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WORKERS AND GROUP IDENTITY

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Dishing It Out
Waitresses and the Making of Their Unions in San Francisco, 1900-1941

Dorothy Sue Cobble

Editor's Introduction

[Where] waitresses' unions are strong, the business is on a high plane, the hard work fairly paid and the working women who are engaged in it are self-respecting and respected by all who know them. They are distinctly high class, and so it can be here, if the girls will get together and work.
—Anonymous journalist writing for the Independent in 1908

We are all working as we never did before, and our days and hours are forgotten. Our feet are sore, our bones ache, our throats are tired, but we feel great because we are getting something done.
—Gertrude Sweet, International organizer, HERE, April 13, 1937

The contagious spread of trade unionism in early-twentieth-century San Francisco was not confined to skilled male workers; unskilled and semi-skilled workers also achieved a considerable degree of organization. As early as 1902, there were two thousand organized culinary workers in San Francisco, a significant and growing number of them female waitresses. The waitresses of San Francisco founded the first California affiliate of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union (HERE) in 1901. Subsequently, the problems of operating in a union with men led the San Francisco waitresses to form one of the first separate locals in the country in 1906.

The fortunes of HERE, and those of the women within the union, waxed and waned in the early decades of the twentieth century. By the late 1930s, however, the majority of hotels and motels were union houses, and 95 percent of the twenty-five hundred restaurants were organized.

In this extract from her book Dishing It Out: Waitresses and Their Unions in the Twentieth Century , Dorothy Sue Cobble explores the vicissitudes of women's trade unionism from the early twentieth century until World War II. She argues that from the outset waitresses defined their goals in explicitly self-conscious ways, announcing their intention to "further the rights of working women" and to bring about economic and political equality with men. Like male waiters, they had a deep sense of craft identity that was crucial to the success of their organizing efforts. During the 1930s, Cobble contends, the success of the longshoremen's strike, in

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particular, helped to galvanize both male and female restaurant workers. With its eighteen thousand members, the union also helped to organize some of San Francisco's largest downtown department stores.

The historic barriers to female unionism before the 1930s were formidable: women's lack of permanent wage status, the ambivalence emanating from a trade union movement overwhelmingly male, the class tensions between female wage earners and their elite sisterly allies, and the objective difficulties in organizing "unskilled" workers with little strike leverage.^[1] Moreover, as recent scholars have argued, many women workers may have preferred to exert collective power in ways other than unionization.^[2] Yet waitresses not only chose unionization as their vehicle for expressing militancy, but they also managed to build all-female union institutions in these early years that provided them with an impressive degree of power and dignity.

Waitresses turned to unionization as early as the 1880s, forming separate all-female unions as well as locals that included male waiters and other food service crafts. With the help of the Federated Trades Council of San Francisco and the International Workingmen's Association, San Francisco waitresses organized a separate local on May 25, 1886, while Los Angeles waitresses united with male culinary workers in requesting that the White Cooks, Waiters and Employees Protective Union of the Pacific Coast charter a mixed-gender and craft local. Many of these earliest locals affiliated briefly with the Knights of Labor, but by the mid-1890s most had either disbanded or cast their lot with the newly emerging American Federation of Labor (AFL).^[3]

In April of 1891, the AFL chartered the Waiters and Bartenders National Union with an initial membership of 450. The Waiters and Bartenders

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National Union, later to change its name to the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union (HERE), made little progress until the first years of the twentieth century: in 1899 the total membership of the union had not passed a thousand. By World War I, however, membership climbed to sixty-five thousand: HERE had established itself as a permanent fixture in the industry.^[4] The Industrial Workers of the World also experimented with organizing the "foodstuff" industry in this era but with notably meager results. IWW culinary locals sprang up in a few Western IWW-dominated mining and lumbering towns, and the IWW inspired strikes in New York and other immigrant centers, but their organizations were short-lived and geared primarily to male waiters and cooks.^[5]

Choosing Separatism

Substantial gains in organizing female culinary workers did not occur until after the founding of separate HERE-affiliated waitress organizations. The first permanent waitress union, Local 240 in Seattle, received its charter on March 31, 1900. Over the next decade, HERE waitress organizations took root in at least a half dozen other communities. By the World War I era, at the height of the movement for separate female organizations, more than seventeen permanent waitress locals existed, and approximately 70 percent of organized HERE waitresses belonged to separate locals.

The impetus for separate gender organization among women workers has been poorly understood by scholars. Although many unions barred women from membership or relegated them to second-class citizenship, separate-gender organization was not merely a product of nor a reaction to the discrimination of male workers. In many industries, the sex segregation of work decreed that membership in locals organized by trade or department would be either predominantly one sex or the other. Moreover, although a consensus on separatism as a strategy never existed among working women, in certain periods and in certain trades, women themselves pushed for separate-sex organizations.^[6]

Waitresses had strong affinity for separatism. They initiated numerous separate locals before the 1930s, and their commitment to separatism sustained many of these locals into the 1970s. In part, their preference for separatism derived from their ethnic and cultural orientations. As Susan Glenn has suggested, Americanized, native-born women tended to be greater supporters of separatism because of their unencumbrance with the strong community and class ties of recent immigrant women and their closer connection with the native-born variety of feminism rooted in the separate-spheres traditions of American middle-class womanhood.^[7] The

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particular workplace experiences and family status of waitresses also nourished their inclinations to organize autonomous, all-female locals—locals that could address "female" concerns and provide women with an "initiating," leadership role.

The desire of waitresses for separate organization prevailed over the mixed-gender model suggested by the organization of food service work. In contrast to many workplaces where divisions along sex and craft lines were synonymous, female and male servers belonged to the same craft. Simply following the craft logic of the food service workplace would have resulted in a mixed-sex craft division in which waiters and waitresses belonged to the same craft local. The formation of separate waitress locals necessitated a rationale beyond craft identity: the legitimacy of gender concerns had to be put forward.

Moreover, female culinary workers faced opposition from male unionists who supported integrating women into mixed-sex locals or organizing them into separate but subordinate branches of the male local. A separate, autonomous female local would create problems. Some men feared conflict over wage scales, work rules, and distribution of jobs; others were reluctant to lose dues-paying members.^[8] The International union pursued neutrality: it officially encouraged organization by craft "regardless of race, color, sex, or nationality" but allowed for the formation of separate organizations based on race and sex. Section 49 of the 1905 HERE Constitution read: "there shall not be more than one white or colored local of the same craft in any city or town, except waitresses who may obtain a charter." In short, women workers had to take the initiative in establishing their own locals, and they did so.^[9]

Organized male culinary workers seldom erected formal constitutional barriers to the entry of women, but their reluctance to organize women retarded the growth of waitress organizations and at times was as much of an obstacle as the hostility of employers. Women HERE members from their first days of union participation appealed to their male counterparts for organizing support, but the majority of men resisted these calls to action until the 1930s.

The problems of operating within mixed locals led San Francisco waitresses to conclude that their interests as women trade unionists would be better served through separate-sex organizations where they could define their own organizational goals and practices. Much to the surprise of the waiter officials of San Francisco's Local 30, not only the bartenders but "the waitresses too" began "asking for an organization" in 1901. By April, sixty-three waitresses had formed a branch of the waiters' union; five

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years later, having "decided that a separate organization was desirable," they petitioned their male co-workers for "a local of their own." Once the waiters voted approval, the new two hundred and fifty member local installed its first officers on February 21, 1906.^[10]

The San Francisco local enjoyed continuity and vigor in its principal leaders. The waitresses elected Minnie Andrews as president and first business agent. Andrews guided the local through its first decade, later becoming one of the first women organizers on the International staff. Louise Downing LaRue—a firebrand agitator for women's suffrage and a veteran officer of the mixed culinary locals in St. Louis and San Francisco—took a leading role as did Maud Younger, a native-born San Francisco heiress (known locally as the "millionaire waitress") who devoted her life to suffrage and social reform. By the 1920s and 1930s, the reins of leadership passed to Montana-born Frankie Behan, a 1922 transfer from Seattle who served as an officer into the 1950s, and Lettie Howard, who devoted thirty-nine years to the union, broken only by her absence in 1919 when she helped organize waitresses in Los Angeles. There were others such as Julia Marguerite Finkenbinder, Elizabeth Kelley, and Laura Molleda, almost all of whom were native born and of Northern European background.^[11]

The first waitress locals encountered considerable obstacles in sustaining their fledgling organizations. In addition to the ambivalence of their own culinary brothers, they faced bitter feuds with employers, condescension from middle-class "uplift" or moral reform groups, and divisions in their own ranks. Nevertheless, many locals weathered these trials and established themselves permanently in the industry.

Typically, female locals faced their greatest battles with employers after they demonstrated significant bargaining power. Employers often underestimated the organizational potential of their female employees and, taken by surprise, were forced to grant concessions. These initial union victories, however, sparked employer counterorganization and open-shop campaigns.

The San Francisco waitresses in their first two decades experienced cycles of advance followed by employer backlash and defeat. After the union began pressing for the ten-hour day in 1901, the local Restaurant Keepers Association gained the backing of the San Francisco Employer Association and precipitated a strike. After enjoining union picketing, the owners held out for six months, operating their restaurants with scab labor. The union lost considerable membership—union waitresses had trouble getting jobs, and some were forced to leave town or assume false names—but the local

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followed the strike defeat with a remarkable period of rebuilding. In part, the unprecedented surge in membership resulted from the waitresses' decision to pursue "more subtle means than direct action," according to one early authority on the union. The Waitress Union dedicated itself to an educational campaign that brought results in both working conditions and increased membership. Although many restaurants refused to bargain or sign agreements, by May of 1902, a handful of establishments instituted working conditions in conformity with the standard 1902 Waitress Wage Scales and Working Agreement: employment of union members only; six-day week; and $8 a week for day work, $9 for night work. In December 1903, the waitresses survived a second open-shop campaign and lockout by the employers. With the assistance of Mayor Eugene Schmitz, recently elected by San Francisco's Union Labor party, they emerged victorious with a new one-year agreement that reduced hours to nine a day.^[12]

By the time the separate waitress charter became official in 1906, union waitresses had signed up a majority of their co-workers. Relying on "silent picketing" to foil court injunctions and the new union strategy of "monthly working buttons" worn conspicuously by all union waitresses—an idea that can "accomplish . . . what the Union label has secured for the printers and other craftsmen"—the local steadily increased its numbers and influence, even adding cafeteria waitresses to its ranks after 1910.^[13] In 1916, however, when San Francisco culinary workers struck for the eight-hour day, the employers regained the upper hand. The strike, dubbed a "complete failure" by more than one analyst, was called off after three months, but not before membership defections left the Waitress Union reeling. In particular, the cafeteria women disregarded the strike order and remained on the job. As a result, the Waitress Union lost the cafeteria workers and did not regain them until the 1930s.^[14]

Some waitress locals disappeared completely during these years. In New York City, Waitresses' Local 769 had the support of the Women's Trade Union League (WTUL) and such well-known reformers as San Francisco's Maud Younger, but it went under in 1908 after only a few years of activity.^[15] In 1912 and 1913, the International Hotel Workers Union, a syndicalist-inspired, independent organization, agitated among New York's hotel and restaurant workers, drawing in a few waitresses. IWW organizers Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Joseph Ettor, who lent their talents to the organization, urged novel tactics such as exposing adulterated food and "scientific sabotage"—defined variously as dropping trays of food on the floor, spilling "gravy on the shirt-fronts of well-dressed patrons," and confusing orders—but few if any concessions were wrested

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from employers. The WTUL picked up the refrain for a separate waitress union in 1914, but a credible organization was not in place until 1919.^[16]

Waitress unionism revived during World War I. Long-established HERE locals gathered steam, and new HERE units such as Local 729, representing the employees of the Harvey eating houses, sprang to life. In Minneapolis, department store waitresses held out for $9 a day and a guaranteed return to their posts in the tea room, preferring "to be silent picket[s] and pace the sidewalk with [their] message than be turned into inexperienced and inefficient glove or ribbon sales[women]."^[17]

Most locals incurred losses in the labor turmoil following the war, but by the mid-twenties membership resumed its upward spiral. By 1927, femaie membership in HERE had more than quadrupled from pre-World War I figures. Women now represented more than a fifth of the total membership of the International union, a sizable leap from 5.4 percent in 1910 and 9.3 percent in 1920,^[18] and for the first time, women outnumbered men in some of the mixed culinary unions, prompting workers in the industry to label these communities "girls' towns."^[19] These changes resulted partially from the resiliency of the female unions during this period and the feminization of food service work; the declining vitality of the male-dominated locals also contributed to the changing sex ratio.

The advent of Prohibition and the employer campaigns of the 1920s cut deeply into the male membership of HERE. Having peaked in 1918, the number of male culinary unionists dropped precipitously after the passage of the 18th Amendment and plunged downward throughout the 1920s, hitting bottom in 1933. The 18th Amendment, in effect nationwide by January 1920, wrecked the all-male bartending constituency within the union. Numerous waiter and cook locals also folded up for lack of membership and finances. After the passage of Prohibition, employers who previously had been sympathetic to unionism because of the higher profit margins accompanying liquor service adopted tough bargaining stances. Speakeasies, operating in a subterranean fashion, did not yield to traditional organizing methods. The public attention generated by unionization usually resulted in the bar or restaurant closing.^[20] In addition to these industry-specific problems, the union faced a climate inhospitable to any brand of unionism. The American Plan destroyed locals across the country, and employers' liberal use of court injunctions, yellow-dog contracts, and employer-dominated culinary associations stymied union advance at point after point.^[21]

In addition to facing the hostility of employers and the lackluster support of potential allies, waitress unionists contended with internal divisions

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among their own ranks. Before the New Deal, some white waitresses—fully 90 percent of the trade in this period—reached out to black and Asian women, but on the whole, their attitude was ambivalent and even hostile. Female culinary activists were neither more nor less progressive on this issue than their brother unionists.

Most white waitress officials, like their male counterparts, encouraged black women either to form separate black waitress locals or to join mixed-gender all-black locals. Separate locals of black waitresses sprang up in Philadelphia in 1918 and in Atlantic City in 1919.^[22] A small number of waitress locals also accepted black women, at least temporarily. The Chicago waitresses in their earliest days organized black women and white into the same local, and the Butte Women's Protective Union (WPU) prided itself in "not drawing the color line"—in 1907 three of their members were from "the colored race." But most, like San Francisco, restricted union membership to "white women only" until the 1930s.^[23]

In contrast to the ambiguous policy toward blacks, culinary unionists preached a stridently unambivalent message to Asian workers: they were unwelcome in the industry and in the union. The stated International position was that "no member of our International be permitted to work with asiatics, and that no house card or bar card or union button be displayed in such a place." For years, the frontispiece of the national culinary magazine proclaimed, "Skilled, Well-paid Bartenders and Culinary Workers Wear Them [union buttons]. Chinks, Japs, and Incompetent Labor Don't." Indeed, one of the most promising organizing strategies in this period was to gain sympathy for union labor by advertising the link between union-made products and white labor. Local unions frequently reported successful boycotts of restaurants employing Asian help and the subsequent implementation of contracts requiring the discharge of all Asian workers. Restaurant owners simply were not allowed to bring their Asian employees into the union.^[24]

Female culinary activists shared these prejudices against Asian workers. Waitress organizer Delia Hurley spent a considerable amount of her time speaking to unionists in other trades, beseeching them to honor HERE boycotts of restaurants employing Chinese and Japanese help. "We laid special stress on the injury these people were doing our organization, and that the members of our local were being dispensed with . . . through the inability of proprietors . . . to compete with these chinks." In Butte, where in the 1890s a successful union-led boycott of establishments employing Chinese had reduced the numbers of Chinese in the service trades, the WPU still refused house cards to the popular Chinese "noodle parlours" in the 1920s and insisted that white girls seek employment only in

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non-Asian restaurants. Women HERE leaders spoke fervently against a resolution introduced in the 1920s by San Francisco's Hugo Ernst that would have allowed admittance of Asians who were American citizens. Ernst's resolution was resoundingly defeated.^[25]

Nonetheless, because only a small proportion of waitresses were black or Asian, the exclusionary policies practiced by most female locals did not interfere substantially with the successful organizing of white waitresses. Exclusionary waiter and cook unions suffered more from unorganized nonwhite competitors than did waitress locals because employers who hired black and Asian front-service personnel preferred men. In fact, in the short run, racial exclusionary policies may have solidified the ranks of white waitresses and hence facilitated their organizing.

Divisions among waitresses based on marital status, economic circumstance, and age hampered the organization of white waitresses more than cultural or ethnic divisions. Time and again, veteran organizers complained of the antiunion attitudes of the part-time married workers, the young waitresses, and the summer-only workers. After years of organizing, Hurley realized "the injury being done our organization by a certain set of women workers, viz, the short day workers, of whom most are married women who pretend they are only using their spare time, and have no desire to do anything that would further the interest of women workers." Another waitress organizer defined the problem as the naiveté of younger women who, upon first entering the trade, considered their work outside the home to be temporary. The new workers are young and "don't feel much responsibility for what happens to other people, and they don't look far ahead. 'It isn't worthwhile to join the union,' they say, 'because we will soon get married and quit working.' That's what they think now. A lot of them come back later, and want a job, and then they see what it means to the older women who still must work." According to a waitress business agent in Atlantic City, two classes of women undermined standards there: the school teachers working temporarily over the summer and "the kind . . . very popular with the men folks" that she chose not to describe by name.^[26]

Nevertheless, waitress organizations suffered less from this problem than women's locals in other trades. The majority of waitresses not only worked year-round and full-time but also perceived their work status as permanent and their work as essential to their economic survival and that of their families. This economic stake in their work underlay their trade identification and made it one of the more significant allegiances in their lives. Moreover, the impact of part-time and summer workers was minimized by their peripheral status in the trade. Significantly, the short-hour

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girls were married or living at home, whereas the long-hour girls were self-supporting single or divorced women.^[27] This segregation of the industry by family and economic status meant that waitresses with "problem attitudes" were concentrated in certain peripheral sectors and were not a factor in organizing campaigns involving year-round hotels or full-service restaurants in which the staff was predominantly long-hour employees. "One-meal girls" did not compete directly with the long-hour waitresses and rarely were used as replacements in strike situations; in large part, they were not available or did not desire full-time employment.

In sum, although waitress solidarity was strained and sometimes broken by internal dissension, waitresses succeeded in forging sufficient unity to sustain unionism. In some circumstances, the union-oriented majority ignored the dissenters in their ranks and organized despite the disinterest of their "problem" co-workers. In other situations, white waitresses chose to exclude their Asian and black co-workers and organized in opposition to their nonwhite sisters. Nevertheless, in some notable instances, such as in Chicago, the ties of craft and gender overcame the differences of race, ethnicity, age, and family status, uniting all the sisters in the craft.

Victories on the Political Front

Unlike their brother AFL unionists, waitresses devoted a considerable portion of their energies to the pursuit of protective legislation in the pre-New Deal era. Many actively lobbied for maximum hour legislation and minimum wage laws.^[28] Thus, they were not adverse to parting ways with the larger labor movement and asserting what they perceived as the particular interests of their craft and of their sex. They were pragmatists, however, rather than ideologues. The survival of their organization took precedence over advancing the interests of working-class women as a whole. Moreover, their position on protective legislation was determined by the economic, political, and social circumstances in which they operated rather than deriving from an overarching, universal belief concerning the role of the state. Where they perceived the law as beneficial to their trade, their support held firm. In other less propitious instances, they condemned protective laws. In short, waitresses were neither voluntarist nor anti-voluntarist in regard to legislative matters, but adjusted their philosophy to the exigencies of their particular situation. By winning victories in the legislative arena, waitress locals demonstrated their effectiveness as reform organizations and created among unorganized waitresses a new respect for the power of collective activity.

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Waitresses needed little prompting to join the movement for maximum hour legislation that peaked in the decade before World War I. Indeed, although middle-class women's organizations spearheaded the campaign nationwide, waitresses and their sisters in working-class female organizations took the lead in states such as Washington, California, and Illinois. Waitress activists initiated legislative reform, shepherded bills through their state legislatures, and in many cases celebrated ensuing victories.^[29]

In California, working women such as Hannah Nolan of the Laundry Workers' Union, Margaret Seaman of the Garment Workers, and Louise LaRue of the Waitresses were the chief speakers in favor of passage of the 1911 hours bill. Their principal arguments centered on preserving the health of working women, reducing the percentage of workers with tuberculosis, and protecting women's child-bearing functions. When the hotel proprietors challenged the law in court, winning a victory in the California lower courts, Louise LaRue responded: "We are sorry he [the lower court judge] isn't a woman and had to walk 10 to 12 hours a day and carry several pounds . . ., then perhaps he would realize that not half of the women who work in dining rooms are in condition physically to become mothers of the future generation."^[30]

In contrast to the enthusiasm shown over maximum hour laws, waitresses were less certain of the advantages of minimum wage legislation. The majority of locals supported it, but some vacillated, dramatically shifting their stance toward wage legislation in the course of their activities.^[31] The twists and turns in the positions taken by waitresses in California clearly reveal how economic concerns undergirded waitress union policy.

After initially opposing the concept, California waitresses came to favor minimum wage laws by the 1920s. When the San Francisco Labor Council voted against the minimum wage in 1913, the loudest opposition came from delegates representing women workers: garment workers, waitresses, and laundry workers. San Francisco waitresses did not dispute the arguments of minimum wage proponents that the health of working women and their competency as future mothers would be enhanced; they simply found the protection of their own trade union organization more compelling. Joining in the general negative consensus of male unionists from AFL president Samuel Gompers to local AFL officials, they argued that "any minimum established by law would certainly be lower than that established by the unions, thus tending to undermine the union scales." Such legislation, they reasoned, "would prove a detriment to the only practical method of improving the conditions of the working women,

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namely organization." Significantly, waitresses also feared that a minimum wage for women would mean female job loss because women "are fitted to perform, without previous experience and study, but very few avocations" and must rely on situations where "job training is provided, but little in the way of cash compensation."^[32]

Ignoring the objections raised by both unions and employers, the California public voted in favor of the legislation in a 1913 referendum election, and soon thereafter organized labor began vying with employers over the control of the Industrial Welfare Commission (IWC)—the five-person board given jurisdiction over maximum hours, minimum wages, and working conditions. Waitresses' Local 48 joined with the San Francisco Labor Council, Millinery Workers, Laundry Workers, Bakery Workers, League of Women Voters, and the YWCA to form the Committee for Enforcement of the Minimum Wage. Much to their surprise, they found they could obtain acceptable standards and that the commission was committed to aggressive enforcement of those standards. They also discovered that state regulation of minimum standards neither inhibited organizing sentiments nor depressed union wage scales. In fact, after the IWC passed its first wage order governing hotel and restaurant employees in 1919, organized labor negotiated one of its better contracts. The first IWC minimum, set higher than the current union wage scale, could be used effectively as a public indictment of the low wage rates in the service trades.^[33]

Union support of protective legislation enhanced labor's appeal among its own members as well as among the unorganized. Because wage-and-hour orders were less frequently violated by union employers, that fact became one more argument in favor of organizing. In houses that employed members of the Waitresses' Union the law was never violated, Bee Tumber, a prominent Southern California waitress officer, pointed out in 1924. "The girls receive their wages in real money instead of 'charge offs' for meals [and] laundry." They have "good food served them," and above all it is "possible to have improper conditions remedied by the representative of the union." Organized workers received the protection of the collective bargaining agreement and the advantage of an outside organization that would ensure legislative standards were met.^[34]

Although the majority of California organized labor continued to oppose the minimum wage, by the mid-1920s the waitress organizations broke publicly with their brother unionists. When the state supreme court heard arguments concerning the constitutionality of the legislation, Waitresses' Local 639 in Los Angeles, along with other female wage-earner organizations, filed briefs in support of the law. Waitresses had seen how

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government regulation could work for them, not against them. They moved from being leading opponents of government interference with wages to being staunch defenders.^[35] In short, rather than relying on abstract principles in forming their positions, waitresses stayed close to the lessons taught by experience.

Before the 1930s, then, waitress unionists made limited but significant breakthroughs in both the collective bargaining and legislative arenas. Relying primarily on their own tenacity, ingenuity, and organizational strength, their accomplishments were piecemeal in scope and were often lost in bitter strikes or hostile court decisions. But unlike women in many other trades, waitresses established permanent institutions dedicated to the uplift of their craft. After 1930, assisted by a radically different social climate and a labor movement aggressively extending its organizational sway, waitresses finally wrested a decent standard of living from their employers and extended those standards to large numbers of female service workers.

Described in 1930 as little more than "an association of coffin societies," the labor movement confounded critics by its unprecedented expansion over the next two decades, adding fifteen million members by the early 1950s.^[36] Culinary workers were not immune to the union fever: HERE nearly doubled its membership in 1933, the first heady year of New Deal legislation favoring unionization. Membership spurted ahead during the sit-downs of 1936 and 1937, and again during the war years. By the end of the decade HERE membership topped four hundred thousand, with a quarter of all hotel and restaurant workers organized.

As the International union matured into a substantial power within the hotel and restaurant industry, its membership became increasingly female. The percentage of women within the union doubled after 1930, climbing to 45 percent by 1950. Waitress locals aggressively reached out to unorganized waitresses in hotels, cafeterias, drugstores, and department stores; many waiters' locals opened their doors to female servers for the first time; and the new industrial hotel locals swept in large numbers of waitresses, chambermaids, female cashiers, checkers, and kitchen workers. By the late 1940s, more than two hundred thousand female culinary workers were organized, with close to a quarter of these within separate waitress organizations.^[37]

The upsurge of unionism among waitresses undoubtedly was linked to larger societal forces that affected all workers: the more favorable public policy toward labor, the breakthroughs in organizing tactics and strategy on the part of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), and the enhanced bargaining leverage of workers during World War II. But this

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general picture cannot fully explain the growth of waitress unionism. After all, other groups of women workers, notably from the clerical and retail sector, failed in bringing permanent, widespread unionization to their industry.

The recovery of organized strength among culinary workers occurred first among male workers, primarily bartenders, and waiters. The repeal of Prohibition in December 1933 boosted male membership as restaurants added the serving of hard liquor and as soda fountains, creameries, and lunch stands metamorphosed into taverns and cocktail lounges. Catering Industry Employee , HERE's national journal, proudly announced that union house and bar cards "swing in perfect rhythm with the ceiling revolving fans of local beer gardens. Banned during prohibition days because their presence would uncover the close links between speakeasies and the Bartenders' Union, the displays . . . now hold prominent places."^[38]

HERE organizing campaigns also benefited from the passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act in 1933. Like the mining and garment unions, HERE sought to influence New Deal legislation and exploit the situation for organizing purposes. In the case of the restaurant code, HERE lobbied National Recovery Administration (NRA) chief Hugh Johnson, threatened a strike if the codes were not revised upward, and testified at hearing after hearing along with the Amalgamated Food Workers (AFW), the Food Workers Industrial Union (FWIU), the Women's Trade Union League (WTUL), and the Women's Bureau.^[39]

The NRA codes sparked organization in the culinary industry because they raised hopes of improved wages and working conditions, yet failed miserably in delivering on these promises. The problem was twofold: the codes themselves, largely determined by employers, were substandard; and employers violated even these barest of employee protections because the government gave little evidence of either having the will or the ability to uphold code standards. According to San Francisco waiter official Hugo Ernst, if employers in that city adopted the governmental standards, working conditions would be "as bad as those thirty years ago."^[40]

The Fruits of Solidarity

In San Francisco, waitresses enjoyed not only a long tradition of separate-sex organizing among workers and city residents, but also a solid union consciousness that resurfaced with a vengeance in the 1930s.^[41] Waitresses' Local 48 organized first in restaurants patronized by union clientele, spread its drives to restaurants outside working-class neighborhoods, swept up cafeteria, drugstore, and tea-room waitresses, and then embraced

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waitresses employed in the large downtown hotels and department stores. By 1941, waitresses in San Francisco had achieved almost complete organization of their trade, and Local 48 became the largest waitress local in the country. Their success resulted from a combination of factors: an exceptionally powerful local labor movement; sympathetic, fair-minded male co-workers within the Local Joint Executive Board (LJEB); and the existence of a waitress organization committed first and foremost to organizing and representing female servers.

In the early 1930s, Local 48 confronted unrelenting employer pressure for wage reductions and lowered standards. Delighted by the meager standards set by the NRA codes, restaurateurs replaced their union house cards with the Blue Eagle insignia (indicating compliance with government recommendations), lowered wages, and reverted to the fifty-four-hour week.^[42]

In response, Local 48 informed the owners that the five-day, forty-hour week was the union standard, and, in conjunction with the other culinary crafts, they picketed some 284 restaurants in 1933 alone. They sidestepped restrictive local picketing ordinances by "selling" labor newspapers in front of targeted eating establishments during peak business hours. The attorney for one distraught employer complained to the judge that "the women walked back and forth in front of the plaintiff's restaurant, and prominently displayed newspapers bearing the headline in large black letters 'Organized Labor' and 'Labor Clarion,' and each of said women called out repeatedly in a loud, shrill, penetrating voice, at the rate of 30 to 40 times a minute, 'organized labor' 'organized labor.'"^[43]

Culinary workers also resisted wage cuts in the hotels. After two years of reductions totaling 20 percent, the cooks struck the leading hotels in April 1934. The San Francisco LJEB considered calling a general strike of all culinary workers in San Francisco, but Edward Flore, assisted by federal mediators, convinced employers to submit the cooks' dispute to an arbitration board.^[44]

Less than two months after the first discussion of an industrywide strike, culinary union members voted 1,991 to 52 to join the emerging citywide shutdown on behalf of striking maritime workers. Outraged over the death of two workers—one of whom was a cook and member of Local 44—during a bloody clash between police and picketers who had gathered in support of striking longshoremen, the San Francisco labor movement brought business to a standstill for three days. In the end, they secured collective bargaining in the maritime industry. The solidarity and militancy displayed by the culinary locals was typical. The International union wired sanction for an industrywide sympathy strike, and culinary crews

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walked out 100 percent at midnight on Sunday, July 15. The few nonunion houses that dared open the following Monday morning closed their doors after "a little persuasion." Only two restaurants on Third Street where strikers ate—operated by people "apparently very close to the labor movement"—were in operation.^[45]

Relying on the labor unity that prevailed among San Francisco unions in the aftermath of the 1934 General Strike, the waitresses' local doubled its membership over the next four years. They received general assistance from the Teamsters, the needle-trades workers pressured the kosher bars into compliance, and the printers, streetcarmen, longshoremen, and maritime trades organized the restaurants and bars adjacent to their work sites. Culinary spokespeople acknowledged their dependence: "There is a much better spirit of cooperation than formerly and the Culinary Workers have profited from it. We are indebted to the Maritime Unions and . . . in fact all the unions pull with us whenever we go to them with our troubles, thus our brothers did not give their lives for nothing."^[46]

During the heady days of 1936 and 1937, organizing reached a fever pitch stimulated by the successful sit-down strikes in auto and other industries and the Supreme Court's favorable ruling on the constitutionality of the Wagner Act. San Francisco waitresses moved from their base in small independent restaurants to tackle campaigns in drugstore and 5 and 10 cent store lunch counters; in cafeterias and self-service chains; and in department store restaurants and the dining rooms of the major San Francisco hotels. The most significant breakthrough came as a result of the San Francisco hotel strike of 1937. The strike, which brought union recognition and a written contract covering workers in fifty-five hotels, inaugurated a new chapter in culinary unionism in San Francisco. With the backing of the San Francisco Labor Council (SFLC) and the promise from such pivotal unions as the butchers, bakers, teamsters, musicians, and stationary engineers not to cross the lines, three thousand hotel employees, one-third of whom were women, walked out on May 1, shutting down fifteen San Francisco hotels simultaneously.^[47]

From the outset, the strikers were exceptionally well organized. "The union moved with military precision," wrote the federal mediator, "set up their strike headquarters [and] organized their picket squads, each squad consisting of one representative of each of the unions involved." As workers came off the job, they were handed printed cards bearing strike and picket instructions. Picket duty lasted for four continuous hours; failure to picket meant loss of one's job once the strike was settled. Margaret Werth, the waitress business agent assigned to the hotels, organized militant

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waitress picket lines and achieved notable results with her waitress parade and beauty contest. After eighty-nine days of effective mass picketing that closed off the hotels to food delivery and arriving guests, a back-to-work settlement was signed involving fifty-five San Francisco hotels. The unions gained wage increases of 20 percent for most employees, equal pay for waiters and waitresses, preferential hiring with maintenance of membership, the eight-hour day, and union work rules for all crafts. For a generation of food service workers, the curtain rang down on the open-shop era with resounding finality.^[48]

After this victory, the union soon reached a separate four-year agreement with the majority of small hotels in the city. Next they secured recognition from the Owl Drug Company chain, operating eleven stores in San Francisco with culinary departments; the major resident clubs of San Francisco; the Clinton's Cafeteria chain; and, after fourteen years on the union's unfair list, the Foster System, which consisted of thirty-two luncheon restaurants. "Please rush fifty house cards," Hugo Ernst, president of the San Francisco LJEB, wrote the International in 1937. "All Foster new houses will open up with a display of the house cards and other places too . . . demand the cards."^[49]

The unionization of San Francisco's large downtown department stores also meant new members for Local 48. In October 1934, the LJEB moved into action against the Woolworth and Kress's 5 and 10 cent stores, placing them on the "We Don't Patronize" list, picketing, and distributing thousands of handbills house-to-house in working-class districts "to acquaint workers with the slave conditions that prevail." The Retail Clerk officials warned the LJEB that "it costs too much money to organize these national chains" and that they "would not consider wasting money on them," but the culinary workers continued picketing.^[50]

Victory came in the spring of 1937 when Woolworth and twenty-five other department and specialty stores signed on with the newly chartered Department Store Employees, Local 1100, Retail Clerks International Union, AFL.^[51] Initially, the retail local represented the food service workers in the stores as well as the sales employees because Ernst, supporting an industrial approach to organizing, had waived jurisdiction over the lunchroom employees. In 1940, however, Local 48 successfully demanded that the food service workers in department stores be part of their union.^[52]

The infant department store and hotel unions faced major trials in their first few years such as the department store strike of 1938 and the hotel strike of 1941, but unionization had come to stay. Every eating establishment of any consequence had a union agreement. The Retail Creamery

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Association, composed of fifty ice cream and fountain stores, signed on with the waitresses in 1940, granting a wage scale and working conditions on a par with the waiters. A year later, the union negotiated an agreement with the Tea Room Guild (some twenty employers), winning the closed shop, a forty-hour, five-day week, vacations with pay, and employer responsibility for providing and laundering uniforms.^[53] By 1941, culinary union membership in San Francisco approached eighteen thousand. A majority of the hotels and motels were operating as union houses, and 95 percent of the estimated 2,500 restaurants in San Francisco were organized.^[54]

Tactics: Reason, Humor, and Muscle

The organizing and bargaining tactics employed by San Francisco culinary unionists from the late 1930s to the 1950s represent the apogee of union power and creativity. With the majority of the industry union, many shop owners now voluntarily recognized the union. In 1941 alone, seventy-three restaurant owners sent the LJEB requests for union cards. Evidently, many employers judged the house or bar card announcing their union status essential to a steady flow of customers in union-conscious San Francisco. To promote patronage in unionized eateries, the culinary unions fined members for eating in nonunion restaurants and bought "a steady ad in the [San Francisco] Chronicle advertising the various union labels." They also appointed a committee specifically to devise "ways and means to advertise our Union House Card."^[55]

In some cases, unionization appealed to employers who desired stability in an industry characterized by extreme open entry and a high rate of business failures. Citywide equalization of wage rates protected establishments from cut-throat competitors and chain restaurants that could slash wages and prices in one location until the independent competition capitulated. Employers recognized this function of culinary unionism and on more than one occasion approached the LJEB with names of nonunion houses that should be organized. "We, the undersigned, respectfully request your assistance" began one employer plea to the LJEB. "Attempts have been made to get [unfair] places to join us . . . these attempts have failed completely. We understand that union houses are protected against cut-throats and we wonder why we have been neglected."

Culinary unionists also realized that thorough organization was necessary to protect the competitive position of union houses. In the union campaign to organize tea rooms, for example, all but a few had signed up by the summer of 1939. The union pursued those recalcitrants, insisting

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they were "unfair competition for the others." Reasoning along similar lines, the LJEB refused to issue house cards to employee-owned, cooperative enterprises although they met wage scales and working conditions. Their lower prices, the LJEB pointed out, were "a menace" to the union restaurants of the city. From 1937 through the 1950s, when organization among San Francisco restaurants remained close to 100 percent, many employers willingly complied with this system of union-sponsored industry stabilization and cooperation.^[56]

Employers who failed to recognize the good business sense of unionization were asked to justify their refusal before the united board of culinary crafts. If this interrogation proved fruitless, the employer was reprimanded to a higher body: the executive council of the SFLC or a conference of retail and service unions including the Bakery Drivers, Milk Wagon Drivers, Bakers, and other involved parties. When these oral persuasions went unheeded, the restaurant faced increasing pressure through the council's "We Don't Patronize" list. Few employers could withstand the business losses of withdrawn union patronage when approximately one-fifth of San Francisco's entire population belonged to a labor organization. The Duchess Sandwich Company, for instance, explained that they refused to "force unionism" on their employees and declined to recognize the culinary workers. After less than a month on the council's unfair list, the co-owners of the company wrote that "we have given further consideration to your request that we take the initiative in bringing our employees into the Culinary Workers Organization. . . . We will be glad . . . to work out ways of bringing our plant into complete union membership . . . [and] to get away from the penalties which have piled up on us as a result of your putting us on the unfair list."^[57]

When necessary, culinary unionists turned to picketing, creative harassment of shop owners and their clientele, and innovative strike tactics. Traditional strikes, whether by skilled or semiskilled culinary workers, rarely had much impact on businesses that could use family members or find at least one or two temporary replacements. In response, locals often picketed without pulling the crew inside. In these cases, picketing could be successful even if the potential union members working inside were indifferent or hostile to unionism. If picketing persuaded customers to bypass the struck restaurant or halted delivery of supplies, the employer usually relented. With the unity prevailing among San Francisco labor following the 1934 General Strike, culinary unionists experienced few problems stopping deliveries. Influencing customers was a far more difficult proposition.

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Mass picketing intimidated prospective customers, but even in the heyday of union rank-and-file activism the LJEB had trouble generating large groups of pickets for so many scattered, isolated locations.^[58] To supplement and reinforce weak picket lines, the San Francisco culinary unions devised masterful public relations techniques. The 1941 department and variety store pickets, for instance, attended the Stanford-UCLA football game and passed out "score cards" asking the captive public to help them "hold that line." Using the extended metaphor of football, the leaflets explained that "when Hi prices and Hi taxes throw their full power against left tackle—that's where the pocketbook is kept—only higher wages can plug the hole, and stop the play."^[59]

Other attention-grabbing devices used by the same strikers in 1938 and again in 1941 included "Don't-Gum-up-the-Works gum" given out up and down Market Street, boats cruising the Bay during the Columbus Day celebration to advise "Do Not Patronize," and costumed picket lines. The costume variations were endless: Halloween pickets, women on skates, and even Kiddie Day picket lines. One picketer engaged a horse and buggy and trotted around San Francisco carrying a large placard that read "this vehicle is from the same era as the Emporium's labor policy." During the 1941 department store strike when a prize was offered for the picketer with the best costume, a young lunch counter striker won with a dress covered entirely with spoons; on her back she carried a sign reading "Local 1100 can dish it out but can the Emporium take it?" The 1938 dimestore strikers called themselves "the million dollar babies from the 5 & 10 cent stores." Carmen Lucia, an organizer for the Capmakers International Union who assisted the strikes, recalled, "I had them dressed up in white bathing suits, beautiful, with red ribbons around them, and [they'd] bring their babies on their shoulders." Strikers' children handed out leaflets reading "Take our mothers off the streets. Little Children Like to Eat."^[60]

A community contingent reinforced the continuous flow of propaganda from the strikers. One group, developed out of the 1938 strike, called itself the Women's Trade Union Committee. Open to union women and wives of union men, the committee, chaired by waitress Frances Stafford, devoted itself to "educating women who have union-earned dollars to spend, as to where and how to spend them." During strikes, the committees escalated their "educational tactics." One devised a tactic called the "button game": shoppers were to go to stores in the busy hours, fill their carts with merchandise, and then demand a clerk wearing the union button. In eating places, supporters relied on somewhat different tactics. Helen Jaye, a San Francisco waitress in the 1930s, recalled one approach: "The people who

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came into the cafeteria . . . were members of the ILGWU and they . . . gave him [the owner] the very dickens. I remember a couple of men [took] their trays up to the cash register and just dumped them on the floor."^[61]

The Compromise of Collective Bargaining

Faced by this intimidating array of union tactics and the more favorable legal and political climate for labor, employers revised their approach to unions in the 1930s and in the process profoundly reshaped labor relation practices in the hotel and restaurant industry. Small and large employers now formed employer associations whose primary goal was the establishment of formal industrywide collective bargaining. In addition to stabilizing the industry and reducing competition, they hoped to end once and for all the insidious union "whip-saw technique" whereby the union insisted on dealing with each employer separately, playing one against the other. They also sought an end to the system in which union workers unilaterally determined their wages and working conditions and then struck for employer compliance. In other words, rather than oppose unionization altogether, employers banded together to contain the power of unions through institutionalized collective bargaining.^[62]

The union, on the other hand, desired the extension of its old system of unilaterally determined wage scales and enforcement of standards on a house-by-house basis. Before 1937, individual culinary locals met and voted on the conditions that would govern their craft. These wage scales and working rules were not discussed with the employer; they were arrived at by the mutual consent of the members of each separate local. The individual crafts then submitted their proposals to the LJEB for approval (if a LJEB existed). The board, on behalf of its member trades, presented the standards to individual employers. Employers agreeing to the union wage scales and working conditions earned the privilege of displaying a union house card. A single-page "Union Labor License Agreement," signed by both the union and the employer, bound the "union card employer" to hire only union "members in good standing dispatched from the office of each respective union" and to pay employees "not less than the rate of wages . . . adopted by the LJEB." It was "expressly understood" that the LJEB reserved "the right to alter or modify or change the said scales from time to time." Wages and conditions of employment, then, were determined by the union "on a unilateral non-bargaining basis" and could be changed overnight at the whim of the unions.^[63]

In 1937, the employers banded together and began organizing to subvert the old system. At a mass meeting of the restaurateurs, called by

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attorney David Rubenstein, they empowered the Golden Gate Restaurant Association (GGRA) to act as their negotiating body. The majority of small luncheonettes and cafeterias formed a separate but similarly inclined organization, the Dairy Lunch and Cafeteria Owners Association (DLCOA). Rubenstein, chosen to head both organizations, needled apathetic owners still outside the associations by constant warnings of the dire consequences of inaction. "They are picking us off one by one," he railed. "If you fail to attend [association meetings] and are squeezed to the wall like a soft tomato, blame none but yourself."^[64]

For three years, neither the GGRA nor the DLCOA made headway in moving the LJEB toward industrywide collective bargaining.^[65] Desperate, the restaurant employers turned for assistance to Almon Roth, president of the San Francisco Employer's Council. The council had solidified its reputation during the 1938 department store strike, helping the employers win a single master agreement on an open-shop basis.^[66] When the culinary unions issued their 1941 wage cards, directing significant wage increases for the first time since the 1920s, Roth responded, "the terms and conditions set forth in the cards which you have presented . . . are not satisfactory." Sixty-seven of the larger downtown restaurants instituted a 25 percent wage cut and reverted to the six-day week, eight-hour day.^[67]

In the end, after a two-month lock-out in the summer of 1941, the employers gained their primary objective, a signed master agreement, but at the cost of acceding to union wage demands and a closed-shop clause. The LJEB compromised by signing one standard five-year contract covering the sixty-seven downtown restaurants, the tea rooms, dairy lunches, and cafeterias "with the right each year to re-open the contract and strike on wages but not on working conditions." The house card system continued, but the agreements signed by employers no longer required them to abide by wage scales determined solely by the LJEB. At the insistence of the employers, bilateral bargaining had come to San Francisco's restaurant industry.^[68]

Association bargaining on a bilateral basis was more easily achieved in the hotel than in the restaurant industry. The few large hotel owners could coordinate and agree much more readily than could an unwieldy group of some hundred small restaurant entrepreneurs, some renowned for their flamboyance and boundless egos. Hotel employers also had no prior history of union-dominated unilateral bargaining to overcome. The hotel owners established industrywide association bargaining in their first encounter with the unions in 1937. In a second round of negotiations in 1941, the Hotel Employers Association and the union deadlocked over the union proposal for a closed shop and preferential hiring through the union

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hiring hall. The ensuing hotel strike, called on August 30, 1941, convinced hotel employers that the open-shop era was an irretrievable heirloom of history. When back-to-work orders were finally issued by the National War Labor Board in April 1942, after eight grueling months, the union had proven itself a formidable opponent.^[69]

Thus, by the early 1940s, an accord was achieved in the San Francisco hotel and restaurant industry that opened a new era of surprising stability and cooperation.^[70] Union power had been extended over a wider terrain, yet at the same time employers had modified and diluted that power by forging a new bilateral bargaining system. The next major strike was not to occur until the 1980s, when the carefully crafted system of the 1930s began unraveling.

4
Okies and the Politics of Plain-Folk Americanism

James N. Gregory

Editor's Introduction

In the early decades of the twentieth century, California agriculture expanded greatly. In 1900, there were 72,000 farms in the state, valued at a total of $708 million. By 1925, California boasted 136,400 farms, worth more than $3 billion. This growth was spurred by the spread of irrigation, which enabled farmers to cultivate fruits and vegetables on a large scale in the arid Central Valley. The era of "factories in the field" had truly arrived.

The rapid expansion of California agriculture, especially seasonal crops, called for a large, migratory agricultural proletariat. To an extent, this need was met by Japanese, Mexican, Filipino, and other minority workers. During the 1920s, however, the Alien Land Acts and other factors greatly reduced the number of Japanese workers in California agriculture. Mexican immigrants, in particular, helped to make up the shortfall, but even their increasing numbers failed to meet the labor demands of California agriculture. During the 1920s and 1930s, these demands were met from a more indigenous source.

While California agriculture continued to expand during the interwar period, this was not the case in many other states. Low prices, foreign competition, mechanization, soil erosion, drought, pestilence, and New Deal farm programs all combined to drive millions of farmers off the land in this period. No area of the country was as hard hit as the American Southwest. By 1950, 23 percent of all people born in Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, and Missouri lived outside the region. These states lost 50 percent of their agricultural work force between 1910 and 1950.

During the 1920s and 1930s, more than 550,000 Southwesterners migrated to California, primarily to Los Angeles and the Central Valley, where

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a significant number ended up as part of California's agricultural proletariat. In the 1940s, upward of 600,000 more "Okies," lured especially by the prospect of work in California's booming wartime industries, joined the exodus from the Southwest.

Jim Gregory's book American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California provides the most detailed and authoritative account we have of the migration of people from the Southwestern states of Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, and Missouri, examining both the causes and the character of this mass migration. Gregory also explores in depth the profound social, cultural, and political impact that this Okie migration had on California in the 1930s and 1940s. Specifically, he examines the nature of the Okie subculture in California and how Southwesterners adapted to life in their newly adopted state.

In this extract from his book, Gregory argues that a very distinctive Okie subculture existed in California, "derived largely from the outlooks, habits, and institutions of Southwestern 'plain folk,' a broad social category encompassing most rural and blue-collar whites." Okie culture was an amalgam of many components, including late-nineteenth-century populism and early-twentieth-century fundamentalism.

A "cult of toughness" helped condition the response of the Okies to California. Although their political traditions encouraged them to support some radical causes in the 1930s, their patriotism, racism, individualism, and "toughness" made them indifferent, even hostile, to trade unionism. Later, in the context of World War II, when many Okies got jobs in California's cities, they became much more receptive to trade unionism. But Okies in rural areas remained as indifferent or hostile to agricultural unionism in the 1940s as they had been in the 1930s. Gregory probes the reasons for this through his analysis of Okie culture.

The patterns of alienation built up in the 1930s encouraged the process of cultural adaptation that gave California its Okie subculture. Regional cultural differences that in other circumstances had meant little took on expanded significance in this one. Although some Southwesterners consciously abandoned distinguishing characteristics, others fell back on the cultural resources of their upbringing, creating community systems laced with values and institutions of Southwestern origin. The primary locus of

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this subculture was the San Joaquin Valley, but in weakened form it also developed in the metropolitan areas, especially during the 1940s when new waves of migrants created for the first time substantial enclaves of Southwesterners in the cities.

Some definitions are needed. The term subculture is quite elastic, which is useful in this case. A subculture is a social formation with a distinctive set of norms and values that offers members a significant sense of identity and locus for social interaction. Subcultures come in many forms, based on ethnicity, class, religion, political ideology, peer group, even consumer interests. But the Okie subculture does not fit neatly into any one of these categories. Depending upon where we look and also what time periods we examine, the formation seems to take on different shapes.^[1]

Social science has never supplied the right tools for categorizing the process of cultural adjustment that accompanied the Dust Bowl migration. Initially it was not seen as a cultural process at all. Apart from the concern that the migrants came from a "backward" area, few contemporaries gave much thought to questions of regionalism, assuming that differences between native-stock Americans were minor, that culture carried social consequences only when linguistic, political, religious, or moral traditions were sharply differentiated. Trained social scientists were especially reluctant to find significance in the regional backgrounds of the migrant population. In the usual view class and its many complications alone defined the group.

Anthropologist Walter Goldschmidt best expressed this assessment. After close consideration he concluded that the migrants were not really a group in any coherent sense. A "disorganized aggregate" sharing conditions of poverty and hostility, they lacked "mechanisms by which they could be organized into a community." Though he described in detail the separate Okie neighborhoods, social life, and religious institutions, he assumed these to be transitory developments attributable to the vicissitudes of class. To the extent that the migrants demonstrated divergent values and customs, a history of rural disadvantage or more recent poverty was to blame. Otherwise, the newcomers seemed to share in the basic standards of the host society and appeared most anxious to win acceptance within it.^[2]

Stuart Jamieson saw matters differently and, for his time, singularly. In 1942 the Berkeley-trained labor economist published the results of his study of Olivehurst, one of several Okie communities in the Sacramento Valley. Struck by the similarities between the social position of the "new American migrants" and the foreign immigrant groups they had largely replaced in the agricultural labor force, he observed that the newcomers

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take on the "appearance of a distinct 'ethnic group.'" Despite cultural backgrounds that are "fundamentally the same" as their hosts', he argued, the economic and social context contributed to the migrants' "quasi-segregation" and had the "effect of perpetuating some old traditions and customs of the settlers," among which he listed speech, dress, paternalistic family relations, and religious institutions.^[3]

Although he was essentially alone with this formulation in the 1940s, a time when conventional definitions of ethnicity envisioned only national, religious, and racial groups, the redefinition of ethnicity in the last few decades has made his argument increasingly plausible.^[4] Indeed, it is consistent with what regional sociologists John Sheldon Reed and Lewis Killian have been saying recently about the ethnicity of white Southerners. In a long list of books and articles published since 1972, Reed catalogues the similarities between Southern whites and conventionally recognized ethnic minorities, stressing the region's persecution complex, enduring sectional identity, and persisting differences in social, personal, and religious values. Killian introduced some of the same points in his 1970 book White Southerners , which was published in Random House's Ethnic Groups in Comparative Perspective series. He also examined the process of Southern out-migration and argued that it was among the "hillbillies" of Chicago and other northern cities that the evidence of minority group behavior was strongest. Caught in an urban context of stereotypes and hostilities not much different from that experienced by their Okie cousins, the working-class Southern whites Killian studied engaged in a process of group formation and cultural retention typical of ethnic minorities.^[5]

It is a tempting argument, but there are some complications, at least in the case of the California migrants. The issue of group definition is one. Until recently, few Southwesterners of the middle class identified themselves as Okies. On the other hand, a number of people from states other than the Southwest associated with and were perceived to be Okies; and some today embrace the term. There is something similarly fuzzy and flexible about the cultural materials, the institutions and symbols, that in time gave the group a sense of community and identity. These, too, have not been consistently and exclusively Southwestern.

While in the end it may be valuable to talk about Okie ethnicity, it is important first to deconstruct the experience, to understand that the subculture has operated in several guises. Being an Okie for some Southwesterners is a straightforward matter of regional heritage, and for them the ethnic concept is relevant. They celebrate their state origins and proudly

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proclaim symbols and distinguishing cultural elements of that background. If ethnicity refers to a sense of peoplehood rooted in a perception of common history and ancestry, some Okies qualify.^[6]

But for other participants the subculture expresses something different, either experiential pride (as veterans of the migrant experience) or, most interesting, allegiance to a set of social-political perspectives that might be labeled plain-folk Americanism. This ideological persuasion was part of the cultural system of the Southwest—or more properly of a particular class of Southwesterners—but it was not exclusive to that region. Other white Americans, particularly other rural Protestant-stock Americans, shared many of these interests and values, and still others later found them attractive. Here it is harder to talk about ethnicity, since regionalism was not the central issue. In this guise the Okie subculture was an ideological community of uncertain and, indeed, expanding dimensions. For those who identified with this version of the community, being an Okie was a matter of experiences, standards, and values.

A Framework of Understandings

California's Okie culture derived largely from the outlooks, habits, and institutions of Southwestern "plain folk," a broad social category encompassing most rural and blue-collar whites. As in other parts of the South, the social structure of the trans-Mississippi states divided most obviously into three basic categories: blacks; whites of the business, professional, and land-wealthy strata; and the majority white population of modest means. Some scholars insist on subdividing this last group into its wage-working, tenant farmer, and yeoman components, while others confuse the issue with labels like "poor white" or "redneck." Those distinctions are not helpful here. Tied together in many instances by kinship, rural and formerly rural working-class Southwesterners shared a wide range of life-ways, values, and outlooks. Most of all they shared a seasoned political culture.^[7]

Southwestern plain folk claimed a set of social and political commitments that had once flourished widely in nineteenth-century America. Heirs to anti-monopoly and citizen-producer ideas that in earlier periods had guided both agrarian and working-class radicalism, they stood also in the shadow of generations of white Protestants who had fought to preserve the Republic's ethnic and religious integrity. These perspectives tracked through a long line of neo-populist campaigns aimed at rural and working-class audiences. From the days of the powerful Farmers' Alliance, through the resurrected radicalism of Huey Long, "Alfalfa Bill" Murray, and "Ma" Ferguson, those constituencies responded best to shirt-sleeved

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campaigners who talked about the dignity of hard work and plain living and promised deliverance from the forces of power, privilege, and moral pollution, near and far.^[8]

Southwestern plain folk brought these and other outlooks to California and made them the basis for their subculture. What they built, however, was not merely a replica of what they left behind. The Okie subculture evolved through a process of cultural negotiation involving many participants. Partly a dialogue between Southwesterners and their new California setting, there was also a speaking role for non-Southwesterners who associated with the migrant population. The resulting synthesis expressed some of the familiar ways of the Southwest, but other elements were changed or newly emphasized.

The subcultural construction occurred in stages. It was not until the 1940s that the more obvious institutions—churches, saloons, and country music—began to solidify and make an impact on the surrounding society. Until then the subculture was harder to locate. In the 1930s, the group was taking shape informally and more or less unintentionally in the neighborhoods, camps, and job sites where migrants gathered. Through the act of socializing, men and women discovered common understandings and worked out the new meanings that would give the group its sense of identity and cohesion.

We are fortunate to have a source which identifies some of the more important values that were affirmed in those interactions. The "Pea-Patch Press" was Charles Todd's name for the collection of newspapers emanating from the FSA (Farm Security Administration) camps during the last years of the 1930s. Tow-Sack Tattler, Pea-Pickers Prattle, Covered Wagon News, Voice of the Migrant —the colorful, free-form titles say much about the style of these tiny mimeographed publications which were supported by camp fees and published whenever someone volunteered to serve as editor. The format was usually wildly eclectic. More community bulletin board than newspaper, they published a hash of contributions from residents and management. Letters, recipes, poems, jokes, stories, editorials, complaints, homilies, political opinions, discussions of current issues, reports of camp gossip, notices of meetings, lists of rules and regulations, jeremiads by camp managers—whatever was available went out in the next issue.^[9]

Many of the contributions were original, but residents also sent in remembered bits of verse, Bible passages, riddles torn from other publications, anything that seemed meaningful enough to share. It is this participatory aspect which makes the camp newspapers so valuable. We hear from children, parents and grandparents, men and women, union activists

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and Pentecostal worshippers, those who liked California and those who hated it. They wrote not only about issues but also about day-to-day life. We witness their attempts at entertainment, their approach to humor, their sense of propriety. In letters, poems, and gossip notes, they argued and agreed about community standards, about morals, about right and wrong as they wrestled with the meaning of their California experience and reminded themselves what was important in life.

Were these camp residents typical of the broader population of Okies? Those who lived in the camps were often poorer, more transient, newer to California than residents of the migrant subdivisions where the lasting social networks were being strung. But any distinctions between the populations of these settings were minor and temporary. Residents of camps and Little Oklahomas came from the same background, occupied the same farmworker class, and faced similar adjustment challenges. In both settings large numbers of mostly Southwestern newcomers explored the basic business of living together. The difference is that the camp residents left us a record of the process.

Cult of Toughness

Reading that record for its core values, one concern stands out. A favorite poem expressed it.

If the day looks kinder gloomy
An' the chances kinder slim;
If the situation's puzzlin',
An' the prospect awful grim,

An Perplexities keep pressin'
Till all hope is nearly gone
Just bristle up and grit your teeth,
An' keep on goin' on.^[10]

The message of persistence, determination, of "try, try again" defined one of the essentials of what the migrants considered good character. Learned in school, in church, from parents and friends, courage and determination were the special forte of these plain people. Struggle, they assured themselves, was what they and their ancestors did best. Persistence was more than the key to success—there could be no dignity, manhood, or self-esteem without it. No other theme was expressed as frequently or as passionately as the need to never let up, never quit, to always "keep on goin' on." Winnie Taggart shared her composition "Migratory Grit" with fellow residents of the Brawley camp near the pea fields in the Imperial Valley:

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Forget the grouch, erase the frown.
Don't let hard luck get you down.
Throw up your head, thrust out your chest,
Now at a boy! Go do your best.

It's hard to laugh, and be at ease,
When the darned old peas all start to freeze.
But a pea tramps always full of grit,
He never does sit down and quit.

To laugh, should be the pea tramp's creed
For that is what we greatly need.
It does not take great wealth to laugh
Just have the grit to stand the gaff.^[11]

These calls for courage, determination, and "grit" reflected a preoccupation with toughness that became one of the cornerstones of the Okie subculture. The values involved were in no way unique to the migrants, but in the process of emphasizing and reinforcing them, they were beginning to forge the normative standards of the group and a myth that would anchor expressions of group identity.^[12]

Toughness meant, first of all, an ability to accept life's hardships without flinching or showing weakness, a standard applied to both males and females. Displays of weakness were actively discouraged in the camp newspapers. "Complainers," "grumblers," "gripers," and "whiners" came in for frequent criticism. "All's not well that is the talk; / A grumbler being the worst of the lot," one poet chided.^[13] " 'Taint no use to sit an' whine," cautioned another version of "Keep On A-Goin'."^[14] "Now come on everybody, quit that complaining," a letter writer at the Indio camp in the Coachella Valley urged. "Every cloud has a silver lining. If you don't like things here in camp and the relief you get, be nice enough to keep it to yourself."^[15]

Toughness also meant a willingness to fight, metaphorically for women, in all senses of the word for men.

It takes a little courage;
And a little self-control;
And a grim determination;
If you want to reach the [goal];

It takes a deal of striving;
And a firm and stern-set chin.
No matter what the battle,
If you really want to win.

― 124 ―

You must take a blow and give one.
You must risk and you must lose
And expect within the battle
You must suffer from a bruise.

But you mus[t]n't wince or falter.
Lest a fight you might begin.
Be a man and face the battle.
That's the only way to win.^[16]

An Arvin camp resident thought his fellow campers might benefit from that untitled poem, perhaps remembered from childhood, a personal credo now being shared. Its message was a familiar one in the migrant communities. It mentions goals but is mostly about struggles and manliness. A man has courage and self-control, he fights his own battles, facing each with "stern-set chin." And, significantly, he prepares not so much to win as to lose, steeling himself to "suffer from a bruise."

Another poem, labeled "A Man's Creed," repeats the same themes:

Let this be my epitaph
Here lies one who took his chances
In the busy world of men
Battled luck and circumstances
fought and fell and fought again
Won sometimes, but did no crowing
Lost sometimes, but did not wail
Took his beating but kept going
And never let his courage fail.^[17]

In both of these contributions a man's creed is courage, not as a means to something but as a goal itself. What is important is the ability to fight and fall and fight again, to take a "beating" and keep going. There is an understanding of life here that lies outside the Franklinesque formulas of aspiration and success that are the core of middle-class American culture.

These invocations speak to a worldview in which struggle is the only verity, in which society is divided not into winners and losers but into those who fight and those who quit, men and cowards. They speak to a system of honor which, Bertram Wyatt-Brown and others suggest, may be a special feature of the culture of Southern whites. More definitely we can say that these values flourish outside the middle-class mainstream of twentieth-century American society, in working-class and rural contexts where symbols of prestige are hard to come by, where money and occupation cannot be everything. This was a context Okies knew well.^[18]

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Physical courage was a central part of the creed, and not just for males. Both children and adults were expected to know how and be willing to fight. Fist fights occurred frequently in the camps, in the schools, and in nearby saloons and were a continual source of concern to camp authorities, among others. Most involved males, but girls also fought with surprising frequency.

Young people have a "strange code," the Shafter camp manager complained in his regular column. "A young lady was called into my office for fighting and she said she had to fight or the other children would call her chicken."^[19] He need only have read his own camp newspaper to begin to understand that the "code" was promoted by parents as well as the younger generation. Aside from crime or base immorality, no more serious charge could be leveled at another person than the charge of cowardice. "The world will forgive you for being blue, sometimes forgive you for being green, but never forgive you for being yellow," a Yuba City camp philosopher intoned.^[20]

The words were meant to be taken seriously, and elsewhere were backed up with punishing ridicule. A boy who walked away from a school fight was mercilessly taunted as a crybaby in the Arvin camp newspaper: "Bill Jones got his feelings hurt in the school room the other day, he went home to get his [baby] bottle but his mother was not home so he came back crying."^[21]

The migrants' support for the values of toughness and courage which made up that "strange code" can also be seen in the enormous popularity accorded the sports of boxing and wrestling. Amateur bouts were staged weekly at many of the FSA camps and quickly proved to be the best attended of the camps' many recreational activities, attracting Okies living outside the camps as well as residents. On some nights, crowds of up to 500 people would assemble to watch what the Shafter Covered Wagon News described as "plenty of good fighting and lots of action."^[22] The matches featured contests between boys of several age levels up to the early twenties and nearly always included at least one pair of girls.

The Shafter paper's description of a fight between two teenage girls shows something of both the enthusiasm for the sport and the importance attached to displays of toughness:

A rough and tumble exhibition was put on by Mildred Searcy and Aldyth Aust, two of our promising young ladies. Mildred sure protected her pretty face all during the two rounds, and bucked like a ram with her head. Both girls displayed good sportsmanship by taking their punishment with a smile.^[23]

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That fighting between girls should be sanctioned in this way suggests a significant departure from the standards of comportment absorbed by generations of middle-class American women. Nevertheless, as the passage itself implies, fighting was primarily a test of male honor. For women, toughness had more to do with the ability to shoulder burdens, withstand pain, and bear up under life's trials. Female toughness was preeminently a matter of fortitude.

In several respects the migrants' cult of toughness represented an adjustment of old values to a new setting. In their efforts to deal with the formidable challenges of resettlement, the migrants appear to have emphasized courage and determination even more than they had back home. Beyond that, these values took on new social implications. At home toughness was a matter of individual concern; in California it became a badge of group pride, something that Okies believed made them collectively special.^[24]

To listen to former migrants today is to encounter again and again this proprietorial claim to toughness. It takes various forms, emerging sometimes in proud tales of Okie fighting prowess. In his book Okies , a collection of short stories, Kern County native Gerald Haslam, a second-generation Okie on his father's side, sees fighting as one of the major themes of the group experience. His male characters are frequently locked in combat, proving their courage and manhood to themselves and each other, rising to each challenge instinctively, obsessively, even as they sometimes wish they could turn a cheek and walk away. In the story "Before Dishonor," a battered "good old boy" moves from one teeth-shattering fight to another as other males test the truth of the "Death Before Dishonor" tattoo on his forearm. "There's things a kid does just haunts a man," the protagonist says of the tattoo he must defend. For Haslam it is all part of a particular system of honor which haunts and therefore helps to define Okies.^[25]

If Haslam is intrigued by the Okie reputation for violence, he is not alone. Many of his contemporaries and elders relish stories about fighting, particularly accounts of fights between resilient Okies and insolent Californians. The understanding is that Okies were singularly proficient with their fists, more than a match for their native detractors. "About the time they'd say, 'Okie,' I'd put my fist in their mouth," Byrd Morgan recalls.^[26] Charles Newsome uses the same proud tone in telling of his school-yard fights:

As the Missourians always said, "It was show me time." . . . Well, the Okie was the one that could show them so that's why there were a lot of little tough Okie kids running around the schools because they had to be tough.^[27]

― 127 ―

James Lackey was an adult when he arrived in California, and evidently a good fight never came his way. But he witnessed many and sees courage as an Okie trait. "I've never seen an Okie run from trouble at all. If you corner an Okie he's going to fight."^[28] Hadley Yocum likewise takes pride in the fights won by others. "I'll tell you one thing," says the former Arkansas and Oklahoma sharecropper, whose land holdings now make him a millionaire, "the native Californians weren't no match for the boys coming from Oklahoma when it came to fist fights."^[29]

This celebration of combat skills is part of the mythology of the Okie subculture. By mythology I do not mean the claims are untrue—indeed, there are good reasons to believe most of them—but rather that, true or not, such ideas form an important element in the framework of the group's identity.^[30]

The toughness myth extends beyond physical combat, however. In its most important manifestation, Okies find meaning in the belief that they or their parents or grandparents were part of a special encounter with suffering, a special exercise in perseverance and hard work, a special triumph over adversity.

Listen to Francis Walker, who looks back proudly on the years she and her family spent in the cotton fields of the San Joaquin Valley. "The Okies were invincible, they won, they are here, they own land, houses—and are comfortable," she insists.^[31] "Okies were resilient," echoes Dee Fox, a third-generation Okie whose pride in her heritage comes from "hearing all the stories" from her grandparents and parents.^[32] Okies "were willing to work," says Charles Newsome, "they'd work long hours trying to get ahead" while the "big shots" who settled the area earlier "had learned to live on a silver spoon and . . . didn't know how to compete."^[33]

Okies are people "who tried to stay alive and managed," explains Lester Hair, who was born in Arizona as his parents made their way west from Texas in 1924. And struggle, he continues, gives them a sense of pride "that is more important to that person than anything else."^[34] Hard times, hostile treatment, persistence, and struggle—"that's what made Okies out of us, " concludes Texas-born Bernie E Sisk, who worked his way out of the fruit orchards to become congressman from Fresno County.^[35] Whether all this struggle was in fact unique is unimportant; the belief that it was continues to shape a group identity.

A Shifting Populism

Related values of a more political nature also helped the newcomers feel themselves part of a special enterprise. The process turned on their

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understandings of American heritage and character. As they took a close look at the residents and the reigning values of their new state, they found a basis for rethinking their inferiority complex. California had some significant flaws. Maybe the migrants were not the ones who should be making the concessions and changes.

Plain-folk Americanism found its central bearings in a neo-populist perspective that understood but two great social classes, producers and parasites. Once key to a far-reaching radical critique of the economic order, the perspective had been changing political coloration since the turn of the century as adherents added anti-Communism, racism, nativism, and the resilient individualism evident in the toughness code to their list of political priorities. By the 1930s, many plain folk embraced an ideological construction which seemed to cross the conventional boundaries of Northern (and Californian) politics. Ever sympathetic to appeals on behalf of the common man or against the "interests," they responded with equal vigor to symbols that recalled a white Protestant and intensely patriotic vision of Americanism. This parochial populist combination matched neither the business conservatism nor the urban liberalism that had become dominant in California's Depression-era political life. A lens through which the migrants judged their surroundings, it became as well one of their contributions to their new state.^[36]

The outlook was evident in the camp newspapers, in the way camp residents dealt with questions of ambition, privilege, and equality. Invocations to personal ambition were curiously muted. For all the talk of determination and fighting, no Andrew Carnegie models appeared on these pages; few indeed were the discussions of competitive striving. This is striking when we consider the didactic nature of many of the contributions and the fact that they were often aimed at the younger generation. Reading closely we can see that particular standards of ambition were being employed. Exhorting one another to be the best they could be, contributors urged also that limits be recognized. Be your own man, proud but no better than anyone else—this was what contributors seemed to want for themselves and their children.

What occupational references there were suggest unfamiliarity with and some distrust of white-collar work. Bankers seem to have been hated, businessmen mostly ignored, bureaucrats and intellectuals widely lampooned. A joke about an "old Texas farmer" who uses common sense to outsmart a pretentious college professor reveals a sense of distance from the world of higher education. Underlying these evaluations was a basic belief in the primacy of manual labor. Real work meant creating with one's

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hands either in the fields or in the factories, ideally in a setting where one was independent, "his own boss."^[37]

Clearer than the migrants' occupational discriminations was their intolerance of social snobbery or elitism. Residents frequently blasted those who put on uppity airs, acted "high hat," or who tried to become "better than other people." "In Oklahoma and Texas where we folks come from one person ain't no better than another," an angry Shafter camp resident wrote after learning that elected camp council members were to be henceforth exempt from the task of cleaning bathrooms.^[38]

Outsiders found that a democratic demeanor was essential to any sort of effective dealings with Okies. Eleanor Roosevelt passed the test. After she paid a brief visit to the Shafter camp, the newspaper exuded: "No more gracious lady, no kindlier lady have we folks ever seen. When she talked with us she was so common, so plain, so sincere. Said a man in Unit Five, 'She is plain like all of us—not stuck up or stuffed.' "^[39]

On the other hand, some of the camp managers, most of them young college graduates, ran afoul of the migrants' standards. Oklahoma-born Wiley Cuddard, Jr.,^* criticized the string of previous managers at the Arvin camp—all "educated men, who have never done any real work"— for acting like "Dictators." The last one, he said, was "the professor type, he didn't associate with the people enough, too much business about him." Cuddard had nothing but praise, however, for the new manager, Fred Ross: "he is an educated man but when he came here he acted as one of the boys. . . . He didn't act one bit better than his staff or the people in the camp. And he's always got time to say a few words to you."^[40]

This commitment to social equality and resentment of pretension and authority had implications for the migrants' adjustment. Strictures against social snobbery dampened status ambitions that otherwise might have lured young people out of the working class and hence out of the Okie milieu. Here may be one of the factors in the high drop-out rate among high school students. If the camp newspapers are any guide, young people were taught at home to set modest life goals. Mrs. V. E. Langley passed along this piece of advice to residents of the Brawley camp in the Imperial Valley:

We all dream of great deeds and high positions. . . . Yet success is not occupying a lofty place or doing conspicuous work; it is being the best tha[t] is in you.

Rattling around in too big a job is worse than filling a small one [to] overflowing. Dream aspire by all means; but do not ruin the life you must lead by dreaming pipe dreams of the one you would like to lead. Make the most of what you have and are. Perhaps your trivial, immediate task is your one sure way of proving mettle.^[41]

― 130 ―

"The secret of happiness is not doing what one likes, but in liking what one has to do," a Yuba City camp resident argued.^[42] That was the message also of a popular poem entitled "Be What You Is" that appeared in print in several different newspapers:

If you're just a little tadpole
Don't try to be a frog
If you're just a tail
Don't try to wag the dog
You can always pass the plate
If you can't exhort and preach
If you're just a little pebble
Don't try to be the beach.
Don't be what you ain't
Jes' be what you is.
For the man who plays it square
Is a-goin to get "his."^[43]

Reinforced by the teachings of some of the churches they attended and also by important themes in country music, messages of restrained ambition doubtless helped to sustain the class integrity of the Okie group.

This sort of class consciousness also had political implications. Politics loomed large in the catalogue of fears inciting native hostility. Residents assumed the newcomers to be Democrats and, worse, probably radical Democrats. They were not far from the mark. Missouri, north Oklahoma, and parts of the Arkansas Ozarks knew something of the Republican party, but most Southwesterners had been raised in areas that acknowledged only one legitimate party. And since the onset of the Depression, major elements of that Democratic party had become reacquainted with radical-sounding rhetoric and proposals which harkened back to the 1890s. Leading Southwestern politicians such as Thomas Gore and "Alfalfa Bill" Murray of Oklahoma, Jim and Miriam ("Pa" and "Ma") Ferguson of Texas, Hattie Carraway of Arkansas, and, of course, the broadly influential Huey Long of Louisiana had greeted the economic crisis of the 1930s with a resurrected language of angry opposition to Eastern money and corporate greed, with dramatic calls for federal action to rein in the rich and re-distribute wealth, and with renewed commitment to the cause and dignity of plain, hard-working folks—in short with a neo-populism (a debilitated populism, says historian Alan Brinkley) that found an eager if perhaps not entirely credulous audience among the region's distressed rural and working-class populations.^[44]

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Percentage Voting for Democratic Candidates and Ham 'n' Eggs Initiative, for Arvin Precincts and Statewide California
Electoral Contest	Arvin	Statewide
1934 gubernatorial (Sinclair v. Merriam)	54%	38 %
1936 presidential (Roosevelt v. Landon)	75 %	67 %
1938 gubernatorial (Olson v. Merriam)	71%	52 %
1940 presidential (Roosevelt v. Willkie)	65 %	57%
1939 Ham 'n' Eggs	65%	34%
SOURCES : Arvin Tiller , Nov. 6, 1939; Voter Registration and Election Results Arvin Area, Goldschmidt Records, San Bruno; Michael P. Rogin and John L. Shover, Political Change in California (Westport, 1969), 123, 132; Robert E. Burke, Olson's New Deal for California (Berkeley, 1953), 33, 112.

The same disposition shows itself in the voting habits of many of the migrants who settled in California. Using the largely Okie town of Arvin as a gauge, we can see what worried Republicans and conservative Democrats. Arvin, from 1934 through the end of the decade, voted more strongly Democratic and much more in favor of liberal and radical Democratic candidates than the state as a whole. While Californians rejected the 1934 candidacy of Upton Sinclair, Arvin voted for him. Four years later, when Culbert Olson won the governor's mansion with 52 percent of the statewide vote, Arvin residents gave him 71 percent of theirs. Olson's blasts against big business, his calls for public ownership of utilities, and his endorsement of a watered-down version of Sinclair's "production for use" proposal may have bothered a good number of Californians, but those familiar with the anti-corporate, government-as-savior tone of Southwestern electioneering were not among them. The best indication of the neo-populist mind set of the new voters was Arvin's showing on the oddly named Ham 'n' Eggs initiative of 1939. Losing two to one statewide, it won by the same margin in Arvin amidst indications that the proposal was especially dear to the hearts of much of the migrant population. Ham 'n' Eggs was a radical welfare scheme derived from the earlier formulations of Dr. Francis Townsend, the famous Long Beach geriatric crusader. Among other things it called for the distribution of $30 in special scrip every Thursday to each needy Californian over the age of fifty. Like the Townsend plans, the goal was to assist the elderly while stimulating the economy through massive currency expansion.^[45]

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Denounced as crackpot economics not only by financial experts and conservative politicians but also by much of the liberal and left community, including Upton Sinclair, the initiative nevertheless seems to have inspired more enthusiasm and political activity than any other issue to come before the Okie group in the 1930s. Letters to camp newspapers and the established press called out their endorsement, often revealing a profound mistrust of the experts who opposed it: the self-same bankers alleged to have brought on and profited from the Depression. "Ham and eggs everybody," Arkansan Henry King urged fellow residents of the Arvin camp. "Do you believe it will work, the money Gods say it wont. . . [Don't] believe those dirty rich liars that say Ham and Eggs wont work. . . Ham and eggs wont work if the rich can help it."^[46]

In addition to playing to the migrants' suspicions of bankers, corporations, and pretentious wealth, Ham 'n' Eggs found a responsive echo in the neo-populist fondness for currency manipulation schemes. Financial conspiracies were responsible for the economic crisis, financial wizardry would resolve it. Bill Hammett was the kind of voter who found Ham 'n' Eggs compelling. Although his comments were made several years before the initiative appeared, his political philosophy suggests the sort of down-home radicalism that earned the ballot measure so much support among resettled Southwesterners:

I ain't no communist . . . I hold the American flag's just as good here and now as when Betsy Ross finished her stitchin' and handed it over to George Washington. What's good over in Russia don't mean it's good for us. I ain't edicated enough to know whether it's Epic plan or Townsend plan or whatever, but if there's plenty folks ready and willin' to raise food and other folks are still starvin', don't take no college edication to know there's some-thin' cloggin' the gin feed.^[47]

Labor's Dilemma

If the migrants' worldview could take them in radical directions, it also, as the orthodox left discovered, took them in conservative ones. The plain-folk ideology circulating in the migrant communities was tinged with much else beside the old populism of their forefathers. When Okies talked of social equality, they usually meant equality for whites and often only native-stock whites. When they sorted out their pantheon of enemies, they frequently figured Communists to be more dangerous than bankers. And when faced with organizational opportunities that might yield collective benefits, they typically fell back instead on habits of individualism and family self-sufficiency. The 1930s marked something of a midpoint in the

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transformation of the political culture of Southwestern plain folk. The insurgent potential had been steadily draining away. Even as many South-westerners continued to use a class-based terminology of the plain versus the powerful, more persuasive commitments to patriotism, racism, toughness, and independence were pointing towards the kind of conservative populism that George Wallace would articulate three decades later.

Suggestions of this trend can be seen in the migrants' response to the two left-wing unions which tried to recruit them in the closing years of the 1930s. The United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers of America, a Congress of Industrial Organizations union better known by its acronym UCAPAWA, and the Workers Alliance, which called itself the "union of the unemployed," together tried to organize the migrants in their twin roles as farmworkers and relief recipients. Neither was very successful. The plain people's consciousness which found expression in the Ham 'n' Eggs vote fit much less well with the programs and campaigns of radical organized labor.

Strictly speaking, the Workers Alliance was a pressure group rather than a union. A loosely structured organization that enjoyed the support of both the Socialist and Communist parties, it was the chief successor to the militant Unemployed Councils of the early 1930s. Chapters first appeared in the agricultural areas of California in 1936 and quickly began to pick up members among the Okie population dependent upon relief. Sending grievance committees to lobby local relief authorities while backing those efforts with petitions and public demonstrations, the organization gained a reputation for influence and with it a small but significant following in many of the camps and communities. Helpful, too, was the fact that Workers Alliance stewards sometimes controlled the distribution of jobs on WPA projects. Even migrants who disapproved of the organization's radical politics sometimes found it useful to join. "Seems you've might near got to belong . . . to get what's coming to you," one man complained as he contemplated signing up.^[48] Membership figures are hard to judge, but it seems likely that chapters in Arvin, Bakersfield, Madera, and Marysville could each claim the support of several hundred members by early 1939, while smaller chapters operated in several other locales.^[49]

UCAPAWA first appeared in the migrant communities in late 1937. Part of the newly independent CIO, it pulled together several tiny food-processing and farm-labor locals left over from the campaigns of the early 1930s. Its leaders sought first to build a strong base in the canneries and packing houses (a sector rapidly falling to the American Federation of Labor) but at the urging of state CIO leaders agreed to undertake as well the

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formidable task of organizing the state's vast armies of seasonal farm-workers. UCAPAWA's commitment to the project, however, was inconsistent and greatly hindered by a shortage of financial resources and skilled organizers. Unsure whether it should be setting up dues-paying locals or organizing strikes, the union mostly drifted behind events. Workers Alliance activists took charge of most of the organizing, converting their chapters into UCAPAWA locals during harvest seasons, and at times initiating walkouts for which UCAPAWA leaders were not fully prepared.^[50]

Serious strike activity began in the fall of 1938 with a spontaneous walkout by several hundred Kern County cotton pickers, many of them residents of the Shafter FSA camp. Emboldened by the reputation of the mediagenic CIO and angered by the drastic wage cuts that accompanied the federally sponsored acreage cutbacks, a militant minority, consisting of Okies and Hispanics, had initiated the action. The union dispatched organizers to try to broaden and discipline the strike, but after some exhilarating efforts at coaxing other workers from the fields using automobile picket caravans, the strike collapsed, helped to its early end of the mass arrest of some one hundred picketers.^[51]

The next year saw a wave of similar walkouts in other crops as cadres of activists spread the union enthusiasm up and down the state. One or two of the strikes resulted in wage increases, but most, like the Kern strike, floundered after dramatic beginnings, either because most workers refused to strike or because other migrants appeared to take the jobs of those who did.^[52]

The cotton harvest of 1939 promised to be the major test. UCAPAWA tried a new strategy. Counting on the support of the recently installed Olson administration and the public sympathy engendered by the publication of The Grapes of Wrath , leaders were hoping to win bargaining concessions from growers without a strike. But when industry representatives ignored the recommendations of the governor's Wage Rate board, the scene was set for confrontation.

The union concentrated efforts in Madera County, where a strong Workers Alliance local had been preparing for months. Initial reports were encouraging. A majority of cotton pickers in the area responded to the strike call, and hundreds gathered in the county park for assignment to picket caravans. Despite some early arrests, observers counted the strike 75 percent effective in the first week in that county, though efforts to inspire walkouts elsewhere in the cotton belt fizzled badly.^[53]

The Madera momentum was also about to end—the Associated Farmers saw to that. On the strike's ninth day, a mob of several hundred growers

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attacked a rally of union supporters with clubs, pick handles, and tire irons. Other beatings and arrests followed as local officials cooperated with efforts to break the strike. With the governor unwilling to intervene and most of the leaders in jail or driven from the county, UCAPAWA's most significant farm-labor strike came to a close. The defeat ended serious efforts to organize field workers. Activists maintained some of the locals and kept the threat of further campaigns alive for another year or so, but union headquarters had lost interest and now turned its energies elsewhere.

It is unwise to make too much of UCAPAWA's poor showing. Substantial obstacles stood in the way of any attempt to organize the farm-labor force, an occupational sector that remains largely nonunion to this day. The timing of the UCAPAWA campaign was particularly bad, coinciding with a dramatic drop in farm employment and a growing surplus of workers. The combination made many migrants angry, but left others desperate for work and unable to make the sacrifices a strike demanded.

Slim Phillips's case is indicative of the choices many faced. He had just arrived in California, was out of money, and had not yet heard of the strike when a grower stopped him on the highway and offered him work. He accepted but moments later encountered a carload of strikers. "We want to get a little better price on this cotton," they told him.

So I says we ain't got nothing to eat. If you got the price of something to eat why we can talk business with you, otherwise, we is gonna starve. We just didn't have no money. That was all there was to it. We was broke.^[54]

Given the desperation of people like Phillips, the aggravating labor market conditions, not to mention the difficulties of coordinating farm-labor strikes against the obstinate and very powerful agricultural industry in California, UCAPAWA's failure is anything but surprising. Still, one can ask whether the values and disposition of the migrants had something to do with the campaign's problems. Many observers thought so, concluding in the final analysis that Southwesterners were not good union material, that, as Charles Todd put it, they were "immune to the wiles of the organizer."^[55] Later writers have also followed this lead. Walter Stein argues that the migrants were unfamiliar with unions and too individualistic to support the campaign. Comparing the UCAPAWA experience with the more encouraging results of the earlier Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union drive among mostly Mexican field workers, he observes that "precisely because Okies were rural Americans with that streak of individualism, they were less malleable material for union organizers

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than were Mexicans. Rugged individualism and collective action do not mix well."^[56]

Can this be correct? The Western South, historian Lawrence Goodwyn assures us, had once thrilled to the cooperative strategies of the Farmers' Alliance and then with equal vigor had supported the programs of the People's party. Even more distinctively, in the years immediately prior to World War I, Oscar Ameringer, Kate Richards O'Hare, and Thomas "Red" Hickey had built the nation's largest Socialist party membership on the foundation of former Populists. Enjoying the support of thousands of tenant farmers, miners, timber workers, and urban sympathizers, the movement had garnered over a third of the vote in many of Oklahoma's poorer counties, and substantial numbers as well in western Arkansas and northern Texas. Now a mere twenty years later was it possible that migrants from this region were too individualistic to contemplate joining a union? ^[57]

The story is more complicated than that. First, it is important to understand that not all migrants responded alike to the union campaign. A sizable minority did join or support these organizations. Many of the activists who agitated in the fields and camps, triggered the walkouts, and mounted the picket caravans were Okies, as were the hundreds and occasionally thousands who responded to their calls. Though definitely in the minority, the number of union supporters was by no means negligible. Just how many there were is not clear, but three small surveys perhaps provide a clue. Approximately one-quarter of the 60 men James Wilson interviewed were UCAPAWA members or supporters; 30 percent of Lillian Creisler's 100 Modesto respondents, not all of whom were farmworkers, belonged to some sort of union; and 39 percent of Walter Hoadley's 117-family Salinas area sample said they might like to join a union, though UCAPAWA was not specifically mentioned. To estimate, then, that one out of every three at least sympathized with the union would not be irresponsible.^[58]

Many belonging to this pro-UCAPAWA segment seem to have had prior experience with either unions or radical causes. Arthur Brown,^* active in UCAPAWA in Kern County, learned his unionism working in the oil fields of Oklahoma. Carrie Morris and her husband, mainstays of the Marysville local and leaders of several walkouts, claimed thirty years of unionism in various industries before coming to California. Likewise, the president of the Wasco local, who looked back on careers in both mining and railroad work, liked to tell visitors that he had "been a Union man all my life." Given the number of farmworkers who had previously worked in nonagricultural jobs, these backgrounds were not unusual.

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Some 28 percent of residents in Modesto's Little Oklahoma claimed previous union experience.^[59]

Other sympathizers came to UCAPAWA via the Southwest's radical movements. Like Jim Ballard, an Arkansas tenant farmer who grew up reading the Socialist weekly Appeal to Reason , some of the people settling in California were veterans of the prewar Socialist campaigns. Others, too young to have participated in the glory days of the Debsian movement, had been involved in such Depression-era leftist ventures as the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union, the Oklahoma-based Veterans of Industry (an organization of the unemployed), or, for that matter, the Workers Alliance, which had chapters in the Southwest as well as California. Tex Pace, editor of the Visalia camp Hub , is a good example. His penchant for items about Commonwealth Labor College at Mena, Arkansas, suggests his roots in the radical subculture of his home region.^[60]

These radicals, however, no longer enjoyed the sympathy that would have once made them welcome in a large percentage of the region's rural households. The two decades since World War I had indeed seen a major transformation in political consciousness. The patriotic fervor and uncompromising repression of the war and Red Scare years had begun the process. Next came the nativist, fundamentalist, and moral reform crusades of the 1920s. The Ku Klux Klan attained for a time major influence in the region, taking power in Texas and Arkansas and coming close in Oklahoma. The experience helped even Klan opponents learn to equate radicalism with treason, anti-Communism with Americanism.^[61]

The region's farm population had been especially affected. Even though the Klan found more enemies than friends among the region's plain folk, the organization's preeminent lesson took hold in the 1920s. Henceforth, patriotism would remain the foremost proposition for the majority of Southwestern farm folk. All other impulses, including their continued interest in economic justice, would be subject always to qualms about the proper activities for loyal Americans. For the organized left, this proved an insurmountable burden. Still a force in the Southwest's cities, oil fields, and mining camps, radicals usually encountered an aroused and suspicious majority opinion in rural and small-town settings. Despite the turmoil and discontent that the 1930s brought to the region's farm population, patriotic concerns channeled most energies away from the radical left, sometimes into the election campaigns of neo-populist candidates such as Murray and Carraway, sometimes into apathy.^[62]

It was to be the same in California. Chief among the obstacles that the unionists faced were the strong anti-Communist sentiments of many of

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their fellow migrants. Both UCAPAWA and the Workers Alliance were vulnerable on that score. As grower representatives and major newspapers never tired of pointing out, both organizations had important links to the Communist party. For people like Oklahoman Clint Powell,^* there was nothing more to be said. Probably unaware that he was inverting the Populists' famous challenge to raise less corn and more hell, he refused to have anything to do with a "damned red outfit" which "just raises more hell than anything else."^[63]

Even migrants who otherwise claimed to be interested in unionization were sometimes deterred by the Communism issue. An old-timer who felt that unionization was definitely "in my interests" nevertheless insisted that "it won't do us a bit of good unless it's 100 per cent, and unless all the radicals are killed off." "The radicals," he continued, "are so unreasonable, it hurts rather than helps us."^[64] A twenty-seven-year-old Oklahoman who felt "we need some form of pullin' together to prevent goin' into slavery" was also wary. Though he thought UCAPAWA "is the best thing we've got now to keep wages up," he was not a member. "I don't knock on the CIO but I do say let's be careful lest we join an organization that's influenced by some foreign government."^[65]

The scope and vehemence of this concern seem unusual for the late 1930s. Most sectors of the American public probably shared the migrants' antipathy towards Communism, but not in the same measure. At least in urban settings, the CIO found its Communist allies more help than liability, as tens and hundreds of thousands of industrial workers ignored red-baiting campaigns and picked up the union card. But anti-Communism had become a more serious proposition in heartland regions like the Western South where the nativist-fundamentalist fires of the 1920s had burned so brightly.^[66]

Religious and racial concerns also had something to do with UCAPAWA's difficulties. The evangelical churches that claimed the attention of a significant minority of the migrant group often spoke against union membership, sometimes quite vehemently. "They get up and tell the people that the CIO is wrong, and that those who are wearing the CIO badges have the mark of the 'beast' upon them," a UCAPAWA leader charged, and he suspected the preachers were "paid by the ranchers."^[67] They did not need to be bribed. Many of these churches belonged to Pentecostal or Holiness sects that taught that all forms of political action were wrong because they distracted from the pursuit of individual salvation. Worldliness of any kind was to be avoided. Even the conservative American Federation of Labor "had trouble with these holy rollers." A frustrated Cannery

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Workers Union official complained, "They have screwy ideas. Some of them don't want to belong to any organization and will quit their jobs rather than join a union. Their preachers won't let them belong to any organization, but their own."^[68]

Again, it had not always been so. Evangelical groups had played a different role in the era of Southwestern radicalism before World War I, says historian Garin Burbank. The Socialist movement, he argues, gained the support of preachers and deeply religious farm folk who found a resonance between the promises of Socialism and chiliastic Christianity.^[69] But that link had largely dissolved by the 1930s. Among the ministers and religious-minded migrants who came to California one finds only scattered examples of sympathy for radicalism: a Nazarene minister active in the Olive-hurst chapter of the Workers Alliance; a Pentecostal preacher known as Brother Theodore, who reconciled his belief in Socialism by saying, "Ah have to seek the truth, Brother, an' after ah've found that truth then ah've gotta preach it"; and Lillie Dunn, who discovered Jesus at age thirteen and the Communist party twelve years later and never found the two in conflict.^[70] They were exceptional. Most of the migrants involved in the union campaign were not necessarily irreligious, but rarely were they closely involved in a church.^[71]

UCAPAWA's policy of racial inclusion may have also limited its appeal to white Southwesterners. Like most left-wing CIO organizations, the union insisted that workers of all colors and national origins be included, though not always within the same local. Bowing to the logic of language groups, UCAPAWA divided them into Spanish- and English-speaking locals. Still, the fact that Hispanic farmworkers, some of them veterans of the 1933 strikes, played prominent roles in some strikes kept certain whites on the sidelines. Even more troublesome was the presence of a small number of black unionists. The Wasco local evidently defied headquarters and discouraged interested blacks from attending most functions. The local's president denied this and assured Walter Goldschmidt that all races were welcome, but his wife interrupted to insist, "You can't equalize me with no nigger—I don't care what."^[72]

The issue of individualism remains to be considered. Much depends on the definition, whether an ideology or a condition is meant. The notion that rural Southwesterners were "rugged individualists" unfamiliar with the rudiments of cooperation is another one of the mistaken stereotypes generated by a society that was uncomfortable with its rural shadow. Here is the New York Times quoting a Farm Security Administration official's characterization of the migrants: "These are men who got a shotgun and

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guarded a stalk of cotton that was hanging over the fence so that the farmer on the other side of the fence wouldn't pick it." "They're the greatest individuals on earth," he went on. "They'd die in a factory."^[73] This is nonsense. Okies were neither loners nor frontiersmen, and they did as well as anyone else in the factories. Cooperation was certainly nothing new. The churches that many supported and attended before coming to California were proof of that.^[74]

On the other hand, it was true that plain-folk culture gave considerable emphasis to issues of self-reliance and personal or family autonomy, and true that even today symbols of independence rank highly in the honor scheme of the Okie group. That makes the union question complicated, because it is not necessarily true that unionism and the spirit of independence are incompatible. Over the years a good deal of American labor activism has been generated in defense of principles of self-reliance, manhood, and personal integrity. From railroadmen in the 1880s to teamsters in the 1980s, the collective discipline of unionism seems often to be marshaled in favor of symbols of pride and independence.^[75]

The notion that Okies were unprepared for or ideologically opposed to unions breaks down as soon as industries other than agriculture are considered. In the oil fields and canneries, or in the shipyards and aircraft factories that many entered during World War II, Southwesterners showed little reluctance and in some cases considerable enthusiasm for workplace organization. Confronting faceless corporations, they were readily persuaded that the exercise of group power was not only practical but honorable.

But a union of farmworkers seemed a different proposition. Farming was too sacred an endeavor for the tactics of the factory. Whatever their current social station, the majority of these former farmers could not but remain loyal to the enterprise of their ancestors. And whatever their current economic interests, they thus found it hard not to identify with their employers.

UCAPAWA faced an impossible public relations problem. Organizers tried to convince the newcomers that California agriculture was not what they were used to, that independent farming was a fiction in an industry controlled by giant concerns, and that in any event the union had no quarrel with the small growers. "All the farms around here are financed, and the finance companies wouldn't allow but so much [for wages], and they couldn't pay more," explained a Missourian who found the lessons persuasive. It galled him that "a bunch of these Chamber of Commerce,

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White Collar fellows, who never farmed in their lives, go up to Fresno every year and set the prices."^[76]

But even as many of the migrants agreed with the union's characterization of the system as "monopoly agriculture," it was difficult for UCAPAWA to break the bonds of sympathy that these former farmers often felt for their particular California employers. Many are the stories of workers who stuck by their bosses during the strikes because "he was a good fellow." Ed Crane, who allows that "I never was too much on strikes," worked through several in the 1930s. "If I'm working for a person I owe my allegiance to my employer until it becomes patently unfair and then I'll go somewhere else to go to work. That's been my theory of the whole thing."^[77]

Particularly if they worked for a grower of modest scale, the migrants were quick to identify with him. A young father from Kansas was barely feeding his family on his 25 cents per hour wage. But though he knew it "is a little too low, a man should have 30 cents," he was not complaining. "Under present prices these California farmers are payin' about all they can stand fer wages. . . . Last year a good many farmers went broke."^[78] Martin Childs^* sympathized with the aims of the union but was too much of a farmer at heart to fully accept the logic of opposing interests implicit in the union strategy. "The ranchers have done pretty well [by us]," he allowed. "Our main drawback is too many people. We've rustled pretty hard in my family and got quite a bit of work. They seem to pay a reasonable fair price. Some folks don't think they do, but I figure they pay a reasonable fair price."^[79]

And with less frequency the same logic worked for even the wealthiest of growers. James Lackey is today a stalwart member of the pipefitters' union, but in the late 1930s he made his home on the gigantic DiGiorgio ranch, most famous of the "factories in the field." And he had no interest in the union: "I didn't see anybody taking advantage of anyone. . . . It was friendly and the bosses were good. In fact I talked to the old man DiGiorgio, the one that owned it, and little Joe. . . . they was just like common people. All the bosses were swell." Here was the unions' dilemma. A farmer (even a millionaire California grower with international corporate interests), if he acted like a man of the soil and treated his employees with dignity, was more of a kindred spirit than were some of the allies the unions proposed: nonwhites, Communists, educated middle-class sympathizers.^[80]

The significance of all this for the UCAPAWA campaign was limited. Farm-labor unionism in the late 1930s was defeated by market conditions

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that would have undermined even the most determined constituency. But the migrants' response helps us to see both the variation in their political orientations and the majority trend. If we seek the central tendency in this emerging subculture, we will find it among those who were suspicious of the left and impressed with gestures of independence and toughness even while they retained a faith in programs that promised economic justice. This was a political culture in transition, lodged somewhere between the agrarian radicalism of an earlier era and the flag-waving conservatism of the next. And for the moment it found at best an awkward home in California, fitting only partly under the very liberal banner of California's Democratic party.

True Americanism

Nativism and racism were aspects of the value system of Southwestern plain folk which figured also in the subculture taking shape in California. For all their aggravation at the hands of middle-class white society, nothing bothered the newcomers more than California's system of racial and ethnic relations. It was one of the features of their new surroundings that convinced them that California's standards, not their own, needed changing.

Settlement in California imposed a number of unfamiliar ethnic encounters on migrants from the Western South. Coming from a region where blacks and in some settings Hispanics were the only significant minorities and where white Protestant supremacy was an unquestioned fact of life, the greater diversity and somewhat more tolerant habits of California offered a serious challenge.^[81]

Some found themselves working for Italian, Scandinavian, Portuguese, Armenian, or perhaps even Japanese growers; others for Hispanic labor contractors or once in a while a black contractor. They competed for jobs with Hispanic and Filipino workers, sometimes finding that these groups were preferred by certain growers. All this was confusing. "We thought we were just 100 percent American," recalls Martha Jackson, who arrived in California as a teenager in 1937. "I had never heard of an Armenian, I had never met an Italian and I never had seen Chinese or Japanese or Mexican people. . . . We thought their grandparents didn't fight in the Civil War or Revolution."^[82]

The new encounters were especially difficult because of the contempt Okies experienced at the hands of so many white residents. Accustomed to a social structure which guaranteed them ethnic privileges, they read California's arrangements as an inversion of accustomed patterns. "I have not noticed the California critics condemning the Filipinos, Japanese, or any

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other foreigners," William Siefert wrote to Fresno's major newspaper. "But when United States born citizens come here, they say we cut wages and lower their standard of living."^[83]

"Just who built California?" another writer asked rhetorically before revealing his ignorance of California's ethnohistory:

Certainly not the Chinese, Japanese, Hindus, etc., that you let stay inside her borders. . . The aliens are perfectly welcome, but the real citizens must stay out. . . Not one word of protest did I hear [about foreigners]. But let a citizen from the East come out here and try to make a home and be a respectable person and one hears plenty.^[84]

James Wilson encountered similar complaints among the migrants he interviewed in Kern County. Among those who would speak freely of their feelings of discontent, several blamed Mexicans, Japanese, and Filipinos, all of whom, one Oklahoman claimed, "git the cream of the crop, they git the jobs." "That is where a lot of our trouble is," he continued, "the country is too heavily populated with foreigners . . . the farmers ain't got no business hirin' them fer low wages when we native white American citizens are starvin'."^[85] It was bad enough, Clyde Storey^* maintained, that Californians refused to "treat you like a white man," but to encounter a sign reading "No White Laborers Need Apply" at the ranch belonging to former President Herbert Hoover was in his mind the most painful irony of all.^[86] A young Oklahoman summarized the fear that pressed heavily on the self-esteem of many migrants: "they think as much of a 'Nigger' uptown here as they do white people."^[87] It was not true, of course, but the decline in their own social position, combined with what most Southwesterners saw as a substantial elevation in the rights of racial and ethnic minorities, perhaps made it seem so.

Without question the most troubling feature of the California ethnic system for Southwesterners centered on interactions with blacks. A tiny black population shared the farm-labor occupational strata with Okies in the San Joaquin Valley. Excluded even from the FSA camps, living mostly in isolated enclaves in some of the larger towns, blacks, as always, suffered far more serious economic and social discrimination than any whites. Still, they enjoyed certain opportunities not common to the Southwest, and these offended the sensibilities of the newcomers. The superiority of white over black was the bottom line of plain-folk culture, and any change in the status of black people was very deeply felt.^[88]

The most obvious breach in segregation etiquette occurred in the schools, some of which admitted black students to the same classrooms as whites.

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Ruth Woodall Criswell recalls the resulting trauma in her household. It was "the first time in my life I'd ever gone to school with anyone except just white children." Her parents "could hardly reconcile themselves to the fact. At first they didn't seem to mind so much about the Mexican and Chinese but the blacks bothered them."^[89]

Noting that "they are niggers back home but colored people here," one of Goldschmidt's informants confessed similar worries. "I thought it would be awful to send our children to school with niggers, but they aren't so bad. The children like the niggers alright—they don't bother any. These niggers around here don't bother us any if you let them alone."^[90]

Alvin Laird was one of many Southwestern parents who became embroiled with school officials over the issue. He claims (though it is hard to believe) that education authorities in the Imperial Valley tried to enroll his children in an "all-colored school." "My children ain't going to go over there," he told the officials, and rather than send them he kept them out of school until the family moved north to the San Joaquin Valley. There were problems in the new setting as well. After his daughter was blamed for an altercation with a black teenager, he confronted the school principal, announced that his daughter would not apologize, and threatened that if the youth "don't leave my daughter alone I'll have one of them boys of mine to whop him so you won't know him when he comes to school."^[91]

Parents' anxieties were played out in a sometimes violent fashion by the younger generation. Charles Newsome remembers with some embarrassment his first days at an elementary school in Tulare County.

The teacher assigned me and told me to go sit in this desk . . . it was right behind the only colored kid in the class. So I was a little smart ass Okie and I had never had much school with them so no way was I going to get behind no colored kid . . . I told her "Teacher, I don't sit behind no nigger." So when recess time came naturally that's when a fight got started.^[92]

The fighting became more serious in the upper grades. High school teachers sometimes blamed Okie youths for persecuting black students, anti knifings and serious brawls were reported.^[93] Not all of this was the fault of whites. Juanira Price, one of the few black Oklahomans to come west during the 1930s, recalls some of the violence in the Bakersfield area and blames it on both sides:

When the white Southerners came here a lot of them got whippings from black people . . . the blacks had a little hostility in them and when they came out to California they thought the situation was different so they could just whip a white fella and forget it. And many fights went on. The

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blacks had said all their lives, "one of these days I'm going to whip me a white kid," and they'd whip one. It was just stupidity.

Some of it was also bloody. She tells of one particularly violent incident. "Tex's Bar," an Okie hangout in Bakersfield, prominently displayed a "NO NIGGERS" sign on the door. When a black man walked in one day, the owner tried to throw him out. The would-be customer then pulled a knife and "cut him up real bad."^[94]

All this needs to be qualified. Racial tolerance was not unknown in the Western South, and some migrants warmly endorsed more equitable racial relations. Despite the example of the Wasco UCAPAWA local, racial liberalism was especially pronounced among the minority who participated in unions and radical politics. And others also came to accept the sorts of inter-ethnic contact that California imposed. James Wilson listened as a group of young cotton choppers discussed their employer, a black labor contractor:

HARVEY JOHNSON^* :	That "Nigger" guy is a nice boss, better than a lot of white men.
BILL BROWN^* :	But I wouldn't let anybody know I was workin' fer a "Nigger."
HENRY JOHNSON^* :	He said to me the other day, "Will you please cut the weeds over behind those beets?" He said "Please."
BOYD JONES^* :	They think as much of a "Nigger" uptown here as they do white people. I don't even like fer one of them to ask me fer a cigarette. Another thing, they drink out of the same cup.
ANGUS DOW^* :	I don't mind drinkin' out of the same cup if he'll set it down and let it set fer five minutes.
HARVEY JOHNSON^*	I've been in ten states and don't like them yet.^[95]

As the conversation indicates, this was a process which would take time. Even as some whites were learning new lessons, others clung tenaciously to racial animosity. And if we are looking again for central tendencies, it would have to be said that racism remained the subculture's dominant voice. Many Southwesterners found purpose in speaking out against rather than for interracial understanding.^[96]

This became quite evident in the 1940s, when the racial composition of California underwent a fundamental change. Black migration accelerated dramatically during World War II, nearly quadrupling the state's Afro-American population by 1950. Where Okies and blacks met there was

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continual tension. Sociologist Katherine Archibald observed the conflict in a Bay Area shipyard. Blacks were resented by most whites, she noted, but especially by Okies, who "found it hard to accept the casual contact between Negro men and white women to which Northern custom had become indifferent—sitting together on streetcars and buses, standing together before lunch counters or pay windows, working side by side in the same gangs."^[97] Grumbling that "it's the niggers who are taking over California," Okies talked loudly, she added, about lynchings and other bloody remedies. "What you need round here," one Southwesterner told her, "is a good old-fashioned lynching. Back in my home state we string a nigger up or shoot him down, every now and then, and that way we keep the rest of them quiet and respectful."^[98]

Apparently it was not all talk. Violent incidents, including cross burnings and even murders, occurred in both the Bay Area and Los Angeles, settings where defense work brought the two groups of Southerners together. At the end of the war a brief florescence of Ku Klux Klan activity in southern California was linked to Southwestern whites.^[99]

Southwesterners enjoyed no monopoly on racism, of course. Nor did California, with its legacy of anti-Asian sentiment, need instructions in white supremacy. Black newcomers met resistance from many quarters. But some white Southwesterners brought a heightened militancy to the subject. Both because interracial contacts at work and school were new and because their self-esteem at this juncture was so fragile, vigorous racism became a prominent feature of the Okie response to California. Charles Newsome remembers the transference. "The people out here [Californians] looked down on the Okies but the Okies looked down on other people too at the time."^[100]

An outlet for frustration, racism was in subtle ways also a source of group identity—something that made at least some Okies feel special and distinct. While many white Californians shared the migrants' racist outlook, the fact that some features of California law and custom were different than back home allowed certain newcomers to conclude that there was much that was wrong with the state and its citizenry. And some, as we see in Archibald's report, styled themselves guardians of white supremacy, dispensing advice on how to deal with blacks. Here, sadly, was another understanding and shared purpose, another piece of the subcultural framework.

Native Sons

If the debasement of California's nonwhites had therapeutic and group definitional implications, the migrants' concept of Americanism figured

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more ambiguously in relations with the state's whites, most of whom possessed old-stock credentials not much different than their own. Mostly, Americanism provided a bridge. That so many of the Californians were "Americans" minimized the migrants' defensive reactions and sustained their interest in assimilation, which as we have seen was one compelling strategy of adjustment. But for some members of the group, expectations about the behavior of proper Americans also provided ammunition for criticizing their native hosts. And while this endeavor was but a weak reflection of the disdain Okies knew was directed their own way, it offered some measure of emotional conciliation and group definition.

Southwesterners used several devices to turn the tables on Californians, the simplest of which were snide labels of their own, including "Calies," "native sons," and the curious favorite, "prune pickers," which played on the bathroom humor associated with the sticky, sweet dried fruit. A stereotype accompanied the labels, the thrust of which was that Californians were selfish, arrogant, "privileged characters" who thought they were better than everyone else. As one novice poet put it:

Some of the Californians go around, with their nose stuck up;
Like when it would rain, They'd use it for a cup.^[101]

This view of rude and haughty natives was often coupled with the notion that Californians had grown soft and lazy, and furthermore that their resentment of the migrants was rooted in jealousy and fear. "If it weren't for Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas, there wouldn't be much to California, would there?" a migrant hitchhiker lectured Charles Todd. He figured that everybody else in the state had forgotten the meaning of real work.^[102]

As have-nots often do, the migrants also enjoyed suggestions that Californians' lofty social positions rested upon lowly origins and ill-gotten or unearned wealth. A popular ditty that apparently pre-dated the Dust Bowl migration delighted Okies with its irreverent view of the California pedigree.

The miners came in forty-nine,
The whores in fifty-one;
And when they bunked together
They begot the native son.^[103]

The author of a letter to the Modesto Bee had different suspicions about California bloodlines. Establishing his own credentials as a "native son of the U.S.A." whose "father and grandfather served in the Civil War," he addressed his challenge "to the native son who owns your big dairies, your big vineyards, your big orchards, look up the records and get the facts. . . .

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The few I have worked for, I have been informed, got their starts from their fathers, who happened not to be native sons."^[104] Here was the plain folks' critique in a nutshell: "big" farms, too big and too cushy; unearned wealth and social position; and possibly immigrant backgrounds. It was quite a brief.

Still, these attempts at denigration, unlike those directed at nonwhites, were not particularly serious. Few Okies really entertained feelings of superiority over white Californians. Most of the jibes were simply attempts to reassure themselves and regain some composure. Nevertheless, the process had bearing on the emerging subculture. In clarifying their definitions of proper Americanism and in laying special claim to that heritage, the migrants were developing an identity capable of sustaining a group experience that initially owed its existence to external forces of class and prejudice.

We will let Ernest Martin restate the proposition that underlay the group identity. An Oklahoman who came to California as a child, grew up in the valley, then moved to Los Angeles and became a minister and religious scholar, he speaks boldly and with insight about the cultural and cognitive parameters of the Okie experience. They considered themselves "the best Americans in the world," he recalls. "To our people their way of life was America. New York isn't America . . . we were America."^[105]

There is no simple statement of regional pride. The Okie subculture was anchored in a group concept that is not reducible to the ethnic formula that scholars sometimes employ in relation to other groups of Southern white out-migrants. Instead of a particularistic definition of the group based on state origins, many Southwesterners laid claim to a nativist conception of national community. Plain-folk Americanism was in some respects a regional enterprise—white Southerners were its core proponents in California—but it also spoke to and for whites of many other backgrounds. Hence, the curious dynamics of the Okie subculture. Southwesterners drew together and gained feelings of pride and definition from this ideological system but never manifested the exclusivity, the insularity, of an ethnic subsociety. Plain-folk Americanism gave their community a different thrust, outward and expansive, open to other whites who embraced the proper values. These heartlanders had come to California with something not just to save but to share.

This would become increasingly clear in the decades to come. The 1940s would simultaneously reduce the structures of social and economic isolation and encourage the proliferation of key cultural institutions. Country music and evangelical churches would become important emblems of the

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Okie group in the post-Depression decades. And each would function in the dual manner we have been observing, on the one hand solidifying elements of group pride, while also carrying messages of wider appeal that helped to spread the Okie cultural impact far beyond the formal boundaries of the Southwestern group.

5
James v. Marinship
Trouble on the New Black Frontier

Charles Wollenberg

Editor's Introduction

In 1940, African Americans made up almost 11 percent of the total population of the United States but were only 1.8 percent of California's population. Beginning in the 1920s, however, structural and cyclical factors began to displace millions of black and white agricultural workers from the South. The boom created by World War II led to the first massive migration of African American people to California. Between the spring of 1942 and 1945, 340,000 black migrants poured into California. By 1950, African Americans made up 4.7 percent of the state's population; and by 1980, they constituted 7.7 percent.

A significant number of the wartime African American migrants were skilled workers. A survey taken in San Francisco during World War II revealed that the migrant group contained five times as many skilled workers as the national average for African Americans. More than three-quarters of the new migrants worked in industry, and they were nearly evenly divided between skilled and unskilled workers. During the early months of the war, discriminatory hiring practices severely limited black employment. Executive Order 8802, however, and the vigorous activities of Region 12 of the Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC), combined with the booming demand for wartime labor, eventually resulted in the large-scale employment of black workers.

Although many large employers desisted from their most blatant discriminatory practices, the majority of AFL unions were slow to drop their racial barriers. As Charles Wollenberg shows, the International Brotherhood of

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Boilermakers, Iron Shipbuilders and Helpers of America forced African Americans to join segregated auxiliary locals. In 1943, black workers at a Bay Area shipyard protested this practice and refused to pay their dues. The union then Withdrew their work clearances, and the company barred them from their jobs. The FEPC investigated the complaint but did not have the power to make changes. The case was taken to the California Supreme Court. In James v. Marinship (1945), the court declared that segregated unions in a closed shop were unconstitutional and ordered an end to the practice.

Wollenberg's article examines this important episode. He also notes that the 1945 court victory was followed by a series of others. But these decisions came at a time when employment in the shipyards was declining dramatically. Despite the outlawing of discriminatory practices, economic opportunities for African Americans after World War II were very limited.

Nathan I. Huggins, now a distinguished Harvard historian, was one of 4846 black residents of San Francisco in 1940. He was then in junior high school and remembers "how small a community we were. . .. How self-satisfied everyone was, despite discrimination in almost every line of employment, pervasive restrictive covenants, and powerlessness in city politics." Huggins also remembers "how ambivalent everyone was about the wave of blacks from the South, brought to man new jobs in the war industries. The old [black] residents saw the new as crude, rough and boisterous. They lacked the manners and sense of decorum of San Francisco." But the newcomers made good wages and formed what Huggins calls "the basis of black business in the city." Blacks no longer could be ignored, and "complacency disappeared. Racial tensions rose." Huggins notes that many of the old black residents wished the newcomers "would all go back where they came from."^[1] But they stayed and laid the foundations of most black neighborhoods and communities that still exist in the San Francisco region.

The great World War II migration is the most important event in the history of black people in the Bay Area. The region became a new black frontier, the Afro-American population growing from less than 20,000 in 1940 to over 60,000 in 1945. The number of blacks in San Francisco more than quadrupled during the war, while that in Richmond and Vallejo grew by ten times. By 1945, blacks had replaced Asians as the Bay Area's largest non-white minority and the chief target of prejudice and discrimination.^[2]

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In some respects, the huge migration was typical of earlier movements of non-whites to California. Like Asians and Mexicans, wartime blacks came to fill a labor shortage. But while previous minorities came as foreign immigrants and were forced into unskilled, low-paid employment, wartime blacks were American citizens recruited to fill high-wage industrial jobs created by the national emergency. About seventy percent of the employed black newcomers worked in one industry—the shipyards. Blacks made up less than three percent of the region's shipyard labor force in 1942, but that figure rose to seven percent in the following year and to more than ten percent by the end of the war.^[3]

Shipyard work was largely in skilled, unionized crafts. Most Bay Area craft unions traditionally had been "lily-white," excluding both Asians and blacks, but during the war the unions suddenly had to face the possibility of large numbers of non-white members. To admit black workers violated long-standing membership rules and traditions, but to refuse to do so left unions open to charges of the very kind of undemocratic behavior against which America was supposed to be fighting. Moreover, if unions enforced membership restrictions against blacks, they would deprive shipyards of thousands of workers in the midst of a national emergency and regional labor shortage.

In spite of their significance, neither the wartime black migration nor the labor conflicts it engendered have received much historical attention. Recent works on California black history have concentrated on the pre-World War II years, and studies produced during the 1940s naturally lack historical perspective.^[4] The article presented here seeks to redress this scholarly imbalance by concentrating on the wartime struggle between black workers and the Boilermakers union, which resulted in the California Supreme Court's landmark decision in the case of James v. Marinship . The conflict at Marinship was a microcosm of the tensions produced by the great demographic movements of World War II. In ethnic relations, as in so many other areas, the war fundamentally changed American society.

Marinship was one of the "instant" wartime shipyards created by the United States Maritime Commission. The Commission owned the yards but contracted with private companies to build and operate the plants. The first and largest such enterprise in the Bay Area was the giant Kaiser complex in Richmond. W. A. Bechtel Company of San Francisco had previously been involved in several joint business ventures with Kaiser (such as the Boulder Dam project) and had also been contracted to operate Maritime Commission yards, including Calship in southern California.

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On March 2, 1942, the Commission asked Bechtel to establish a new plant on San Francisco Bay. One week later Kenneth Bechtel was in Washington with a proposal for a yard on the Marin County shoreline of Sausalito, just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. On June 27, less than four months after the contract was awarded, Marinship laid its first keel. Initially, the yard produced "liberty ships," cargo vessels also manufactured by Kaiser. In 1943 Marinship shifted to production of prefabricated tankers, and by late 1944 the yard was launching a ship per week. By fall of 1945, Marinship had built ninety-three vessels.^[5]

Bechtel originally estimated that 15,000 workers were needed to keep the yard operating twenty-four hours a day, seven clays a week. In January, 1943, Marinship in fact had about 20,000 employees, and by mid-1944 the workforce had grown to 22,000. Recruiting workers was difficult in the midst of the war with ten million people in the armed forces. Marinship competed for labor with Kaiser and several other Bay Area shipyards and defense contractors. In addition to a few experienced shipbuilders, the company recruited women, teenagers, retired people, "Okies" from rural California, and newcomers from all parts of the country. Included among the industrial migrants were blacks, chiefly from states on the western rim of the South (Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, and Oklahoma). By mid-1943, blacks were by far Marinship's largest minority group, nearly ten percent of all employees in a multi-ethnic workforce which included some Asians and Latin Americans. The company carried out a massive training effort, taking paternalistic pride in the "indoctrination program which taught colored recruits who had never held a responsible job before, as well as those from the so-called underprivileged portions of the country, good work habits."^[6]

The massive influx of war workers created a major housing crisis in the Bay Area. Government restrictions limited construction of new private homes, but public housing alleviated some of the demand. Public projects were hastily erected throughout the region, including Marin City, planned in just three days for a 200-acre site immediately north of the Marinship yard. The project was built by Bechtel with Maritime Commission funds and operated by the Marin County Housing Authority. By the end of 1943, Marin City had a population of 5500 Marinship workers and their families.^[7]

Under the leadership of Miles C. Dempster, Chief of Project Services, the Housing Authority attempted to make Marin City a model community.

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Although it was unincorporated territory under county control, an elected City Council was established to advise county authorities. The council published a weekly newspaper, the Marin Citizen , and cooperated with USO and the Travelers Aid organization to provide social services. Dempster was proud of his agency's nondiscrimination policy, for unlike other Bay Area housing projects, Marin City rented accommodations on a first-come-first-served basis without regard to race. Dempster admitted that this sometimes led to inter-racial conflict and complaints from "prejudiced whites." He responded to the complaints by pointing out that "these black men are Americans. They are needed just as you are—to build ships." The City Council had both black and white members, and, according to Dempster, "gradually the color prejudices lost ground." The Christian Science Monitor reported that Marin City proved that "white people and Negroes can live side by side—and get along." But a former Housing Authority official admitted that if the white majority were given the power to eject blacks from the project, they probably would do so.^[8]

The bulk of Marinship workers were unable to get Marin City or other Marin County accommodations and so commuted to the yard by car, bus, or ferry from San Francisco.^[9] Private housing was tight for everybody, but particularly for blacks. Many Bay Area neighborhoods had restrictive covenants attached to deeds which prohibited sale or rental of homes to minorities. Residents and real estate firms practiced less formal but equally effective tactics to keep other neighborhoods and communities all-white. As a result, blacks unable to obtain public housing were crowded into those few areas that traditionally were open to minority residents.

Such an area was San Francisco's Fillmore District, home of most black Marinship workers. Before 1942, the Fillmore had a few hundred black families scattered throughout an essentially multi-ethnic, working-class neighborhood. Shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, several thousand residents of the Fillmore's "Japantown" were relocated to government camps by presidential order, and this opened up inexpensive housing just as the influx of black workers began. Even so, there was not enough space available. By 1943 about 9000 blacks were crowded into an area previously occupied by 5000 Japanese Americans, and city health officials classified over fifty-five percent of black housing in the Fillmore as substandard.^[10] In 1945 the Fillmore was still a multi-ethnic neighborhood, but Lester Granger of the National Urban League warned it could become "another Harlem." Granger explained that San Franciscans were adopting "the social stereotypes of the East, and they want Negroes to stay in the Fillmore."^[11]

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While there were no legal barriers to housing discrimination, federal defense contracts did prohibit job discrimination on the basis of race, religion, and national origin. The Kaiser yards initially attempted to hire only whites in skilled trades, but protests from C. L. Dellums, vice president of the Sleeping Car Porters union, and other local black leaders forced the company to reverse that policy. By the time Marinship began hiring in 1942, blacks were being recruited at all Bay Area yards. In mid-1943 the region faced a labor shortage of 50,000 people, and any able-bodied man or woman, white or black, could get a shipyard job. Blacks and women advanced rapidly to journeyman status in welding and other trades but received few promotions to supervisory positions. Within particular job categories, workers received equal pay and benefits, regardless of race or sex.^[12]

Bay Area shipyard workers usually labored together peacefully and efficiently, but racist (and sexist) attitudes were certainly present in the yards. Katherine Archibald, a Berkeley student who was employed at the Moore Company in Oakland, believed most of her white co-workers shared a "race hatred that was basic." When she tried to explain to a woman from Oklahoma that prejudice against blacks was similar to the prevalent "anti-Okie" feeling, the woman accused Archibald of inferring that Oklahomans were "no better than a nigger." Another worker responded to Archibald's plea for tolerance with the comment, "Well a nigger may be as good as you are, but sure ain't as good as me." But Archibald noted that few whites made such statements directly to blacks. A white welder explained, "if you call him that ['nigger'], he's liable as not to pick up a piece of pipe and break your head with it." According to Katherine Archibald, such fears usually kept an effective, if uneasy, racial peace at Bay Area shipyards.^[13]

If Archibald was right about the prejudices of a majority of her white coworkers, the chief shipyard union, the International Brotherhood of Boiler-makers, Iron Shipbuilders and Helpers of America, accurately reflected the views of most its members. The Boilermakers represented about seventy percent of the workers at Bay Area shipyards under terms of a Master Agreement between Pacific Coast shipbuilders and the AFL Metal Trades Council. The agreement established a closed shop, specifying that "all workers . . . shall be required to present a clearance card from the appropriate union before being hired." If existing union members could not be found for job openings, new workers could be hired but were still required "to secure a clearance card . . . before starting work."^[14] The Boilermakers, then, had used the wartime labor shortage to achieve one of the most important union goals: control of job access. But wartime conditions had also

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created a multi-ethnic workforce that directly threatened the union's long tradition of white-only membership.

The Boilermakers' racial policy was shared by many, though not all, AFL craft unions. In the Bay Area, the union movement had a heritage of anti-Asian activity, and many unions also discriminated against blacks. In 1910 San Francisco black leaders persuaded a bare majority of the city's labor council to recommend that unions end restrictions against black membership, but little effort was made to enforce the resolution. The fact that employers sometimes used blacks as strikebreakers hardly promoted the cause of racial tolerance. Nevertheless, some AFL affiliates, including the Shipyard Laborers Union representing unskilled maintenance and construction workers at the yards, had long championed nondiscriminatory membership policies. In the 1930s, the new CIO unions, particularly the Longshoremen, not only had black members, but also actively supported civil rights causes in the Bay Area and elsewhere.^[15]

The Boilermakers modified their national racial policies in 1937. Prior to that, blacks had been totally banned from membership, but the union's 1937 convention authorized the establishment of all-black "auxiliaries." As the term implies, the auxiliaries were not full union locals, and their members did not have full membership rights. Instead, the new structures were subordinate to regular, white locals which controlled auxiliary policies and treasuries. Auxiliaries had no independent grievance procedures, nor could they hire their own business agents. Auxiliary members had no vote on local union matters and no representation at national conventions. They also received smaller union insurance benefits than white members.^[16]

Bay Area Boilermaker locals avoided direct confrontations over the issue of auxiliary membership during the first year of the war simply by issuing clearances to black shipyard workers without requiring them to join the union or pay dues. But by February, 1943, the black segment of the workforce was too large to ignore. East Bay locals formed auxiliaries and required blacks to join and pay dues equal to those paid by whites as a condition of employment. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People filed a complaint against this policy with the National Labor Relations Board, but while the NLRB criticized the auxiliary membership status, it did not ban it outright. Meanwhile, most black workers at Kaiser and other East Bay yards apparently paid their auxiliary dues. According to the NAACP magazine Crisis , the black worker "knew jim crow, segregation and second-class citizenship when he saw it," but he paid his

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dues anyway, in "much the same manner as he took a rear seat on a bus in Memphis. . .. He regarded the payments as a necessary bribe for the privilege of working at a job that paid more than he ever dreamed."^[17]

On the west side of the bay, Boilermakers Local 6, with jurisdiction over the Bethlehem and Western Pipe yards in San Francisco as well as Marin-ship in Sausalito, chartered Auxiliary A-41 on August 14, 1943. The local announced that henceforth black workers must join and pay dues to the auxiliary in order to receive their union work clearance.^[18] The announcement provoked organized opposition by the San Francisco Committee Against Segregation and Discrimination, made up of several local blacks and led by Joseph James. James, in his early thirties at the time, grew up on the east coast, studied music at Boston University, and pursued a promising singing career in New York. He came to San Francisco in 1939 to appear in the "Swing Mikado" at the Treasure Island Exposition and settled in the Fillmore after the fair closed. He was hired at Marinship in 1942, and in two months advanced from welder's helper to journeyman, normally a six month process. By mid-1943 James was a member of a "flying squad" of expert welders used for special jobs. He was also an active member of the NAACP, a recognized black spokesman at the yard, and, with all this, still managed to keep up his singing career. His performances were a staple at Marinship launchings and ceremonies.^[19]

On August 21, 1943, just a week after the establishment of Auxiliary A-41, the company employee magazine, the Marin-er , devoted much of its issue to a discussion of race relations at Marinship. Management obviously was concerned about racial tensions, particularly following major race riots in Detroit, Los Angeles, and other American cities earlier that summer. The special issue of the magazine was prepared with the assistance of a "Negro Advisory Board" headed by Joe James. James also wrote the lead article, "Marinship Negroes Speak to Their Fellow Workers," calling on his readers "to turn our hatred, instead of against each other, against the forces of fascism." An editorial condemned discrimination and proclaimed that the war was being fought "to prove for all time the dignity and rights of the individual man regardless of race, creed or color."^[20]

Marinship soon found itself in the middle of a struggle to establish those very principles in the Boilermakers union. After three months, at least half of the approximately 1100 blacks in jobs under Boilermaker jurisdiction at Marinship still refused to join Auxiliary A-41. On November 24, 1943, the union ordered management to fire 430 black workers unless they

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paid their auxiliary dues in twenty-four hours and warned an additional 150 workers that they soon faced similar treatment.^[21] That evening about 350 people met in San Francisco under the aegis of the Committee Against Segregation and Discrimination to decide on an appropriate response. Joe James told the meeting that their fight was not to destroy the Boilermakers but to strengthen the union by insisting that blacks be granted full and equal membership rights. C. L. Dellums reiterated the point, and the participants voted unanimously to continue boycotting the auxiliary.^[22]

On Friday, November 26, about thirty blacks on the afternoon shift were refused permission to work, the company explaining that the union had withdrawn their work clearances. Throughout the ensuing controversy, Marinship insisted it was simply an innocent bystander, required to enforce its collective bargaining contract in a dispute between black workers and the union. However, by agreeing to dismiss blacks, the company accepted the legality of the union action. Legalisms aside, Marinship must have feared that resisting the Boilermakers' wishes might result in a strike that would interrupt production.

More workers were barred at the beginning of the graveyard shift on November 26, and by Saturday morning, November 27, hundreds of black men and women had gathered at Gate 3 of the yard to protest the lay-offs. Eventually, the crowd grew to about 800 and was described by the San Rafael Daily Independent as "Marin's greatest labor demonstration and most critical situation to arise since the San Francisco 'general strike' in the summer of 1934." Sheriff's deputies and Highway Patrolmen arrived with nightsticks and tear gas, "ready for any emergency." But two black deputies from Marin City assured the County Sheriff they could keep order, and, reported the Independent , they "succeeded admirably." Joe James and three other black committee members, Preston Stallinger, Edward Anderson, and Eugene Small, met with company officials and then addressed the crowd with divided counsel. James, Stallinger, and Anderson urged those who still had union clearance to return to their jobs while continuing to boycott the auxiliary. But Small called on blacks "to stand pat and not return to work" until they had won full union membership.^[23]

How many workers took Small's advice is a matter of dispute. The San Francisco Examiner reported that 1500 walked off their jobs, but that figure is larger than the total number of Marinship blacks in jobs under Boiler-maker jurisdiction. The American Labor Citizen , voice of the Bay Area Metal Trades Council, assured its readers that the trouble was caused by a handful of malcontents and that a "vast majority of Negro workers" remained on the job. Whatever the number of strikers, it concerned Admiral

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Emory S. Land of the Maritime Commission. Initially, Land urged workers to join the auxiliary under protest, but when this plea failed, the admiral asked the company to suspend the lay-offs. California Attorney General Robert Kenny made a similar request, pointing out that if ship production slowed, "more American boys are going to die, both white American boys and black American boys."^[24] However, the company again insisted that under its collective bargaining agreement it was obligated to bar workers without union clearance.

Local 6 business agent Ed Rainbow argued that the closed shop agreement was recognized by the federal government and that blacks understood Boilermaker policy when they took shipyard jobs. The Labor Citizen charged that black workers who "laid down their tools" had caused all the trouble, and the paper saw nothing wrong with blacks joining auxiliaries "composed of their own people." Both Rainbow and the Metal Trades organ claimed that Local 6 had no choice in the matter, since it was simply following national union policy.^[25] In at least one previous instance, however, Rainbow had bent national rules. In 1942 he refused clearance for six white woman welders at Marinship, citing male-only provisions of the Boilermaker constitution. One woman became "very impolite and abrupt," and Rainbow eventually reconsidered. Thousands of white women were later accepted as full Local 6 members, and the woman who had protested so vociferously became a union shop steward. Rainbow was quoted saying he would "rather get hit by a baseball bat than to become embroiled with a pack of women who wanted to work."^[26]

The business agent probably soon had similar feelings about Joe James and his supporters. By Sunday, November 28, 160 blacks, including James, lost their work clearances, and that evening about 1000 people attended a committee meeting in a Fillmore District church. Eugene Small again called for a labor boycott, telling the Independent that blacks were considering taking jobs "not involving union membership." But James and other leaders argued the fight was against segregation, not trade unions. Eventually, the meeting approved legal action. The next morning, committee attorneys filed suit in Federal District Court on behalf of James and seventeen other black workers, asking reinstatement by Marinship and $115,000 damages from the Boilermakers. Judge Paul St. Sure issued a temporary restraining order, suspending the lay-offs pending formal hearing of the suit.^[27]

The company announced it would halt further lay-offs but refused to re-hire the 160 idle workers until they received union clearance. It took another court order to achieve this, and even then, Local 6 held out until Friday, December 3. On that morning, "a crowd of waiting Negro workers"

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were at union headquarters in San Francisco. They gathered "before the grilled windows where permits are issued," and finally, after about four hours, "the little white slips of paper started to come through." "Now we can get back to work," Joe James announced, and during the weekend, committee sound trucks toured the Fillmore and Marin City urging blacks to return to their jobs.^[28]

The formal hearing occurred on December 12 in a courtroom crowded with black spectators. Committee attorneys George Anderson and Herbert Ressner were accompanied by NAACP Chief Counsel Thurgood Marshall and Bartley Crum of the National Lawyers Guild. Anderson argued that if blacks could be forced into separate auxiliaries, so could American Indians like Ed Rainbow, Irish Americans (Judge Michael Roche) or Armenian Americans (defense attorney Charles Janigian). But the union refused to respond to this point, contending instead that federal courts had no jurisdiction and that the case should be dismissed. Judge Roche referred the dismissal motion to a three-judge panel, and until the panel made its decision, the temporary restraining order remained in force. On January 6, 1944, the judges announced they were granting the union's motion and dismissing the case. "The plaintiff's action," the court explained, "does not arise out of the federal constitution or any federal statutes."^[29]

The dismissal automatically ended the restraining order, and Local 6 announced it would withdraw union clearance for workers who had not paid auxiliary dues by Friday, January 14. But on that day committee attorneys returned to court, this time before Marin Superior Judge Edward I. Butler of San Rafael. The committee now based its suit on state rather than federal law, and Judge Butler issued another temporary order restraining the lay-offs. The order was served just fifteen minutes before a work shift was to change at Marinship. The company already had removed black workers' time cards from the rack, but clerks hurriedly replaced the cards, and the shift changed without incident.^[30]

While the case was being argued in court, the Boilermakers' auxiliary policy also was being investigated by the President's Fair Employment Practices Commission. President Roosevelt established FEPC in the summer of 1941 in response to a plan by a group of prominent blacks, led by Sleeping Car Porters Union head A. Philip Randolph, to stage a massive march on Washington to protest discrimination in defense employment and the federal government. Only after Roosevelt agreed to form a federal commission to monitor enforcement of non-discrimination policies in federal contracts

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and government civil service did Randolph call off the march. The President's order allowed FEPC to hold hearings, write reports, and issue orders and recommendations. But the commission had no independent authority to punish wrong-doers either by criminal, civil, or administrative penalties or by canceling contracts.^[31]

In mid-November, 1943, the commission held hearings in Portland and Los Angeles to investigate complaints about Boilermaker auxiliaries by black workers in Pacific Northwest and southern California shipyards. Yard operators, including Kaiser and Bechtel, argued they were caught in the middle of a fight between blacks and the union. The Boilermakers simply refused to testify before the commission. During the Marinship strike later that month, FEPC Chairman Malcolm Ross asked union and management to delay lay-offs until the commission issued its report. Nothing came of Ross's request, and on December 14, 1943, FEPC announced a decision that was a blow to the union cause. The Boilermakers were ordered to "eliminate all membership practices which discriminate against workers because of race or color," and five employers, including Bechtel's Calship, were prohibited from enforcing closed shop provisions which contributed to such discrimination. However, the employers appealed the decision, and the appeal procedure, necessitating new briefs and hearings, took a year to complete. In the meantime, the commission suspended its order.^[32]

Malcolm Ross hoped he could persuade the Boilermakers to change their membership policies at the union's International Convention, scheduled for the end of January, 1944, in Kansas City. This also was the hope of those attending a mass meeting in Oakland on January 23. C. L. Dellums, Joe James, and committee attorney George Anderson were among the speakers at the Oakland gathering. Business agents for the Stage Riggers and Pile Drivers described their unions' open membership rules, and Ray Stewart, a white Boilermaker, contended that "abolishing auxiliaries will benefit the union as much as the Negro." Apparently, Stewart spoke for at least some of his white co-workers. East Bay Boilermakers Local 681 had passed a resolution requesting the convention to allow full membership "without regard to race, color, creed, national origin or sex." Of six thousand signatures gathered at Bay Area shipyards in support of the resolution, about seventy-five percent came from white workers.^[33]

The convention received a similar appeal from twenty-two prominent black citizens. AFL President William Green criticized job discrimination in general terms from the convention floor, and delegates heard much the same

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thing from President Roosevelt via telegram.^[34] But incoming Boilermaker President Charles MacGowan already had made his position clear. "One of the greatest causes contributing to the failure of the Negro to advance farther," MacGowan explained, "is the professional Negro."^[35] MacGowan had invited Malcolm Ross to the convention, and the FEPC chairman described his experiences in Kansas City with something less than enthusiasm: "So it happened that a bureaucrat, minced up into little pieces, was served during a several hour ceremony to the International officers and heads of lodges as a hors d'oeuvre to whet appetites for the main racial dish."^[36]

Much the same thing happened to Local 681's resolution. In the end, the convention liberalized membership rules only to the extent that auxiliaries were allowed to elect delegates to future conventions and to local metal trades councils. In addition, blacks henceforth would receive equal union insurance benefits. But auxiliaries remained something less than full union locals and blacks something less than full union members.^[37] The convention did break precedent by allowing a black auxiliary leader, William Smith from Richmond, to address the delegates. Smith welcomed the rule changes and promised whites "we will do our best to be worthy of your trust." That statement must have reinforced President MacGowan's conviction that the auxiliary problem was "not within the membership but with professional agitation attempting to make a cause where none exists."^[38]

This was not the view of Judge Butler of the Marin Superior Court. On February 17, 1944, Butler announced his decision in what now was known as the case of James v. Marinship . Butler ruled that the Boilermakers' policy of "discriminating against and segregating Negroes into auxiliaries is contrary to public policy of the state of California," and he prohibited the union from requiring blacks to join auxiliaries as a condition of employment. The judge also barred Marinship from laying off workers who refused to pay auxiliary dues. As far as Butler was concerned, if the Boiler-makers wished to retain closed shop privileges, they must "admit Negroes as members on the same terms and conditions as white persons."^[39]

Both union and management appealed this decision to the California Supreme Court, and it took nearly a year for the state's highest court to decide the case. In the meantime, the Boilermakers did not accept blacks as full members, but the union could not require auxiliary membership as a condition of employment at Marinship. Judge Butlet's decision did not apply to other yards, but during 1944, cases similar to the Marinship suit were brought in various Bay Area courts. Continued attempts by FEPC Chairman Ross to achieve a voluntary settlement failed, so the matter was

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not resolved until the State Supreme Court announced its final decision on January 2, 1945.

The court's unanimous opinion, written by Chief Justice Phil Gibson, was a decisive defeat for the Boilermakers. The union had argued that it was not guilty of discrimination, since blacks were paid equal wages and had equal, though separate, status in auxiliaries. The justices did not dispute the contention of equal wages, but found that it was "readily apparent that the membership offered to Negroes is discriminatory and unequal." The union also contended the case was moot because various federal agencies, particularly the FEPC, were investigating the matter. The court responded that since the commission's powers were limited, "it is not a complete or adequate administrative remedy."^[40]

The Supreme Court agreed with Judge Butler that the auxiliary practice violated the California statute that held racial discrimination "contrary to public policy." The union had argued that this statute applied only to discrimination in public places and services, not to voluntary associations such as labor organizations. But Gibson concluded that when such an organization achieves a closed shop contract controlling access to labor, it affects an individual's "fundamental right to work for a living" and thus the union occupies a "quasi-public position." The court explained that it was not outlawing the concept of closed shop per se , but that "an arbitrarily closed union is incompatible with a closed shop."^[41]

The court also refused to let management off the hook. Marinship asserted that it was simply enforcing terms of a federally approved labor contract and could not be held responsible for union discrimination. But Justice Gibson pointed out that the company had "full knowledge of the dispute and at least indirectly assisted the union in carrying out discrimination." By the same token, Local 6 could not argue that it only enforced national union policies over which it had no control. "The true rule is, of course, that the agent is liable for his acts."^[42]

The San Francisco Chronicle hailed the decision as confirmation of the principle of "no representation, no dues." The Marin Citizen said the ruling "should be welcomed by every believer in genuine trade unionism," while the Communist People's World emphasized that the court had outlawed discrimination, not the closed shop. Joe James made the same point, contending that his supporters had waged the battle "strictly on a pro-union basis." By this time, James had been elected president of the San

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Francisco NAACP branch and proclaimed that the organization was "in the forefront of every fight against open shop proposals."^[43]

James also thanked white workers who had supported his cause. He explained that both the NAACP and the Committee Against Segregation and Discrimination were inter-racial groups, and that many whites had signed petitions, donated money, and discussed the issues with their fellow workers. At Moore shipyard, Katherine Archibald reported that the union's initial 1943 victory in federal court "aroused the rejoicing of several of my [white] colleagues." But the final decision of the State Supreme Court in 1945 gave blacks "status as a people in the eyes of their white companions." There might be mutterings of discontent, "but the decision was respected and the conviction grew that the law at least . . . was on the side of the black man." One white worker conceded, "I guess we can't keep hold of all the jobs."^[44]

A few days before the court decision was announced, the FEPC released its final ruling on the appeals of the five shipyard cases in southern California and the Pacific Northwest. As expected, the commission reaffirmed its order of a year earlier that black workers could not be fired or denied employment for refusing to pay auxiliary dues. During the trial of the James case, commission chairman Ross found it ironic that union and management argued that the case was moot since it was being handled by FEPC. This, said Ross, was "a solemn plea, coming from parties who had informed FEPC that it had no authority and could go jump in the lake." Ross believed the court decision "went far beyond" the commission ruling and "knocked the pins from under the defense of the shipyards and the Boilermakers."^[45]

The union announced it would obey the decision and abolish its California auxiliaries. But in their place, the Boilermakers intended to form "separate but equal" local lodges. Blacks would be given full membership rights but would be required to join all-black locals. However, black Boilermakers could transfer only to black locals, thus limiting their job mobility within the union. Whether this would have passed the judicial test will never be known, since the union made serious efforts to establish "separate but equal" locals for only a short time. A 1948 study found that all Boilermaker lodges in the Bay Area were racially integrated.^[46]

James v. Marinship , then, produced important changes in Boilermaker membership practices. Ironically, very few blacks were ultimately able to take advantage of that fact. In 1944, Local 6 had 36,000 members, including about 3000 blacks theoretically in segregated auxiliaries. In 1948, the

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local was racially integrated but had only 1800 members of whom just 150 were black.^[47] Even by the time of the Supreme Court decision, work was declining in Bay Area shipyards. The Allies clearly were winning the war, and the government began cutting back contracts. Between January, 1944, and January, 1945, total Bay Area shipyard employment fell from about 240,000 to 200,000. Black employment in the yards continued to increase slightly during that year (from 24,000 to 26,000), but after January, 1945, the black workforce also rapidly declined. It was 20,000 in July, 12,000 in September, and an "insignificant number" by mid-1946.^[48]

At Marinship total employment in April, 1945, was about half of what it had been a year before. In May, Marin City housing was opened to non-Marinship workers for the first time. Company fortunes seemed to improve with the signing of new contracts to build barges for the invasion of Japan, but the Japanese surrender in August ended work on that project. The Maritime Commission asked Bechtel to continue running the yard, but the company refused, explaining that in peacetime it would not operate a government enterprise "in competition with privately-owned plants." Bechtel also declined to buy the yard, so on May 16, 1946, Marinship formally closed. Most significant work had ended several months earlier.^[49]

The meaning of the decline in Bay Area shipbuilding for the black workforce is graphically described in Cy Record's story, "Willie Stokes at the Golden Gate," published in 1949. Willie came to the Bay Area from Arkansas during the war and got a job as a welder at Kaiser, ultimately earning $10 a day. After the war, he was laid off, and by June 1946 was fortunate to be making $6.40 a day as an unskilled laborer. A year later he was unemployed. Stokes found it "funny almost. One day you are an essential worker in a vital industry (they said that in speeches every time they launched a ship) and the next you were a surplus unskilled laborer, essential to no one." One sympathetic employer explained, "in most cases your wartime experiences will mean very little. During the war, wage costs weren't important and the system of classification by skills was all out of whack . . . the government was footing the bill." Now businesses were hiring only workers with high school diplomas, a credential Willie Stokes did not possess. In fact, a 1950 study found that only about twenty percent of black wartime migrants to the Bay Area over twenty-five years old had graduated from high school; half had not even finished the eighth grade.^[50]

It was a classic case of "last hired, first fired." During the war, about seventy-five percent of black heads of households in San Francisco were classified as skilled industrial workers, the great majority in the shipyards. By 1948 only about twenty-five percent of black workers were still in

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industrial jobs, while over half were employed as unskilled laborers or service workers. More than fifteen percent of Bay Area black men were unemployed in 1948, nearly three times the state-wide rate for all persons. Only in government and clerical jobs had blacks managed to hold their wartime vocational gains, but the number of people in these categories was small. The United States Department of Employment noted that "as long as Negroes are commonly regarded as marginal labor, they will suffer very heavy unemployment when sufficient white labor is available."^[51]

In this situation, it was hardly surprising that some blacks left the Bay Area after the war, including Joe James, who returned to New York to pursue his singing career. Yet an estimated eighty-five percent of the wartime migrants stayed, their numbers increased by their newborn children and by new, post-war migrations from the South. By 1950 San Francisco's black population had grown to over 40,000, by 1960 to nearly 75,000. As Lester Granger had warned, much of the Fillmore became a black "ghetto," as did Marin City, surrounded by some of the most prosperous white suburbs in America.^[52]

Back in 1945 Joe James believed he had identified a pattern in California's treatment of minority migrants: "we need them, we use them, when we are through with them, we banish them."^[53] Wartime blacks were needed and used, but not banished. Thousands of Willie Stokeses still live in the Bay Area, as do their children and grandchildren. They, along with growing numbers of Latinos and Asians, may soon give California a "Third World" population majority. In San Francisco many of the old, white craft unions have declined along with the industries they serve. The largest union in the city today is the Hotel and Restaurant Workers, and its members are mostly of Asian, Afro-American, and Latin American origin.

The problems of black poverty, unemployment, and lack of economic opportunity identified after World War II have become chronic for a large portion of the region's non-white population. Of course, this situation is by no means unique to the Bay Area. But the area's experience is unusual in that the beginnings of its large black population are so directly tied to the short-term boom in a single industry. As long as the wartime shipyards operated at or near capacity, blacks had access to well-paying jobs. In the midst of the national emergency and regional labor shortage, they even won the legal principle of equal membership in exclusive craft unions. But the precipitous decline of the shipyards after the war was an economic disaster from which the region's black population has never

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fully recovered. Even the protests, civil rights legislation, and anti-poverty measures of the 1960s did not produce economic opportunity comparable to World War II.

Nathan I. Huggins is correct when he says that wartime migration created the Bay Area's first black bourgeoisie, for only with the migration was there enough population to support black lawyers, doctors, teachers, and entrepreneurs. But Douglas Daniels makes the equally important point that the war also created the region's first black proletariat.^[54] During the 1940s, these workers won battles that established important legal principles, but they have yet to win an equitable share of the region's wealth and power.

2
WORKERS AND GROUP IDENTITY

3
Dishing It Out
Waitresses and the Making of Their Unions in San Francisco, 1900-1941

Dorothy Sue Cobble

Editor's Introduction

Choosing Separatism

Victories on the Political Front

The Fruits of Solidarity

Tactics: Reason, Humor, and Muscle

The Compromise of Collective Bargaining

Further Reading

4
Okies and the Politics of Plain-Folk Americanism

James N. Gregory

Editor's Introduction

A Framework of Understandings

Cult of Toughness

A Shifting Populism

Labor's Dilemma

True Americanism

Native Sons

Further Reading

5
James v. Marinship
Trouble on the New Black Frontier

Charles Wollenberg

Editor's Introduction

Further Reading

2 WORKERS AND GROUP IDENTITY

3 Dishing It Out Waitresses and the Making of Their Unions in San Francisco, 1900-1941

Dorothy Sue Cobble

Editor's Introduction

Choosing Separatism

Victories on the Political Front

The Fruits of Solidarity

Tactics: Reason, Humor, and Muscle

The Compromise of Collective Bargaining

Further Reading

4 Okies and the Politics of Plain-Folk Americanism

James N. Gregory

Editor's Introduction

A Framework of Understandings

Cult of Toughness

A Shifting Populism

Labor's Dilemma

True Americanism

Native Sons

Further Reading

5 James v. Marinship Trouble on the New Black Frontier

Charles Wollenberg

Editor's Introduction

Further Reading

2
WORKERS AND GROUP IDENTITY

3
Dishing It Out
Waitresses and the Making of Their Unions in San Francisco, 1900-1941

4
Okies and the Politics of Plain-Folk Americanism

5
James v. Marinship
Trouble on the New Black Frontier