Abuse of Power: Another Chapter in 1992

We don’t change. We keep doing the same things over and over. It’s in our nature that the most powerful among us like to keep others in their places, almost go out of their way to step on those beneath them.

A good example of this is what caused the Wheatland labor riot in 1913. It wasn’t the money so much as the humiliation of the thing.

Wheatland is a farm town in Yuba County at the southern end of the Sacramento Valley. In 1913 few roads were paved and the population was only 350. Just outside town, the 641-acre Durst ranch was the largest independently held hop ranch in the state. It was here that the Wheatland riot started.

Hop is a tall, stringy vine, and its cone-shaped cluster of scaly flowers is what’s used to flavor beer. These beer blossoms ripen in August or September, the hottest time of the year, and when the crop’s ready to be picked, it is ready. Either it’s harvested fast or it’s ruined.

The Durst brothers advertised as far away as Oregon and Nevada, asking for 3,000 workers to help with their harvest. When nearly that many showed up, it turned out the Durst fields could hold only 1,500 at a time. Unneeded workers stood around hoping for a field ticket that would let them start picking. Pay was 90 cents per 100-pound bag, and nobody picked two bags a day.

Workers camped on a barren hill. The only sanitation was a row of nine doorless privies, each usually with a line of women and children waiting. For those who could afford it, a ragged tent rented for 75 cents a week. Most slept in the open. Many wells were dry, privies overflowed and were never cleaned, trash and garbage was left where it fell.

It sounds cruel to have people live like this, but understand, these were not people anyone cared about. These people had nothing. These migrants of 24 nationalities were the anonymous men, women and children who chased crops up and down the central valleys, cooked on the ground and walked the richest farm land in the world with all they owned strapped to their backs.

The government had started talk about labor reforms. Things like child labor and worker compensation were in the works, but they wouldn’t apply to the migrants. Farm workers were somehow less. These were the ones could be stepped on. Taken advantage of.

To a point, they could.

Concession wagons carried stew and lemonade and water out to pickers in the field. The Durst relatives who ran them charged high prices for stew and lemonade and sold water only if something else was bought. It was this, I think, that pushed the workers over the edge.

Because here it was: They were in the middle of a field planted with hop vines strung on trellises 18 feet high, it was 105 degrees, they were hot, dirty, tired and thirsty, and the only way they could get a drink of water was if they’d buy it, and even then they had to pay for a bowl of stew first. They had to know they were being stepped on.

The workers, led by a Wobbly labor organizer named Blackie Ford, staged a protest and handed Ralph Durst a list of demands that included clean toilets and ice water for the pickers. Durst agreed to some of it, but he wanted Ford arrested for causing trouble and called the Yuba County sheriff.

Carloads of deputies showed up, along with the sheriff and the district attorney. A deputy fired one shot--to calm the crowd, he said. The workers charged, and other shots were fired. When the smoke cleared, everyone had scattered, and the district attorney, a deputy and two pickers lay dead.

Those in power decided the deaths were caused by Blackie Ford and three workers. Four men were charged with murder, but only Ford and one other were convicted. Both served time in prison.

It wasn’t much of a riot, not as we know riots today. True, people did die, and a crowd attacked the police, but all in all, it was over as soon as it happened. By the time National Guard troops arrived, there was nothing to quell.

But it was one of the times people on the bottom made their voices heard. Stood up and said: For God’s sake, why do you treat us this way? For a while, a short while, some people listened.

An investigator for Gov. Hiram Johnson was amazed at how hop pickers had been exploited and forced to live in miserable conditions. What came of it was that at the Durst ranch, the workers’ area was cleaned, new tents were put up and pickers in the field got their ice water.

What caused the Durst people to treat their workers so? They were one of the largest farm employers in the state. The little money involved couldn’t have made much difference to them.

I think the answer is that it’s just in human nature, because you see it all the time. See how people of wealth and power use their positions to strip away the last bit of respect from the lowest among us. We’ve done it in the past. We’re still doing it.

According to the newspapers, Gov. Pete Wilson caused someone to pay out almost three-quarters of a million dollars to gather enough signatures to put his welfare initiative on the November ballot. This initiative will cut back the money paid to a welfare mother with two children from $663 a month to $507.

The governor has identified this mother, least powerful among us, as the cause of most of our problems.

The money will matter to her, sure. But it won’t sting like the humiliation of it.