Dorothea Lange

by Linda Gordon

  Growers organized to cope with this problem. They consolidated vertically, combining to own all the processes of growing and distributing agricultural products, from planting through harvesting, processing, packing, and selling.16 They also organized horizontally, forming in 1926 the Agricultural Labor Bureau, which enabled them to allocate workers according to growers’ needs, standardize wage rates, head off strikes, blacklist rebellious workers, and represent growers in dealings with government—to function, in short, as a monopolistic concern.17 Growers benefited from a system in which California counties provided relief to farmworkers when there was no work for them, thus shifting a burden from employers to taxpayers,18 but cut them off relief rolls when growers needed labor, so that workers had no bargaining power over wages.19

  Making this setup still worse for farmworkers and better for owners was the subcontracting system. On most large farms, managers did not hire their own labor, but relied on subcontractors, usually of the same ethnic origin as the workers they recruited. On a large commercial truck farm, for example, a contractor would receive a rate per ton for topping and loading beets, or per acre for harvesting corn. Two layers of management thus extracted profit. Subcontractors might also operate commissaries and saloons where workers received credit, thus keeping them in debt from one payday to the next.20 Subcontractors also freed growers from policing, hiring, or firing workers themselves.

  Growers further held down wages by recruiting—through newspaper ads and leaflets—more labor than needed so as to set up competition for jobs; with jobs scarce, workers could not hold out for higher wages because there would always be others willing to accept the lower wages. Throughout the 1920s, growers typically recruited 40 percent more workers than they needed. A Texas cotton grower told Taylor, “no such thing as too many laborers.”21 Employers also induced workers to arrive before the crops were ready for harvest, to provide growers with just in-time labor—but they were not paid until picking began.

  By the late 1920s Taylor had become the leading scholarly expert on western agriculture and the only one concerned with the labor force. He traced a seventy-five-year pattern of using foreigners in the fields. Recruiting from around the world was an early form of globalization, in which employers brought cheap labor to the United States instead of exporting jobs as they do today. The Chinese came at first on their own, attracted by discoveries of gold, and turned to farmwork when their prospecting did not pan out. The growers soon became active recruiters, convinced that only the Chinese were reliable: “ ‘. . . nothing [else] can be ordered like a gang of Chinamen and require no further coaching.’ ”22 When a wave of racism resulted in the Chinese Exclusion acts of 1882 and 1892, the growers brought in Japanese laborers. They lost their reputation as model workers when they began to save money and buy farmland themselves, often competing with Anglo growers. Another wave of racism stopped Japanese immigration by the 1920s, so Imperial Valley growers then imported Punjabis (called Hindus in California). When immigration quotas limited them, growers turned to Filipinos, who were exempt from a quota, since the Philippines had become a U.S. territory. Southern Europeans were recruited too, and soon there were two dozen nationalities in the California farm-labor force.

  In the early twentieth century, growers often insisted that Mexicans were “ ‘chronically indolent’ ” and would not do the work. Nevertheless, after about 1910, Mexicans became the core of southwestern farmworkers, and employers’ appraisals of their qualities changed as a result: “ ‘. . . a fellow easy to handle and very quiet in his living . . . takes his orders and follows them . . .’ ”; “ ‘. . . the Mexican is not politically conscious, has no political ambitions and does not . . . aspire to dominate the political affairs of the community . . . does not intermarry with Americans. . . .’ ”23 Like most immigrants to the United States, Mexicans did not intend to stay, but to earn in order to take money and goods home to their families. More were impelled northward (to Mexico’s lost provinces—or México de afuera as they called it) to escape the violence of the Mexican Revolution. Meanwhile, irrigation allowed growers to expand the land under cultivation, thereby creating a seemingly bottomless demand for farm labor in California and Arizona. By 1920 Mexicans made up the majority of California’s farmworkers. By the late 1920s there were 368,000 Mexicans, making up 84 percent of the agricultural labor force in Southern California and 56 percent in the San Joaquin Valley.24

  Figures like these usually came from Taylor’s research, as did information about how farmworkers lived. In 1928, a year of excellent harvests, Mexicans earned thirty-five cents an hour on average. Almost every family member was in the fields, old and young, and children very rarely attended school. They lived in shacks, tents, barracks, or jacales—huts made of mud, branches, and grasses—without relief from the heat. They drew water from streams, or wells dug by growers, often very close to privies or garbage dumps, so infectious disease was rampant and many children died. They were often paid with scrip, which was accepted only in overpriced company stores, where the quality of food was poor. Recruiters and growers frequently cheated them, promising one wage and then paying a lower one, or promising more days of work than were available, or simply shaving hours from their records. Workers lost wages because they had to carry picked produce to weighing stations and then wait in line to have it weighed. Workers might not know one day whether there would be work the next.

  WHITES ONLY signs were common in California, both reflecting and ratcheting up racism. The Depression then produced a nativist hysteria that “aliens” were taking jobs and relief from “whites.” The Immigration and Naturalization Service, responding to xenophobic pressure, implemented a “repatriation” program, in which a combination of economic pressure, intimidation, and forcible ejection sent about 300,000 Mexicans (some say 500,000, others 150,000) out of the country between January 1930 and April 1933. Many of those forced out were U.S. citizens.25 As some Mexicans left, however, others came, because growers continued to employ them. Agribusiness spokesmen complained. One grower insisted, “If I do not get Mexicans to thin these beets and to hoe these beets and to top these beets, I am through with the beet business. The Hindu is worthless, the Filipino is nothing, and the white man will not do the work.’ ”26

  Grower confidence in Mexican docility began to erode when, beginning in the 1920s, workers organized strikes. Taylor added strikes to his research topics. Western labor struggles earlier in the twentieth century had taken place primarily in mining and logging camps; during the Depression the battleground shifted to the fields. Nineteen-twenties farmworker unions tended to be local and thus easily crushed by sheriffs’ deputies and growers’ vigilantes. Then in 1933, some young Communist party organizers threw their energies and talents behind the farmworkers’ efforts (which were, at best, disregarded by other unions, most of which supported deportation) and built the Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union, CAWIU, bringing together workers in lettuce, peas, potatoes, beets, tomatoes, chiles, cherries, strawberries, raspberries, grapes, peaches, pears, and, at the end of the year, citrus fruits—the entire contents of California’s cornucopia. During 1933 and 1934, about 130,000 farmworkers participated in 140 strikes across a five-hundred-mile front.27 The biggest strike erupted in cotton, which by the 1930s was California’s most important agricultural product. The cotton region stretched 114 miles long and 30 to 40 miles wide, so it was no small crisis when fifteen thousand workers went on strike in 1933.28 Growers first tried to prevent workers’ access to food supplies, but that failed because sympathetic store owners provided credit and donated food; then the growers’ men, armed and deputized, threatened violence, forced law-enforcement officials to arrest picketers, and ultimately shot at picketers, killing one and wounding others.29

  The strikes became a war in the fields. The growers fought back with a new organization, Associated Farmers, drawing support from nearly all California’s corporate powers—banks, railroads, utilities, and the Industrial Associat
ion, California’s version of the National Association of Manufacturers. As John Steinbeck wrote sarcastically, “Associated Farmers, which presumes to speak for the farms of California and which is made up of such earth-stained toilers as chain banks, public utilities, railroad companies and those huge corporations called land companies . . .”30 Associated Farmers wielded often insuperable political power in California. AF blacklisted pro-union workers, and created armed vigilante squads that threatened and beat workers, burned crosses next to workers’ camps, evicted them, terrorized their families, and tried to starve them into submission.31 Farmworkers, in turn, threatened and attacked scabs. In Azteca Hall, strike headquarters in Brawley, police and deputies tear-gassed a meeting, forcing participants out, and then beat them. Vigilantes attacked a mass strike meeting in Pixley, killing Delores Hernández and Delfino Dávila and wounding seven others. The New York Times labeled it civil war.32 The vigilantes were acquitted and sixteen strikers were convicted for rioting. Some charged that the vigilantes and their employers were creating a fascist rural tyranny.33

  Taylor continued his research on agricultural labor relations—three consecutive years on leave from the university from 1927 to 1930, then six months in Mexico in 1931—at a cost: although he was tenured, the Berkeley economics department responded to his unconventional work by denying him promotions and salary increases. Moreover, his publication rate created resentment among some colleagues.34 Soon Taylor made more dangerous enemies. The Bank of America had endowed the Giannini Foundation of Agricultural Economics at the university in 1930 with $1.5 million, an enormous gift for the time. The foundation worked closely with Department of Agriculture agents and the Farm Bureau Federation, the lobbying representative of big growers. The Giannini Foundation’s head, the chancellor, and other university leaders met with the growers formally in the Agricultural Legislative Committee and informally in several elite men’s clubs.35 So neither this foundation nor the Agricultural School would support research on agricultural labor. Taylor’s stream of publications impugning their exploitive labor policies and, later, the huge water subsidies they got naturally infuriated them. They would later declare him their enemy #1.36 The growers, well represented among the university’s regents, exerted great influence on the whole university system: as John Kenneth Galbraith, a graduate student at Berkeley in the 1930s, described the situation: “. . . the California Farm Bureau Federation and . . . the opulent and perpetually choleric baronage which comprised the Associated Farmers of California . . . told the Dean of the College of Agriculture and the director of Extension what they needed in the way of research and also conclusion. They were heard with attention, even respect. No one was ever told to shape his scholarly work accordingly; men were available who did it as a matter of course.”37 Luckily, Berkeley’s provost, Monroe Deutsch, defended Taylor against critics who wanted him muzzled.38

  Taylor got himself commissioned by the U.S. Senate to investigate the 1933 cotton strike, and produced a report with his graduate student and friend Clark Kerr. Its opening words tell us something of who Taylor had become: a humanist economist. “As the faulting of the earth exposes its strata and reveals its structure, so a social disturbance throws into bold relief the structure of society . . .” Rejecting outside-agitator theory, Taylor and Kerr insisted that the conflict arose from farmworkers’ attempts to earn a living. They criticized the Communist party, judging it opportunist and manipulative toward workers, especially those of color, shifting its policy according to orders from above rather than demands from below. They insisted, however, that the Party organizers were not initiating, but responding to, even trying to catch up with, wildcat strikes initiated by the workers themselves.39

  TAYLOR’S WORK HAD another cost, borne by his family. From this sketch of his life, a reader might not guess that he had a wife and three children. His fatherly absentee record was even worse than Maynard’s: From 1927 to 1931 he was on the road most of the time, driving through the San Joaquin and Imperial valleys in California, into Colorado and Texas, to the Calumet region of Illinois and Indiana, and as far east as Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and into Mexico on a Guggenheim Fellowship, following the migrant workers.

  Paul had met his wife, Katharine Whiteside, at the University of Wisconsin. Born in Louisville, Kentucky, she was a pampered child. She later wrote a memoir that began, “No little princess could have had more truly loving and admiring attendants”—her mother and father, many doting relatives, and two black servants. Like Paul’s mother, Katharine was a high achiever. At Wisconsin she earned straight A’s, swam on a team, performed with a dance group, published poetry in a literary magazine, and rushed one of the “best” sororities. Like Paul she was socially aware and concerned. In 1917, she helped organize a Woman’s Peace Committee that gathered two thousand signatures on a petition calling on the president to stay out of the war, and she stood up to being labeled “yellow” by her mother and “pro-German” by her sorority. But she did not get the recognition she wanted; she recalled her hurt when boyfriend Phil La Follette, son of Senator “Fighting Bob” La Follette and future governor of Wisconsin, said she got A’s only because “she looks like a million dollars.” Unlike Paul Taylor, but like most female students, she had no faculty mentors. Conflicted, she longed to be both an intellectual and a belle.

  A cautionary word to readers is now required: almost everything I know about Katharine comes from her unpublished confessional memoir.40 By the time she wrote it, she was a Jungian analyst with a deeply psychoanalytic view of her life and a national expert in progressive early-childhood and adolescent development. Her expertise may have made her insightful, or she may have reconstructed memories over time, as we all do, and both might be true. She was, without doubt, a self-dramatizing person—so be on guard, reader.

  She was both flirtatious and sexually restrained. Paul gave her his fraternity pin before they ever kissed, and she believed firmly “that all caressing must be kept for a very serious declaration of love leading to marriage. . . .” (This was not a wildly unusual standard for a southern college girl at the time, but neither was it typical.) They did not even kiss good-bye when Paul went off to Marine Officers Training School in 1917. She followed Paul to Berkeley in 1921; they married and had what she described as a miserable honeymoon in Carmel: “We had agreed not to have complete intimacy until we were planning to have a baby. . . . The idea of birth control procedures was abhorrent to me.” (There are strange contradictions in this prudishness: A few years later, she engaged in several affairs; her mother was a birth-control advocate.) By the end of the two weeks in Carmel, she recalled, referring to Paul’s sexual frustration, he was eager to get back to his studies.

  Evidently, she and Paul did soon have sexual relations, because she gave birth in 1922 to a daughter, named Katharine, and in 1925 to a son, named Ross, after E. A. Ross.41 Paul’s mother, Rose, and her sister Ethel moved to a Berkeley house nearby and Katharine had to contend with the woman who still commanded Paul’s primary allegiance. But Katharine was no doormat. Lovely, chic, a diligent faculty wife with “a country-club style,” according to Clark Kerr, she decorated the house well and invited the right people to dinner.42 Like Dorothea Lange in these years, she was trying to do what a wife should. She also built a life for herself, studying childhood development and helping to start a Berkeley nursery school. She became a bit bohemian: professing free love, reading Bertrand Russell, and attending “natural” dancing classes for mothers and children given by a pupil of Isadora Duncan—a woman who lived with her family in a tent in a eucalyptus grove high in the Berkeley hills and dressed in tunics. Even in the 1920s, Berkeley had its counterculture.

  Katharine developed longings for love outside marriage almost immediately upon moving to Berkeley. In her memoir, she confessed to frequent “crushes” on important men.43 She relished her identity as a free woman and liked telling others about her affairs. In 1926, she had a brief affair with visiting anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski. I
n 1927, she began an affair with Herbert Rowell Stolz, her child-development professor and head of a child development institute, and this relationship continued for seven years. Like Malinowski, he was married and had children. Both Katharine and Herbert told their spouses what was going on, attempting to create open marriages. There is no evidence of affairs on Paul’s part.

  Katharine’s third child, Margot, born in 1929, was Herbert’s, and it was no secret. Margot learned it herself while still quite young. Quite brutally, Paul’s mother, Rose, refused to accept Margot as her grandchild and demanded that Margot be told about her biological father when she was eight—if Katharine or Paul wouldn’t tell her, then Mother Rose would.44 Katharine openly referred to Margot as her “love child,” and Margot always knew that her mother “had many men.”45 Yet Paul treated her as his own.

  Katharine and Dorothea shared some qualities: willfulness and a capacity for taking risks. Paul Taylor was consistently attracted to vivid and forceful women. But Katharine’s aspirations were cramped. She herself and her daughter Margot, as an adult and a psychotherapist, offered the same diagnosis: Katharine Whiteside Taylor was an ambitious woman, thwarted by the gender and family conventions of the time, who sought her “destiny” through attachments to men.46

  The Berkeley gossip network knew that the Taylors’ marriage had to be rocky, and tended to blame Katharine exclusively; but Paul was no less remote, no less irresponsible as a parent, than Maynard. His incessant travel was both a cause and an effect of their friction, signaling both a desire to escape and a denial of his pain and humiliation. This denial, of anger but probably of longings, too, was so effective that falling for Dorothea took him completely by surprise.