--Los Angeles, July 15

1. TERROR has broken out into the open again in California, the state nearest to the setting sun and organized "fascism from above." In the Eureka lumber strike two workers have been slain and scores wounded; in San Pedro Fred Friedl, an official of an A. F. of L. maritime union, was slain by police in ambush, and open street riots occurred after his death. The waterfront situation is tense in San Diego, San Pedro, and San Francisco, with every indication that a showdown on a vast scale is imminent. The state is full of propaganda organizations, such as the reorganized Crusaders, now engaged in spying on relief workers, and the New Order of Cincinnatus. The secret militaristic bodies, such as the Berkeley Nationals and the California Cavaliers, are growing fast. The state itself is arming: the California Naval Militia has been recruited by an intensive radio campaign, and the California Marine Militia is in formation. Both of these militia organizations will be commanded by the regular adjunct general of the National Guard; they constitute, in effect, an indirect attempt to increase the strike-breaking armed forces of the state. The resurgence of terror in California blasts the cheerful assumption of many liberals that oppression on the West Coast has been relaxing, that the terror has been beaten back by a wave of popular repudiation, and that fascist violence is a phenomenon of the past.

2. It is true that since the conclusion of the criminal-syndicalism trial in Sacramento California has been outwardly calm. The sun shines, the highways are not barricaded, and an EPIC bloc in the legislature encourages the liberals to think that a better day is dawning. But this calm does not augur peace. The period is one of transition from sporadic vigilante activity to controlled fascism, from the clumsy violence of drunken farmers to the calculated maneuvers of an economic-militaristic machine. For the time being the vigilante outrages of 1934 have somewhat abated, but terror-a cold and tightening terror-is everywhere discernible. It is the terror of preparation-violence in embryo. In no phase of the industrial life of the state is this type of terror more clearly reflected than in agriculture, the state's chief industry; and the situation in the field does not differ substantially from that on the waterfront or in the factories and mines. A highly industrialized, heavily capitalized agriculture is mobilizing for action. "We don't want any trouble," is the phrase of the hour, "but we insist on harvesting our crops."

3. The sort of preparation now being carried on is illustrated by the activities of the Associated Farmers, an organization notorious for the part it played in the agricultural strikes of 1933-34 and in the recent criminal-syndicalism trial in Sacramento, which was, of course, a judicial manhunt directed against the leaders of the Cannery and Agricultural Workers' Industrial Union. The San Francisco headquarters of the Associated Farmers maintains an elaborate espionage system. At present its file on "dangerous radicals" contains approximately 1,000 names, alphabetically arranged, with front- and side-view photographs of each individual indexed, and, on the reverse side of the card, biographical information, including notations of arrests, strike activities, affiliations, and a reference to a corresponding number in the archives of the State Bureau of Criminal Identification. Sets of this file have already been distributed to more than a hundred police officers in the state, and a selected list has been sent to members of the association so that they will be able to identify radicals in their communities. Incidentally, the State Bureau of Criminal Identification is closely affiliated with the Associated Farmers, deputies from the bureau frequently working in the field in cooperation with agents of the association. The state bureau had its private investigators sleuthing for the Tagus Ranch in the San Joaquin Valley; it employed, at one time or another, the various stool pigeons upon whose testimony the several defendants in the recent Sacramento trial were convicted.

4. The Associated Farmers maintain a smoothly functioning propaganda machine. Press releases are issued regularly and members of the organization receive confidential bulletins, some of which are interesting. They explain the operations of the Communist Party, coach members on strikebreaking strategy, point with pride to convictions in radical cases, digest the reports of stool pigeons, quote with approval such comment as that of John Lawrence Seymour, the California composer, that "a planned invasion of America's cultural sources by Communist propaganda is obvious," and encourage the drive toward fascism in the law. In a bulletin issued on March 22, 1935, Judge Dal M. Lemmon, who presided at the Sacramento trial, was congratulated on having instituted a "speed-up" system against the defense, and members of the association were urged to be in constant attendance at the trial. The association has regular radio time. It has four branch offices and it maintains in addition a representative in every county of the state. It is also closely affiliated with the state and local chambers of commerce.

5. It is interesting to note that Associated Farmers is not, strictly speaking, a farmers' organization. The committee appointed to raise funds for the organization consisted of an executive of the Pacific Gas and Electric Company, a representative of the Industrial Association of San Francisco, an executive of the California Packing Association, and a representative of the California Farm Bureau. At the organization meeting at Fresno on May 7, S. Parker Frisselle told those present that the "bankers, shippers, and oil companies" would raise the necessary funds, and also explained that the "farm" label was adopted so that the organization would "carry more weight with the public." Fruit exchanges, packing houses, and shipper-grower organizations, all contribute to the treasury. In the strikes in the Imperial Valley in 1934 Eastern banking interests are reported to have indemnified the farmers for the loss of unharvested crops in order that the strike activities of the Cannery and Agricultural Workers' Industrial Union might be crushed. Moreover, Associated Farmers is closely affiliated with local grower-shipper organizations throughout the state. The California Cavaliers, a semi-secret anti-labor organization, was formed in Sacramento last February at the suggestion of the Associated Farmers. "We aren't going to stand for any more of these organizers from now on," to quote from a statement of Herman Cottrell, a peach grower, in the Sacramento flee, "and anyone who peeps about higher wages will wish he hadn't."

6. Organized terrorism in agriculture is producing a system of peonage. By the use of elaborate identification records the growers make the workers conscious that they are being watched and their individual histories investigated. The workers live in guarded quarters which have "no trespass" signs at the entrance and are surrounded during harvest with barbed-wire fences and "moats." The conviction of the leaders of the C. A. W. I. U., on evidence transparently false, deprived the workers of valuable leadership and warned them of the consequences of organization. Such warning was, however, superfluous, more than a hundred arrests having been made in connection with the cotton strike in the San Joaquin Valley in 1934. The great company farm-factories are watched by armed special deputies and machine-gun equipment has been installed in several establishments. Living in company camps, the workers are made to realize that they can be summarily evicted. The existence in the locality of a sturdy "stockade" is a visible warning of possible concentration. The threat of deportation is constantly used, particularly with the Mexican laborers, many of whom, of course, have illegally entered the United States-a circular distributed in the cotton strike warned the Mexicans that if they did not go back to work they would be "deloused, defilthed, and, if that isn't enough, deported."

7. The various social-service agencies of the state, instead of investigating working conditions, generally spend their time and exhaust their budgets in investigating the workers. The state and federal employment agencies work in close cooperation with the growers, and the relief agencies obligingly strike names from the relief rolls whenever cheap labor is needed in the fields. That relief agencies have discriminated against workers active in agricultural strikes is well known (People vs. Lillian Dunn and Others, I Cal. App. 2d Series, 556). And along the highways are the state highway patrolmen, always ready to break a strike or arrest a worker.

8. With state officials working under their direction to help ferret out, fingerprint, and incarcerate trouble-makers the organized big growers have sought to establish a network of "controls" throughout the state. They have pushed through anti-picketing ordinances in practically every county in the state. A sample ordinance adopted in Tulare County a year ago prohibited "unauthorized line-ups of automobiles, concentrations in camps for which permits have not been obtained, and meetings of more than twenty-five persons without permits," and also outlawed lectures, debates, discussions, loitering in alleys, halls, and the like without a permit. With this system of intimidation in force, the growers can penalize interchange of opinion and even prohibit association among workers.

9. But the preparations do not end at this point. Throughout the state certain curious establishments are in course of construction. About ten miles from Salinas, conveniently removed from the main highway, an enclosure has recently been built. A stout and unbroken wall of planks a dozen feet high forms a rectangular stockade which is divided off into several compartments on the inside, the whole occupying an acre or more. Along one wall are ranged a group of outhouses, the only sign that the structure is intended for humans rather than swine. A water tower rises in solitary grandeur in the midst of the camp. Surrounding the tank is a platform, splendidly adapted for observation, night illumination, and marksmanship. Flood lights are located at the four corners of the stockade in such manner that they can illuminate the interior and also encircle the stockade with a clearly illuminated zone.

10. When local workers became curious about this menacing structure, they were referred to Mr. Sterling of the Sterling-Harding Packing Company, and to Mr. Church of the firm of Church and Knowlton, both Salinas concerns. These gentlemen informed the workers that the stockade was being built "to hold strikers, but of course we won't put white men in it, just Filipinos." The argument usually advanced is that the stockade will be used to protect strikebreakers, that is, to keep the strike-breakers in and the strikers out. But of course the structure is equally well adapted to herd strikers into and to keep them in.

11. The fortress defense is a feature of the model labor camp established at Brentwood by the Balfour-Guthrie Company, a large grower concern in which British capital has been prominent. This camp has hot and cold showers, free electricity, a camp caretaker, seventy-five cottages supplied with free gas for cooking, and tents with floors and frames connected with a community kitchen. During the last strike in the community the camp was protected by "a substantial fence surmounted by plenty of barbed wire, with the entrance guarded night and day." Yet despite these evidences of solicitude the owners complained that the "agitators continually referred to it as a stockade, a cattle corral, or a prison, and to its inhabitants as slaves or prisoners." P. S. Bancroft, president of the Associated Farmers' unit of Contra Costa County, in defending the camp said that "obviously the fence and guard were there to keep the lawless element out, not to keep the contented workmen in." Yet when the striking laborers of Imperial Valley set up a camp and strike headquarters in 1934, it was raided by local police, because, to quote from the Shipper-Grower Magazine of March, 1934, "it was a concentration camp in which the workers were being kept against their wishes" by Communist labor leaders. The burning question would seem to be, When is a concentration camp not a concentration camp? Who is herding whom and what for?

12. With these preparations concluded, it is slight wonder that the Associated Farmers announce in a radio broadcast that their members "can go ahead and harvest your crops and not worry about agitators." But air-tight as the system appears to be, it is in danger. Recent hearings in Los Angeles indicate that still further wage cuts for agricultural labor may be expected. The employed farm laborer in California today makes on an average about $300 a year, with about 150 working days; the prevailing hourly wage for farm labor at present is about 22 1/2 cents. Under these circumstances it can only be a question of time until the lid is blown off.