California Crucible. Jonathan Bell
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to riot or strike, and social peace would be restored. The larger question of the economic status of lowly paid, seasonal workers was never addressed, and there was no direct organizational link between government and the agricultural workforce to match the development of labor unions for industrial workers. Indeed, despite efforts in the 1930s to unionize and politicize farm labor, it quickly became clear that differences of ethnicity, citizenship, and patterns of work in the fields rendered agriculture a far cry from urban industry in its place in the economic structure.61 Progressive politics in California saw questions of labor relations and economic inequality as individual technical problems to be addressed on a case by case basis. Without a coherent ideological worldview to unite elected politicians and the economically disenfranchised it was difficult to see how the overall position of farm workers could be improved.
In the 1940s the question of the economic and political position of farm workers gained new salience with the passage of the bracero law in 1942 and the decision of the AFL-affiliated National Farm Workers' Union to organize in California in early 1947. The wartime pressure for maximum agricultural production led to leaders of agribusiness to press congress into allowing the legal importation of Mexican farm labor into the United States, initially on an emergency basis but extended indefinitely in 1951. The bracero program was also supported by a ready supply of illegal immigrant labor that made it virtually impossible for labor organizers to exert upward pressure on wages, as farm owners increasingly turned away from a reliance on domestic labor in order to ensure complete employment flexibility and to keep wages low. Out of some half million people involved in harvesting crops in California in the 1940s, only about 140,000 were local day wage laborers, meaning that imported labor constituted much of the rest. “Vast differences in culture and ethos separated [braceros, domestics, and illegals] despite their common class status as rural proletarians,” wrote Ernesto Galarza, farm labor organizer in the NFLU in the late 1940s. “Significant savings in the wage outlay for harvesting became possible by discarding domestics and lowering wage scales to more economical ratios with fertilizer, machinery, fuel, and other non-human inputs.”62 Rivalries between domestics and non-U.S. citizens for jobs undermined efforts to create solidarity over issues of pay and conditions, and the flexibility of the bracero system allowed owners and managers to circumvent unionization efforts by firing striking workers and bringing in extra imported labor.
The first serious effort by the NFLU to make headway in California was the strike at the DiGiorgio ranch in 1947, but the protracted and bitter dispute over union recognition at the largest estate in the central Valley revealed serious political roadblocks to the union's goal of transforming working conditions in the farming heartland of the state. The problem was not just one of supply and demand—the fact that the availability of cheap and willing labor outweighed the number of workers willing to strike—it was also one of political power. Not only did Robert DiGiorgio benefit from the support of local officials in Kern county, including the sheriff, the Board of Supervisors, and the justice of the peace, but he also drew upon larger reserves of political patronage at the state level, and knew that the weight of legislative and legal machinery could be brought to bear.63 Membership of the state board of agriculture, for instance, was restricted to leading figures in the Farm Bureau, the Associated Farmers, grower-shipper associations, and business leaders, all hostile to union organizing.64 Farm owners had almost exclusive access to state and federal officials who implemented and managed the bracero agreements with Mexico, allowing them to write wage agreements and dictate the terms of the program to their advantage. And when in the wake of the unsuccessful DiGiorgio strike the NFLU and AFL organized a boycott to pressurize owners into recognizing the union, DiGiorgio's lawyers filed suit against the boycotters, invoking the ban on secondary boycotts in the recently passed Taft-Hartley Act despite the fact that agricultural labor was excluded from federal collective bargaining legislation. Agricultural labor was thus deprived of the benefits of the National Labor Relations Act but victim of its antistrike provisions, testimony to the major imbalance in New Deal-era industrial relations law between employers and employees.65
The very limited success of the farm worker organizing movement in the late 1940s demonstrated the vital need for a shift in the wider political climate in California at Mid-Century. Without the integration of farm labor into the protective embrace of collective bargaining, minimum wage, and prospective fair employment legislation, the scope for a substantive shift in living conditions on the land in the Golden State remained severely limited, regardless of grassroots organizing activity. Existing power structures in the era of Earl Warren had no incentive to challenge the dominance of grower elites in the central and Imperial Valleys, and the California Federation of Labor, keen to keep its place at the legislative table in Sacramento and to head off any attempts to roll back its political influence, was by the early 1950s wary of getting too involved in new organizing drives.66 What was lacking was a language of social inclusion in political discourse at the state level that could embrace farm workers in its legislative and ideological agenda. It would take a new generational of political activists who, on the face of it, had nothing in common with those toiling in the fields to change the landscape of California politics in ways that could open the door at least to a consideration of farm labor as part of a broader question of social citizenship in the 1950s.
CHAPTER 2
Building the Democratic Party in the 1940s
The California Democratic Party needed a message and a program in order to unite all left-of-center interests in the state behind its banner and thus establish a genuine political choice for the public and set up the terms of debate in the postwar years. The difficulties it faced in achieving this task also point up reasons why it would become one of the most radical in reshaping its political perspective during the 1950s and 1960s: liberal political ideology was being thrashed out within the Democratic party hierarchy and in activist organizations against a backdrop of a strong popular front tradition in leftist politics, a powerful antistatist opposition against which to define itself, and a lack of established channels of Democratic patronage of the type that dampened political ambition and radicalism elsewhere. The Democratic political project of the postwar decades that is the subject of this book would unfold anew out of the political circumstances of the very late 1940s and 1950s.
Engaging the Popular Front
When James Roosevelt took over the leadership of the state party in late 1946, he found a party in turmoil, reeling from bitter attacks from business interests and the Republican political establishment, and convulsed by political divisions over the role of communists in the coalition of the left in California. The party's troubles were hardly unique, and in fact California voting patterns in the mid-1940s reflected national trends: the Democrats did relatively well in 1944, carrying the state for the presidential ticket and winning nine of the twenty-three congressional districts and the Senate seat, albeit by narrow margins. In 1946, as elsewhere, the party did appallingly badly, losing five congressional seats, the Senate race, and also failing to win their own primary in the gubernatorial race.1 But there was more to the party's problems than just national ennui directed at the unpopular Truman administration. For every account of a political house party, public meeting, or Young Democrat group was a story that told a very different tale: a Democratic party in Alameda county, which contained over 200,000 registered Democrats in the late 1940s, that could not get a quorum at its meetings; county committees that never met; bitter infighting among members of the state central committee over some members' links to communists and supporters of the Progressive citizens of America and other fellow-traveler groups.2 Fresh from his comprehensive drubbing at the hands of a conservative Republican in the Seventh congressional District in Oakland in 1946, Democratic candidate and prominent Alameda businessman Patrick McDonough put the blame for the party's electoral disaster squarely on the dissident left-wing elements in the party who had been using it as a popular front vehicle since the 1930s. “The election did not come out as perhaps we all wished,” he wrote a business associate, “but as for myself, I do not regret the outcome. The political situation here in California for us Democrats is very much confused. This defeat permits all of us to take a stand and begin inviting those whose views and actions do not harmonize with the best interests