The King of California: J. G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire by Mark Arax and Rick Wartzman

Members of my congregation in Bakersfield responded to my asking about the history and culture of California’s Central Valley by recommending I read this book.

The “King” crowned here is a farmer named James Griffin Boswell II. In the middle of the 20th century, J. G. Boswell took over a vast farming empire founded by his uncle, called the Colonel, and expanded it even further. The Boswell Company now farms hundreds of thousands of acres on the west side of California’s Central Valley centered around Corcoran, as well as in Arizona, Australia, and elsewhere. Founded in cotton, the empire grew to numerous other crops, and, as farming fortunes and political conditions changed, also expanded into housing development and other projects. The Sun City senior housing development near Phoenix is built on land that was previously a Boswell cattle ranch.

The book threads the story of the Boswell family, from the Colonel, to the nephew, and on to the nephew’s son, James W. Boswell, the current President of the farm empire, through a history of California and its intersections with other stories of the American west. The writers, two former reporters for the Los Angeles Times, give the reader much more than a biography of a fascinating, obscure, businessman; we also get an education on modern agriculture and mega-farms, the wet and dry environment of the central valley, the politics of water rights and small farms vs. large, the economics of farm labor largely dependent on immigrants, and so on. It’s a fascinating read, though at times packed with more detail than I could sustain interest for. (430 pages of text, plus extensive notes)

The Colonel was born in Georgia in 1882. He came to southern California as a young man and began working in the cotton trade, buying and selling crops grown in the Imperial Valley. Eventually he was convinced of the advantages of running his own farm, and of the potential of the Central Valley as farmland, particularly the area around Tulare Lake.

Fed by the four great rivers coming down from the snowpack in the eastern sierra: the Kings, the Kaweah, the Tule, and the Kern, the Sierra run-off has been so dammed and canalized, stored, shifted, and spent, that the Tulare Lake, once the largest body of freshwater west of the Mississippi, no longer exists. During the early years of the 20th century, when the Colonel was developing his business, the challenge was managing his farms on the bed of a lake which would flood some years and shrink in size the next. His success came through a combination of several factors: the Colonel’s business acumen (and that of his nephew, later), the technological advances of farming (gradually replacing human labor with machines, chemical fertilizers, defoliants, and pesticides) and the political dexterity to control the water. Boswell and the other valley farmers worked to convince the government to build dams which helped them with flood control and a government-subsidized source of water in wet years, received government relief payments when farms dried up in drought years, and accepted government payments to leave farms fallow when the official policy supported higher commodity prices by limiting yield.

The Colonel’s first wife died. He remarried into the Chandler family, Ruth Chandler. Here’s the mention from the text, which pulled me up short:

“[Harry] Chandler died in September 1944 at the age of eighty. Four months later, the Colonel slipped out of his office (by then located in the H. W. Hellman building in L.A.’s Spring Street financial district) and drove with Ruth to Yuma, Arizona–the place where it had all started for Boswell as a cotton merchant. The pair eloped.” (p. 214)

The H. W. Hellman building was converted from offices to apartments in the 1990s; it’s where I live now. I might be living in the Colonel’s former office! The mansion Boswell and Ruth moved into in San Marino was often rented as a movie set, including for Funny Girl when Fanny Brice marries the millionaire Nicky Arnstein. While the Colonel managed the business from Los Angeles, his brother, Bill and his wife lived up near the farms in Corcoran.

The California story begins with the Spanish, who built a string of mission churches up the coast but were unsuccessful in expanding into the Central Valley. The gold rush brought a wave of American settlers from the east. Then, when the gold ran out, the settlers moved down into the central valley and began ranching and farming. There follows the common sad story of the native population, the Yokuts, being abused and relocated and dying in large numbers from disease. Southern farmers, like the Boswells, came west following the civil war, and brought the cotton and southern culture with them. The cotton farms back east failed against the boll weevil which had moved up north and east from Mexico but was prevented from reaching California by the dry heat barrier of the southwest deserts. Waves of laborers came along, from the American south, from the dustbowl, from Japan, and Mexico.

With nearly no rain in the valley itself, the farmers benefited from never losing a crop to an early or late storm, but depended on irrigation from the distant snowpacks, or ground water from extremely deep wells. Only large farmers could manage those large resources. So Boswell, the company, and a few rivals that the book tracks grew extremely large, and Boswell, the family, grew extremely wealthy. Meanwhile, the farm towns they founded, such as Corcoran, were lively and prosperous when the farms provided jobs, but as farming became more and more mechanized, the need for farm labor dwindled and the towns dried up along with the work.

The book was published in 2003. The interviews the writers did with J. G. Boswell take place following a flood year of 1998-1999, when the Tulare Lake attempted to reassert itself. J. G. looks back with a mixture of pride and defensiveness, as he answers questions about his complicated history. He has reached the end of his career. In fact, he is somewhat beyond the end of his career as he had already ceded control to his son and then came back to the business after being disappointed in some of the decisions his son was making. J. G. would die in 2009. The son, J. W. continues to run the business. The challenge of farming in the Central Valley is no longer how to manage the occasional years with too much water but a likely future of persistent drought. That history is yet to be written.