September Nineteen Thirty-Six

On September fourth, nineteen thirty-six, the three thousand two hundred members of the Fruit and Vegetable Workers Union Local eighteen two eleven walked out of the lettuce packing sheds in the Salinas and Watsonville district. They wanted union recognition and preferential hiring for union members. The workers they were trying to protect were mostly women who trimmed and packed iceberg lettuce in cold, wet sheds for wages that had been steadily squeezed since the last attempted strike, in nineteen thirty-four.

The growers and shippers of the Grower-Shipper Vegetable Association had no intention of recognizing the union. What followed over the next three weeks became one of the most documented cases of organized employer violence and law enforcement complicity in the California labor archive.

The packing plant operators surrounded several of their facilities with ten-foot barricades and hired armed men to guard them. They built tent cities inside the barricaded grounds to house replacement workers. A man named Colonel Henry R. Sanborn, a reserve Army officer and publisher of a paper devoted to fighting what he called radical and subversive elements, arrived in Salinas on September thirteenth to coordinate the employers' strike defense. He worked under an assumed name, Henry Winter. The National Labor Relations Board, which investigated afterward, wanted to know who had hired him and what authority he thought he had.

On September fifteenth, when the first lettuce trucks arrived at the sheds, a crowd of roughly two thousand strikers, supporters, and bystanders gathered at a barricade gate. Police Chief George Griffin ordered a gas attack. Ten officers emerged from behind the barricade with riot gas guns and grenades. The following day, a second tear gas attack outside the Shippers Ice Company set off hours of street conflict. Highway patrol officers beat picketers with billy clubs. The National Labor Relations Board investigation would later describe what happened as inexcusable police brutality, in many cases bordering on sadism.

The governor did not send the National Guard. Monterey County Sheriff Carl Abbott was among the strikers' adversaries. Order was restored, on the terms of the growers, within weeks.

The Filipino and Mexican workers who had been organizing in these fields since the early nineteen thirties watched the defeat of the shed workers closely. The alliance between Filipino and Anglo workers that had formed in nineteen thirty-four had demonstrated that the combined labor force, across racial lines, had real leverage. The growers understood this too, and the suppression of nineteen thirty-six was partly aimed at preventing that kind of coalition from forming again.

The Library of Congress holds photographs from that September. They are dated and labeled and available to anyone with an internet connection. They show a city that looked very much like any other Central Valley city in nineteen thirty-six, and a conflict that the rest of the country mostly did not hear about until John Steinbeck started writing about it.