by Eric Rutkow
The citrus industry began enthusiastically exporting this sensibility to the populations back East. At the 1893 World’s Columbia Exhibition at Chicago, for instance, the California exhibit included a globe and Liberty Bell constructed from sixty-five hundred fresh oranges. And during that fair’s California Day, some 230,000 attendees received an orange. Even the industry’s packaging was used as a vessel for these Edenic values: the orange crate, originally a nondescript, utilitarian box for protecting fruit during transport, began to feature colorful labels during the 1890s; soon these evolved into fantastic depictions of idealized California scenery. Some labels portrayed groves of orange trees basking on a sun-soaked plain, with snow-covered mountain peaks in the background. Others employed images from Yosemite, like Half Dome or El Capitan. Almost all used a distinctive color palette of pastels. Kevin Starr, a historian of California, explained that the message these labels conveyed “was largely believed in by an entire generation of Americans.” The orange, in many respects, was more than a refreshing snack, it embodied ideas of fecundity and earthly perfection.
The view from inside the California horticultural industry, however, was not quite so idyllic. From the outset, the production of oranges (like nearly all of the state’s fruits and vegetables) and the planting and cultivation of the trees they grew on required massive infusions of inexpensive labor. Carey McWilliams, author of Factories in the Field, an influential 1939 polemic against conditions in the fruit industry written in the wake of John Steinbeck’s seminal novel The Grapes of Wrath, provided the following explanation:
If specialized farming [i.e., fruit growing] was to compete with mechanized and extensive farming [i.e., wheat growing], the latter of which could cheapen production by the application of machinery, then specialized farming, which had to rely on labor to so much greater an extent, could do so only by cheapening the labor which it required in its own field.
Initially, the orange industry depended on Chinese labor, but over the years it exploited numerous groups, including Japanese, Filipinos, native Californians, and Mexicans, who became the dominant force in the labor supply after about 1914. The orange tree thus helped create the so-called farm labor problem that still endures in California.
This exploitive treatment of immigrants was an issue that nearly all early commentators overlooked in evaluating the industry. By most accounts, orange growers were among the most enlightened and forward-thinking group of men. J. Eliot Coit, who wrote about the citrus industry in 1915, observed: “California citrus culture, among all horticultural industries, is peculiar in that the people who have built it up have been, in many cases, retired business men or professional men from the New England and Central states. . . . Citrus culture appeals to people of intelligence and refinement.” The growers were considered responsible stewards of the land, who invested in their local communities and treated one another with a spirit of cooperation. At the same time, they were comfortable with the mechanics of late-nineteenth-century corporate industrial capitalism—in this respect they differed from farmers in the South and Midwest, many of whom had endorsed a form of populism that was hostile toward railroads, banks, and economic elites.
Beginning in the 1890s, orange growers began to form cooperative associations to better spread risk and to coordinate the marketing and selling of their product. The first, not surprisingly, appeared in Riverside, the Pachappa Orange Growers’ Association, created in 1892. Three years later, roughly one-third of the region’s growers joined together to form the Southern California Fruit Exchange. This organization flourished for a decade until it was reorganized in 1905 as the California Fruit Growers’ Exchange (the Exchange), a name that quickly became synonymous with the state’s oranges.
The Exchange, which controlled about 40 percent of the state’s citrus at the time of its founding, developed into the nation’s most sophisticated agricultural entity. Though it had been organized to coordinate fruit sales, it exceeded this mandate almost immediately in the pursuit of corporate capitalism. It sought to eliminate waste, improve efficiency, boost the size of operations, and apply scientific techniques to growing, managing, and marketing. Any problem that affected the industry seemed to fall within its ambit. In 1907, for instance, it created the Fruit Growers Supply Company to provide materials at cost to the fruit packers, who went through 40 million board feet of wood per year making crates. Eventually, the Exchange simply purchased forestland in Northern California to ensure the delivery of its timber.
Improved production mechanisms generated a new problem for the Exchange: Supply began to outstrip demand. For the older generation of growers this came as something of a shock. The common attitude in the late nineteenth century, according to one prominent orangeman, was that “the demand for choice fruit at high prices will always remain in advance of the supply.”
While the efficiencies of corporate capitalism had produced the crisis, these same economic forces offered a solution: mass-market advertising, a new industry that was blossoming around the turn of the century. Advertising theory argued that oversupplies were not due to overproduction but to under-consumption. All that the growers needed to do was inflate demand for their product through publicity. Traditionally, agriculturists had opposed any form of advertising as a waste of money, feeling that the value in their goods resulted from labor inputs, but the orange growers were more willing to experiment.
In 1907, the Exchange commissioned Lord & Thomas, one of the nation’s most prominent advertising firms, to coordinate a publicity campaign. It would be the first time that perishable fruits were advertised and, according to some, the first consumer-product saturation marketing effort in history. The Lord & Thomas proposal called for a special Orange Train that would travel through Iowa, chosen as a test state, and champion the slogan “Oranges for Health—California for Wealth.” The intent was to persuade consumers that the fruit was not merely an exotic luxury good for special occasions, but an essential part of the diet that ought to be consumed daily.
This initial campaign appeared a success, and the following year Lord & Thomas coined a new name that would transform the Exchange into one of the world’s most famous brands: Sunkist. In the wake of this development, as the Exchange increased its advertising budget dramatically, the Sunkist name began appearing everywhere. Lord & Thomas took out full-page ads in mass-circulating periodicals like Ladies’ Home Journal and Good Housekeeping. A Sunkist billboard would eventually appear in New York’s Times Square, where countless thousands of people saw it each day. Another massive sign would be placed at Coney Island with “Sunkist” spelled in giant, neon-orange letters that glowed day and night. Soon every American knew that Sunkist meant delicious California oranges. The head of advertising for the Exchange wrote in 1917: “Sunkist has been advertised for eight years and the popularity of the fruit bearing this label is too generally recognized to need discussion. That one word ‘Sunkist’ is a business asset worth millions of dollars to the Exchange shippers.”
As successful as the saturation advertising campaigns had been, there was still much more revenue for the Exchange to extract from its oranges and trees. Sometime after 1910, the cooperative began to experiment with the idea of marketing oranges not only as food but also as juice. This innovation was almost wholly uncharted territory, and the corporate citrus apparatus would need to direct all the tools it had mastered in selling its fruit to the new endeavor. The Exchange began by developing electronic juice extractors. It then started to distribute the machines at cost to soda fountain operators. Finally, in 1916, it launched a massive new advertising campaign: “Drink an Orange.” The concept was nothing short of revolutionary. Simmons’ Spice Mill, a trade journal for the tea and coffee industries, ran a piece in January 1916 that summed up popular sentiment. The title read “Drink an Orange!” and the opening line simply read “What?” The Exchange’s relentless campaign ensured that this question soon had an answer. “If the liver is sluggish or you feel ‘out of tune,’ drink
an orange or two daily,” advised an ad in Good Housekeeping. “Try it for ten days, for better digestion. The results are almost certain if the practice is made a habit.”
Sales of orange juice shot up in the years after World War I. The worldwide epidemic of influenza in 1918 that killed 675,000 Americans had made many people more health conscious. Consumers thus bought into the Sunkist rhetoric that orange juice promoted good health. This belief became sacrosanct in the 1920s, following the discovery of vitamin C. Sales of orange juice also grew thanks to Prohibition, which started in 1920 and opened the door for the success of nonalcoholic beverages. Within barely a decade, fresh-squeezed orange juice went from literally unheard of to the second-best-selling drink at cafés and soda fountains, trailing only Coca-Cola. More than seven million boxes of Sunkist oranges, one in every five, were consumed as juice during the mid-1930s.
The remarkable growth of the orange market and its trees in the early twentieth century suggested that the industry would forever reign as the king of Southern California. But soon the region’s iconic orange groves would be little more than a memory. The Great Depression collapsed demand for oranges like everything else, and some growers were forced to sell their cherished lands to investors at absurd discounts. Additionally, the city of Los Angeles was growing exponentially, buoyed by both the entertainment industry and, after World War II, defense contractors. The push for real estate began to crowd out the orange trees. By 1970, citrus acreage in Southern California had decreased over 96 percent, replaced with tract houses and exurbs. Riverside lost most of its legendary groves, the legacy of its golden era a small park that still contains one of Eliza Tibbets’s original navel orange trees.
The growers who once populated Riverside, Pasadena, and dozens of other towns across the Citrus Belt eventually turned their attention to the state’s Central Valley, a region more than four hundred miles long between the coastal range and the Sierras. It had formerly been too arid to support citriculture, but the Central Valley Project, one of the most ambitious programs in President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, had developed irrigation across much of this land.
As for America’s love affair with the orange, it hasn’t disappeared entirely, but much of the juice has been squeezed out. When John McPhee, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author, wrote his book Oranges in 1967, he lamented: “People in the United States used to consume more fresh oranges than all other fresh fruits combined, but in less than twenty years the per-capita consumption has gone down seventy-five per cent, as appearances of actual oranges in most of the United States have become steadily less frequent.” Long gone are the days when the embodiment of the American Dream was to own a grove of orange trees near Los Angeles, and every piece of fruit offered a little taste of that aspiration.
The Big Mill at Bogalusa
THE SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA citrus industry had arisen in response to new social, economic, and cultural forces converging around the turn of the century. These same forces were also radically reshaping established tree-related industries, including one of the nation’s oldest: logging.
When Charles Sprague Sargent released his hugely influential Report on the Forests of North America in 1884, he not only catalogued the nation’s tree resources, but speculated on the future of their commercial exploitation. In his view, the unprecedented efficiency of lumber barons like Weyerhaeuser and Stephenson ensured the “extinction of the forests of the lake region,” and this meant the inevitable end of its dominance as a timber zone. He then offered a prediction about the industry’s future that would have surprised all but the most knowledgeable lumbermen:
The country between the Mississippi river and the Rocky mountains, now largely supplied with lumber from Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, must for building material soon depend upon the more remote pine forests of the Gulf region. . . . [T]he pine of Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas will reach Kansas, Nebraska, and the whole country now tributary to Chicago. Western Texas and northern Mexico will be supplied by rail with the pine of eastern Texas.
The South, the Deep South in particular, contained an enormous, nearly untapped forest whose commercial potential dwarfed that of New England or the Lake States. This was not the interior hardwood forest that Daniel Boone had famously tackled, but instead a gigantic maritime pine belt, varying between one hundred and two hundred miles in width, that blanketed the southeastern and Gulf coastlines. It began near the lower boundary of Virginia, stretched down the southern states of the Atlantic coast, enveloped part of the Florida peninsula, and then broadened to cover much of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, southern Arkansas, and eastern Texas. Sargent’s Report estimated that this region, some 250 million acres in total, contained 237 billion board feet of pine timber, three times the quantity in the Lake States—eastern Texas alone nearly equaled the combined wealth of Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, a supply that some thought “will last 250 years.”
If this massive forest had a monarch, it was the longleaf pine. These trees were a regal sight, often dominating their landscape. One southern writer explained, “The stately trunks rise forty to sixty feet and then spread out their dense foliage, which joins above like the arches of a cathedral. There is little or no undergrowth, and the view fades into a maze of the column-like tree trunks.” These longleafs were not only abundant, but the most commercially promising of the area’s pines, a group that also included the loblobby, shortleaf, and slash varieties. Longleaf lumber was straight-grained and sturdy, relatively free of defects, and durable when facing the elements, overall an ideal structural timber. As one government report noted in 1884, “It is to the extreme South what the white pine is to the extreme North.”
Nonetheless, lumbermen who had been raised singing the praises of white pine were slow to embrace its southern cousin, for reasons based mostly in tradition. Only as the commercial white pines grew scarce did attitudes begin to soften. By 1887, an influential tome on the South could assure, “Southern pine is rapidly winning its way into popular favor in nearly all parts of the United States and also in foreign countries.”
The long-standing discrimination against longleafs was only one of the reasons that the southern pine forests had survived the nation’s first century largely intact. Much of the responsibility rested with the region’s overall lack of economic development, attributable in large part to a system built around cotton and slave labor. When the Civil War arrived, it devastated the area’s economy, setting back any incipient industries that might have increased lumber use. The radical Reconstruction era that followed did little to facilitate new economic growth. There were local lumbering activities and a thriving turpentine business, but neither of these affected the forests quite like industrialized logging. Other factors contributed to forest preservation as well. Pines tended to grow on gravelly, relatively infertile soil, which was unproductive even when cleared, meaning that few chopped down the forests for agricultural reasons. The South’s warmer climate also meant that settlers felled fewer trees as a source of fuel for domestic heating. Finally, there was the transportation problem: Most of the area’s rivers flowed south, away from the main eastern markets, and the nation’s train network had been slow to develop in an area of low growth and little industry.
Change within the pine forests arrived in the form of northern capital. Beginning in 1876, largely at the behest of southern politicians desperate for economic growth, federal and state timberlands across much of the South were made available at rates bordering on the absurd, pennies an acre for pristine pinelands as well as for swamps rich with ancient bald cypresses, another valuable timber species. These land sales formed part of a larger strategy among some southerners, known as the “New South” movement, to reconstruct the regional economy with industry instead of agriculture. Northern speculators moved cautiously at first, but as the train network expanded and after Sargent’s 1884 Report raised the region’s profile, lumbermen rushed to take advantage of the situation. From there, things qui
ckly got out of hand. Tens of millions of acres fell into the hands of northern capitalists, especially the lumber barons from the Lake States—they accounted for 69 percent of purchases for lots five thousand acres or greater. By the mid-1880s, a government report warned: “English and Northern capitalists are fast purchasing our magnificent pine forests. The avarice of capitalists, and the great number of saw-mill men, if not in some way checked, will ere long destroy the grand pine forests of this section.” Southern politicians moved to stem the tide during the late 1880s, but it was already too late. The South had lost control of its forests, perhaps the region’s greatest natural resource.
The new industry that arose in the wake of this land grab differed greatly from what had preceded it in the North. Rivers and lakes gave way to railroads as the primary mode of transporting both felled trees to the mills and processed lumber to the population centers. The absence of serious winters transformed logging from a seasonal occupation into a perpetual one. Mills also grew in size and sophistication. Finally, the laborers were no longer the descendents of New England loggers or immigrants from Northern Europe. Southern loggers comprised a mix of poor white farmers in need of higher-paying work and freed slaves who typically came to the forests from a life of sharecropping.
