352 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 36 illus., 7 tables, 1 map, append., notes, bibl., index

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ISBN 0-8078-2658-8

This citrus belt complex of peoples, institutions, and relationships has no parallel in rural life in America and nothing quite like it exists elsewhere in California. It is neither town nor country, neither rural nor urban. It is a world of its own. —Carey McWilliams, Southern California Country: An Island on the Land

Citrus fruit has always possessed a unique status among the many crops that make up California's vast agroecosystem. While wheat, cotton, and grapes have had their images tarnished by revelations of labor exploitation, grower vigilantes, and absentee landlords, citrus has usually escaped such criticism. Even today, the image of the orange evokes a vision of prosperity in abundance. Witness the opening monologue to the recent 1950s/noir genre film L.A. Confidential in which actor Danny DeVito uses the citrus groves as a metaphor for the wealth of Southern California. While flashing images of women swimming through a pool full of oranges, DeVito entices the American public to come to Los Angeles where "the orange grove stretches as far as the eye can see, there are jobs aplenty, and land is cheap."

Such depictions are consistent with those conceded by even the most strident critics of California agribusiness. Carey McWilliams, a prolific and insightful writer on the subject, acknowledged the seemingly impenetrable aura possessed by the orange tree and its grower when he wrote: "With its rich black-green shade, its evergreen foliage, and its romantic fragrance, it is the millionaire of all the trees of America. . . . The aristocrat of the orchards, it has, by a natural affinity drawn to it the rich and the well-born, creating a unique type of rural-urban aristocracy. There is no crop in the whole range of American agriculture the growing of which confers quite the same status that is associated with ownership of an orange grove."[1] In spite of his criticism of growers and their exploitation of minority laborers, McWilliams could not help but appreciate the citrus farms because "they have contributed as much, perhaps, as any single factor to the physical charm of the region."[2]

The image or "look" of citrus has contributed to the mystique surrounding the fruit. Numerous writers and scholars—Los Angeles boosters and debunkers alike—have identified the orange, and to a lesser extent the lemon and grapefruit, as "a symbol of California's call to civilized rural life."[3] Crate labels produced by the industry's marketing cooperative, Sunkist (the metonymic alias for the California Fruit Growers Exchange), perpetuated these images by integrating scenes of the California Spanish Missions with contemporary views of the linear citrus orchard. Through the "semiotics of selling," historian Douglas Sackman has argued, Sunkist recreated the nature of oranges to increase their consumption and sales throughout North America during the first half of the twentieth century.[4] Advertisements of the "sun kissed" orange came to represent a number of ideas, including health, wealth, and the achievement of the American dream.

These images, however, concealed more than they revealed. In an attempt to get behind "the orange curtain," this study focuses on the reality of citrus farming, in particular, the labor that produced the sweet fruit, idyllic landscape, and phenomenal profits. Although analyzing the "semiotics of selling" contributes to an overall understanding of the citrus industry, I am not concerned with the refashioning, repackaging, and re-presenting of citrus fruits by marketing agencies and advertisers. Rather, I am interested in the labor choices made by citrus ranchers, as well as the recommendations offered by citrus industry leaders, government officials, and community representatives. Integral to this project is a consideration of how labor transformed the "landscape"—both physically and culturally—of a region that experienced intensive citrus cultivation. Since citrus grew throughout California during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I have limited my survey to that portion of Southern California regarded as the "most highly developed and largest contiguous citrus area in the state."[5] This region, referred to by Carey McWilliams as "the citrus belt," stretched sixty miles eastward from Pasadena, through the San Gabriel and San Bernardino Valleys, to the town of Riverside.[6]

From the beginnings of the industry in the 1870s to the height of citrus production in the 1920s, industry and government literature depicted citrus ranching as an ideal occupation for eastern and midwestern investors. The warm, dry climate of Southern California, the availability of land, and the profitability of citriculture offered an attractive alternative to potential transplants nearing retirement, or those simply tired of cold weather and hard work. State and local government agencies, industry spokespeople, and the Southern Pacific Railroad Company produced pages and pages of promotional literature espousing the virtues of owning and operating a citrus farm in the Southland. For example, A. J. Cook, State Commissioner of Horticulture, published California Citrus Culture in 1913, a manual explaining to "the novice" the essential ingredients for a profitable citrus farm. Cook assured potential investors that a small orange grove of from ten to forty acres "[could] be cared for by its owner with very slight aid from others, and thus the greatest handicap in agriculture—inability to secure labor—is solved."[7] Moreover, Cook emphasized that the labor, "never too arduous and uniform the entire year through," promised health, vigor, happiness, and comfort "to the owner of a citrus grove that is properly located and well cared for."[8]

Promoters of citriculture often argued that citrus possessed a natural affinity for Southern California's environment. According to one writer, "the same amount of well-directed industry upon a small area of land will produce more return [here] than in almost any section of the United States." He attributed this condition to nature, suggesting that "the difference between this and many parts of our land is that [here] nature seems to work with man, and not against him."[9] Indeed, writers often projected the image of the yeoman farmer as the ideal citrus rancher and the foundation for a new and improved society in the far West.

Such visions conformed to the agrarian or pastoral myth associated with agricultural development in North America. Developed by Thomas Jefferson and Norman cartographer St. John de Crèvecoeur in the eighteenth century, the agrarian philosophy rested on the idea that American society would expand indefinitely westward. Thomas Jefferson advocated the development of agrarian communities because he believed that agriculture constituted the most virtuous of human endeavors and would strengthen the moral and democratic character of the nation. In his famous Notes on Virginia, Query XIX, Jefferson articulated this philosophy: "Is it best then that all our citizens should be employed in its improvement, or that one half should be called off from that to exercise manufactures and handicraft arts for the other? Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue."[10]

Jefferson acted upon this belief by prescribing a plan of orderly agricultural development in the frontier regions of his home state of Virginia. He advised that no more than ten people settle within a square mile, that primogeniture be abolished, and that education and government facilities be made conveniently accessible to all citizens. The Virginia legislature ultimately rejected Jefferson's original homestead plan, but his ideas significantly influenced land use patterns in the state and he successfully established one of the first public universities in the union.[11] Although regarded as utopian by critics, the philosophy developed into an "ideal" for Western conquest and settlement in the subsequent century.

In his classic study, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth, Henry Nash Smith argues that Americans often idealized Jefferson's concept of the agrarian community without observing why he cherished the philosophy. On the most basic level, the agricultural settlement was universally recognized as the line separating civilization from savagery—the domestication of the "Wild West" and the creation of a "civilized" and "productive" society. Yet Jefferson valued the tight-knit, agrarian settlement not so much for what it contributed to the American economy, but rather for the guiding principles it provided Americans. Jefferson believed that the ideal agricultural communities promoted material equality and discouraged social stratification. Notwithstanding his narrow focus on white, landowning, male suffrage, Jefferson's key contribution to American political thought was his emphasis on the creation of a nation based on family farmers-proprietors who performed all of their own labor. He believed such investments would lead to a populace deeply committed to participatory democracy and the creation of institutions that protected their interests. The equitable distribution of land and the common purpose of farming suggested a process of horizontal, or "even" development that Marx and his followers would later render as incompatible with a capitalist system. In fact, American settlement patterns during the nineteenth century contributed to the critique of Jefferson's philosophy as utopian. Ultimately, argues Smith, "the equalitarian overtones of this ideal were by no means acceptable to the country as a whole," and the "deeper belief in social stratification" prevailed.[12]

Americans' misinterpretation of the agrarian tradition generated important contradictions. The philosophy's implicit dependence on "nature" as the great equalizer conflicted with the notion of dominance inherent to capitalist societies. How could one adhere to the agrarian philosophy and accept social stratification if "labour in the earth" produced a more equalitarian society? This contradiction led Smith to conclude, "the capital difficulty of the American agrarian tradition is that it accepted the paired but contradictory ideas of nature and civilization as a general principle of historical and social interpretation."[13] Equally important (though not considered by Smith): What if the labor that produces this virtue is performed by someone other than the farmer? Indeed, as historian Jack Kirby argues, there is no place in Jeffersonian agrarianism for nonfamily labor, the likes of which came to be employed on American farms during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Consequently, today we often speak of this tradition not as the "agrarian philosophy," but rather the "agrarian myth."[14]

Americans "resolved" the contradiction between nature and civilization by redefining the relationship of humans to the natural world. In The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, Leo Marx argues that prior to the industrial revolution, early capitalism in America developed vis-à-vis "geographic nature" rather than against social forms (such as feudalism), thus making "the relation between mankind and the physical environment . . . more than usually decisive." By the mid-nineteenth century, however, the predominance of technology produced yet another interpretation of the agrarian, or "pastoral" ideal. Rather than define nature strictly as external to human beings, Americans began to see technology, the natural world, and people as part of a universal nature. According to Marx, a "rhetoric of the technological sublime" assimilated technology into the natural world, while a "rhetoric of the nature sublime" "humanized" nature. By the end of the nineteenth century, Americans saw themselves sharing a common destiny—uniting technology and nature to "[create] a society in the image of a garden."[15]

Los Angeles boosters embraced the concept of the garden as an accurate depiction of Southern California. The Southern Pacific Railroad Company, a major landowner in California and the primary transporter of citrus fruits, used "garden" tours of the region to lure midwesterners and easterners westward. Advertising "the way through the wonderful fruit and flower garden of Southern California," the company's tourist magazine The Inside Track characterized "citrus land" as one integrated landscape of cities, orchards, and mountains where residents lived in harmony with their environment. Tourists experienced a symphony of colors and aromas traveling eastward along the snow-clad peaks of Mount San Antonio, Mount San Bernardino, and Mount San Gorgonio. As the train coursed through the "orange belt" of the San Gabriel and San Bernardino Valleys, tourists witnessed the bright green of alfalfa fields and grape vineyards, the silver and gray of alluvial sands, the golden brown of mountain walls, and the sweet smell and deep green of orange groves. Passengers ended their trip in the archetypal citrus colony, Riverside, possessing "all the advantages of an unsurpassed rural district and a model city."[16]

Although Southern Pacific promotional writers advanced an idyllic image of the landscape, the trip reflected a pattern of economic, social, and cultural development unique to the region prior to World War II. Los Angeles depended heavily on agriculture and industry in its "hinterlands" as a foundation for its economy. In addition to oil, citrus formed, to quote historians Ronald Tobey and Charles Wetherell, "the engine" of a regional economy. Between 1899 and 1937, the multibillion-dollar citrus industry in Southern California grew at a rate unparalleled by any agricultural product in the world, and unequaled by most other industries in the region. In 1913, ranchers received almost $40 million in return on their investment, paying out approximately one-third of this total in transportation cost. By 1930, citrus growers in the five counties of Southern California—Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, and Ventura—grossed a phenomenal $144.6 million. As a point of comparison, the area's combined manufacturing wages earned in the movies, oil, and aircraft industries totaled $196 million. Moreover, land under citrus cultivation in Southern California increased from 83,600 acres in 1903 to more than 329,700 in 1944. Although the initial investment required a substantial amount of money and patience (trees did not bear fruit of marketable quality until five years after planting), the payoff was potentially very high. For example, the owner of an average, fully productive, debt-free ten-acre grove in 1929 earned $2,800—four times the per capita income of Americans.[17]

Urban planners, geographers, and historians studying Los Angeles have commented on the unique structure of Southern California society. Dispersed economic development mitigated the formation of a city organized around a downtown district. Los Angeles's dependence on citrus and oil during its formative years significantly shaped what today many scholars regard as a "polynuclear" metropolis.[18] While oil drilling and refining spurred urban development south of Los Angeles towards San Pedro, the establishment of citrus cities throughout the San Gabriel Valley expanded the metropolis eastward.[19] In Los Angeles County, towns varying in size from Pasadena to Pomona and Ontario served as nuclei for local control and community development throughout the region. Although the California Fruit Growers Exchange (CFGE), the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, and the Southern Pacific Company influenced the expansion of the citrus industry from their offices based in Los Angeles, growers successfully organized local clubs, grower associations, water companies, and chambers of commerce that decentralized this agriculture-based economy. According to famous Los Angeles lover and historian Reyner Banham, this spatial arrangement resembled an "instant townscape" seventy square miles wide rather than a traditional city.[20]

In analyzing the roots of Los Angeles's postmodern geography, urban theorists and historians have debated its cause and effect. While most scholars interpret Los Angeles' development as haphazard and random, state and metropolitan officials, investors, and city boosters prior to World War II celebrated the settlement patterns and eclectic economy of Southern California. For example, in Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth-Century Metropolis, Greg Hise demonstrates that urban planners and real estate developers intentionally "planned dispersion of jobs, housing, and services" throughout the metropolitan landscape beginning in the 1920s. Similarly, historian Virginia Scharf called 1920s Los Angeles a "great, diffuse urban agglomeration" that "would prove to be the prototype for twentieth-century American cities."[21] Contrary to the city/suburb dichotomy subscribed to by traditional urban theorists, Los Angeles officials and investors embraced "suburbanization" as urbanization.

The Southern Pacific, CFGE, and real estate developers were not alone in their enthusiasm for Los Angeles' unique landscape. The Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce (LACC), the agency responsible for organizing the city's economic growth, acknowledged the importance of agriculture to the regional economy. The LACC aggressively promoted agricultural development in the county by publishing literature that compared the Southland to the most productive regions of the Mediterranean. In 1907, the agency strongly endorsed a bond issue that supported the construction of the L.A. Aqueduct and advocated the use of this water partly for the expansion of fruit and vegetable farms. Not exclusively committed to the growth of industry, the LACC pushed an agenda that balanced manufacturing with agriculture on a regional level. Beginning in 1888 and extending throughout the 1920s, the LACC published the booklet Los Angeles: The City and County in which author Harry Ellington Book outlined the various economic opportunities available to newcomers throughout the Southland. In his section on San Gabriel Valley, Book referred to the citrus belt as the "The Ideal Country Life" and appealed to a "back to the land" sentiment popular among Americans at the turn of the century. According to Book, "in no other section can an acre of land be made to yield products of so great value." Highlighting its unique blend of rural and urban characteristics he added, "here may be found beautiful rural homes, whose owners are within touch of social life, and enjoy the best features of the city and country combined."[22]

By 1918, the agency maintained a department entirely devoted to agriculture and allied industries. Headed by the indefatigable George Pigeon Clements, the department quickly grew into one of the most influential government agencies in California and the West, influencing farm operations from Fresno to the Mexican border. Clements believed that the prosperity of a great city or metropolis depended on its ability not only to feed itself, but also to dominate regional, and if possible, national markets. Southern California possessed an environment unusually endowed with rich agricultural land that allowed it to achieve these two objectives. In a 1924 article for the Los Angeles Examiner, Clements boasted that Los Angeles had become "the perishable fruit and vegetable garden of the United States" through the combination of water reclamation and a total use of "the most valuable acreage on the Western Hemisphere." "Los Angeles must depend upon the husbandman for her food," he wrote, "and every acre of ground must be made to bear its full burden to this end." Given the extensive agricultural development accomplished during the first two decades of the twentieth century, Clements assured readers that "there is no longer any back country; the city's sphere of influence has brought the so-called back country to constitute a part of itself."[23] During the 1920s and 1930s, Clements downplayed suburban/urban distinctions and made farming in Southern California the business of the LACC and the city. He took particular interest in the citrus industry, frequently speaking at local grower association conferences, coordinating meetings between ranchers, and representing their interests in Congress and the California State Assembly.

Government agencies interested in improving citrus yields and increasing profits also contributed to the success and importance of citrus in the first three decades of the twentieth century. The State Commission of Horticulture and the University of California invested in the industry by supporting scientific studies of geography and fruit. From the fruit-growing "boom" of the 1880s to the turn of the century, farmers used a costly process of trial and error to determine the most appropriate places to cultivate citrus. By 1910, geographers' surveys of the land eliminated much of the risk and helped the industry realize its full potential in the coastal portions of Southern California, particularly the Los Angeles basin. Studies conducted at the University of California's Citrus Experiment Station established in Riverside in 1913 revealed that the proximity of farms to mountains and foothills determined the type and quality of citrus. In Los Angeles County, the San Gabriel and San Bernardino mountains provided a necessary watershed and windbreak, as well as the right combination of soil and climate. Since most water runoff occurred below ground level in detrital cones, farmers planted citrus crops in the porous alluvial soils beneath the towering Sierra Madre range of the inland valley and along the slopes of the coastal mountains.

Climate was the principal environmental factor that made Southern California an ideal location for the commercial production of citrus fruits. Low-lying fog and cool breezes from the Pacific Ocean chilled the coastal plains and made frost a constant concern for farmers. Off the valley floor, foothills rose above the onshore flow of heavy, moist air providing warmer conditions more favorable to citrus. Higher up the mountain soil became too rocky for agriculture and the threat of frost increased during the chilly winter months. Consequently, farmers planted citrus fruits in thermal "belts" ending sixty to one hundred miles east from Los Angeles.[24] Researchers discovered that the hardiness of oranges, lemons, and grapefruits varied according to climate and soil types as one ascended from the valley floors. Ranchers planted oranges and grapefruits at lower levels because of their greater tolerance for cold weather, while frost-sensitive lemons grew at slightly higher elevations where mostly warmer air resided.

Among oranges, Valencias and Washington navels occupied different places in the citrus belt. Since Valencias possessed seeds and were used primarily for juice, farmers cared more about their quantity than quality. Consequently, ranchers grew Valencias near coastal ranges and further down the inland valleys. In the interior, a combination of dry desert breezes, low atmospheric moisture, and the threat of high-elevation frost produced oranges of higher sugar content with a deep reddish-orange hue. Farmers took advantage of such conditions by planting the seedless navel in these districts. Regarded as the sweetest eating-orange and the "autocrat of the price list," the navel thrived in a narrow belt that extended along the San Gabriel Valley's inner-mountain foothills from Pasadena to San Bernardino and Redlands.

Zones of agricultural production produced not only profits, but also an aesthetic quality to the landscape unparalleled by any other farming region in the United States. The variety of crops generated a diversity of textures and colors that impressed visitors and attracted investors and newcomers. Appreciating the "visible tokens of invisible soil and climatic variations," Carey McWilliams described a typical view of the San Gabriel Valley prior to World War II: "Alfalfa, grain, sugar beets, and other crops not injured by frost, are planted in the lowlands; farther up the slopes appear the belts of grapes and fruit crops, still higher, and usually in the form of a dark-green horseshoe curve around the rim of the valleys, is the orange belt; and, still higher on the slopes, are the zones of lemons and avocados."[25]

The physical landscape contributed substantially to the social organization of the citrus belt. In the coastal regions of Orange and Los Angeles Counties, Valencia groves predominated. Since the Valencia typically grew on large commercial farms that contributed to lower population density and fewer townships, a "rural coloration" characterized development in these areas. In the inland district of the Washington navels, however, growers engaged in more intensive farming. Ranchers raised navels in clusters since these oranges tended to be more sensitive to soil and climatic variations. Initially, the high-yielding ten-acre farm referred to by various promotional writers predominated in these areas, producing greater numbers of residents and more townships, including Pasadena, Monrovia, Duarte, Azusa, Glendora, Covina, San Dimas, Pomona, Claremont, Upland, and Ontario. Often, groves came right to the doorsteps of growers' homes.[26]

Since residential districts preceded or simultaneously developed with the groves, these communities exhibited an eclectic mix of urban and rural characteristics. Often, these "colonies" coalesced around the cultural and/or religious backgrounds of settlers. For example, in 1873, D. M. Berry of Indianapolis organized fifty families from his home state into the Indiana Colony of California. This group constituted the original members of the San Gabriel Orange Grove Association that founded Pasadena. Further east, members of the Church of the Brethren founded the town of Lordsburg (renamed La Verne), and Mormon missionaries organized the colony that became San Bernardino. Even "secular" colonies prided themselves on their high degree of homogeneity. Congregationalists in the town of Claremont tended to dictate the morals of that community, while city officials throughout the citrus belt enforced strict temperance laws. These culturally homogeneous communities eased the transition into a new environment for many migrants, and perpetuated the illusion that the small town of the Midwest and East could be recreated in Southern California.[27]

Investors found that by organizing into blocks, they could more easily control resources. Land purchases by groups rather than individuals allowed migrants to place more acreage under citrus cultivation, thereby transforming the environment more rapidly and radically. Strength in numbers also permitted them to form irrigation districts or companies that controlled local water resources. George Chaffey, for example, established the town of Ontario in 1882 by purchasing land, founding a colony, and organizing the San Antonio Water Company. Chaffey harnessed water flowing out of the San Antonio Canyon and built delivery systems that made the valley below blossom into one of the richest citrus- and grape-growing regions in California. His experiments in hydroelectric power provided Ontario all the amenities of a big city, including well-lit streets and eventually an electric car that carried residents from the citrus heights to downtown. In 1903, the U.S. government honored Ontario by selecting it as the standard of American Irrigation Colonies. Federal engineers constructed a miniaturized version of the "model colony" for exhibition at the St. Louis World's Fair held the following year.[28]