5
WORKERS IN POST—WORLD WAR II CALIFORNIA

13
Cesar Chavez and the Unionization of California Farmworkers

Cletus E. Daniel

Editor's Introduction

As the seemingly inexorable expansion of California agriculture progressed, its labor needs were met during World War II by the bracero program and after World War II by the program's successor, Public Law 78. In its peak year, 1957, the bracero program imported 192,000 Mexican workers. Along with Chicanos, the braceros soon became the most important component of the California agricultural work force after World War II.

Theoretically, the bracero program, at the insistence of the Mexican government, provided standard contracts covering wages, hours, transportation, housing, and working conditions. The American government guaranteed the provision of emergency medical care, workmen's compensation, and disability and death benefits. In reality, many of these provisions were never enforced, and it soon became clear that the bracero system perpetuated the tragic poverty of California's migratory laborers. Hispanic labor was used mainly on large farms, where growers regarded the workers as cheap and docile laborers, born to the hardship of agricultural work. The unlimited pool of labor available to the growers enabled them to keep wages down. Thus, between 1950 and 1960, the earnings of three million Mexican nationals employed in 275 important crop areas were effectively frozen; average annual wages in fact declined slightly, from $1,680 in 1950 to $1,666 in 1959.

In the 1930s and the 1940s, the Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union (CAWIU), the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA), and the National Farm Labor Union had all valiantly attempted to organize California's farmworkers. For many reasons—not the least of which was the bracero program itself,

which was often used to import strikebreakers—these efforts eventually failed. In 1959, the AFL-CIO made another effort to organize farm-workers when it launched the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC).

The movement to organize California farmworkers during the 1960s came from more grassroots sources. No one played a more integral role than Cesar Chavez. In this article, Cletus Daniel evaluates the crucial role played by Chavez in the eventual founding of the United Farm Workers (UFW) and the struggle of the UFW to gain recognition and a strong foothold in California.

Daniel provides an interesting account of Chavez's social background, early influences, and political involvement before he began organizing farmworkers. Chavez founded the National Farm Workers Association in 1962. Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, he and the UFW engaged in a bitter struggle with California agribusiness and the Teamsters. Chavez's nonviolent tactics and skillful political lobbying paid off when California's Agricultural Labor Relations Act was passed in 1975. Daniel concludes by noting the decline of the UFW in the late 1980s, attributing this in part to flaws in Chavez's leadership. Wherever the blame lies, when Cesar Chavez died in 1993, a union that once had had perhaps fifty thousand members had been severely reduced in numbers, in the face of a decline in the wages and working conditions of most farmworkers during the 1980s and early 1990s.

It was, Cesar Chavez later wrote, "the strangest meeting in the history of California agriculture." Speaking by telephone from his cluttered headquarters in La Paz to Jerry Brown, the new governor of California, Chavez had been asked to repeat for the benefit of farm employers crowded into Brown's Sacramento office the farmworker leader's acceptance of a farm labor bill to which they had already assented. And as the employers heard Chavez's voice repeating the statement of acceptance he had just made to the governor, they broke into wide smiles and spontaneous applause.

That representatives of the most powerful special interest group in California history should have thus expressed their delight at the prospect of realizing still another of their legislative goals does not account for Chavez's assertion of the meeting's strange character. These were, after

all, men long accustomed to having their way in matters of farm labor legislation. What was strange about that meeting on May 5, 1975, was that the state's leading farm employers should have derived such apparent relief and satisfaction from hearing the president of the United Farm Workers of America, AFL-CIO, agree to a legislative proposal designed to afford farmworkers an opportunity to escape their historic powerlessness through unionism and collective bargaining.

Beyond investing the state's farmworkers with rights that those who labored for wages on the land had always been denied, the passage of California's Agricultural Labor Relations Act (ALRA) was a seismic event, one that shattered the foundation upon which rural class relations had rested for a century and more. For the state's agribusinessmen, whose tradition it had been to rule the bounteous fields and orchards of California with a degree of authority and control more appropriate to potentates than mere employers, supporting the ALRA was less an act of culpable treason against their collective heritage than one of grudging resignation in the face of a suddenly irrelevant past and an apparently inescapable future. For the state's farmworkers, whose involuntary custom it had always been to surrender themselves to a system of industrialized farming that made a captive peasantry of them, the new law made possible what only the boldest among them had dared to imagine: a role equal to the employer's in determining terms and conditions of employment. Yet if the ALRA's enactment was a victory of unprecedented dimensions for California farm-workers as a class, it was a still greater personal triumph for Cesar Chavez.

More than any other labor leader of his time, and perhaps in the whole history of American labor, Cesar Chavez leads a union that is an extension of his own values, experience, and personality. This singular unity of man and movement has found its most forceful and enduring expression in the unprecedented economic and political power that has accrued to the membership of the United Farm Workers (UFW) under Chavez's intense and unrelenting tutelage. Indeed, since 1965, when Chavez led his then small following into a bitter struggle against grape growers around the lower San Joaquin valley town of Delano, the UFW has, despite the many crises that have punctuated its brief but turbulent career, compiled a record of achievement that rivals the accomplishments of the most formidable industrial unions of the 1930s.

While this personal domination may well be the essential source of the UFW's extraordinary success, it has also posed risks for the union. For just as Chavez's strengths manifest themselves in the character of his leadership, so, too, must his weaknesses. Certainly the UFW's somewhat confused

sense of its transcending mission—whether to be a trade union or a social movement; whether to focus on narrow economic gains or to pursue broader political goals—reflects in some degree Chavez's personal ambivalence toward both the ultimate purpose of worker organization and the fundamental objective of his own prolonged activism.

Had his adult life followed the pattern of his early youth, Cesar Chavez need not have concerned himself with the task of liberating California farmworkers from an exploitive labor system that had entombed a succession of Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Mexican, and other non-Anglo immigrants for more than a hundred years. Born on March 31, 1927, the second child of Librado and Juana Chavez, Cesar Estrada Chavez started his life sharing little beyond language and a diffuse ethnic heritage with the Chicano—Mexican and Mexican-American—workers who constitute nearly the entire membership of the United Farm Workers of America. Named after his paternal grandfather Cesario, who had homesteaded the family's small farm in the north Gila River valley near Yuma three years before Arizona attained statehood, Chavez enjoyed during his youth the kind of close and stable family life that farmworkers caught in the relentless currents of the western migrant stream longed for but rarely attained. And although farming on a small scale afforded few material rewards even as it demanded hard and unending physical labor, it fostered in Chavez an appreciation of independence and personal sovereignty that helps to account for the special force and steadfastness of his later rebellion against the oppressive dependence into which workers descended when they joined the ranks of California's agricultural labor force.

It is more than a little ironic that until 1939, when unpaid taxes put the family's farm on the auction block, Chavez could have more reasonably aspired to a future as a landowner than as a farmworker. "If we had stayed there," he later said of the family's farm, "possibly I would have been a grower. God writes in exceedingly crooked lines."

The full significance of the family's eviction from the rambling adobe ranch house that had provided not only shelter but also a sense of place and social perspective was not at once apparent to an eleven-year-old. The deeper meaning of the family's loss was something that accumulated in Chavez's mind only as his subsequent personal experience in the migrant stream disclosed the full spectrum of emotional and material hardship attending a life set adrift from the roots that had nurtured it. At age eleven the sight of a bulldozer effortlessly destroying in a few minutes what the family had struggled over nearly three generations to build was meaning enough. The land's new owner, an Anglo grower impatient to

claim his prize, dispatched the bulldozer that became for Chavez a graphic and enduring symbol of the power that the "haves" employ against the "have-nots" in industrialized agriculture. "It was a monstrous thing," he recalled: "Its motor blotted out the sound of crickets and bullfrogs and the buzzing of the flies. As the tractor moved along, it tore up the soil, leveling it, and destroyed the trees, pushing them over like they were nothing. . .. And each tree, of course, means quite a bit to you when you're young. They are a part of you. We grew up there, saw them every day, and they were alive, they were friends. When we saw the bulldozer just uprooting those trees, it was tearing at us too."

The experience of the Chavez family fell into that category of minor tragedy whose cumulative influence lent an aura of catastrophe to the greater part of the depression decade. The scene became sickeningly familiar in the 1930s: a beleaguered farm family bidding a poignant farewell to a failed past; setting out for California with little enthusiasm and even less money toward a future that usually had nothing but desperation to commend it.

"When we were pushed off our land," Chavez said, "all we could take with us was what we could jam into the old Studebaker or pile on its roof and fenders, mostly clothes and bedding. . .. I realized something was happening because my mother was crying, but I didn't realize the import of it at the time. When we left the farm, our whole life was upset, turned upside down. We had been part of a very stable community, and we were about to become migratory workers."

Yet if Chavez's experience was in some ways similar to that of the dispossessed dustbowl migrant whose pilgrimage to California was also less an act of hope than of despair, it was fundamentally unlike that of even the most destitute Anglo—John Steinbeck's generic "Okie"—because of virulent racial attitudes among the state's white majority that tended to define all persons "of color" as unequal. For the Chavez family, whose standing as landowners in a region populated by people mainly like themselves had insulated them from many of the meanest forms of racism, following the crops in California as undifferentiated members of a brown-skinned peasantry afforded an unwelcome education. To the familiar varieties of racial humiliation and mistreatment—being physically punished by an Anglo teacher for lapsing into your native tongue; being in the presence of Anglos who talked about you as if you were an inanimate object—were added some new and more abrasive forms: being rousted by border patrolmen who automatically regarded you as a "wetback" until you proved otherwise; being denied service at a restaurant or made to sit in the "Mexican

only" seats at the local movie house; being stopped and searched by the police for no reason other than that your skin color announced your powerlessness to resist; being cheated by an employer who smugly assumed that you probably wouldn't object because Mexicans were naturally docile.

But, if because of such treatment Chavez came to fear and dislike Anglos—gringos or gabachos in the pejorative lexicon of the barrio—he also came to understand that while considerations of race and ethnicity compounded the plight of farmworkers, their mistreatment was rooted ultimately in the economics of industrialized agriculture. As the family traveled the state from one crop to the next, one hovel to the next, trying desperately to survive on the meager earnings of parents and children alike, Chavez quickly learned that Chicano labor contractors and Japanese growers exploited migrants as readily as did Anglo employers. And, although the complex dynamics of California's rural political economy might still have eluded him, Chavez instinctively understood that farmworkers would cease to be victims only when they discovered the means to take control of their own lives.

The realization that unionism must be that means came later. Unlike the typical Chicano family in the migrant stream, however, the Chavez family included among its otherwise meager possessions a powerful legacy of the independent life it had earlier known, one that revealed itself in a stubborn disinclination to tolerate conspicuous injustices. "I don't want to suggest we were that radical," Chavez later said, "but I know we were probably one of the strikingest families in California, the first ones to leave the fields if anyone shouted 'Huelga!'—which is Spanish for 'Strike!' . . . If any family felt something was wrong and stopped working, we immediately joined them even if we didn't know them. And if the grower didn't correct what was wrong, then they would leave, and we'd leave."

Chavez had no trouble identifying the source of the family's instinctive militancy. "We were," he insisted, "constantly fighting against things that most people would probably accept because they didn't have that kind of life we had in the beginning, that strong family life and family ties which we would not let anyone break." When confronted by an injustice, there "was no question. Our dignity meant more than money."

Although the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers of America, a CIO-affiliated union, was conducting sporadic organizing drives among California farmworkers when Chavez and his family joined the state's farm labor force at the end of the 1930s, he was too young and untutored to appreciate "anything of the real guts of unions." Yet because his father harbored a strong, if unstudied, conviction that unionism was a

manly act of resistance to the employers' authority, Chavez's attitude toward unions quickly progressed from vague approval to ardent endorsement. His earliest participation in a union-led struggle did not occur until the late 1940s, when the AFL's National Farm Labor Union conducted a series of ultimately futile strikes in the San Joaquin valley. This experience, which left Chavez with an acute sense of frustration and disappointment as the strike inevitably withered in the face of overwhelming employer power, also produced a brief but equally keen feeling of exhilaration because it afforded an opportunity to vent the rebelliousness that an expanding consciousness of his own social and occupational captivity awakened within him. Yet to the extent that unionism demands the subordination of individual aspirations to a depersonalized common denomination of the group's desires, Chavez was not in his youth the stuff of which confirmed trade unionists are made. More than most young migrant workers, whose ineluctable discontent was not heightened further by the memory of an idealized past, Chavez hoped to escape his socioeconomic predicament rather than simply moderate the harsh forces that governed it.

To be a migrant worker, however, was to learn the hard way that avenues of escape were more readily imagined than traveled. As ardently as the Chavez family sought a way out of the migrant orbit, they spent the early 1940s moving from valley to valley, from harvest to harvest, powerless to fend off the corrosive effects of their involuntary transiency. Beyond denying them the elementary amenities of a humane existence—a decent home, sufficient food, adequate clothing—the demands of migrant life also conspired to deny the Chavez children the educations that their parents valiantly struggled to ensure. For Cesar school became a "nightmare," a dispiriting succession of inhospitable places ruled by Anglo teachers and administrators whose often undisguised contempt for migrant children prompted him to drop out after the eighth grade.

Chavez's inevitable confrontation with the fact of his personal powerlessness fostered a sense of anger and frustration that revealed itself in a tendency to reject many of the most visible symbols of his cultural heritage. This brief episode of open rebellion against the culture of his parents, which dates from the family's decision to settle down in Delano in late 1943 until he reluctantly joined the navy a year later, was generally benign: mariachis were rejected in favor of Duke Ellington; his mother's dichos and consejos —the bits of Mexican folk wisdom passed from one generation to the next—lost out to less culture-bound values; religious customs rooted in the rigid doctrines of the Catholic church gave way to a fuzzy existentialism. In its most extreme form, this rebelliousness led

Chavez to affect the distinctive style of a pachuco , although he never really ventured beyond dress into the more antisocial ways in which that phenomenon of youthful rebellion manifested itself in the activities of Mexican gangs in urban areas like Los Angeles and San Jose. In the end, Chavez reacted most decisively against the debilitating circumstances of his life by joining the navy, a reluctant decision whose redeeming value was that it offered a means of escape, a way "to get away from farm labor."

The two years he spent in the navy ("the worst of my life") proved to be no more than a respite from farm labor. If Chavez had hoped to acquire a trade while in the service, he soon discovered that the same considerations of race and ethnicity that placed strict limits on what non-Anglos could reasonably aspire to achieve at home operated with equal efficiency in the navy to keep them in the least desirable jobs. Without the training that might have allowed him to break out of the cycle of poverty and oppression that the labor system of industrialized agriculture fueled, Chavez returned to Delano in 1946 to the only work he knew.

Finding work had always been a problem for farmworkers because of the chronic oversupply of agricultural labor in California. The problem became even more acute for migrant families after the war because agribusiness interests succeeded in their political campaign to extend the so-called Bracero program, ^[1] a treaty arrangement dating from 1942 that permitted farm employers in California and the Southwest to import Mexican nationals under contract to alleviate real and imagined wartime labor shortages.

For Chavez, the struggle to earn a living took on special urgency following his marriage in 1948 to Helen Fabela, a Delano girl whom he had first met when his family made one of its periodic migrations through the area in search of work. Being the daughter of farmworkers, and thus knowing all too well the hardships that attended a family life predicated upon the irregular earnings of agricultural work, did nothing to cushion the hard times that lay ahead for Helen Chavez and her new husband, a twenty-one-year-old disaffected farm laborer without discernable prospects.

Chavez met the challenge of making a living, which multiplied with the arrival of a new baby during each of the first three years of marriage, in the only way he knew: he took any job available, wherever it was available. Not until 1952, when he finally landed a job in a San Jose lumberyard, was Chavez able to have the settled life that he and Helen craved. The Mexican barrio in San Jose, known to its impoverished inhabitants as Sal Si Puedes—literally "get out if you can"—was a few square blocks of ramshackle

houses occupied by discouraged parents and angry children who, in their desperation to do just what the neighborhood's morbid nickname advised, too often sought ways out that led to prison rather than to opportunity. Long before it became home to Chavez and his family, Sal Si Puedes had earned a reputation among the sociologists who regularly scouted its mean streets as a virtual laboratory of urban social pathology. In the early 1950s, however, the area also attracted two men determined in their separate ways to alleviate the powerlessness of its residents rather than to document or measure it. More than any others, these two activists, one a young Catholic priest, the other a veteran community organizer, assumed unwitting responsibility for the education of Cesar Chavez.

When Father Donald McDonnell established his small mission church in Sal Si Puedes, he resolved to attend to both the spiritual need of his destitute parishioners and their education in those doctrines of the Catholic church relating to the inherent rights of labor. To Cesar Chavez, the teachings of the church, the rituals and catechism that he absorbed as an obligation of culture rather than a voluntary and knowing act of religious faith, had never seemed to have more than tangential relevance to the hard-edged world that poor people confronted in their daily lives. But in the militant example and activist pedagogy of Father McDonnell, Chavez discovered a new dimension of Catholicism that excited him precisely because it was relevant to his immediate circumstances. "Actually," he later said, "my education started when I met Father Donald McDonnell. . . . We had long talks about farm workers. I knew a lot about the work, but I didn't know anything about economics, and I learned quite a bit from him. He had a picture of a worker's shanty and a picture of a grower's mansion; a picture of a labor camp and a picture of a high-priced building in San Francisco owned by the same grower. When things were pointed out to me, I began to see. . . . Everything he said was aimed at ways to solve the injustice." Chavez's appetite for the social gospel that McDonnell espoused was insatiable: "[He] sat with me past midnight telling me about social justice and the Church's stand on farm labor and reading from the encyclicals of Pope Leo XIII in which he upheld labor unions. I would do anything to get the Father to tell me more about labor history. I began going to the bracero camps with him to help with Mass, to the city jail with him to talk to prisoners, anything to be with him so that he could tell me more about the farm labor movement."

More than anyone else, Father McDonnell awoke Chavez to a world of pertinent ideas that would become the essential source of his personal

philosophy; introduced him to a pantheon of crusaders for social justice (Gandhi among them) whose heroic exertions would supply the inspiration for his own crusade to empower farmworkers. Yet the crucial task of instructing Chavez in the practical means by which his nascent idealism might achieve concrete expression was brilliantly discharged by Fred Ross, an indefatigable organizer who had spent the better part of his adult life roaming California trying to show the victims of economic, racial, and ethnic discrimination how they might resist further abuse and degradation through organization.

Drawn to Sal Si Puedes by the palpable misery of its Chicano inhabitants, Ross began to conduct the series of informal house meetings through which he hoped to establish a local chapter of the Community Service Organization (CSO), a self-help group that operated under the sponsorship of radical activist Saul Alinsky's Chicago-based Industrial Areas Foundation. Always on the lookout for the natural leaders in the communities he sought to organize, Ross at once saw in Chavez, despite his outwardly shy and self-conscious demeanor, the telltale signs of a born organizer. "At the very first meeting," Ross recalled, "I was very much impressed with Cesar. I could tell he was intensely interested, a kind of burning interest rather than one of those inflammatory things that lasts one night and is then forgotten. He asked many questions, part of it to see if I really knew, putting me to the test. But it was much more than that." Ross also discovered that Chavez was an exceedingly quick study: "He understood it almost immediately, as soon as I drew the picture. He got the point—the whole question of power and the development of power within the group. He made the connections very quickly between the civic weakness of the group and the social neglect in the barrio, and also conversely, what could be done about that social neglect once the power was developed." "I kept a diary in those days," Ross said later. "And the first night I met Cesar, I wrote in it, 'I think I've found the guy I'm looking for.' It was obvious even then."

The confidence that Ross expressed in Chavez's leadership potential was immediately confirmed. Assigned to the CSO voter registration project in San Jose, Chavez displayed a natural aptitude for the work; so much in fact that Ross turned over control of the entire drive to him. And if his style of leadership proved somewhat unconventional, his tactical sense was unerring. While Ross had relied upon local college students to serve as registrars for the campaign, Chavez felt more could be gained by using people from the barrio. "Instead of recruiting college guys," he said, "I got all my

friends, my beer-drinking friends. With them it wasn't a question of civic duty, they helped me because of friendship, and because it was fun." With nearly six thousand new voters registered by the time the campaign ended, Chavez's reputation as an organizer was established.

As exhilarated as he was by the challenge of organizing, Chavez was also sobered by the personal attacks that the local political establishment unleashed against anyone who presumed to alter the balance of power in the ghetto. Since it was the heyday of McCarthyism, the charge most frequently lodged against him was that he was a Communist. It seemed not to matter that such charges were preposterous. Even the vaguest suggestion of radicalism was enough to cause the more cautious members of the Chicano community to regard Chavez with growing suspicion. "The Chicanos," he said, "wouldn't talk to me. They were afraid. The newspaper had a lot of influence during those McCarthy days. Anyone who organized or worked for civil rights was called a Communist. Anyone who talked about police brutality was called a Communist."

Everywhere I went to organize they would bluntly ask, "Are you a Communist?"

I would answer, "No."

"How do we know?"

"You don't know. You know because I tell you."

And we would go around and around on that. If it was somebody who was being smart, I'd tell them to go to hell, but if it was somebody that I wanted to organize, I would have to go through an explanation.

Before long, however, Chavez became an expert in turning the cultural tendencies of his Chicano neighbors to his own advantage. When his detractors wrapped themselves in the flag, Chavez countered, with the help of Father McDonnell and other sympathetic priests, by cloaking himself in the respectability of the Catholic church. "I found out," he recalled with apparent satisfaction, "that when they learned I was close to the church, they wouldn't question me so much. So I'd get the priests to come out and give me their blessing. In those days, if a priest said something to the Mexicans, they would say fine. It's different now."

In the course of raising the civic consciousness of others, Chavez broadened and deepened his own previously neglected education. "I began to grow and to see a lot of things that I hadn't seen before," he said. "My eyes opened, and I paid more attention to political and social events." And though his emergence as a trade union activist was still years away, Chavez the community organizer felt a sufficient affinity with his counterparts in the labor

field that he adopted as texts for his self-education "biographies of labor organizers like John L. Lewis and Eugene Debs and the Knights of Labor."

After watching his protégé in action for only a few months, Fred Ross persuaded Saul Alinsky that the CSO should employ the talents of so able an organizer on a full-time basis. Becoming a professional organizer, however, was a prospect that frightened Chavez nearly as much as it excited him. Helping Fred Ross was one thing, organizing on his own among strangers was quite another. Yet in the end, his desire to oppose what seemed unjust outweighed his fears.

From the end of 1952 until he quit the organization ten years later to build a union among farmworkers, the CSO was Chavez's life. He approached the work of helping the poor to help themselves in the only way his nature allowed, with a single-mindedness that made everything else in his life—home, family, personal gain—secondary. For Chavez, nothing short of total immersion in the work of forcing change was enough. If his wife inherited virtually the entire responsibility for raising their children (who were to number eight in all), if his children became resentful at being left to grow up without a father who was readily accessible to them, if he was himself forced to abandon any semblance of personal life, Chavez remained unshaken in his belief that the promotion of the greater good made every such sacrifice necessary and worthwhile.

The years he spent as an organizer for the CSO brought Chavez into contact, and usually conflict, with the whole range of public and private authorities to which the poor were accountable and by which they were controlled. The problems he handled were seldom other than mundane, yet each in its own way confirmed the collective impotence of those who populated the Chicano ghettos that became his special province. "They'd bring their personal problems," Chavez said of his CSO clients. "They were many. They might need a letter written or someone to interpret for them at the welfare department, the doctor's office, or the police. Maybe they were not getting enough welfare aid, or their check was taken away, or their kids were thrown out of school. Maybe they had been taken by a crooked salesman selling fences, aluminum siding, or freezers that hold food for a month."

In the beginning, helping people to deal with problems they felt otherwise powerless to resolve was an end in itself. In time, however, Chavez saw that if his service work was going to produce a legacy of activist sentiment in Chicano neighborhoods, it was necessary to recast what had typically been an act of unconditional assistance into a mutually beneficial transaction. And, when he discovered that those whom he was serving

were not just willing, but eager, to return the favor, Chavez made that volition the basis upon which he helped to build the CSO into the most formidable Mexican-American political organization in the state. "Once I realized helping people was an organizing technique," he said, "I increased that work. I was willing to work day and night and to go to hell and back for people—provided they also did something for the CSO in return. I never felt bad asking for that . . . because I wasn't asking for something for myself. For a long time we didn't know how to put that work together into an organization. But we learned after a while—we learned how to help people by making them responsible."

Because agricultural labor constituted a main source of economic opportunity in most Chicano communities, many of those whom Chavez recruited into the CSO were farmworkers. Not until 1958, however, did Chavez take his first halting steps toward making work and its discontents the essential focus of his organizing activities. This gradual shift from community to labor organization occurred over a period of several months as Chavez struggled to establish a CSO chapter in Oxnard, a leading citrus-growing region north of Los Angeles. Asked by Saul Alinsky to organize the local Chicano community in order that it might support the flagging efforts of the United Packinghouse Workers to win labor contracts covering the region's citrus-packing sheds, Chavez embarked upon his task intending to exploit the same assortment of grievances that festered in barrios throughout the state.

His new clients, however, had other ideas. From the beginning, whenever he sought to impress his agenda upon local citizens, they interrupted with their own: a concern that they were being denied jobs because growers in the region relied almost entirely on braceros to meet their needs for farm labor. It proved to be an issue that simply would not go away. "At every house meeting," Chavez recalled, "they hit me with the bracero problem, but I would dodge it. I just didn't fathom how big that problem was. I would say, 'Well, you know, we really can't do anything about that, but it's a bad problem. Something should be done.'" An apparently artless dodger, he was, in the end, forced to make the bracero problem the focus of his campaign. "Finally," he admitted, "I decided this was the issue I had to tackle. The fact that braceros were also farmworkers didn't bother me. . . . The jobs belonged to local workers. The braceros were brought only for exploitation. They were just instruments for the growers. Braceros didn't make any money, and they were exploited viciously, forced to work under conditions the local people wouldn't tolerate. If the braceros spoke up, if they made the minimal complaints, they'd be shipped back to Mexico."

In attacking Oxnard's bracero problem, Chavez and his followers confronted the integrated power of the agribusiness establishment in its most forceful and resilient aspect. While farm employers around Oxnard and throughout the state were permitted under federal regulations to employ braceros only when they had exhausted the available pool of local farm-workers, they had long operated on the basis of a collusive arrangement with the California Farm Placement Service that allowed them to import Mexican nationals without regard to labor market conditions in the region.

Although Chavez and the large CSO membership he rallied behind him sought nothing more than compliance with existing rules regarding the employment of braceros, the thirteen-month struggle that followed brought them into bitter conflicts with politically influential employers, state farm placement bureaucrats, and federal labor department officials. Yet through the use of picket lines, marches, rallies, and a variety of innovative agitational techniques that reduced the Farm Placement Service to almost total paralysis, Chavez and his militant following had by the end of 1959 won a victory so complete that farm employers in the region were recruiting their labor through a local CSO headquarters that operated as a hiring hall.

Chavez emerged from the Oxnard campaign convinced that work-related issues had greater potential as a basis for organizing Chicanos than any that he had earlier stressed. The response to his organizing drive in Oxnard was overwhelming, and he saw at once that "the difference between that CSO chapter and any other CSO up to that point was that jobs were the main issue." And at the same juncture, he said, "I began to see the potential of organizing the Union."

What Chavez saw with such clarity, however, the elected leadership of the CSO, drawn almost exclusively from the small but influential ranks of middle-class Chicanos, was unwilling even to imagine. Determined that the CSO would remain a civic organization, the leadership decisively rejected Chavez's proposal to transform the Oxnard chapter into a farm-workers' union. "We had won a victory," Chavez bitterly recalled, "but I didn't realize how short-lived it would be. We could have built a union there, but the CSO wouldn't approve. In fact, the whole project soon fell apart. I wanted to go for a strike and get some contracts, but the CSO wouldn't let me. . . . If I had had the support of the CSO, I would have built a union there. If anyone from labor had come, we could have had a union. I think if the Union of Organized Devils of America had come, I would have joined them, I was so frustrated."

Even though he remained with the CSO for two years following his defeat over the issue of unionism, Chavez's devotion to the organization

waned as his determination to organize farmworkers increased. Finally, when the CSO once again rejected the idea of unionism at its annual convention in 1962, Chavez decided that he had had enough. He resigned as the convention ended and left the organization on his thirty-fifth birthday. "I've heard people say," he later explained, "that because I was thirty-five, I was getting worried, as I hadn't done too much with my life. But I wasn't worried. I didn't even consider thirty-five to be old. I didn't care about that. I just knew we needed a union. . . . What I didn't know was that we would go through hell because it was an all but impossible task."

Based on the often heroic, but inevitably futile, efforts of those who had earlier dared to challenge the monolithic power of industrialized agriculture in California—the Industrial Workers of the World before World War I; the Communist-led Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union during the early 1930s; the CIO in the late thirties; the AFL in the 1940s; and a rich variety of independent ethnic unions over the better part of a century—Chavez's assertion that organizing the state's farm-workers was "an all but impossible task" hardly overstated the case. Farm employers, assisted by a supporting cast representing nearly every form of public and private power in the state, had beaten back every attempt by workers to gain power while assiduously cultivating a public image of themselves as beleaguered yeomen valiantly struggling against the erosive forces of modernity, including unionism, to preserve the nation's Jeffersonian heritage.

To the task of contesting the immense power and redoubtable prestige of the agribusiness nexus, Chavez brought nothing more or less than an intensity of purpose that bordered on fanaticism. And while he would have rejected the disdain that the remark reflected, Chavez was in essential agreement with the cynical AFL official who declared in 1935: "Only fanatics are willing to live in shacks or tents and get their heads broken in the interest of migratory labor." In Chavez's view, nothing less than fanaticism would suffice if farmworkers were to be emancipated from a system of wage slavery that had endured for a century. When a reporter observed during one of the UFW's later struggles that he "sounded like a fanatic," Chavez readily admitted the charge. "I am," he confessed. "There's nothing wrong with being a fanatic. Those are the only ones that get things done."

In many ways, Chavez's supreme accomplishment as an organizer came long before he signed up his first farmworker. Attracting disciples willing to embrace the idea of a farmworkers' movement with a passion, single-mindedness, and spirit of sacrifice equal to his own was at once Chavez's

greatest challenge and his finest achievement. By the fall of 1962, when he formally established the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) in a derelict Fresno theater, Chavez had rallied to "La Causa"—the iconographic designation soon adopted by the faithful—an impressive roster of "co-fanatics": Dolores Huerta, a small, youthful-looking mother of six (she would have ten in all) whose willingness to do battle with Chavez over union tactics was exceeded only by her fierce loyalty to him; Gilbert Padilla, like Huerta another CSO veteran, whose activism was rooted in a hatred for the migrant system that derived from personal experience; Wayne Hartimire and Jim Drake, two young Anglo ministers who were to make the California Migrant Ministry a virtual subsidiary of the union; Manuel Chavez, an especially resourceful organizer who reluctantly gave up a well-paying job to join the union when the guilt his cousin Cesar heaped upon him for not joining became unbearable. Most important, there was Helen Chavez, whose willingness to sacrifice so much of what mattered most to her, including first claim on her husband's devotion, revealed the depth of her own commitment to farmworker organization.

Working out of Delano, which became the union's first headquarters, Chavez began the slow and often discouraging process of organizing farm laborers whose strong belief in the rightness of his union-building mission was tempered by an even deeper conviction that "it couldn't be done, that the growers were too powerful." With financial resources consisting of a small savings account, gifts and loans from relatives, and the modest wages Helen earned by returning to the fields, the cost of Chavez's stubborn idealism to himself and his family was measured in material deprivation and emotional tumult. Had he been willing to accept financial assistance from such sources as the United Packinghouse Workers or the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC), a would-be farm-workers' union established in 1959 by the AFL-CIO, the worst hardships that awaited Chavez and his loyalists might have been eased or eliminated. Yet, following a line of reasoning that was in some ways reminiscent of the voluntarist logic of earlier trade unionists, Chavez insisted that a farm-workers' union capable of forging the will and stamina required to breach the awesome power of agribusiness could only be built on the sacrifice and suffering of its own membership.

During the NFWA's formative years there was more than enough sacrifice and suffering to go around. But as a result of the services it provided to farmworkers and the promise of a better life it embodied, the union slowly won the allegiance of a small but dedicated membership scattered through the San Joaquin valley. By the spring of 1965, when the

union called its first strike, a brief walkout by rose grafters in Kern County that won higher wages but no contract, Chavez's obsession was on its way to becoming a functioning reality.

Despite the studied deliberateness of its leaders, however, the struggle that catapulted the union to national attention, and invested its mission with the same moral authority that liberal and left-wing activists of the 1960s attributed to the decade's stormy civil rights, antipoverty, and antiwar movements, began in the fall of 1965 as a reluctant gesture of solidarity with an AWOC local whose mainly Filipino membership was on strike against grape growers around Delano. Given the demonstrated ineptitude of the old-time trade unionists who directed the AFL-CIO's organizing efforts among California farmworkers, Chavez had reason to hesitate before committing his still small and untested membership to the support of an AWOC strike. But the strike was being led by Larry Itliong, a Filipino veteran of earlier agricultural strikes and the ablest of the AWOC organizers, and Chavez did not have it in him to ignore a just cause. "At the time," he recalled, "we had about twelve hundred members, but only about two hundred were paying dues. I didn't feel we were ready for a strike—I figured it would be a couple more years before we would be—but I also knew we weren't going to break a strike." The formal decision to support AWOC, made at a boisterous mass meeting held in Delano's Catholic church on September 16 (the day Mexicans celebrate the end of Spanish colonial rule), produced twenty-seven hundred workers willing to sign union cards authorizing the NFWA to represent them in dealing with area grape growers.

The Delano strike, which soon widened beyond the table grape growers who were its initial targets to include the state's major wineries, was a painful five-year struggle destined to test not only the durability of agricultural unionism in California but also the wisdom and resourcefulness of Chavez's leadership. Because growers had little difficulty in recruiting scabs to take the place of strikers, Chavez recognized immediately that a strike could not deny employers the labor they required to cultivate and harvest their crops. Even so, picket lines went up on the first day of the strike and were maintained with unfailing devotion week after week, month after month. Chavez emphasized the need for picketing because he believed that no experience promoted a keener sense of solidarity or afforded strikers a more graphic and compelling illustration of the struggle's essential character. "Unless you have been on a picket line," he said, "you just can't understand the feeling you get there, seeing the conflict at its two most acid ends. It's a confrontation that's vivid. It's a real education."

It was an education, however, for which pickets often paid a high price: threats, physical intimidation, and outright violence at the hands of growers and their agents and arbitrary arrests and harassment by local lawmen who made no effort to mask their pro-employer sympathies. Yet, no matter how great the provocation, no matter how extreme the violence directed against them, strikers were sworn by Chavez not to use violence. Chavez's unwavering commitment to nonviolence was compounded from equal measures of his mother's teachings, the affecting example of St. Francis of Assisi, and the moral philosophy of Gandhi. In the end, though, it was the power of nonviolence as a tactical method that appealed to him. Convinced that the farmworkers' greatest asset was the inherent justice of their cause, Chavez believed that the task of communicating the essential virtue of the union's struggle to potential supporters, and to the general public, would be subverted if strikers resorted to violence. "If someone commits violence against us," Chavez argued, "it is much better—if we can—not to react against the violence, but to react in such a way as to get closer to our goal. People don't like to see a nonviolent movement subjected to violence. . . . That's the key point we have going for us. . . . By some strange chemistry, every time the opposition commits an unjust act against our hopes and aspirations, we get tenfold paid back in benefits."

Winning and sustaining public sympathy, as well as the active support of labor, church, student, civic, and political organizations, was indispensable to the success of the Delano struggles because the inefficacy of conventional strike tactics led Chavez to adopt the economic boycott as the union's primary weapon in fighting employers. Newly sensitized to issues of social justice by the civil rights struggles that reverberated across the country, liberals and leftists enthusiastically embraced the union's cause, endorsing its successive boycotts and not infrequently showing up in Delano to bear personal witness to the unfolding drama of the grape strike. Many unions—from dockworkers who refused to handle scab grapes to autoworkers, whose president, Waiter Reuther, not only pledged generous financial assistance to the strikers but also traveled to Delano to join their picket lines—also supported the NFWA. Even the AFL-CIO, which had been sponsoring the rival Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, ended up embracing the NFWA when Bill Kircher, the federation's national organizing director, concluded that the future of farmworker unionism lay with Chavez and his ragtag following rather than with the more fastidious, but less effective, AWOC. Kircher's assessment of the situation also led him to urge a merger of the UFWA and AWOC. And although their long-standing suspicion of "Big Labor" impelled many of the Anglo

volunteers who had joined his movement to oppose the idea, Chavez and the union's farmworker membership recognized that the respectability and financial strength to be gained from such a merger outweighed any loss of independence that AFL-CIO affiliation might entail. With Chavez at its helm and Larry Itliong as its second-in-command, the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee (UFWOC) was formally chartered by the AFL-CIO in August 1966.

The public backing the farmworkers attracted, including that of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who became an outspoken supporter of the union when the Senate Subcommittee on Migratory Labor held its highly publicized hearings in Delano during the spring of 1966, indicated that large segments of the American people believed that grape strikers occupied the moral "high ground" in their dispute with farm employers. To an important degree, however, public support for the farmworkers' cause also reflected a willingness among many Americans to believe and trust in Cesar Chavez personally; to see in the style and content of his public "persona" those qualities of integrity, selflessness, and moral rectitude that made his cause theirs whether or not they truly understood it. And if Chavez was more embarrassed than flattered by such adoration, he was also enough of an opportunist to see that when liberals from New York to Hollywood made him the human repository of their own unrequited idealism or proclaimed his sainthood, it benefited farmworkers.

"Alone, the farm workers have no economic power," Chavez once observed, "but with the help of the public they can develop the economic power to counter that of the growers." The truth of that maxim was first revealed in April 1966, when a national boycott campaign against its product line of wines and spirits caused Schenley Industries, which had 5,000 acres of vineyards in the San Joaquin valley, to recognize the farmworkers' union and enter into contract negotiations. For Chavez, who received the news as he and a small band of union loyalists were nearing the end of an arduous, but exceedingly well-publicized, 300-mile march from Delano to Sacramento, Schenley's capitulation was "the first major proof of the power of the boycott."

Chavez's tactical genius, and the power of a national (and later international) boycott apparatus that transformed an otherwise local dispute into a topic of keen interest and passionate debate in communities across the country, prompted one winery after another to choose accommodation over further conflict. For two of the biggest wine grape growers, however, the prospect of acquiescing to UFWOC's brand of militant unionism was so loathsome that they resolved to court a more palatable alternative: the

giant International Brotherhood of Teamsters. And although they had no apparent support among farmworkers in the region, the Teamsters, under the cynical and opportunistic leadership of William Grami, organizing director of the union's western conference, eagerly sought to prove that theirs was indeed the type of "businesslike" labor organization which anti-union farm employers could tolerate. Yet as good as the idea first seemed to the DiGiorgio Fruit Corporation and then to Perelli-Minetti Vineyards, consummating such a mischievous liaison with the Teamsters proved impossible. In the end, neither the companies nor the Teamsters had the will to persist in the face of intensified UFWOC boycotts, angry condemnations by the labor movement, and a rising tide of public disapproval. The controversy was finally resolved through secret ballot elections, which resulted in expressions of overwhelming support for Chavez and UFWOC.

The victories won during the first two years of the Delano struggle, while they propelled the cause of farmworker organization far beyond the boundaries of any previous advance, left Chavez and his followers still needing to overcome table grape growers in the San Joaquin and Coachella valleys before the union could claim real institutional durability. The state's table grape industry, composed for the most part of family farms whose hardworking owners typically viewed unionism as an assault on their personal independence as well as a threat to their prerogatives as employers, remained unalterably opposed to UFWOC's demands long after California's largest wineries had acceded to them. Thus when Chavez made them the main targets of the union's campaign toward the end of 1967, table grape growers fought back with a ferocity and tactical ingenuity that announced their determination to resist unionism at whatever cost.

While the boycott continued to serve as the union's most effective weapon, especially after employers persuaded compliant local judges to issue injunctions severely restricting picketing and other direct action in the strike region, the slowness with which it operated to prod recalcitrant growers toward the bargaining table produced in farmworkers and volunteers alike an impatience that reduced both morale and discipline. It also undermined La Causa's commitment to nonviolence. "There came a point in 1968," Chavez recalled, "when we were in danger of losing. . . . Because of a sudden increase in violence against us, and an apparent lack of progress after more than two years of striking, there were those who felt that the time had come to overcome violence by violence. . . . There was demoralization in the ranks, people becoming desperate, more and more talk about violence. People meant it, even when they talked to me. They

would say, 'Hey, we've got to burn these sons of bitches down. We've got to kill a few of them.'"

In responding to the crisis, Chavez chose a method of restoring discipline and morale that was as risky and unusual as it was revealing of the singular character of his leadership. He decided to fast. The fast, which continued for twenty-five painful days before it was finally broken at a moving outdoor mass in Delano that included Robert Kennedy among its celebrants, was more than an act of personal penance. "I thought I had to bring the Movement to a halt," Chavez explained, "do something that would force them and me to deal with the whole question of violence and ourselves. We had to stop long enough to take account of what we were doing." Although the fast's religious overtones offended the secular sensibilities of many of his followers, it was more a political than a devotional act; an intrepid and dramatic, if manipulative, device by which Chavez established a compelling standard of personal sacrifice against which his supporters might measure their own commitment and dedication to La Causa, and thus their allegiance to its leader. The power of guilt as a disciplinary tool was something Chavez well understood from his study of the life and philosophy of Gandhi, and he was never reluctant to use it himself. "One of his little techniques," Fred Ross said of Chavez's style of leadership, "has always been to shame people into doing something by letting them know how hard he and others were working, and how it was going to hurt other people if they didn't help too."

Those in the union who were closest to Chavez, whatever their initial reservations, found the fast's effect undeniably therapeutic. Jerry Cohen, the union's able young attorney, while convinced that it had been "a fantastic gamble," was deeply impressed by "what a great organizing tool the fast was." "Before the fast," Cohen noted, "there were nine ranch committees [the rough equivalent of locals within the UFW's structure], one for each winery. The fast, for the first time, made a union out of those ranch committees. . . . Everybody worked together." Dolores Huerta also recognized the curative power of Chavez's ordeal. "Prior to that fast," she insisted, "there had been a lot of bickering and backbiting and fighting and little attempts at violence. But Cesar brought everybody together and really established himself as a leader of the farm workers."

While a chronic back ailment, apparently exacerbated by his fast and a schedule that often required him to work twenty hours a day, slowed Chavez's pace during much of 1968 and 1969, the steadily more punishing economic effects of the grape boycott finally began to erode the confidence

and weaken the resistance of growers. With the assistance of a committee of strongly pro-union Catholic bishops who had volunteered to mediate the conflict, negotiations between the union and the first defectors from the growers' ranks finally began in the spring of 1970. And by the end of July, when the most obdurate growers in the Delano area collapsed under the combined weight of a continuing boycott and their own mounting weariness, Chavez and his tenacious followers had finally accomplished what five years before seemed impossible to all but the most sanguine forecasters.

The union's victory, which extended to eighty-five percent of the state's table grape industry, resulted in contracts that provided for substantial wage increases and employer contributions to UFWOC's health and welfare and economic development funds. Even more important, however, were the noneconomic provisions: union-run hiring halls that gave UFWOC control over the distribution of available work; grievance machinery that rescued the individual farmworker from the arbitrary authority of the boss; restrictions on the use of pesticides that endangered the health of workers; in short, provisions for the emancipation of workers from the century-old dictatorship of California agribusiness.

After five years of struggle and sacrifice, of anguish and uncertainty, Chavez and his followers wanted nothing so much as an opportunity to recuperate from their ordeal and to savor their victory. It was not to be. On the day before the union concluded its negotiations with Delano grape growers, Chavez received the distressing news that lettuce growers in the Salinas and Santa Maria valleys, knowing that they would be the next targets of UFWOC's organizing campaign, had signed contracts providing for the Teamsters' union to represent their field workers. In keeping with the pattern of the Teamsters' involvement with agricultural field labor, no one bothered to consult the Chicano workers whose incessant stooping and bending, whose painful contortions in the service of the hated short-handle hoe, made possible the growers' proud boast that the Salinas valley was the "salad bowl of the nation."

Except for one contract, which the union acquired in 1961 through a collusive agreement with a lettuce grower scheming to break a strike by the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, the Teamsters had been content to limit their interest to the truck drivers, boxmakers, and packing-shed workers of the vegetable industry. The Teamsters' decision to expand their jurisdiction to include field labor was a frontal assault on UFWOC. Still weary from the Delano struggle and confronting the

complex job of implementing the union's newly won contracts, Chavez and his staff rushed to Salinas in order to meet the challenge.

If William Grami and his Teamsters cohorts discovered that the specter of a UFWOC organizing drive put Anglo lettuce growers in an unusually accommodating frame of mind, they found that Chicano farmworkers in the Salinas and Santa Maria valleys were unwilling to accept a union other than of their own choosing, especially after Chavez launched his boisterous counterattack. As thousands of defiant workers walked off their jobs rather than join a union of the employers' choice, the Teamsters' hierarchy, inundated by a rising tide of liberal and labor criticism, decided that Grami's tactics were inopportune from a public relations standpoint, and therefore ordered him to undo his now inexpedient handiwork. Grami dutifully, if reluctantly, invited Chavez to meet with him, and the two men quickly worked out an agreement providing that the UFWOC would have exclusive jurisdiction over field labor, and that the Teamsters would renounce their contracts with lettuce growers and defer to the workers' true preference in bargaining agents. For a few of the largest growers in the Salinas valley, those who felt most vulnerable to the boycott Chavez had threatened, abandoning Teamsters' contracts in favor of agreements with UFWOC provided a welcome escape from a misadventure. Yet when the Teamsters asserted that they were "honor bound" to respect the wishes of 170 growers who refused to void their contracts, Chavez had no choice but to resume hostilities.

Although the more than five thousand workers who responded to UFWOC's renewed strike call brought great enthusiasm and energy to the union's rallies, marches, and picket lines, their capacity to disrupt the fall lettuce harvest declined as the influence exerted by a ready supply of job-hungry "green carders" (Mexican nationals with work permits) combined with aggressive strikebreaking by violence-prone Teamsters "guards," hostile police, politically influential employers, and injunction-happy local judges. As strike activities diminished and boycott operations intensified, employers obtained a court order declaring both types of union pressure illegal under a state law banning jurisdictional strikes. ^[2] Chavez later spent three weeks in jail for instructing his followers to ignore the order, but the publicity and additional support his brief imprisonment generated made it one of the few positive developments in an otherwise discouraging slide into adversity.

The challenge presented by the Teamsters-grower alliance in the lettuce industry forced UFWOC to divert precious resources into the reconstruction of its far-flung boycott network. It also distracted Chavez and his

most competent aides at a time when the union was in the process of transforming itself from an organization expert in agitation into one equipped to administer contracts covering thousands of workers in the grape industry. Meeting the demands of the hiring hall and the grievance process, which were the union's greatest potential sources of institutional strength, also became its most worrisome and debilitating problem as ranch committees composed of rank-and-file members struggled against their own inexperience, and sometimes powerful tendencies toward vindictiveness, favoritism, and a residual servility, to satisfy the labor requirements of employers and to protect the contractual rights of their fellow workers.

Although Chavez instituted an administrative training program designed by his old mentor Fred Ross, he rejected an AFL-CIO offer of assistance because of his stubborn conviction that a genuinely democratic union must entrust its operation to its own members even at the risk of organizational inefficiency and incompetence. And when he shifted the union's headquarters fifty miles southeast of Delano to an abandoned tuberculosis sanitorium in the Tehachapi Mountains that he called La Paz—short for Nuestra Señora de la Paz (Our Lady of Peace)—Chavez claimed the move was prompted by a concern that his easy accessibility to members of the union's ranch committees discouraged self-reliance. "It was my idea to leave for La Paz," he explained, "because I wanted to remove my presence from Delano, so they could develop their own leadership, because if I am there, they wouldn't make the decisions themselves. They'd come to me." But the move intensified suspicions of internal critics like Larry Itliong, who left the union partly because Chavez's physical isolation from the membership seemed to enhance the influence of the Anglo "intellectuals" while diminishing that of the rank and file. The greatest barrier to broadening the union's leadership and administrative operation, however, was posed by neither geography nor the influence of Anglo volunteers, but by Chavez himself, whose devotion to the ideal of decentralization was seldom matched by an equal disposition to delegate authority to others. Journalist Ron Taylor, who observed Chavez's style of leadership at close range, wrote: "He conceptually saw a union run in the most democratic terms, but in practice he had a difficult time trying to maintain his own distance; his tendencies were to step in and make decisions. . . . Even though he had removed himself from Delano, he maintained a close supervision over it, and all of the other field offices. Through frequent staff meetings and meetings of the executive board, he developed his own personal involvement with the tiniest of union details."

If Chavez's deficiencies as an administrator troubled sympathetic AFL-CIO officials like Bill Kircher, they tended to reinforce the suspicion privately harbored by such trade union traditionalists as federation president George Meany that viable organization was probably beyond the compass of farmworkers, no matter how driven and charismatic their leader. Indeed, what appeared to be at the root of Meany's personal skepticism was Chavez's eccentric style of leadership and somewhat alien trade union philosophy: his well-advertised idealism, which uncharitably rendered was a species of mere self-righteousness; his overweening presence, which seemingly engendered an unhealthy cult of personality; his extravagant sense of mission, which left outsiders wondering whether his was a labor or a social movement; his apparently congenital aversion to compromise, which, in Meany's view, negated the AFL-CIO's repeated efforts to negotiate a settlement of UFWOC's jurisdictional dispute with the Teamsters. None of these reservations was enough to keep the AFL-CIO in early 1972 from changing the union's status from that of organizing committee to full-fledged affiliate—the United Farm Workers of America—but in combination they were apparently enough to persuade Meany that Chavez was no longer deserving of the same levels of financial and organizational support previously contributed by the federation.

Yet if trade union administration of an appropriately conventional style was not his forte, Chavez demonstrated during the course of several legislative battles in 1971 and 1972 that his talents as a political organizer and tactician were exceptional. When the Oregon legislature passed an anti-union bill sponsored by the American Farm Bureau Federation, Chavez and his followers, in only a week's time, persuaded the governor to veto it. Shortly thereafter, Chavez initiated a far more ambitious campaign to recall the governor of Arizona for signing a similar grower-backed bill into law. And while the recall drive ultimately bogged down in a tangle of legal disputes, Chavez's success in registering nearly one hundred thousand mostly poor, mostly Chicano voters fostered fundamental changes in the political balance of power in Arizona.

It was in California, however, that the UFW afforded its opponents the most impressive demonstration of La Causa's political sophistication and clout, and Chavez revealed to friends and foes alike that his ability to influence public debate extended well beyond the normal boundaries of trade union leadership. With the backing of the state's agribusiness establishment, the California Farm Bureau launched during 1972 a well-financed initiative drive—popularly known as Proposition 22—designed

to eliminate the threat of unionism by banning nearly every effective weapon available to the UFW, including the boycott. Having failed the year before to win legislative approval for an equally tough anti-union measure, farm employers were confident that they could persuade the citizens of California, as they had so often before, that protecting the state's highly profitable agricultural industry was in the public interest. Aware that the UFW could not survive under the restrictive conditions that Proposition 22 contemplated, but without the financial resources needed to counter the growers' expensive media campaign, Chavez and his aides masterfully deployed what they did have: an aroused and resourceful membership. In the end, the growers' financial power proved to be no match for the UFW's people power. In defeating Proposition 22 by a decisive margin—58 percent to 42 percent—the UFW not only eliminated the immediate threat facing the union, but also announced to growers in terms too emphatic to ignore that the time was past when farm employers could rely upon their political power to keep farmworkers in their place.

The political battles that occupied Chavez and the UFW during much of 1972 involved issues so central to the union's existence that they could not be avoided. But even in the course of winning its political fights with agribusiness, the union lost ground on other equally crucial fronts. Organizing activities all but ceased as the UFW turned its attention to political action, and further efforts aimed at alleviating the administrative problems that plagued the union's operation in the grape industry and increasing the pressures on Salinas valley lettuce growers were neglected. At the beginning of 1973 the UFW was in the paradoxical situation of being at the height of its political strength while its vulnerability as a union was increasing.

Just how vulnerable the union was became apparent as the contracts it had negotiated in 1970 with Coachella valley grape growers came up for renewal. Chavez had heard rumors that the Teamsters were planning to challenge the UFW in the region, but not until growers made plain their intention to reclaim complete control over the hiring, dispatching, and disciplining of workers did he suspect that a deal was already in the making. The UFW retained the allegiance of a vast majority of the industry's workers, but neither the growers nor the Teamsters seemed to care. As soon as the UFW contracts expired, all but two growers announced that they had signed new four-year agreements with the Teamsters. Hiring halls, grievance procedures, and protections against dangerous pesticides disappeared along with the workers' right to a union of their own choice.

Unlike their earlier forays into agriculture, which reflected the opportunism of lower level functionaries interested in advancing their own careers, the Teamsters' move into the grape industry was only the leading edge of a grandiose new strategy by the union's top leadership to rescue farm employers from the UFW in return for the exclusive right to represent farmworkers. Teamsters president Frank Fitzsimmons, with the strong encouragement of the Nixon administration, had suggested such an arrangement late in 1972 when he appeared as the featured speaker at the annual convention of the American Farm Bureau Federation. The Teamsters provided further evidence of their revived interest in agriculture by announcing a few weeks later that the union had renegotiated contracts with 170 growers operating in the Salinas, Santa Maria, and Imperial valleys even though the existing five-year agreement still had nearly three years to run.

The Teamsters' special appeal to California's agribusiness community was obvious: while the UFW insisted that farm employers share power with their workers, Teamsters contracts required only a sharing of the industry's wealth in the form of higher wages and other economic benefits. That the Teamsters never contemplated a kind of unionism that would permit Chicano farmworkers to gain a measure of control over their own lives was confirmed by Einar Mohn, director of the Western Conference of Teamsters, who said shortly after the union announced its coup in the grape industry: "We have to have them in the union for a while. It will be a couple of years before they can start having membership meetings, before we can use the farm workers' ideas in the union. I'm not sure how effective a union can be when it is composed of Mexican-Americans and Mexican nationals with temporary visas. Maybe as agriculture becomes more sophisticated, more mechanized, with fewer transients, fewer green carders, and as jobs become more attractive to whites, then we can build a union that can have structures and that can negotiate from strength and have membership participation."

In the face of the Teamsters' onslaught, the UFW, reinforced by a familiar coalition of religious, student, liberal, and labor volunteers, resorted to its customary arsenal: picket lines, rallies, marches, boycotts, and appeals to the public's sense of justice. Yet with hundreds of beefy Teamster goons conducting a reign of terror through the region, and UFW activists being jailed by the hundreds for violating court orders prohibiting virtually every form of resistance and protest the union employed, the Chavez forces never had a chance of winning back what they had lost in the

Coachella valley, or of stopping the Teamsters when they later moved in on the UFW's remaining contracts with Delano-area table grape growers and the state's major wineries. George Meany, who described the Teamsters' raids as "the most vicious strikebreaking, union-busting effort I've seen in my lifetime," persuaded the AFL-CIO executive council to contribute $1.6 million to the UFW's support. But the money could only ease the union's predicament, not solve it. After five months of bitter struggle, more than thirty-five hundred arrests, innumerable assaults, and the violent deaths of two members—one at the hands of a deputy sheriff who claimed that his victim was "resisting arrest," the other at the hands of a gun-toting young strikebreaker who said he felt menaced by pickets—Chavez, his union in ruins, called off any further direct action in favor of the UFW's most effective weapon: the boycott. The UFW, which only a year before had more than one hundred fifty contracts and nearly forty thousand members, was reduced by September 1973 to a mere handful of contracts and perhaps one-quarter of its earlier membership.

In the wake of the UFW's stunning defeat in the grape industry, writing the union's obituary became a favorite pastime not only of its longtime adversaries but of some of its traditional sympathizers as well. Most acknowledged the irresistible pressures that a Teamsters-grower alliance unleashed against the union, but many also found fault with the leadership of Cesar Chavez, especially his real or imagined failure to progress from unruly visionary to orderly trade unionist. Chavez's "charisma," said one sympathizer, was no longer "as marketable a commodity as it once was." Another observer concluded that "the charisma and the cause are wearing thin." The "priests and nuns" were losing interest; "the radchics from New York's Sutton Place to San Francisco's Nob Hill are bored with it all." "I admire him," George Meany said of Chavez. "He's consistent, and I think he's dedicated. I think he's an idealist. I think he's a bit of a dreamer. But the thing that I'm disappointed about Cesar is that he never got to the point that he could develop a real viable union in the sense of what we think of as a viable union."

Yet if Chavez left something to be desired as a union administrator, his alleged deficiencies scarcely explained the UFW's precipitous descent. The union's battered condition was not a product of its failure to behave conventionally, or of Chavez's disinclination to abandon his assertedly quixotic proclivities in favor of the pure and simple ethic that informed the thinking and demeanor of the more typical trade union leader. Rather, the UFW's sudden decline was, for the most part, not of its own making:

grape growers had never resigned themselves to sharing power with their workers, and when the Teamsters proffered an alternative brand of unionism that did not impinge upon their essential prerogatives they happily embraced it.

It was precisely because Chavez was "a bit of a dreamer" that the idea of farmworker organization gathered the initial force necessary to overcome the previously insurmountable opposition of employers, and it was because he remained stubbornly devoted to his dream even in the face of the UFW's disheartening setbacks that those who had rushed to speak eulogies over the momentarily prostrated union were ultimately proven wrong. The resources available to him after the debacle of 1973 were only a fraction of what they had been, but Chavez retained both the loyalty of his most able assistants and his own exceptional talents as an organizer and agitator. As the nationwide boycotts he revived against grape and lettuce growers and the country's largest wine producers, the E. and J. Gallo Wineries, slowly gained momentum during 1974, Chavez reminded his Teamsters-employer adversaries in the only language they seemed to understand that the UFW was not going away no matter how diligently they conspired to that end.

The same message was communicated through the union's greatly intensified political activity in 1974. The union relentlessly lobbied the state assembly to win passage of a farm labor bill providing for secret-ballot union-representation elections. Although it later died in the agribusiness-dominated senate, Chavez still demonstrated that the UFW had lost none of its political prowess. The union also brought considerable pressures to bear on Democratic gubernatorial nominee Jerry Brown to win a promise that, if elected, he would make the passage of an acceptable farm labor bill one of his top legislative priorities. The UFW had no real hope of achieving its legislative aim as long as the anti-union administration of Governor Ronald Reagan dominated the state government, but in the youthful Brown, who had actively supported the UFW's grape boycotts while he was a seminary student, Chavez recognized a potential ally.

Because they could not have the kind of explicitly anti-union law they had promoted through their unavailing campaign in support of Proposition 22, the state's farm employers, in a significant reversal of their longstanding position, sought to undermine the UFW by joining with both the Teamsters and AFL-CIO in support of federal legislation extending the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) to include farmworkers. Chavez, who had years before supported such an extension, strongly opposed

NLRA coverage for farmworkers both because of its diminished effectiveness in guaranteeing workers' rights and because it banned the secondary boycotts upon which the UFW had become so dependent.

With Brown's election in November 1974, a legislative solution to the conflict that had convulsed the state's agricultural labor relations for nearly a decade appeared to be at hand. But given the mutual rancor and distrust that existed between farm employers and Teamsters on the one hand and Chavez and his followers on the other, drafting legislation compelling enough in its composition to induce compromises required both unfailing patience and an uncommon talent for legerdemain. Brown, however, was persuaded that a combination of good will and resolve could produce such a "vehicle for compromise." The new governor recognized that almost ten years of constant hostilities had not only rendered the combatants less intransigent, but had also created public enthusiasm for legislation that might restore labor peace to California's fields and vineyards.

Though none of the parties affected by Brown's compromise bill was fully satisfied in the end, each found reasons to support it. For the Teamsters' union, whose reputation as labor's pariah was reinforced by its anti-UFW machinations, supporting the Agricultural Labor Relations bill was a belated act of image polishing. For the state's agribusinessmen, who were finally discovering that preemptive arrangements with the Teamsters would not protect them from the UFW's seemingly inexhaustible boycott organizers, accepting Brown's proposal promised to restore order to their long unsettled industry. For the UFW, whose leaders were hopeful that legislation might do for La Causa what it had earlier done for the civil rights movement, going along with the governor's bill was a calculated risk that had to be taken.

The Agricultural Labor Relations Act, which went into effect during the fall harvest season of 1975, established a five-member Agricultural Labor Relations Board (ALRB) to implement the law, the most important provisions of which guaranteed the right of farmworkers to organize and bargain collectively through representatives chosen by secret-ballot elections. The ALRB, which faced problems not unlike those confronted by the National Labor Relations Board forty years earlier, was forced to operate under exceedingly difficult circumstances, particularly after disgruntled growers provoked a bitter year-long political confrontation with the UFW by blocking the special appropriations the agency needed to support its heavier than expected workload. Yet despite attacks from all sides, an inexperienced staff, and the administrative miscarriages that inevitably

attended the discharging of so controversial and exceptional a mandate, the ALRB doggedly pursued the law's essential intention of ensuring that farmworkers were free to decide questions of union affiliation without undue interference.

Whereas Chavez was often frustrated by the ALRB's plodding pace and periodic bungling, and at times criticized its operation in language as caustic and intemperate as that used by the most aggrieved farm employer, he considered the law a "godsend . . . without question the best law for workers—any workers—in the entire country." Chavez and the UFW, notwithstanding their sporadic fulminations, had good reasons to consider the ALRA in providential terms. Within two years of its passage, the UFW, with a membership approaching forty thousand, had regained its position as the dominant union in California agriculture. Even more important, the union's success persuaded the Teamsters, who had faltered badly in the heated competition for the allegiance of farmworkers, to sign a five-year pact that effectively ceded jurisdiction over agricultural labor to the UFW. ^[3] The ALRA became, in short, the means by which the UFW accomplished its own resurrection, the instrument by which Cesar Chavez redeemed his stewardship of La Causa.

But for the tenacious idealism and organizational virtuosity of Cesar Chavez, there is no reason to believe that the circumstances which fostered the ALRA's enactment would have arisen. Before he arrived on the scene, agribusinessmen in California were as secure in their power and authority as any employers in the country. Yet only ten years after Chavez and his followers first challenged their supremacy, farm employers were acquiescing to a law that augured the demolition of their one-hundred-year-old dominion over labor.

The law, however, imposed obligations as great as the benefits it promised. Beyond forcing the UFW to prove that the support it had always claimed to enjoy among farmworkers was actual rather than imagined, the ALRA had also challenged the capacity of Chavez and his lieutenants to take their organization into a new and different phase, one that rewarded abilities more closely associated with conventional trade union leadership than with the boycotting, marching, and other forms of social proselytism that the UFW had emphasized up to that time. Once the ALRA created the machinery whereby farmworkers might secure their rights to organize and bargain collectively, the conflicts that remained between themselves and employers had much less to do with elemental questions of justice than with arguable issues of economic equity and job control. The law

enabled the UFW to make its presence felt in California's industrialized agriculture; it did not ensure that the union would either prevail in the short run or endure in the long run.

As from the beginning, the UFW's future as an organization is inextricably linked to Cesar Chavez's success as a leader. And since 1975 the union's record testifies to a mixed performance on Chavez's part. After reaching a membership of approximately fifty thousand by the late 1970s, the union has slowly dwindled in size, comprising roughly forty thousand members by the early 1980s, nearly all of whom, except for isolated outposts in Florida, Arizona, and a couple of other states, are confined to California. The union's continuing failure to make greater headway among the 200,000 farmworkers who are potential members in California alone is attributable, in part, to the growing sophistication of employers in countering the UFW's appeal to workers through voluntary improvements in wages and conditions; to the entry into the farm labor force of workers without strong emotional ties to or knowledge of the heroic struggles of the past; and to the inability of an increasingly politicized ALRB to enforce the letter and the spirit of its mandate in a timely fashion, especially following the election in 1984 of a governor allied with the union's fiercest opponents.

It is also the case, however, that the UFW's drift from vitality toward apparent stagnation is partially rooted in a web of complex factors related to the sometimes contradictory leadership of Cesar Chavez: a sincere devotion to democratic unionism that is undermined by a tendency to regard all internal dissidents as traitors at best and anti-union conspirators at worst; a professed desire to make the UFW a rank-and-file union governed from the bottom up that is contradicted by a strong inclination to concentrate authority in his own hands and those of close family members; a commitment to professionalize the administration of the UFW that is impeded by a reliance on volunteerism so unyielding as to have caused many of the union's most loyal and efficient staff members to quit.

In fairness, however, Chavez's performance must be assessed on a basis that encompasses far more than the normal categories of trade union leadership. For unlike most American labor leaders, who had stood apart from the traditions of their European counterparts by insisting that unionism is an end in itself, Chavez has, in his own somewhat idiosyncratic way, remained determined to use the UFW and the heightened political consciousness of his Chicano loyalists as a means for promoting changes more fundamental than those attainable through collective bargaining and other conventional avenues of trade union activism. In defining the UFW's

singular mission, Chavez once declared: "As a continuation of our struggle, I think that we can develop economic power and put it in the hands of the people so they can have more control of their own lives, and then begin to change the system. We want radical change. Nothing short of radical change is going to have any impact on our lives or our problems. We want sufficient power to control our own destinies. This is our struggle. It's a lifetime job. The work for social change and against social injustice is never ended."

When measured against the magnitude of his proposed enterprise, and against his extraordinary achievements on behalf of workers who were among the most powerless and degraded in America prior to his emergence, Chavez's real and alleged deficiencies in guiding the UFW across the hostile terrain of California's industrialized agriculture in no way detract from his standing as the most accomplished and far-sighted labor leader of his generation. Whether or not he has it in him to be more than a labor leader, to turn the UFW into an instrument of changes still more profound and far-reaching than it has already brought about, remains to be proven.

The history of American labor is littered with the wreckage of workers' organizations—the Knights of Labor and the Industrial Workers of the World among them—that tried and failed to combine the immediate purposes of trade unionism with an ultimate ambition to alter the fundamental structure of American society. Indeed, in an era when many labor leaders are preoccupied with nothing so much as the survival of their organizations, Chavez's pledge before the UFW's 1983 convention to lead the union in new and even bolder assaults against the economic and political status quo seems distinctly unrealistic. Unrealistic, that is, until one recalls the implausibility of what he has already accomplished.

Further Reading

Dunne, John G. Delano: The Story of the California Grape Strike . 1971.

Fodell, Beverly, ed. Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers: A Selected Bibliography . 1974.

Fogel, Walter, ed. California Farm Labor Relations and Law . 1985.

Garcia, Richard A. "Dolores Huerta: Woman, Organizer, Symbol." California History 72 (Spring 1993): 56-71.

Garcia, Richard A., and Richard Griswold del Castillo. Cesar Chavez: His Life and Times . Forthcoming.

Jenkins, J. Craig. The Politics of Insurgency: The Farm Workers Movement in the 1960s . 1985.

Levy, Jacques. Cesar Chavez: Autobiography of La Causa . 1975.

Loftis, Anne, and Dick Meister. A Long Time Coming: The Struggle to Unionize America's Farm Workers . 1977.

Majka, Linda C., and Theo J. Majka. Farm Workers, Agribusiness, and the State . 1982.

Matthiessen, Peter. Sal Si Puedes . 1969.

Rose, Margaret. "'From the Field to the Picket Line: Huelga Women and the Boycott,' 1965-1975." Labor History 31 (Summer 1990): 271-293.

Taylor, Ronald. Chavez and the Farm Workers . 1975.

14
Why Aren't High-Tech Workers Organized?
Lessons in Gender, Race, and Nationality from Silicon Valley

Karen J. Hossfeld

Editor's Introduction

"We'll show a real interest in unions when they show a real interest in us."
—Margarita, a Mexicana assembly worker in Silicon Valley

Since the 1930s, the character of the California economy has profoundly changed. The state had a significant manufacturing base by the 1930s, as Gerald Nash argues persuasively in his book World War II and the West: Reshaping the Economy (1990), but it was the Second World War that transformed California into a major manufacturing power. The Cold War further stimulated this transformation. Industries directly and indirectly tied to defense, especially aerospace, flourished, as did basic industries such as steel, oil, chemicals, clothing, and automobiles.

Employment in California grew rapidly. Between 1950 and 1980, while older regions of the country were suffering from severe structural unemployment, California's labor force grew by 250 percent. A key factor in this postwar economic prosperity was technical innovation. Waves of federal spending during World War H and afterward played a major role not simply in expanding the California economy but also in placing the state in the vanguard of the postwar high-technology revolution.

Since the end of World War II, the center of much of California's high-technology industry has been the Santa Clara Valley, now commonly called Silicon Valley. Largely as a result of the high-tech sector, employment in Santa Clara County doubled in the 1940s and 1950s. Between 1960 and 1980, four hundred thousand new jobs were created in Silicon Valley. By 1980, Silicon Valley was creating 20 percent of all high-technology jobs in the United States and contained more than two thousand high-tech companies.

Unlike most manufacturing industries in the United States, high-tech is almost entirely nonunion. Despite a few attempts by several unions, labor

organizers estimate that fewer than 6 percent of production workers in Silicon Valley are organized. This failure is not unique to the region; the union movement has failed dismally at organizing a significant number of workers in any semiconductor or computer manufacturing firm anywhere.

In this selection, Karen Hossfeld examines the reasons for the failure of the union movement to take hold in Silicon Valley. Hossfeld's study is based on two hundred interviews with workers and their families, labor organizers, and employers, including in-depth interviews with more than eighty immigrant women workers from various Third World countries.

Hossfeld argues that the obstacles to union organizing efforts are formidable. The work force is divided by race, language, and nationality. Physically, the workers employed by a single company are often dispersed among several plants. Management threats to relocate or automate when faced with unionization have had a chilling effect. Furthermore, international unions have not demonstrated much commitment to organizing high-tech workers. Unions have not appreciated the importance to women of issues such as comparable worth, sexual harassment, domestic violence, and child care. Patriarchal ideology and structures are also obstacles: Union involvement is not encouraged by most male heads of households, and motherhood and domestic chores impose demands on women that leave little time for union involvement. Hossfeld argues that unions must alter their priorities and devise new strategies to have a reasonable prospect of organizing high-tech workers.

This article examines the problems of labor organizing in the high-tech manufacturing industry in Silicon Valley, California.^[1] Microelectronics manufacturing is the largest and fastest-growing manufacturing industry in the world, and Silicon Valley is the industry's birthplace and reigning capital. An estimated two hundred thousand people work in the high-tech industry in California's Santa Clara County (Silicon Valley) region, approximately 20 percent of them in manufacturing production. Yet unions have paid little or no attention to organizing the industry's production

workers. Working conditions for line operatives are notoriously dangerous and insecure, but Silicon Valley, like the high-tech industry worldwide, remains almost exclusively nonunionized. Unions do continue to wage organizing campaigns in older, more traditional industries such as auto and steel, despite the decreasing relative size and economic influence of these industries. So why aren't unions devoting more attention to an industry that is growing? In an era when the labor movement needs to bolster its declining membership in order to survive, why aren't high-tech workers being organized?

These questions are important both to Silicon Valley workers and to the labor movement in general, for Silicon Valley is viewed by global industrialists as a prototype, not only in terms of its new technologies but also in terms of labor arrangements. If organized labor is once again to become vital in the United States, it must come to grips with the types of challenges and failures it faces in Silicon Valley.

What are these challenges? Labor leaders have argued, quite legitimately, that the microelectronics industry's ability to easily "emigrate and automate" its production facilities is a strong deterrent to organizing efforts (although automation remains very costly, and workers in the "offshore" locations that the industry has favored are in many cases actually proving to be more likely to organize than workers in the United States).^[2] Silicon Valley employers have also engaged in savvy union-busting strategies. But there are other major barriers to organizing that union leaders have not as readily acknowledged: namely, gender, race, and nationality dynamics, not only within the workplace but also outside it. Silicon Valley operatives, like their peers in high-tech assembly shops overseas, are predominantly Third World women.^[3] The class concerns of these women workers are intricately entwined with their concerns based on gender, ethnic identity, and nationality, with their needs as wives, mothers, and members of ethnic and immigrant communities. Just as it is no coincidence that employers have focused on hiring this specific work force,^[4] it is also no coincidence, my research suggests, that unions have been unable (and perhaps, in some cases, unwilling) to organize this work force.

This essay first provides an overview and a history of trade union organizing efforts in Silicon Valley and looks at management strategies to combat these efforts. It then focuses on how other dynamics affect the potential for labor organizing in the region's factories: sexism, racism, and national chauvinism within unions; gender arrangements in workers' households; and, finally, the ethnic and national identities of workers.

The discussion is based on data drawn from a larger field study of the lives and labors of Third World immigrant women workers in Silicon Valley.^[5] Conducted between 1982 and 1993, the study includes more than two hundred interviews with workers, family members, union organizers, and employers. In-depth, open-ended interviews were conducted with eighty-four women workers who have emigrated from a total of twenty-one Third World countries. I also interviewed an additional group of workers, both immigrant and nonimmigrant, male and female, who were introduced to me by union contacts specifically because of their active union involvement. Although I present comments from this group, they are not included in my statistical references, as they were not representative of my target population, which was more randomly selected, consisted exclusively of immigrant women, and was decidedly less pro-union. The largest nationality groups both in my study and in the general production-line labor force in Silicon Valley are Mexican, Chinese, Filipino, Korean, and Vietnamese.

According to other researchers' estimates, Third World immigrant women account for between 68 and 90 percent of the operative labor force in Silicon Valley high-tech shops.^[6] In the nineteen plants I observed (independent of conducting interviews with workers), the count averaged 90 percent. Collectively, the workers interviewed had been employed by more than thirty local microelectronics production companies, including large, well-known, vertically integrated firms, such as National Semiconductor and Advanced Micro Devices, and smaller, subcontracting assembly shops.

No trade union has ever won a shop floor vote in a Silicon Valley production firm, despite several past campaigns. Lockheed Missiles and Space Company, organized by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, Lodge 508, and electronics distributor Wyle Labs, organized by the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union, Local 6, might be seen as exceptions, but they are not primarily engaged in semiconductor or computer manufacturing. In addition, these shops were organized before Santa Clara County's transformation into the high-tech-dominated Silicon Valley; the Machinists, for example, won their first contract with Lockheed in 1957. Organizers estimate that fewer than 6 percent of production workers in the local high-tech industry belong to unions. This situation is not specific to Silicon Valley: Nationwide, no merchant semiconductor or computer manufacturing firms are organized, in contrast to most manufacturing industries in the United States.

Two of the organizers I interviewed attribute this problem to the relative newness of the industry, with organizers and workers just beginning

to get their bearings on a system still in formation. But several Silicon Valley manufacturing firms have now been around for twenty-five years—time enough for "newness" to be ruled out as the leading deterrent to organizing. Because high-tech has become a leading basic industry and is growing rapidly, it would seem logical for unions to target the industry as a high priority. Yet as of this writing in 1994, not one single full-time organizer was employed by a union to organize Silicon Valley high-tech production workers.^[7] Have unions given up on the region and the industry? Have they temporarily retreated after a few important, but not historically atypical, setbacks? Are high-tech workers simply not "unionizable" compared to other workers?

The failure of Silicon Valley organizing drives must be located in the context of declining worker support for organized labor nationwide. In the American work force as a whole, union membership has been steadily declining since World War II. Between 1975 and 1985, it dropped from 29 percent of the total nonfarm work force to only 19 percent.^[8] This decline has caused consternation among unions and other labor rights advocates and has sparked controversial debate about the future direction of and need for union activities.

The inability of traditional labor unions to organize Silicon Valley's workers is an important feature of the new international and gender division of labor within the high-tech industry. Whether this feature will persist or extend to other industries is not yet clear, but it is an important possibility for organized labor to consider. Union failure in Silicon Valley is not inevitable; unions have in the past dealt successfully with changes in the organization of work and the composition of the work force. In the 1930s, for example, American unions successfully adapted to the shift from craft to industrial work—although the adaptation came two decades after the shift in production began in the pre-World War I years.

The primary unions that in fact have tried to organize Silicon Valley shops are the Glaziers (Glaziers, Architectural Metal and Glassworkers Union), UE (United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers), and the Machinists (International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers). Nationally, the Communication Workers of America (CWA) has also focused its sights on the high-tech manufacturing industry, conducting campaigns at companies located in Massachusetts's Route 128 region, such as Wang Laboratories, Digital Equipment, and Honeywell.^[9] When I conducted my preliminary field research in the early and mid-1980s, UE was organizing

worker committees at Signetics in Sunnyvale and National Semiconductor in Santa Clara, and the Glaziers were conducting a mass campaign at Atari. In addition, the Santa Clara County Central Labor Council, which coordinates 104 union locals and district councils, was involved in encouraging campaigns. Since the 1970s, at least seven concerted organizing drives have targeted specific plants in the valley. Union campaigns at Siliconix, Signetics, and National Semiconductor never reached the stage of elections. Campaigns that did hold elections—at Semimetals West, Xidex, Raytheon, and, most recently, Atari—failed to win a majority of worker votes.

The Glaziers' (Local 1621) campaign to organize Sunnyvale-based Atari's 3,000 employees in the early 1980s was one of the valley's most noted union drives. In 1982, the Glaziers announced that they had collected enough signature cards—from 30 percent of eligible employees, as required by law—to call an election. The company, which manufactures coin-operated video games and home computers, fought back in full force. Management circulated an anti-union petition, which supervisors pressured workers to sign, and began inviting production workers to unprecedented company-sponsored parties, according to workers and Glaziers organizer Ed Jones. Jones also collected signed affidavits from workers who were threatened by supervisors because of their union support. The union lost some support and had to cancel its petition for election with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), but the campaign continued.

In February 1983, while the Glaziers were gearing up for another election bid, Atari announced that it was laying off 1,700 employees and relocating production to Taiwan and Hong Kong. Atari spokesperson Bruce Entin claimed that the decision to relocate was based solely on cost considerations and had no connection to the union drive. Ed Jones and pro-union workers are convinced otherwise, according to interviews. Since the massive layoffs, the Glaziers have been unable to gain the required 30 percent of signatures from eligible workers on Atari's one remaining production line in the valley.

Typically in Silicon Valley, employers such as Atari argue that unions are unsuccessful because working conditions are already favorable to workers, making unions unnecessary and anachronistic. In contrast, organizers claim that unions are greatly needed in what is a very unfavorable work climate but that the industry's anti-union campaigns and its ability to relocate foil all attempts at organizing. Unions insist that they have a great deal to offer all workers, including women and immigrants, in terms of tangible benefits. According to Department of Labor statistics, women workers have even more to gain from union membership than males do in

terms of wages. Male union members who worked full time earned an average of 18 percent more than their nonunion male peers in 1986 ($482 a week compared to $394), whereas female union members earned 25 percent more than their nonunion women peers ($368 a week compared to $274).^[10] Women who work under union contracts also enjoy greater health care, retirement, and vacation benefits than those not under contract.^[11]

Organizers in Silicon Valley stress that unions offer working parents their best chance for winning child care provisions and parental leave and also offer immigrants much-needed legal advocacy. They stress union commitment to protecting workers against problems to which high-tech manufacturing jobs are particularly prone: unsafe use of toxic chemicals in the work process, frequent layoffs, plant relocations, and automation. It is around these issues, as well as wages and benefits, that union organizers in Silicon Valley have tried to rally workers.

Yet national trade unions have not demonstrated a major commitment to or investment in organizing high-tech workers, according to frustrated local union activists. This is illustrated by the lack of commitment to the development of a full-time organizing staff. Without a greater allocation of resources, the hope of organizing high-tech workers locally or nationally remains slim. Lack of material support from union headquarters was a central problem pointed out by all the organizers with whom I talked. That unions have not focused more energy on the largest manufacturing industry in the United States is, in former UE organizer Mike Eisenscher's words, "a frightening condemnation of the labor movement."^[12]

Local union activists justifiably argue that this limited show of sustained support dampens workers' confidence in the potential of unions. The high-tech production workers I interviewed do not consider unions capable of helping them achieve better working conditions or job security. In fact, the majority of those interviewed believe that union organizing drives threaten their jobs, for management's threats to automate or relocate if unions succeed have not been empty. Organizers consider Atari's decision to relocate overseas in the midst of a promising union campaign to be a prime example of management making good on its anti-union threats. When asked what they thought would happen if their manufacturing workers unionized, all of the employers I interviewed told me that they would probably relocate production. Whether or not all employers are actually prepared to follow through on this, relocation is financially and physically possible at most manufacturing facilities, and the threat is clearly articulated to workers. One of the comments I heard most frequently from workers was, "If we unionize, the company will move away."

But, in addition, an equally frequent comment was, "Unions don't improve anything, anyway."

It has been extremely difficult for unions to attempt to organize a labor force that is not only severely divided by language, race, and nationality but also often spatially and geographically spread out between multiple plants within one firm. Atari, for example, had several plants in Sunnyvale, Milpitas, and San Jose at the time of the Glaziers' organizing drive. Organizers point to these as key problems, along with the very real threats of plant relocation and automation.

Also important is the concerted effort Silicon Valley employers have mounted to keep the high-tech manufacturing industry union-free. Management has a strong vested interest in keeping unions out of the microelectronics industry. Chief among management's fears, undoubtedly, are wage increases and benefits. Wages in more organized industries are significantly higher than in high-tech: Steel and aerospace workers in the mid-1980s, for example, earned an average of approximately $12 an hour, autoworkers $12.50. The average hourly wage of skilled (nonassembly) workers at electronics equipment companies during the same period was only $9.62^[13] —and workers labeled "unskilled" and "semiskilled," such as the ones in subcontracted assembly work, usually earn half that.

Other concerns, not directly wage-related, are also central to employers' hostility toward unions. Tougher occupational health and safety standards; responsibility for the medical effects of occupational hazards; job security; input concerning the introduction of new technologies such as automation; grievance procedures; retraining and severance pay for laid-off workers—all these are issues that union campaigns have emphasized and that managers and employers complained about. "It's very simple," according to a subcontractor named Robert. "Unions cost too much, and they try to tell us what to do. I started this company because I wanted to do things my way. If they think their way is better, let them start their own companies." Steve, the production manager at a large assembly firm, commented: "If we made all the changes that [one union organizer] wanted, this would be a real cushiony place to work—and a lousy place to try to pull down an executive paycheck. The assemblers would be making as much as me!"

Several large high-tech firms, purportedly in connection with the American Electronics Association (AEA), have employed the services of union-busting law firms to combat union campaigns. Production supervisors and mid-level managers report that they have been shown training films and given lectures on such subjects as "keeping our company union-free,"

"dealing with outside agitation," and "the importance of an 'independent' work force." During my field research, managers at three firms invited me to "union prevention" seminars offered by their employers. Such inhouse seminars have been common at larger firms, while smaller firms are more likely to send their managers out to attend similar courses offsite.

In 1983, the AEA published a report on union activity in the industry, crediting management tactics with stopping unionization. Workers and organizers also attest to management's large repertoire of anti-union tactics, from the simple to the costly. Several workers acknowledged that company spokespersons had warned them against unions. I saw newsletters from two companies telling employees that if they unionized, the companies would have no choice but to automate or relocate. Union organizers confirm that this is a standard tactic used by Silicon Valley employers. It is a tactic that is both ideological and pragmatic; whereas some companies only threaten, others, like Atari, actually move. Management does not tell workers that unions are harmful to profits because they lead to wage and benefit increases. Rather, they contend that unions lead to "bureaucratic overload and inflexibility that slows production," as one corporate leader told me, and "cut down on the company's ability to create [its] own set of benefits and type of work environment that are far better than any a union could provide."

Workers who have been identified with unionization drives report that they have been persecuted and fired. Although very few of the immigrant women operatives in my main sample had been involved with organizing drives, almost all had heard stories about other workers who were harassed or laid off when they got involved with unions. The comments made by Rui, a Chinese assembly worker, are typical of the attitudes these workers expressed:

I could never risk my boss thinking I'm with [the union trying to organize her shop at the time]. They find a reason to fire you if they think you are involved. They say you're not doing good work anymore, or that they don't need so many people. Or they put you in a dangerous job, to try to make you quit. This already happened to two of the girls—and one was not even in the union, she was just friends with the girl who was. I can't afford that—I have three kids, and my husband is already out sick.

In one of the more extreme cases, a woman worker at Signetics was fired for her union organizing activities. Her co-workers protested and filed grievances. In 1984, the National Labor Relations Board ordered the laid-off worker reinstated (which she declined) and given back pay of $42,500.^[14] Workers at other firms facing union drives also told me that

organizers are routinely transferred and harassed, passed over for promotion, and fired first during layoffs. Immigrant workers at two assembly plants that do subcontracting work for "famous" large semiconductor companies told me that managers led them to believe that they could be deported for union activities—even if they were in the United States legally. Employers and managers generally deny these charges, but Ed, a Korean immigrant who works as a line supervisor at one of the large firms facing a union drive, told me, "It's standard policy to get rid of the troublemakers. If unions come in, it will hurt everyone—so we weed out the agitators, to protect the company and all of our jobs."

Management thus seems to take the union "threat" seriously, especially during periods of local union activism. While the campaign at Atari was going on, administrators at three other companies I visited were concerned that I was an undercover union organizer and denied me entrance to their plants. During the same period, employers at two other plants, when asked if they were aware of any union activities, took the opportunity to vilify Dave Bacon, a UE organizer who was well known for his radical activism. One employer said about Bacon: "He's a one-man, son-of-a-bitch troublemaker." Managers at firms that were not being targeted also knew the names and descriptions of individual organizers such as Ed Jones of the Glaziers and Mike Eisenscher of UE. "We do our homework," one executive told me. "Unions are one of the few things my competitors and I share information about."

There has been little optimism among union supporters in the valley for several years, at least until recently. But increasing job insecurity for industry employees at all levels, organizers argue, means that the time is ripe for renewed union efforts. The semiconductor and computer industries have continued their typically volatile up and down swings, accompanied by alternating layoffs and hirings. Even professional and skilled workers have come to realize the instability of their jobs, as they too face sudden layoffs without warning. Companies that supposedly had "no layoff" clauses, such as Hewlett-Packard and Advanced Micro Devices, reneged on their policies in the late 1980s and laid off hundreds of workers.

In order to circumvent the dissent and disruption that layoffs create, companies began to increasingly use temporary employment agencies in the mid-1980s. According to Janine, a personnel manager, "Temp agencies are the way of the future for large high-tech firms" because they allow expansion and contraction even more easily than subcontractors do. According to the director of one of the largest local temp agencies, Silicon Valley has a greater number of temporary agencies, relative to population size,

than any other area in the country. More than half of these agencies were established in the 1980s. Electronics worker Pat Sacco reports that at one large firm, management told laid-off regular workers that they might try looking for work at a local temporary agency that had openings. The firm then hired back the same workers, through the agency, at lower wages. Because of this, these workers also lost their rights to unemployment benefits.^[15]

The early 1990s have seen increased organizing activity in the valley. Several community groups, including ethnic, religious, and environmental organizations, have expanded their efforts to focus on workers' concerns. The Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, for example, has initiated several educational campaigns about occupational hazards in the high-tech industry.^[16] Labor unions have also increased their profile. In 1992, workers at Versatronex, a contract printed circuit board assembly plant in the city of Sunnyvale that employs predominantly Mexican women, struck for six weeks, the first time any Silicon Valley production workers have gone out on a concerted strike. The strikers went back to work when the National Labor Relations Board ruled in their favor that the company must reinstate Joselito Muñoz, a worker who had been fired for speaking out against poor working conditions and in favor of union organizing. The day they went back to work, the strikers filed with the NLRB for a union representation election. Versatronex management agreed to recognize the union, the United Electrical Workers, but as election arrangements were being made, the company announced that it was permanently closing down—and it did so soon after. Although the strikers' victory was bittersweet, it was not without impact on workers and employers elsewhere. Workers at other plants participated in sympathy hunger strikes and protests, rare events in the industry. In a letter of thanks to community supporters, the workers who participated in the strike wrote: "We are proud of our struggle, and we are proud to be part of the union movement."

Another historic first for Silicon Valley organizing occurred during the same time. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) mounted a "Justice for Janitors" organizing campaign that may well have important ramifications for organizing in Silicon Valley. The union set out to pressure industry giant Apple Computer to hire only janitorial services that employ unionized workers. Investing more than one million dollars in a high-profile media campaign aimed at portraying image-conscious Apple in a critical light, the union won its goal in 1992.

The strategy of targeting the publicity-sensitive "big company" in order to accomplish change at the smaller companies it dealt with was

effective, but expensive. SEIU's intent, according to one of the campaign's organizers, was to set a precedent and put other companies on notice. "We noticed, all right," a high-level executive at one of Apple's chief competitors told me. "We're all watching very carefully to see who they go after next." One of his colleagues added: "Most of us in this industry rely heavily on contracting work out. Unions could never touch the subcontractors—they're too small, and there are too many of them. They were very clever to go after it at our level." A local attorney and management consultant, who bills himself as "a professional union-buster," reports that his phones have been "ringing off the hook since this janitors thing."

Clearly, Silicon Valley employers have worked hard to keep unions out. But their efforts are not the only barriers to organizing. Also important are the dynamics of gender, race, and nationality, both within the unions and in the lives of immigrant women workers in general. The following sections examine some of these dynamics and also consider ways that unions might redirect their strategies to more fully incorporate and address the needs of a diverse work force.

Recent changes in the gender composition of the work force are important to labor organizations as well as to employers and to women. Most unions have traditionally had male leadership and a male membership drawn from male-dominated occupations. With women making up an ever-increasing proportion of the labor force, unions will have to redirect their membership focus.^[17] At a time when total union membership in the United States is decreasing dramatically, female membership is actually increasing. This is partly explained by the unions' increased targeting of the state and service sectors, both of which have relatively high concentrations of women employees. But women are also being organized in the industrial sector, for example in textile plants and canneries.^[18] Today, almost six million workers, 34 percent of all union members in the country, are women, double the percentage of 1960.^[19] If unions are to survive, they must deal both with women workers' specific needs and with sexism in the union itself at all levels.

Historically, white male union members and leaders have often successfully campaigned to exclude immigrants, people of color, and women from the mainstream of labor through prejudice and discrimination.^[20] Chris, a union organizer I interviewed, suggested that in recent years this exclusion has typically been more subdued, as unions have recognized its divisive and weakening effect on labor solidarity. Yet many unions still do

not address the special situations and needs of immigrants, diverse ethnic and racial groups, and women. And even though in recent years union organizers have become more interested in and committed to these populations, 80 percent of the women immigrant workers I interviewed do not perceive traditional organizing movements as useful options for improving their work and life conditions in terms of their own priorities.

Approximately 50 percent of the women interviewed are also ideologically opposed to labor unions, although this varies by nationality, class background, and political affiliation. And, typically, even those women immigrant workers who are interested in union membership find it difficult to actively participate. They are constrained by the time demands of household responsibilities and "moonlighting" at jobs in the casual service sector to make ends meet. They also face resistance from male family members who do not approve of their womenfolk's involvement in "unchaperoned" activities with male "strangers" beyond paid work hours.^[21]

In the past two decades, some unions have begun to organize around concerns targeted by women workers. Encouraged by the development of organizations such as the Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW), which was founded by women trade unionists in 1974, unions such as SEIU, the International Union of Electrical Workers (IUE), CWA, and others are active in the fight for pay equity, an end to sex and race discrimination, pregnancy benefits, and parental leave.^[22] Only a few unions have given priority to these issues, however, and many are impeded by resentment from male union members who do not consider "women's issues" to be priorities, as illustrated by some of the testimony from my study. In Silicon Valley, I talked with union organizers who are clearly aware of and committed to these feminist workplace issues, but they agree that top union leadership still has not given full attention to such concerns. "The big unions are still completely male-dominated and male-defined at the top," a local organizer outside the high-tech industry told me. "That really hasn't changed, and it's killing the union movement."

Labor organizers and observers believe that part of the reason national union leadership has shown limited interest in organizing Silicon Valley is because Third World immigrant women are not a union priority. Linda, a Latina union organizer, reported:

Sure, the big guys say they're interested in high-tech, but they give us only two or three organizers and a shoestring budget, and there's a couple hundred thousand workers out there. If this was steel, or auto, or any of the other traditional men's jobs, they'd give us a lot more attention. It's easy to get a sense that the union leadership really couldn't care less about

a bunch of minorities and women. The local leadership really does, but they don't control the resources.

Another woman organizer was so fed up with the low priority the national union gave her campaign that she quit in frustration. And a labor advocate in the immigrant community says that unions "still don't want to touch immigrant workers with a ten-foot pole, even though we're a permanent sector of the labor force."

Unions have traditionally had problems, identifying with and appealing to the special needs of women, people of color, and immigrants. Luisa, a Chicana worker who supported an organizing drive at her plant, illustrates these problems:

[The union organizers] kept asking me, "Why don't the other Mexican women come to the meetings? They have just as much to gain." I kept telling them—they're afraid of deportation, they can't afford the dues, they've got to take care of their kids, and their husbands won't let them. And they don't understand English good. And all [the organizers] said was, "But it's in their own best interests." . . . Eventually, they got Spanish-speaking organizers, but it's like they didn't even consider the other barriers. They kept asking me, "Why don't they come?"

Many organizers, leaders, and rank-and-file members of traditional industrial trade unions realize that women need to be integrated into the ranks of the organized. The problem for workers of both sexes who favor extending the brotherhood to sisters is how to create a "siblinghood" that is not based on exclusively male needs and definitions. SEIU is perhaps the best example of a union that has paid attention to the specific problems of its many women and immigrant members. Organizers targeting the high-tech industry agree that their unions have much to learn from the SEIU model—and a long way to go to implement the necessary changes.

Another significant barrier to women joining unions has been the discomfort and, in some cases, hostility expressed by male workers toward women workers and their perceived "petticoat encroachment," as one male rank-and-filer termed it. When asked by a friend what he thought of the feminization of his union, Bob, a U.S.-born member of a different union, responded, "That's an interesting term, 'feminization'—what you're really talking about is 'sissification' . . . and I'm against it."

What will it mean for the organizing strength of both women and unions if "female" is equated with low status and "sissification"? Both labor and women's organizations—as well as individual male workers—will have to contend with this problem if the feminization of the work force

and labor unions continues. Although occupational sectors remain sex-segregated, unions are becoming more integrated, and male union members are being forced to face their own sexism within the ranks. Craig, a white male labor analyst I spoke with, went as far as blaming the current decline in the size, status, and power of unions on increased female membership, arguing that as women move in, men will move out. Historically this has certainly been the case with occupations such as secretarial work, but "blaming" women for their own devaluation is counterproductive. John, a Chicano union member, expressed the conflicts:

It's strange having women at the meetings. I mean, the guys don't know how to act with ladies around. I know we were the ones complaining about declining membership, but we never thought the new "brothers" would be female. They're the ones getting the new jobs in this area, though, so if it comes down to women or no new members at all—well, I'm not sure what most of the guys would choose.

Women report that although many men have supported their membership, many others have reacted with none-too-subtle sexist hostility. Judy, an Afro-Caribbean woman who belongs to a union active in the high-tech industry, explained:

The first time we [a group of women] showed up at the [union] meeting, we were a little bit nervous, so we drove over there together and all sat together in the back. Some of the guys got all upset and grumbled that the "cunt block" was taking over. Well, that broke down all the confidence we had built up in two of the girls just to come to the meeting, and they left right away. . . . Luckily, some of the guys have been real supportive of us—particularly the ones from our company—but a lot of them think we're "pinking up" their turf. What do they think we're going to do, put up lace curtains? This is a union, not a boys' club!

Not only do some of the men in Judy's union think that all the women want to do is put up lace curtains, but many also think that it is a woman's responsibility to do just that. When not actually relegated to coffee-making and interior decorating, women union members have found that they are expected to do secretarial work, make phone calls, and provide child care. Carla, one of the few Central American refugee women I met who is active in a union, told me that even though it was a man—a single father—who recommended that child care be provided during meetings, he assumed that women union members or the wives of other male members would organize, advertise, and provide the care. "How can I change diapers if I'm taking shorthand?!" protested Carla, who also takes minutes

at the meetings. "I get to do drudge work on the line—that's not why I joined a union!"

My research indicates that male and female workers do not commonly see themselves as having generic, genderless needs as workers. Both men and women articulate the view that the two sexes have different styles of discussing, deciding on, and implementing policies and actions and also often tend to focus on different issues. Most of the men I interviewed devalue both the concerns of women workers and the women's style of presenting and processing their concerns. The women, in contrast, tend to acknowledge the men's concerns—although not always their presentation style and processing—as valuable. The following comment was made by Leonard, a white male trade union member in his thirties:

[The women] just keep bringing up stuff that gets in the way of the union's real concerns. If it's going to turn into a ladies' bitch session or a coffeeklatsch, I'm not going to stick around.

And just what is the ladies' "stuff" that gets in the way of the union's "real concerns"?

You know, all these new women's lib issues: wanting to spend our valuable time inventing a comparable worth program, instead of fighting for higher pay. And last meeting we had this whole program on sexual harassment. Christ, I'd like to have more sex at work, not less!

Leonard does not consider issues that affect primarily women at work to be workers' issues. He belittles and dismisses them as inappropriate union concerns because they do not affect men in the same way. But comparable worth and sexual harassment are of course labor issues: They affect workers on the job. Comparable worth means higher pay for a major sector of the work force, yet Leonard seems to view it as a struggle that will take energy away from increasing wages as he defines them, that is, male wages. Compare his attitudes with those of Clemintine, a Filipina in the same union:

[The male shop steward] encouraged me to get more involved in union activities, and to get other women to join. He kept saying, "We really need more women—and the women could really benefit from the union." Well, I agree with him, but it's hard having to act like "just one of the guys." Of course, the issues they talk about are important to us—wages and close-downs and job security affect us, too. I even think it's fine that they spend a lot of time talking about, you know, "guy stuff," like sports, and fixing up their cars, and bragging about how much heavy equipment they can lift—and they organize social events around those things, and that's fine. But they get real annoyed when [the union leadership] brings up things that are important to the girls—like trying to get child care during meetings,

and counseling for domestic violence. They say those things are out of place at a union.

The problem Clemintine refers to is not simply that of men belittling women's social activities in comparison to their own. Gender-specific social concerns are frequently considered appropriate for union attention only if they are male, and inappropriate if they are female. Recreational activities that will improve men's quality of life, such as organizing male sports teams, are often deemed acceptable union business, whereas social change activities that will improve women's quality of life—such as providing child care and dealing with domestic violence—are seen as outside the bounds of union discussion. That child care and domestic violence are viewed by both men and women as female problems, while sports and cars are seen as men's interests, is of course one of the roots of the problem. Interestingly, these examples contradict male rank-and-filers' oft-voiced assumptions that women are more concerned with socializing and men more interested in "hard-core" work issues.

Conversations with both union and nonunion women workers indicate that for a woman to have the courage to enter an often hostile male union, the chances are that she is motivated by crucial work concerns. If she is looking for a social club or even a women's organization, she will likely turn to an organization less threatening than a male-dominated union to meet her needs. Certainly, men do not join a union merely because they want to play in its baseball league. But most unions are still places where men feel more comfortable than women, where males get more of their specific needs met than do women. Unions need to develop a better understanding of the gender biases of their own systems and processes, sensitizing workers to the reality that issues which primarily affect women workers are not "women's problems" and that male workers' definitions of issues are not necessarily the generic standard against which women workers should be measured. Unions must identify which work issues potentially unite and which divide male and female workers and learn how to deal with both. Otherwise, employers' tendency to devalue both work and women by creating more and more low-paid female jobs will be reproduced by unions and workers themselves.

For those immigrant women workers who are interested in and supportive of unions, gender ideologies and arrangements within the family can also be primary barriers to union involvement. In many families, males control

and restrict women's time and access, meaning that women are heavily discouraged from engaging in union activities. This helps to explain why male immigrants are more likely to be involved in unions than their female family members. Maria Elena, a twenty-year-old Filipina worker, described her situation:

I am in favor of unions. In Manila, my brother and my father worked for a clandestine union that the government was after. I used to work at National [Semiconductor], and the union was trying to organize there. But I could never go to the meetings because my father would not let me. It is true for my friends, too. Girls are not allowed to go to any meetings or places without a relative.

Workers I talked with from a wide spectrum of national backgrounds, including European American, reported that males frequently discourage or forbid female family members from participating in unions. Some of the men believe that unions are a male preserve and prerogative, and not a place for women; some are simply anti-union and expect their womenfolk to act accordingly. Others are fearful of company or state retribution and want to protect their family. Still other men, as well as a few women, think that it is inappropriate for females to "mix" with males in an unchaperoned environment, particularly with men of different ethnic, national, and religious backgrounds. ("Mixing" on the job site was considered chaperoned or simply unavoidable; then, too, the workplace is highly sex-segregated.)

Many women, and some men, disagree with these gender-based assumptions, and some immigrant women workers do indeed become involved in unions. More than 95 percent of those I interviewed, however, do not. Even those women who wished to get involved have little leverage in disobeying male authority when their life and survival are intricately connected to family and household. The women who do get involved in unions tend either to have familial support for doing so or to live in households without men. In my main informant group, however, fewer than 10 percent of the women workers lived in households with no adult male present. Approximately 70 percent of the women interviewed believed that their menfolk would stand in their way if they wanted to become involved in unions.

Another central ideological barrier to immigrant women's involvement in organizing involves the women's own consciousness about their jobs. Many immigrant women in Silicon Valley shops view their current occupations as both temporary and secondary.^[23] Although they are critical

of the low wages, the lack of job security, and the high-risk occupational hazards, they are typically hesitant to organize because they believe that they will stay at these jobs only for a short time, while they are "helping" their menfolk become established in the United States. They also consider their primary identity to be as a family caregiver, and they view their wages as secondary to male family members' wages. In reality, however, in 1993, the large majority of women in my study were still employed in the same industry—if not by the same employer—as they were when I started interviewing them in the early 1980s. In addition, 80 percent of the women have consistently been the primary source of steady income in their households throughout the course of my study, even when adult males are present. Nonetheless, they continue to perceive themselves as temporary workers and secondary earners, identities that mitigate against investing energy in workplace organizing.

In addition to gender ideology, hierarchical gender structures—in particular, the unequal sexual division of labor within the home—often constrain women's union involvement. Libby, a white thirty-six-year-old divorced mother of two, who works in high-tech processing, commented:

Union meetings? Who has the time? The commute [to work] is over an hour each way—I get home, pick up my kids, and then try to spend some time with them before they go to bed, when I do the laundry. And I'm trying to find time to go back to school. Even if I had the time, I can't afford to pay a sitter while I'm off saving the world.

Women who live in households with other adults, as do most of the women in my formal sample, have the same constraint. Said Marta, a Mexicana assembly worker who is married and lives with her in-laws:

I would really like to get involved with the union, but there is no time to go to meetings or help recruit after work. I have too much to do when I come home, with the kids, the apartment, and so forth. I need to relieve my mother-in-law, who has taken care of everything all day while I'm at work—I would feel bad asking her to stay longer. My husband, of course, doesn't have this problem , so he gets involved for the both of us and brings me home reports of the meetings and things. [emphasis added]

That her husband "doesn't have this problem" of working a double shift, first on the job and then in the household, is not something she questions; she later agreed that it is perhaps unfair, but she is resigned that "God did not make men and women equal." Her sentiments are not unique: Family responsibilities are cited as barriers to labor organizing by most of the women who are at all interested in unions.

Historically, many union leaders have viewed this situation as a failure of women themselves to adjust and give priority to traditional union platforms and practices. Donald, an African American union organizer who works outside the high-tech industry, told me that "any worker who truly recognizes the importance of having a say over his [sic ] job can make time to get involved. It's like anything else; you make time for your top priorities." He added that "for whatever the reasons," women workers are not as committed to gaining control over their jobs as are males:

Most of the gals would rather spend more time at home, doing domestic things, than get involved with the union. There's not much we can do about that. . . . Everyone likes to spend more time with their kids, of course, but all we need is one night a week. The fellas are willing to give that, but not the ladies. [emphasis added]

It did not seem relevant to Donald that women workers usually have no choice about working this double shift. Male workers may be more "willing" to devote time to unions because, in most cases, they in fact have more time—a situation that should not be news to union activists who are familiar with women's lives.

Several of the women I interviewed who were familiar with union activities expressed dissatisfaction with what unions have to offer people who must handle the double shift of work and household demands. Charo, a Mexicana semiconductor processor, noted:

Why should we pay money to the unions? We already have the supervisors telling us what to do—we don't need someone else to do it, too. My major problem is that I can't find good child care, and I don't have any time to study English. Will the union keep my kids off of the streets? Will they keep [my husband] from drinking? No.

Her friend Mila, who was sitting in on this interview, added: "What you need is a wife, not a union!"

Another factor that greatly influences the relationship of immigrant workers to the U.S. labor movement is their earlier experience with politics and organizing in their country of origin. This section provides some limited anecdotal information that may help to explain why immigrants of different nationalities tend to view unions differently. Not all the nationalities represented in my study are discussed here; the findings are preliminary, but they convey a sense of the magnitude of multicultural understanding that must be developed by anyone wishing to effectively organize a diverse immigrant labor force.

According to Thu, a Vietnamese community leader and union advocate, many Vietnamese immigrants to the United States equate unions with communism. If they are anti-communist, as are the vast majority who have fled to America, they tend to be anti-union. For example, 90 percent of Vietnamese refugees with U.S. citizenship are registered in and vote regularly for the Republican party,^[24] which traditionally supports business interests when they conflict with organized labor. Vietnamese immigrants, across classes, strongly favor Republican candidates and policies because they perceive Republicans as more staunch opponents of communism and greater supporters of military defense than Democrats. Only one of the Vietnamese workers I interviewed claimed to have had any involvement with labor unions in Vietnam. Most would not discuss their families' direct involvement in political activities, except to specify that they were vehemently anti-Vietcong. None of the Vietnamese immigrant workers or their family members claim membership in any U.S. labor union, and most speak of unions in either a derogatory or a wary tone.

In contrast, local Filipino immigrant communities have a tradition of labor militancy that is tied to labor and resistance movements in the Philippines. Under former president Ferdinand Marcos, outlawed labor unions were clandestine and were part of the insurgency against the regime. The majority of working-class Filipino immigrants in Silicon Valley are anti-Marcos, according to community members interviewed; many of them came to the United States to escape political persecution by the Marcos regime. Many Filipino immigrants have remained in close contact with political groups in their homeland and have been influenced by the rising tide of labor militancy there. Compared to Vietnamese immigrants, fewer Filipinos who immigrated during the Marcos days have sought American citizenship, and thus voting rights, because they expected that Marcos would soon be overthrown and that they would return home. Since Marcos has fallen, however, relatively few have returned to the Philippines.

Among the Filipino immigrants I interviewed, most politically support U.S. labor unions in theory, but their own organizing energy in recent years has been directed toward conditions in the Philippines. During the time of my earlier interviews, before Corazon Aquino took office, anti-Marcos Filipinos in the United States, like those in the Philippines, had to remain clandestine and low-profile in all of their political activities, for fear of retaliation by pro-Marcos forces. Informants claimed that wealthy Marcos supporters in the San Francisco Bay Area maintained a "hit squad" that targeted local anti-Marcos activists. Sympathizers on both sides of the struggle expressed fear of reprisals.^[25] Although Marcos supporters in the

United States feared retaliation from the numerically stronger anti-Marcos forces, the pro-Marcos sector wielded much greater financial and political power. Anti-Marcos activists claim that before Aquino's victory they were harassed by both the FBI and its Filipino equivalent and that their activities in the United States led to severe persecution of family members in the Philippines. Because of these conditions, many Filipino workers I talked with before the ouster of Marcos were understandably reticent to discuss their political involvement. Those who did were overwhelmingly anti-Marcos. In an interview I conducted in 1983, Tito, a Filipino janitor and the husband of a high-tech production worker, commented:

Of course we are all anti-Marcos; that is why we came here. If we liked what he was doing, if we were not afraid for our lives, would we have left the homes we love? . . . The only ones here who are for the regime are Imelda's rich cronies—they come here to invest their money safely—but they still fly back to see her all the time.

His teenage daughter told me that it was easy to distinguish which of her compatriots were pro-Marcos: "They're the ones you see shopping; we're the ones you see working."

In the post-Marcos period, more wealthy, pro-Marcos Filipinos have immigrated to the Bay Area. A pro-Marcos position is generally equated with a pro-Republican stance, whereas those who are anti-Marcos range from being pro-Democrat to having left-wing sympathies. Working-class Filipino immigrants tend to be anti-Marcos and pro-labor. Only two of the Filipina workers I interviewed claimed to have been active in labor unions in the Philippines, but 40 percent reported that male family members had been actively involved. In several of the Filipino households I visited, family members engaged in impassioned discussions about labor and liberation movements in the Philippines when I asked them about their homeland. Similarly, although only two Filipina workers (one of whom was also a trade unionist in the Philippines) reported that they had been involved in U.S. unions, approximately 30 percent of their adult male family members reported that they were unionists.

Institutional barriers to women's participation are very real, yet women have nevertheless been active in the local labor movement. And Filipinos of both sexes have been at the forefront of collective organizing efforts that have taken place in Silicon Valley. In 1985, a group of twelve workers from chip-maker giant National Semiconductor Corporation came before Santa Clara County's Human Rights Commission to publicly testify about their employer's racially discriminatory labor practices. Most

of these workers were Filipino. And during the drive to organize National Semiconductor, the single largest group of workers to join the union were Filipinas. Organizers note that the involvement of these women coincided with one of the major nationalist upsurges against Marcos in the Philippines. Local organizers report that National Semiconductor is aware of the connection between politics in the Philippines and Silicon Valley organizing; according to rumor, the company has even sent management representatives to the Philippines to investigate and lobby against labor unions.^[26]

Most of the immigrants I talked with from the Philippines, El Salvador, Indochina, and other regions torn by civil war essentially came to the United States as political refugees, whether or not the U.S. government granted them official refugee status. The factors that push other groups to immigrate to America are less frequently tied to individuals' particular political affiliations, although in the broader sense all immigration occurs in a political context. Within nonrefugee communities, there tends to be a greater diversity of political histories and labor sympathies, much of which seems to be tied to previous experiences with organizing and to class background. This was the case with Mexican workers I interviewed. Mexican informants and their family members tend to have been either unemployed or underemployed in rural or urban labor before coming to the United States. Although few workers—less than 10 percent of the women and just over 10 percent of their male family members—reported involvement in unions or other labor groups in Mexico, 10 percent of the women and 30 percent of the men reported attending at least one union meeting in the United States. Two of the Mexican women had joined a union in the United States, and more than 20 percent had male family members who belong to a union.

Recent labor insurgencies in South Korea, such as the widespread strikes at Hyundai and other plants, might suggest that Korean immigrants, like their Filipino co-workers, would also be inclined to labor militancy. This was not the case for the Korean workers I talked with. Half of these workers were nonunionized professional or semiprofessional workers before immigration. Only one claimed that she or any family member had ever been involved in union activities in Korea. None of the Korean women is involved in a union in the United States, although a few female family members are. Approximately 8 percent of the male family members interviewed have been involved in unions since their arrival.

Most of the immigrant women workers I interviewed were aware of

union organizing drives in the valley during the course of their employment, yet fewer than 10 percent knew which unions were involved, what union membership entails, or the issues on which unions were focusing. Fewer still expressed any interest in participating in union activities. One reason that the women were relatively uninformed about union specifics is the language barrier; another is fear of persecution by the Immigration and Naturalization Service and other government agencies.

My findings indicate that the large majority of immigrant women in Silicon Valley high-tech manufacturing jobs are alienated from the trade union movement. That does not mean, however, that they do not understand the value of collective organizing. Irma, a Filipina immigrant, an undocumented high-tech production worker and a young mother, told me this story. After a hard day on the job, she cooks dinner and puts the kids to bed. Late at night, when she is clone helping her husband get off to his night job and her sister go through the job ads, she sometimes goes over to her neighbor's apartment "to watch TV." Her neighbor is a Mexican woman who works at the same plant. They sit around drinking coffee while their kids are asleep, and though they are exhausted, they talk about their dreams and goals and how to achieve them:

When I think about it, we don't really dream of fortunes or kingdoms or things like that very often. We mainly dream about our real lives. . .. And so much of what we want for ourselves and our families is conditioned by our jobs, even though we don't think of our jobs as something that we care about, because they're pretty depressing. . . .

We dream that when we work hard, we'll be able to clothe our children decently, and still have a little time and money left for ourselves. And we dream that when we do as good a job as other people, we get treated the same, and that nobody puts us down because we're not like them. We dream that our jobs are safe, and secure, and when we're really on a roll—we even imagine that they're interesting and enjoyable! . . .

Then we ask ourselves, "How could we make these things come true?" And so far we've come up with only two possible answers: win the lottery, or organize. What can I say, except I have never been lucky with numbers. So tell them this in your book: Tell them it may take time that people don't think they have, but they have to organize! It doesn't have to be through a union, because God knows unions have problems. So you can do it any-where—but organize! Because the only way to get a little measure of power over your own life is to do it collectively, with the support of other people who share your needs.

For immigrant women workers, a successful organizing movement will be one that addresses the intersections of class, gender, race, and nationality

in their lives, a movement recognizing that for women such as Irma a work life means not only wage work but household and community labor, and often includes the struggles associated with being undocumented. What is needed is an interethnic labor and community movement that challenges gender and racial oppression as well as dangerous, unstable working conditions in the high-tech industry. And because of the global scope and mobility of the industry, such a movement must also have an international component.

These are, of course, very tall orders. But Third World women workers such as the ones interviewed for this study constitute a major and growing force in the modern international division of labor. A labor movement that wishes to remain viable must therefore make the problems presented in these pages a primary focus. To paraphrase Margarita, the Mexicana assembler quoted in the opening of this article, today's new workers will take an interest in labor movements—or any social movement—only when those movements demonstrate a real interest in them.

Further Reading

Chapkis, Wendy, and Cynthia Enloe. Of Common Cloth: Women in the Global Textile Industry . 1983.

Colclough, Glenna, and Charles M. Tolbert. Work in the Fast Lane: Flexibility, Divisions of Labor, and Inequality in High-Tech Industries . 1992.

Fernandez-Kelly, Maria Patricia. For We Are Sold, I and My People: Women and Industry in Mexico's Frontier . 1983.

Friaz, Guadalupe Mendez. "Employment Security in a Nonunion Workplace: A Study of Blue Collar Workers in a High-Tech Firm." Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1989.

Green, Susan S. Silicon Valley's Women Workers: A Theoretical Analysis of Sex-Segregation in the Electronics Labor Market . 1980.

Gregory, Kathleen. "Signing-Up: The Culture and Careers of Silicon Valley Computer People." Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern University, 1984.

Hayes, Dennis. Behind the Silicon Curtain: The Seductions of Work in a Lonely Era . 1989.

Hossfeld, Karen J. "Hiring Immigrant Women: Silicon Valley's Simple Formula." In Women of Color in U.S. Society , edited by Bonnie Thornton Dill and Maxine Baca Zinn, pp. 65-93. 1994.

———. "Small Foreign, and Female ": Profiles of Gender, Race, and Nationality in Silicon Valley . Forthcoming.

———. "'Their Logic Against Them': Contradictions in Sex, Race, and Class in Silicon Valley." In Women Workers and Global Restructuring , edited by Kathryn Ward, pp. 149-178. 1990.

Katz, Naomi, and David S. Kemnitzer. "Women and Work in Silicon Valley: Options and Futures." In My Troubles Are Going to Have Trouble with Me: Everyday Trials and Triumphs of Women Workers , edited by Karen Bodkin Sacks and Dorothy Remy, pp. 209-218. 1984.

Keller, John Frederick. "The Production Workers in Electronics: Industrialization and Labor Development in California's Santa Clara Valley." Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 1981.

Muller, Thomas, and Thomas J. Espenshade. The Fourth Wave: California's Newest Immigrants . 1985.

Olson, Lynne. "The Silkwoods of Silicon Valley." Working Woman 8 (July 1984).

Saxenian, AnnaLee. "Contrasting Patterns of Business Organization in Silicon Valley." Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 10 (1992): 377-391.

———. "In Search of Power: The Organization of Business Interests in Silicon Valley and Route 128." Economy and Society 18 (1989): 25-70.

———. "Urban Contradictions of Silicon Valley: Regional Growth and Restructuring of the Semiconductor Industry." International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 7 (June 1983): 237-261.

Siegel, Lenny, and John Markoff. The High Cost of High-Tech: The Dark Side of the Chip . 1985.

Storper, Michael, and Richard Walker. The Capitalist Imperative: Territory, Technology, and Industrial Growth . 1989.

U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Women and Minorities in High Technology . 1982.

Walker, Richard. "The Playground of U.S. Capitalism: The Political Economy of the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1980s." In Fire in the Hearth: The Radical Politics of Place in America , edited by Mike Davis et al., pp. 3-82. 1990.

Winner, Langdon. "Silicon Valley Mystery House." In Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space , edited by Michael Sorkin, pp. 31-60. 1993.

15
Fontana
Junkyard of Dreams

Mike Davis

Editor's Introduction

In 1920, Upton Sinclair wrote that California was "a parasite upon the great industrial centers of other parts of America." Beginning during World War II, however, a set of basic industries emerged in California that provided the state with a manufacturing base comparable to that in most of the industrialized states of the East and the Midwest. Southern California was the primary location of this industrial expansion, with growth centered in the greater Los Angeles conurbation. Between 1940 and 1944, more than $800 million was invested in five thousand new industrial plants in southern California, and the value of Los Angeles's manufacturing output during the war rose from $5 billion to $12 billion.

The growth continued after the war. Manufacturing payrolls increased from $1.3 billion in 1947 to $4.4 billion in 1956, with southern California accounting for 71 percent of the total factory payrolls of the state. More than 90 percent of the state's aircraft and parts, rubber and tire, and scientific industries were located in southern California in 1956, while approximately 80 percent of the apparel, furniture, electrical machinery and equipment, and motor vehicle industries were based in the southland.

Federal government expenditures for defense and aerospace played a significant role. By a conservative estimate, the federal government spent $100 billion in California between 1940 and 1970, far more than in any other state. During the 1980s, the Los Angeles area alone accounted for 17 percent of all U.S. defense spending. Little wonder that between the early 1970s and the early 1980s the Los Angeles region generated a quarter of a million jobs.

But this phenomenal growth masked underlying problems that existed in some of southern California's manufacturing industries long before the

devastating impact of the recession that began in 1989 took effect. Certain basic industries were falling victim to the pressures of international competition. From 1978 to 1982, ten of the twelve largest nonaerospace plants in East Los Angeles laid off more than fifty thousand workers, many of them African Americans and Chicanos.

All was not well in the "Inland Empire" (San Bernardino and Orange counties) either. During World War II, Henry Kaiser built the first steel mill in the Pacific Coast states at Fontana, fifty miles east of Los Angeles. For more than two decades, Fontana flourished. By the late 1960s, however, a series of events occurred that would ultimately doom this blue-collar community.

In this extract from his book City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles , Mike Davis returns to Fontana to tell the history of his birthplace and analyze the profound social, cultural, and environmental changes and tensions produced over the years. He examines how the Kaiser steel plant transformed pastoral Fontana during World War II, bringing jobs but also social dislocation and a high crime rate, including vigilantism against African Americans.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Kaiser ignored the competition from more profitable Asian and European steel plants. Efforts to modernize the plant in the 1970s were too little too late. In 1983, the plant closed, and six thousand workers lost their jobs. But Fontana did not turn into a ghost town. A group of ambitious real estate developers converted it into a suburban bedroom community. The new middle-class and upper-class residents of Fontana, in alliance with developers, then killed industrial redevelopment plans, arguing that they would have an adverse environmental impact on a densely populated residential suburb.

Mental geographies betray class prejudice. In the trendy-chic L.A. Weekly 's "Best of Los Angeles" guide, one of the "Ten Best of the Best" is the Robertson Boulevard off-ramp of the Santa Monica Freeway near Beverly Hills: where the air starts to clear of smog and the true heaven of the Westside begins. In Yuppie dell-map consciousness, landscapes tend to compress logarithmically as soon as one leaves the terrain of luxury lifestyles. Thus Fairfax is the near Eastside, while Downtown is the far horizon, surrounded by dimly known zones of ethnic restaurants. Even if the

Westsider is vaguely familiar with the old concentrations of Wasp wealth marooned in Pasadena, Claremont, or Redlands, the eastbound San Bernardino Freeway (the I-10)—traversed at warp speed with the windows rolled up against the smog and dust—is merely the high road to Palm Springs and the Arizona Desert. The "Inland Empire" of western San Bernardino and Riverside counties is little more than a blur.

One of the few modern writers to venture thither, Joan Didion, on her way to a San Bernardino murder trial, found the landscape "curious and unnatural":

The lemon groves are sunken, down a three- or four-foot retaining wall, so that one looks directly into their dense foliage, too lush, unsettlingly glossy, the greenery of nightmare; the fallen eucalyptus bark is too dusty, a place for snakes to breed. The stones look not like natural stones but like the rubble of some unmentioned catastrophe.^[1]

Rising from the geological and social detritus that has accumulated at the foot of the Cajon Pass sixty miles east of Los Angeles, the city of Fontana is the principal byproduct of this "unmentioned catastrophe." A gritty blue-collar town, well known to line-haul truckers everywhere, with rusting blast furnaces and outlaw motorcycle gangs (the birthplace of the Hell's Angels in 1946), it is the regional antipode to the sumptuary belts of West L.A. or Orange County. "Designer living" here means a Peterbilt with a custom sleeper or a full-chrome Harley hog. A loud, brawling mosaic of working-class cultures—Black, Italian, hillbilly, Slovene, and Chicano—Fontana has long endured an unsavory reputation in the eyes of San Bernardino County's moral crusaders and middle-class boosters.

But Fontana is more than merely the "roughest town in the county." Its indissoluble toughness of character is the product of an extraordinary, deeply emblematic local history. Over the course of the seventy-five years since its founding, Fontana has been both junkyard and utopia for successive tropes of a changing California dream. The millions of tourists and commuters who annually pass by Fontana on I-10, occasionally peeking into the shabbiness of its backyards and derelict orchards, can little imagine the hopes and visions shipwrecked here.

In its original, early-twentieth-century incarnation, Fontana was the modernized Jeffersonian idyll: an arcadian community of small chicken ranchers and citrus growers living self-sufficiently in their electrified bungalows. Then in 1942 the community was abruptly reshaped to accommodate the dream of a Rooseveltian industrial revolution in the West. The Promethean energies of Henry Kaiser turned Fontana overnight into a

mighty forge for war, the only integrated steel complex on the Pacific Slope. In the early 1980s, with equally brutal swiftness, the milltown was shuttered and its workers and machines reduced to scrap. Yet, phoenix-like, a third Fontana—the "affordable suburb"—has arisen from the ruins of Kaisertown. In the new economic geometry of the Southern California "metrosea," where increasing masses commute three or more hours daily to reconcile paychecks with mortgages, Fontana—and its sister communities of San Bernardino County's "West End"—are the new dormitories of Southern California's burgeoning workforces.

If violent instability in local landscape and culture is taken to be constitutive of Southern California's peculiar social ontology, then Fontana epitomizes the region. It is an imagined community, twice invented and promoted, then turned inside-out to become once again a visionary green field. Its repeated restructurings have traumatically registered the shifting interaction of regional and international, manufacturing and real-estate, capitalism. Yet—despite the claims of some theorists of the "hyperreal" or the "depthless present"—the past is not completely erasable, even in Southern California. Steelmaking in the shadow of the San Bernardinos—the transposed culture of Pennsylvania millworkers on a horticultural semi-utopia on the edge of the desert—have left human residues that defy the most determined efforts of current developers to repackage Fontana as a vacant lot. To this extent the Fontana story provides a parable: it is about the fate of those suburbanized California working classes who cling to their tarnished dreams at the far edge of the L.A. galaxy.

Fontana Farms

It was just the type of place they often had talked of. Ten acres of level land . . . rich, fertile. On it were 200 fine walnut trees, young, but sturdy. And on four sides was a beautiful fringe of tall, graceful eucalyptus, through which they glimpsed the lofty crests of the San Bernardinos.

"It would be wonderful, if we just had money enough," said she. "At least," said he, "we have enough to make a start. We can pay down what we can spare and stay in the city for a while. There'll be enough to put up a little garage house, and we'll have a place of our own to come to weekends and holidays."

And so, much sooner than they had hoped, their dream of a place all their own, out in the country, came true. Every weekend, every holiday, found them on their Fontana farm, planting things, cultivating their walnut trees, watching things grow. And their farm returned their affection in full measure. Never did the walnut trees

thrive so. Never did berry bushes and fruit trees do better. Each week they carried back with them some of the products of their farm.

Then there came a day when they could build the farm home they always had planned. A roomy, rambling house, with a world of windows. A broad green lawn, and trees in front, and at the back equipment for 2,000 chickens, a rabbitry for 240 full-blooded New Zealand Whites, and, just for the fun of it, pens for Muscovy and Peking ducks, turkeys . . .

And so, the first of the year, they moved in. Each week brings an egg check of $40 to $50 or more. There is a ready market for every rabbit they can produce. The walnut trees will be in production soon, and in full bearing they will add another $2,000 per year net to the profits of the place. In all Fontana there's no farm that's finer, no couple that is happier, and it's proved so easy . . . after they found their Fontana farm.
Fontana Farms ad, 1930^[2]

Fontana Farms was the brainchild of A. B. Miller, San Bernardino contractor and agriculturalist. All but forgotten today, Miller was one of the hero-builders of a unique civilization of affluent agricultural colonies in what was once known as the "Valley of the South,"^[3] stretching from Pomona to Redlands. Like the more widely known George Chaffey, whose Ontario colony had decisive influence on the technology of Zionist settlement in Palestine, Miller was a visionary entrepreneur of hydroelectric power, irrigated horticulture, cooperative marketing, and planned community development. Which is to say, he was a brilliant real-estate promoter who fully grasped the combination of advertising and infrastructure required to alchemize the dusty plains of the San Bernardinos into gold. If Chaffey, along with L.A. water titan William Mulholland, far surpassed the hydraulic accomplishments of Miller, the latter was unique in the thorough planning and complementary agricultural diversity that made Fontana such a striking realization of the petty-bourgeois ideal of withdrawal into Jeffersonian autonomy. Only the failed Socialist utopia of Llano del Rio, in the Mojave Desert north of Los Angeles, aspired to a more ambitious integration of civility and self-sufficiency.

In 1906 Miller, flush with construction profits from the new Imperial Valley, took over the failed promotion of the Semi-Tropic Land and Water Company: twenty-eight square miles of boulder-strewn plain west of San Bernardino. Incessantly raked by dust storms and desiccating Santa Ana winds, the alluvial Fontana-Cucamonga fan for the most part retained the same forlorn aspect—greasewood, sage, and scattered wild plum trees—that had greeted the original Mormon colonists sent by Brigham Young in

1851 to establish San Bernardino as Deseret's window on the Pacific. Raising capital from prominent Los Angeles bankers, Miller undertook the construction of a vast irrigation system (tapping the snows of Mount Baldy via Lytle Creek) and the planting of half a million eucalyptus saplings as windbreaks. By 1913 his Fontana Company was ready to begin laying out a townsite between Foothill Boulevard (an old wagon road soon to become part of famous US 66) and the Santa Fe tracks. At the inaugural barbecue, Miller's friend and sponsor, Pacific Electric Railroad President Paul Shoup, promised that his Red Cars would soon bring thousands of daytrippers and prospective homesteaders to see the future at work in Fontana.^[4]

Other famous irrigation colonies of the day—Pasadena, Ontario, Redlands, and so on—thrived by franchising citrus growing as an investment haven for wealthy, sun-seeking Easterners. The cooperative, "Sunkist" model (later so influential in shaping Herbert Hoover's vision of self-organized capitalism) provided newcomers with a network of production services, a coordinated labor pool, and a national marketing organization with a common trademark.^[5] On the other hand, the arcadian life of a Southern California orange, lemon, or avocado grower required substantial startup capital (at least $40,000 in 1919) and outside income to sustain the operator until his trees became fruit-bearing.^[6] Ready access to capital was also necessary to tide growers over between the seasons and periodically to absorb the costs of crop-killing frosts. Seduced by the siren song of fabulous profits in the foothills, thousands of undercapitalized citrus ranchers lost their life savings in a few seasons.^[7]

Miller's concept of Fontana was presented as an alternative to aristocratic citrus colonies like Redlands as well as to the more speculative settlements in the eastern San Gabriel Valley. Fontana was envisioned as an unprecedented combination of industrialized plantation (Fontana Farms) and Jeffersonian smallholdings (subdivided by Fontana Land Company). Fontana Farms was a futuristic example of vertically integrated, scientifically managed, corporate agriculture. Its primary input was the City of Los Angeles's garbage, which, from 1921 to 1950, it received in daily gondola car shipments by rail. (The garbage contract was so lucrative that Miller was forced to make large payoffs to corrupt city councilmen—igniting a 1931 municipal scandal.) The five or six hundred daily tons of garbage fattened the sixty thousand hogs that made Fontana Farms the largest such operation in the world. When the hogs reached full weight, they were shipped back to Los Angeles for slaughter, recycled garbage thus providing

perhaps a quarter of the region's ham and bacon. The coincident accumulation of manure was no less valued: it was either utilized as fertilizer for Miller's citrus grove (also the world's largest) or peddled to neighboring ranchers. Fontana Farms even made a small profit reselling the silverware it reclaimed from restaurant garbage.^[8]

Meanwhile the Fontana Company was busy subdividing the rest of the Miller empire into model small farms. With an enthusiasm for mass marketing and production that clearly prefigured Henry Kaiser's, Miller aimed his promotion at precisely that middling mass of would-be rural escapists who had previously been cannon-fodder for Southern California's most ill-fated land and oil speculations. His "affordable" Fontana farm idyll, by contrast, was designed to be assembled on lay away with combinations of small semi-annual installments and lots of sweat equity. For bare land prices of $300-500 (for the minimum 2.5 acre "starter farm" in 1930), the prospective Fontanan was offered a choice of bearing grapevines or walnut trees (corporate Fontana Farms maintained a vast nursery of a million saplings). Starting with "vacation farming" on weekends (Los Angeles was only an hour away by automobile or Red Car), the purchaser could gradually add on living quarters, which the Fontana Farms Company offered in a complete range from weekend cabins to the ultimate "charming, redtile Spanish Colonial farmhouse." Examples of these are still widely visible throughout Fontana.

What was supposed to make the whole endeavor ingeniously self-financing, however, was Miller's formula of combining tree crops (walnuts and mixed citrus) or vineyards with poultry, supported by cheap inputs from Fontana Farms' industrial economies of scale (fertilizer, saplings, water, and power). Colonists were urged to install chicken coops as soon as possible to generate reliable incomes. This famous "Partnership of Hens and Oranges" was intended to stabilize the small tree rancher through the vagaries of frost and cashflow, while simultaneously guaranteeing the Fontana Company its installment payments. Ideally, it was supposed to allow the retired couple with a modest pension, the young family with rustic inclinations, or the hardworking immigrant the means to achieve a citrus-belt lifestyle formerly accessible only to the well-to-do.^[9]

Miller's dream sold well, even through the early years of the Depression. By 1930 the Fontana Company had subdivided more than three thousand homesteads, half occupied by full-time settlers, some of them immigrants from Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Italy. The ten pioneer poultry plants of 1919 had grown to nine hundred, making the district the premier

poultry center of the West. Fontana Farms, meanwhile, had expanded to a full-time workforce of five hundred Mexican and Japanese laborers—com-parable to the largest cotton plantations in the Mississippi Delta. In the early thirties Miller joined forces with the Swift dynasty from Chicago to buy out the historic Miller (no relation) and Lux cattle empire in the San Joaquin Valley. His rising stature in California agriculture, together with his contributions to making it into a genuine "agribusiness," were acknowledged by Republican Governor Rolph, who appointed Miller president of the State Agricultural Society and, ex officio, a regent of the University of California.

Even if Fontana Farms was ultimately little more than a real-estate promotion cleverly, and extravagantly, packaged as semi-utopia, it retains considerable historical importance as the most striking Southern California example of the "back to the land" movement in the inter-war years. Originally a yeoman's version of the irrigation colony ideal (exemplified by both Chaffey's Ontario and the Socialists' Llano del Rio), Fontana grew to share many of the qualities of Frank Lloyd Wright's "Broadacres" project and the 1930s anti-urban experiments. Skimming through old advertising brochures for Fontana Farms, one is struck by the ideological congruence—however inadvertent—between Miller's declared aims and the Henry Georgian program which Giorgi Ciucci has claimed infused Wright's Broadacres: "labor-saving electrification, the right of the average citizen to the land, the integration of the city and the countryside, cooperation rather than government, and the opportunity for all to be capitalists." If, as Ciucci sarcastically observes, "Wright's ideal city would be realized only in the grotesque and preposterous form of Disneyland and Disney World,"^[10] Miller's more practical version of the Broadacres ideal had a brief, but real tenure. All the more ironic, then, that pastoral Fontana Farms would be upstaged, and eventually uprooted, by Henry Kaiser's "satanic mill."

Miracle Man

The "Miracle Man" Comes to Fontana
1942 headline^[11]

In 1946, after two years of criss-crossing all the old forty-eight states ("my ideal day was to spend all morning with the First National Bank and the afternoon with the CIO"), John Gunther published Inside USA —his vast (979-page), Whitmanesque snapshot of the domestic political scene on the threshold of the postwar era.^[12] For Gunther, the most popular

journalist of his generation, World War Two was comparable to the Revolution or the Civil War as a watershed of American character. From the standpoint of an onrushing "American Century," he was concerned to distinguish the progressive from the reactionary, the visionary from the backward-looking. Although later journalists, albeit only by team effort, eventually duplicated the scale of his canvas (that is, the entire US political universe), none has ever matched the astuteness or piquancy of his characterizations of an entire generation of public figures. Unsurprisingly, in the gutter bottom of national political life, Gunther identified the representatives of Mississippi, the Hague machine of New Jersey, and other avatars of domestic fascism. Conversely, at the very pinnacle of his new American pantheon, rising above even Governors Warren and Stassen (perennial Gunther favorites), was "the most important industrialist in the United States . . . the builder of Richmond and Fontana," Henry J. Kaiser.^[13]

Forty-five years later, with the mighty Kaiser empire now dismantled, Gunther's panegyric to Kaiser (he was given an entire chapter to himself) requires some explanation.^[14] In essence, Gunther, like many contemporary observers, saw Kaiser as the exemplary incarnation of the Rooseveltian synthesis of free enterprise and enlightened state intervention. Kaiser of the 1930s and 1940s is heroically entrepreneurial—Gunther compares him to nineteenth-century empire-builders like the Central Pacific's "Big Four"—yet, unlike the old-fashioned "railroad corsairs," Kaiser "has great social consciousness and conscience." A lifelong registered Republican, he avidly supports the New Deal. "As to labor Kaiser's friendly relations are well known. He wants to be able to calculate his costs to the last inch, and he never budges without a labor contract."^[15] Although his early background was as a small-town salesman, lacking any formal training in engineering or manufacturing, Kaiser by the mid 1940s had become the great problem-solving magician of the war economy: mass-producing Liberty ships in four days and achieving other productivist feats worthy of Edison or Ford. Even better than Ford himself (who represented an earlier era of authoritarian engineer-capitalism), Kaiser personified the spirit of the war-generated high-productivity, high-wage economy that later economic historians would refer to as "Fordism." But "Kaiserism" would have been a more apt name for the postwar social contract between labor and management:

Production in the last analysis depends on the will of labor to produce . . . you can't have healthy and viable industry without, first, a healthy labor movement, and second, social insurance, community health, hospitalization

plans, and decent housing. "To break a union is to break yourself." The "Kaiser Credo "^[16]

Kaiser was also a hero of the West. Denounced by Wall Street as the "economic Antichrist" and "coddled New Deal pet," he was welcomed west of the Rockies as a self-made frontier capitalist who, against incredible odds, had triumphed over William Jennings Bryan's "cross of gold."^[17] To Western economic nationalists, like A. G. Mezerik, Kaiser was a "new kind of industrialist," an incarnation of the "trust-busting Second New Deal" and a pioneer of the "independent industrialization of the West."^[18] In fact, Kaiser, accumulating a small fortune in the corrupt street-paving business during the auto-crazy 1920s, was transformed into an industrial giant during the 1930s by virtue of strategic (and sometimes secretive) business and political alliances. In the late 1920s, Kaiser became a favorite of the legendary Amadeo Giannini, founder of the Bank of Italy (later Bank of America) and the West's major independent financier.^[19] With Giannini backing, Kaiser assumed de facto leadership over the coalition of construction companies building Hoover Dam and became the Six Companies' Washington lobbyist. In the capital Kaiser hired consummate New Deal "fixer" Tommy Corcoran to represent his interests in the White House, while cultivating his own special relationship to powerful Interior Secretary Harold Ickes.^[20]

Most important, Kaiser, together with Giannini and other local allies, was able to recognize the extraordinary "window of opportunity" for Western economic development opened up by the political crisis of the "First" New Deal in 1935-36. To be fair, it was actually Herbert Hoover, the first president from California, who had launched the industrialization of the Pacific Slope by authorizing construction of both the Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge. But the big chance for Western (and Southern) businessmen came in the interregnum between the Banking Act of 1935 and the beginning of Lendlease, when relations between the White House and Wall Street reached their twentieth-century nadir. As Eastern finance capital (including many key supporters of FDR in 1933) turned against the New Deal, Kaiser and Giannini, together with Texas oil independents and Mormon bankers (led by Six Companies partner and new Federal Reserve chairman Mariner Eccles), politically and financially shored up the Roosevelt Administration, preventing the insurgent labor movement from dominating the national Democratic Party.^[21] In his epic Age of Roosevelt , Arthur Schlesinger describes the convergence of interests that supported the "Second" ("anti-trust") New Deal of the late 1930s:

It included representatives of the "new money" of the South and West, like Jesse Jones, Henry J. Kaiser and A. E Giannini, who . . . were in revolt against the rentier mentality of New York and wanted government to force down interest rates and even supply capital for local development. It included representatives of new industries, like communications and electronics [including Hollywood]. . .. It included representatives of business particularly dependent on consumer demand, like Sears Roebuck. And it included speculators like Joseph E Kennedy, who invested in both new regions and new industries.^[22]

The modern "Sunbelt" was largely born out of the political rewards of this Second New Deal coalition. Billions of dollars in federal aid (representing net tax transfers from the rest of the country) laid down an industrial infrastructure in California, Washington, and Texas. And nearly $110 million in major construction contracts—including the Bay Bridge, the naval base on Mare Island, and Bonneville, Grand Coulee, and Shasta dams—fueled the breakneck expansion of the Kaiser Company. Long before Pearl Harbor, Kaiser was already discussing with Giannini and a select group of Western industrialists (Donald Douglas, Stephen Bechtel, and John McCone) strategies for maximizing the role of local capital in a war economy. Recognizing that a Pacific war would make unprecedented demands on the under-industrialized California economy, Kaiser proposed to adapt Detroit's assembly-line methods to revolutionize the construction of merchant shipping. Although critics initially scoffed at the idea that a mere "sand and gravel man" could master the art of shipbuilding, Kaiser, with the support of his high-level New Deal connections, became the biggest shipbuilder in American history. In four years his giant Richmond, Portland, and Vancouver (Washington) yards launched a third of the American merchant navy (80 per cent of "Liberty Ships") as well as fifty "baby flat-top" aircraft carriers: nearly 1,500 vessels in all.^[23]

In Richmond, where 747 ships were build, Kaiser was able to create a social and technological template for postwar capitalism. To simplify welding, huge deckhouses were assembled upside-down and then hoisted into place, helping reduce the traditional six-month shipbuilding cycle to a week. In the absence of a skilled labor force, Kaiser "trained something like three hundred thousand welders [at Richmond alone] out of soda jerks and housewives."^[24] But his real genius was the systematic attention he focused on maintaining labor at high productivity with minimum time lost to sickness or turnover—the nightmares of other military contractors. Back in 1938, while trying to meet deadlines on the Grand Coulee, Kaiser experimented with transforming indirect medical costs into a direct, calculable

industrial input by subscribing his workers to the pre-paid health plan pioneered by Dr. Sidney Garfield. This Permanente Health Plan—to be the most enduring part of the Kaiser legacy—was adapted with union collaboration to the massive Richmond workforce, together with active company intervention to construct war housing, organize recreation, and rationalize overloaded public transport (Kaiser imported cars from the old Sixth Avenue El in New York).^[25]

But Kaiser's Richmond shipyards had a critical bottleneck: a persistent shortage of steel plate. An industrial colony of the East, the West Coast had always imported steel at high markups ($6-$20 per ton); now, in the midst of a superheated war economy, the Eastern mills could not supply, nor could the railroads transport, enough of this high-cost steel to meet the demands of Pacific shipyards. Although US Steel's Benjamin Fairless claimed that "abstract economic justice no more demands that the Pacific Coast have a great steel industry than that New York grow its own oranges,"^[26] the war shortage prompted the corporation to propose a new integrated (ore to steel) mill on a Utah coalfield. Arguing, however, that the postwar Western market would not justify the extra capacity added by the mill, US Steel demanded that the Defense Production Corporation pay the cost of construction.

Kaiser countered with his own, characteristically audacious proposal to borrow the money from the government to build on his own account a tidewater steel complex in the Los Angeles area, using Boulder (Hoover) Dam power. From the outset this was treated by all sides as a Western declaration of independence from Big Steel, provoking rage in Pittsburgh in equal measure to the enthusiasm it generated in California. In any event, Washington tried to satisfy all sides by allowing US Steel to operate the government-built mill in Geneva, Utah, while loaning $110 million to Kaiser via the Reconstruction Finance Corporation.^[27] The War Department, however, whether acting from post-Pearl Harbor hysteria or secretly lobbied by Big Steel (as Mezerik believed), insisted that the Kaiser facility had to be located at least fifty miles inland, "away from possible Japanese air attack."^[28] This locational constraint was widely thought to preclude postwar conversion of the facility to competitive production. Rule-of-thumb wisdom held that an integrated complex could operate at a profit only if dependence on rail transport was confined to one "leg" of its logistical "tripod" of iron ore, coking coal, and steel product. A Southern California tidewater plant was accorded but a slim chance of survival in the postwar market; an inland location, dependent upon coal and iron rail shipments from hundreds of miles away, was considered an economic impossibility.^[29]

But Kaiser believed that "problems were only opportunities with their work clothes on" and refused to be daunted. He calculated that radical economies in steel-making and mining technology, together with the vast promise of the postwar California market (drastically underestimated by Big Steel), would allow him to convert profitably to peacetime production. Accepting the War Department's disadvantageous conditions, he sent his engineers in search of a suitable inland location. They quickly fixed their sights on Fontana.

The De Luxe War Baby

From Pigs to Pig Iron!
Fontana Steel Will Build a New World!
Kaiser Slogans, 1940s^[30]

In that Indian summer before Pearl Harbor, Fontana's destiny seemed fixed forever on hogs, eggs, and citrus. While locals debated the hot prospects in the annual "Hen Derby" or fretted over rising mortality on "Death Alley" (Valley Boulevard), Fontana Farms publicists were boasting that the 1940 Census "Proves Fontana, Top Agricultural Community in the United States!"^[31] A. B. Miller, now in partnership with giant Swift and Company, waxed more powerful than ever in state agribusiness circles and conservative Inland Empire politics. Then, with chilling punctuality, death struck down Fontana's founders: Miller (April 1941), followed within months by leading businessman Charles Hoffman, water system founder William Stale, and Fontana Farms Citrus Director J. A. McGregor.^[32]

With the passing of the pioneer generation, and the growing awareness that California would soon become the staging ground for a vast Pacific war, boosters in spring 1941 began a xenophobic promotion of Fontana as an ideal location for war industry. Miller's Fontana Farms successor, R. E. Boyle, joined local supervisor C. E. Grier and congressman Henry Sheppard in cajoling Fontanans into accepting that their "patriotic duty . . . based on real American principles" was to create the new "Partnership of Agriculture and [War] Industry."^[33] But six months of aggressive advertising and patriotic bombast yielded not a single munitions plant or aircraft factory. Instead, the hysteria that followed Pearl Harbor, when Japanese aircraft were daily "sighted" over Long Beach and Hollywood, prompted a sudden rush for "safe," inland residences. In the early weeks of 1942 Fontana Farms was selling two ranches per day to anxious refugees from Los Angeles.^[34] Even supervisor Grier, chief advocate of the military industrialization of the Inland Empire, was forced to admit that Fontana would

contribute "in great measure to winning the war by the productivity of its poultry."^[35] Then came the great bolt from Kaiser headquarters in Oakland.^[36]

Prevented from building at tidewater, Kaiser was attracted to Fontana for two different reasons. On the one hand, his engineers and their military counterparts added up the ready-made advantages of Miller's infra-structural investments: cheap power from Lytle Creek (now augmented by Boulder Dam), excellent rail connections near two major railyards (San Bernardino and Colton), and, most important in a semi-desert, an autonomous, low-cost water supply.^[37] The weak claims of local government over the unincorporated Fontana area were also considered an asset. San Bernardino was a "poor rural county" with an unusually large relief load, and Kaiser clearly preferred to deal with, and if necessary overawe and intimidate, its unsophisticated officials, desperate for any type of industrial investment, than face more powerful and self-confident public bureaucracies elsewhere.

On the other hand, Kaiser was personally captivated by Miller's utopia. As in Richmond, he placed social engineering on par with the priorities of production engineering, figuring that hens and citrus might mitigate the class struggle.

He saw advantages to building in a rural community. Workers at the steel mill had the opportunity to raise chickens on the side or plant gardens. Kaiser believed these "hobby farms" created a more relaxed atmosphere and the workers would be more content. It was something that could not be found in the Eastern steel towns [and, therefore, a comparative advantage].^[38]

On the first anniversary of A. B. Miller's interment, Kaiser broke ground on a former Miller ranch a few miles west of Fontana township, his bulldozers literally chasing the hogs away.^[39] Under the supervision of veterans of Grand Coulee and Richmond, the construction shock-brigades made breathtaking progress. By 30 December 1942 the acrid smell of coke hung over the citrus groves, and, as local radio announcer Chet Huntley officiated, Mrs. Henry J. Kaiser threw the switch that fired the giant, 1,200-ton blast furnace named in her honor ("Big Bess"). An even more elaborate ceremony in May 1943 celebrated the tapping of the first steel. Surrounded by Hollywood stars and top military brass, Kaiser—with typical bravado—announced that Fontana was the beginning of the "Pacific Era" and "a great industrial empire for the West." Fleets of diesel trucks began the long shuttle of Fontana-made plate to the steel-hungry shipyards of Richmond and San Pedro.^[40]

The vast, mile-square plant—Southern California's "de luxe war baby"^[41] —seemed to erupt out of the earth before Fontanans had a chance

to weigh the impact on their small rural society. Perhaps because of the rapidity of the transition, or because of patriotic consensus, there was no recorded protest against the plant construction. Kaiser spokesmen reassured residents that the plant "could be erected in the middle of an orange grove and operated continuously without the slightest damage to trees."^[42] By the end of the first year, however, disturbing evidence to the contrary had become obvious. The coking coal first employed at Fontana had high sulfur content, producing acidic vapors that withered saplings and burnt the leaves off trees. Ranchers across from the mill picked grapefruit from their trees for the last time in the fall of 1942.^[43] This was the beginning of the end of Miller's Eden, as well as the start of a regional pollution problem of major proportions.

While Fontanans were watching their trees die, Kaiser was shattering the illusion of starry-eyed San Bernardino County supervisors that the plant would be an enormous tax windfall. Assessed at normal rates in July 1943, the Company rejected the County's bill out of hand, warning that they "might be forced to close the plant." Although reporters scoffed at the obviously absurd threat to shutter the brand-new, $110 million mill, overawed supervisors obediently reduced the assessment to a small fraction of the original.^[44] Their concession set a precedent that allowed Kaiser officials to protest any prospective tax increase as undercutting the economic viability of the plant. As a result, San Bernardino County saw its major potential tax resource evolve into a net tax liability (a fact that helps explain official apathy to the plant's closure a generation later).

As the experts had foreseen, the major difficulty in producing steel in Fontana was the organization of raw material supply. Kaiser could purchase limestone and dolomite flux from local quarries, but it had no alternative but to develop its own network of captive mines to source iron and coal. Although geologists reassured Kaiser that the nearby Mojave Desert contained enough iron ore within a three-hundred-mile radius to supply the plant for several centuries, exploitation of the richest deposits required costly investments in rail-laying and mining technology. Initially Fontana was supplied with ore from the Vulcan Mine near Kelso; after the war, the company developed the great Eagle Mountain complex in Riverside County with its own rail line and mining workforce of 500. Coking coal—the most difficult supply variable—had to be imported 800 miles from Price, Utah (in 1960 Kaiser Fontana switched to new mines in New Mexico). Overall, Fontana was refining low-cost iron ore with the nation's highest-cost coal, an equation that left its furnace costs well above other integrated mills (including US Steel's coalfield plant in Utah).^[45]

Despite the burden of these supply costs, Kaiser by 1944 was making steel more efficiently than anyone had expected, to build ships in greater tonnage than anyone had dreamt possible. He was also smelting aluminum, assembling bombers, mixing concrete, even producing the incendiary "goop" with which the Army Air Corps was systematically immolating Tokyo and Osaka. At the pinnacle of his popularity, he was widely rumored to be Roosevelt's favorite choice for a fourth-term running-mate. Meanwhile, his alliance with the New Deal had catapulted the Kaiser companies to the top ranks of privately owned firms, and, unlike the California aircraft industry, his operations were totally independent of Wall Street and Eastern banks. (When he was not borrowing government money, his old ally Giannini made available the Bank of America's largest single line of credit.)^[46] Buoyed by the successes of his shipyards and steel and aluminum mills, Kaiser surveyed a bold, coordinated expansion into postwar markets for medical care, appliances, housing, aircraft, and automobiles. In his wartime speeches, Kaiser was fond of adding a fifth "freedom" to Roosevelt's original four: "the freedom of abundance."^[47]

He recognized, with singular prescience, that the conjuncture of rising union power (which he supported) and wartime productivity advances was finally going to unleash the mass consumer revolution that the New Deal had long promised. He also calculated that the pent-up demand for housing and cars, fueled by the fantastic volume of wartime forced savings, created an explosive market situation in which independent entrepreneurs like himself might find the opportunity of the century to compete with the Fortune 500. Everything depended on the speed of reconversion/retooling and the ability to offer the kind of streamlined products that Americans had been dreaming about since the 1939 New York World's Fair.

With characteristic hubris, Henry J. attempted to expand into all markets simultaneously. His venture into experimental aviation was short-lived, when he abandoned to the obsessive Howard Hughes the further development of their prototype super-transport, the notorious "Spruce Goose."^[48] In the field of mass-produced housing, on the other hand, Kaiser had substantial success. For two decades he had been building homes for his dam and shipyard workers, even master-planning entire communities. He had also been discussing the national housing crisis with such seminal thinkers as Norman Bel Geddes, the designer of the famous Futurama exhibit at the 1939 World's Fair. Shortly after V-J Day Kaiser dramatically announced a "housing revolution": "America's answer to the so-called accomplishments of Communists and Fascists." Creating "a nearly 100 mile plant-to-site assembly line" in Southern California (where he predicted

that immigration would reach a million per year in the immediate postwar period), he launched construction of ten thousand prefabricated homes in the Westchester, North Hollywood, and Panorama City areas. Defying an acute shortage of ordinary building materiel, Kaiser engineers innovated with fiberglass board, steel, aluminum siding, and sheet gypsum, while "applying Richmond methods" to train armies of construction workers whom Kaiser promptly unionized.^[49]

But Kaiser Homes, however important in demonstrating the feasibility of postwar "merchant homebuilding," were only a sideshow for their master. Henry J.'s real ambition was to challenge the Eastern corporate establishment on its own turf. Unfortunately, he chose to fight Detroit and Pittsburgh at the same time. "Tilting at the most dangerous and dramatic of American windmills,"^[50] he launched Kaiser-Frazer Motors in a giant re-converted bomber plant in Willow Run, Michigan. Simultaneously, he brought Fontana steel into direct competition with Big Steel for control of Western markets.

Only one capitalist from the West had ever attempted such a brazen invasion of the East: Giannini in the late 1920s. For the impudence of staking a seat on Wall Street, Giannini was temporarily deposed in his own house, as J. P. Morgan mounted a retaliatory raid on Transamerica, the Giannini bank holding company.^[51] (As a Morgan director told Giannini: "Right or wrong, you do as you're told down here.")^[52] It was poetic justice, therefore, that Giannini was allied to Kaiser's postwar schemes, introducing him to Joseph Frazer, the rebel Detroit capitalist, as well as supporting the campaign to refinance Fontana steel.

The "debacle" of Kaiser-Frazer has been recently retold in Mark Foster's scholarly biography of Henry J. Fearing postwar layoffs as well as an anti-union backlash by the major automakers, the United Auto Workers had begged Kaiser to convert the Willow Run assembly lines (scheduled for closure after V-J Day) to auto production. Teamed up with Frazer, the former head of Willys-Overland, and cheered on by the unions, Kaiser and his engineers tried to duplicate the miracle of Richmond. Within a year of taking over Willow Run, they had built 100,000 cars and recruited an impressive national network of dealerships. The 1947 Kaiser-Frazer shock wave rattled nerves in the executive suites of Dearborn Park and the Chrysler Building. But, endemically undercapitalized in the face of the auto majors' billion-dollar plant expansions and model changes, the new company sank deep into the red. In the meantime Giannini had died, Wall Street had boycotted Kaiser's offerings, and Frazer had resigned. After the failure of a last-ditch remodeling in 1954-55, Willow Run was sold off to

General Motors and the dies were shipped to South America, where Kaiser-body cars were still being assembled as late as the 1970s. Although Kaiser continued for another decade to build Jeeps at his Willys-Overland subsidiary in Toledo, the Western invasion of Detroit was over.^[53]

Fontana, by contrast, was an untrammeled success, despite bitter opposition from Big Steel and financial problems comparable to Kaiser-Frazer's. In the immediate reconversion period of steel shortages and turbulent industrial relations (1945-46), Kaiser's friendship with the CIO exempted Fontana from the bitter national steel strike. Expanding into new product markets, especially construction, Kaiser Steel strained at capacity during the steel drought, even briefly exporting to Europe. But, once the steel strike was settled and capacity had begun to adjust to demand, Fontana's inherent logistical and financial problems seemed to signal doom.^[54]

Fortunately, Kaiser metallurgists produced the kind of technical breakthrough at Fontana that eluded the design teams at Willow Run. Just as Henry J. had brashly promised, his engineers offset their high coal costs by radically reducing coke loads and increasing blast furnace efficiency. Similarly at Eagle Mountain, Kaiser mining engineers pioneered new economies in ore extraction, reducing their iron costs even further below Eastern averages. By the mid 1950s Fontana was an international benchmark of advanced steelmaking, keenly studied by steelmasters from Japan and other high raw-material-cost countries.^[55]

A more intractable problem was repaying the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) loan that had built Fontana. With Congress recaptured by the Republicans in 1946, and his New Deal allies leaving the Truman Administration in droves, Kaiser was politically isolated. Under fire in Congress for alleged profiteering on his wartime shipbuilding contracts (a calumny, he charged, that was spread by his Eastern corporate enemies), he was unable to persuade the RFC to discount or refinance any of his 1942 loan. Despite liberal support (the New Republic denounced the RFC for betraying the West's "attempts to build its own steel mills and free itself from control by the East"), and innumerable resolutions from chambers of commerce, Kaiser had exhausted his political IOUs. To rub salt in his wounds, the War Assets Administration auctioned the Geneva, Utah, mill to US Steel (the lowest bidder) for a mere twenty-five cents on the dollar of its cost.^[56]

If steel demand had softened at this precarious point, Fontana might have floundered. Instead a big transcontinental gas pipeline deal provided

Kaiser Steel with invaluable collateral, while the sudden outbreak of the Korean War revived the West Coast shipbuilding industry. Following the advice of the Giannini family (who also extended Fontana's credit), Kaiser made his steel operations public. The Los Angeles business elite, led by Times heir Norman Chandler (who became a Kaiser Steel director) and old friend John McCone, rallied to the initial stock offering, allowing Henry J. to retire the RFC loan in 1950.^[57]

With increased access to private capital, and with a Southern California market booming beyond all expectations, Kaiser Steel expanded and diversified. Two postwar expansions added a second blast furnace as well as new tinplate, strip, and pipe mills; a revolutionary pellatizing plant was installed at Eagle Mountain; and in 1959 Governor Brown joined Henry J. for the dedication of a state-of-the-art basic oxygen furnace. With a work-force of eight thousand, and plans on the drawing board for doubling capacity, Kaiser Steel was a national midget, but a regional giant. In 1962, in a move that "was a big step in the direction of eliminating that historic phrase 'prices slightly higher west of the Rockies,'" Kaiser Steel sharply reduced its prices. Eastern steel was virtually driven from the market, leaving Fontana, together with US Steel at Geneva, to co-monopolize the Pacific Slope.^[58]

Equally reassuring, Kaiser Steel seemed to continue in the forefront of enlightened industrial relations. Although, unlike in 1946, Fontana was closed down during the long 1959 steel strike, it broke ranks with Big Steel to embrace the United Steel Workers' proposals for a gains-sharing plan to integrate technological change into the collective bargaining framework. First a tripartite committee, with a public member, was established to study conflicts between local work rules and the introduction of automation. Then in 1963 the company and union, with considerable ceremony, formalized the landmark Long Range Sharing Plan (loosely based on the so-called "Scanlon plan"), whose complex formulae and provisions were supposed to fairly compensate workers for accepting rapid productivity advance. The Plan, whose original backers had included the elite of academic industrial relations specialists and two future Secretaries of Labor (Goldberg and Dunlop), became the Kennedy Administration's prototype for New Frontier-era collective bargaining and was soon cited as such in every industrial relations textbook.^[59]

This was the golden age of Kaiser Steel, Fontana—flagship of the West's postwar smokestack economy. Neither the captain on the deck nor the crew below could see the economic icebergs ahead.

Holocaust in Fontana

Whites from the South compose the majority of the population of Fontana. They have brought to that community their backward community mores, their hate-mongering religious cults . . .
O'Day Short, murdered by Fontana vigilantes, 1946^[60]

For hundreds of Dustbowl refugees from the Southwest, still working in the orchards at the beginning of World War Two, Kaiser Steel was the happy ending to the Grapes of Wrath. Construction of the mill drained the San Bernardino Valley of workers, creating an agricultural labor shortage that was not relieved until the coming of the braceros in 1943. Kaiser originally believed that he could apply his Richmond methods to shaping the Fontana workforce: leaving the construction crews in place and "training them in ten clays to make steel" under the guidance of experts hired from the East. But he underestimated the craft knowledge and folklore, communicated only through hereditary communities of steelworkers, that were essential to making steel. Urgent appeals, therefore, were circulated through the steel valleys of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia, recruiting draft-exempt steel specialists for Fontana.^[61]

The impact of five thousand steelworkers and their families on local rusticity was predictably shattering. The available housing stock in Fontana and western San Bernardino County (also coveted by incoming military families) was quickly saturated. With few zoning ordinances to control the anarchy, temporary and substandard shelters of every kind sprouted up in Fontana and neighboring districts like Rialto, Bloomington, and Cucamonga. Most of the original blast furnace crew was housed in a gerrybuilt trailer park known affectionately as "Kaiserville." Later arrivals were often forced to live out of their cars. The old Fontana Farms colonists came under great pressure to sell to developers and speculators. Others converted their chicken coops to shacks and rented them to single workers—a primitive housing form that was still common through the 1950s.^[62]

Although areas of Fontana retained their Millerian charm, especially the redtiled village center along Sierra with its art-deco theater and prosperous stores, boisterous, often rowdy, juke joints and roadhouses created a different ambience along Arrow Highway and Foothill Boulevard. Neighboring Rialto—presumably the location of Eddie Mars's casino in Chandler's The Big Sleep —acquired a notorious reputation as a wide-open gambling center and L.A. mob hangout (a reputation which it has recovered in the 1990s as the capital of the Inland Empire's crack gangs). Meanwhile the ceaseless truck traffic from the mill, together with the town's

adjacency to Route 66 (and, today, to Interstates 10 and 15), made Fontana a major regional trucking center, with bustling twenty-four-hour fuel stops and cafes on its outskirts.^[63]

Boomtown Fontana of the 1940s ceased to be a coherent community or cultural fabric. Instead it was a colorful but dissonant bricolage of Sunkist growers, Slovene chicken ranchers, gamblers, mobsters, over-the-road truckers, industrialized Okies, braceros , the Army Air Corps (at nearby bases), and transplanted steelworkers and their families. It was also a racial frontier where Black families tried to stake out their own modest claims to a ranch home or a job in the mill. Although, as the war in the Pacific was ending, there was an optimistic aura of sunshine and prosperity in the western San Bernardino Valley, there were also increasing undertones of bigotry and racial hysteria. Finally, just before Christmas eve 1945, there was atrocity. The brutal murder (and its subsequent official cover-up) of O'Day Short, his wife, and two small children indelibly stamped Fontana—at least in the eyes of Black Californians—as being violently below the Mason-Dixon line.

Ironically Fontana had been one of the few locations in the Citrus Belt where Blacks had been allowed to establish communities. Every week during the 1940s, the Eagle —Los Angeles's progressive Black paper—carried prominent ads for "sunny, fruitful lots in the Fontana area."^[64] For pent-up residents of the overcrowded Central Avenue ghetto, prevented by restrictive covenants ("L.A. Jim Crow") from moving into suburban areas like the San Fernando Valley, Fontana must have been alluring. Moreover, Kaiser's Richmond shipyards were the biggest employer of Black labor on the coast, and there was widespread hope that his new steel plant would be an equally color-blind employer. The reality in Fontana was that Blacks were segregated in their own tracts—a kind of citrus ghetto—on the rocky floodplain above Baseline Avenue in vaguely delineated "north Fontana." Meanwhile in the mill, Blacks and Chicanos were confined to the dirtiest departments—coke ovens and blast furnaces (a situation unchanged until the early 1970s).

O'Day Short, already well known in Los Angeles as a civil rights activist, was the first to challenge Fontana's residential segregation by buying land in town (on Randall Street) in fall 1945. Short's move coincided with the Ku Klux Klan's resurgence throughout Southern California, as white supremacists mobilized to confront militant returning Black and Chicano servicemen. In early December, Short was visited by "vigilantes," probably Klansmen, who ordered him to move or risk harm to his family. Short stood his ground, reporting the threats to the FBI and the county

sheriff, as well as alerting the Black press in Los Angeles. Instead of providing protection, sheriff's deputies warned Short to leave before any "disagreeableness" happened to his family. The Fontana Chamber of Commerce, anxious to keep Blacks above Baseline, offered to buy Short out. He refused.^[65]

A few days later, on 16 December, the Short house was consumed in an inferno of "unusual intensity." Neighbors reported hearing an explosion, then seeing "blobs of fire" on the ground and the family running from their home with clothes ablaze. Short's wife and small children died almost immediately; unaware of their deaths, he lingered on for two weeks in agony. According to one account, Short finally died after being brutally informed by the district attorney of his family's fate. (The D.A. was later criticized for breaking the hospital's policy of shielding Short from further trauma.)^[66]

The local press gave the tragedy unusually low-key coverage, quoting the D.A.'s opinion that the fire was an accident.^[67] That a coroner's inquest was held at all (on 3 April 1945) was apparently due to pressure from the NAACP and the Black press. "Contrary to standard practice in such cases," District Attorney Jerome Kavanaugh refused to allow witnesses to testify about the vigilante threats to the Short family. Instead Kavanaugh read into the record the interview he had conducted with Short in the hospital, "in which the sick man repeatedly said he was too ill and upset to make a statement, but yielded to steady pressure and suggestion by finally saying that the fire seemed accidental 'as far as he was concerned.'" Fontana fire officials, conceding they had no actual evidence, speculated that the holocaust might have been the result of a kerosene-lamp explosion. The coroner's jury, deprived of background about the vigilante threats, accordingly ruled that the Shorts had died from "a fire of unknown origin." The sheriff declined an arson investigation.^[68]

The Black community in Fontana—many of whom "themselves had been admonished by deputy sheriff 'Tex' Carlson to advise the Shorts to get out"—was "unanimous in rejecting the 'accident' theory." Fontana's most famous Black resident, Shelton Brooks (composer of the Darktown Strutter's Ball ), demanded a full-scale arson investigation. J. Robert Smith, crusading publisher of the Tri-County Bulletin , the Black paper serving the Inland Empire, decried an official cover-up of "mass murder"—a charge echoed by Short's friends Joseph and Charlotta Bass, publishers of the Los Angeles Eagle .^[69]

The case became a brief national cause célèbre after the Los Angeles NAACP, led by Lorenzo Bowdoin, hired renowned arson expert Paul T.

Wolfe to sift through the evidence. Noting that the supposed cause of the fire, the kerosene lamp, had actually been recovered intact, he found compelling evidence that the Short home had been deliberately soaked in quantities of coal oil to produce an explosive blaze of maximum ferocity. He concluded that "beyond a shadow of a doubt the fire was of an incendiary origin." In the meantime, the Tri-County Bulletin discovered that the original sheriff's report on the fire had "mysteriously" disappeared from its file, while the Eagle raised fundamental doubts about Short's purported testimony to D.A. Kavanaugh. Mass demonstrations were held in San Bernardino and Los Angeles, as scores of trade-union locals, progressive Jewish organizations, and civil rights groups endorsed the NAACP's call for a special investigation of "lynch terror in Fontana" by California's liberal attorney general Robert Kenny (another Gunther favorite). Catholic Interracial Council leader Dan Marshall pointed out that "murder is the logical result of discrimination," while Communist leader Pettis Perry described the Short case as "the most disgraceful that has ever occurred in California."^[70]

But it was hard to keep the Short holocaust in focus. Attorney General Kenny succeeded in temporarily banning the Ku Klux Klan in California, but made no attempt to reopen the investigation into the Short case or expose the official whitewash by San Bernardino officials. The Los Angeles NAACP, spearhead of the campaign, quickly became preoccupied with the renewed struggle against housing discrimination in Southcentral Los Angeles.^[71] The Trotskyist Socialist Workers' Party continued its own sectarian campaign through the spring of 1946, but used the Short case primarily to polemicize against Kenny (Democratic nominee for governor) and his Communist supporters.^[72] In the end, as protest faded, the vigilantes won the day: Blacks stayed north of Baseline (and in the coke ovens) for another generation, and the fate of the Short family, likely victims of white supremacy, was officially forgotten.^[73]

However, early postwar Fontana found it difficult to avoid notoriety. If the press downplayed the Short case, it sensationalized the murder trial of Gwendelyn Wallis—a local policeman's wife who confessed to shooting her husband's mistress, a pretty young Fontana schoolteacher named Ruby Clark. At a time when countless Hollywood films in the Joan Crawford vein were beginning to sermonize against wartime morals and gender equality, the Wallis trial became a lightning rod for contending values. Girls argued with their mothers, husbands fought with wives, marriages reportedly even broke up over Gwendelyn's justification for killing Ruby: that she was a "scheming, single, working woman." Her surprise acquittal

in March 1946 was greeted across the country with both anger and celebration. At the courthouse in San Bernardino she was "mobbed by sympathetic women"—mostly long-suffering housewives like herself, who had become her adoring fans in the course of this real-life soap opera.^[74]

Finally, to permanently reinforce the new Fontana's wild image, 1946 was also the year that the original nucleus of the Hell's Angels began to coalesce in the area. According to legend, the founders were demobbed bomber crewmen, right out of the pages of Heller's Catch- 22, who rejected the return to staid civilian lives. Whatever the true story, members of the Fontana-based gang were surely participants in the infamous Hollister (July 1947) and Riverside (July 1948) motorcycle riots that were immortalized by Brando in The Wild One ("the bike rider's answer to the Sun Also Rises ").^[75] When the beleaguered American Motorcycle Association denounced an "outlaw one per cent," the proto-Angels made that label their badge of honor. At a "One-Percenters" convention in Fontana in 1950 the Hell's Angels were formally organized; the "Fontana-Berdoo" chap-ter became the "mother" chapter with exclusive authority to charter new branches. The founding philosophy of the group was succinctly explained by a Fontana member: "We're bastards to the world, and they're bastards to us."

Although "Berdoo" continued through the 1960s as the nominal capital of outlaw motorcycledom, power within the Angels shifted increasingly toward the ultra-violent Oakland chapter led by Sonny Barger, who also launched the group into big-time narcotics dealing.^[76] As Hunter Thompson put it, "the Berdoo Angels made the classic Dick Nixon mistake of 'peaking' too early." There are two different versions of the story of their decline. According to "Freewheelin' Frank," the acidhead Nazi secretary of the San Francisco chapter, "Berdoo" was ruined by the seduction of the movie industry and a lawyer-huckster named Jeremiah Castelman, who convinced them that they would become rich selling Hell's Angels T-shirts.^[77]

In the other version of the story, they were driven off the streets by police repression. After the lurid publicity of a rape and two violent brawls, the Berdoo Angels became the bête noire of LAPD Chief William Parker, who organized a posse of law enforcement agencies to crush the chapter. Establishing police checkpoints on favorite motorcycle itineraries like the Pacific Coast Highway and the Ridge Route, he generated "such relentless heat that those few who insisted on wearing the colors [Angel jackets] were forced to act more like refugees than outlaws, and the chapter's reputation withered accordingly." By 1964, when Thompson was slumming

with the Oakland chapter, Fontana—"heartland of the Berdoo chapter's turf"—had been essentially pacified. Local Angels "couldn't even muster a quorum" for an outlaw motorcycle scene in a Sal Mineo movie: "some were in jail, others had quit and many of the best specimens had gone north to Oakland."^[78] Despite its eclipse, however, the Berdoo chapter never collapsed. A generation after Thompson's account, mother Angels are still hunkered in their Fontana redoubt, raising enough hell to force the cancellation of a major motorcycle show in Downtown Los Angeles (in February 1990) after a violent collision with another gang.^[79]

Milltown Days

For Abel to win the nomination at Fontana, the public relations pivot of the McDonald administration, would be a definite psychological victory.
John Herling^[80]

After the turbulent, sometimes violent, transitions of the 1940s, Fontana settled down into the routines of a young milltown. The Korean War boom enlarged the Kaiser workforce by almost 50 per cent and stimulated a new immigration from the East that reinforced the social weight of traditional steelworker families. The company devoted new resources to organizing the leisure time of its employees, while the union took a more active role in the community. The complex craft subcultures of the plant intersected with ethnic self-organization to generate competing cliques and differential pathways for mobility. At the same time, the familiar sociology of plant-community interaction was overlaid by lifestyles peculiar to Fontana's Millerian heritage and its location on the borders of metropolitan Los Angeles and the Mojave Desert. Although locals continued to joke that Fontana was just Aliquippa with sunshine, it was evolving into a sui generis working-class community.

This is not to deny that there was a lot of Aliquippa (or Johnstown or East Pittsburgh) in Fontana. Mon Valley immigrants ended up as the dominant force in United Steel Workers Local 2869. Dino Papavero, for instance, who was president of the local in the early 1970s, moved out from Aliquippa in 1946 because his father was worried about a postwar slump at Jones and Laughlin. It was widely believed amongst Pennsylvania steel-workers that Kaiser, in booming California, was recession-proof. John Piazza—Papavero's vice-president and current leader of the Fontana School Board—first came to San Bernardino County (from Johnstown, PA) as one of Patton's "tank jockeys" training for the Sahara in the Mojave. While

hitchhiking Route 66 to the Hollywood USO he was intrigued by a billboard boasting of the opening of Kaiser Steel. After the war, he found himself trapped in an apparently hopeless cycle of layoffs and rehiring at Bethlehem which seemed to preclude any advancement up the seniority ladder. Together with other Johnstowners, he headed out to Fontana—ini-tially living in one of the converted chicken coops—because Kaiser advertised itself as a frontier of opportunity for younger workers.^[81]

These young Mon Valley immigrants quickly discovered that mobility within the plant or union in Fontana, as in Aliquippa or Johnstown, depended upon the mobilization of ethnic and work-group loyalties. The oldest and most visible of local ethnicities were the Slovenes. Their community core—a group of Ohio coal miners who had amassed small savings—had come to Fontana in the 1920s as chicken ranchers, establishing a prosperous branch of the Slovene National Benevolent Society, a large meeting hall and retirement home. Some of their children worked in the mill. Although only informally organized, the "Roadrunners" from West Virginia and the Okies constituted distinctive subcultures within both the plant and the community. But it was the local Sons of Italy chapter—attracting streetwise and ambitious young steelworkers like Papavero and Piazza—that ultimately generated a whole cadre of union leaders during the 1960s and 1970s.

Although the Southern California District of the USW in the 1950s and early 1960s, under Director Charles Smith and his henchman Billy Brunton, was a loyalist stronghold of international president Donald McDonald, Local 2869 with its Mon Valley transplants became a hotbed of discontent. Many Kaiser workers resented Smith's and Brunton's proconsular powers and ability to bargain over their heads in a situation where Local 2869 was far and away the largest unit in the District. In 1957 the rank and file dramatically registered their dissent by electing Tom Flaherty, local spokesman for the national anti-McDonald movement (the Dues Protest Committee), as president of 2869. After several wildcat strikes, the Kaiser management demanded that McDonald intervene to force the local "to discharge its contractual obligations." Obligingly the international imposed an "administratorship" on 2869 and deposed Flaherty and his followers.^[82]

Although "law and order" were now officially restored within Fontana by the international's police action, the opposition was simply driven underground. By 1963-64 the older dues protesters (led by Joe and Minnie Luksich) had been joined by younger workers embittered by the wage inequalities generated by the new "fruits of progress" plan. To rub salt in

rank-and-file wounds, the Committee of Nine who administered the plan virtually ignored Local 2869 and Fontana, preferring to conduct their deliberations in the more congenial setting of a Palm Springs resort. As a re-suit, "the situation deteriorated so badly in the summer of 1964 that the members picketed the union hall. Their signs read: 'USWA Unfair to Organized Labor' and 'Equal Pay for Equal Work.'" At this point, Ronald Bitoni, former chairman of the plant grievance committee, began to unify the different opposition factions around the national insurgency of I. W. Abel, a dissident official supported by Walter Reuther. In his history of the successful Abel campaign, John Herling described Fontana as both the "gem of McDonald's achievement in labor-management cooperation" and the Achilles heel of his power in the West. On election day, 9 February 1965, tens of thousands of pro-Abel steelworkers in the oppositional heartland of the Ohio and Monogahela valleys nervously watched to see how Fontana, two thousand miles away, would vote. Abel's commanding 2,782 to 1,965 victory within Local 2869 announced the end of the ancien régime .^[83] But at the same time it warned of profound rank-and-file discontent with the "textbook" gains-sharing model. Within a few years many Kaiser unionists would be as alienated from the "reformist" administration of Abel as they had been from the absolutism of McDonald.

While Local 2869 was fighting to increase local control over the gains-sharing plan, the relationship between the company and the town was evolving in a very curious way. Despite the stereotype of being a Kaiser "company town," Fontana was no such thing. When Fontana incorporated in 1952, the mill was left outside the city limits in its own, low-tax "county island." Not contributing directly to the town's budget, Kaiser lacked the despotic fiscal clout that Eastern steelmakers conventionally exercised over their captive local governments. Nor did a majority of Kaiser management ever live in the Fontana area. Unlike Bethlehem or Johns-town, no corporate suburb or country-club district projected the social and political power of management into the community. Managers, instead, commuted from genteel redtile towns like Redlands, Riverside, and Ontario. The dominating presence in Fontana was, rather, the huge union hall on Sierra. Local merchants and professionals were left in relatively unmediated dependence upon the goodwill of their blue-collar customers and neighbors. Although never directly controlled by labor, Fontana government, as a result, tended to remain on the friendly side of the union.

Yet while eschewing direct control, the Company still played a ubiquitous role in communal life. The location of the mill, far from big city lights, stimulated the organization of leisure time around the workplace.

Kaiser's 1950s-60s personnel director, Vernon Peake, managed one of the most extensive corporate recreation programs west of the Mississippi. The internal structure of plant society was vividly reproduced in the composition of Kaiser's six bowling leagues during the kegling craze of the 1950s. While Hot Metal battled Cold Roll in the no-nonsense Steelers League, white-collar Bulb Snatchers traded spares with Pencil Pushers in the Fontana League, and Slick Chicks edged Pinettes in the Girls' (sic ) League. Like other steel towns, Fontana prided itself on Friday night "smokers," and there were usually half a dozen pros and scores of amateurs training in the mill's boxing club. "Roadrunners" and Okies were especially active in the plant's various hunting and gun clubs, while others joined the popular fishing club.^[84]

But blue-collar Fontana also enjoyed recreations that were usually management prerogatives in the more rigid caste order of Eastern steel towns. Golf was popular in some production departments, and leading union activists were frequently seen on the fairways. Other steelworkers took up tennis, joined the toastmasters, became rockhounds, rehearsed with the excellent local drama society, or even moonlighted as stuntmen in Hollywood. Others raced stockcars, dragsters, and motorcycles, or simply spent weekends plowing up the Mojave in their dune buggies.^[85] Whatever the avocation, the point was that Fontana tended to see itself differently—as more egalitarian and openminded (at least for white workers)—than the steel cultures left behind in the valleys of the Ohio.

Drivin' Big Bess Down

The Fontana plant has the potential to be competitive with any in the world. (1980)

You can't melt steel in the middle of a residential valley profitably. (1981)
Elliot Schneider, steel industry "expert"^[86]

Like every decline and fall, Kaiser Steel's was an accumulation of ironies. One was that the future began to slip away from Fontana not in the midst of a recession, but at the height of the Vietnam boom. Kaiser was forced out of a rapidly expanding market. Another irony was that, although Kaiser executives in the last days would complain bitterly that Washington had abandoned them in the face of Japanese competition, the company had collaborated avidly with that very same competition in a vain attempt to restructure itself as a steel resource supplier. Kaiser was literally hoisted on its own corporate petard.

After firing up its first Basic Oxygen Furnace (BOF) in 1959, Kaiser

Steel neglected plant modernization for almost fifteen years. Having wrested the West from Pittsburgh, it ceased looking over its shoulder at the competition. In the meantime Asian and European steelmakers were rapidly moving ahead with a technological revolution that included full conversion to BOF and the introduction of continuous casting. Kaiser fought the Japanese, its erstwhile protégés and main competitors (whose original plants Kaiser-made "goop" had incinerated in 1945), with Pearl-Harbor era technology that included obsolete open-hearth furnaces, old-fashioned slab casting, thirty-five-year-old blast furnaces, and dinosaur, over-polluting coke ovens. Although Kaiser protested that the Japanese steel industry enjoyed "unfair" state subsidies, this hardly explains why its own investment program (the company was in the black until 1969) failed to sustain technological modernization. If Kaiser Steel squandered its once formidable technical leadership, it was because, unlike the more single-minded Japanese, it purposely diverted its cashflow into alternative accumulation strategies.

In truth, Fontana and the other fifty-odd Kaiser enterprises were an unwieldy legacy. After Henry J.'s retirement to Hawaii in the mid 1950s, Kaiser Industries evolved as a family holding company with decreasing hands-on affinity for the world of production. Orthodox financial management, not heroic technical problem-solving, became the order of the day. From this basically rentier perspective, Kaiser Aluminum, with its consistently high profit margins, became the family's darling. Kaiser Industries' long-range planning focused on how to complement aluminum sales to the Pacific Basin with other primary product exports. When, in the early 1960s, the Japanese demand for steel began to soar (as a result of the first stages of a "Fordist," home-market-led expansion), Kaiser Industries (the major shareholder in Kaiser Steel) was more concerned about sourcing this demand with raw materials than with the future implications of expanded Japanese capacity for international competition. Specifically for Kaiser Steel this entailed a fateful diversion of its plant modernization budget to purchase export-oriented iron ranges in Australia and coal mines in British Columbia. Eagle Mountain was also expensively remodeled, with an elaborate pellatizing plant added to process iron ore for export to Japan. Thus, years before US Steel's notorious acquisition of Marathon Oil with funds coerced from its basic steel workforce in the name of "modernization," Kaiser Steel was restructuring itself, with diverted capital improvements, to export resources to its principal competitor, while allowing its own industrial plant to become obsolete.^[87]

The Vietnam War—which jump-started the Japanese export offensive—dramatically transformed economic relationships around the Pacific Rim. In 1965 Japanese steel imports claimed a tenth of the US West Coast market; by the war's end, a decade later, nearly half the steel in California was Asian-made and the state was officially included in the Japanese steel industry's definition of "home market." Kaiser Steel made large profits exporting iron and coal to the Japanese only to see these raw materials shot back at them in the form of Toyotas and I-beams for skyscrapers. Together with US Steel's Geneva mill (still entirely open-hearth, since USS's plant modernization had been concentrated in the East), Kaiser Fontana could supply barely half of Western demand, and they were constrained from adding capacity because of their technological inability to compete at cost with the foreign steel. Thus the Japanese, and increasingly the Koreans and the Europeans as well, were able to confiscate all the Vietnam-boom growth in Western steel demand. The so-called "trigger price mechanism," adopted by the Carter Administration at Big Steel's urging, only worsened the situation on the West Coast. Trigger prices were too low to prevent Japanese imports and, because they were calibrated higher in the East, they actually encouraged EEC producers to dump steel in California.^[88]

In the meantime Kaiser's vaunted labor peace was beginning to erode. Over the years relations between workers and managers had calcified at the shop level—a situation that was exacerbated by the recruitment of truculent managers from Big Steel during the 1970s. At the same time the incredibly complex formulae of the Long Range Sharing Plan continued to generate pay inequalities that had already sparked protest in 1964-65. Workers retaining membership in the older incentive scheme were winning pay increases at a dramatically higher rate than participants in the general savings scheme (a trend which also aggravated inter-generational tension within the union). Likewise LRSP remuneration seemed arbitrarily detached from individual productivity efforts.^[89]

Faced with a new wave of rank-and-file discontent, the recently elected president of Local 2869, Dino Papavero, called a strike vote in February 1972. The resulting 43-day walkout was the first "local issues" strike—apart from the two 1957 wildcats—in the plant's history. Papavero, who clearly visualized the import threat, hoped that the strike would be a safety-valve, releasing accumulating tensions and paving the way for a new labor-management detente. With the encouragement of the company, he launched a plant-wide "quality circle" movement in a last-ditch effort to raise productivity to competitive levels. Although workers cooperated in hundreds

[Full Size]

Fontana, Capitol of the Smog Belt

of improvements, management appeared to go along for a free ride, refusing to implement the broad capital modernization program that was necessary to save the plant. Moreover there was the traditional dissonance between Local 2869's priorities and the international's goals. USW Regional Director George White—as always, concerned about the impact of Kaiser innovations upon Big Steel—opposed the work-rule-weakening precedent of the quality circles. He was supported, moreover, by Fontana rank-and-filers embittered by the long walkout and fearful of the loss of hardwon seniority rights and clearcut job boundaries. In 1976 Papavero, the main advocate of cooperativism in the historic spirit of the LRSP, was defeated by a more confrontationist slate.^[90]

The year 1976 was indeed one of bad omens. Steel profits had entirely collapsed, and Kaiser Steel's net earnings were exclusively sustained by profits from resource exports. The long delayed modernization program, aiming at full conversion to BOF and continuous casting, was finally launched, only to immediately encounter complaints about the plant's role as chief regional polluter. Since the 1960s Fontana had emerged as the literal epicenter of air pollution in Southern California, and Kaiser Steel's huge plume of acrid smoke became indissolubly linked in the public mind with the smog crisis in the Inland Empire.^[91] (See map.)

The actual situation was considerably more complex: aerial photographs taken by Kaiser during the 1972 strike, when the plant was entirely

shut down, showed no abatement in air pollution.^[92] Moreover many ex-steelworkers still vehemently believe that the Kaiser pollution scare was purposely manufactured by developers who regarded the plant—smog-spewing or not—as a huge negative externality to residential construction in the Cucamonga-Fontana area. As San Bernardino County's West End fell under the "urban shadow" of Los Angeles and Orange County, developable property values came into increasing conflict with the paycheck role of the mill as leading local employer. Inevitably the pollution debate reflected these divergent material interests. While developers became strange bed-partners with environmentalists in demanding a huge cleanup at Fontana, the Kaiser workforce joined with its management to protest the costs of abatement. As one ex-steelworker put it, "Hell, that smoke was our prosperity."^[93]

In any event, Kaiser was forced to sign a consent decree with the Southern California Air Pollution Control Board that mandated $127 million for pollution reduction. This was more than half of the modernization budget.^[94] Partly as a result—from 1975 to 1979 while "modernization" was being implemented—the union was forced to accept painful triage. Capacity was ruthlessly pared as older facilities were scrapped, including the open hearth, the cold weld, pipe and cold roll mills, and, finally, the original BOF. The inefficient and polluting coke ovens, on the other hand, were deemed too expensive to replace and were left intact. Fontana, in quiet anguish, began to bleed away its future. Four thousand younger workers—sons, brothers, and a few daughters—were laid off by seniority. With the company reassuring them that the new technology would restore price competitiveness, Local 2869 accepted partial decimation as a necessary sacrifice to save the plant and the community of steelworkers.^[95]

When, at last, the new Kaiser Steel chief, Mark Anthony, launched the modernized facilities in an elaborate ceremony on 9 February 1979, he proclaimed the company's "rededication to making steel in the West."^[96] But the new technology—including BOF 2, the continuous caster, and state-of-the-art emission controls—proved cruelly disappointing. Startup costs were staggeringly over budget, and pollution from the antiquated coke ovens continued to embroil the plant in battles with local and federal air quality control agencies. In the face of this deteriorating situation, and with the vaunted modernization program near shambles, Anthony was removed, and Edgar Kaiser, Jr., personally took the helm, advised by experts from his family's investment bankers, First Boston. Although company publicists extolled the return of "Kaiser magic" to active management,

most workers were skeptical.^[97] Henry J.'s grandson was widely viewed as a "playboy," more interested in his toys, like the Denver Broncos, than in saving California's ailing steel industry.^[98]

Mistrust became rampant as the Kaiser family's real strategy was gradually revealed. Years later Edgar Jr. confessed to an interviewer that, despite all the promises to the contrary, he had been sent to Fontana in 1979 by his father as a liquidator:

We were both in tears. I knew what it meant. Nobody else saw it, but I knew what I had to do . . . break up a lot of Steel. I sold off a lot of divisions of Steel. My first day on the job was the prodigal son returning. I had to go out after 30 percent of the workforce at Fontana. . .. It sure wasn't fun.^[99]

The Kaiser family had in fact been engaged in negotiations with Nippon Kokan KK, the world's fifth largest steelmaker.^[100] The Kaisers wanted the Japanese to take over Fontana while they restructured Kaiser Steel as Nippon Kokan's resource supplier. This was, perhaps, the inevitable consequence of the company's long-term bias toward resources rather than steel products. But to Oakland's consternation Nippon Kokan did not take the bait as expected. Instead, following detailed technical inspections of Fontana by its engineering teams, the Japanese giant politely declined Kaiser's offer.^[101]

As Kaiser Steel ran out of cash and its stock plummeted on the exchanges, a second merger deal was hastily confected and put on offer to Dallas-based LTV. The negotiations collapsed in the face of the Volcker-Reagan recession, which plunged the US steel industry into its worst crisis since 1930.^[102] On the West Coast, local branch-plant manufacture was swept away by a typhoon of Asian imports. At the very moment when Fontana's fate depended on an iron will to survive—as during Henry J.'s fight to pay off the RFC loan after World War Two—the Kaiser heirs reached for the financial ripcord. The cherished goal of a resource-oriented restructuring was abandoned in favor of a staged liquidation of Kaiser Steel.

In order to keep Fontana temporarily afloat as an attraction to potential buyers, and to drive stock values up to assuage panicky stockholders, the Kaisers sold off the Australian ore reserves, the British Columbia coal mines, and the Liberian ore shipping subsidiary.^[103] Edgar Jr. withdrew as CEO in 1981 after, as promised, "breaking up a lot of Steel."^[104] The new managerial team, after a few months of bravado about a "crusade" to save the blast furnaces, stunned the survivors of previous cutbacks with the announcement that ore mining at Eagle Mountain and primary steelmaking

at Fontana would be phased out, while the modernized fabrication facilities were put up for sale. Barely two years after their ceremonious "rededication," BOF 2 and the continuous caster were being written off as scrap, a $231 million loss.^[105]

Local 2869 mustered for a last stand, as best it could, but it had tragically few friends or resources. A desperate move to trade wage and work-rule concessions for job-protection guarantees was cold-shouldered by the company before being vetoed altogether by the international.^[106] As horrified members watched another two thousand pink slips being readied, the Local clutched at the final straw of an employee buyout, an "ESOP."^[107] British Steel, long interested in finding a stable market on the West Coast for its unfabricated steel slabs, signaled that it was ready to consider a liaison with a restructured Fontana mill under ESOP ownership. Local 2869 retained the Kelson Group as advisors and sent representatives to Sacramento to lobby Governor Brown and the Democratic leadership.^[108] In any event, however, Kaiser's intransigence about the ESOP frightened off British Steel, while government intervention on behalf of Fontana—or, for that matter, of any of California's floundering heavy industrial plants—was ruled out by Jerry Brown's new entente cordiale with the California Business Roundtable.

Meanwhile, San Bernardino County leaders were divided over the implications of the closure of Kaiser Steel. Having boasted for years that Kaiser pumped nearly a billion dollars annually into the local economy, they were anxious about the loss of so many paychecks. But apprehension was balanced by delight at the thought of rising real-estate values and the removal of the county's principal environmental stigma. As a result, with the exception of pro-union Democratic Congressman George Miller, the local elites and politicos sat on their hands.

In the face of this inertia in the local power structure, Local 2869's only remaining hope might have been a militant community-labor mobilization against shutdowns that allied Fontana with similarly threatened factories and communities like Bethlehem-Maywood, General Motors-South Gate, or US Steel-Torrance.^[109] Unfortunately there was no tradition of communication or mutual support between Southern California's big smokestack workforces. Moreover the international unions and the county federations of labor tended to oppose any rank-and-file or local union initiative that threatened their prerogatives. When the rudiments of such a united front—the Coalition Against Plant Closures—finally emerged in 1983 it was too little and too late to save Fontana. At best, some of the survivors managed

to float a life raft: the Steelworkers' Oldtimers Foundation, which has helped unionists deal with the bitter aftermaths at Fontana and Bethlehem.

The Unscrupulous Suitors

How Kaiser Steel arrived at this sorry state is an American tragedy.
Forbes^[110]

While Local 2869 was fruitlessly searching for friends in high places, Kaiser Steel was like Ulysses' wife Penelope: haplessly pursued by a hundred unscrupulous suitors. Despite the reluctance of other steelmakers to assimilate Fontana to their operations, there was no shortage of corporate predators eager to stripmine the company's financial reserves. Following the sale of the offshore mineral properties, the company was temporarily awash in liquidity—by one estimate, almost one-half billion dollars.^[111] Many Wall Street analysts believed that the plant was undervalued. With shrewd management, they guessed that the modernized core could be re-configured as a profitable "minimill," fabricating imported slabs or local scrap.^[112]

While the new CEO (the sixth in seven years), Stephen Girard, feuded with the Kaiser family over the terms of sale, desperate unionists and stockholders looked toward San Francisco investor Stanley Hiller, who was rumored to represent billionaire speculators Daniel Ludwig and Gaith Pharaon. Hiller's offer of $52 per share appeased the Kaiser family, but Girard, trying to retain control over a cash hoard still estimated at $430 million, broke off negotiations. The Kaisers, backed by the union (which believed it could interest the Hiller group in its ESOP concept), rallied other large stockholders to override Girard.^[113] By March 1982, however, when Girard resumed talks with Hiller, the write-down costs of phased-out steel facilities, originally estimated at $150 million, were admitted to be nearly $530 million, including $112 million in employee termination costs. The contingent liabilities in health and benefits for the laid-off workforce seemed especially to overawe the Hiller group, who, to the consternation of unionists and stockholders, abruptly retreated from the field on 11 March.^[114]

The company promptly moved to claim tax write-offs by auctioning its primary steelmaking equipment for scrap: a final blow that killed any hope of an ESOP-based resurrection.^[115] In late October 1983 the last heat of Eagle Mountain iron ore was smelted into steel; for another month a skeleton crew of 800 (out of a workforce that once numbered 9,000) cold-

rolled the remaining slabs into coils, sheets, and plate. At 4 P.M. on Saturday, 31 December, Kaiser Steel Fontana died.^[116]

While thousands of Kaiser workers and their families mourned the sinking of California's industrial flagship, sharks in grey flannel suits circled around the undervalued assets of Kaiser Steel, no longer hemorrhaging $12 million per month in operating deficits. The first to strike was corporate raider Irwin Jacobs of Minneapolis—known in the trade as "Irv the Liquidator"—who had become the leading shareholder after the withdrawal of Hiller.^[117] Scared that he would simply "gut" the company, Kaiser Steel management swung behind the rival bid of Oklahoma investor J. A. Frates. Then, as Forbes later reported, "Monty Rial suddenly appeared, uninvited and unknown," swaggering like a corporate Butch Cassidy and brandishing the high-powered law firm of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen and Katz. Posing as a coal baron from Colorado (though his holdings had never actually produced a ton of coal), Rial dealt himself into the Kaiser Steel takeover game by boasting that he could profitably restructure the company around its billion tons of high-grade coal reserves in Utah and New Mexico.

What Jacobs and Frates didn't realize, or bother to find out, was that Rial was simply bluffing. While laying siege to Kaiser's half-billion-dollar equity, Rial's "Perma Group" was itself less liquid than some of the Fontana bars in which the ex-steelworkers groused. According to Forbes , the "Perma Group couldn't even pay its copying bills. A local copy shop was pursuing the company to collect a past-due $1,200, which Perma paid in twelve monthly installments." No matter: an impressed and incredibly gullible Frates admitted Rial ("it rhymes with smile") as a fifty-fifty partner. In February 1984 they outbid Jacobs to take control of Kaiser Steel, offering $162 million in cash and $218 million in preferred stock.

The most viable sections of the Fontana plant were immediately sold off—for $110 million (exactly the amount that Kaiser had borrowed from the RFC in 1942)—to a remarkable consortium that included a Long Beach businessman, Japan's giant Kawasaki Steel, and Brazil's Campanhia Vale Rio Doce Ltd. In a mindbending demonstration of how the new globalized economy works, California Steel Industries (as the consortium calls itself) employs a deunionized remnant of the Kaiser workforce under Japanese and British supervision to roll and fabricate steel slabs imported from Brazil to compete in the local market against Korean imports. Derelict Eagle Mountain, whose iron ores are five thousand miles closer to Fontana than Brazil's, has meanwhile been proposed as a giant dump for the non-degradable solid waste being produced by the burgeoning suburbia of the Inland Empire.

While Fontanans were trying to absorb these strange economic dialectics, Rial—the guy who couldn't pay his Xerox bill ten months before—was wresting control of the company from Frates (and transferring its headquarters to Colorado). His method of financing the takeover was ingenious: he sold to Kaiser Steel, at incredibly inflated prices, additional coal reserves which he owned and which it scarcely needed. The impact of the two back-to-back leveraged buyouts was little short of devastating. The original half-billion-dollar cash hoard was reduced to $500,000 as the raiders ran away with their spoils.^[118] Moreover the company was hopelessly saddled with new, and utterly unnecessary, debt. As the rest of the business press was celebrating the contribution of corporate raiders to making the economy "leaner and greener," two Forbes journalists saw a different moral in the story of Frates and Rial looting Kaiser Steel without spending a penny of their own money:

Frates staged a classic, no-money-down, 1980s takeover. Kaiser Steel changed hands for $380 million. Where did the money come from? Not from the pockets of the people doing the takeover. The Frates Group used $100 million borrowed from Citibank and $62 million of Kaiser's own cash to pay $22 a share to Kaiser's stockholders, and gave them $30 [face value] of preferred stock for the rest of the price. Thus, for $162 million that wasn't his and $218 million of paper in the form of Kaiser Steel preferred, Frates took over the company. Naturally, Frates took millions of dollars in fees and expenses, so his net cash investment was less than nothing.

[To buy out Frates] Rial traded illiquid assets to Kaiser for land and cash. . .. Kaiser shelled out $78 million for the same Perma assets Frates valued 18 months earlier at only $65 million. What's more, because the SPS [coal contract] was valued at only $12.2 million this time around, the value of Rial's coal properties must have risen to $65.8 million—a 65% increase. . .. When the dust settled Frates had $20 million of cash, a $5 million near-cash receivable . . . and $15 million of Kaiser land. . .. Rial hasn't stinted himself, however. He took $2.4 million in salary last year.^[119]

Rial's swashbuckling depredations finally provoked a backlash from Kaiser Steel's preferred stockholders, who allied themselves with Bruce Hendry, the famous scrapdealer in distressed companies (he had previously picked over the remains of Erie-Lackawanna and Wickes).^[120] Forcing Rial aside as CEO in 1987, Hendry proposed to rescue the stockholders' equity at the expense of the ex-Kaiser workforce. Borrowing a leaf from Frank Lorenzo, Hendry plunged Kaiser Steel into a chapter-eleven proceeding in order to liquidate worker entitlements.

During the shutdown in 1983, workers had taken some solace in the assurance that cash-rich Kaiser, unlike some bankrupted Eastern steelmak-

ers, would always be able to honor its obligations. Now, four years later, six thousand outraged former employees watched as Hendry cancelled their medical coverage and pension supplements, while transferring part of the burden of their pension funcling to the federal Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation. In order to deflect worker anger, he also initiated lawsuits to recover the $325 million in Kaiser reserves allegedly "stolen" by Frates and Rial through their buyouts.^[121] At the moment of this writing, three years further on, most of the benefits remain unrecovered, the various lawsuits have disappeared in a judicial logjam, and thousands of ex-steelworkers and their families have endured further, unexpected hardships.

The Mirage of Redevelopment

Nothing Is As Nice As Developing Fontana
Current official slogan

Fontana Headed For Economic Catastrophe
Headline, 1987^[122]

Even as the "Reagan Boom" was taking off in 1983, steel towns were still dying across the country, from Geneva (Utah) to Lackawanna (New York), Fairfield (Alabama) to Youngstown (Ohio). Aliquippa, from which so many Fontanans had emigrated in the 1940s and 1950s, was amongst the hardest hit. The shutdown of the immense, seven-mile-long Jones and Laughlin (LTV) complex, and the layoff of twenty thousand workers, was the equivalent of a nuclear disaster. A third of the population fled; of those left behind, more than half were still jobless four years after the closure. The Salvation Army became the town's leading employer. A 1986 study of three hundred Aliquippa families revealed that 59 per cent had difficulty feeding themselves, 49 per cent were behind in their utility bills, and 61 per cent could not afford to see a doctor.^[123]

Driving through the Valley on Thanksgiving Day 1988, on the way to lay a wreath at the union martyrs' monument in Homestead, I found little improvement or new hope. For miles along the Ohio River the sides of the great mill had been stripped away by demolition crews, exposing the rusting entrails of pipework and machinery. Downtown Aliquippa, tightly wedged in its abrupt valley, was boarded up and as empty as any Western ghost town. At the old main gate, through which ten thousand Aliquip-pans had once daily streamed to work, a forlorn lean-to and some fading picket signs announced "Fort Justice," the site of a futile, two-year vigil by local unionists to save the plant from demolition.

By any standard Fontana should have suffered the same fate as Aliquippa.

Studies in the early and late 1970s confirmed that almost half of the town worked for Kaiser and nearly three-quarters drew paychecks dependent upon the mill.^[124] Yet when the final shutdown came in December 1983, Fontana was a boom-, not a ghosttown. Side by side with the defeated milltown, a new community of middle-class commuters was rapidly taking shape. In the last years of the plant's life the population began to explode: doubling from 35,000 to 70,000 between 1980 and 1987, with predictions of 100,000-150,000 by the year 2000. In an interview with the Times as the last slabs were being rolled out at Kaiser, Fontana's Mayor Simon exulted about the city's new-found prosperity as the housing frontier of Southern California. "Nobody expected what's been happening here. When Kaiser closed, everybody thought the town was going to go kaput, but that hasn't happened."^[125]

The recycling of Fontana had begun in the mid 1970s after a clique of local landowners and city officials, led by City Manager Jack Ratelle, recognized that residential redevelopment was a lucrative alternative to continued dependence upon the waning fortunes of Kaiser Steel and its blue-collar workforce. Unlike Aliquippa they had the dual advantages of being the periphery of a booming regional economy and having access to an extraordinary tool of community restructuring—California's redevelopment law. Created by a liberal legislature in the late 1940s to allow cities to build public housing in blighted areas, the law had become totally perverted by the 1970s. Not only was it being employed for massive "poor removal" in downtown San Francisco and Los Angeles, but "blight" was now so generously interpreted that wealthy cities and industrial enclaves—from Palm Springs to City of Industry—were using the law to build luxury department stores, convention centers, and championship golf courses with "tax increments" withheld from general fund uses.

Fontana's particular riff on these redevelopment strategies was its creation of an open, some would say "golden," door for developers. Ratelle and the other city fathers fretted about their ability to compete with Rancho Cucamonga to the west—a "greenfield" city concocted out of several thinly populated, agricultural townships. In order to eventually become like Orange County, they started out by acting like Puerto Rico. To compensate for gritty Fontana's "image problem," and to give it a comparative advantage in the Inland Empire's landrush, they bent redevelopment law to offer "creative financing" for large-scale developers: tax-increment and tax-exempt bonds, waiver of city fees, massive tax rebates, and, unique to Fontana, direct equity participation by the redevelopment agency. Application and inspection processes were drastically streamlined to accelerate ground-

breaking in the city that aspired to become the "developer's best friend."

Fontana's pioneer redevelopment project was an expensive—many would say unnecessary—facelift of Sierra Avenue begun in 1975. David Wiener, whom the local paper likes to call the "dean of Fontana developers," was given tax-exempt financing and sales-tax rebates to construct four new shopping complexes. A little later the Fontana Redevelopment Agency (FRA) began to uproot vineyards south of Interstate 10 to build the Southwest Industrial Park. But the big Orange County and West L.A.-based developers, already heavily involved in Ontario and Rancho Cucamonga, refused to consider Fontana until it was clear that Kaiser Steel was doomed and that the milltown onus could be removed.

Fontana's first megaproject, initiated in 1981, was the Village of South-ridge, located in the Jurupa Hills redevelopment area south of I-10 and projected for a build-out of nine thousand homes by the year 2000. Creative Communities, the Huntington Beach-based developers of South-ridge, seduced Fontana's civic leaders by giving them a tour of Irvine, the famous master-planned city in southern Orange County. They convinced the starstruck Fontanans that a simulacrum of Irvine could be developed in Fontana's own south end if the city were willing to provide adequate infrastructure and financing. As Mayor Simon later recalled, "the city fathers wanted the project so bad that they could taste it." Accordingly, with visions of Fontana-as-Irvine dancing before their eyes, they signed a far-reaching agreement with Creative Communities that pledged the FRA to reimburse most of the infrastructural costs normally borne by developers.^[126]

In 1982, one year after the groundbreaking in Southridge, Fontana annexed a huge triangle of boulder-strewn fields north of the city, abutting Interstate 15 (then under construction). The completion of I -15 through western San Bernardino and Riverside and northern San Diego counties has created one of the nation's most dynamic growth corridors. (One of the corridor's boomtowns is "Ranch California," a 100,000-acre project originated by Kaiser Development Co. in Temecula.) Three hundred thousand new residents are expected in western San Bernardino County alone.^[127] Fontana, sitting at the strategic intersection of I -15 and I -10 (the San Bernardino Freeway), has superb linkages to this rapidly expanding commutershed. The North Fontana Project Area, which incorporates the old Fontana "ghetto" (an area of ironically exploding land values), is the largest redevelopment project in California (fourteen square miles), encompassing a series of prospective master-planned communities. Largest is the upscale Village of Heritage, directly competitive with Rancho Cucamonga's Terra Vista, and Victoria, which is being developed by BD Part-

ners of West Los Angeles (Richard Barclay and Joseph Dilorio), with heavy equity participation from FRA. Heritage will provide four thousand of the eighteen thousand new homes that the FRA wants to add in North Fontana over the next generation.^[128]

By the time the demolition crews got around to dismantling Big Bess, Fontana's leaders had managed to put 20,000 new homes in the $60,000-and-up range on the drawing boards in Southridge and North Fontana.^[129] Within four years of Kaiser Steel's closure, raw land prices in Fontana had doubled.^[130] This remarkable achievement garnered national accolades and much talk of a paradigmatic "Fontana miracle." The Los Angeles Times , for example, downplayed the impact of the Kaiser shutdown and resulting 15 per cent local unemployment (which it misreported as 9 per cent) in order to emphasize the city's "bright future" under its redevelopment strategy.^[131] Journalists uncritically reproduced city officials' claims that Fontana would soon be wealthy from its soaring tax bases and profits on its equity position in different developments. Just as Kaiser industrial relations had once been studied as a textbook model, now Fontana's resilience was presented as laboratory confirmation of the Reagan Administration's claim that deindustrialization was only a temporary and marginal cost in the transition to postindustrial prosperity based on services, finance, and real estate.

The first symptom that all was really not so well in Fontana redux was the sharp increase in white supremacist agitation and racial violence after the layoffs at the mill. During the course of 1983 the local Ku Klux Klan—about two dozen strong—crawled out from under their rock and began distributing leaflets in the high schools, holding public rallies, and even offering to "assist" the Fontana police. The Klan revival seems to have exercised a certain charisma upon a periphery of skinhead youth. In a savage October 1984 attack, a twenty-year-old Black man, Sazon Davis, was left paralyzed from the chest down after being beaten by three skinheads on Sierra Avenue—Fontana's main street. The Black community was further outraged—shades of O'Day Short—when the San Bernardino County district attorney refused to prosecute the white youths, one of whose mothers was the dispatcher for the Fontana police. (The reaction of Fontana development director Neil Stone to this local precursor of Howard Beach was to moan that "image has been our main problem.")^[132]

Worse problems lay soon ahead. By Christmas 1986 the Fontana bubble had burst. City Finance Director Edwin Leukemeyer resigned in the face of charges that he had embezzled public funds and sold off city-owned vehicles to his friends and relatives. Within six months the stream of res-

ignations and indictments prompted one paper to claim that "police detectives and auditors [are] almost as common a sight in City Hall as file clerks."^[133] Amongst the new casualties—a list that included the city treasurer, the motor pool director, the redevelopment director, and the development director—was City Manager and ex officio FRA chief Jack Ratelle, the chief architect of the "third Fontana." The city council forced Ratelle to resign after published reports of gratuities from leading developers made his position untenable.^[134]

Demoralization in Fontana City Hall was turned into panic in August 1987 by the release of an independent audit of the city by the regional office of Arthur Young. The Young report was devastating: the FRA was in a "chaotic state of disarray" and the city was on the edge of bankruptcy.^[135] The Young analysts discovered that the FRA had pawned Fontana's future in order to seduce developers. With 60 per cent of its tax base located in redevelopment areas, and obligated as payments or rebates to developers, the city could not afford to meet the needs of its expanding population. No tax revenue was left over to pay for the additional load that the new suburban population placed on its schools or public services.

Southridge alone, which Ratelle had always portrayed as a municipal gold mine, threatened to drive the city into bankruptcy as the FRA faced $10,000 per day in new interest charges accumulating on the unreimbursed principal which it owed Creative Communities. Official estimates of the total tax revenue that will be absorbed in debt service to Southridge run as high as $750 million by 2026 when the agreement expires.^[136] It is unlikely that the principal will ever be repaid. Like a miniature Mexico or Bolivia, Fontana is a debtor nation held in thrall to its Orange County and West L.A. creditor-developers. With its suburban property tax streams diverted to debt service, the city has had to impose both austerity (in the form of overcrowded schools and degraded services) and (as in Southridge) special fee assessments on unhappy new arrivals. The alternative of raising additional city income from existing commerce is excluded by the FRA's profligate rebates of sales taxes and municipal fees to the owners of the new shopping centers.

The release of the Young report (which also included sensationalist details of financial mismanagement and the destruction of records in City Hall) emboldened local journalists to muckrake through the FRA's records, untangling the circumstances of the agency's incredible profligacy. Mark Gutglueck of the Herald-News eventually exposed in detail how various redevelopment schemes had pauperized the city.^[137] The older mom-and-dad businesses along Sierra Avenue, for instance, were starved of

redevelopment funds by FRA policies that favored chain-store "K-Martization." Thus the FRA, in a typical example, gave tax-exempt financing and a $750,000 tax rebate to induce National Lumber to move into one of David Weiner's new shopping centers, itself financed by tax givebacks. The net result for the city was a large tax deficit and the closure of Ole's Hardware, an oldtime Fontana institution.^[138]

Likewise, in the case of Southridge, Gutglueck revealed how City Manager Ratelle and redevelopment lawyer Timothy Sabo (accused in the Young report of raking off excessive fees) overrode the strong objections of the city attorney to provide Creative Communities (later Ten-Ninety Ltd.) with whatever they demanded: hiked-up interest rates on FRA's obligation, forgiveness for their failure to build schools on time per contract, and so on. Moreover, the developers were repeatedly allowed to modify the community's specific plan, successively reducing the quality of housing and local amenities. The developers, in turn, pampered officials (like planning chief Nell Stone) with "finders fees," gratuities, and the use of a lakeside resort, while Southridge—which Mayor Simon liked to call "the Beverly Hills of Fontana"—evolved into misery.^[139] One planner who worked there has described it as "rabbit hutches with two-car garages, without adequate schools or public services."^[140] Not surprisingly the Young report and the Gutglueck revelations fueled a revolt by embittered Southridge residents who demanded a moratorium on further growth, the recall of the council majority, and a system of district elections.^[141]

Given the enormity of Fontana's suddenly exposed problems—the venality of its officials, its Andean-sized debt and the lien on its tax base until the next millennium, its underfunding of essential services, a growing mismatch between housing and jobs, and so on—the voter revolt was strangely muffled. Closure of Kaiser had dispersed much of the political base once organized by Local 2869, while the new commuter citizens had little time or focus for civic engagement. As a result the growth coalition—minus a few leaders in jail or exile—handily dispersed its challengers.^[142] The Southridge-instigated recall campaign was easily defeated, while the demand for a growth moratorium was harmlessly converted into a 45-day temporary freeze on building permits. The council did scale back a few development plans in North Fontana and gave lip service to the Young report's two hundred recommendations. But the most symptomatic reaction to the crisis came from Mayor Simon (then under investigation for making unlawful personal investments in one of the redevelopment areas), who simply urged Fontanans "to just keep smiling."^[143]

Since then the city fathers have tried to escape bankruptcy by tacking

their sails to various, sometimes countervailing, winds. Like the rubes they are, they have ended up buying back into schemes virtually identical to those that Bolivianized Fontana in the early 1980s.

First, they have searched high and low for some commercial deus ex machina to generate a compensatory tax flow for their fiscal deficit. Mayor Simon's own pet-rock scheme—contrived during a Canadian vacation from his legal problems—was to induce a multi-billion-dollar investor to build the California version of the Edmonton supermall in Fontana.^[144] In the absence of responses from Donald Trump or the Sultan of Brunei, the city teamed up instead with Alexander Haagen, Southern California's major mall builder, in a scheme to build a combination mall-entertainment complex in South Fontana. Just like Southridge, Haagen's Fontana Empire Center (scheduled for completion in 1995) was sold to local officials in a blaze of Orange County imagery: "Fontana's answer to the South Coast Plaza." Lest any of the Fontanans stop to ponder the absurdity of a Sears-anchored mall competing with the nation's wealthiest regional center anchored by Gucci and Neiman-Marcus, Haagen anesthetized opposition by generously donating to all ten candidates wing for the two vacant seats on the council.^[145] (Recently Haagen has started to backtrack on his original promises, proposing to develop one-half of the mall site for luxury homes instead of commerce.)^[146]

Meanwhile, Fontana leaders have tried to scrub the city clean of its blue-collar, "felony flats" image by drastically limiting the development of apartments and low-income units.^[147] The revised Fontana masterplan even de-emphasizes "starter homes"—the meat and potatoes of the previous plan—to favor more expensive "move-up" or second homes.^[148] Salesmen of Fontana's "new look," however, were immediately embarrassed by a recrudescence of the old Fontana in 1988. Millions of television viewers nationwide watched as celebrants of Martin Luther King's birthday had to be escorted down Sierra Avenue by a hundred and twenty police as acrid little knots of Fontana Klansmen shouted, "Long live the Klan. Long live the white boys." Subsequent "Death to the Klan" counter-rallies by the Jewish Defense League contributed yet more unwanted notoriety.^[149]

The campaign for an upscaled Fontana also collided with plans for a reindustrialized Fontana. With an unerring sense for courting contradiction, as one group of Fontana planners was trying to increase residential exclusivity, another was simultaneously kicking out the jambs for breakneck factory and warehouse construction. Offering contractors the state's fastest track for industrial development, they guarantee building starts six days after application, rather than the nine months normal elsewhere.^[150]

As angry homeowners have pointed out, combining poorly monitored industrial development—much of it highly toxic—with dense residential development is like mixing oil with water. This point was vividly illustrated in 1988 when more than 1,500 Southridge residents had to be evacuated after a nearby chemical spill.^[151]

The final irony, however, is Fontana's ardent courtship of Kaiser Steel's residuum: Kaiser Resources. Left with a mile-long slag mountain and seven hundred acres of polluted wasteland, KR in partnership with Lusk-Ontario Industries has maneuvered brilliantly to get Fontana to foot the bill for the clean-up. By coyly flirting with Ontario and Rancho Cucamonga, then suddenly throwing kisses to advocates of independent cityhood for Fontana's unincorporated westside ("Rancho Vista"), KR drove Fontana officials into a jealous frenzy. As a result, debt-hobbled Fontana is offering a memorandum of understanding to KR and Lusk that would guarantee $190 million in public funds to renovate the ex-Kaiser Steel site. In particular Fontana would help clean up the still spreading plume of soil and groundwater contamination that is the legacy of forty years of steelmaking, and which has replaced the smoke-cloud from Kaiser's coke ovens as the symbol of environmental distress in San Bernardino County. KR and Lusk, in turn, would accept annexation by Fontana and agree to develop a high-tech industrial park. But a centerpiece of KR's plan is a perverse environmental joke: importing Silicon Valley's toxic waste for processing in Kaiser Steel's still extant treatment facility.^[152]

So What's Left?

It's tacky, very, very tacky. But, maybe I should be grateful. People tell me it used to be worse.
New Fontana commuter-resident^[153]

Eat shit and die.
Reaction of old Fontana "homeboy"

After so many schemes, scandals, and sudden upheavals, what is Fontana today? Begin, arbitrarily, with its Wild West, unincorporated fringe. Follow the fire-engine-red Kenworth K600A "Anteater" pulling its shackled double reefers into the lot of "Trucktown" off the Cherry Street exit of I-10, just south of the Kaiser ghost plant. There are more than one hundred and twenty independent trucking companies based in the Fontana area, and this is their central fuel stop and oasis. Around midnight Truck-town really bustles, and rigs are often backed up to the Interstate waiting for a fuel-stop or parking berth. The biggest truckstop in the country is

just a few miles further west in Ontario, but drivers resent Union 76's private police force and stale pie.

Cherry Avenue is clearly, as they say, "west of the Pecos," and it is easier to make deals of all kinds here. Inside the care the counter is occupied by an apparition of Lee's Army after Appomattox: lean, bearded, hollow-eyed, and taciturn. There is more animation in the booths. Owner-operators wrestle with logbooks and second-driver problems; husband-wife teams have family arguments; brokers with questionable loads wrangle for haulers; outlaw bikers peddle old ladies and "Black Molly" (speed). The Cherry Avenue fringe has always accommodated illicit but popular activities. Until its recent closure by the Highway Patrol, the adjacent rest area on I-10 functioned as a girls-and-dope drive-in for morning commuters in Toyotas and tourists in Winnebagos.

Now the entire Fontana periphery (including the incorporated north-side and Rialto as well as the Cherry Street area) has become the Huallaga Valley of Southern California. Long the "speed capital of the world," its meth labs have recently diversified into the mass manufacture of "ice" (crystal, smokable speed) and "croak" (a smokable combination of speed and crack). For the most part this is grassroots narco-patriotism: drug addiction made-in-America by small-town good old boys and distributed throughout the heartland by a vast network of motorcycle gangs and outlaw truckers. From the standpoint of free enterprise economics it is also a textbook example of small entrepreneurs filling the void left by the collapse of a dinosaur heavy industry. Speed not steel is now probably Fontana's major export.

Which is not to deny that a lot of steel is still being hauled out of Fontana even if Big Bess herself was long ago melted for scrap. The multinational hybrid of California Steel Industries, just up Cherry Avenue, continues to roll Brazilian slabs into a variety of products for local markets (although the Japanese, and increasingly the Koreans, dominate the big-ticket structural items). The United Steel Workers recently attempted to organize CSI, but the campaign ended in disaster. Whether out of fear of losing their jobs again, or in resentment against the international's failure to come to their aid eight years earlier, the ex-Local 2869 men at CSI re-soundly voted the union down (88 per cent to 12 per cent).

The former primary steelworks itself looks like Dresden, Hiroshima, or, perhaps the most fitting image, Tokyo in April 1945 after three months of concentrated fire-bombing with Kaiser-made "goop" had burnt the city down to the ferroconcrete stumps of its major buildings. The wreckers long ago picked the plant clean of any salvageable metal—some of which,

reincarnated in Toyotas and Hyundais, zooms by on I-10. Meanwhile, the towering smokestacks, once visible for thirty miles, are collapsed into rubble, while only the skeletal concrete cores of the blast furnaces remain. Around the heavily guarded perimeter, Kaiser Resources leases land to a series of "mom-and-dad" scrapyards, who, having run out of Kaiser wreckage, are now happily crushing and shredding derelict automobiles. The whole scene looks like Mad Max: a post-apocalyptic society of industrial scavengers and metal vultures.

Across the road lie shadows of Fontana Farms. A ghostly vintage chicken ranch is overgrown with weeds but otherwise kept intact by its octogenarian owner who recalls the great plague of Newcastle's disease in 1971 that killed millions of Fontana hens. A few miles away in South Fontana a handful of chicken ranchers have managed to hang on and modernize their operations. Near the corner of Jarupa and Popper stands an astounding automatic chicken plant that works by conveyor belts, where one man can easily tend 250,000 hens. But the resulting accumulation of chicken manure is so vast that it has to be pushed around the ranch by bulldozers. Nearby commuter homeowners—no longer beguiled by the romance of chicken shit—are circulating petitions to close down this successful survival of the Millerian age. When the last trace of the chickens, pigs, and orchards has been removed, Fontana's remaining link to its agrarian past will be its thousands of dogs. We are not talking about manicured suburban house dogs, but old-fashioned yard dogs: snarling, half-rabid, dopey, friendly, shaggy, monstrous, and ridiculous Fontana dogs.

Fontana probably also has more wrecked cars per capita than anywhere else on the planet. The nearby Southern California Auto Auction is considered by some aficionados to be the eighth wonder of the world. More impressive to me is the vast number of dismantled or moribund cars deliberately strewn in people's yards like family heirlooms. I suppose it is a sight that blights Fontana's new image, but the junkyard sensibility can grow on you after a while (at least it has on me). The Fontana area—or rather the parts of it that are not named "Heritage" or "Eagle Pointe Executive Homes"—is a landscape of randomly scattered, generally uncollectable (and ungentrifiable) debris: ranging from Didion's creepy boulders to the rusting smudge-pots in phantom orchards, to the Burma-Shave-era motel names (like "Ken-Tuck-U-In") on Foothill Boulevard. Even crime in Fontana has a random surreality about it. There is, for instance, the maniac who has murdered hundreds of eucalyptus trees, or Bobby Gene Stile ("Doctor Feldon"), the king of obscene phone calls, who has confessed to fifty thousand dirty phone conversations over the last twenty-three years.

"Doctor Feldon" had, perhaps, wandered too far and too freely in the fleshpots of Fontana's Valley Boulevard (still, as in 1941, "Death Alley"). Just east of Cherry Avenue the boulevard is a boring repetition of adult bookstores and used truck dealerships. Closer to Sierra, however, there is a gathering sense of a mise en scène by a downhome Fellini. On one corner a hardluck cowboy is trying to sell his well-worn Stetson hat to the patriarch of a family of road gypsies—or are they Okies circa 1990?—who pile out of their converted Crown bus home. They have just left the Saturday swap meet at the nearby Belair Drive-In. Inside a lobster-faced desert "flea" from Quartzite is haggling with a trio of super-bag-ladies from the San Fernando Valley over the value of some "depression" glass saucers and an antique commode. Some local kids with "Guns and Roses" gang-bang T-shirts are listening to another grizzled desert type—this one looking like Death Valley Scotty—describe his recent encounter with aliens. A Jehovah's Witness in a maroon blazer kibbitzes uncomprehendingly.

A block away is an even more improbable sight: a circus wrecking yard. Scattered amid the broken bumper cars and ferris wheel seats are nostalgic bits and pieces of Southern California's famous extinct amusement parks (in the pre-Disney days when admission was free or $1): the Pike, Belmont Shores, Pacific Ocean Park, and so on. Suddenly rearing up from the back of a flatbed trailer are the fabled stone elephants and pouncing lions that once stood at the gates of Selig Zoo in Eastlake (Lincoln) Park, where they had enthralled generations of Eastside kids. I tried to imagine how a native of Manhattan would feel, suddenly discovering the New York Public Library's stone lions discarded in a New Jersey wrecking yard. I suppose the Selig lions might be Southern California's summary, unsentimental judgment on the value of its lost childhood. The past generations are like so much debris to be swept away by the developers' bulldozers. In which case it is only appropriate that they should end up here, in Fontana—the junkyard of dreams.

Further Reading

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. A Tale of Two Futures .1994.

Clark, David L. "Improbable Los Angeles." In Sunbelt Cities: Politics and Growth Since World War II , edited by Richard M. Bernard and Bradley R. Rice, pp. 268-308. 1983.

Clayton, James. "The Impact of the Cold War on the Economies of California and Utah, 1946-1965." Pacific Historical Review 36 (November 1967): 449-453.

Collins, Keith E. Black Los Angeles: The Making of the Ghetto, 1940-1950 . 1980.

Davis, Mike. "Chinatown Revisited? The 'Internationalization' of Downtown Los Angeles." In Sex, Death, and God in L.A ., edited by David Reid, pp. 19-53. 1992.

———. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles . 1990.

———. "The Empty Quarter." In Sex, Death, and God in L.A ., edited by David Reid, pp. 54-71. 1992.

———. "Fortress Los Angeles: The Militarization of Urban Space." In Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space , edited by Michael Sorkin, pp. 154-180, 244-245. 1993.

———. "The Los Angeles Inferno." Socialist Review 22 (January-March 1992): 58-80.

———. "Who Killed L.A.? A Political Autopsy." New Left Review 197 (January-February 1993): 3-28.

———. "Who Killed Los Angeles? Part Two: The Verdict Is Given." New Left Review 199 (May-June 1993): 29-54.

DeLeon, Richard Edward. Left Coast City: Progressive Politics in San Francisco , 1975-1991. 1992.

Delgado, Hector L. New Immigrants, Old Unions: Organizing Undocumented Workers in Los Angeles . 1993.

"Envisioning California." Special issue. California History (Winter 1989/1990).

Fishman, Robert. Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia . Chapter 7. 1987.

Fogelson, Robert. The Fragmented Metropolis: Los Angeles, 1850-1930 . 1967.

"Fortress California at War: San Francisco, Los Angeles, Oakland, and San Diego, 1941-1945." Special issue. Pacific Historical Review 63 (August 1994).

Foster, Mark S. Henry J. Kaiser: Builder in the Modern American West . 1989.

Hartman, Chester. The Transformation of San Francisco . 1984.

Hazen, Don, ed. Inside the L.A. Riots . 1992.

Jackson, Bryan O., and Michael B. Preston, eds. Racial and Ethnic Politics in California . 1991.

Klein, Norman M., and Martin Schiesl, eds. Twentieth-Century Los Angeles: Power, Promotion, and Social Conflict . 1990.

Kotkin, Joel, and Paul Grabowicz. California Inc . 1982.

"Los Angeles—Struggles Toward Multiethnic Community." Special issue. Amerasia Journal 19 (Spring 1993).

Los Angeles Times. Understanding the Riots: Los Angeles Before and After the Rodney King Case . 1992.

Lotchin, Roger W. Fortress California, 1910-1961: From Warfare to Welfare . 1992.

Markusen, Ann, et al. Rise of the Gunbelt . Chapter 5. 1991.

Ong, Paul, ed. The Widening Divide: Income Inequality and Poverty in Los Angeles . 1989.

Rieff, David. Los Angeles: Capital of the Third World . 1991.

Schiesl, Martin J. "Airplanes to Aerospace: Defense Spending and Economic Growth in the Los Angeles Region, 1945-60." In The Martial Metropolis: U.S. Cities in War and Peace , edited by Roger Lotchin, pp. 135-149. 1984.

———. "City Planning and the Federal Government in World War II: The Los Angeles Experience." California History 59 (Summer 1980): 126-143.

Scott, Mel. The San Francisco Bay Area: A Metropolis in Perspective . 1985.

Sonenshein, Raphael. Politics in Black and White: Race and Power in Los Angeles . 1993.

Walker, Richard. "The Playground of U.S. Capitalism: The Political Economy of the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1980s." In Fire in the Hearth: The Radical Politics of Place in America , edited by Mike Davis et al., pp. 3-82. 1990.

Walters, Dan. The New California: Facing the 21st Century . 1992.

Wiley, Peter, and Robert Gotlieb. Empires in the Sun: The Rise of the New American West . 1982.

Wollenberg, Charles. Golden Gate Metropolis: Perspectives on Bay Area History . 1985.