Imperial (57 page)

ANOTHER PRAYER TO THE MINISTRY OF CAPITAL

Harry Chandler
versus
Wilber Clark, subsistence homesteader
versus
landed capitalist, that is certainly one divide which the history of Imperial leads us to meditate on. Another dichotomy remains to be considered: Harry Chandler
versus
Jefferson Worth.

Did the latter ever exist? We remember that he was modeled on W. F. Holt.
He works too hard to have time to sit around the corner store stove and whittle with the rest of the fellows, so when they get out to work they find the Holt fields are all plowed . . . Lots of people don’t like Holt; lots do.

If we consider
The Winning of Barbara Worth
not as “literature,” from which standpoint it obviously falls as far short as some Imperial drainage ditch gasping out its last trickle into the sand, but as the capitalist equivalent of socialist realism, which was never “realistic” at all but in fact deployed stereotypes and happy endings to show everybody how life ought to be, then this novel becomes as revealing as any manifesto. I have always believed that in spite of the dreariness, inefficiency, menace and sheer murderousness with which it has been most often practiced, socialism
as an idea
remains superior to capitalism, which is really a philosphy of selfishness. Marx wrote:
From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
To me this is as sublime as anything in the Gospels; and to envision a system under which we actually live for each other and a better world is wonderful for me. Hence I cannot help but sympathize with
ejiditarios.
By contrast, the social order in which American Imperial and I now happen to find ourselves consists of freedom, selfish aloofness and disinterest in our neighbors, greed, corporate in place of “proletarian” ugliness, hierarchy, jingoistic commercialism. Who could justify all that better than a writer of “capitalist realism”? The works of Ayn Rand come to mind, exemplified by her
Virtue of Selfishness.
As for Harold Bell Wright, he professed, as had William Smythe in his
Conquest of Arid America,
that the irrigation of Imperial was actually undertaken for some higher good:

The methods of The King’s Basin Land and Irrigation Company . . . were the methods of capital, impersonal, inhuman, the methods of a force governed by laws as fixed as the laws of nature, neither cruel nor kind . . . The methods of Jefferson Worth were the methods of a man laboring with his brother men, sharing their hardships, sharing their returns; a man using money as a workman uses his tools . . . It was inevitable that the Company and Jefferson Worth should war.

James Greenfield served Capital; Jefferson Worth sought to make Capital serve the race.

As you might have guessed, I am skeptical that the methods of Jefferson Worth ever existed. We find Mr. Holt hiring a special train to bring Angeleno investors to the Imperial Valley; the Southern Pacific Railroad commissioned him to reconnoiter Mexican Imperial for precisely the sort of irrigation projects soon to be undertaken by Harry Chandler—who for his own part would argue in due course that his methods were good for Mexico. His justifications were as milk-white as the Salton Sea sometimes appears to be at twilight. To
agraristas
of the 1930s, his enterprise would be the
horrible company that hoarded the land.

FRIENDS OF JEFFERSON WORTH

And now to our tale, whose plot might be summed up as follows:
THE DESERT DISAPPEARS.

You may remember that Wilber Clark’s arrival in Imperial was early enough, and hence newsworthy enough, to be reported by a
Los Angeles Times
correspondent. The year before that, a
Times
editor named J. W. Jeffrey sent back such glowing accounts of Imperial’s prospects that Harry Chandler and four colleagues paid a visit and filed land claims. Indeed, such was his eagerness that Chandler apparently became the third person to file a claim on Imperial Valley Lands.

I now list some of the members of his syndicate.

General Harrison Gray Otis, who then owned the
Los Angeles Times,
was Chandler’s father-in-law. (After he died, the syndicate would propose to rename its still hypothetical railroad terminus at Port Isabel, Sonora, Port Otis. For isn’t to name Imperial to possess her?) At the time of their purchase from Andrade, Chandler was the
Times’
business manager. He would inherit the entire enterprise. As for C. E. Richardson, Albert McFarland and Frank X. Pfaffinger; they all worked for the
Times
in more middling capacities. The Title Insurance and Trust Company got represented by Messieurs Allen, Clark and Brant; the Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad Company, a subsidiary of the Southern Pacific, found occasion to send in its own tentacle; First National Bank and Merchants Bank both had their men in, and although I’ll end here, the truth is that I’m not done. For instance, I never mentioned that builder of interurban railways, Moses H. Sherman. Why then should I personalize the Colorado River Land Company as Harry Chandler? Because for most of its long tenure in the Mexicali Valley, he owned eighty-five percent of the stock.

Here is an epitaph for all those boomers, empire-builders and union-haters:
There is no doubt that they sought wealth and power, but they also viewed themselves as performing a civic duty
⁸⁷
by helping to build the support facilities of an expanding Los Angeles . . .
In other words,
Jefferson Worth sought to make Capital serve the race.

HIGH FINANCE AND A LOW CANAL

In his hypocritically threadbare fictionalization (he’s such a pious Imperialist that he never would have blasphemed against the Ministry of Capital, so why not name names and be done with it?), Otis B. Tout informs us that
Henry Auster, head of a syndicate of wealthy men, had been farsighted enough
(would a Marxist put it quite this way?)
to lend quite a sizable sum of money to the careless scion of an ancient Castilian family some years before. The family held a grant of land of more than half a million acres in Mexico.
This Henry Auster expressed the Los Angeles Idea very well and called in his debt when the time was right. In Mr. Tout’s novel, the Mexican voluptuary is happy enough to shrug off his half-million arid acres in exchange for forgiveness of the debt and enough money to keep him in cigarettes and gambling-chips; money is here; money will always be here. Later he reads in the newspaper that the Auster Syndicate is irrigating half a million acres of Mexican Imperial. How does he feel then? That’s not in the story.

But in his official history of the Imperial Valley, Mr. Tout is content with the more accurate observation that the land
was purchased outright from the Mexican government.

The Mexican government
originally consisted of two millionaires: Guillermo Andrade,on whose eponymous mesa (they now call it simply
la mesa
) I generally find campesinos harvesting green onions; and Thomas Blythe, the founder of Blythe. What had happened was that when Andrade’s first attempt at a syndicate failed, Blythe stepped in. Thanks to Blythe’s money, Andrade’s connections, and of course the eternal beneficence of that upstanding Minister of Capital, President Díaz, the partners
now held title to virtually the entire Mexican portion of the delta . . .

When Blythe died in 1883, and thirty court cases eventually decided against both the estranged mistress and the current mistress who’d passed as his niece, the illegitimate daughter won what remained. Through maneuvers of his own, Andrade eventually got most of his Mexican land back, but by so doing he overextended himself. He sold some of his lands to a Petaluma syndicate in 1887-88. Clever Harry Chandler would eventually gain possession of these, too, once the rival syndicate defaulted.

In 1898, the year before the California Development Company suckered George Chaffey into taking on the Imperial Valley’s reclamation-through-irrigation, an entity named the California-Mexico Land and Cattle Company bought from Andrade 832,337 more acres of the Mexicali Valley, which is to say nearly ninety percent of it—an area larger than the future Imperial Irrigation District. In due course, this landowner became known as the Colorado River Land Company.
⁸⁸

But first, and we are still in 1898, the California Development Company created a puppet called the Sociedad de Irrigación y Terrenos de la Baja California, S.A., one of whose stockholders happened to be a certain Guillermo Andrade.

Since topographic considerations obliged George Chaffey to dig his Imperial Canal through Mexican territory, Andrade sold the required hundred thousand acres to the Sociedad de Irrigación y Terrenos de la Baja California, S.A.—with the canny proviso that half the water in the canal was his. It was this particular perk (transferable to any subsequent owner of Andrade’s lands) that made the Mexicali Valley particularly attractive to the Chandler Syndicate.

ACCOUNTINGS

In 1901, George Chaffey raised his headgates in Northside.
WATER IS HERE
.

In 1902, two giants were born: the United States Reclamation Service and the Colorado River Land Company. Both of them spent extravagantly for irrigation, and neither one ever turned a profit. About the latter, which was first called the California-Mexico Land and Cattle Company, the
Imperial Valley Press and Farmer
shouts on page one:
LARGEST IRRIGATED RANCH IN THE WORLD
.

Almost anytime I like in 1903, I can open my
Imperial Valley Press and Farmer
and discover an advertisement from the Sociedad de Irrigación y Terrenos de la Baja California, S.A., G. Andrade, Vice-President. In that year, a certain W. H. Holabird, whose name I will often discover in connection with various water matters of Mexican Imperial, takes a ten-day hunting trip across the line with an unnamed party of good fellows, successful Los Angeles businessmen who “do things,” sees deer, meets a Mexican cowboy, shoots ducks, visits Volcano Lake, and concludes that the delta of the Río Colorado is unsurpassably rich! I wonder who those businessmen could have been?

On 23 May 1904, Guillermo Andrade is the grantor and the Colorado River Land Company the grantee in a transaction recorded in the Imperial County property records. On 13 June 1904, the Colorado River Land Company is the grantee, receiving property from the Sociedad de Irrigación y Terrenos de la Baja California, which happens to be a subsidiary of the Southern Pacific Railroad. Meanwhile, on one side or the other of that irrelevant international line, that Chandler subsidiary the California-Mexico Land and Cattle Company is already accepting delivery of another herd of Texas cattle for fattening.

As a much later book tells the tale,
their plan was simple: to grow cotton with free water and cheap labor and sell it in the United States for top dollar.
The water was not free, although the charge that the Chandler Syndicate did not pay for it has been often repeated. Otis P. Tout’s assertion is far more credible, and just as disconcerting to believers in small scale agrarian democracy:
It may be said that the Chandler interests are the largest cash customer the Imperial Irrigation District has.
⁸⁹
As for the cheap labor and the hoped-for top dollar, that part was accurate enough.

And so by the end of 1904, the Colorado River Land Company has already begun to operate a goodly amount of Mexican acres
from the Colorado River to the Cocopah Mountains, and from the international line to the Gulf of California.
In the Imperial Valley, angry settlers berate the California Development Company for shortchanging them on water they need to irrigate their acres. But here in Mexico, it’s more difficult to make trouble for corporate interests. After all, Porfirio Díaz is still President, and surely will be until doomsday!

By 1907, we hear a sober citizen remarking to a Congressional subcommittee that
the most valuable portion of the valley is on the Mexican side of the line, owned by the Otis-Chandler syndicate.
To what extent that value has been tapped remains in dispute; one historian asserts that in 1908 a hundred and fifty thousand American Imperial acres have already been irrigated as green as dollar bills, while south of the line fewer than seven thousand acres are in cultivation. But the Chandler Syndicate, after all, must simultaneously pursue many other titanic projects; Mexicali wasn’t built in a day.

In 1910 the California-Mexico Land and Cattle Company, which we might as well call the Colorado River Land Company, will comprise
1,100 acres of highly developed ranch land in California and 876,000 acres just across the line in Mexican territory.
In 1918, Judge Farr praises
this model ranch owned by a Los Angeles stock syndicate . . . More stock is produced there than on any other ranch in Southern California . . . Walter Bowker is the manager of this vast tract.

By 1929, the Colorado River Land Company keeps busy four thousand to eight thousand workers per year.

Well, then why did Harry Chandler and his partners fail to achieve what they had dreamed? They certainly turned a profit here and there. In the course of 1904, the Colorado River Land Company made five purchases, thereby ending up with eight hundred and fifty thousand acres of the Mexicali Valley. The land cost them $533,959. In 1910 they sold a thirty-thousand-acre piece of it for eight hundred thousand dollars. More impressive than this, because for several years it was repeated, is that between the end of World War I and the Depression, Harry Chandler’s homestead grew eighteen million dollars’ worth of cotton per annum.