But the collective portrait created by Popular Front artists and their colleagues was incomplete: at best it related only to a particular time and place; at worst, it was an insult to farm workers’ genuine tradition and history. Workers acting on their own behalf never win in these representations. They can’t, because winning, or even fighting effectively, would muddy the moral waters. This cultural agenda was so fixed that in Steinbeck’s morality tale of an apple strike, In Dubious Battle, farm workers suffer a grand defeat, although farm workers won in the actual 1933 peach strike on which his story was based.7 In Lange’s photographs, noble migrants suffer and endure. Rarely in the photos do we see images of farm workers throwing back tear gas canisters, or angrily confronting scabs, or giving a rousing speech at a mass meeting. All of that happened on a regular basis in the early 1930s, and even amid the general defeat of the late 1930s. The farm workers’ combative tradition and their recurring power during harvest seasons and in times of labor scarcity have been trumped by the images of 1939, where, as the cultural historian William Stott put it, farm workers come to us “only in images meant to break our hearts.”*
A more complete portrait of California farm workers requires quite different images. In the early Depression, farm workers were united in a movement that had blown hot and cold since 1928 and became a mighty storm by 1933. Of the several winds that have blustered through the California fields, that was the biggest. Never before had so many farm workers gone on strike. At the height of their struggle in 1933, led by the Communist-sponsored Cannery and Agriculture Workers Union (C&A), ten thousand people were striking in the peaches, four thousand in the grapes, and fifteen thousand in the cotton—three of the most important harvests in the state at the time. Five days into the cotton strike the battle’s first chroniclers, Paul Taylor and Clark Kerr, called it an earthquake and the New York Times called it a war; the San Francisco Chronicle compared it to a volcano. No cataclysmic metaphor was too excessive. For the almost exclusively Mexican strikers the first days were a determined, joyful demonstration of their unity and strength. Trucks and cars overflowing with strikers went from field to field, the caravans getting larger as other pickers joined them. The growers and police were overwhelmed. Twenty-five strikers stopped a rancher’s car and broke all the windows before allowing the two frightened growers to escape. In the midst of a small confrontation, a woman striker took a cop’s gun and car keys. Some strikers ran into the fields to chase off scabs. Others set fires. Thousands of pounds of picked cotton went up in smoke. Everywhere the deepest mark of the workers’ power was on display: deserted fields helplessly guarded by frustrated farmers who had no one to pick their crops. When three strikers were shot and killed, their compañeros held mass funerals, which even former strikebreakers attended. In a large caravan after the murders, strikers openly displayed their guns, and the Mexican consul reported that workers had told him they “were prepared to die fighting for their rights.”8
Official government sources reported that nearly 50,000 people struck in the California fields in 1933, about 25 percent of farm workers then in the state. By way of comparison, in 1937, at the apex of strike activity among industrial workers, only 8 percent of the workforce went on strike. The big industrial strikes were more successful than the farm workers’, for industrial workers not only won higher wages but also secured union contracts in major industries, while most—but not all—of the farm worker strikes were settled without workers winning recognition of their unions. But farm workers did not strike in vain. More than 80 percent of the twenty-five strikes officially recorded in 1933, including the peach and cotton wars, won the strikers higher wages, increasing farm worker pay by about 40 percent.9
The great upheaval of the early Depression was not a unique event. Periodically throughout their history, California farm workers have fought vigorously, sometimes in small, local battles unknown to anyone but the immediate participants, and at other times in large campaigns—directed by radical or even openly revolutionary leaders—that have lasted for several seasons. The nature of these fights is rooted in the special character of agricultural production and in the real opportunities that farm workers have encountered in the fields for nearly a hundred years.
Commercial farmers of whatever size have two special vulnerabilities. Although they must work the land much of the year—preparing the soil, planting, thinning, weeding, irrigating, fertilizing—only during the harvest do they produce a commodity. If the harvest is delayed or interrupted by a strike, they cannot warehouse their fields or shut down production temporarily and then work people overtime once the strike is over. If the strike is effective, growers can lose their entire investment in a few weeks or even less, as some fruits and vegetables must be harvested within days of becoming harvest-ready. Also, because the growers’ demand for labor varies greatly during the year, there is not enough work in any particular area to sustain an extensive settlement of agricultural workers. That is why farm towns are small, and growers depend on migrants. But migratory trails are not always reliable, and occasionally enough farm workers don’t arrive in time to work the precious, short-lived harvest.
Time is often on the workers’ side, and they have not hesitated to seize it. Brief harvest walkouts, sit-downs, slow-downs, and stay-at-homes are part of farm worker tradition, weapons used much more regularly by agricultural workers than by industrial workers. When conditions have been favorable, these short strikes and quasi-strikes have been transformed into large, extensive campaigns, like the coordinated shutdowns of the early thirties, or the later battles out of which the UFW emerged.
The pattern of militant farm worker action, significant wage gains, and an ultimate failure to build a lasting union was set nearly a generation before the Depression-era upheaval. Between 1914 and 1917, in a period of overall labor scarcity, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), at times working in tandem with the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM), led a series of walkouts in the California fields, orchards, and vineyards that pushed up wages, forced labor-camp managers to provide better food, and prompted the state of California to build an extensive series of new labor camps, which improved the lives of many migrants. A harvest-time strike in the hops in 1914 doubled piece-rate wages, and by 1917, the average wage of California farm workers had risen to nearly 90 percent of the average wage of California’s city workers.10
Although the major strikes received the most publicity, the Wobblies, or Wobs, as IWW members were called, applied much of the pressure on the growers through smaller on-the-job actions. Using tactics as old as agricultural slave labor, they skipped over fruits and vegetables ready to harvest, worked sloppily enough to ruin some of what they picked, and often labored at so slow a pace that they enraged their overseers and foremen. In 1915, the Wobblies proposed a regular slow-down of fifteen minutes per hour, during which farm workers would neglect their jobs and turn their “full attention” to the cases of two IWW leaders, Richard (Blackie) Ford and Herman Suhr, who had been framed for murder, and for whom the union was demanding pardons. The Wobs also threatened to sabotage the entire 1915 harvest if Ford and Suhr were not freed. In March 1915, E. Clemens Horst, a major California hop grower, and W. H. Carlin, one of the prosecutors who had helped frame Ford and Suhr, both testified in support of a pardon for the two hated agitators—a clear indicator of Wobbly power.
The Wobblies openly advocated acts of sabotage such as burning barns, sheds, and haystacks. Nineteen fifteen and 1916 were bad years for fires in rural California, but none of the blazes was ever pinned on a Wob. One act of sabotage easily traced to the IWW was the popular poster affixed to thousands of California fruit trees with copper nails; the poster warned people not to drive copper nails into fruit trees because it would damage them.
According to the Wobblies, their actions in the fields cost the growers about $10 million a year in lost crops between 1914 and 1917. The U.S. Justice Department, which had its own reasons for exaggerating