Factories in the Field: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in California

by Carey McWilliams

Book Overview

This book was the first broad expos of the social and environmental damage inflicted by the growth of corporate agriculture in California. Factories in the Field-together with the work of Dorothea Lange, Paul Taylor, and John Steinbeck-dramatizes the misery of the dust bowl migrants hoping to find work in California agriculture. McWilliams starts with the scandals of the Spanish land grant purchases, and continues on to examine the experience...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520224132
• ISBN13: 9780520224131
• Release Date: February 2000
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 363 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.6" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Smashing myths

"Factories in the field" opened my eyes in a few ways. First, it shows that the history of California agribusiness isn't a post WWII creation as I thought. California agribusiness came out of the Spanish land grants that Americans of the U.S. variety exploited after the gold rush. Nineteenth century agribusiness was a time of giant farms and massive harvest of crops such as wheat. Second, that the history of the exploitation of farm workers also goes back to the nineteenth centure and while the ethnicity might change, the approach to these workers does not. Workers should be powerless and paid as little as possible. They should be provided the very minimum in living conditions and disappear after the harvest, not calling attention to themselves if they end up in the cities placing demands on municipalities causing the growers political trouble. Finally, I learned that when a particular group of farm workers got uppity, the government would pass laws stripping them of their land and/or making it possible to acquire new property. If these groups striked, then the vigilantees inflicted violence on the workers and disrupted their strikes and had them imprisoned. Carey McWilliams does a great job both of providing a social history of agribusiness in California and of showing why workers must never give up the struggle for social justice because the moneyed forces are always working to keep their wages down and their voices silenced.

No NEW DEAL in Paradise

A quick look at the index of Carey McWilliams's "Factories in the Field" finds not a single reference to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Should that be surprising? Given that the book was first published in 1939, I believe it should. But in this "Story of Magratory Farm Labor in California," neither the New Deal or the Great Depression followed the same script as in the rest of the country. 1939 was also the year of publication of John Steinbeck's great novel "Grapes of Wrath." The two books have been linked ever since, one as documentation for the other, even though McWilliams published first. The "dustbowl refugees" of Steinbeck's fiction were white Americans, fleeing from the Depression and the folly of pioneer agriculture in an area unsuitable to family farming. They do turn up in Factories in the Fields, as victims of exploitation and violence, but Steinbeck knowingly overlooked the majority of migrant workers in California in the 1930s (and earlier and later), who were not white transplants from the poor South but rather Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, and eventually prodominently Mexican. McWilliams describes in convincing terms how the nascent "industrial farmers" of California used racism, inter-ethnic competition, anti-union sentiments, and the pro-business partiality of American labor law not only to exploit the poorest of the poor unconscionably but also to consolidate huge holdings in some of America's richest farm land. The landest land-holding, that of the King family, is still around, and if I remember correctly it's larger than any of a half-dozen small states. The chapters in which McWilliams describes the violence, cloaked in legality, with which all efforts to organize migratory workers to defend their right to the Pursuit of Happiness are graphic and heart-rending. One era's historiography often becomes the source material for historians of later eras, and this is surely the case of Factories in the Fields. Sixty years later it's a vivid window into the mentality of earnest reformers of the New Deal, who had plenty to be passionate about. But Factories in the Fields not only was history; it also made history. Few books on such an obscure subject have had such long-term influence. I can state with certainty that without this book the efforts of Cesar Chavez, one of America's greatest heroes, would not have had half the chance of success; the boycotts that created the United Farm Workers were led by people who knew about migrant labor chiefly through McWilliams. Even today, the cautious distrust many people feel toward the Bush Republican proposals to create a pool of non-immigrant guest workers reflects the memory of the exploitative "bracero" program that was terminated in the 1960s through protests from, once again, people who'd read Factories in the Fields. I've recently reviewed two other studies of the New Deal era - "The Political Life of Floyd B. Olson" and "The New Deal and the Iroquois". My central point in these reviews h

Factories in the Field

An excellent book for anyone interested in California History, US History, the Great Depression or the history of corporate agriculture. Originally released the same year as Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, McWilliams' book relates the history of not only migrant farm labor in California, but the corporate farm as well. Having included extensive background on California's 19th Century land grab, McWilliams presents a comprehensive look at corporate agriculture, including its effect on various labor groups and the economy of the State of California. Written with a definite bias toward the underdog (the migrant worker), Factories in the Field nevertheless provides the reader with an understanding of the beginnings of corporate economy in California and its true beginnings in agriculture, including an explanation of the power of the ag growers--a political hot potato that continues in the state today.