How California Birthed the Modern Right Wing

from In These Times:


How California Birthed the Modern Right Wing
Many of 20th-century conservatism’s tricks were honed in 1930s agribusiness’s fight against farmworkers

BY CHRIS LEHMANN


Conservative rule in America is by now so deep-seated that a veritable cottage industry has sprung up to explain its origins. By varying accounts, the modern Right’s resurgence has its roots in populist religious revivals, Cold War paranoia, racial scapegoating and the ongoing cultural backlash against the New Left. Taken together, they raise the question: What served as the mainspring force?

Kathryn S. Olmsted, a UC-Davis historian, furnishes an arresting, if partial, answer in Right Out of California: The 1930s and the Big Business Roots of Modern Conservatism. In order to take hold, the American Right had to make the liberal bulwarks of modern American prosperity seem irredeemably creaky, corrupt and sinister. Olmsted focuses on the convergence of the Right’s defining traits—a small-government ideology of economic individualism, a mediagenic narrative of business victimology and a healthy dose of anti-collectivist paranoia—as they were mobilized at the height of the New Deal to battle an enemy that barely registered on the radar of American public opinion at the time: the scattered, multiracial, and grossly undercompensated farmworkers of the Golden State.

How this defining conflict came to pass is itself an instructive story in the limits of New Deal liberalism. Migrant farmworkers, who had seen their wages stagnate well before the Depression, seized upon the Roosevelt administration’s support for collective bargaining to start organizing. But there was just one problem: Thanks to deals cut in Congress with conservative Southern Democrats, farmworkers were exempt from federal collective-bargaining protections (and still are). Nonetheless, desperate Californian agricultural laborers picked up on the robust pro-union mood of New Deal America and took matters into their own hands. As a 1933 wildcat strike among California berry pickers picked up momentum throughout the state’s rich agricultural interior, one Department of Labor bureaucrat wrote to another: “They are union mad, and they have been led to believe that the government upholds them in their stand.”

The group doing much of the leading was the Communist-run Cannery and Agricultural Workers’ Industrial Union (CAWIU). In 1934, the union coordinated a strike for better wages in the cotton fields of the San Joaquin Valley. ..........(more)

http://inthesetimes.com/article/18403/the-rights-roots-in-1930s-farmworker-unionbusting-and-redbaiting