CALIFORNIA & THE FICTIONS OF CAPITAL CALIFORNIA & THE FICTIONS OF CAPITAL George L. Henderson New York Oxford Oxford University Press 1999 135798642 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Oxford University Press Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogotá Buenos Aires Calcutta Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Paris São Paulo Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Copyright © 1999 by George L. Henderson Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Henderson, George L., 1958– California and the fictions of capital / George L. Henderson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-19-510890-6 1. American literature—California—History and criticism. 2. Capitalism and literature—California. 3. California—Historical geography. 4. California—Economic conditions. 5. Capital— California—History. I. Title. PS283.C2H46 1999 810.9'32794—dc21 97-52308 Contents Introduction: The Alchemy of Capital and Nature ix Why the Late Nineteenth-Century Countryside? xii The Discourse of Rural Realism xiii Why Rural Realism, Why the Novel? xv Stalking the Interdisciplinary Wilds xvii Reference Maps xxi PART I Making Geographies 1 Rural Commodity Regimes: A Primer 3 The Logics and Illogics of Production: The Shift to and out of Grain 4 The Regime of Specialty Crops 7 A Wider Division of Labor: The Country in the City 18 2 Nature and Fictitious Capital: The Circulation of Money Capital 28 Capitalism and Nature: The Agrarian Nexus 28 Axis One: The Mann-Dickinson Thesis, Nature as Obstacle 30 Axis Two: Exploiting the Natural Obstacle 32 Keeping Capitalism Out or Letting Capital In? Marx on Circulation 34 Blurred Boundaries and Fugitive Bodies 38 Nature and Circulation 42 Capital, Nature, and the Space-Time of Agro-Credits in the United States 44 Capital, Nature, and the Space-Time of Agro-Credits in California 52 Conclusion: Reading the Landscape of Fictitious Capital 77 vi INTRODUCTION 3 Toward Rural Realism: Variable Capital, Variable Capitalists, 81 and the Fictions of Capital The Way to Get Farm Labor? 81 The Ever-New, Ever-Same, 1: Continuity of Wage Labor and Changes in the Wage Labor Market 83 The Ever-New, Ever Same, 2: Resistance and Reaction 87 Racializing the Working Body and Multicultural Racism 90 Toward Rural Realism: An Agrarianism without Illusions? 96 Variable Capitalists All: Capitalist Laborers and the Fictions of Capital in Country and City 104 Coda: The Labor of Fiction 112 PART II Excavating Geographical Imaginations Introduction 115 Many Countrysides 115 The Trials of Capital and Narratives of Social Space 118 The Narrative of Social Space in Rural Realism 121 4 Mussel Slough and the Contradictions of Squatter Capitalism 123 The Commodification of Mussel Slough: Railroad, Speculators, and Squatters Converge in the Tulare Basin 125 Blood-Money and the Anatomy of Development 130 The Country and the City: From Transgression to Similitude 137 The Octopus and the Bourgeois Sublime 139 Bourgeois Discourse and the Uses of Nature 148 5 Realty Redux: Landscapes of Boom and Bust 150 in Southern California Where Is Southern California? 150 From Ranchos to Real Estate 152 The Boom of the 1880s 154 The Southern California Boom Novel 160 Conclusion: Production, a Necessary Evil 173 6 Romancing the Sand: Earth-Capital and Desire 175 in the Imperial Valley The Problem 175 Engineers and Entrepreneurs 176 Producing the Imperial Valley 178 What a Difference a Flood Makes 179 Imperial Valley Representations, 1: Promotion and Its (Dis)Contents 181 Imperial Valley Representations, 2: The Winning of Barbara Worth and the Erotics of Western Conquest 182 Conclusion: Engineering Rural Realism 193 vi CONTENTS INTRODUCTION vii 7 Take Me to the River: Water, Metropolitan Growth, 196 and the Countryside Designer Ducts 196 Los Angeles and the Owens Valley 198 San Francisco and Hetch Hetchy Valley 200 Rural Eclipse: The Water-Bearer and The Ford 204 Wither Rural Realism? 213 Conclusion 215 Notes 219 References 235 Index 251 CONTENTS vii D. W. Griffith, “A Corner in Wheat” (1909). (Courtesy of Kino Film International Corporation.) Introduction The Alchemy of Capital and Nature Though he was already dead, Frank Norris had a good year in 1909. His epic novel The Octopus (1901) was brought to the screen by visionary film artist D. W. Griffith—no other filmmaker has touched it since. Titled “A Corner in Wheat,” the film is a confident, bare-bones distillation of the novel’s hundreds of pages into fewer than fifteen minutes of viewing time. It is of course no substitute for the original, a point compounded by the fact that Griffith drew on a second Norris novel, The Pit (1903), also a rather long book. Griffith’s work is such a treat for Norris’s readers because it superbly confirms that Norris was an expert craftsmen of signature tableaux, devices that regularly punctuated his narratives and that allowed him to tie together the worlds of meaning he had been summoning up. Of several exemplary scenes that structure the two novels, one from The Octopus was perhaps guaranteed to be filmed. This was an especially macabre sequence involving a conniving grain speculator, who is destined for live burial under the tons of wheat he has amassed. Thrashing about in a pelting rain of wheat, chok- ing on grain dust, and trying desperately to stay alive, he inevitably succumbs. The wheat continues to pile up around him, until only one hand is able to poke through in a final, gruesome salute. In Norris’s hands, the speculator, also an urban sophisticate, has tumbled into the hull of a ship while the wheat was being loaded. In the film, he happened to have plummeted to the bottom of a grain silo. But no matter the difference in detail, the scene is a brilliant summation of the novel’s back and forth movements between San Francisco and its startlingly productive hinterland, the San Joaquin Valley. As such, it establishes a host of disquieting themes and questions. For one thing, here is a man who has been profiting without producing: What sort of economy could properly allow that? Who could call watching the ticker tape “work,” and why, up to the point of the speculator’s demise, should it have brought such riches? But assuming this man is actually a legitimate creation of ix x INTRODUCTION his economic environment, and yet still he comes to an untimely end, what sort of economy would eat its own progeny? Does it need people like this, or want to do away with them? Perhaps both. Or first one and then the other. For the sake of the overall good of the economic machinery, perhaps the machine must kill a portion of itself in order to move on. But move on where? Where did it come from in the first place and what will be its wellspring in the future? The urban sophis- ticate, for example, apparently specialized in things “rural.” Was he out of his element, or was the polis the uncontested master of a far-flung geography? Maybe the rural is best served by suffering the whims of urban capital and urban aspira- tions. Or, perhaps we have it reversed; it’s the wheat that has its grasp on the speculator. It’s rural economy, not urban whims, that make time and place en- dure, that create wealth, settle populations, and build cities. But what is it about rural economy that offers attractions to capital and its circuits? And on what basis would this appeal last? The kicker is that all these seemingly disparate entities—the speculator versus his wheat, finance versus production, city versus country—are far more alike than one might think at first. Speculative profits tend toward the unpredictable, but so too does the rural economy. Agricultural production is notoriously sporadic. Bumper crops are followed by lean years, while, in any one year, late frosts or torrential storms may stunt the harvest: The inconsistencies are legion. Specula- tors are compulsive and so is nature. What initially seems like the clash of oppo- sites in Norris’s story, therefore, is better read as the complementary energies of regional political economy. Somehow, casualties aside, the rhythms of capital and the rhythms of nature find each other. It is no stretch, then, to say that lurking behind the image of the speculator’s death in the wheat, there is more than a hint that conditions transcend this one individual. The speculator is not just a speculator, nor the harvest just a pile of grain. When there are speculators, there must be something speculative about economy itself. And when this character drowns in the harvest, there must be something risky about nature that needs to be taken into account. (In fact, one truth behind the mass of grain is that the soil has been mined of its nutrients.) The point, it would seem, is that capital and nature are webs of constraint and confinement that must be carefully recast as fields of opportunity. To be sure, the resulting alchemy can be as volatile as it can be profitable. In California, these are old and defining themes, nature and capital. Most fa- mously, they began with gold. Or rather when the gold gave out—for post Gold Rush California clarifies what those few heady years were all about. When the placers grew scarce and the hoses that flushed the Sierra hillsides of their riches grew flaccid, the unity of money and nature in California (what gold most essen- tially was) was rent asunder, ensuring that desire for more of that unity held fast. This book focuses on the period during which pride of place and visions of al- chemy next came to agriculture, 1 and did so by virtue of an enveloping capitalist economy. A major arena of emphasis here is how—as a desired end—the capi- talist transformation of California was narrated and represented, by whom and through what rhetorical means. The result is a work of historical geography, poli- tical economy, and literary criticism. Some of what I have written about here is taken for granted now, especially the explosive growth of irrigation and the fantastic levels of California’s farm [...]... an d Cities of Californ ia (Cou rtesy of Tin a Esp in oza) xxiv REFERENCE MAPS 0 100 Miles Ap p roxim ate Location of Irrigated Areas of Californ ia, 1900 (Cou rtesy of Tin a Esp in oza) REFERENCE MAPS 0 xxv 100 Miles Ap p roxim ate Location of Irrigated Areas of Californ ia, 1920 (Cou rtesy of Tin a Esp in oza) xxvi REFERENCE MAPS 0 100 Miles Ap p roxim ate Location of Irrigated Areas of Californ... estw ard tilt of fin an ce cap ital an d th e d evelop m en t of som e of th e m ost sop h isticated fin an cial stru ctu res of th e early-tw en tieth -cen tu ry Un ited States Th at is, if n atu re p osed an obstacle to on e faction of cap ital, as ru ral sociologists Man n an d Dickin son (1978) in sist, oth er faction s of cap ital, w h ose earn in gs w ere based on th e ap p rop riation of valu es... licity of lan d scap e” (Dan iels 1987) Th at is, th ey w ere n ot taken in by th e aesth etic p leasu res of th e ru ral to th e exten t of m issin g INTRO DUCTIO N xv th e fact th at th e ru ral w as th e scen e of som e of th e m ost sop h isticated (an d for th em , su blim e) m an ip u lation s of cap ital On e ou gh t n ot read , for exam p le, Sarah Orn e Jew ett’s Main e id yll, T h e Cou n try of. .. reach es of th e San Joaqu in Valley, w h ere h e cam e to ow n a 100-m ile sw ath of lan d on both sid es of th e San Joaqu in River By th e tim e of Miller’s d eath in 1916, h is Californ ia h old in gs n u m bered 1.25 m illion acres, m ost of th em in th e San Joaqu in Valley (Bean 1968) Lloyd Tevis an d Jam es Ben Ali Haggin w ere tw o oth er exem p lars of th e go-go years Tevis (p resid en t of Wells... low ed th eir p rofits in to th e fertile lan d s of th e San Joaqu in Valley, Sou th ern Californ ia, an d th e Im p erial Valley Bu t, in tu rn , each of th ese region s gen erated its ow n tu rn over an d rein vested it locally A p ortion of th ese in vestm en ts, both local an d n ot, w ere d irected at th e d evelop m en t of irrigated agricu ltu re Irrigation gen erated a fon t of w ealth an d... attern Californ ia an d th e Fiction s of Cap ital is th erefore by n ecessity a w ork of h ybrid sch olarsh ip Th at it h as d ep en d ed on th e fin d in gs an d in sigh ts of d iscip lin es oth er th an m y ow n field of geograp h y h as m ad e for a h igh ly en joyable ven tu re, w h ile of cou rse su ggestin g to m e m an y tim es th e cu m bersom e n atu re of acad em ic d ep artm en talization... l to th e Dep artm en t of Geograp h y at Colgate Un iversity for very gen erou sly allow in g m e u se of an office an d com p u tin g facilities A Sm all Gran t from th e Un iversity of Arizon a’s Social an d Beh avioral Scien ces Research In stitu te allow ed on e m ore su m m er research trip to Californ ia Th en an d on m an y oth er occasion s th e staff of th e Ban croft Library h as been kin... ave in m in d is th e fabrication of a d iscou rse th at d ep icted , su bserved , an d resp on d ed to th e rh yth m s of th e circu lation of cap ital th rou gh th e cou n trysid e Arisin g from th at im p u lse, ru ral realism w as th e am algam ation of ch aracters, p lots, settin gs, an d n arrator voices m obilized for th e p u rp ose of totalizin g th e id eals of th e liberal cap italist m arket... sifyin g brew of ru ral com m od ity p rod u ction an d in n ovation No sin gle essay can d o an yth in g n ear ju stice to th e story of th ese com m od ity revolu tion s Th e p oin t of th is ch ap ter is to sim p ly tease ou t for u n fam iliar read ers a th u m bn ail sketch of ru ral Californ ia’s com m od ity h istory th rou gh d iscu ssion of its m ajor featu res—th e sh ift to an d ou t of w h eat;... of w h eat; large-scale an d som etim es h yp ercom m od ified ap p rop riation s of lan d an d w ater; th e rise of h igh -valu e sp ecialty crop s an d th e econ om y of lan d su bd ivision ; th e p roblem of m arkets; th e u n even d evelop m en t of th e irrigation ap p aratu s; an d th e w id er social d ivision of labor, 3 4 MAKING GEO GRAPHIES w h ich con n ected ru ral an d u rban econ om ies . on the collapse of the Comstock and the Bank of California in the mid 1870s, and others on the legal proscription of hydraulic mining in 1884. The important point is that after the decline of. 3 The Logics and Illogics of Production: The Shift to and out of Grain 4 The Regime of Specialty Crops 7 A Wider Division of Labor: The Country in the City 18 2 Nature and Fictitious Capital: The. study of these novels and of Califor- nia is the very phenomenon with which the writings themselves are concerned: social and geographical processes of uneven development and the circulation of capital.