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“Green Pastures of Plenty from Dry Desert Ground”: Nature, Labor, and the Growth and Structure of a California Grape Company

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2015

GABRIEL WINANT
GABRIEL WINANT*
Affiliation:
Gabriel Winant is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at Yale University. Contact information: Department of History, Yale University, 320 York Street, P.O. Box 208324, New Haven, CT 06520. E-mail: gabriel.winant@yale.edu.
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Abstract

This article examines the growth and change of a southern California table grape firm, the George F. Johnston Company. Combining business, labor, and environmental history, it traces the company’s expansion from a semi-arid region just east of Los Angeles to the fully arid deserts of the Coachella and Imperial Valleys of California. The Johnston Company moved south and east into this more hostile environment to produce grapes out of the traditional season, beating the competition to market. In the process, it produced a racially stratified workforce and contributed to an ecological catastrophe. The Johnston case suggests that agricultural production pits capitalists in a triangular struggle over the moment of the harvest with nature and labor. This struggle is intensified by competitive dynamics that drive firms to expand or shift the timing of the productive process.

Type
Articles
Information
Enterprise & Society , Volume 16 , Issue 1 , March 2015 , pp. 109 - 140
Copyright
Copyright © The Author 2015. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Business History Conference. All rights reserved. 

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References

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Kershner, Frederick D., Jr. “George Chaffey and the Irrigation Frontier.” Agricultural History 27 (1954): 115–122.Google Scholar
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Mink, Nicolaas. “It Begins in the Belly.” Environmental History 14.2 (2009): 312–322.Google Scholar
Olsson, Tore E. “Peeling Back the Layers: Vidalia Onions and the Making of a Global Agribusiness.” Enterprise & Society 13 (2012): 832–861.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Osterud, Nancy Grey. “Gender and the Transition to Capitalism in Rural America.” Agricultural History 67.2 (1993): 14–29.Google Scholar
Raff, Daniel M. G. “How to Do Things with Time.” Enterprise & Society 67.2 (1993): 435–466.Google Scholar
Rhode, Paul W. “Learning, Capital Accumulation, and the Transformation of California Agriculture.” Journal of Economic History 55.4 (1995): 773–800.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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Sewell, William H., Jr. “The Temporalities of Capitalism.” Socio-Economic Review 6.3 (2008): 517–537.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Williams, Jeffrey. “The Origin of Futures Markets.” Agricultural History 56.1 (1982): 306–316.Google Scholar
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California Spatial Information Library. Available at http://atlas.ca.gov/download.html#/casil.Google Scholar
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New York TimesGoogle Scholar
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George F. Johnston Company Records. Etiwanda Historical Society, San Bernardino, CA.Google Scholar
Andrés, Benny Joseph. “Power and Control in the Imperial Valley, California: Nature, Agribusiness, Labor and Race Relations, 1900–1940.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of New Mexico, 2003.Google Scholar
De Lara, Juan. “Remapping Inland Southern California: Global Commodity Distribution, Land Speculation, and Politics in the Inland Empire.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2009.Google Scholar
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Jennie Masi, . Interview by Enid H. Douglass. Rancho Cucamonga Oral History Project, Etiwanda, CA, July 23, 1992.Google Scholar
Alamillo, José M. Making Lemonade Out of Lemons: Mexican American Labor and Leisure in a California Town, 1880–1960. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Baptist, Edward E. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. New York: Basic Books, 2014.Google Scholar
Belasco, Warren, and Scranton, Philip, eds. Food Nation: Selling Taste in Consumer Societies. New York: Routledge, 2001.Google Scholar
Cronon, William. Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York: Norton, 1992.Google Scholar
Daniel, Cletus. Bitter Harvest: A History of California’s Farmworkers. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.Google Scholar
Davis, Mike. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. New York: Vintage, 1992.Google Scholar
DeBuys, William. A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.Google Scholar
Freidberg, Suzanne. Fresh: A Perishable History. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Garcia, Matt. A World of Its Own: Race, Labor, and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los Angeles. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.Google Scholar
Guerin-Gonzales, Camille. Mexican Workers and American Dreams: Immigration, Repatriation, and California Farm Labor, 1900–1939. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994.Google Scholar
Hahamovitch, Cindy. No Man’s Land: Jamaican Guestworkers in America and the Global History of Deportable Labor. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011.Google Scholar
Hannickel, Erica. Empire of Vines: Wine Culture in America. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.Google Scholar
Harvey, David. The Limits to Capital. London: Verso, 1982.Google Scholar
Henderson, George. California and the Fictions of Capital. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003.Google Scholar
Higbie, Frank Tobias. Indispensable Outcasts: Hobo Workers and Community in the American Midwest, 1880–1930. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003.Google Scholar
Johnson, Walter. River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kindleberger, Charles. The World in Depression. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.Google Scholar
Kulikoff, Allan. The Agrarian Origins of American Capitalism. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1992.Google Scholar
Lichtenstein, Nelson. The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business. New York: Picador, 2010.Google Scholar
Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 3. Trans. Fernbach, David. London: Penguin, 1993.Google Scholar
McCurry, Stephanie. Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.Google Scholar
McWilliams, Carey. Southern California: An Island on the Land. Salt Lake City, UT: Gibbs Smith, 1973.Google Scholar
McWilliams, Carey. Factories in the Field: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Minsky, Hyman. Stabilizing an Unstable Economy. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008.Google Scholar
Mitchell, Don. They Saved the Crops: Labor, Landscape, and the Struggle Over Industrial Farming in Bracero-Era California. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012.Google Scholar
Ngai, Mae M. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.Google Scholar
Peck, Gunther. Reinventing Free Labor: Padrones and Immigrant Workres in the American West, 1880–1930. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Pisani, Donald J. From the Family Farm to Agribusiness: The Irrigation Crusade in California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Reisner, Marc. Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water. New York: Penguin, 1993.Google Scholar
Roediger, David R., and Esch, Elizabeth D.. The Production of Difference: Race and the Managemnet of Labor in U.S. History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.Google Scholar
Ross, Andrew. Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World’s Least Sustainable City. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sabin, Paul. Crude Politics: The California Oil Market, 1900–1940. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Sackman, Doug. Orange Empire: California and the Fruits of Eden. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Soluri, John. Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Starr, Kevin. Material Dreams: Southern California through the 1920s. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.Google Scholar
Stoll, Steven. The Fruits of Natural Advantage: Making the Industrial Countryside in California Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vaught, David. Cultivating California: Growers, Specialty Crops, and Labor. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Walker, Richard A. The Conquest of Bread: 150 Years of Agribusiness in California. New York: The New Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Weber, Devra. Dark Sweat, White Gold: California Farm Workers, Cotton, and the New Deal. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.Google Scholar
Woeste, Victoria Saker. The Farmer’s Benevolent Trust: Law and Agricultural Cooperation in Industrial America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.Google Scholar
Worster, Donald. Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.Google Scholar
Allen, Nicholas. “Exploring the Inland Empire: Life, Work, and Injustice in Southern California’s Retail Fortress.” New Labor Forum 19 (2010): 36–43.Google Scholar
Bardhan, Ashok and Walker, Richard. “California Shrugged: Fountainhead of the Great Recession.” Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy, and Society 4.3 (2011): 303–322.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gereffi, Gary. “The Organization of Buyer-Driven Global Commodity Chains: How U.S. Retailers Shape Overseas Production Networks.” In Commodity Chains and Global Capitalism, editd by Gereffi, Gary and Korzeniewicz, Miguel, 95–122. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994.Google Scholar
Gisolfi, Monica Richmond. “From Crop Lien to Contract Farming: The Roots of Agribusiness in the American South: 1929–1939.” Agricultural History 80.2 (2006): 167–189.Google Scholar
Gwynne, Robert N. and Ortiz, Jorge. “Export Growth and Development in Poor Rural Regions: A Meso-Scale Analysis of the Upper Limari.” Bulletin of Latin American Research 16.1 (1997): 25–41.Google Scholar
Hallagan, William S. “Labor Contracting in Turn-of-the-Century California Agriculture.” Journal of Economic History 40 (1980): 757–776.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kershner, Frederick D., Jr. “George Chaffey and the Irrigation Frontier.” Agricultural History 27 (1954): 115–122.Google Scholar
Levy, Jonathan Ira. “Contemplating Delivery: Futures Trading and the Problem of Commodity Exchange in the United States, 1875–1905.” American Historical Review 111.2 (2006): 306–335.Google Scholar
Mann, Susan A., and Dickinson, James M.. “Obstacles to the Development of a Capitalist Agriculture.” Journal of Peasant Studies 5.4 (1978): 466–481.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mink, Nicolaas. “It Begins in the Belly.” Environmental History 14.2 (2009): 312–322.Google Scholar
Olsson, Tore E. “Peeling Back the Layers: Vidalia Onions and the Making of a Global Agribusiness.” Enterprise & Society 13 (2012): 832–861.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Osterud, Nancy Grey. “Gender and the Transition to Capitalism in Rural America.” Agricultural History 67.2 (1993): 14–29.Google Scholar
Raff, Daniel M. G. “How to Do Things with Time.” Enterprise & Society 67.2 (1993): 435–466.Google Scholar
Rhode, Paul W. “Learning, Capital Accumulation, and the Transformation of California Agriculture.” Journal of Economic History 55.4 (1995): 773–800.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Seager, Richard and Vecchi, Gabriel A.. “Greenhouse Warming and the 21st Century Hydroclimate of Southwestern North America.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 107.50 (2010): 21277–21282.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Seager, Richard, Ting, Mingfang, Held, Isaac, Kushnir, Yochanan, Lu, Jian, Vecchi, Gabriel, Huang, Huei-ing, Narnik, Nili, Leetmaa, Ants, Lau, Ngar-Cheung, Li, Cuihua, Velez, Jennifer, and Naik, Naomi. “Model Projections of an Imminent Transition to a More Arid Climate in Southwestern North America.” Science 316.5828 (2007): 1181–1184.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Sewell, William H., Jr. “The Temporalities of Capitalism.” Socio-Economic Review 6.3 (2008): 517–537.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Williams, Jeffrey. “The Origin of Futures Markets.” Agricultural History 56.1 (1982): 306–316.Google Scholar
California State Board of Agriculture. Annual Report. Sacramento, CA: California State Printing Office, 1917.Google Scholar
California Spatial Information Library. Available at http://atlas.ca.gov/download.html#/casil.Google Scholar
U.S. Bureau of the Census. United States Census of Agriculture: 1954. Vol. 1: Part 33.Google Scholar
Holtville TribuneGoogle Scholar
Los Angeles TimesGoogle Scholar
New York TimesGoogle Scholar
Woody Guthrie. “Pastures of Plenty.” The Columbia River Collection. Smithsonian Folkways, 1988.Google Scholar
George F. Johnston Company Records. Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT.Google Scholar
George F. Johnston Company Records. Etiwanda Historical Society, San Bernardino, CA.Google Scholar
Andrés, Benny Joseph. “Power and Control in the Imperial Valley, California: Nature, Agribusiness, Labor and Race Relations, 1900–1940.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of New Mexico, 2003.Google Scholar
De Lara, Juan. “Remapping Inland Southern California: Global Commodity Distribution, Land Speculation, and Politics in the Inland Empire.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2009.Google Scholar
Jim Clark, and Clark, P. J.. Interview by Knox Mellon. Rancho Cucamonga Oral History Project. Etiwanda, CA, October 2, 1991.Google Scholar
Jennie Masi, . Interview by Enid H. Douglass. Rancho Cucamonga Oral History Project, Etiwanda, CA, July 23, 1992.Google Scholar