Food Fights, Chapter 2
The Lettuce Bowl Strike of 1936 remains a dark stain on the history of Salinas.
Scuffle on a Salinas street, 1936
The labor troubles of 1934 showed that powerful business interests in Salinas could coordinate an effective campaign against common enemies. In 1934 the enemies were Filipino farmworkers who organized a union in an effort to improve their wages and their conditions. The racial divide was clear, but two years later Filipino and Anglo workers recognized the strength of their combined numbers in the fields and their unions joined forces to renew their demands.
By 1936, the farmers and the chamber of commerce types weren’t so concerned about the race of their antagonists. To them, anyone audacious enough to seek livable wages was a troublemaker, probably a Communist deserving of a good beating by a mob in a back alley.
And if Monterey County Sheriff Carl Abbott turned a blind eye to the rogues that burned Ruben Canete’s labor camp in 1934, he tripled down in 1936 with brutish tactics and a suspension of due process. To help him stomp down union agitators, he and the city of Salinas turned over law enforcement duties to an out-of-town firebrand who deputized thousands of willing locals, including a troop of local Boy Scouts.
The Lettuce Bowl Strike of 1936 remains a dark stain on the history of Salinas.
In preparation for the lettuce harvest and recognizing that unions were stirring up trouble, the Salinas Valley oligarchy organized something called the Citizens Association of the Salinas Valley to coordinate the interests of local businesses. The association’s leaders included representatives from the Grower-Shipper Vegetable Association, the Pacific Gas & Electric Company, the Salinas Chamber of Commerce, local banks and others.
Sheriff Abbott, ever the useful tool, was fully on board and ramped up his canard about the scourge of commie union organizers to everyone who would listen.
“It was,” according to California historian Kevin Starr, “a government preparing for war.”
On Sept. 19, 1936, a mysterious man named Henry P. Sanborn showed up at the Salinas Armory, where nearly 500 locals, ready for action, were gathered. Sanborn was introduced by the city clerk, Fred Hepple, who declared that the labor actions amounted to a “virtual war.”
Sanborn, an “anti-radical” publisher from San Rafael, identified himself at the meeting as a “law enforcement coordinator” responsible for all enforcement activities in and around Salinas. Also known around the state as a reliable union buster, he earned his chops beating down waterfront workers in San Francisco and intimidating warehouse employees in Crockett. He had been in Salinas for a couple of days before his appearance at the Armory, setting up shop on the sixth floor of the nearby Hotel Jeffery under the name “Mr. Winters” and meeting privately with civic leaders and local lawmen.
In no time, Sanborn had mobilized thousands of Salinas residents as “special deputies” armed with rifles, shotguns and ax handles. He also secured the services of another shadowy fellow named William Ragsdale, of Tucson, Ariz. Ragsdale specialized in security services, and he recruited about 35 men from the Bodell Industrial Detective Agency in Los Angeles, equipping them with shotguns, submachine guns and something called “nauseating gas.”
After his introduction at the Armory, Sanborn took the stage to invoke the U.S. Constitution and to announce a sort of conscription order for able-bodied men in the county. He told the assembly that law enforcement “has a right to call on all citizens of the county to come … and put down disorders. It is not your right to refuse. If you do, you are disobeying the law and are subject to severe penalties. You are the great unorganized reserves in which we must go, in the final analysis, to uphold the constitution and the protection of life and property. This is an opportunity that may come but once in your life.”
Abbott then took the stage, offering encouraging words to the worked-up crowd. “We are here to determine how many red-blooded Americans there really are,” he said.
Oddly, Abbott told a San Francisco Chronicle reporter that he didn’t authorize Sanborn’s official declaration of authority. “My signature should not be there,” he said. “And I must have been out of the room when the arrangement for the appointment of Sanborn as coordinator was made.”
Nevertheless, Sanborn set up his “office” at Hotel Jeffery; the Armory building, two blocks away, was headquarters for his troops. Hepple, the city clerk, was a commanding officer of the ragtag army.
Monterey County was on the hook for most of Sanborn’s expenses, including his room, his meals, his telephone calls and $111.34 for liquor. In all, Sheriff Abbott and Sanborn ran up $2,281 in strike-related expenses — or about $48,000 in today’s money. Those expenditures included $56.22 spent at Salinas Hardware Company for ax handles, rawhide ropes and shotgun shells. They also spent $42 for 1,000 “Alice-blue deputy arm bands” for the city’s posse comitatus. (Sanborn insisted that his untrained citizen troops were not vigilantes, and referred to them as posse comitatus vested with the authority of law enforcement and authorized to keep the peace.)
Reporters summoned to the Jeffery reported a maze of telephones and a steady traffic of strangers and lawmen running in and out of the place.
One of the vigilantes’ first actions was a raid on the home of George Kircher, chairman of the strike organization committee. Sanborn announced he had seized “communist” documents from the home that he said would result in charges of “criminal syndicalism.” The raid by an undeputized citizen was clearly illegal, but apparently within reasonable bounds for local lawmen at the time.
The Lettuce Bowl Strike wasn’t technically a strike. It was a lockout, a reaction to the unions’ preparations for a general strike. The packing plant operators put the unions on their heels by imposing a lockout. They surrounded several packing plants in Salinas and in Watsonville with 10-foot barricades and armed goons; they also set up tent cities within the protected grounds of the plants to keep their scabs safe. Lettuce cut in the fields was trucked to the packing plants with police escorts, while pickets did all they could to stop the vehicles.
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“There were guns bristling all over, It was just like the Wild West. It was lucky that no one was killed.” — John Stolich
On Sept. 16, 1936, the labor action exploded, set off by a tear gas attack on the picketers outside of the Shippers Ice Company. Soon after, about 500 picketers tracked down flatbed trucks, stopping them on back streets and scattering crates of lettuce. Highway patrol officers on the scene smacked strikers with billy clubs. Two men were shot and wounded. Around town, tear gas canisters were lobbed into buildings known to be frequented by strikers. When gassed strikers fled the Salinas Labor Temple on Pajaro Street, they were met on the street by a mob with axes and more tear gas. Dynamite explosions and gunshots could be heard in all corners of the city.
Meanwhile, citizen vigilantes were dispatched to county lines, where they set up roadblocks to check that motorists entering Monterey County were white, patriotic and weren’t there to infuse the region with communist ideals.
A reporter for the Salinas Index-Journal was cornered on three different occasions that night by thugs who told him he was violating a curfew. “They were big and rough and tough,” John V. Young recalled 50 years later, in an interview with the Salinas Californian during a series on the strike’s anniversary. “They were goon squads from Los Angeles.” Young was a Salinas newspaper reporter at the time of the strike. He recalled a couple of days of “mass panic” in the city.
“There were guns bristling all over,” remembered Peter Stolich, a young produce salesman from Salinas. “It was just like the Wild West. It was lucky that no one was killed.”
One of the Filipino strike leaders, Manuel Luz, called the 1936 action a watershed event. It was the first time unions representing both Filipino and Anglo workers formed a united front, he said. But it wasn’t easy. “As far as Filipinos were concerned, it was hell,” Luz told the Californian reporter. Luz said fellow Filipinos were herded out of town and harassed. He was branded a communist, jailed for vagrancy and was “busted over the head about a dozen times.”
On Sept. 17, 1936, schools and theaters were shut down and a truck with a loudspeaker roamed the streets to warn people not to congregate in groups. In one comic instance, three cars filled with scabs tried to enter one of the Salinas packing plants, but they were dragged out of their cars by the growers’ goon squad and forced to flee on foot. Newspapers reported they refused to come back after embarrassed farmers realized their guards had attacked the wrong people.
Later that day, five Salinas community leaders issued a statement to the “right-minded citizen of California.” Their statement, published in local newspapers, meant to clarify reports about the strike. First they denied the presence of vigilantes. “There is no civil war,” read the statement, signed by Abbott, the mayor and chief of police of Salinas, and the president of the Salinas Chamber of Commerce. It also insisted that the troubles were being caused by “radicals and outside influence.”
Sanborn himself spread word that communist-inspired longshoremen from San Francisco were marching into town to add muscle to the strife. As evidence he produced a bunch of red ribbons he found along the shoulders of Highway 101, north of town. He announced with confidence that the ribbons had been placed by agitators to help the longshoremen find their way to Salinas. Actually, the ribbons had been placed along the road as survey markers for a road-widening project, a point of much hilarity.
As mysteriously as Sanborn appeared in Salinas, he retreated back to his Northern California haunts after an increasing string of bad press, including the red-ribbon nonsense. The newspapers also included critical stories about numerous violations against “rule of law” and “due process.”
Competing San Francisco newspapers sent hordes of reporters and photographers to record the strike. Both The Chronicle and The Examiner devoted dozens of pages to the “Lettuce Bowl Strike.” One particular Chronicle article, which summarized years of labor tensions in the region, was headlined “It Did Happen Here.” The headline was a twist on the Sinclair Lewis novel about encroaching fascism in the United States, and the story noted that “for a full fortnight, the ‘constitutional authorities’ of Salinas have been but the helpless pawns of sinister forces which have operated from a barricaded hotel floor in the center of town.”
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“It seems to me that man has engaged in a blind and fearful struggle out of a past he can’t remember, into a future he can’t foresee nor understand.” — John Steinbeck
Twenty miles to the west of Salinas, in Monterey, the citizenry was mostly horrified at the spectacle unfolding in Salinas. In a front-page editorial on Sept. 19, 1936, the Monterey Peninsula Herald declared that “thousands of people in this county (are) affected by hydrophobia” and that people were acting like “an aggregation of dumb bunnies.”
Dispatches about fascist behavior among the “oligarchs” in the Salinas Valley spread across the country, propelling strong support for strikers. From Hollywood, actors like Gary Cooper, James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart sent $1,000 in strike aid.
Despite the insistence of Sanborn and Abbott that communists were crawling about the county, the president of the Monterey Anti-Communist League assured residents that he looked into the situation himself and could declare with certainty that the “Salinas lettuce strike is neither Communist inspired nor Communist led.”
Sanborn’s departure coincided with a visit from California Gov. Frank Merriam, who showed up in Salinas in a well-publicized effort to mediate the labor dispute. The city was relatively quiet for several days, until labor talks broke down when growers refused to accept hiring rules proposed by Merriam. The United Press reporter on the scene described the “guerilla warfare” that broke out in Salinas after Merriam left, with bands of picketers chasing down lettuce trucks and destroying produce. Newspapers carried daily accounts of picket activities, assaults, gunshots fired, legal challenges, arrests, vigilante actions, recriminations and angry letters to the editor for months.
Sanborn may have slipped away, and Abbott had been humiliated by widespread accounts that he had ceded his authority to an out-of-town rabble rouser, but the Citizens Association of the Salinas Valley’s strategy never wavered.
The farmers were still hampered in their efforts to move lettuce, and so the association convinced the Salinas City Council to impose an ordinance that outlawed assemblies of strikers.
To counter the ordinance, the unions ingeniously bought every daily newspaper they could find in the county and distributed them to picketers for resale outside the packing plants and City Hall. Now the people assembled outside the barricades weren’t strikers; they were newsboys. Lawmen were baffled about what to do next.
Over the months, the strikers were worn down by the bullying and intimidation, and by the unwillingness of farmers to negotiate. The Salinas strike ended on Nov. 3 with a complete victory for the Grower-Shipper Association.
Once the dust cleared and the harvests moved to other corners of California and Arizona, the National Labor Relations Board met in Salinas in 1937 to figure out how things got so out of hand. More specifically, the board wanted to know what Henry Sanborn was doing in Salinas, who invited him, and why he thought he could get away with vigilante justice. Sanborn frustrated his interrogators by refusing to answer any of their questions.
Three years later, the NLRB released its ruling about how the labor unrest was handled. It referred to “inexcusable police brutality, in many cases bordering on sadism.”
The Salad Bowl Strike seemed like a real-life backdrop to the publication of John Steinbeck’s “In Dubious Battle,” which was released in 1936. Steinbeck, born and raised in Salinas, packed all the familiar scenarios into the novel: striking farmworkers, unions, scabs, roaming bands of vigilantes, mob rule.
“It seems to me that man has engaged in a blind and fearful struggle out of a past he can’t remember, into a future he can’t foresee nor understand,” Steinbeck wrote, attributing the line to Doc Burton, the detached but sympathetic health officer in the novel. “And man has met and defeated every obstacle, every enemy except one. He cannot win over himself. How mankind hates himself.”
Twenty-four years after “In Dubious Battle,” United Farm Workers founder Cesar Chavez was jailed by lawmen in Salinas for refusing to obey a court order to end a boycott his union called against lettuce grown by a Salinas Valley farmer. But that is another story.
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Sources:
“Endangered Dreams: The Great Depression in California.” Kevin Starr, Oxford University Press, 1996
The Philippines Mail
The Salinas Daily Index
The Salinas Morning Post
The Monterey Peninsula Herald
The San Francisco Chronicle
The San Francisco Examiner
The New York Times
The Salinas Californian