Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.3 | The History Cooperative

The Farmer's Benevolent Trust: Law and Agricultural Cooperation in Industrial America, 1865-1945. By Victoria Saker Woeste. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. xx, 369 pp. Cloth, $49.95, isbn 0-8078-2421-6. Paper, $19.95, isbn 0-8078-4731-3.)

How does a farmers' cooperative, typically established to help small farmers fight big business, become a big—even a very, very big—business itself? This is the question, previously overlooked by legal and agricultural historians, that Victoria Saker Woeste considers in her concise, intelligent study of a powerful California raisin growers' cooperative's multiple attempts to combine forces without running afoul of state and federal sanctions against monopolies and trusts. As the growers came to control more than 90 percent of the raisin crop, this became an increasingly difficult task. In one effort to distinguish the California Associated Raisin Company (CARC) from corporate trusts in steel and oil and gas, the CARC trustee H. H. Welsh argued that, while rather large, theirs was nevertheless a "good trust." But, as Woeste points out, Welsh could barely keep a straight face at his own suggestion. . . .

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