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Book Review
| Orange Empire: California and the Fruits of Eden. By Douglas Cazaux Sackman. London and Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. xvi + 386 pp. Illustrations, map, notes, index. $45.00.
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| Over the past twenty years, a series of books have examined the political power, racial discrimination, and agricultural regime that shaped rural California into an industrial countryside. Most recently, Richard Walker's The Conquest of Bread: 150 Years of Agribusiness in California attempts a synthesis of much of this work, with special attention to oranges. Yet though historians have known about the orange business for a long time, none ever assembled a more subtle, expansive, and intricate narrative than Douglas Sackman's Orange Empire. Sackman brings together the tangled social relations, commercial ambitions, and compulsive image making that made orange growing more than agriculture production but a kind of cultural reproduction. |
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Sackman's argument is that the California countryside is a fabrication, with growers working behind the scenes to assemble the political power and scientific knowledge necessary to construct a landscape dedicated to their goals. They then created a romantic past while trying to control the poverty or rebellion. Yet, the fabrication did not fool those on the political left, who assailed it continually throughout the 1930s. Sackman makes good use of John Steinbeck's more obscure writings on labor and land in California, the Observer, published by the Simon J. Lubin society, and the U.S. congressional committee hearings headed by Robert La Follette, of Wisconsin, in which Carey McWilliams and Dorothea Lange testified. This is effective research and writing. Sackman demonstrates great control of his subjects and lands his discussions right where they belong. |
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Orange Empire provides an occasion to mention two other books that do not appear in its bibliography and which richen the cultural and economic story it tells. The first is George L. Henderson's California and the Fictions of Capital (Oxford, 1999), which takes off from a material problem and traces it though fiction. Henderson employs a stunning analysis of capital circulation and pairs that with an equally deep investigation of fictional accounts of rural California (ante-Grapes of Wrath). The novels reveal a "bourgeois discourse" that mirrors the uneven accumulation of capitalist agriculture. Sackman and Henderson share the same sense that cultural products are crucial mirrors for understanding the way economic empires are crated and perpetuated. |
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The second book amplifies an idea implicit in Orange Empire: David Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity (Blackwell, 1990). Harvey is a political geographer who argues here and in other books that in order for capitalism to continually create value from everything it must continually create spaces that give it social as well as economic power. These spaces are replicated as the economic systems spreads. The landscape is not just a product of economic activity. In the form of monocultures, it closes off all alternative uses and creates a kind of imperative for the spread of monocultures. Sackman catches the same drift when he writes about the southern California "growth machine," or the series of linked institutions (chambers of commerce, newspapers, commercial banks, labor contractors) all aimed at the expansion of the orange empire. The war of images and metaphors fought by the reformers, liberals, and radicals who make up so much of Sackman's book can be understood as a contest over the continued expansion of the capitalist countryside. |
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Orange Empire is less notable for its overall argument than for its power as an extended essay. It winds and turns unexpectedly, telling compelling stories—like the way that the State of California and Sunkist constructed camps intended to Americanize Mexican workers, Upton's Sinclair's EPIC campaign and his peculiar high-modernist vision of agriculture, and Luther Burbank's organismal inventions. It is imaginative, learned, and finely written; it is richly informative and dramatic in moments. Most of all, Orange Empire succeeds by connecting culture and agriculture. |
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Steven Stoll is associate professor of history at Yale University. He is writing a book about the idea of economic growth in the nineteenth century. |
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