Tue Nov 14 04:44:17 EST 2006
Published by EH.NET (November 2006)
Douglas Cazaux Sackman, _Orange Empire: California and the Fruits of
Eden_. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005. xv + 386
pp. $45 (cloth), ISBN: 0-520-23886-9.
Nahum Karlinsky, _California Dreaming: Ideology, Society, and
Technology in the Citrus Industry of Palestine, 1890-1939_
(translated from Hebrew by Naftali Greenwood). Albany, NY: State
University of New York Press, 2005. xiv + 270 pp. $45 (cloth), ISBN:
0-7914-6527-6.
Reviewed for EH.NET by Paul Rhode, Department of Economics,
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
In the summer of 1927, Frank Adams, a Professor of Irrigation at the
University of California, joined a tour-group studying the
agriculture of Palestine. One event receiving special note "was a
California luncheon tendered the members of the Commission at the
home of one of the settlers in the colony of Benjamin. The hosts were
all former students of the University of California College of
Agriculture ... or those who have had some agricultural training and
experience on California farms or ... agricultural enterprises."[1]
This scientific inter-exchange lies at the intersection of these two
valuable recent books exploring the growth of the citrus production
in two distant, but environmentally similar lands.
Employing a cultural history approach, Sackman chronicles the rise of
the California orange industry between 1870 and 1950. By his account,
powerful regional boosters in southern California cultivated, or
rather manufactured, an advertising image of a sunny "Garden of Eden"
to better market their commodities and hide their exploitation of
immigrant workers and their increasingly chemical-dependent
production techniques. Across its first four chapters, _Orange
Empire_ sketches the founding myths of the local industry, covering
the introduction of the Washington navel orange at the Tibbets
farmstead, the conquest of blue mold by USDA pomologist G. Harold
Powell, and the establishment of cooperative state-federal citrus
research system.
But the heart of the work is the analysis of citrus marketing,
especially of Sunkist's advertising efforts, in Chapter 3, which
bears the telling title "Pulp Fiction." Sackman sees the Sunkist
co-operative (p. 12) as the "driving force behind the rise of the
Orange Empire." Early attempts to promote California citrus appear
lame, even a little bizarre. He observes that the state's exhibit at
the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 displayed a model of the Liberty
Bell made from oranges. The California Fruit Growers Exchange, formed
in the same year, developed a more effective campaign of "scientific
salesmanship" of oranges under the Sunkist label. Beginning with a
1907 promotional drive in Iowa using catch phrase "Oranges for
Health-California for Wealth," the cooperative became a leading
national advertiser by the early 1920s. Among the bold claims in its
magazine copy was that citrus was a good source of the
newly-discovered Vitamin C -- a claim that Sackman suspiciously notes
was based on nutrition research partially funded by Sunkist. A sense
of the tenor of the argument is offered on p. 115: "By using the
legitimating stories of medical science and playing cultural fears of
disease, Sunkist configured nature's oranges as a vital ingredient
for the health and growth of the nation." Similar statements abound.
The operation of advertising is indeed mysterious. Yet are tastes
holding that fresh oranges are beautiful, delicious, and healthy
(compared with other snacks) merely the product of Sunkist
brain-washing? Despite his immersion in post-modern rhetoric, even
the author does really appear to believe so (see p. xi). Maybe,
sometimes, an orange is just an orange. And delicious at that.
Karlinsky adopts an approach more familiar to economic historians,
one embracing the evaluation of evidence regarding production costs,
export markets, technological choice, and the difficulties of
cartelization. Like Sackman, he also emphasizes the play of ideology,
specifically of conflicting visions within the Zionist movement, in
shaping the development of the Jewish citrus industry in Palestine
over the period from 1890 to 1939. One core ideological issue was
whether the new sector was to develop along capitalist, private
enterprise lines as advocated by pioneering grower, Moshe Smilansky,
or along communal lines as advocated by Arthur Ruppin and Zionist
socialists. A second, related set of issues involved nationalism and
the use of hired labor. Should the citrus colonies rely on Jewish
workers exclusively as the Ben-Gurion and Zionist Labor Movement
demanded, or could cheaper Arab hired hands be employed? It is
fascinating to compare the role and treatment of Mexican workers in
the California citrus industry, which Sackman's fourth chapter places
in a new light, with intense debates raging at the same time in the
Zionist movement over "the conquest of labor." Another interesting
point of comparison is the ideological position of cooperatives such
as Sunkist. Sackman briefly (p. 93) notes that its founders declared
themselves free "from commercial exploitation" by middlemen. But this
understates how different cooperative members believed their
community-based production and marketing organization was from the
standard modes of operation of the family farms in the American
Midwest. California agriculture offered something new, although not
as radically different as some desired.
Karlinsky's title, _California Dreaming: Ideology, Society, and
Technology in the Citrus Industry of Palestine_, is evocative but a
little misleading. The Hebrew version of the book was called _Citrus
Blossoms: Jewish Entrepreneurship in Palestine, 1890-1939_. One
imagines that in bringing out an English translation (and a good one
at that), the editors at the SUNY Press decided a slight repackaging
would increase the work's American market. Karlinsky discusses the
"California model" in excellent detail, but only beginning in Chapter
5 on production techniques and in Chapter 9 on marketing. (The phrase
"California model" was commonly used in the industry to characterize
the agricultural and marketing practices propelling California to
global leadership. The term was explicitly adopted by Harold Powell,
Jr. when he moved to South Africa with a mission to reproduce
California's success there in the 1910s.)
A major point of the fifth chapter is that while Jewish leaders
admired California's achievement and studied its techniques regarding
the use of hired labor, plant spacing, cultivation, irrigation,
picking and packing, and joint marketing, the industry in Palestine
did not actually adopt many of these practices on a sustained basis.
As one example, by the 1920s, California citrus farmers were
irrigating with electric-driven horizontal centrifugal pumps and
underground cement tubes. Despite expert advice to adopt the
"California irrigation method," Jewish planters persisted in using
piston pumps driven by internal combustion engines and in manual
irrigating via ditches. As another example, during the "big planting
period" of the early 1930s, Jewish farmers abandoned the wide spacing
advocated by California's citrus experts in favor of tighter spacing
and earlier maturation. Karlinsky concludes (p. 120) the "attempt to
transplant the California model to Palestine ... did not turn out
well, mainly due to differences in conditions: scarcity of land,
availability of cheap unskilled labor, high interest rates, and the
wish to obtain a return on equity as quickly as possible."
The situation was similar in packing and marketing. Attempts in the
early 1920s to install an efficient, large-scale, American-style
packing plant failed miserably. The machinery was designed for the
round American oranges, not for the oval Shamouti variety grown in
Palestine. Growers, moreover, were initially suspicious of the drive
towards centralization they considered inherent in the modern
techniques. Finally, efforts to form marketing cooperatives,
including the Padress and the Jaffa Citrus Exchange, went through
repeated trials and efforts at reorganization.
Given his interests and sources, Karlinsky is relatively silent on
the growth of the Arab side of the Palestinian citrus industry.
Chapter 6 provides a short overview of technological innovations in
that sector. This brevity is unfortunate because except for the
1926-35 period, when Jewish planting outpaced Arab planting before
falling back again, the two sectors were of roughly equal size and
shared many of the same patterns of expansion and crisis. The Arab
sector predated Jewish efforts and tended to be more traditional. But
it also grew rapidly during the Mandate era, using lower production
costs to compete in export markets. One of the hypotheses advanced in
the text is that capital from Jewish land purchases as well as
lessons about modern techniques learned by Arabs working in Jewish
orchards pushed the expansion of the Arab sector. As Karlinsky
explicitly states, a definite comprehensive study of the Arab half of
the Palestinian citrus industry awaits another treatment.
As with the English-language title of Karlinsky's book, _Orange
Empire_ does not fully convey the contents of the Sackman's work. The
scope of this book -- which (p. xii) asserts it is the first
historical monograph on the California citrus industry written since
Carey McWilliams's 1946 _Southern California_ -- is both larger and
smaller than is suggested. _Orange Empire_ visits all of the
"stations of the cross" in the McWilliams version of California's
agricultural history -- the 1913 riot at the Durst ranch in
Wheatland, the 1934 EPIC campaign of Upton Sinclair, the
strike-breaking activities of the Associated Farmers during the
1930s, the controversies surrounding John Steinbeck's _Grapes of
Wrath_, and the story behind Dorothea Lange's iconic 1936 photograph
of the "Migrant mother." Little matter that Durst produced hops; that
Lange's mother picked peas, not oranges; or that Charles Teague, the
book's key opponent of EPIC and proponent of the Associated Farmers,
was a lemon (and walnut) producer. Using care to distinguish between
California oranges and lemons is important because the producers of
the latter continued to be much more dependent on tariff protection
to stave off European competition than producers of the former.
The cost of this broad take on the subject matter is that Sackman
pays limited attention to many issues of interest to economic
historians. The economic literature has focused on whether the
cooperatives such as Sunkist were strictly rent-extracting
output-restricting cartels or whether they increased efficiency by
lowering costs and solving marketing problems. In either case, how
did such organizations solve the "free rider" problem to retain
members and market position? The advertising of Sunkist was costly
and inevitably some of the increased demand would spill over to
non-Sunkist citrus. How were outsiders prevented from reaping what
they did not sow? Advertising and branding might also provide
informative signals about quality to consumers concerned about
purchasing spoilt or dry and pulpy fruit. Sackman's treatment leaves
these issues largely unexplored. Although focused on Palestine,
Karlinsky's work does a far better job discussing the challenges of
running a cartel. Sackman's book is also silent on tariff policy and
global trade, providing no indication of the role of protectionism in
building California's _Orange Empire_. Finally and most
unfortunately, the book's last chapter devotes just a few pages to
the _Empire's_ fall, to its disappearance from Southern California in
the post-War period as a result of suburbanization, smog, and the
open land of the San Joaquin Valley. That is a story bearing a fresh
telling.
Note:
1. Frank Adams, "Agriculture in Palestine," _California Countryman_
(Jan. 1928), p. 21.
Paul Rhode is the author (with Jos=E9 Morilla Critz and Alan L.
Olmstead) of "'Horn of Plenty': The Globalization of Mediterranean
Horticulture and the Economic Development of Southern Europe,
1880-1930," _Journal of Economic History_ (1999). Beginning in
January 2007, he will join the Department of Economics at the
University of Arizona.
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