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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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,
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
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.