About the Book
Critically
acclaimed and a Times bestseller, The King
of California is ripe for discovery by a whole new
audience eager to learn of the great untold stories of the
American West and American business. The
story of J.G. Boswell, the biggest farmer in America, is
a tale of how the Boswell family transplanted themselves
from plantation Georgia to gain control of the center of
California, converting lush wetlands into vast cotton fields.
In anecdote-rich
detail, Arax and Wartzman trace how the genius and perfidy
of three generations of Boswells helped transform Muir’s
400-mile bed of wild roses, violets, bryanthus and clover
into the biggest, most industrialized farm in the world.
Unlike the Borgia, the late Col. J.G. Boswell and his surviving
nephew, Jim, didn’t poison their rivals – just
the landscape. They drained and redrained a lake once so
big that pilots flying over it used to lose sight of land.
Then they created a cotton plantation so huge, that Jim
could drive the authors across it for half a day without
ever leaving his property.
The
“king” of the book’s title, both its hero
and its villain, is 80-year-old J.G. Boswell, who built
a farming empire while thumbing his nose at nature, politicians,
labor unions, journalists and anyone else who got in his
way.
This
book is much more than a biography of Boswell and the Boswell
family. It also is the story of labor migration into the
valley by Mexicans, African Americans from the South and
whites fleeing the Dust Bowl, about the resulting labor
strife, about battles over water rights, and about the arrogance
of power and the dichotomy of agricultural wealth and unspeakable
poverty.
The
story of the Boswells begins with the 1921 migration of
the present Boswell leader’s great-uncle and namesake,
Col. J.G. Boswell, from Georgia to Pasadena, where he set
up shop as a regional cotton broker. On a vacation jaunt
in Santa Barbara, Boswell heard that further inland and
north were huge, inviting stretches of prime cotton land,
in and around Tulare Lake and the farming community of Corcoran.
Tulare
Lake was at the confluence of four rivers, and covered at
the time some 800 square miles. The lake would flood frequently
with the melting of the winter snow pack in the Sierras,
but otherwise the soil and climate conditions were ideal
for cotton cultivation, so the elder Boswell took the plunge.
He was
starting his business in a region that, like much of the
rest of the state, had been long convulsed by battles over
the control of water. Beginning in the 1880’s, a series
of speculators began to divert the rivers and snow melt
into private canals and irrigation systems – which
made it possible for Col. Boswell to farm the Tulare lake
bed, which boasted some of the region’s richest soil,
even as it posed obvious flood risks.
Enter
the federal government. Rather than leaving the Boswells
and neighboring large-scale cotton outfits in the lake bed
to suffer the discipline of the market, by which risky entrepreneurship
is punished as well as rewarded, the feds agreed to build
an enormous dam project, known as Pine Flat, to dam the
Kings river and contain and collect the valley floodwaters.
Pine Flat began life under Franklin Roosevelt’s Bureau
of Land Reclamation, which posed two immediate problems
to Boswell and the other big valley growers. First, the
bureau would be constructing the project and would expect
sizable contributions from the farmers who benefited. And,
second, the bureau had a strict size limit for farms that
fell under its purview: No operation would be allowed to
exceed 160 acres.
This
was, needless to say, not something that the feudal-scale
estates of the big operators of the San Joaquin Valley regarded
as a viable option. So a fierce lobbying war began, either
to modify existing BLR regulations or to designate Pine
Flat a flood-control project and muscle the BLR out of the
picture. When Pine Flat was completed in 1954, the big growers
got almost everything they wanted; the Army Corps of Engineers
dammed the Kings under the auspices of flood control, and
by 1963 it had bottled up the other three major rivers that
had fed the Tulare lake bed. When the huge project was finished,
one of the construction workers announced, “We moved
the rain.”
Not
coincidentally, the Boswell farm (which had passed into
the savvy managerial hands of the colonel’s nephew,
J.G., aka Jim, fresh out of the Army and Stanford business
school) embarked on a massive growth spurt in the postwar
era that continues through this day. As the flagship Boswell
operation grew, soaked up federal subsidies and streamlined
labor costs, many of the valley’s towns, such as once-thriving
farming capitol of Corcoran, shriveled up and all but expired.
Smaller growers couldn’t compete with the enormous
economies of scale that the Boswells enjoyed – nor
could they game the federal subsidy programs the way that
the well-connected Boswell fiefdom could.
In one
especially memorable bit of legerdemain, the J.G. Boswell
Co. (which, true to most Western agricultural outfits, loudly
advertises its hostility to the federal government’s
evil prerogatives) seized on an early-1980s federal payment-in-kind
program to stockpile surplus government wheat to retire
some of its cotton acreage from production. A few years
on, though, the Agriculture Department had such a run of
farmers acquiring surplus wheat that the agency ran out
– and so purchased a cool $3.7 million in wheat that
Boswell had independently cultivated, only to turn around
and hand much of it back to Boswell as payment for cultivating
fewer cotton acres. Boswell’s managers were then able
to sell the wheat government had already purchased from
them a second time, this time on the open market.
Critics / Reviews
"I call it the nonfiction Grapes of Wrath."
—Bridget Kinsella, Publishers Weekly
"A
landmark and entertaining book."
—David Kipen, San Francisco Chronicle
"A
passionate, fair-minded, thought-provoking and groundbreaking
book."
—Malcolm Margolin, Los Angeles Times Book Review
"A
rollicking tale . . . an alluring and fascinating account."
—Raleigh News & Observer
"While
this tale is highly readable and entertaining, the authors
have left barely a stone untouched in researching their
topic. This is at once a work of analytical journalism and
exhaustive scholarship."
—San Jose Mercury News
"Many
stories, all rolled into one epic . . . Written in a lively
style that matches
the bigger-than-life qualities of its subject."
—Booklist
“A
remarkably detailed and eye-opening portrait.”
—Chris Lehmann, The Washington Post
“Intelligently
fair-minded”
—The Economist
“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.”
—Chicago Tribune
“A
book that will become a necessity on the shelf of anyone
interested in California history.”
—Sacramento Bee
“Perhaps
once in a generation there comes a book about the central
San Joaquin Valley that grabs the heart and won’t
let go. The King of California . . . is one of those books.”
—Fresno Bee
“A
tale of battles, settler vs. Indian, farmer vs. farmer,
farmer vs. laborer, farmer vs. nature.
There’s murder, massacre, explosion, lawsuits, worker
strikes, droughts and floods . . .
Through it all, part hero and part villain, is J.G. Boswell,
a colorful character.”
—Bakersfield Californian
“It
has that feel of authenticity that only comes with shoe
leather. It deserves notice.”
—Portland Oregonian
“Should
be required reading for anyone interested in the Central
Valley’s history.”
—Visalia Times-Delta
“Almost
staggering in its width and breadth—and its revelations.”
—Carmel Pine Cone
