Bitter Harvest: A History of California Farmworkers, 1870-1941

This is a very readable book on the California farm workers. Daniel uses an impressive array of primary sources from the period studied to show the powerlessness and misery of California farm workers (whose many problems of the 1930's remain today). He begins by describing the last gasps of Californian agrarianism in the late 19th century and the racist ideology constructed by growers about their use of Chinese immigrant labor. An interesting part of the book is the section dealing with the California Housing and Immigration Authority. This Authority, created in 1913 in response to worker unrest on California farms, investigated farm working conditions and of course found them to be horrendous. Workers lived in ramshackle mud and wood huts, were paid below starvation wages, and so on. One of the leaders of the Authority peppered his written investigations with very learned Freudian analyses describing how the misery and hopelessness of farm worker life created all sorts of complexes in the victims. Daniel describes how the Authority tried to undermine any signs of unionism among California farm workers.. The Authority engaged in extensive spying operations against the IWW, gathering material the federal Justice Department made use of during the World War I era Red Scare. The Authority, according to Daniel, coaxed some growers to modestly improve conditions of workers but such improvements were beaten back during the ultra-free market, anti-union climate of the 1920's. Daniel describes the half-assed and half-hearted effort of the A.F of L to try to organize California farm workers before World War one along with a highly inept effort by the IWW. Daniel does an excellent job describing the lukewarm attitude the New Deal progressives had toward unionization. While some officials were sympathetic to the farm workers plight, the Roosevelt government on the whole was extremely reluctant to offend agribusiness interests. Farm workers were specifically excluded from laws protecting union organization, first under the laws of the National Recovery Administration (NRA) (1933-35) and then the Wagner Act of 1935. Administration officials concerned about providing stability for California agriculture were confronted the rise of the active and militant Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union (CAWIU). The CAWIU was the creation of the American Communist Party. Its courageous white organizers, such as Pat Chambers and Caroline Decker, were sent into a workforce which was so poor it had great difficulty affording very modest union dues and where employers and local officials had no restraint in employing violence against union organizers. The workforce was divided along racial and linguistic lines. A majority of the workforce was Mexican but there was a large Filipino minority along with some white and black workers fleeing the dust bowl further east. Daniel laboriously describes the CAWIU's strikes of 1933-34 and notes the violence fro