by Andrew Needham
Progressive Era conservationists considered land monopoly a grave threat to the nation's prosperity because it encouraged speculation and inefficient use of land. When large tracts were cultivated, monopoly resulted in absentee ownership and the creation of a landless class of tenant farmers. Many conservationists feared land monopoly would create a stagnant rural economy and an unstable rural society. Through the exercise of government action directed by agricultural experts, some conservationists attemp ted to change monopolistic land ownership in the West. In its place, they envisioned a republican society of independent small farmers. Conservationists hoped to achieve their republican vision through a combination of new irrigation technology and govern ment management of land settlement. The 1902 Newlands Reclamation Act, which brought the development and irrigation of arid Western lands under the control of the federal government, limited the size of farms receiving water from federal projects to eight y acres. Senator Francis Newlands explained the democratic, republican nature of his plan: "The purpose is to create homes for the people, to make the waters of the West available for the reclamation of arid lands by actual settlers, and to eliminate entirely the speculator and the capitalist."[1] Underlying the Newlands Act was an effort to expand rural settlement in the West to create a socially conservative population of small, land-owning farmers.While federal reclamation achieved engineering triumphs, it failed to realize its social vision. The Reclamation Bureau proved unable to prevent speculation and land consolidation on federal projects while several promising projects were thwarted by the intransigence of landowners. In 1913, the Wheatland Riot in California's San Joaquin Valley (pitting transient farm laborers against farm owners) presented state leaders with the reality of class disparity and conflict in California agriculture. Californi a progressives began to search for a new program to populate the countryside, a solution that would break up large landholdings and create a republican rural society.
Beginning in 1915 in the wake of the Wheatland Riot, the California State Commission on Colonization and Rural Credits convened to investigate the concentration of land ownership and the efforts of private land companies to promote agricultural colonies. The Commission sent questionnaires to individual settlers, the settlement companies, and local businessmen. Settler responses painted a bleak picture for independent farmers, as Mrs. S. Fitts's letter indicates:
We went into the ranch proposition with such feeling of hope. The papers and magazines all over the country for some years have been calling people "back to the land," and here we are at the end of three years thoroughly disgusted and dis heartened and we will consider ourselves fortunate to get back to the city to a salary again and we say, when asked how we like ranching-"Ranching! never again! And the pity of it all is ours is only one of many cases that might be cited of blasted hopes and empty pocket books.[2]The settler responses provided a litany of the shattered hopes of disappointed landholders and misrepresentations by speculative companies: flooded farmlands, non-existent railroads and irriga-tion works, vacant land advertised as a bustl ing community, and "potter's soil" where rich loam was promised.[3] The Commission also found that land companies had severely misrepresented costs of farming to prospective settlers. The study of California's twenty-four private farm col onies dis-covered that seventy-three percent (719 of 991) of the settlers were in debt with an average indebtedness of $2,367. The Commission concluded, "Opportunities have been so exaggerated and the expenses of developing a farm so minimized as to induc e settlers to undertake what on trial has proved to be impossible."[4]The Commission recommended the state enter into colonization, providing settlers with better financial terms and expert advice. "By regarding colonization and the creation of rural communities as a trust, we may create agricultural colon ies filled with people who will make this a state where the best people in this country will want to live."[5] In 1917, the state legislature appropriated $260,000 to establish what would become the State Demonstration Colony at Durham an d appointed Dr. Elwood Mead, a innovative progressive irrigation expert, to head the project. Mead's state-sponsored project determined to succeed where private enterprise had failed, to establish a republican model for land ownership in a California wher e many agricultural areas were characterized by virtual land baronies. In studying land settlement patterns in California, the Commission discovered several troubling trends: high land prices, rampant speculation, increasing tenant farming, and decreasing numbers of white farmers. The Demonstration Colony at Durham became the solution that Mead and others provided to the social problems of rural California.
While Elwood Mead has received a good deal of scholarly attention for his innovations in Wyoming's water laws and his work as head of the Bureau of Reclamation, the Durham Colony has received only cursory examination. Some studies focused upon Durham hav e emphasized the utopian quality of the colony and lamented its failure. These analyses, emerging from labor histories of California agriculture, view the colony as a democratic opportunity for "the people," California's impoverished agricultural workers, to overcome the power of "the interests," California land barons. Carey McWilliams, in his seminal Factories in the Field, refers to Durham as "a daring innovation in American land policy" and claims, "Had these initial ventures been carried through . . . it is quite likely that an important first step in the solution of the State's old, old problem of farm labor might have been effected." Cletus Daniel, writing forty years after McWilliams, echoes his analysis, citing the colony's effor t to restore the family farm as an attempt "to help democratize California's rural economy."[6] While both McWilliams and Daniel sympa-thize with the plight of landless agricultural workers, they misconstrue state colonization as a sympat hetic policy attempting to empower a growing rural proletariat. One aspect of this study will investigate the attitudes of Durham's proponents toward democracy and thereby reexamine their motives in creating the colony.
The study is informed, in part, by the development of a Western history that has examined water management in order to understand social and political development. Donald Worster, a pioneer in the field, writes that the control of water inevitably has le d to social control. Worster describes the West as a "hydraulic society," explicitly using the term used by Karl Wittfogel to describe the development of totalitarian societies in ancient Egypt and China. Extreme centralization of power into the hands of those few able to control water characterizes Wittfogel's "hydraulic societies." Technological means of controlling water accompanies the concentration of power, resulting in "absolute centralized control over both nature and man." Taking Wittfogel's conc eption and imposing it upon the modern state, Worster concludes that notions of "hydraulic society" should not be limited to antiquity. He claims Wittfogel's construction explains the emergence of a semi-totalitarian West, with control ce ntralized in the hands of agribusiness and the Bureau of Reclamation.[7] In contrast to Worster, Norris Hundley concludes that water control may have led to powerful agencies, but the electorate continually approved hydraulic improvements that reflected their values and the needs of an expanding society. His investigation reveals "a wide and often confused and crosscutting range of interest groups and bureaucrats, both public and private, who accomplish what they do as a result of shiftin g alliances and despite frequent disputes." For Hundley, Western society evolved its rationale for controlling water as part of a larger societal trend justifying the development of resources to benefit society.[8]
Despite their differences, Hundley and Worster concur that the use of water was at the center of Western political development. Whether supported by voters or not, the complicated politics of water allowed the rise of expert bureaucracies offering to sim plify complex problems and to regulate society through their control. The Durham colony was created and managed by an appoint-ed board of engineers and businessmen, and any examination of the colony must consider their rhetoric and policy attempting to ju stify and consolidate their political power.
Donald Pisani's study of the politics of the Western irrigation movement provides a vital addition to the work of Worster and Hundley. Analyzing irrigation in light of the consolidation of agricultural land in California, Pisani determines that irrigatio n was often promoted as a tool of social and economic reform, a technology that promised to create a republican society of small farmers and freeholders in California. According to Pisani, irrigation continually failed to realize the repu blican ideal because of inefficiency, mismanagement, and opposition from powerful land-holders.[9] James Kluger's biography of Elwood Mead reinforces many of Pisani's conclusions about the intentions of irrigation promoters. Kluger descri bes Mead as an engineer who considered himself a social as well as a technological planner. He claims that Mead, and other engineers sharing this trait, conceived engineering as the discipline most able to direct the forces of industrialization toward soc ial stability. Raised on a Midwestern family farm, Mead wanted to recreate an ideal-ized, republican countryside. As the director and primary promoter of the Durham colony, Mead attempted to forge a combination of his republican agrarian vision with his i deas of social engin-eering.[10] Unfortunately, Kluger never provides an argument explaining how these competing visions were reconciled in Durham.
Kluger's analysis draws heavily upon the organizational synthesis of the Progressive Era formulated by Robert Wiebe and, more importantly for this study, Samuel P. Hays. This synthesis portrays government and corporate bureaucrats as the driving force be hind the progressive movement. Bureaucrats occupied the central role in the transition from an informal, regionally based society to the hierarchical bureaucracies of government and business. A bureaucratic elite, primarily concerned with the stability o f the social order, took steps to eliminate conflicts detrimental to the stability of business and government. Hays views conservation as the central movement in this transition. Conservation leaders emerged from disciplines such as hydrology, forestry, a nd engineering, disciplines imbued with confidence in the ability of science and technology to resolve conflicts between limited natural resources and the desire for economic expansion. These professionalized disciplines staked a claim as the legitimate a rbiters of complex resource-use disputes. Efficient management became their religion; through expert control, they believed, conflicts between resource users could be eliminated. In The Revolt of the Engineers, Edwin Layton concurs with Hays' thesis, and additionally concludes that the new role for engineers was a way of solving a status dilemma. According to Layton, engineers felt trapped between the industrialists who dictated the terms of their work and the laborers who manufactured their creations. Layton argues that engineers attempted to manipulate society to their terms, the mechanistic, as a way to assume a major role in society's management.[11] Mead's work was characteristic of the revolt Layton describes as it functioned as a proving ground for the validity of engineering as a social tool.
While Mead was part of a national trend in organization and engineering, the Durham colony displayed uniquely Western qualities. The new Western history allows for a cohesive understand-ing of the mix of cultures, classes, and races that has constituted the Western past. Until recently, no historiographical structure existed that interpreted the considerable differences between the modern West and the rest of the nation. The Turner thesis had proposed that the West remained a unique and vital entity only so long as the frontier remained open, providing a leveling and demo-cratizing influence upon the frontiersmen who participated in the formation of new communities. With the closing of the frontier, however, Turner sees the West as ceasing to be a separa te entity and becoming integrated into national society. Patricia Nelson Limerick, in her convincing synthesis, The Legacy of Conquest, discards Turner's thesis, claiming, "There is simply no definition of 'the closing of the frontier' that is anything bu t arbitrary and riddled with exceptions and qualifications." While Turner understands American exceptionalism through the democratic exper-ience of self-creation on the Western frontier, Limerick studies the conflicts arising from the collision of culture s in the West-cultures of race, class, and ethnicity. A new conception of the West emerges from her book, emphasizing the West's diversity and its continuing conflicts. In Limerick's words, "Western history has been an ongoing competition for legitimacy-f or the right to claim for oneself and sometimes for one's group the status of legitimate beneficiary of Western resources." The competition for property and profit was tied to a struggle for cultural dominance, a struggle involving political ideology, rel igion, and language. The new Western history has been most useful in bringing all of the West's disparate groups into the historical gaze, allowing historians to treat them all as essential elements in the drama of the formation of Wester n society.[12]
This study, then, draws upon the analytic technique developed in the new Western history to examine the organization and establishment of the Durham colony. Engineers and planners, primarily Elwood Mead, are the central figures. Durham's politics and ide ology were inherently bound up in the political concerns of the early twentieth-century West, an unfamiliar society for all of its inhabitants. The agrarian myth, that America was a nation given definition by its independent small farmers, increasingly se emed endangered by the simultaneous rise of urbaniza-tion and tenant farming. While urbanization and industrialization created increasingly solidified classes, tenant farming brought unattached people to rural society, among them Asians and Latinos, seen as unassimilable and hence dangerous to social stability. Elwood Mead and other California progressives feared a society that threatened to grow beyond their control. The Durham colony, then, evoked their hope of an agrarian, republican, and racially homo genous society in California. The colony was their answer to threatening social trends, their hope for legitimacy, their bid for control of resources, and their plea for the ideal society. The new order of engineers and social planners that established Du rham saw state colonization as the idea that would save America, and in some cases the Anglo-Saxon race, from decline and eclipse. In accord with their professional beliefs, they instituted Progressive Era bureaucratic ideas of efficiency and expert contr ol while engaging in the racial fear-mongering that typified California politics of the era.
Before his appointment to head the Durham colony, Elwood Mead's thinking was shaped by his experiences as an engineer, an analyst, and an administrator of irrigation projects. Following his education as an engineer, Mead moved west to accept a job as an engineering professor at Colorado State University. While at Colorado State, he developed an interest in irrigation technology. His innovations in ditch irrigation brought Mead to the attention of Wyoming officials, and he was appointed territorial engine er in 1888. Frustrated with Wyoming's confusing maze of water claims overseen by local judges, Mead determined that Wyoming's water rights must be centrally controlled and managed by the state engineer. Mead's solution, soon to be known as the Wyoming sys tem, was included in Wyoming's initial Constitution. The Wyoming system gave the state engineer-Mead-extensive power and autonomy in determining the validity of water claims. His work in Wyoming brought him to national attention, and in 1899 Mead was appo inted expert-in-charge of irrigation investigations for the Office of Experiment Stations in the Department of Agriculture. His duties included analyzing the most effective combinations of irrigation and crops, examining the laws concerning water rights, and assisting farmers in securing and protecting water rights. Mead became the main critic of the federal Reclamation Bureau, finding that, despite the mandate in the Newlands Act, federal officials often neglected the needs of small farmers and ignored t he importance of forming rural communities which would provide social stability. Mead maintained that state governments were best suited to pursue innovative policies encouraging small farm ownership. Because of his opposition to federal initiatives, Mead 's influence within the federal government waned. In 1907, Mead accepted an offer from the government of Australia to create land settlement colonies in the state of Victoria. By drawing from his Wyoming experience the necessity of central planning and co mbining it with his federal experience which emphasized the creation of small farms oriented around a community, Mead created several small, irrigated, state-managed farm colonies in the Australian desert. When he returned to the United States in 1914 to teach at University of California, Berkeley, and serve California and the federal govern-ment as an irrigation expert, Mead believed he had invented the model program for solving the problematic dwindling of America's rural population.[< a href="#13">13]
Mead was appointed to head the California Commission on Land Settlements and Rural Credits. The Commission not only illustrated and analyzed the dismal conditions for California's indepen-dent small farmers, it also proposed a comprehensive plan to solve these problems, based on Mead's experience in Australia. The Commission's plan, a "state demonstration in scientific colonization," was submitted to Governor Hiram Johnson in 1916 and called for the state to purchase a ten-thousand-acre plot of land chos en by a special committee. The land would be studied and tested, then subdivided according to the quality of the soil and the crops to be grown. The ten-thousand-acre tract would support two hundred family farms, varying in size from twenty to one hundred acres. The plan expected settlers to engage in intensive irrigation-based agriculture, relying on scientific agriculture techniques to make their small plots profitable. One hundred two-acre farm laborer plots would be allotted. Before settlers arrived, the land would be prepared for irrigation and cultivation. Once the land was prepared, potential settlers would be invited to inspect the farm sites and apply for them.[14] A bill containing the general conception of M ead's plan was drafted in January 1917 and received Governor Johnson's support. Despite opposition from real estate interests who claimed that the bill injured innocent land agents and colonization companies, and created excessive government intervention into business, the legislature approved the bill. The measure established a Land Settlement Board to administer the project and appropriated $260,000 to begin the process.[15]
Appointed to chair the Board, Elwood Mead began the search for a suitable piece of land. The Board, consisting of Mead and four businessmen-Prescott Cogswell, Mortimer Fleishhacker, Frank Flint, and William Langdon-researched possible land sites and acce pted offers from landowners. Eventually, they selected a 6,239-acre tract of land in Butte County, owned by Stanford University, located one-half mile from the village of Durham in the central Sacramento Valley. This land was selected both for its potenti al in supporting canal and subterranean irrigation and its claim on a substantial amount of the annual flow of Butte Creek. The land cost $550,000, more than twice the project's appropriation. The Land Settlement Board paid $200,000 cash and relied on pro fits from settlers' land purchases to make up the balance. This payment left the Board with $50,000 ($10,000 was set aside for administrative expenses) to prepare the land for irrigation, cultivation, and settlement. The California College of Agriculture mapped the land and classified the soil, which varied from sandy loam to adobe. After classification, a contour survey was made to determine the most effective placement of irrigation ditches, and the land was leveled to regulate water flow in the ditche s. Based upon the contour survey, the Board subdivided the land into one hundred ten farms, sized from eight to three hundred acres. The size of each farm was based upon the soil's ability to support high-yield, specialized crops, or, in the case of the l arge farms, the ability to grow enough forage to feed a sizable dairy herd. Twenty-six two-acre plots were set aside for farm laborers. Once the farm plots were studied and mapped, the Board issued a pamphlet introducing the colony and i nviting potential settlers to inspect the land. In the pamphlet the financial details of the colony were explained, and the financial appeal of the colony to poor farmers was apparent.[16]
The initial Commission on Land Colonization and Rural Credits had found farm ownership was moving beyond the reach of farmers of limited means. California agricultural land was the most expensive in the country, averaging $110 an acre f or non-irrigated land and $180 for improved land; these prices were three to five times more expensive than land in most regions.[17] Given these high land prices, California's high mortgage rates proved a significant disincentive to the small farmer. Average interest rates of eight percent and payment periods averaging 5.8 years ensured that all but the most successful farmer would forfeit his land to the mortgage holder. Private land colonization companies, focused on developing and se lling land at a profit, failed to ensure the financial or agricultural viability of their settlers. If the settlers forfeited, the land returned to the company with increased value. Lack of funds and motivation to train settlers exacerbated the problem.
The Commission's report had argued that only the state had the finances and resources necessary for successful colonization. "To prepare some areas properly for settlement involves an immense expenditure of money. Ultimate results depend quite largely on the honesty and efficiency of those in charge." The state could provide guidance free of the corrupting influence of profit. The state could also provide expert planning and regulation of the many variables involved in cultivating semi-arid land. "The fa ctors of soil, climate, water supply, and markets, which affect the value of land and the well-being of settlers are so important that they make colonization a scientific problem. The best results to this state can only be secured by rec ognizing this and invoking and using scientific knowledge in shaping our future development."[18] The Commission claimed that, due to the high land prices and difficult agricultural conditions in California, the involvement of state expe rts in land settlement was essential. The organizers of the Durham colony attempted to ease the financial and technical difficulties, first by alleviating the impossible economic plight of the independent farmer, and then through the scientific study and manipulation of the land.
The financial arrangements of the Durham colony were its most innovative aspects. Even though it was state-managed, the plan's supporters did not want the colony to be financially dependent upon the state. After an initial appropriation, the funds coming from settlers' land purchases were intended to allow the Board to operate at a surplus. As Mead wrote, "The state gives nothing. In effect, it loans the board money at 4 per cent [sic]." With the surplus, the Board could seek out and purchase more land, begin new settlements, and eventually bring much of California into a publicly managed agricultural system of privately owned family farms. While the press referred to Durham as an experiment, Mead insisted upon instead calling it a demonstration, believing that his success in Australia had proven the merit of his scheme. In Mead's view, Durham was the first step in a comprehensive plan for settling the West with a stable rural population following the most up-to-date and appropri ate agricultural techniques for the land on which they were located.[19] To provide for the financial solvency of the Land Settlement Board, land prices within the colony remained high, ranging from $75 to $235 an acre and averaging $150 an acre. To offset these high prices, the terms of the settlers' land mortgages were generous. Settlers making a five-percent down payment on the price of the land and a forty-percent down payment on the improve-ments received a thirty-seven year mortgag e with an interest rate of five percent. These financial arrangements represented a radical departure from current practice both in term (thirty-seven years versus a California average of 5.8 years) and in amortizing the mortgage over the term. The Board' s purpose in these innovations was twofold: to allow farmers with limited means to own their own farms and to encourage settlers to remain on the land for the long term.
However, the Board took few financial risks in selecting settlers. Only settlers whose financial security was assured were chosen. Mead later wrote that the Board refused to consider any settler with assets less than $1,500. The 110 families selected to settle Durham possessed capital ranging from $1,500 to $15,000 with an average of $6,700. More than half of the settlers came from a tenant farming background. The financial criteria for the farm laborers selected was somewhat more flexi-ble. But, althoug h the colony's boosters celebrated and publicized the laborer plot awarded to a family with a net worth of $20, the average worth of the farm laborers was $800. While the Board trumpeted Durham as an opportunity to help deserving but des titute tenant farmers, it tended to select people whose financial security would ensure the prosperity of the colony.[20] While the Durham colony promoted innovative methods of allowing tenant farmers to buy land and avoid bankruptcy, it selected settlers who possessed at least modest success and wealth, thereby ensuring the financial stability of the colony for the most difficult early years.
The Durham colony functioned under the tight management and constant observation of the Land Settlement Board and Elwood Mead. The pamphlets introducing the settlement stressed the ultimate power of the Board to determine policy. While members of the Board found authority in their expert status as "officials who had for years been dealing with different features of rural life, and thereby accumulating a practical knowledge of its needs,"[21] they failed to incorporate the settler into the process of colonization. Writing of the power of the community and at the same time stressing the need to control the settlers, Mead celebrated the social power of the settler while denying him power of decision over the land he had p urchased. "It is imperative they should be controlled by men who, like Dr. Elwood Mead, have an expert knowledge of the business, combined with broad views and a due recognition of the magnificent asset to a country each successful settler becomes."[22] According to the documents, most aspects of the settler's lives were predetermined, and variation from the plans of the Board carried rebuke and punishment.
Durham settlers signed documents which served as virtual constitutions for the colony, establish-ing the overall control of the Land Settlement Board. The settlers were required to contract with the Board; the contract stated, in part, "the purchaser sha ll cultivate the land in a manner to be approved by the Board and shall keep in good order and repair all . . . permanent implements situated on his allotment." Non-compliance with dictates of the Board could lead to unilateral terminati on of the contract, with the Board deeming all payments rental fees.[23] Mead and his staff planned most essential aspects of the community before any settlers arrived. In addition to parceling out the plots with no input from potential settlers, the Board directed the seeding and cultivation of most farmland preceding settlement. When the settlers arrived, the Board's policy instructed them to concentrate upon the initial harvest and wait until the winter to prepare their homes, built f rom plans supplied by a Board-hired architect. The Board formed the Co-Operative Stock Breeders' Association to regulate the breeds of animals allowed into the colony. While the settlers appointed three of the Association's five directors, the essential d ecisions involved in stock raising-which types of cattle, hogs, and sheep would be purchased and how they would be bought-had already been determined from a California School of Agriculture study of Durham's conditions and the species and breeds best suit ed for the colony. When one settler attempted to bring his own stock to the colony, the animals were destroyed under suspicion of tuberculosis.[24] The rules pertaining to the settlers indicated their subservience to t he will of the community, a community that echoed the dictates of the Land Settlement Board.
Not only did the Board control settlers' major decisions regarding planting and livestock, but settlers remained under the surveillance of the Board's representative at Durham, Superintendent George Kreutzer. His duties included providing expert assistan ce to the settlers, serving as one of the directors of the Stock Owners Association, and filing detailed reports on the work habits of the settlers. Mead indicated the necessity of the latter in his book touting the success of the colony, Helping Men Own Farms:
Experience with settlers disgruntled by political agitation showed that the commission must know at all times just what progress each settler was making and that this information must be on record. . . . If the report stated that the set tler did not milk his cows until 11:00 in the forenoon, [or] that he spent most of his time in town . . . then the application for advance of money or postponement of payments was refused.[25]The correspondence between Kreutzer and Mead indicated the full measure of control and involve-ment Mead had in the daily affairs of the colony, even from outside the colony. Their voluminous correspondence dwells upon the most mundane a ctivities: whether a farm laborer could transfer his services to a different farmer, when to begin harvesting crops, which settlers were involved in community functions, which settlers avoided community involvement, even what to do about broken farm imple ments.[26] The colony became not so much an exercise in expert management as one of obsessive micro-management. A quest for total observation and knowledge of the settler's actions was consistent with Edwin Layton's conception of the soc ial engineer who strives for total knowledge in a continuing effort to regulate the social machine. Unfortunately, the lack of settler narratives does not permit an examination of the reaction of the Durham colonists to this continuing level of observatio n and regimentation.In any case, speculation about settler resistance or resentment would only serve to obscure what can be known through available evidence. As the financial background of the settlers indicated, they were among the more successful small independent and ten ant farmers, and they remained successful at Durham. Buoyed by wartime increases in food prices, the colony prospered. Jim Bigley saved two thousand dollars in his first fifteen months, cultivating a two-acre farm laborer's plot,[27] and the financial statements released by the Land Settlement Board supported contentions that the colony was a rousing success. Mead credited the settlers for their part in creating a successful economy but claimed that the ultimate credit should go to the Board's thorough investigations of the settlers' backgrounds and intentions.
When the board looked into the question of what was needed to make the new farms an opportunity rather than a temptation [for speculation], they came to the conclusion that the chief factor was the selection of the settlers. It therefore spared no effort in finding out the plans of those seeking land and learning whether they were qualified to succeed.[28]
The tight control the Land Settlement Board held over the colony, in fact, indicated a lack of confidence in the ability of the settlers to succeed without the continual affirming presence of the Board and its expert managers.
While the organizational and financial details of the Durham colony provide some understand-ing of the attitudes of its organizers, they do not entirely explain the rationale behind the colony. Durham existed as an experiment in scientific management, bu t it also attempted to create a new, planned society based on what Richard Hofstadter long ago labelled "the agrarian myth." This myth did not reflect the reality of agricultural life, but it embodied particular values to such an extent that it shaped Mea d's perceptions and decisions. According to Hofstadter, the agrarian myth consists of the belief that a better type of man comes from the experience of farming:
The yeoman, who owned a small farm and worked it with the aid of his family, was the incarnation of the simple, honest, independent, healthy, happy human being. Because he lived in close communion with beneficent nature, his life was bel ieved to have a wholesomeness and integrity impossible for the depraved populations of cities. His well-being was not merely physical, it was moral; it was not merely personal, it was the central source of civic virtue. . . . Since the yeoman was believed to be both happy and honest, and since he had a secure propertied stake in society in the form of his own land, he was held to be the best and most reliable sort of citizen.[29]Regardless of the reality of the notion, it became a central connection to the past, a method of remembering triumphs and values. At the same time, the agrarian myth criticized the present society and its structure. It therefore functioned as both an evoc ation of a past, better society and a source of conceptions for improving the present society. The proponents of Durham believed and utilized the agrarian myth to garner support and sympathy for their project.The 1915 California Commission on Land Settlement and Rural Credits had discovered that many private colonization schemes existed as speculation activities for both the buyers and sellers of the land. Speculation, the Commission concluded, encouraged lan d to lay fallow and unproductive, drawing profit from California's rising land values. In Mead's opinion, this use of fertile land was a form of indefensible self-interest that kept land prices artificially high. As he wrote to an official of the Reclamat ion Service, "This [the high price of non-irrigated land] raises the question of whether present prices of land are based on the productive value or are inflated selling values. It also makes desirable to know whether the land is really held by poor people or by the men who have reaped the benefit of this unearned increment."[30] Mead attacked speculators in 1916 for their lack of productivity and for preventing the progress of rural society:
The speculative landholder on our irrigation projects and his allies . . . as a rule invest no money in improving or cultivating land. They produce nothing and have no intention to produce anything from the soil. They rely for their prof it on the necessities of the settlers and farmers and on the unearned increment due to the rise in land values. . . . They constitute not only no use or value to the project, but are the greatest possible nuisance, handicap, and hindrance to development a nd progress. This blemish . . . must be eliminated, controlled, or abated before any successful system of land settlement in the arid States can be carried out by the States or General Government.[31]Speculation violated the agrarian myth: a cohesive rural society could not develop if speculators kept great tracts of land from settlement and production. It also violated Mead's professional training. As an engineer and a conservationist, he believed th at the greatest good for society came from the most careful and complete use of all resources. In order to achieve complete use, non-productive speculation had to be eliminated.Speculation also encouraged the rise of tenantry, as landowners rented to landless rural people. Many Californians believed tenant farming to be the great societal danger of their age. The argument against tenant farming had various aspects: tenantry eli minated the close connection small farmers possessed with their land, preventing the formation of close-knit rural communities; as rural landholding became less viable, more and more able farmers flocked to the cities where they joined the dangerous class es of industrial laborers; and, in their place, tenantry encouraged the introduction of foreign, unassimilable elements into rural society. All of these arguments were incorporated into the rationale for establishment of the state colony at Durham.
The rise of tenantry was feared by Mead and other social engineers because it created a rural equivalent to the industrial masses creating conflict in the cities. Mead's answer was to re-imagine a republican society of small, cooperating farmers. Republi can societies, where men owned the small plots of land they cultivated, were considered to be socially and politically stable. "The best farms, the best homes, the most stable political conditions are found where men own the land they cu ltivate."[32] The farm was considered such a stable institution because the individual was allowed to control his production. The farmer had no reason to agitate because success or failure was purely a result of his effort. He was not a member of a class, but a member of a great egalitarian rural society. "No such dangers [the socialism and unrest found in cities] confront government from the unrest of the farmer. He works harder but receives no larger pay than the city artisan. Yet this has not led him to join in class warfare because he is both laborer and capitalist."[33]
Mead's agrarianism envisioned not only a classless society, but cooperative, non-competitive agriculture, eliminating the consolidation that had destroyed independent farmers in the East. Forcing independent small farmers, producing what their families c ould cultivate, to compete with huge, tenant- or wage-labor based, "factories in the field" destroyed the delicate cooperative balance of rural society and endangered the political stability of the nation as well:
The time has come when we must have more attention to the contribution which rural life makes to human society. Whether we have good government or bad government depends quite largely on public opinion and to have an intelligent public o pinion in the country, farmers must have time to read, think, meet together and discuss public affairs. They cannot do this if they have to compete with the men who are able to pay high prices for land or high rents for farms because of their low standard of living. Under such competition the time and strength of the American family must be given up to the hard task of making a living.[34]The rise of tenant farming was blamed for the increasing tide of urbanization, as farmers and their sons abandoned the impossible task of competing with low-paid tenants and sought higher wages and shorter hours in the cities. George Kreutzer, the superin tendent at Durham, foresaw two main problems with this trend. First, the population of the city would eventually so outstrip the productive capacity of the country that the nation would have to depend on other countries to provide its sustenance. Second, the rural population would become a counterpart to the urban industrial masses then seen as a breeding ground for radical social change. He saw only one course that could reverse these trends, "through laws and social arrangements by whi ch men own the houses they live in and the soil they cultivate."[35] Edwin A. Cox, an agricultural expert at the University of California, commented on the condition of the tenants, finding, "The White contin-gent of California's tenant class are generally living under conditions inimical to Democratic [sic] citizenship. . . . Neighborhood solidarity . . . is seriously lacking . . . and the Commonwealth must correspondingly suffer." Cox's solution mirrors Kreutzer's. "California should a nd must be a community of homes. Its tenants, other than Oriental, are worthy as a whole and will make the best of citizens, but no such desideratum is possible until each one who is worthy, is able to live on a place, however small, of his very own."[36] Tenantry represented an abandonment of the agrarian dream to these Californians. Without land ownership, agriculture became just another facet of industrial society. Without stable yeomen, rural society would soon come to mirror the str ife of cities with masses of unattached people engaging in constant conflict with landowners. The virtuous rural citizens who characterized the cooperative rural society would flock to the city, where they could find the solace of high wages. Once these p eople were gone, rural society would be left entirely to the new immigrants from Asia and Southern Europe.The immigration of massive numbers of non-whites, apparently defined as Asians, Latinos, and peasants from Eastern and Southern Europe, was a central concern of the supporters of state-sponsored colonization, and preventing this immigration became a cent ral part of their argument for the urgency of land settlement. Mead's writings incorporate racial arguments found in the work of Madison Grant and Theodore Lothrop Stoddard, two leading pseudo-scientists of the day. Their work portrays a world engulfed in a continuing racial war, with the "Nordic" high race besieged by both lesser whites and colored peoples of the world. According to Stoddard, the world's progress hinges on the continuing dominance of the white race. "If white civilizati on goes down, the white race is irretrievably ruined . . . carrying with it to the grave those potencies upon which realization of man's highest hope depends."[37]
Much of Mead's writing parallels the sentiments of Grant and Stoddard. Speaking of the origin-al (white) immigrants to California, Mead writes, "They were people whose morals and standards of living made their children men and women of strength and beaut y. The good looks of the descendants of American pioneers . . . had their origin in both ancestry and right living."[38] In Helping Men Own Farms, Mead calls these immigrants, "The finest type of American citizen this n ation had produced. . . . A citizen first, a money maker second."[39] In contrast to the socially oriented, moral character of California's first immigrants, new immigrants from Eastern Asia and peasants from Southern and Eastern Europe had no interest in becoming part of the existing society.
There have been growing up in California tenant communities made up entirely of Asiatics or of peasants from those portions of Europe where life is sordid and the standards of living are low. These tenants have no interest in community n eeds. They maintain their racial indifference and aloofness. They are not a contribution to our political and social strength.[40] Through their domination of rural society, these new immigrants had the ability to destroy the yeoman ideal, putting in its place the rural structure of their own nations.
These people are separated by language from each other and from the past ideals and standards of American rural life. . . . If some of these backward, emotional, unstable peoples are left to herd alone, they will not be lifted up to American standards, bu t the standards of poorer countries will be established here.[41]
Edwin Cox illustrated the spread of Japanese tenant leases throughout California, noting they had increased from 80,000 acres in 1912 to 115,000 acres in 1914 to 169,200 acres in 1916. Studying a Japanese tenant camp in the Sacramento De lta, he ominously stated that among the thirty to forty Japanese women in the camp "every one has a baby each year."[42] In a 1920 interview, Mead agreed that the rapid spread of Asians and peasant Europeans was an immediate threat to Ca lifornia's stability:
There are sections [in California] now which include people from every country in Southern Europe and nearly all of Asia. If they intermarry what will the mongrel descendants be like? What they are in South America we know. They have be en described as "unhappy beings, every cell of whose bodies is a battle ground of joining heredities who express their souls in acts of hectic violence and aimless instability." If they do not intermarry, then each of our great valleys will be the home of racial friction which will make the Balkans seem like a prayer meeting.[43]While Mead and his followers never went so far as Stoddard proclaiming open racial warfare, they clearly believed that American society was endangered by the threat of "lesser" peoples controlling American agriculture. They used that threat to stress the urgency for expansion of their project. "If the preservation of a white democracy forbids the importation of Asiatic labor, other means must be found to keep the farmer on the land, to increase his numbers and to help him get his work do ne. . . . Do not think, for a moment, that his need is not the concern of all of us, town and country alike."[44]The Board's selected community was consistent with its professed attitudes toward "foreign" cultures within rural society. If, as according to Mead, "Good people were driven out by cheaper people just as good money drives out bad money, "[45] a cooperative community required an over-whelming majority of "good people." The 1920 Census indicated the "good people" selected to populate the Durham colony. Seventy-two percent (121 of 167) of the adult family heads and their w ives in the Durham colony were at least third-generation American citizens, with both parents born in the United States. Another nineteen percent (32 of 167) were born in the United States with one or two foreign-born parents. Only eight percent were fore ign-born; of the fourteen people making up the eight percent, only one was born in a country considered "non-Nordic."[46] The one "non-Nordic" member of the community, Domingo Galves, a native of Chile, was singled out by Mead to illustr ate the effectiveness of the colony as an agent of assimilation. "This mingling with his fellowmen has made a good American out of [Galves] who before that had drifted over the country with no social ties or political ties. He along with all the settlers, loves California for its interest in their daily lives, for what it has done for them."[47] Whether applicants with ethnic heritage other than old-stock American or Northern European were uniformly rejected or whether they did not apply due to the rhetoric of the promotional material, the Durham colony consisted almost exclusively of people of Northern European ethnic heritage. According to this measure, Mead's plan was successful at one of its professed goals: the pop ulation of rural California with a profita-ble, white population. According to the proponents of Mead's plan, the political stability of the nation, as well as its social stability, depended upon the farmers. Walter Woehlke condensed this vision of the Du rham colony in his profile for Sunset Magazine:
The place was all cleared and every inch was producing. The cow, a pure bred Holstein, had a calf; in the pen a healthy litter of Duroc Jersey pigs waited expectantly for the skim milk; a triumphant hen loudly told the world her disappro val of race suicide. The youngsters romped on the lawn in front of the house, climbed over the piles of cobblestones that were to form the ornamental gate posts for the neat green-and-white fence.[48]For its creators and supporters, Durham reinvigorated rural society with a rebirth of profitable family farms, run by familiar, stable pillars of society.Much like the Progressive Era itself, the Durham colony arose from a complex combination of attitudes and beliefs. Strains of many different historical developments appeared in the organiza-tion and settlement of the colony. Engineers and expert managers , like Elwood Mead, dedicated to a stable social vision, took leadership in developing a settlement that reflected their values of rationality and efficiency. Mead's procedure in creating the colony illustrated the patterns Samuel Hays found characteristi c of progressive conservation movements. Hays' initial step involved knowledge and classification of the resources in a project. With solid knowledge of the capabilities and uses of the resources, operational priorities were established while the conditions of resource use were carefully regulated by a central entity, able to make rapid, efficient evaluations.[49] Mead brought in experts to study Durham's soil and established farm plots according to the soil's capacity. With the plots established, rapidly putting land into production became Mead's central concern, a priority he urged above all else, including the construction of permanent shelter. Finally, the Land Settlement Board controlled how every settler cultivate d his land and held the ability to remove settlers if their performance did not meet the standards established by the Board. Hays' and Wiebe's concepts of professionalization and of a management boldly acting to create a stable planned society, effectivel y illuminate many facets of the Durham settlement's development.
This approach, however, fails to explain fully some significant elements in this example. While Mead as a member of the professional class was confident and aggressive, he seemed more concerned with the eclipse of the society of his childhood, with the i deal of the "agrarian myth." In many ways, Mead's thought appears characteristic of Richard Hofstadter's old and often challenged notion of the progressives as a displaced and fading elite, anxious over loss of social stature. Mead was driven by a fading agrarian vision and a fear that the yeoman lifestyle would be forever lost in an America that was rapidly urbanizing and industrializing. He agonized over the destructive effect immigration was having on his vision of society, filling the country with peo ple unable or unwilling to be "Americans." However, Mead's anxiety did not prevent him from conceiving solu-tions that contained dynamic, progressive elements such as mortgage reform and extensive government intervention. While Hofstadter's theses of the agrarian myth and elite anxiety help to explain Mead's motivation, the approach of Hays and Wiebe better accounts for the new methods and solutions proposed by Mead.
Perhaps Durham should not be understood as an example of a greater movement, but as characteristic of a region. The proper perspective for Durham must encompass its peculiar, Western characteristics. Durham illustrates Donald Pisani's conception of irrig ation as a tool of social redress but indicates that the social vision of the irrigation promoters reacted to the presence of new elements within Western society. Irrigation promoters utilized the progressives's anxiety over the influx of peasant European s and especially Asians to gain agency to engage in social engineer-ing. Durham also indicates how the social values of a particular strain of irrigation reform promoted the concentration of power. While the legislature approved the plan proposed by the C ommission on Colonization and Rural Credits, power in the colony came to rest solely in the hands of social engineers who neither required, nor sought, council with the settlers. By attempting to create an entity that would buy and settle massive amounts of land according to its own standards, Mead attempted to establish control over land settlement and water management that reached beyond the control of the electorate. However, his attempt to create a financially self-sufficient board failed. In the 1920 s, a referendum sponsored by Mead to sell state bonds in order to continue the state colonization process was soundly defeated.
Durham is perhaps best understood as an exercise in the legitimation of expert management. Mead and his supporters argued that only experts such as they could provide the stability needed for a healthy (that is, economically productive and socially stabl e) society. Reflecting two dominant attitudes in white Western society during the period, they evoked the nobility of the small farmer while demonizing the unfamiliar cultures of Asian and Southern and Eastern Euro-pean immigrants as a danger to society. While their methods of manufacturing yeomen through regimentation were unsuccessful, and likely unpleasant for those who experienced the constant surveillance of Superintendent Kreutzer, Mead and his followers illustrated the continuing Western struggle t o control both resources and society.
Finally, Durham represented repeated government efforts to encourage the growth of a rural population. Throughout the Progressive Era, leaders from Francis Newlands to Elwood Mead believed small farmers and rural community to be a source of conservatism and social stability. They hoped to use technological means and government management to establish a society based on republican principles. With the agricultural depression following World War I, government-spon-sored studies increasingly determined that much of American's rural population was superfluous. As Harry McDean has illustrated, social scientists attempted to identify "pathological farm areas," areas which could not be farmed profitably. They concluded that "a heavy out-migrat ion of the poor, unprogressive farmers was the foundation upon which to build any sensible federal policy for agriculture."[50] This out-migration was intended to remove the pressure of the high number of small farmers and consolidate la nd into the hands of successful farmers. The creation of Elwood Mead's Durham colony exhibited a very different understanding of the nature of rural society than that of the social scientists that followed in the twenties. While later social scientists co nsidered rural America a continuing source of economic instability and attempted to identify those farmers destined to fail, Mead viewed rural society as the vital control over an otherwise unmanageable society. Mead attempted to engineer a rural center o f racial and social solidarity. His attempt, the Durham colony, exhibited a paradoxical mixture of nostalgia for an idealized, homogenous rural America and confidence in the ability of technology and management to re-establish that society.
Endnotes
1 Francis G. Newlands, The Public Papers of Francis G. Newlands, edited by Arthur B. Darling, vol. 1 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1932), 64. Return to essay2 S. M. Fitts, Yolo County, California, to State Commission on Colonization and Rural Credits, Sacramento, California, Typewritten letter signed 15 October 1915, Elwood Mead Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkel ey. Return to essay
3 Numerous settler questionnaires and letters to the State Commission. Mead Papers, Bancroft Library. Return to essay
4 California State Commission on Land Colonization and Rural Credits, Report of the Commission on Land Colonization and Rural Credits of the State of California. November 29, 1916 (Sacramento: California State Printing Office, 1916) , 7, 14. Return to essay
5 Ibid., 28. Return to essay
6 Carey McWilliams, Factories in the Field: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in California (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1939), 205, 210; Cletus E. Daniel, Bitter Harvest: A History of California Farmworkers, 1870-1941 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 100. Return to essay
7 Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 51. Return to essay
8 Norris Hundley, Jr., The Great Thirst: Californians and Water, 1770s-1990s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), xvi. Return to essay
9 Donald J. Pisani, From the Family Farm to Agribusiness: The Irrigation Crusade in California and the West, 1850-1931 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). Return to essay
10 James R. Kluger, Turning on Water with a Shovel: The Career of Elwood Mead (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992). Return to essay
11 Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967); Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959); Edwin T. Layton, Jr., The Revolt of the Engineers: Social Responsibility and the American Engineering Profession (Cleveland: The Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1971). Return to essay
12 Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1987), 23, 27. Return to essay
13 Kluger, 14-73. Return to essay
14 Mead, "Solution of the Land Question," The New Republic 6 (April 29, 1916): 348-49; Kluger, 87-88. Return to essay
15 Kluger, 89. Return to essay
16 Elwood Mead, Helping Men Own Farms: A Practical Discussion of Government Aid in Land Settlement (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1920), 25; Land Settlement Board of the State of California, Farm Allotments and Farm Laborers ' Allotments in the Durham Land Settlement (Sacramento: California State Printing Office, 1918), 1. Return to essay
Table 1. Average Land Price per Acre by Region, in Dollars _________________________________________________________________ Land Improved Land Unimproved Land _________________________________________________________________ North Atlantic 64.30 38.71 South Atlantic 38.02 23.79 North Central (east of Mississippi) 100.67 74.95 North Central (west of Mississippi) 78.21 59.68 South Central 33.38 24.09 Far West 102.58 58.40 California 180.00 110.00 _________________________________________________________________Source: California Commission on Land Colonization (1916), 18.
Return to essay18 California Commission on Land Colonization and Rural Credits, 54, 56. Return to essay
19 Kluger, 87. Return to essay
20 Elwood Mead, How California is Helping People Own Farms and Rural Homes (Berkeley: University of California, School of Agriculture, 1920), 14; Farm Allotments and Farm Laborers' Allotments in the Durham State Land Settlement , 3. Return to essay
21 California State Land Settlement Board, Information Regarding Progress Under the Land Settlement Act of the State of California and About the Plans for Solider Settlement in the Future (Sacramento: California State Printing Offi ce, 1919), 4. Return to essay
22 Herbert Easton, Some Particulars of the Durham, California Community Land Settlement by Herbert E. Easton, Hon. Secretary, British Immigration League, Who Went Over the Area in November 1919, Typewritten Manuscript, Bancroft Li brary, University of California, Berkeley. Return to essay
23 Farm Allotments and Farm Laborers' Allotments in the Durham State Land Settlement, 5. Return to essay
24 Helping Men Own Farms, 178. Return to essay
25 Ibid., 77-78. Return to essay
26 Various letters in the Mead-Kreutzer correspondence file, Mead Papers, Bancroft Library. Return to essay
27 Walter V. Woehlke, "Food First: How One Western State is Staking the Farmers: The Question of White or Yellow Bread," Sunset 45 (October 1920),:36. Return to essay
28 Helping Men Own Farms, 117. Return to essay
29 Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York: Albert A. Knopf, 1955), 24-25. Return to essay
30 Mead, Berkeley, California to E. E. Roddis, U. S. Reclamation Service, Washington, D. C., TL, 15 July 1915, Elwood Mead Papers, Water Resources Center Archives, University of California, Berkeley. Return to essay< /a>
31 Report of the Central Board of Review on the Carlsbad Project, New Mexico," The Reclamation Record 7 (July 1916), 300, Mead Papers, Water Resources Center Archives. Return to essay
32 Mead, to G. M. King, Secretary, San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, TL, 8 June 1917, Mead Papers, Water Resources Center Archives. Return to essay
33 Helping Men Own Farms, 198. Return to essay
34 How California Is Helping People Own Farms and Rural Homes, 15. Return to essay
35 George Kreutzer, "Needed, A National Land Policy," TMs, Mead Papers, Water Resources Center Archives, 1. Return to essay
36 Edwin A. Cox, "Farm Tenantry in California," TMs, Mead Papers, Water Resources Center Archives, 5. Return to essay
37 Theodore Lothrop Stoddard, The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-Man (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1920.), 303-4; see Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Atheneum, 1992), Chapter 6, for a discussion of the work of Stoddard and Grant. Return to essay
38 How California Is Helping People Own Farms and Rural Homes, 16. Return to essay
39 Helping Men Own Farms, 5. Return to essay
40 California Commission on Land Colonization and Rural Credits, 52. Return to essay
41 How California Is Helping People Own Farms and Rural Homes, 17. Return to essay
42 Cox, 3. Return to essay
43 Woehlke, 37. Return to essay
44 Ibid., 38. Return to essay
45 How California is Helping People Own Farms and Rural Homes, 13. Return to essay
46 United States Census Bureau, 14th Census of Population, 1920, Census questionnaire, (Washington DC: U.S. Census Bureau, 1920, 1992), Microfilm Reel 96, 165-169. The foreign-born population consisted of 4 Danes, 2 Swedes, 4 Irish men, 1 Englishman, 1 Canadian, and 1 Chilean. Return to essay
47 How California is Helping People Own Farms and Rural Homes, 12. Return to essay
48 Woehlke, 9. Return to essay
49 Hays, 69-72. Return to essay
50 Harry C. McDean, "Social Scientists and Farm Poverty on the North American Plains, 1933-1940," Great Plains Quarterly 4 (Winter 1983): 21. Return to essay