Octopus's Garden: How Railroads and Citrus Transformed Southern California

Completion of the transcontinental railroads revolutionized commercial agriculture in California. Between 1870 and 1920, the frontier wheat and beef industries spawned by the gold rush swiftly gave way to the numerous specialty crops that would eventually make California America's number-one farm state. In Los Angeles and the surrounding counties of Southern California, this great transformation was ignited by the respective arrivals, in 1876 and 1885, of the Southern Pacific and Santa Fe railroads, which sparked the rapid proliferation of irrigated citrus orchards planted to lemons and two remarkably successful varieties of oranges: the summer-ripening Valencia and the winter-ripening Washington navel. The Valencia flourished along the coast from Santa Barbara to San Diego, while the navel thrived farther inland across Los Angeles's San Gabriel Valley to San Bernardino and Riverside, the birthplace of Sunkist, perhaps the most successful marketing cooperative in the history of American agriculture.In Octopus's Garden, historian Benjamin Jenkins traces the dramatic rise of Southern California's citrus industry while underscoring the vital roles played by the transcontinental lines and the Pacific Electric Railway in bringing success to the region's pioneer growers. As Jenkins's title suggests, novelist Frank Norris's classic 1901 portrayal of the Southern Pacific as a grasping monopolistic monster in The Octopus did not reflect actual conditions in Southern California, where a largely symbiotic relationship developed between growers and shippers. Together, says Jenkins, they transformed California's rural Southland into an “Octopus's Garden,” a vast domain of bountiful citrus groves and prosperous farm communities tightly interwoven by a dense network of steel rails (3).Unfortunately there is nothing new in Jenkins’s overriding argument that “railroads and the citrus industry transformed Southern California in three distinct ways: by promoting economic growth through linkages to markets across the country; by using booster material to influence popular perceptions of the Southland and the people of color who lived and labored there; and by altering the landscape to fit their commercial needs” (237–38).Indeed, all three components of Jenkins's thesis have received thorough treatment in the extensive literature devoted to Southern California's “Orange Empire” (3). The now familiar stories of California citrus, the rise of Sunkist, and their consequent environmental and economic impacts have been well told by numerous scholars, including Jared Farmer, Catherine Merlo, Vincent Moses, Douglas Sackman, Richard Sawyer, Steven Stoll, and Ian Tyrrell. Many of these authors also gave careful scrutiny to the citrus industry's consistent exploitation of Native American, Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, and Mexican workers. So, too, have farm labor historians José Alamillo, Genevieve Carpio, Matt Garcia, Gilbert González, Margo McBane, and Richard Steven Street. Meanwhile, the mutually beneficial relationships forged between citrus growers and the railroad companies have been clearly elucidated by railway historians such as Ward McAfee, John H. White, and, especially, Richard J. Orsi.Readers familiar with these authors will be hard pressed to find anything surprising in Octopus's Garden, which, alas, does not even succeed as a helpful synthesis of the literature. Sprinkled with typographical and factual errors, Octopus's Garden suffers from insufficient editing and a poor organizational framework that favors strict chronological order over sustained topical coherence. Repeated phrases and facts abound. For instance, readers are informed on at least four separate occasions that Riverside became the “wealthiest city per capita in the United States” by 1900 (14, 82, 111, 130). Meanwhile, Jenkins's statistical outpourings beg for periodic summations. This is especially the case with the near-constant stream of orange and lemon production data for the years 1870 through 1950. Despite all the impressive annual output figures, multiyear trends remain difficult to discern because they are never assembled in tables and are frequently rendered in differing units of measure (tons, crates, boxcar loads, etc.) that defy ready comparison.Conversely, precise quantification is sorely lacking for other key topics, such as the overall size of the farm labor force or its constantly shifting ethnic, racial, and gender compositions. At no point does Jenkins ever make clear the extent to which the workforce was composed of women, whites, or any of the ethnic groups that toiled in Southern California's groves and packinghouses. Regrettably, Octopus's Garden is not likely to join The Octopus in the literary canon of California agricultural history.