The King of California: J.G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire
By Mark Arax and Rick Wartzman
PublicAffairs, 558 pages, $30
California. The word brings to mind beaches, Hollywood, Disneyland, even colossal redwoods–but seldom cotton. In fact, in a state where farms are so big and modern that their owners call themselves growers rather than farmers, cotton growers are the biggest of all. And one of them, Jim Boswell, was the biggest grower in the world until his recent retirement. “The King of California” is his biography. It is also the story of the San Joaquin Valley, just over the low coastal mountains north of Los Angeles, where Boswell cotton spreads over 300 square miles.
Journalistic exposes of grower greed are a staple in California. For decades, the spectacle of dirt-poor migrants toiling for San Joaquin Valley land barons has inspired numerous social critics, most famously John Steinbeck in his classic novel “The Grapes of Wrath.” But Mark Arax and Rick Wartzman, reporter and business editor, respectively, at the Los Angeles Times, a Tribune Co. paper, have no truck with Steinbeck or his ilk, an “angry pack of agrarians” who have portrayed big agriculture as “a single-dimension bad guy” without ever interviewing “a single big farmer.” If their mission is to trace the career of California’s most successful farmer and his international “secret empire” of real estate and agriculture, they claim their interests are less reformist than investigative. How, they ask, has the valley become so dominated by such a powerful few? And if its farms are so rich, why are the towns so poor?
For all the authors’ protests, these questions certainly sound like the same ones that “angry pack of agrarians” asked all those years ago. Much of their search for answers is devoted to lively corporate and family history. Boswell Co. was founded by Lt. Col. James G. Boswell, who learned the cotton business in his native Georgia before relocating to California in the 1920s. With venture capital from Cecil B. DeMille and other southern California investors, Boswell and several other growers crafted a new landscape that resembled the South in some ways (huge plantations and plenty of racism) but was more modern in its dependence on vast sums of capital and technology (in recent years, Boswell technicians used laser-guided scrapers networked to global-positioning satellites to level their cotton fields prior to planting for ease of harvesting). Boswell’s farm long kept pace with California agriculture, which has advanced through accumulation of vast acreages, relentless pursuit of intensive mechanization, devotion to applied chemistry (fertilizers and pesticides) and a preference for near-powerless migrant workers.
Indeed, Boswell’s early dominance came as much through political mastery as business savvy. Family members spent less time on the farm than in the exclusive neighborhoods of Pasadena, where they built lasting alliances. Boswell eventually married Ruth Chandler, daughter of the Los Angeles Times-owning Chandlers, the most powerful family in southern California. The Boswell political reach grew long indeed.
In 1850, the land that was fated to become California’s cotton kingdom had been under water. Each spring, snowmelt rushed from the Sierra Nevada into the San Joaquin. There it recharged the abundant breeding grounds and habitat of birds, fish and clams in Tulare Lake, the biggest body of fresh water west of the Mississippi River. Early efforts to drain the lake and turn the land to agriculture culminated in the 1930s, when the Boswells and neighboring growers persuaded federal authorities that the lake was a flood, which officials then checked with a taxpayer-funded dam.
The effort has never been wholly successful. Even now, in wet years, parts of the lake briefly return. Jim Boswell, nephew of Boswell Co.’s founder, took advantage of the situation after he assumed control in 1952. He bought out competitors who could not sustain the fight against the resurgent lake, and as he expanded his valley holdings to monster size, he diversified into numerous other businesses. He sold unprofitable Arizona cotton fields to developer Del Webb, then partnered with him to build Sun City, the nation’s first retirement community. He bent Australian laws against foreign ownership to consolidate a 60,000-acre cotton spread. Back in California, the company finally prevailed in a 50-year congressional fight to gut federal laws that would have broken up the farm and reduced the Boswell latifundia to a yeomanly 160 acres.
This is a great story, but the authors’ devotion to the growers’ perspective is a tricky proposition. The book’s most persistent witness to the valley’s history is Jim Boswell himself, a charismatic figure whose capacity for distortion is suggested in his claim, early in the book, that there has never been any significant black presence in the town of Corcoran, where Boswell Co. is based. In fact, there were once four black churches in the town, and Arax and Wartzman provide a remarkable history of the area’s black and Mexican labor camps and communities, much of it drawn from their own interviews. Similar discrepancies between Boswell’s version of the past and the authors’ interpretation energize the book with a constant sense of revelation and intrigue, the uncovering of the secret American empire promised in the book’s subtitle.
But, played out over more than 400 pages of text, the continual scramble to correct or fill in Boswell’s distortions and half-truths seems to exhaust the authors. Nowhere is their simultaneous effort to cajole and critique the growers more troubling than in their account of Boswell’s neighbor, Clarence Salyer, a transplanted Virginian who careers through the book trailing mistresses, fist fights, drunken car wrecks and family feuds. For all Salyer’s failings, his “savage temper and rascal ways” met locally with a “willingness to forgive” that was “almost universal.”
The folksy synopsis of Salyer’s career sits uneasily near the end of a book whose early chapters include an astounding revelation. On Oct. 10, 1933, Clarence Salyer was in a crowd of growers confronting a peaceful picket line, when somebody opened fire on the strikers. Two workers were shot down in cold blood. While there were indictments, nobody was convicted of the crime. But, as Arax and Wartzman discover, Salyer was convinced he had killed somebody. He returned home that day with his gun, which he melted down in the coal forge in back of his house.
Salyer’s escape from possible punishment might be ascribed less to the goodwill of his neighbors than to his wealth and power. His fortune was second only to Jim Boswell’s. He kept a local constable on his payroll. It is to the authors’ credit that they uncover Salyer’s involvement in a long-unsolved murder. But the resort to local color veers toward whitewash when they dismiss Salyer as a “rascal” and his untouchability as “forgiveness.”
By book’s end, though, even the most powerful of California’s growers seems to be on the verge of becoming an anachronism. Competition from Chinese cotton makes Boswell’s fields ever-less economical. Just over the hill, thirsty Los Angeles promises top dollar for Boswell water, which may be their next commodity. A neighboring grower has already foregone cotton to compost sewage for the City of Angels, a service that brings in millions of dollars a year and obviates the need (or ability) to grow any kind of crop at all.
This may not be such a bad thing. Arax and Wartzman may want no part of that “angry pack of agrarians,” but by the book’s end they sound a lot like them. Cotton farming has all but destroyed the valley’s great wetlands. The spray of pesticide makes the whole basin smell “like rotten flesh,” and dire residues and runoff cause horrendous mutations in the remnant flocks of egrets, ducks and other waterfowl.
The region’s people have not done well either. Jim Boswell is a philanthropic man who has funded college scholarships, a park and a YMCA in Corcoran. He paid his workers well. And yet, precious little of Boswell Co.’s immense wealth flows downstream. The highly mechanized company produces fewer jobs than ever, and town residents are desperate. In the 1990s they agreed to host a new high-security prison. Nonetheless, their community remains a slough of despond. Unemployment hovers above 15 percent, gangs murder to control the drug trade, and the teen pregnancy rate is higher than Haiti’s. It is a sad contrast to neighboring towns like Kerman and Kingsburg, where a preponderance of smaller farmers have produced a persistent middle class and viable downtowns.
In the end, then, Arax and Wartzman’s careful research and sharp analysis of the local scene correct Boswell’s many distortions. For readers seeking a weave of corporate history, family biography and insight into the devil’s bargain Americans have made with big agriculture, there is no more colorful a tale than “The King of California.”.
