Orange Empire: California and the Fruits of EdenThis innovative history of California opens up new vistas on the interrelationship among culture, nature, and society by focusing on the state's signature export—the orange. From the 1870s onward, California oranges were packaged in crates bearing colorful images of an Edenic landscape. This book demystifies those lush images, revealing the orange as a manufactured product of the state's orange industry. Orange Empire brings together for the first time the full story of the orange industry—how growers, scientists, and workers transformed the natural and social landscape of California, turning it into a factory for the production of millions of oranges. That industry put up billboards in cities across the nation and placed enticing pictures of sun-kissed fruits into nearly every American's home. It convinced Americans that oranges could be consumed as embodiments of pure nature and talismans of good health. But, as this book shows, the tables were turned during the Great Depression when Upton Sinclair, Carey McWilliams, Dorothea Lange, and John Steinbeck made the Orange Empire into a symbol of what was wrong with America's relationship to nature. |
Contents
Diego Rivera Allegory of California | 2 |
Los Angeles County Today | 6 |
Paul Julian Orange Pickers | 14 |
Introduction 1 8 1 | 17 |
The Land of Sunshine | 21 |
Orange groves bordering the Sherman Institute | 51 |
A Cornucopia of Invention | 53 |
The red scale menace | 79 |
A Record of Edens Erosion | 225 |
Tractored out | 235 |
Refugees | 237 |
Windshield | 238 |
Migrant mother | 240 |
Father and son in citrus camp | 243 |
Mexicana mother | 246 |
Woman in citrus camp | 250 |
Chemical cornucopia consumer bounty | 80 |
Oranges as Liberty Bell | 85 |
Landscape brand label | 88 |
California Eve brand label | 90 |
Have One brand label | 91 |
Sunkist window display | 99 |
Sunkist | 105 |
Introduction I 19 | 119 |
Orange picker | 144 |
The Finished Products of Their Environment | 154 |
Thunder over California | 188 |
113 | 223 |
Factory in the field | 252 |
American Way billboard | 255 |
Citrus camp with billboards | 257 |
What Hurts Business Hurts Me billboard | 258 |
Grapes of Wrath billboard | 259 |
Okie orange tree | 260 |
Epilogue By Their Fruits Ye Shall Know Them | 289 |
Packing house on eve of demolition | 297 |
NOTES | 301 |
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY | 349 |
| 375 | |
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Common terms and phrases
agrarian dream agrarian partisans agricultural American Angeles argued Associated Farmers become Berkeley billboards body booster California Fruit California Press called campaign camps Carey McWilliams CFGE Chinese citrus growers citrus industry citrus landscape citrus workers climate consumers cornucopia County crate created crops culture Dorothea Lange Dust Bowl environment EPIC explained farm Francisco Fruit Growers fumigation garden Grapes of Wrath growing growth machine harvest home teacher horticultural human immigrants improved Indian John Steinbeck label labor land Lange living Los Angeles Lubin Luther Burbank Mexican migrants million nation nature nature's Okies Orange County Orange Empire orange groves orange trees organic Pacific packing house pamphlet photographs pickers picking picture plants political portrayed Powell production racial Riverside scientists Sherman Institute Sinclair soil Southern California Steinbeck story sumer Teague tion turned University of California University Press Upton Sinclair varieties Washington navel women York