On this day in 1933, about 350 farm workers gathered in the small central California town of Pixley to listen to Pat Chambers, a 33-year-old Irish-American Communist union organizer. Chambers’s union, the Cannery and Agricultural Workers International Union, was coordinating the largest farmworker strike in U.S. history up to that point: a walkout by 20,000 mostly Mexican cotton pickers up and down the Central Valley to protest wages as low as ten cents an hour.
The young organizer, who was still recovering from a broken jaw he suffered from a vigilante attack in a recent strike, stood on a truck bed, urging the workers to remain non-violent, but to protect themselves if they were attacked. As Chambers spoke, a caravan of cars and trucks filled with forty growers roared into town and pulled up behind them. The men spilled out of the cars, brandishing pistols, rifles, and shotguns. Chambers told the men, women, and children to move into the union headquarters across the street.
As the workers and their families rushed to the safety of the building, the growers pursued them. When one grower fired his weapon into the air, a striker angrily approached him and shoved his rifle barrel to the ground. Another grower began beating the striker, and then shot him dead. The vigilantes emptied their weapons into the fleeing crowd, killing two workers and wounding eight. Mobs killed another striker in the town of Arvin that same day.
The violence that day was not unusual for the California fields. Infuriated by the increasing militancy of workers during the Great Depression, California growers and their allies responded with mob violence and official repression. Up and down the state, vigilantes beat pickets with axe handles and clubs, raked them with fire hoses, and smothered them with tear gas. Police arrested strikers for vagrancy or loitering, federal officials cut off their relief payments, and landlords evicted their families. Carey McWilliams used the term “farm fascism” to describe the response of corporate growers to the unionization of their workers. In this dangerous atmosphere, only the Communists were willing to organize California’s field workers. As one AFL organizer said, “only fanatics are willing to live in shacks or tents and get their heads broken in the interests of migratory laborers.”
Although federal mediators forced the cotton growers to raise wages, there was still no justice on California’s factory farms. After a local jury quickly acquitted the men charged with the Pixley killings, California officials then proceeded to decapitate the union, charging Chambers and 16 other union leaders with violating the state’s criminal syndicalism law. Chambers went to San Quentin for his sins, but an appeals court set him free in 1937. California farm workers were not so lucky: they would have to labor under miserable conditions until the 1960s, when Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers helped them win some protections and the right to unionize.
The Edge of the American West 
9 comments
October 10, 2009 at 12:16 pm
Mike
This sounds an awful lot like Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle. I have always seen that novel linked to a fruit pickers’ strike in Watsonville, but I wonder if this incident is a more likely source?
October 10, 2009 at 12:25 pm
Mario
Do we think Pixley was named after Frank Pixley of San Francisco? A quick google search seems to think so, but that’s far from conclusive.
If so, it’s a fascinating instance of the name of a place later intersecting with the events that happen there. Frank Pixley was a great anti-Chinese racist; and the early unions were (at least in California) formed as white laborers’ groups. As for Pixley himself, I quote from Jean Pfaelzer’s fantastic Driven Out: The Forgotten War against Chinese Americans:
“Police officers, diplomats, clergy, doctors, and anti-Chinese leaders led the witness list for the hearings. Frank Pixley, former California state attorney general and a leader of the Anti-Coolie Union, testified that he longed to stand on Telegraph Hill and watch Chinese hang from the yardarms of burning immigrant ships entering San Francisco Bay.” (Pfaelzer, Driven Out, p. 76)
October 10, 2009 at 1:42 pm
Sir Charles
I thought it was the unions that were violent and used goons.
I learn something new at EOTAW every day.
October 10, 2009 at 2:36 pm
kathy a.
this was just one violent incident involving farm workers being attacked by large agricultural interests. conditions were awful for the workers all through the 1930’s, and as kathy notes, for ensuing decades. even back then, the family farm was well on its way out, and much farming was controlled by large land holders, who were also politically very powerful.
steinbeck could have been aware of this particular incident in pixley. it happened not far from arvin, which was the location of a federal workers’ camp and the model for such a camp as depicted in the grapes of wrath. but steinbeck grew up in salinas and lived much of his adult life in the monterey area, not far from watsonville, and probably knew of stories from that area. the salinas valley is not nearly as large as the central valley, but is a rich agricultural area. workers there faced the same huge disparity in power vis a vis agricultural landholders.
October 10, 2009 at 5:47 pm
Kathy
Mario — thanks for the tip on Pixley. That’s an interesting connection.
And, regarding Steinbeck, yep, these were apparently the events he was writing about. I’m doing some research on that right now….
October 10, 2009 at 6:46 pm
K
So Pixley is, what, about 40-45 miles from Selma, about which Victor Hansen Davis has such fond recollections.
October 11, 2009 at 7:21 am
politicalfootball
Carey McWilliams used the term “farm fascism”
It’s like he never even heard of Godwin.
October 11, 2009 at 7:05 pm
Vance
How are the farm workers doing these days? Have the gains of Chavez’s day been lost?
October 12, 2009 at 1:25 pm
Don
Did Sir Charles ever read about the miner strikes during the late 1800’s? I seem to recall the goons entered tent cities of the workers with every firearm from pistols to rifles to machine guns as they eliminated the union scum.