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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 June 2016
In 1893 Southern California's orange growers decided to incorporate as the marketing cooperative we now know as Sunkist. Like McCormick or Morgan, growers sought profit through organization and consolidation, but their story is not as straightforward as much historiography would suggest. Growers worried that incorporation would stifle the individual even as they saw their own incorporation as the best way to save their own businesses. They condemned fruit agents' manipulations of fruit markets while calling for their own rigorous control of the citrus market. They debated, in other words, just what incorporation meant for men and women like themselves while they themselves helped incorporate America. California's orange growers urge us to reconsider much current work on the history of capitalism, which concentrates on abstract systems and financial structures. Incorporation, the growers remind us, was also a messy and uneven local project, a response to their fears and aspirations.
1 For comments and suggestions, many thanks to Peter Blodgett, Matthew Guterl, Klaus Hansen, Noam Maggor, Jeffrey McNairn, Steven Stoll, and Christopher Warley.
2 Ledger book for 1899–1900 season, Records of the Cucamonga Citrus Fruit Growers Association (hereafter CCFGA), Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, CA (hereafter HEH).
3 It is possible that this citrus grower was the same Ira More who moved to California from Minnesota in 1875 and became principal of the State Normal School at Los Angeles in 1883. Though this More retired to Cucamonga in 1893, he apparently only lived there for four years before he died, which makes it unlikely that he would show up on the 1900 records of the CCFGA. Perhaps his death was misdated or perhaps the CCFGA Ira More is a different More altogether. I have been unable to find census data for an Ira More from the 1900 census. On the educator Ira More, see The Los Angeles State Normal School: A Quarter Centennial History, 1882–1907 (n.p.: n.d.), 12; An Illustrated History of Los Angeles County, California (Chicago: Lewis Publishing Company, 1889), 281–82.
4 Many fine works have relied on this narrative sequence. See, for instance, Alfred Dupont Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977); David Montgomery, Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982); William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991).
5 On the history of agricultural cooperatives in the United States, see Erdman, H. E. “The Development and Significance of California Cooperatives, 1900–1915,” Agricultural History 32 (July 1958): 179–84Google Scholar; Erdman, H. E., “the Commodity Cooperative Association: Its Strength and Weakness,” Journal of Farm Economics 6 (Jan. 1924): 106–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Joseph G. Knapp, The Rise of American Cooperative Enterprise: 1620–1920 (Danville, IL: The Interstate Printers & Publishers, Inc., 1969); Victoria Saker Woeste, The Farmer's Benevolent Trust: Law and Agricultural Cooperation in Industrial America, 1865–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
6 Sewell, William, “A Strange Career: The Historical Study of Economic Life,” History and Theory 49 (Dec. 2010): 146–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar, especially 162–66; Sven Beckert, “History of American Capitalism” in Eric Foner and Lisa McGirr, eds., American History Now (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011), 314–35.
7 Walter Johnson's Soul by Soul was an early example of this combination, though less insistent than his later River of Dark Dreams. Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); and River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). See also Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014).
8 The emphasis on a temporally and geographically far-reaching system owes more to Karl Polanyi than to Karl Marx. It comes in particular from Polanyi's call to understand the enduring “trauma” of living in a society that had become “submerged in the economic system” rather than one in which “man's economy” was “submerged in his social relations.” Polanyi, Karl, “Our Obsolete Market Economy: Civilization Must Find a New Thought Pattern,” Commentary 3 (1947): 110 Google Scholar, 112 and quoted in Zakim and Kornblith, “An American Revolutionary Tradition,” 4. The details of the description change over time, “contests over rival models of capitalist enterprise” periodically erupt, but the basic conditions of the capitalist structure remain the same. Sklansky, Jeffrey, “The Elusive Sovereign: New Intellectual and Social Histories of Capitalism,” Modern Intellectual History 9 (Apr. 2012): 37 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9 A number of recent articles on the history of capitalism have pointed out the field's avoidance of deterministic narratives such as those implied in terms like “Gilded Age and Progressive Era” or in transition questions more generally. See, for instance, Michael Zakim and Gary J. Kornblith, eds., Capitalism Takes Command: The Social Transformation of Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Lipartito, Kenneth, “Connecting the Cultural and the Material in Business History,” Enterprise & Society 14 (Dec. 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sklansky, Jeffrey, “Labor, Money and the Financial Turn in the History of Capitalism,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 11 (Winter 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Radical History Review 118 (Winter 2014), an issue devoted to “The Fictions of Finance,” especially Aaron Carico and Dana Orenstein, “Editors' Introduction: The Fictions of Finance,” 3–13.
10 Michael Zakim and Gary J. Kornblith, “An American Revolutionary Tradition” in Zakim and Kornblith, eds., Capitalism Takes Command, 2; Garrett, Matthew, “History with a Capital H,” Radical History Review 118 (Winter 2014): 198 Google Scholar. For a dazzling example of this kind of financial history in action, see Jonathan Levy, Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).
11 Brian P. Luskey and Wendy A. Woloson, eds., Capitalism by Gaslight: Illuminating the Economy of Nineteenth-Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 4.
12 See, for instance, Thomas Augst, The Clerk's Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Michael Zakim, Ready-Made Democracy: A History of Men's Dress in the American Republic, 1760–1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Wendy Woloson, In Hock: Pawning from American Independence through the Great Depression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Brian Luskey, On the Make: Clerks and the Quest for Capital in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: NYU Press, 2010).
13 Merlin Stonehouse, John Wesley North and the Reform Frontier (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1965), 205–32; Tom Patterson, A Colony for California: Riverside's First Hundred Years (Riverside, CA: Press-Enterprise Company, 1971), 21–62.
14 John Wesley North to Ann Loomis North, May 26, 1870; John Wesley North to Ann Loomis North, May 29, 1870; John Wesley North to May North, May 26, 1870, John Wesley North Papers, Box 21, HEH.
15 “Riverside, Looking East from Rubidoux Mts.,” unnumbered plate in Souvenir of Riverside: Home of the Orange (Columbus, OH: Ward Brothers, 1887). By 1890, over a million orange trees had been planted in Southern California. By 1910, there were over 6 million orange trees. Richard Walker, Conquest of Bread: 150 Years of Agribusiness in California (New York: The New Press, 2004), 44, 32.
16 Promoters were often quite frank in telling would-be colonists that some up-front capital would be needed, though they also assured prospective settlers of certain returns on any initial investment. See, for instance, “Description of Redlands, Situated in the Fines Part of the celebrated San Bernardino Valley, San Bernardino County, California,” San Francisco, Pacific Rural Press, 1882), 19–20. For more on early colonizers, see Steven Stoll, Fruits of Natural Advantage: Making the Industrial Countryside in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); David Vaught, Cultivating California: Growers, Specialty Crops, and Labor, 1875–1920 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); Douglas Sackman, Orange Empire: California and the Fruits of Eden (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
17 Redlands Orange Grove and Water Company, “Some facts relating to Orange Culture in Southern California,” (Redlands, CA: Citrograph Steam Printing Office, 1889), 14; S. S. Southworth, California for Fruit-Growers and Consumptives. Health, Profits and Drawbacks. How Californians Make a Profit of $150 per Acre (n.p.: Sacramento, CA: 1883), 67.
18 Biennial Report of the State Board of Horticulture of the State of California for 1885 and 1886 (Sacramento, CA: P.L. Shoaff, State Printer, 1887), 92. Livermore was an early proponent of cooperation. Many in his audience were not.
19 Stoll, 32–62. By proprietary businessman, I mean the central figure of proprietary competitive capitalism as Martin Sklar defines the term: “capitalist property and market relations in which the dominant type of enterprise was headed by an owner-manager (or owner-managers), or a direct agent there of, and in which such enterprise was a price-taker rather than a price maker, price being determined by the conditions of supply and demand beyond the control of the enterprise short of anticompetitive inter-firm collusion.” Martin J. Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism: The Market, the Law, and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 4n1. For a more vivid description of proprietary businessmen in action, see Luskey, Brian, “Jumping Counters in White Collars: Manliness, Respectability, and Work in the Antebellum City,” Journal of the Early Republic 26 (Summer 2006): 173–219 CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Phillip Scranton, Proprietary Capitalism: The Textile Manufacturer of Philadelphia 1800–1885 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
20 Navel oranges, the primary citrus crop of Southern California, arrived in Riverside in 1873. By the 1880s, Riverside and its sister colonies were lush gardens, with over a million citrus trees and a crop worth around $2.2 million. California orange growers thoroughly dominated the cultivation of the popular navel. Florida navel trees were “shy bearers” and offered no significant competition. N. M. G. Prange, Citrus Culture for Profit, 2nd ed. (np: William & Toomer Fertilizer Co, 1913), 12.
21 Norman, Emmett B., “Early Citrus Industry: Picking, Packing, and Marketing, 1938, October,” 24, typewritten manuscript, HEH; Ontario Observer (Ontario, CA), “Ontario Fruit Exchange. Its Simple System and What it is Here For,” Jan. 11, 1896; Elmer Wallace Holmes, History of Riverside County (Los Angeles: Historic Record Company, 1912), 121.
22 O. H. Cougar to James DeBarth Shorb, Oct. 6 1885, Box 31, Folder 22, Papers of James DeBarth Shorb, HEH. In the 1880s, some growers banded together in the Orange Growers Protective Union hoping to mitigate the worst aspects of the current distribution system, but too little control over shipping and selling and too little accord among Union members doomed the experiment.
23 Naomi R. Lamoreaux, The Great Merger Movement in American Business, 1895–1904 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
24 Secretary's Report, 1901–2, Box 1, San Antonio Fruit Exchange Records, 1893–1947 (hereafter SAFE), HEH.
25 “Chauncey M. Depew,” Pacific Rural Press, Apr. 8, 1893.
26 Chamblin soon helped organized 10 additional local associations and brought them together under the umbrella of the Riverside Fruit Exchange. Similar efforts took place near Claremont at about the same time.
27 SFGE was formally incorporated in 1895 under California laws governing benevolent and other corporations “for purposes other than profit.” Rahno Mabel MacCurdy, The History of the California Fruit Growers Exchange (Los Angeles: n.p., 1925), 16; W. I. Brobeck and R. M. Sims, The Corporation Laws of California (San Francisco: Bancroft-Whitney Co., 1904), 428–43.
28 Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 11, 104–33, 4.
29 David Vaught argues that the later cooperatives of raisin, hops, and grape growers did combine pursuit of profit with commitment to virtuous small communities, but early orange growers spent their time focused on the problems of commission men, not the quest for community. David Vaught, Cultivating California: Growers, Specialty Crops, and Labor, 1875–1920 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). While marketing cooperatives were focused on increasing profits, those profits went to the growers after the cooperatives took out expenses and future improvement (voted on by members in most cases). The cooperatives as organizations made no profit themselves.
30 Report of the Sixth Annual State Convention [of Fruit Growers, 1886] in Biennial Report of the State Board of Horticulture of the State of California for 1885 and 1886 (Sacramento: State Printing, 1887), 308.
31 Newspaper clipping, no title, no source, no date, Notebook 1, Box 3 Records of the Pasadena Orange Growers' Association (hereafter POGA), HEH.
32 “How Fruit Growers Get Left Out,” Citrograph, Aug. 5, 1893.
33 Clipping, “From the Pasadena Star,” no date, no title, Notebook 1, Box 3, POGA, HEH. (The clipping cites the “Pasadena Fruit Growers Association” instead of the Pasadena Orange Growers Association.)
34 “Consigned His Fruit,” Citrograph, Apr. 8, 1893. Mr. Kingsley, the consigning grower of the title, lost his money because he “expected to be smarter than his neighbors.” The Citrograph offered “no sympathy at all.”
35 Most workers would have strongly disagreed with this definition of “capitalist,” but the growers did not consult them.
36 The cases involved the Diamond Match Trust, Standard Oil Trust, Sugar Trust and the Whiskey Trust. Martin J. Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism: The Market, the Law, and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 98–99. Though the attention these cases received “was disproportionate to their important in the development of restraint of trade jurisprudence,” these cases solidified the Trust Question in the public mind (98).
37 Hearings before the Industrial Commission on the Subject of Trusts and Industrial Combinations (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1899), 26.
38 “Co-operation Among Beekeepers,” California Cultivator (Los Angeles), Jan. 1898.
39 “Nothing for the Grower,” Citrograph, Dec. 15, 1894.
40 Woeste, The Farmer's Benevolent Trust.
41 “Address of the Board of Directors of the Riverside Fruit Exchange,” Citrograph, May 20, 1893.
42 Secretary's Report, 1901-02, Box 1, SAFE, HEH. See also J. W. Jeffrey, “Not a Trust,” California Cultivator, July 6, 1900 and “It Is Not A Trust,” California Cultivator, Oct.5, 1900.
43 Hearings before the Industrial Commission, 7–8, 135, 181.
44 J.W. Jeffrey's editorials for the California Cultivator were filled with pleas for growers to see the light and join the exchange. See, for instance, “Contrasts are Painful,” June 8, 1900; “Standing Together,” June 15, 1900; “Combinations Unpopular,” Jan. 25, 1901; “Controversial Co-operation,” Feb. 15, 1901; “What Was It Begun For,” May 21, 1901 all in California Cultivator. See also excerpts from the California Fruit Grower, Jan. 31, 1891, carton 12, H. E. Erdman Papers Relating to Agricultural Cooperatives, BANC MSS 74/161, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; “About Redlands,” California Citrograph, Dec. 16, 1893; “Independent Associations,” Los Angeles Herald, June 27, 1897.
45 Copy of typescript of Secretary's Report for 1896–97, Office of San Antonio Fruit Exchange Pomona, Sept. 1, 1897, Box 1, SAFE, HEH. See also J.A. Beatie to Offices of Ontario-Cucamonga Fruit Exchange, Dec. 8, 1899, Letterbook 1898–1901, CCFGA, HEH.
46 J.A. Beattie to C.T. Brown, Feb. 28, 1900, Letterbook 1898–1901, CCFGA, HEH.
47 Norman, 34.
48 “Plan for Marketing Riverside Oranges,” clipping dated May 13, 1893, Notebook 1, Box 3, POGA, HEH.
49 “Orange Growers Organize,” California Cultivator, October 1893; J.W. Jeffreys, “From a Business Standpoint: Individualism vs. Co-operation,” California Cultivator, Jan. 15, 1904.
50 Secretary's Report for 1896–97, Pomona Sept. 1, 1897, Box 1, SAFE, HEH.
51 Office of Ontario-Cucamonga Fruit Exchange, “Some facts and figures regarding the season's business for the year 1899–1900,” [North Ontario? Calif., 1900], 1.
52 H. Vincent Moses has argued that the CFGE under the leadership of G. Harold Powell wholeheartedly embraced corporate managerial capitalism in the early twentieth century. I would suggest that any late nineteenth-century moves toward corporate liberalism as Martin J. Sklar has defined it or toward Chandler's managerial revolution was far from straightforward and reflected growers' grappling with questions about incorporation, individualism, and laissez-faire. Moses, Vincent, “G. Harold Powell and the Corporate Consolidation of the Modern Citrus Enterprise, 1904–1922,” Business History Review 69 (Summer 1995): 119–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
53 “How Fruit Growers Get Left Out,” Citrograph, Aug. 5, 1893. The Citrograph was uninterested in the profits of those who did the actual harpooning or fruit picking, it should be noted.
54 “Annual Report, 1900–1901,” dated Sept. 1, 1901, Box 1, SAFE, HEH.
55 “Address. Of the Board of Directors of the Riverside Fruit Exchange,” Citrograph, May 20, 1893; “From the Pasadena Star,” clipping, no source, no date, Notebook 1, POGA, HEH.
56 Daniel Rodgers, The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 11–14; Shultz, 87–89.
57 The search for economies of scale, technological innovation, and cheaper labor that drove manufacturing in the late nineteenth century meant nothing to the orchardist; efficient distribution, good advertising, and growing markets meant everything.
58 “Trauma” is Alan Trachtenberg's word. The Gilded Age, he argues, was “in many ways a period of trauma, of change so swift and thorough that many Americans seemed unable to fathom the extent of the upheaval.”