Imperial (58 page)

But the Colorado River Land Company remained eternally undercapitalized. Chandler had hoped to borrow sufficient capital to build railways, cotton gins and suchlike refiners and carriers of agricultural wealth. Then his tenants could make money, the shareholders would do the same, the capital loans might finally be repaid, more capital could be borrowed; and presently the lands would be subdivided and sold—a
model community,
Chandler called it, a new southern California! But in 1920, he and his associates had to bail out two Calexico banks owned by one of their dependent syndicates. The Colorado River Land Company never paid any dividends at all, although in 1923 and 1924 it did send some modest disbursements to reimburse stockholders what they had originally laid out, without interest. In 1928, thirst for finance capital required it to give up majority control of the Mexicali Valley’s fledgling cottonseed industry. In 1930, the Colorado River Land Company was obliged to rescue the Bank of Mexicali . . .

Meanwhile, various Mexican administrations expected Chandler to develop the valley at his own expense; when the time came, they would wrest it from him. Throughout the 1920s, they played cat-and-mouse, intermittently threatening to undo his titles unless he built more railroads, canals, etcetera.

Squeezed on two fronts, Harry Chandler, like Wilber Clark, failed to strike it rich in his Imperial gamble. Poor man!

In 1935 one of Los Angeles’s glorifiers gives Chandler this epitaph:
It was his inspiration that turned the Imperial Valley from a desert into the truck garden of America.

Another epitaph, from 1988:
The syndicate’s members viewed the entire Colorado River delta—both Imperial Valley and Mexicali Valley—as part of the greater Los Angeles commercial nexus . . .

The best tribute of all dates from 1936, when the Secretary-General of the Union of Peasant Day Laborers of Alamo Mocho cries out that in Mexicali
there is no law nor revolutionary principles . . . There is nothing more than Mr. Chandler, and he is the owner of everything.

Chapter 50

PRACTICALLY SELF-SUPPORTING IN THREE YEARS (1865-2004)

“But this is tremendous!” I cried. “This is Imperial! I haven’t been dreaming of this sort of thing!”

—H. G. Wells, 1901

T
he individual holdings of American Imperial, I’ve said, enlarged themselves beyond the statutory limits of the 1902 Reclamation Act. How much and when? Oh, our dream of the self-sufficient little homestead! Isn’t that the American dream? I have a book called
Remembering the Family Farm: 150 Years of American Prints.
Confessing the sentimentality of some images, the preface remarks:
There is no escaping the stereotype of an ideal agrarian world,
which is to say a realm
where there is harmony and balance between humankind and nature . . . and labor leads to simple but ample rewards, and where the family is central to social fabric.
I look down into John Steuart Curry’s “Valley of the Wisconsin,” which was lithographed almost at midcentury, when Mexican and American Imperial had both come into their glory; and I see Eden on a meadow that slopes ever so gently toward a horizon of fields and trees, the clean little two-storey farmhouse beside its gambrel-roofed barn reminding me of my boyhood years in New Hampshire nearly half a century ago; I remember snowy farmhouses that were warm inside, and a little girl who took me home from school with her; because I never grew up in such a place, I remember her family’s home on its hill of snow as being better than it probably was;
there is no escaping the stereotype of an ideal agrarian world.
What were her chores like? That I never had to learn.

In the middle of the nineteeth century, John Muir was put to work by his father, building up a family farm in Wisconsin.
Many of our old neighbors toiled and sweated and grubbed themselves into their graves years before their natural dying days . . . I was put to the plough at the age of twelve, when my head reached but little above the handles . . .We were all made slaves through the vice of over-industry.
No wonder that he spent the rest of his life wandering through and proselytizing for wilderness!

Meanwhile, in an undated stock photo which strangely resembles Nazi homeland propaganda, two little white boys, one of them blond, the other merely fairhaired, facing each other, the one we can see smiling; they’re each holding a shock of flax; and in this lush grassy California field the pale shocks go marching in wide rows back to the row of trees. And down in Imperial, Wilber Clark and
his wife, Elizabeth F.,
have
settled
happily ever after
on the now greatly improved Wilfrieda Ranch.

“WHAT THE HELL CAN I DO WITH TEN ACRES?”

Once upon a time, Imperial, also known as the BEST FARMING LANDS in the WORLD, stretched all the way to Illinois, whose eponymous Central Railroad Company offered nine hundred thousand acres for sale.
The rapid development of Illinois, its steady increase in population, and its capacity to produce cheap food, are matters for wonder and admiration.
In 1864, this state yields
more than one-fourth of the corn—
Indian corn, that is—
more than one-fifth of the wheat, and almost one-seventh of the oats produced in all the United States.
So buy your forty- or eighty-acre parcels,
or in larger tracts, as may be required by the capitalist or stock raiser,
at nine to fifteen dollars per acre!
The attention of persons, whose limited means forbid the purchase of a homestead in the older States, is particularly invited to these lands.

Turning to Schedule Two of the 1880 California census, namely to “Productions of Agriculture in Los Angeles, in the County of Los Angeles, State of California,” I find mostly under fifty, and often fewer than ten acres per farm. To be sure, Andrew Smith owns forty-five improved acres and Andrew Briswalter two hundred; over in Supervisor’s District Four, Enumeration District Twenty-seven N, a certain Patrick Kooch possesses five hundred acres! But he’s far from average.

In 1901 the first President Roosevelt turned his attention to Arid America and said:
The object of the Government is to dispose of this land to settlers who will build homes on it.
Hence the Reclamation Act of 1902, which allowed a single homesteader up to a hundred and sixty acres—three hundred and twenty for a married couple. What pioneer would need more than that?

In 1917, a glowing tract entitled
Reclaiming the Arid West
explained why it was that American Imperial’s parades, once commenced, would never die away:
The Reclamation Act forbade the delivery of water on any government project to privately owned lands to a greater extent than 160 acres. Thus an effort was made to take it out of the power of capitalists and speculators in land to take selfish advantage of the beneficent work of a government of democracy . . .

That very same year, an Imperialite advises that
experienced men with small means
might be able to get by subsistence farming on ten or fifteen acres, although he doesn’t make it sound easy. Judge Farr (who by the way owns a hundred sixty acres in Mesquite Lake, a hundred seventy-five more near Imperial and eighty near Calexico) insists that
Imperial County was settled in a large part by those who did not have a large amount of capital.
You remember his praise of Wilber Clark’s agricultural experiments:
Some fifty varieties of grapes have been tried out and a profitable express business has been worked up on the same.
How many acres might have been involved? A mere hundred and seventy-one.
Of great interest to Mr. Clark is the six-acre date orchard . . .

But half a century after the publication of Farr’s history, we overhear local grape growers testifying at a hearing in Coachella. The industry is getting “consolidated”; small-timers disappear left and right. In light of these progressive developments, somebody proposes an amendment to define a grower
as anyone who grows or leases ten acres or more,
to which a certain Mr. Reider replies: What the hell can I do with ten acres?

“A PICTURE FROM THE MIDWEST”

In 2004, portly old Richard Brogan, whose paid reminiscences will figure from time to time in this book because his ongoing career as an informant to private investigators gave him interesting knowledge (as he beautifully put it:
That’s what I do for a living, is personalities. Without threatening, without exposing my motives
), sipped at his Coke in the Burgers and Beer Restaurant in Calexico and said: I’ve worked wheat, alfalfa, sudan, barley, cotton, lettuce. I’ve worked as a laborer, as a tractor operator; I’ve worked insecticide; I’ve worked for fertilizer companies; I’ve bought and sold commodities. I have farmed my own ground and I have had my custom harvesting equipment, both cotton and alfalfa. And as a deputy sheriff here and in Yuma County, I had a quasi-official capacity to represent enforcement issues in that capacity. It’s my life. I know enough to know that without money you can’t do anything. This is a complex financial thing. If I had a couple million dollars I don’t know why you’d put it in here in Imperial. Because the returns are small and the potential loss is great every day. I myself dreamed that I could farm, and I tried, and I failed.

I said nothing, waiting, and Richard Brogan said: I kinda think that the family farm is a picture from the Midwest. We work in the corporate farming here. The water costs are the first thing, the land costs are the second. We have an ideal growing climate, and we have an ideal growing climate for bugs, for weeds. That means more money you’ve got to put in. So if your land starts out high, and your water is expensive, well. The date trees are the only crop that looks like you could win with, but even they, you can’t grow anything without water. And that means money. We have two seasons for melons. We have a summer melon and a fall melon. Not watermelons but cantaloupes. There are times when I know we’ve been the world supplier of melons. And that means money. That means acreage. The family farm picture is just a few hundred acres and a family on the premises. That’s not realistic.

Was it ever?

I believe it probably was.

When did it change?

When lettuce became big here. When Bud Antle started making a million dollars off lettuce in a hundred days.
⁹⁰
The only people equivalent to that are the oil people. If you can make a million dollars off eighty acres in between thirty and ninety days, the potential is unbelievable. But the flip side of it, the threat, is you can lose a million pretty fast.

Well, Richard, what’s the minimum one needs now?

I don’t think that a small operator can farm less than seven hundred or a thousand acres.
⁹¹
A diversification of crops is also needed.

Why did the Roosevelt administration insist on that hundred-and-sixty-acre limitation?

I think they picked a figure and they had to have a start. Communication wasn’t what it was. You look at our subsidized agriculture system since Roosevelt, our college system. We got intelligent people teaching this stuff now. It is a science. So whatever applied then, my quick response is, they didn’t have a fax machine. You have to have a practical approach to that, and a hundred and sixty acres probably isn’t enough to justify buying a hundred-thousand-dollar tractor. You have to understand: A lot of people are farming on leased ground! Our sprinkler systems, we’ve devised a way to sprinkle an even inch and we can control that. That’s a natural remedy to alkali. If you just run water through canals, that deposits alkali. If you sprinkle ’em, that draws down the alkali. A guy with a hundred acres of ground couldn’t afford one of these elaborate sprinkler systems. We need to rewrite the limitation law.

PAUL TAYLOR’S COMPLAINT

In 1967, Paul S. Taylor, consulting economist to the Social Security Board, Interior Department, etcetera, formerly the husband of the great documentary photographer Dorothea Lange (with whom he travelled through the Imperial Valley during the Depression years), and now an ancient professor emeritus, steps forward at a public hearing to say:
The Reclamation Law provides for tremendous subsidies for water development, which . . . now runs perhaps at a thousand dollars per acre. In that law is a provision known as the 160-acre law. The purpose of that law is to insure that water does not go to the pre-existing property owner for a tract of larger than 160 acres. It’s to control speculation. It’s to control monopoly. It’s to diffuse benefits widely, to see that they reach all elements of the population.

Taylor then raises the uncomfortable subject of nine hundred thousand California acres either irrigated or about to be irrigated—larger, he remarks, than the state of Rhode Island—which violate the hundred-and-sixty-acre limitation. He urges that the limitation be modernized and continued.

Is there any other public comment? inquires the chairman—for we have a democracy, ladies and gentlemen; even Paul S. Taylor can say what he wants! Well,
is
there any other comment? There is none. America agrees with Richard Brogan.

“WE HAD EVERYTHING”

And does Mexico agree?

In 2004, in Colonia Sieto de Cierro Prieto, not far past the glass factory a few kilometers south of Mexicali, there lived a lady named Teresa García.

Originally we were eleven brothers and sisters, she said, but four have sold their parcels to people from other states. We were given ten hectares each.
⁹²
And the family of my brother’s wife has bought some land . . .