust Bowl. These
mostly white families garnered much more attention from the media and
from the critical voices than had the previous ethnic groups that worked
on California farms.
Perhaps the most famous of the critics (aside from John Steinbeck) was
Carey McWilliams, who published a number of articles sharply critical of
farm labor practices in California throughout the 1930s, culminating with
his topic
Factories in the Field
in 1939 (also the year Steinbeck published
The Grapes of Wrath
). McWilliams's use of this imagery—a factory placed
in the fi eld—emphasized the strangeness of California agriculture vis-à-vis
the U.S. ideal of family farming and drew on the (assumed) sharp divide
between factory and farm production.
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For McWilliams, the industrial
form of farming in California, with large landholdings and capital-inten-
sive production methods, was “irrational” at base and could not be repaired
through modest change (1939, 22, 183). Ultimately, McWilliams believed,
the only solution to the farm labor problem was a fundamental change in
land ownership patterns: “Every solution [to the labor problem] which the
growers have achieved has been a temporary solution, for the ultimate
solution of the problem necessarily involves a basic change in the type of
ownership and a breaking up of the large estates” (1939, 65).
McWilliams had no concrete plan for how this change could be imple-
mented, although he spoke favorably of two experimental utopian farm
communities funded through government agencies and premised on
quasi-socialist methods of collective production and living. In contrast to
his characterization of landholding patterns prevalent in California agri-
culture as irrational, McWilliams pointed to these communities as poten-
tial models for a different path based on rational state planning. Although
both communities ended in failure, McWilliams placed the blame on
incompetent government agencies and the ire of California business inter-
ests, claiming that “neither project was a fair test of what might be accom-
plished under state planning” (1939, 210).
Another critic was the UC Berkeley economist Paul Taylor, who pub-
lished many academic articles on labor relations in California agriculture
and served as a central expert witness in the La Follette Committee's hear-
ings in California. Like McWilliams and other critics of the farm labor
system in California, Taylor contrasted the industrial features of California
