Associated Farmers
Who Are the Associated Farmers?
Richard L. Neuberger
NOT SINCE THE WOBBLIES OF THE I.W.W. ROAMED THE woodlands, has any organization in the Far West stirred such savage antagonisms as the Associated Farmers. Already those antagonisms have had consequences of national significance. Internecine strife has been promoted in old established rural groups. On the Oregon statute books is the most severe anti-labor law ever enacted in America. A widening schism between farm and urban voters imperils the progressive gains which have been won along the Pacific seaboard. Actual violence has occurred in some communities, with vigilantes pitted against labor unions. The malice aroused between classes may not subside for a generation.
Within the past year, organized labor in several states has lost rights gained in half a century of political and economic struggle. The technique for bringing this about has been provided by the Associated Farmers. They have demonstrated that labor excesses and the split in labor's ranks can be made the basis for sufficient public resentment to weaken organized labor. Last November the Associated Farmers, capitalizing on a swing of the political pendulum to the right, put through a law in Oregon which, by practically forbidding strikes and picketing, reduces unions to mere fraternal organizations. This has become the precedent for parallel action elsewhere. Modified versions of the Oregon law have been enacted in Wisconsin, Minnesota and Pennsylvania. Only a governor's veto kept Idaho out of this category, and similar bills have appeared in the legislatures of at least-fifteen other states.
The Associated Farmers are as important as a symbol as they are intrinsically. They represent an attempt to accomplish two purposes: dividing the political allegiance of farm and city voters; and convincing large numbers of people that farmers vociferously demand the control and suppression of labor unions. In many parts of the Far West, "rural" organizations are at work along this line. Some of them maintain intermittent contacts with the Associated Farmers. Others follow the Associated Farmers' methods and means, the most distinctive feature of which is daubing a purely rural camouflage on forays against the trade union movement. California, the periodical of the chamber of commerce of that state, considers the Associated Farmers "the rural manifestation of farmer-employers' efforts to keep their freedom in labor matters." Frequently this alleged defense of freedom results in danger to the liberties of other people. Associated Farmers in the Imperial Valley recently insisted that a regional director of the National Labor Relations Board and Ellis E. Patterson, the lieutenant-governor of California, not be allowed to speak at the county fairgrounds because of their "communistic inclinations."
Although particularly directed at the CIO, the hostility of the Associated Farmers extends to all bona fide labor organizations. Neither the AF of L nor the Railroad Brotherhoods were exempt from the restrictions of the initiative measures which the Associated Farmers pushed in all three Pacific Coast states last autumn. A leader of the Associated Farmers in the state of Washington made no qualifications when he told an NLRB examiner that the methods used against labor organizations may be either "legal or extra-legal." The same individual bragged to a meeting of Associated Farmers, "Just our intention and the formulation (sic) of a pickhandle brigade in Selah put the scare of Christ into organizers out there." On some of the literature of the Associated Farmers appears the slogan: "From Apathy to Action."
The strategy of the Associated Farmers is premised on the fact that with the general public no figure is more popular than the man who grows the nation's food supply. He epitomizes qualities highly held: perseverance, thrift, sedulity, temperance. Cartoonists portray him as a perspiring toiler with a rugged countenance. In a world in crisis the farmer connotes a large proportion of the pleasant phases of life. His home is in the country amidst green fields. The lettuce that decorates salads and the strawberries which pop out of shortcake are raised by him. Seldom is he looked upon as radical like labor or greedy like business. More than any other artisan or worker, the farmer is considered the typical American.
THIS SITUATION THE ASSOCIATED FARMERS HAVE EXPLOITED to full advantage. By using the farmer as an emblem of their policies, they have tried to impress on the people of the West that resentment against labor unions stems straight from the soil. The reasons for this are obvious. Political deference is a corollary of the esteem in which the farmer is held. His voice is listened for in legislative hall and executive mansion. Voters attempt to hear it on election day. It is highly beneficial for any cause to have—or seem to have—a preponderance of rural support. The political potentialities are imaginable if extreme, militant conservatism along the Pacific slope seems to originate not in banks and utility offices and counting houses, but out on the countryside where apples are grown and cattle pastured. The Associated Farmers are the source of that origination. In Oregon, for example, they, rather than industrial and commercial groups, officially and publicly sponsored the bill which has fettered organized labor.
So many western voters have been induced to back bills of this type in the past year or so that liberal as well as labor leaders are thoroughly alarmed. Perhaps President Roosevelt had in mind the Associated Farmers' persistent attacks on labor unions when he chose Labor Day of 1938 to declare, "A small minority is trying to drive a wedge between the farmers on one hand and their relatives and logical partners in the cities on the other." Secretary of Agriculture Wallace has urged farmers not to "allow themselves to be used as cat's-paws in any anti-labor front secretly sponsored by the ultra-reactionary industrial interests." The U.S. wage and hour administrator, Elmer F. Andrews, recently went on the radio to describe the Associated Farmers as "a notorious labor-busting outfit of the West Coast, which is largely financed by the chamber of commerce of California, big public utility interests and employers opposed to organized labor."
And as these words are written, the Senate committee headed by Robert M. La Follette, Jr. has just been allotted $50,000 with which to complete an investigation of denials of civil liberties on the Pacific seaboard. The appropriation was requested by President Roosevelt and advocated by Senators from states where the Associated Farmers have been active. Lewis Schwellenbach of Washington and Sheridan Downey of California introduced the appropriation bill, which had the support of the Republican minority leader, Charles L. McNary of Oregon. The Associated Farmers are expected to be the main object of the probe. A cursory survey last year revealed, according to Marquis W. Childs of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, that "funds provided by the Industrial Association helped to finance the Associated Farmers." Childs claimed the organization was promoting "an anti-union drive on the coast." The Associated Farmers disputed these charges. Now, fortunately, there will be a complete and thorough investigation.
Senator La Follette's committee will discover that although the Associated Farmers have won their major victory to date in Oregon, they had their genesis in California and are a product of that state's complex agricultural economy. Wage earners on the great industrialized farms have long been restless over low wages, seasonality, bad housing. For decades there have been attempts at organization and flare-ups of violence. Perhaps Section 7-a of the National Industrial Recovery Act was the incipient incident of the present movement: it stirred laborers in the field as well as factory to a consciousness of their collective force. In the autumn of 1933 more than 15,000 cotton pickers went on strike in the San Joaquin Valley. A few months later, farm hands and migratory workers were trudging picket lines in the Imperial Valley, many miles to the south. Some of these men and women had been earning less than 75 cents a day. A federal commission found them living in "filth, squalor and an entire absence of sanitation." Farm workers began organizing in other parts of California. Strikes coincided with harvest time.
The employers of farm labor were jittery. In numerous instances the employers were powerful corporate and financial interests; farming is big business in California. And in this big business something new had happened. In a state that produces more than a third of all the fruits and vegetables consumed in the nation, fortunes had been made paying pickers 12 cents an hour. The whole set-up was geared to a peon wage scale. Now people heretofore regarded as virtual serfs had rebelled. Of thirty-seven agricultural strikes which took place in California in 1933, at least twenty-nine resulted in pay increases for the workers. The wage in some localities was boosted to 25 cents for an hour's labor in the orchards.
Other changes were occurring in California. Along the waterfront the longshoremen had formed a strong union. Already their leader had put his name in the headlines, and the state was reading for the first time about Harry Bridges. The abandonment of submarginal farms in the Middle-west also was in the news. Toward the sunset clattered the vanguard of thousands of nomads from the seared and blown Dust Bowl. These people had been ranchers in Oklahoma and Texas and the Dakotas. They could not be kicked around like wandering Mexican pickers who would docilely drink water out of irrigation canals and sleep in tar-paper shanties. They were accustomed to independence. In tourist camps all over the state they bolstered the courage of the agricultural laborers. It was the heyday of the New Deal. Upton Sinclair had started the EPIC campaign which was to make him Democratic nominee for governor. In a Long Beach real estate office, an elderly physician named Townsend talked about pensions of $200 a month.
In this atmosphere the Associated Farmers were incorporated in May of 1934. Groups long absolute in California feared their sovereignty was jeopardized. They got ready to confront the menace on every sector, whether the foe consisted of old people clamoring for pensions, an idealist running for governor or farm labor demanding more pay. "The forces which threaten business stability in California," warned the chamber of commerce, "must be met with concerted, aggressive action if business is to survive." What was needed, said the chamber, was "A United Front for California." The Associated Farmers comprised the rural phase of the mobilization.
AFTER THE SERIES OF AGRICULTURAL STRIKES IN 1933, THE Farm Bureau Federation and the chamber of commerce had recommended a permanent group to conduct "a campaign of education and assistance in the farming areas." Sporadic organization work went on for several months before the Associated Farmers were formally established. Much of this early effort had been concentrated in the Imperial Valley. The chairman at the first meeting of the Associated Farmers was Parker Frisselle of Fresno, a director of the California chamber of commerce. The personnel seemed more distinguished for animosity toward labor unions than for affinity to farmers. In the salient position of executive secretary was no specialist on agriculture, but Guernsey Fraser, an American Legion official conspicuous for condemnation of purported radicals. The Associated Farmers got under way with financial contributions from important utility corporations: the Southern Pacific, Santa Fe and Union Pacific railroads and the Pacific Gas and Electric Company. The welfare of the farmer was discussed, although so far as the policies of the new organization were concerned, that welfare appeared to be exclusively a question of resisting the unionization of farm workers. The reason given for setting up the Associated Farmers was 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 had early opportunities to demonstrate their effectiveness. Strikes continued and the organization fought them grimly. Once in a while the Associated Farmers stayed in the background. More often they moved to the front of the anti-labor procession. They were particularly conspicuous in the great agricultural strike at Salinas in 1936, where a large proportion of the country's lettuce is grown. Local peace officers were advised by prominent Associated Farmers, who took rooms in a downtown hotel. Male residents were mobilized to defend law and order. Numerous Associated Farmers became special deputies. Vigilantes marched against the Central Labor Council. The editor of a conservative newspaper, Paul Smith of the San Francisco Chronicle, went to the scene of the strike and wrote an article called "It Did Happen in Salinas."
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