Imperial (100 page)

But don’t worry! Wasn’t Chinese exclusion a patriotic success? Didn’t we save ourselves from insolent Japanese labor contractors? Why not similarly clean up our Mexican problem? And so, three hundred thousand Mexican workers in American border states, half of them in California, conveniently return home. You will be pleased to know, courtesy of the
Los Angeles Times,
that
those who have already gone did so of their own volition. No “pressure” whatsoever was applied . . .
And a retired minister, who evidently knows how to do well by doing good, explains:
By helping Mexicans return to their own country, we relieve conditions in this country.
Nine hundred of the repatriates will take part in
a vast co-operative farming scheme
in the Colorado River Delta. The crop is, of course, cotton.
Co-operating were the Colorado River Land Company, the Pacific Oil Mills and the Globe Mills.
Shall I give you a morale report?
A peso a day is paid the colonists in provisions and clothing, and many went through the season without so much as a centavo in their pockets, yet were comfortable and happy.

What if they weren’t? DISARM THE RICH FARMER OR ARM THE WORKER FOR SELF-DEFENSE.

Meanwhile, even more hungry would-laborers have arrived in American Imperial. They are squatting along the banks of our canals and ditches. Fortunately, few of them could be labeled alien Reds, for they hail from the heartland.

Once upon a time, twelve years before George Chaffey opened his headgates, the Oklahoma Territory was Imperial. Almost two million acres got staked out in a single day. A novel about this epoch rings with rhetoric which would have coaxed Barbara Worth’s cherry-red lips into their sweetest smile:
There’s never been a chance like it in the world. We can make a model empire out of this Oklahoma country . . .

But just as the Owens Valley in the mid-1920s began to dry up, her farms and stores abandoned, so ten years later the Okies saw their model empire blow away. They did not even have Mulholland to blame.

I see a pale farmhouse whose windmill is as white as a skeleton against the immense oncoming black spheres of dust-cloud. The door to an outbuilding hangs blackly open. Perhaps the family has already gone. The woodcut artist who carved this in 1938 remarks:
A typical scene of the “Dirty Thirties” of the Dust Bowl Days . . . Windows and doors failed to keep out the fine dust.
In another woodcut by the same man, a farmhouse sits half buried in white dust, its trees dead silhouettes, its wagon wheels sunk into the new desert which eerily resembles Imperial, the slat-ted windmill standing above everything like a clock of doom. A lithograph by a different artist five years earlier portrays the sand as rippling with dune-stripes; and before the black-cavitied hulk of a farmhouse stands a shovel, stuck slantwise into the sand as if someone had begun to dig a grave and fled.

In Padua, Oklahoma, Wallace Case stays safely out of debt so that the banks can’t get him. One day his grandson sees him weeping for the first time. Following the mandate of the Agricultural Adjustment Act, G-men have shot his cattle. Doing everything right was not good enough, it would seem.

Oklahoma lost ever more fields to the dust devils; meanwhile, Imperial had too much produce for her own good! Reader, can you connect the dots?

A hobo who wandered the country through those years remembers
Yuma and the Imperial Valley where you could usually pick up a few days work on a ranch or farm . . .

But in
The Grapes of Wrath,
Steinbeck details the plight of desperate Okies
¹⁸²
who went all the way to California, only to find that there was no work for them. There was food, of course—but the growers were destroying surpluses, to keep the price down.

A boy named H. T. Roach is riding the rails in 1935. Los Angeles had just formed a Committee on Indigent Alien Transients, and will refuse entry to people without jobs or money until overruled by the California Attorney General.
Los Angeles declared war on us,
he says.
I was on a freight train that was stopped at the Arizona-California border. A small army of railroad agents swept the train and kicked off upwards of six hundred of us. They left us standing in the silent desert.
Did he get work in Imperial? He does not say.

Philip Bonosky remembers:
We saw the ruling class on the defensive. We saw bread-lines and thousands of workers rioting to get a dozen jobs. We saw cops raising fountains of blood on the heads of ex-servicemen and workers in steel towns and coal towns.

As for the campesinos whose hunger had impelled them across the line into the fields of American Imperial, they must have been aware that their own blood could be invited out of their skulls should they fail to mind their manners.

So thank goodness for politeness: Mr. E. B. Goodman of El Centro
(lived here off
on since 1889)
assures us:
No Red lives here. Desert doesn’t breed reds. They are trying to come in however.
His next remark, alas, sounds like something that a Red would say:
Brokers-shippers others interested in vegetable business exploiting this Country—thinking only of profit. Don’t own land.

But let’s all of us think only of profit! Isn’t that how Arid America’s supposed to reclaim herself? Barbara Worth’s verdant Ministry of Capital harks back to Adam Smith and his invisible hand! W. F. Holt builds up his Redland Syndicate by means of the Three Sacred Axioms:
I can’t help believing in people . . . I have never been cheated out of a dollar in my life . . . I’ve found that the way to get your money is to give

a man a chance to pay you.
So why can’t the growers and the field workers all get rich? In Mexican Imperial they pay three pesos a day—less than the cost of living. Here on the Northside the wage is three times higher. What do we need Reds for?
The first picture on the south wall of the lobby will be that of the “Financial Genius,” without which the Valley would have remained the land of nothing. He made a success through his own efforts. He sold out at a fancy price.

In 1933 and 1934, Imperial County’s years of worst violence, we find Communists still pitted against the Mexican consulate, whose labor organization therefore becomes almost palatable to growers. The first strike (lettuce again) ends to the growers’ satisfaction, and the Consul is their hero. An outside investigator reports:
Consul last year made a survey of whole valley of living conditions—absolutely no complaint.
By the way, the Consul is said to collect or extort bribes from his countrymen upon their arrival in Northside, so I wonder whether the Chamber of Commerce might also take up occasional collections for him?
Consul: Mexicans recognize they
the growers have a common problem with the agitators.
In any event, his exhortations together with the police’s own exertions rescue the growers again during the following strike, of pea pickers; it was concerning this success that Edith Karpen said to me:
The worst part was over quickly.

But now the Communists are in force, and the trick harder to pull off. A Communist cell operates in Brawley. The Party-run Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union also sets up shop. The union’s two organizers, however, possess little experience. Stanley Hancock, twenty-five, has been called
a functionary, and
Dorothy Ray, age nineteen, has not yet graduated from the Communist Youth League. Their bravery must have been immense. Like their predecessors, they will end by doing hard prison time. As the Party will be informed in a disapproving report: ...THEY AGITATED THE WORKERS FOR A STRIKE INSTEAD OF EMPHASIZING ORGANIZATION SO AS TO PREPARE FOR A STRIKE...

Perhaps even fullfledged apparatchiks could not have better directed the workers, given the ugly confluence then squeezing Imperial—that unsold produce withheld from hungry hordes, whose newest members were Dustbowl refugees competing economically and racially with Mexican labor; the failure of previous strikes, which must have inflamed all parties; the increasing militancy in Mexicali, the impending rupture between Cárdenas and the Chandler Syndicate. One must grant that Hancock and Ray chose their battleground well. Have you forgotten that Imperial County remains America’s number-one provider of early lettuce? As a matter of fact, the lettuce growers are already over a barrel. The pro rate system of idling production so as to keep crop prices up will soon become an American institution. In fact, it has recently commenced right here, with lettuce, in self-reliant, Republican Imperial County. What does that indicate, but soft demand? Now is the time. Accordingly, at the beginning of 1934, the Communists call a general lettuce strike. Their primary demand: thirty-five cents an hour.

Growers respond by raising wages from fifteen to twenty-two and a half cents per hour, with a five-hour minimum; they immediately default. Well, even a kept promise might not have kept the peace. Twenty-two and a half cents is not thirty-five.

I see pale tents crammed all the way to the field-horizon, women and children in a line on the pale dirt, a banner for the CIRCO AZTECA ; groups of people under almost every awning; in this tiny print it takes awhile for the eye to realize how teeming this camp really is. On the back is written:
The camp site at Corcoran, Calif.
Mexican labor camps in Imperial must have looked similar.
There were about 2000 here. The Circo Azteca, at the left, was for some show that was in camp—probably to excite the workers.

Analogues to that Mexican labor camp may certainly be found in the entity called Imperial. The Colorado River Land Company does not seem to be hiring Okies. In 1934, the United States Special Commission on Agricultural Labor Disturbances in Imperial Valley reports on squatters’ camps:
. . . we found filth, squalor, an entire absence of sanitation, and a crowding of human beings into totally inadequate tents or crude structures built of boards . . . During the warm weather, when the temperature rises considerably above 100 degrees, the flies and insects become a pest, the children are fretful, the attitude of the parents can be imagined . . . In this environment there is bred a social sullenness which is to be deplored, but which can be understood by those who have viewed the scenes that violate all the recognized standards of living . . .

That year we see people with milk-jugs and bottles lining up to get their free water from a railroad car,
FOR FAMILY USE ONLY
.

Men in work clothes are sitting on long wooden benches in the California Employment Relief Station Camp, whose corrugated metal walls make everything slightly greyer. It is meal time beneath the bare bulbs. The great Hetzel himself has signed this photograph, which is as nondescript as most of his other productions. We get the gist of it: In Imperial in 1934, many, many people have gone on relief. How many would decline to scab? Perhaps this will not be the most propitious time for the Communists’ lettuce strike.

In the Bancroft Library at Berkeley, in a carton labeled
Farm labor situation 1933- 34,
I have seen, among many other faded souvenirs of angry drama, two sheets of stationery bearing the image of Imperial’s heroine, Barbara Worth. Some of the handwriting—evidently Dean Hutchinson’s from Berkeley; he must have been preparing one of his reports on broad and sinister motives—is difficult to make out; most of its references are enigmatic. And yet even an abbreviated version conveys that time’s ugliness, the secretive preparations for worse:

Tried to get
the opposing factions together here. Was arrested. Not jailed. Con
tacted
all groups. Even going to & from Azteca hall, looked suspicious. Did Kris under orders of MacCullough arr.? leave of absence from girl’s office at time.

The lettuce strike begins. Five thousand field workers take part. By now the Consul and his union are utterly discredited, so that the growers feel compelled to meet the picketers with naked violence. Fortunately, many Imperial sheriffs, police, and kindred deputies of legal force happen to be growers, so they can be counted on to enforce the law in the most impartial spirit. Our oracle, the
Imperial Valley Press,
reveals all with kindred objectivity: