October 2006 Labor History
1933 cotton strike paved way for later victories
It united 18,000 workers of all different nationalities – Mexicans, African-Americans, and Southern and Midwestern whites -- at a time of terrible divisions. It lasted less than one month, but had an enduring impact. The organization which started it was ultimately destroyed, but that group’s heroic struggle paved the way for other efforts to win justice for California’s agricultural workers.
October marks the 73rd anniversary of the Cotton Strike of 1933, one of the largest strikes in California’s history. By the time it was over, three workers had been killed, 42 wounded, and over 100 arrested.
After the Great Depression began in 1929, conditions for agricultural workers in California were abysmal. Hundreds of thousands of desperate people who had lost their small farms headed west to find any kind of work they could in agriculture. These immigrants to California from the Midwestern and Southern United States found themselves working side by side with immigrants from Mexico, the Philippines, and other parts of the world.
A three-year state residency requirement barred even those new arrivals who were U.S. citizens from receiving relief. Hunger stalked the “Hoovervilles” that the newcomers set up.
Farmers’ prices fell between 1929 and 1932, as the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) fell by one-third, the unemployment rate reached 24 percent, and the farm work force swelled. Farmers cut wages.
But by 1933, the price of farm products was rising – thanks to the Agricultural Adjustment Act which helped to curtail the surpluses of farm commodities. That year saw 37 strikes in California agriculture involving 48,000 workers in 14 crops. Harvest-time strikes during the spring and summer of 1933 usually resulted in wage increases. By the fall of 1933, California’s agricultural workers were ready to strike for a wage increase for picking cotton, the crop that employed the most workers in the state.
The cotton farmers meet in September 1933 to set a standard piece rate wage. They agreed to 60 cents per 100 pounds of cotton picked. This was an increase from the 40 cents of 1932, but far below the $1.50 of 1929.
The cotton workers had expected a raise to at least one dollar for every 100 pounds picked. On October 4, 1933, their union – the Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union – called a strike to demand one dollar per 100 pounds picked, improved living conditions, and the employers’ recognition of the union.
The growers moved swiftly to evict thousands of strikers and their families from company housing. Most of those evicted moved to CAWIU-run tent camps, which reinforced the strikers’ sense of solidarity.
The cotton growers bitterly denounced the strike. Local government leaders supported the growers. A Tulare newspaper editorialized that “the strike would vanish into thin air overnight if the outside agitators were rounded up and escorted out of the country, as they should be.”
An undersheriff declared: “We protect our farmers here in Kern County. They are our best people. They are always with us. They keep the country going. They put us in here and they can put us out again, so we serve them. But the Mexicans are trash. They have no standard of living. We herd them like pigs.”
CAWIU-led strikes were often marked by violence because growers and their foremen worked closely with local law enforcement officials; in many cases, the growers and their foremen were deputy sheriffs. Agents of the growers tried to break up striker rallies.
Historian Maralyn Edid summed up the situation this way:
“Whenever workers took an activist stance, their union sympathies were quickly and savagely contained by arrests, court injunctions, and vigilante action. Adopting tactics long familiar to industrial employers, growers colluded with leading citizens, bankers, and merchants, and with sheriffs, judges, and mayors to stage sham trials, murders, violence, firings, and Communist-baiting in a determined attempt to maintain control over the work force.”
In the town of Pixley, armed vigilante squads shot down 11 strikers, killing two of them. The strikers resisted and held picket lines in front of the jail to demand freedom for the arrested strike leaders. On one farm, about 100 workers invaded the fields and drove off all the strikebreakers.
After the killing of strikers, state officials rushed to the area to “investigate.” They urged local authorities to disarm the growers, but they issued more gun permits. Reporters and photographers soon arrived to cover the strike. They began to report that the growers were at fault for refusing to raise wages or even to agree to mediation.
When the strike continued, it appeared that the valuable cotton crop would be lost. To avoid this, professors from the University of California were sent to the Valley on a fact-finding mission to obtain some kind of resolution. Eventually, they recommended a wage increase of 75 cents per 100 pounds of cotton picked to a state commission which had been set up to resolve the dispute.
The banks “persuaded” the growers to pay 75 cents by threatening to withhold financing for the 1934 cotton crop if they did not. The government announced that workers who did not go to work by Oct. 16, 1933 would be denied relief in the winter months. Because 75 cents was an increase above the growers’ offer, the CAWIU accepted it and ended the strike, although it did not win union recognition or an end to the labor contract system.
The cotton strike was just one of the 29 agricultural strikes in California in 1933 which resulted in a pay increase. California agribusiness did not take this lying down. Even as the strikes were going on, the growers were preparing their counter-attack.
In May 1934, representatives of California agribusiness, supported by some of the wealthiest and most anti-union industrialists in the state, formed a new group – the Associated Farmers. The purpose of this group was not to discuss soil erosion or weather conditions or any of the particular problems faced by farmers; it was to break unions. The group declared that “the labor controversies in the farming areas had been fomented by communists as a definite part of Moscow’s program to change the form of government in California.”
The Associated Farmers soon got its chance to take revenge on the CAWIU.
In the summer of 1934, a general strike was called in San Francisco by the International Longshoremen’s Association to obtain a union-run hiring hall to allocate work on the docks. San Francisco newspapers falsely quoted leaders of the CAWIU who had led the 1933 strikes, printing statements in which the CAWIU leaders allegedly said that the farm workers would go out on strike in support of the dock workers and that the fields would become battlegrounds in the struggle to bring communism to California. These false statements, printed at the behest of the growers, led to the arrest of 14 CAWIU leaders in Sacramento in July 1934 for vagrancy.
By the time the trial of the CAWIU leaders began in January 1935, the charges against them had been changed to criminal syndicalism, or instigating violence. The Associated Farmers fed material to the prosecutors, and six CAWIU leaders were convicted and sentenced to prison after a four-month trial.
The Associated Farmers also pushed through anti-picketing legislation in 20 rural California counties, ordinances which could be used to prosecute CAWIU organizers. The CAWIU never recovered. The growers congratulated themselves that their “tough” approach had worked, and that unions were gone from the fields of California. They rejoiced too soon.
While the CAWIU was destroyed, the fight to unionize farmworkers did not end. Ever since the Cotton Strike of 1933, the fight to unionize the farmworkers of California has continued, and this fight has stirred the conscience of the American people when the reality of life in the fields has been brought dramatically to the public’s attention.
In March 1936, a photographer named Dorthea Lange took a picture near Nipomo, California of a gaunt, desperate migrant mother from Oklahoma. Reprinted widely, it shocked the country. In late 1937, another agricultural union was formed – the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers of America. In 1938, a musician named Woody Guthrie visited California, meeting the refugees from his native state of Oklahoma and the other exiles of want. His songs of the battles of the down-and-out would help expose those who owned the “Pastures of Plenty.” In April 1940, John Steinbeck’s novel “Grapes of Wrath” was published. President Franklin Roosevelt was quoted as saying after having read it that “something must be done and done soon” to help California farm workers.
While the 1930s ended with the temporary defeat of militant unionism in California agriculture, all the different efforts to expose and change the conditions in the fields helped prepare the ground for the next round of struggle. That round was delayed first by the exclusion of farmworkers from the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, and then by a world war during which tens of thousands of immigrant workers were brought to the United States to work in the fields without rights (the bracero program, which began in 1942.)
It would take until the 1960s for a new series of battles to win union contracts in the fields of California, and to obtain California’s Agricultural Labor Relations Act.
And even with those union contracts, today the San Joaquin Valley is one of the most poverty-stricken areas in the United States; per-capita income is far below the national average. Much remains to be done; but as we carry on that fight, we can take inspiration from the cotton harvesters who fought so bravely in 1933. They were willing to shed their blood to win a wage increase in the midst of the Great Depression, and they won it.