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Totem poles are monumental sculptures carved on poles, posts, or pillars with symbols or figures made from large trees, mostly western red cedar, by indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest coast of North America. The word totem is derived from the Algonquian (most likely Ojibwe) word odoodem [oˈtuːtɛm], "his kinship group". Totem poles are not religious objects, but they do communicate important aspects of native culture. Carvings of animals and other characters typically represent characters or events in a story. The carvings may symbolize or commemorate cultural beliefs that recount familiar legends, clan lineages, or notable events. The poles may also serve as functional architectural features, welcome signs for village visitors, mortuary vessels for the remains of deceased ancestors, or as a means to publicly ridicule someone. Given the complexity and symbolic meanings of totem pole carvings, their placement and importance lies in the observer's knowledge and connection to the meanings of the figures.
Totem pole carvings were likely preceded by a long history of decorative carving, with stylistic features borrowed from smaller prototypes. Eighteenth-century explorers documented the existence of decorated interior and exterior house posts prior to 1800; however, due to the lack of efficient carving tools, sufficient wealth, and leisure time to devote to the craft, the monumental poles placed in front of native homes along the Pacific Northwest coast probably did not appear in large numbers until the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. Trade and settlement initially led to the growth of totem pole carving, but governmental policies and practices of acculturation and assimilation sharply reduced totem pole production by the end of nineteenth century. Renewed interest from tourists, collectors, and scholars in the 1880s and 1890s helped document and collect the remaining totem poles, but nearly all totem pole making had ceased by 1901. Twentieth-century revivals of the craft, additional research, and continued support from the public have helped establish new interest in this regional artistic tradition.
Totem poles serve as important illustrations of family lineage and the cultural heritage of native peoples who live in the islands and coastal areas of North America's Pacific Northwest, especially British Columbia, Canada, and coastal areas of Washington and southeastern Alaska in the United States. Makers of these poles include the Haida, Tlingit, Tsimshian, Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwakiutl), Bella Coola, and Nuu-chah-nulth (Nootka). Totem poles are typically carved from the highly rot-resistant trunks of Thuja plicata trees (popularly known as giant cedar or western red cedar), which eventually decay in the moist, rainy climate of the coastal Pacific Northwest. Because of the region's climate and the nature of the materials used to make the poles, few examples carved before 1900 remain. Noteworthy examples, some dating as far back as 1880, include those at the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria and the Museum of Anthropology at UBC in Vancouver.
Totem poles are the largest, but not the only objects that coastal Pacific Northwest natives use to depict family legends, animals, people, or historical events. The freestanding poles seen by the region's first European explorers were likely preceded by a long history of decorative carving. Stylistic features of these poles were borrowed from smaller prototypes, or from the interior support posts of house beams. Although eighteenth-century accounts of European explorers traveling along the coast indicate that decorated interior and exterior house posts existed prior to 1800, the posts were smaller and fewer in number than in subsequent decades. Prior to the nineteenth century, the lack of efficient carving tools, along with sufficient wealth and leisure time to devote to the craft, delayed the development of elaborately carved, freestanding poles. Before iron and steel arrived in the area, natives used crude tools made of stone, shells, or beaver teeth for carving. The process was slow and laborious; axes were unknown. By the late eighteenth century, the use of metal cutting tools enabled more complex carvings and increased production of totem poles. The tall monumental poles appearing in front of native homes in coastal villages probably did not appear until after the beginning of the nineteenth century.
The scholar Eddie Malin has proposed that totem poles progressed from house posts, funerary containers, and memorial markers into symbols of clan and family wealth and prestige. He argues that the Haida people of the islands of Haida Gwaii originated carving of the poles, and that the practice spread outward to the Tsimshian and Tlingit, and then down the coast to the tribes of British Columbia and northern Washington. Malin's theory is supported by the photographic documentation of the Pacific Northwest coast's cultural history and the more sophisticated designs of the Haida poles. Regional stylistic differences among the poles can be attributed to the application of existing regional artistic styles to a new medium. Earlier theories, such as those of mid-twentieth-century anthropologist Marius Barbeau, who considered the poles a post-contact phenomenon enabled by the introduction of metal tools, are refuted by evidence of the Pacific Northwest's long history of native carving traditions and evaluation of early explorers' and navigators' documents created in the 1790s, which predate the use of iron tools. These early accounts describe and illustrate the existence, although an uncommon appearance, of carved poles and timber homes along the coast of the Pacific Northwest. By the early nineteenth century, widespread importation of iron and steel tools from Great Britain, the United States, and elsewhere led to easier and more rapid production of carved wooden goods, including poles. Scholars have not determined if iron tools were introduced by traders, or whether Alaska Natives produced iron tools from drift iron recovered from shipwrecks, but the presence of trading vessels and exploration ships simplified the acquisition of iron tools, the use of which most likely would have enhanced totem pole construction.
In the nineteenth century, American and European trade and settlement initially led to the growth of totem pole carving, but United States and Canadian policies and practices of acculturation and assimilation caused a decline in the development of Alaska Native and First Nations cultures and their crafts, and sharply reduced totem pole production by the end of the century. Between 1830 and 1880, the maritime fur trade, mining, and fisheries gave rise to an accumulation of wealth among the coastal peoples. Much of it was spent and distributed in lavish potlatch celebrations, frequently associated with the construction and erection of totem poles. The monumental poles commissioned by wealthy family leaders to represent their social status and the importance of their families and clans. In the 1880s and 1890s, tourists, collectors, scientists and naturalist interested in native culture collected and photographed totem poles and other artifacts, many of which were put on display at expositions such as the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and the 1893 World's Columbia Exposition in Chicago, Illinois.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some Christian missionaries discouraged the natives' traditional practices, including creation of totem poles, and urged converts to cease production and destroy existing poles. Nearly all totem=pole-making had ceased by 1901. Carving of monumental and mortuary poles continued in some native villages as late as 1905; however, as native sites were abandoned, the poles and timber homes were left to decay and vandalism.
Beginning in the late 1930s, a combination of cultural, linguistic, and artistic revivals, along with scholarly interest and the continuing fascination and support of an educated and empathetic public, led to a renewal and extension of this artistic tradition. In 1938 the United States Forest Service began a program to reconstruct and preserve the old poles, salvaging about 200, roughly one-third of those known to be standing at the end of the nineteenth century. With renewed interest in native arts and traditions in the 1960s and 1970s, freshly carved totem poles were erected up and down the coast, while related artistic production was introduced in many new and traditional media, ranging from tourist trinkets to masterful works in wood, stone, blown and etched glass, and other traditional and non-traditional media.
Today, a number of successful native artists carve totem poles on commission, usually taking the opportunity to educate apprentices in the demanding art of traditional carving and joinery. Modern poles are almost always executed in traditional styles; however, some artists have included modern subject matter or used nontraditional styles. A commission for a modern pole ranges in the tens of thousands of dollars and usually requires from six to twelve months to complete. Because the time spent on carving after an initial design is may take a year to complete, the commission essentially functions as the artist's primary means of income during the period.
Totem poles symbolize characters and events of a myth or relate the experiences of known ancestors or living people. Some of these characters may appear as stylistic representations of objects in nature, while others are more realistically carved. Pole carvings may include animals, birds, fish, plants, insects, and humans, or they may represent supernatural beings such as the thunderbird. Some symbolize animals that than can transform themselves into another form, so they appear as combinations of animals or part animal-part human forms. Consistent use of a specific character over time, with some slight variations in carving style, helped develop similarities among these shared symbols that allowed people to recognized one from another. For example, the raven is symbolized by a long, straight beak, while the eagle's beak is curved, and a beaver is depicted with two large front teeth, a piece of wood held in his front paws, and a paddle-shaped tail.
The meanings of the designs on totem poles are as varied as the cultures that make them. While totem poles are not religious objects, they do communicate important aspects of native culture and are artistic as well as cultural objects. Some poles celebrate cultural beliefs that may recount familiar legends, clan lineages, or notable events, while others are mostly artistic. Animals and other characters carved on the pole are typically used as symbols to represent characters or events in a story; however, some may reference the moiety of the pole’s owner, or simply fill up empty space on the pole. The carved figures interlock, one above the other, to create the pole, which may rise to a height of sixty feet or more. Smaller carvings may be positioned in vacant spaces, or they may be tucked inside the ears or hang out of the mouths of the pole’s larger characters.
While the intended purpose varies, pole carvings symbolize or commemorate historic persons, represent shamanic powers, or provide objects of public ridicule.
"Some of the figures on the poles constitute symbolic reminders of quarrels, murders, debts, and other unpleasant occurrences about which the Native Americans prefer to remain silent... The most widely known tales, like those of the exploits of Raven and of Kats who married the bear woman, are familiar to almost every native of the area. Carvings which symbolize these tales are sufficiently conventionalized to be readily recognizable even by persons whose lineage did not recount them as their own legendary history."
Totem poles were never objects of worship, but very early European explorers thought they were. However, later explorers such as Jean-François de La Pérouse noted that the poles were never treated reverently. Their purposed seemed only to generate allusions or illustrate stories, and the poles were usually left to rot in place when people abandoned a village. Their association with idol worship was an idea from local nineteenth-centuryChristian missionaries, who considered their association with shamansim as an occult practice.
The vertical order of images is widely believed to be a significant representation of importance, an idea that became so pervasive it entered into common parlance with the phrase "low man on the totem pole". This phrase, indicative of the most common belief of ordering importance, suggests the higher figures on the pole are more important or prestigious. A counterargument frequently heard is that the figures are arranged in reverse hierarchy, with the most important representations on the bottom, at eye level with the viewer to heighten his significance. There are no restrictions on vertical order; many poles have significant figures on the top, others on the bottom, and some in the middle. Other poles have no vertical arrangement, consisting of a lone figure atop an undecorated column.
Given the complexity and symbolic meanings of carvings totem poles, their placement and subsequent importance lies in the observer's knowledge and connection to the meanings of the pole's figures. Asserting that one figure, story, or history has more importance over another because of its placement on a pole may reflect the observer's own cultural perceptions of hierarchy rather than the actual significance of the figures. For example, sometimes a prestigious family crest is placed at the bottom in support of the remainder of the crests or carvings above it. Placement at the bottom of the pole increases a carving's prominence because totem pole logs are thicker towards the base, contributing to the increase in the bottom figure's size, and its position brings the lower figure closer to the people, increasing their interaction with it. Haida doorways, often embedded in the bottoms of house-frontal poles, were kept deliberately small. To enter, guests and members of the household would need to bow in respect to the family crest on the pole. In contrast, the tops of Haida poles often feature a family's moiety crest. Because the Haidas come from one of two moieties and identify themselves as the descendants of an eagle or a raven-associated family, this association and the appearance of an eagle or raven carving at the top if the family's pole could either signify its relevance as the first, or highest, level of family identity and societal structure, or its lesser importance as one of the most common and least exclusive crests.
There are six basic types of totem poles: house frontal poles, interior house posts, mortuary poles, memorial poles, welcome poles, and the ridicule or shame pole.
This type of pole, usually 20 to 30 feet tall is the most decorative. Its carvings tell the story of the family or clan who own them. These poles are also known as heraldic, crest, or family poles. Poles of this type are placed outside the clan house of the most important village leaders. Often, watchman figures are carved at the top of the pole to protect the pole owner’s family and the village. Another type of house frontal pole is the entrance or doorway pole, which is attached to the center front of the home and includes an oval-shaped opening through the base that serves as the entrance to the clan house.
These interior poles, typically 8 to 10 feet in height, are usually shorter than exterior poles. The interior posts support the roof beam of a clan house and include a large notch at the top, where the beam can rest. A clan house may have two to four or more house posts, depending on the native group who built it. Carvings on these poles, like those of the house frontal poles, are often used as a storytelling device for children and help tell the story of the owners' family history.
The rarest type of totem pole is a mortuary structure that incorporates grave boxes with carved supporting poles or includes a recessed back to hold the grave box. It is among the tallest, reaching 50 to 60 feet in height, and most prominent pole. The Haida and Tlingit people erect mortuary poles at the death of important individuals in the community. These poles may have a single figure carved at the top, which may depict the clan's crest, but carvings usually cover its entire length. Ashes or body of the deceased person is placed in the upper portion of the pole.
This type of pole, which usually stands in front of a clan house, is erected about a year after a person has died. The clan chief’s memorial pole may be raised at the center of the village. The pole's purpose is to honor the deceased person and identify the relative who is taking over as his successor within the clan and the community. Traditionally, the memorial pole has one carved figure at the top, but an additional figure may also be added at the bottom of the pole.
Memorial poles may also commemorate and event. For example, several memorial totem poles were erected by the Tlingits in honor of Abraham Lincoln, one of which was relocated to Saxman, Alaska, in 1938. The Lincoln pole at Saxman commemorates the end of hostilities between two rival Tlingit clans and symbolizes the hope for peace and prosperity following the American occupation of the Alaskan territory. The story begins in 1868, when the United States government built a customs house and fort on Tongass Island andleft the U.S revenue cutter Lincoln to patrol the area. After American solders at the fort and aboard the Lincoln provided protection to the Tongass group against its rival, the Kagwantans, the Tongass group commissioned the Lincoln pole to commemorate the event.
Carved by the Kwakwaka'wakw (Kwakiutl) and Nuu-chah-nulth (Nootka) people, these poles include a large carvings of human figures, some as tall as 40 feet. Welcome poles are placed at the edge of a stream or saltwater beach to welcome guests to the community, or possibly to intimidate strangers.
Poles used for public ridicule are usually called shame poles, and were created to embarrass individuals or groups for their unpaid debts or when they did something wrong. The poles are often placed in prominent locations and removed after the debt is paid or the wrong is corrected. Shame pole carvings represent the person being shamed.
One famous shame pole is the Seward pole at the Saxman Totem Park in Saxman, Alaska. It was created to shame former U.S. Secretary of State William H. Seward for not reciprocating the courtesy or generosity of his Tlingit hosts following a potlatch given in his honor. The intent of this pole is indicated by the figure's red-painted nose and ears to symbolized Seward's stinginess.
Another example of the shame pole is the Three Frogs pole on Chief Shakes Island, at Wrangell, Alaska. This pole was erected by Chief Shakes to shame the Kiks.ádi clan into repaying a debt incurred for the support of three Kiks.ádi women who were allegedly cohabiting with three slave in Shakes's household. When the Kiks.ádi leaders refused to pay support for the women, Shakes commissioned a pole with carvings of three frogs, which represented the crest of the Kiks.ádi clan. It is not known if the debt was ever repaid. The pole stands next to the Chief Shakes Tribal House in Wrangell. The pole's unique crossbar shape has become popularly associated with the town of Wrangell, and continues to be used as part of the Wrangell Sentinel newspaper's masthead.
In 1942, the U.S. Forest Service commissioned a pole to commemorate Alexander Baranof, the Russian governor and Russian American Company manager, as a civilian works project. The pole's original intent was to commemorate a peace treaty between the Russians and Tlingits that the governor helped broker in 1805. George Benson, a Sitka carver and craftsman, created the original design. The completed version originally stood in Totem Square in downtown Sitka, Alaska. When Benson and other Sitka carvers were not available to do the work, the U.S. Forest Service had CCC workers carve the pole in Wrangell, Alaska. Because Sitka and Wrangell native groups were rivals, it has been argued that the Wrangell carvers may have altered Benson's original design. For unknown reasons, the Wrangell carvers depicted the Baranov figure without clothes. Following a Sitka Tribe of Alaska-sponsored removal ceremony, the pole was lowered due to safety concerns on October 20, 2010, using funds from the Alaska Dept. of Health and Social Services. The Sitka Sentinel reported that while standing, it was "said to be the most photographed totem [pole] in Alaska".
On March 24, 2007, a shame pole was erected in Cordova, Alaska, that includes the inverted and distorted face of former Exxon CEO Lee Raymond. The pole represents the unpaid debt on $5 million in punitive damages that a federal court in Anchorage, Alaska, determined Exxon owes for its role in causing the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Prince William Sound.
Some poles from the Pacific Northwest have been moved to other locations for display out of their original context.
In 1903 Alaska’s district governor, John Green Brady, collected fifteen Tlingit and Haida totem poles for public displays from villages in southeastern Alaska. At the Louisiana Purchase Exposition (the world's fair held in Saint Louis, Missouri, in 1904), fourteen of them were initially installed outside the Alaska pavilion at the fair; the other one, which had broken in transit, was repaired and installed at the fair's Esquimau Village. Thirteen poles these poles were returned to Alaska, where they were eventually installed in the Sitka National Historical Park. The other two poles were sold; one pole from the Alaska pavilion went the Milwaukee Public Museum and the pole from the Esquimau Village was sold and then given to industrialist David M. Parry, who installed it on his estate in what became known as the Golden Hill neighborhood of Indianapolis, Indiana. Although the remains of the original pole at Golden Hill no longer exist, a replica was raised on April 13, 1996, on the front lawn of The Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art in Indianapolis. Approximately two years later, the replica was moved inside the museum, and in 2005, it was installed in a new atrium after completion of a museum expansion project.
Another example occurred in 1938, when the U.S. Forest Service began a totem pole restoration program in Alaska. Poles used in the Civilian Conservation Corps-created totem parks of southeast Alaska were removed from their original places as funerary and crest poles to be copied or repaired and then placed in parks based on English and French garden designs to demystify their meaning for tourists.
In Britain, at the side of Virginia Water Lake, in the south of Windsor Great Park, there is a 100-foot (30 m) tall Canadian totem pole that was given to Queen Elizabeth II to commemorate the centenary of British Columbia. In Seattle, Washington, a Tlingit funerary totem pole was raised in Pioneer Square in 1899, after being taken from an Alaskan village. In addition, the totem pole collections in Vancouver's Stanley Park, Victoria's Thunderbird Park, and the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia were removed from their original locations around British Columbia.
After the tree to be used for the totem pole is selected, it is cut down and moved to the carving site, where the bark and outer layer of wood (sapwood) is removed. Next, the side of the tree to be carved is chosen and the back half of the tree is removed. The center of the log is hollowed out to make it lighter and to keep it from cracking. Early tools used to carve totem poles were made of stone, shell, or bone, but beginning in the late 1700s, the use of iron tools made the carving work faster and easier. In the early days, the basic design for figures may have been painted on the wood to guide the carvers, but today's carvers use paper patterns as outlines for their designs. Carvers use chain saws to make the rough shapes and cuts, while adzes and chisels are used to chop the wood. Carvers use knives and other woodworking tools to add the finer details. When the carving is complete, paint is added to enhance specific details of the figures.
Raising a totem pole is rarely done using modern methods, even for poles installed in modern settings. Most artists use a traditional method followed by a pole-raising ceremony. The traditional method calls for a deep trench to be dug. One end of the pole is placed at the bottom of the trench; the other end is supported at an upward angle by a wooden scaffold. Hundreds of strong men haul the pole upright into its footing, while others steady the pole from side ropes and brace it with cross beams. Once the pole is upright, the trench is filled with rocks and dirt. After the raising is completed, the carver, the carver's assistants, and others invited to attend the event perform a celebratory dance next to the pole. A community potlatch celebration typically follows the pole raising to commemorate the event.
Totem poles are typically not well maintained after their installation and the potlatch celebration. The poles usually last from 60 to 80 years; only a few have stood longer than 75 years, and even fewer have reached 100 years of age. Once the wood rots so badly that the pole begins to lean and pose a threat to passersby, it is either destroyed or pushed over and removed. Older poles typically fall over during the winter storms that batter the coast. The owners of a collapsed pole may commission a new one to replace it.
Views about the lack of maintenance vary among individuals, but it is generally believed that the deterioration of the pole represents the natural process of decay and death that occur with all living things, and attempts to prevent this are seen as somehow denying or ignoring the nature of the world. This belief has not prevented people from occasionally renewing the paint on poles or performing further restorations, mostly because the expense of a new pole is not feasible for the owner. Also, owners of poles who are not familiar with cultural traditions may see upkeep as a necessary investment for property, and ignore the philosophical implications.
Each culture typically has complex rules and customs regarding designs represented on poles. The designs are generally considered the property of a particular clan or family group, and this ownership may not be transferred to the owner of a pole. As such, pictures, paintings, and other copies of the designs are often seen as an infringement of the ownership rights of a certain family or cultural group. Many Native artists, Native organizations and Native governments note that ownership of the artistic designs represented on a pole should be respected as private property to the same extent as the pole. They ask that public display and sale of pictures and other representations of totem pole designs be cleared with the owners of the pole and the cultural group or tribal government associated with the pole's designs.
Because totem poles, in general, are not the exclusive cultural property of a single culture, the designs are not easily protected. The appropriation of coastal Pacific Northwest culture by the art and tourist trinket market has resulted in production of cheap imitations of totem poles executed with little or no knowledge of their complex stylistic conventions. These include imitations made by other First Nations and Native American peoples in Canada and southwestern United States. Proliferation of "totem junk" has diluted public interest and respect for the artistic skill and cultural knowledge required to produce a pole.
In the early 1990s, the Haisla First Nation of the Pacific Northwest began a lengthy struggle to repatriate a sacred totem from Sweden's Museum of Ethnography. Their successful efforts were documented in Gil Cardinal's National Film Board of Canada documentary, Totem: The Return of the G'psgolox Pole.
The title of "The World's Tallest Totem Pole" is or has at one time been claimed by several coastal towns of North America's Pacific Northwest. Disputes over which is genuinely the tallest depends on factors such the number of logs used in construction or the affiliation of the carver. Competitions to make the tallest pole remain prevalent, although it is becoming more difficult to procure trees of sufficient height. The tallest poles include:
The thickest totem pole ever carved to date is in Duncan, British Columbia. Carved by Richard Hunt in 1988 in the Kwakwaka'wakw style, and measuring over 6 feet (1.8 m) in diameter, it represents Cedar Man transforming into his human form.
Notable collections of totem poles on display include these sites:
Poles similar to totem poles are also found elsewhere in the world. Due to their similarities, they are often described as totem poles. Notable cultures with examples of totem pole-like objects are the indigenous people of Jilin, northeast China; the Koreans; and the Māori, an indigenous people of New Zealand. The Ainu people of Japan created poles with Ainu motifs after admiring the totem poles crafted by the indigenous people of North America.
Mundha is a one-piece decorative wooden pillar that a Madia Gond bridegroom in India carves after he is engaged. The pillar is kept in front of the community dormitory (ghotul) during his marriage ceremony. The Madia Gond are residents of Bhamragad Taluka, of Gadchiroli District, of Maharashtra, India.
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An occupational culture is a means for coping with the vicissitudes or uncertainties arising routinely in the course of doing a job. An occupational culture is a reduced, selective, and task-based version of culture that includes history and traditions, etiquette and routines, rules, principles, and practices that serve to buffer practitioners from contacts with the public. A kind of lens on the world, it highlights some aspects of the social and physical environment and omits or minimizes others. It generates stories, lore, and legends.
The sources of the occupational culture are the repeated, routinized tasks incumbent on the members, a technology that is variously direct or indirect in its effects (mediated by the organizational structure within which the occupation is done), and the reflexive aspects of talking about these doings. In this sense, an occupational culture reflects not only what is done and how it should (and should not) be done but also idealizations of the work.
An occupational culture is a context within which emotions are regulated and attuned to work routines. As Waddington (1998, 292-93) writes perceptively, the police culture is ”… an expression of common values, attitudes, and beliefs within a police context.” A political economy of emotions, or a distribution of emotions consistent with power, stratification, and control, complements characteristic value configurations and interactional patterns. These, in turn, are a reflection of the fit between the differential exposure of practitioners to work-based contingencies. This creates segments within the occupation.
Clearly, uniformed officers face different contingencies than do detectives, and supervisors differ in their experience from top management. Career success is based in part on skills, in part on politics and networks, as well as on reorganizing and reassembling one’s emotional equipment. The emotional tone of an officer on the street may not suit for the demands of top command. Conversely, failure and status deficits may create a shadow world of invalidated role performers, those who are seen to have achieved their positions by political means. In this drama of work, of course, patterns of rise and fall, of failure, redemption, and renewal are seen. In recent years, these minidramas often surround key figures in sexual miscues, harassment, and discrimination by age, gender, or ethnicity. Such minitragedies, as in any occupation, mark its outer boundaries and provide warning signs and cautionary tales.
Policing is politics by other means. Ironically, as Hughes (1958) points out, an occupational mandate consists of setting aside functions others may not do as well as designating those that the occupation may or must do. As the guardians of order, they are ”dirty workers,” who must do what others may not: enabled to violate the law, they must act violently and intrusively, shoot, maim, and kill. They are also required to rationalize or justify the necessary. Perhaps because it is inherently political in function and origins, policing manifests a turgid and resilient occupational culture.
This culture resides within a police organization constituted by several occupations and specialties. Police officers and others police, while police organizations are the accountable means by which this is accomplished. The occupational culture in the literature often is depicted as that of one segment, the uniformed patrol, while the police organization includes and employs civilians (about 25% of the employees of local police organizations), janitors, cooks, consultants, lawyers and researchers, and other short-term employees. It is also entangled in intraorganizational relations as well as local politics. However, the uniformed police occupational culture shadows and dominates the several occupational groups within the organization, and its values are variously subscribed to by the several occupational groups working within the organization.
Structural Features of American Police Organizations That Divide and Unify the Occupation
The police occupational culture is shaped by five structural features of police organizations. The first is the inspectorial strategy of policing, which deploys a large number of low-ranking officers who are ecologically dispersed to monitor and track citizens in the environment and make complex, difficult decisions, usually alone, with minimal supervision and/or review. The second is the localistic, common-level entry and apprenticeship training pattern of police. In the United States, most officers serve their entire careers in one organization, and only top command officers join as a result of lateral mobility. Officers above superintendent are mobile in the United Kingdom.
The third feature is that the police organization is both fact rich and information poor. The police mission, to penetrate and control problematic environments, leads them to overemphasize secrecy and deception as means of achieving organizational ends. Police information consists of collections of scraps of unintegrated data, quasi-secret and secret intelligence files, an amalgam of outdated context-specific information, and a layered archaeology of knowledge. Although secrecy is not the highest value among officers, it is safe to say that the conditions under which information is shared (rarely) are carefully observed.
The fourth structural feature is that risk (positive and negative consequences of high uncertainty) is associated with policing. These features turn officers inward, away from the public, and laterally to their colleagues for support. The features vary empirically from force to force, and the salience of one or the other may vary by local political context.
The task-role complex of the job differentiates the police and serves to highlight variations within the occupational culture. The core tasks and routines are uncertain and unpredictable. Officers share assumptions about the nature of the work (risky, exciting, worthwhile, ”clinical” in nature) and operate in an environment perceived or created by such work routines and codified definitions of relevant tasks. In urban policing, the cynosure of ”the job” is ”working the streets,” patrol response to radio calls. Boredom, risk, and excitement oscillate unpredictably.
The technology, unrefined people-processing recipes, that is, judgments of officers working with little direct guidance, pattern work, and a rigid rank structure officially organizes authority. Policing is realized within a bureaucratic, rule-oriented, hierarchical structure of command and control on the one hand and a loose confederation of colleagues on the other. The interaction of these factors, tasks, environment, technology, and structure produces characteristic attitudes and an ideology, a set of explanatory beliefs rationalizing the work and its contingencies. The operation of these factors stratifies and differentiates the organization and partitions officers’ experience.
Other structural factors unify police. These include the ideal of shared fate or of occupational unity, an experiential base (all served as officers initially), task dependency (officers rely on each other to accomplish joint tasks), and shared, mutually discrediting secrets. There is also an abiding ideology or mythology about policing that concerns the mandate, the legal and societal obligations, and the role as it is represented in public rhetoric, or ”presentational strategies” (Manning 1997). These unifying factors stand in some tension with the differentiating factors. It should be further emphasized that the values produced are also points of ambivalence and counterpoint and do not form a single integrated whole. Unfortunately, detective work, specialized squads such SWAT teams, and staff functions such as internal affairs are omitted in the descriptive catalogs of the police occupational culture (Reiner 2000; Crank 1998).
An Overview of Studies of the Occupational Culture
The academic view of the police occupational subculture is disproportionately influenced by a handful of studies of American or English uniformed patrol officers serving in large urban areas, and it has been reified by text topic treatments. Although rich ethnographic treatments of policing exist (Banton 1964; Holdaway 1983; Bittner 1990; Rubinstein 1972; Van Maanen 1974; and Simon 1991), the police are often flattened, desiccated, and displayed like insects pinned on a display board. Acute observers have noted the differentiation and segmentalization of policing using role types (Terrill, Paoline, and Manning 2003; Reiner 1992, 130-33), the conceptions of external publics (Reiner 1992,117-21), the distinctive misleading binary subcultures such as a ”street cop culture” and a “management culture” (Punch 1983), and the conflicts within forces based on ethnicity and gender (Foster 2004). Value variations based in part on task differentiation also exist within departments (Jermeir et al. 1991). Other social forces, especially technology, management training, the law, and pressures to produce such as traffic ticket quotas and case clearances in detective work, also impact policing.
Some recent work has worked toward a generalized model of the occupational culture (Klinger 2002; Paoline 2003). Janet Chan’s work (1997) is the most theoretically informed of present work. She takes a complex Bourdieu-influenced perspective, arguing that policing is organized around various forms of knowledge and practice shaped continuously by a habitus or way of being and doing. Waddington (1998) has made the most important distinction in the study of the occupational culture in recent years, noting that the oral culture (see also Shearing and Ericson 1992) and the behavior of officers differs. His review points out the fallacy of generalizations based on talk rather than observation.
Three important changes have taken place in the past twenty years in policing. They suggest both the strength of the occupational culture and its roots. The first is the impact of new information technologies. Technology, especially information technology (IT), has eroded authority and altered police workloads. Although technology has absorbed and transformed some work tasks (such as immediate supervision), ”middle managers” have grown in number and importance in policing. (Due in part to the effects of massive hiring between 1968 and 1975, these officers are now nearing retirement.) Ironically, spawned by paperwork and supervisory duties, these positions, sergeant, inspector, lieutenant, and superintendent, are threatened by the introduction of computer-based formal record-keeping systems. These developments suggest the existence of a management cadre or segment within the occupational culture. It has emerged between the lower participants and senior command officers. It also suggests that in the future a division across ranks will be between those who are computer facile and those who are not.
The second is the impact of female and minority officers. While their attitudes seem to fit closely with their colleagues on survey, closer studies (Morash and Haar 1991) suggest that modes of relating and coping and the stresses faced by female officers differ from males and that this may emerge as a cross-cutting segment unified not by rank but by shared sentiments. It already tightly shapes who interacts with whom and why (Haar 1990).
Finally, the rising educational levels within policing and the growth of suburban departments means that tensions arise between the educated officers and the others, that bias and prejudice exist, and that opportunities for promotion may be compromised not only by union rules but by prejudice against educated officers. The most powerful and systematic research, based on observation, interviews, and surveys done in England in the wake of the McPherson report on the investigation of the murder of Stephen Lawrence, shows that racial/ethnic bias remains very strong and virulent, that it affects promotion and rewards at every level of the force, and that the traditional themes of masculinity, violence, crime fighting, and danger remain thematic and not attributed to people of color and women.
Segmentation of the Nondetective Occupational Culture
A segment is a group of people loosely bound by interaction patterns. In policing, the limits on interaction are tightly drawn around rank, although some interaction occurs laterally via sponsorship of proteges and political ties based on religion, union membership, past links in the academy, and so on. The dominant values of the occupational culture, taken as a whole, are espoused throughout but are most salient in the lower segment, where they find a functional, task-relevant home. The occupational values cohere around the most sacred notion of the occupation: one must display, enact, and maintain them before authority. This is often connected to other general beliefs such as loyalty, honor, patriotism, and duty.
Independence, autonomy, authority, and uncertainty are key values of the police occupational culture. Each of these four values has its opposite: dependence, collective obligations, powerlessness, and certainty. They are in effect paired and dynamic oppositions that take meaning from each other. Kai Erikson (1976, 83) argues that ”… people think or feel different things in the service of an overall pattern of coordination. In the same sense that people contribute different skills and abilities to the organization of work, so they contribute different temperaments and outlooks to the organization of sensibility.” The occupational culture in some ways is a configuration of sentiments and values, core and counterpoint, that are more or less salient from time to time (Shearing and Ericson 1992).
The values are also linked to the structural factors noted above that sustain their reality. The dependence pair is linked to the control mission or mandate of policing, the autonomy pair is linked to the fixed character of the organization’s normal functioning, the authority pair is linked to adversarial encounters, and the final pair, certainty, is animated by the appearance of risk.
Their dynamic relationship surfaces primarily in crises in which the veneer of authority is shattered, the public performance is threatened or collapses, or the officer is embarrassed or fails to fill role requirements. In these situations, the officer reflects, and draws on the occupational perspective for support and clarification. The residual of these encounters and their ambiguous outcomes is the basis for the narrative or storytelling that reinforces and renews the culture. The culture rises and falls in salience and does not remain a lens through which the world is always viewed.
The ”lower participant” segment is composed of officers and sergeants. Sergeants, like foremen in factories, interact in both segments and are occasionally caught between them. Organized in narrative form, the values connect in the following way. The uniformed officer works in an uncertain environment in which choice, action, and decision are emphasized, in which the veneer of objectively guided decision making is essential, and in which an often tenuous authority frequently must be asserted with strangers in public. The officer is routinely dependent on fellow officers and the public to maintain a credible performance of authoritative assertions and action, yet the occupation emphasizes autonomy. While dependent, the officer must act authoritatively and without full knowledge of the facts or the consequences of potential actions. An underlying premise is that a neutral emotional tone is to be maintained, and the body, its posture, gestures, shape, and performance, are to be ready.
Working class culture, from which most police are recruited, supplies the most frequently noted emblems, or symbols, that collapse attitudes and practices into valuations of action characterizing policing. Thus, emphases upon individual control of situations, toughness, machismo, hedonism, deprecation of paperwork and abstraction, concrete language, and description are working class values. Officers ”at the coal face” or ”in the trenches” appear to exchange a degree of organizational autonomy to maintain a working class style. There are other visible signs of membership in this segment. Patrol officers, for example, unlike ranks above sergeants and including sergeants in some departments, may acquire overtime for court appearances, work rotating shifts, and wear a uniform and receive a uniform allowance, unless assigned to staff or detective work temporarily.
Lower participants generally emphasize dependence, autonomy, authority, and uncertainty. The latent function of these emphases is to suppress the equally powerful potential, evidence that suggests that police officers are often dependent upon and obligated to others, powerless, or are least relatively powerless, and quite clear and certain about the contours of their work.
The four value themes for the lower participants can be clustered into two metathemes: (l) ”the job,” an index of the interrelated themes of (job) dependency and autonomy, and (2) ”real police work,” an index combining authority and uncertainty in relationships with the public.
The Middle Management Segment
This segment is composed of officers in the ranks sergeant, lieutenant, inspector, chief inspector, and superintendent, or their equivalents. Stereotypically, their style portends an authoritative presence. They are in effect bureaucrats with guns. They walk, talk, and react as managers and persons whose authority rests on their verbosity, good humor, and ability to communicate in writing and verbally. Bodily skill is rarely required of managers. Officers in this segment perform their roles variously, depending on their orientation toward promotion, economic gain, or organizational change. They have achieved a desired rank, and some hope for promotion or transfer (into a detective or specialized unit, for example). Technological developments make management skill a likely consideration for promotion, for example, attending night school for an MBA rather than seeking a law degree.
Like other ”white collar” workers, they are a middle mass with shared tenuous mutual identification, although they may have a separate union. This segment is likely to be riven with cliques (upwardly oriented groups) and cabals (groups resistant to change) and linked by interaction networks with other officers. Organizational politics, both of careers and of the top command, is a keen interest and concern of middle managers. Computer-assisted dispatch, management information systems, computer-based records, and crime analysis applications have altered their workloads (although not necessarily increased them). Symbolically located between command and other officers, they must adapt to organizational realities. They rarely earn overtime and work shifts if not assigned to staff positions. They generally wear uniforms, usually without the jacket since they work ”inside,” and are provided with a uniform allowance. Their claims for occupational prestige are aligned either up or down: toward administrative officers or those on the street.
Middle management officers emphasize independence and collective obligations to form the metatheme (3) ”politics” (of the job or the occupation, oriented partially to internal and partially to external audiences), while the twin themes of authority and certainty (the need to control contingencies through supervision) are clustered as a metatheme (4) ”management.”
The Top Command Segment
The top command segment is composed of officers above the rank of superintendent (or commander), including chief and deputy chief(s). Their style is less obviously working class, and their speech and manner often emulates those they admire in the business world. They have options in dress—full or partial uniform, business suit, or casual wear—and some have adopted the term ”CEO,” mimicking business practice, and talk about ”… changing the way we do business.” They are oriented in a somewhat dualistic fashion, since they must seek the loyalty of the lower participants as well as city ”fathers.” They curry favor with officers on the street as well as external audiences, including political elites, elected officials, and worthy citizens’ groups (Reiner 1991).
Much of their work is ”fire fighting,” managing various kinds of crises. In theory, they make ”policy” decisions, or at least consider issues enduring beyond the end of a shift or day’s work. The administrative cadre is dependent on the goodwill and discretion of officers, because ”working the streets” produces most of the scandals and political incidents. The values of the lower participants remain surprisingly salient: They function as a ground against which the figure of commitment to the perks, rewards, and intrinsic satisfactions of command are seen. Some think of themselves as ”good police officers,” and emphasize their ”street smarts,” ”toughness,” or past crime fighting successes, rather than their administrative skills, wisdom as ”people managers,” or educational achievements. Command officers’ views of policing are reflexive, because they are obligated to manage the consequences of decisions made by others. They must ”read off” these value themes and metathemes to understand and interpret police work.
Command officers emphasize that they manage the dependence and autonomy issues that lower participants label ”the job” and middle managers call ”office politics.” Top administrative officers also emphasize the ”politics” and ”management” themes of middle management. The refracted value tensions of lower participants and managers are an element of the command segment’s work. One metatheme (5) is called ”managing the job.” They see their work bearing external responsibility, being accountable, while being dependent on lower participants. The second meta-theme, (6) ”policing as politics,” glosses command responsibility. Command officers emphasize ”management” rather than ”the job” and view police management as paperwork and coping with and managing the lower participants’ subculture. Uncertainty reappears, although administrators’ uncertainty focuses on their authority in the context of dependence upon the discretion (in both senses of the word) and competence of the lower participants.
Finally, it appears that they combine two metathemes of other segments into a single megatheme, combining the meta-themes ”management” and ”politics” into one that might be called ”policing as democratic politics.” This formulation glosses their interest in sustaining and amplifying the political power and independence of the police in the criminal justice system and dramatizes and displays the role of police in both the local and occasionally the national political system. Policing as democratic politics implies sensitivity to the encumbrances and political implications of policing.
The three segments within policing are indicated by values and value emphases that connote potential division within and across segments. The culture both divides and integrates the occupation, depending on the situation and the issue. These segments and value emphases signal a structural potential for conflict in the police organization. Conflict may arise not only from intrasegment variations in value emphases but from intersegment differences in the meaning of the work and modes of resolving differences.
The police occupational culture is not unique. It reflects the social values of Anglo American societies such as individualism, material success, bias against various others (minorities, people of color, women), and preference for the company of others like themselves. It is particularly shaped by local politics, situational pressures, and media dramatizations. On the other hand, police respond day by day to the untoward, the dirty, ugly, and violent and in general come when they are called. The emotional tone of policing as a practice, the laconic, somewhat distant view, when combined with the humor and stories, are sentiments that reveal basic humanity.


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October 2003, Volume 9, Number 4
Farm Labor in the 1930s
During the 1930s, some 1.3 million Americans from the Midwest and southwest migrated to California, which had a population of 5.7 million in 1930s. The arrival of Okies and Arkies set the stage for physical and ideological conflicts over how to deal with seasonal farm labor and produced literature that resonates decades later, as students read and watch "The Grapes of Wrath" and farmers and advocates continue to argue over how to obtain and treat seasonal farm workers.
Carey McWilliams once said that farm labor in California has "been lost sight of and rediscovered time and again." (quoted in Loftis, p191) Three recent books make important contributions to our understanding of farm labor issues in the 1930s. Interestingly, two of the three are not about farm workers: instead, they focus on the people who interpreted the California farm labor story of the 1930s.
Loftis has written a detailed and well documented 14-chapter book about the major figures who led efforts to publicize the plight of farm workers in the 1930s, the writers and photographers who interpreted the farm workers' story for the American public. She begins with the role of prominent Communists in the 1933 cotton strike, a four-week strike in October 1933 that involved 12,000 to 18,000 workers. Workers refused to pick the 1933 crop for the $0.60 per hundred pounds offered by growers, since the growers' prices had been raised by federal programs aimed at helping agriculture. Growers immediately evicted strikers from grower-owned labor camps, a tactic that backfired as striking workers moved into tent camps organized by the Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union, reinforcing the strike's effectiveness.
California newspapers alternated between ignoring the strike or printing the growers' side until several strikers were killed by growers at a Pixley, California rally. The reporters and photographers who rushed to cover the strike generally reported that it was growers, not strikers, who were breaking labor and other laws. A politically ambitious federal relief official, George Creel, used a three-member arbitration panel appointed by the governor to force growers and workers to accept a compromise $0.75 per hundred pound piece rate, less than the $1 demanded by strikers, but 25 percent more than growers offered. Most cotton pickers were Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, but UC-Berkeley economists Paul Taylor and Clark Kerr selected a migrant from Texas and Oklahoma, Bill Hamett, to be the workers' representative in the final negotiations. Hamett remained a farm worker, but was blacklisted from jobs in the Pixley area.
Loftis interviewed Paul Taylor and Clark Kerr, both of whom grew up on family farms. Taylor believed in the agricultural job ladder, meaning that farm workers could become family farmers, and he encountered resistance at UC-Berkeley for his attacks on a California agribusiness that depended on seasonal farm workers who had little chance of becoming farmers. Kerr, UC president in the 1960s, spent several months in the San Joaquin Valley documenting migrant conditions for Taylor in 1933-34. A subsequent Taylor student, Stuart Jamieson, wrote the definitive history of farm worker unions between 1900 and 1950, as well as documenting the activities of the Associated Farmers, created in 1934 to prevent farm worker unionization.
Loftis emphasizes that John Steinbeck wanted to become a writer in the 1930s and interacted with artists and communists in Carmel. Steinbeck had a rare ability to fictionalize real situations, such as his account of a Watsonville apple harvesters' strike in the 1936 novel, "In Dubious Battle." Steinbeck worked summers on Sprekel Company farms in the Salinas Valley where he grew up, but always considered himself different from other farm workers.
Carey McWilliams was a corporate lawyer and aspiring writer in Los Angeles who was drawn into farm labor issues by his interactions with left-leaning Los Angeles writers, who were taking an interest in the plight of the oppressed during the Depression. McWilliams knew Upton Sinclair (author of The Jungle), who ran for governor in 1934 with an End Poverty in California program (he lost) that included turning large farms into cooperatives, as well as literary critic Edmund Wilson. In the summer of 1934, there was a general strike in San Francisco called by the International Longshoremen's Association to obtain a union-run hiring hall to allocate work on the docks, and San Francisco newspapers falsely quoted the CAIWU leaders who led the 1933 strikes to say that farm workers would go on strike in support of the ILA, and that the fields would become battlefields in the struggle to bring communism to California. These statements, printed at the behest of farm employers, led to the arrest of 14 CAIWU leaders in Sacramento in July 1934 for vagrancy.
By the time the trial of CAIWU leaders began in January 1935, the charges against them had been changed to criminal syndicalism, or instigating violence. The Associated Farmers provided the prosecutors with evidence, and six CAIWU leaders were convicted and sentenced to prison after a four-month trial in April 1935. The actions and treatment of the CAIWU inspired some writers and poets organized under the Western Writers Workshop to prepare the US for the massive increase in federal expenditures for social purposes under the New Deal, under the theory that not doing so could lead to Communism (p106).
Loftis reviews state and local policies to cope with the arrival of Americans from other parts of the US in California during the 1930s. In Fall 1931, migrants were arriving in the state at the rate of 1,200 to 1,500 a day, an annual rate of almost 500,000 (p109). As the in-migration continued, studies concluded that migrants followed networks, and these networks were oriented to rail lines. One of those involved in the studies of migrant networks was lawyer Melvin Belli, who as a participant-observer was arrested for vagrancy on many occasions in 1933.
State and local actions aimed to keep needy migrants out of the state. The vagrancy laws of 1933 and 1937, under which many migrants were arrested and sometimes "lent" to farmers to work off their fines, were finally repealed in 1941 as unconstitutional (Edwards vs California). Similarly, the Los Angeles police operated 16 checkpoints on the California-Arizona border to turn back migrants "with no visible means of support" in February-March 1936 until the checkpoints were ruled unconstitutional. (Loftis, p126).
If government could not keep people out of the state, what could it do to provide assistance to needy residents? Instead of the "pioneer tradition" of giving the poor food and sending them on their way, reformers wanted a system of shelters that provided food, medical care, and counseling/training in exchange for one to three hours of work or community service (p111). However, these transient camps were not yet established when, in 1934, the Dust Bowl in the Midwest began sending migrants to California, the migration documented by Dorthea Lange. In 1935, Paul Taylor hired Lange to accompany him to study migrants, and Taylor credited Lange's photographs of migrant conditions in the privately created "Hoovervilles" with persuading government to begin, in the summer of 1935, to build the first two of what would become a chain of government-funded migrant labor camps in Marysville and Arvin. Lange and Taylor divorced their spouses, and married in December 1935.
Lange's most famous picture, "Migrant Mother," taken in March 1936 near Nipomo, Calif, was the stark symbol of a woman trapped in poverty during the Great Depression. The woman was Florence Owens Thompson, a migrant from Oklahoma. In 1998, the U.S. Postal Service used the Lange photo in the Celebrate the Century series on a 32-cent stamp entitled "America Survives the Depression."
Economist Paul Taylor and lawyer Carey McWilliams were the dominant farm labor researchers/advocates of the 1930s, while photographer Dorthea Lange and writer John Steinbeck turned the story of the great migration to California into enduring parts of American culture. Taylor grew up on a family farm in the Midwest, and wanted to redistribute land and create a family farming system in California. Taylor recognized that many of the migrants arriving in California would need help to make the transition from the non-irrigated cotton and grain farming of the Midwest to irrigated fruit and vegetable farming in California, and he urged the formation of camps and co-ops that would train Okies and Arkies in the vagaries of California agriculture.
Carey McWilliams made his first extended trip through the Central Valley in 1935 with writer Herbert Klein, and their observations were published later that year in the Pacific Weekly in a series of articles entitled "Factories in the Fields" (p142). McWilliams argued that government was providing extensive benefits to farmers--water subsidies and price supports--and very little to farm workers, and urged government to do more for migrants. McWilliams went on to head California's Commission of Immigration and Housing between 1939 and 1942, where he increased inspections of grower-owned labor camps; the Commission had been established in response to the Wheatland hops riots of 1913. McWilliams also changed the wage-relief formula that was used to stop relief for migrants who refused to accept farm jobs at prevailing piece rate wages, effectively forcing some growers to increase piece rates. Growers labeled McWilliams "California's number one agricultural pest, worse than the pear blight or boll weevil." (p169)
The 16 permanent and nine mobile labor camps funded by the Farm Security Administration proved vital to the writing of farm labor literature in the 1930s. White English-speaking migrants (Blacks and Mexicans were often excluded from the camps) were readily accessible to outsiders, and camp managers such as Tom Collins in Arvin (later called Weedpatch and now the Sunset Labor Camp) often made their notes available to writers such as John Steinbeck, who used them in character development. (p146-48)
Steinbeck was recruited by the liberal San Francisco News to publicize the benefits of the fledgling government-run camps, and his first visit was to the Arvin camp. While there, local farmers threatened to disrupt the regular Saturday night dance--if they had succeeded, a precedent may have been established for local law enforcement to invalidate the authority of federal camp managers, who were far more sympathetic to migrants. Steinbeck, then 36, used this and other incidents from Arvin in "The Grapes of Wrath," the novel that opens with the Joad family being pushed off their farm in Sallisaw in eastern Oklahoma, and follows the family west for 1,200 miles on Route 66 through Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona to California. The Dust Bowl migrants captured the imagination of many Americans in part because readers could easily identify with them, and think, "there but for the grace of God go I."
While Steinbeck, Taylor and McWilliams documented the plight of migrants in little-read leftist magazines and papers, Frank J. Taylor presented the growers point of view in the mainstream press. Taylor emphasized that some growers, including the 4,000-acre Tagus Ranch, offered free or low -cost housing as well as on-farm schools and stores for workers. Reformers such as McWilliams thought on-farm housing and services were feudalistic, with workers afraid to leave the ranch, or even consider other jobs, for fear of losing their housing. Growers sponsored monographs entitled "Plums of Plenty" and "Grapes of Gladness."
Taylor emphasized that growers established the San Joaquin Agricultural Labor Bureau to set standard piece rate wages so that workers would not "jump from job to job in the middle of the grape, peach, fig or cotton picking." (p160) Taylor also raised an issue that reformers did not discuss: California between 1935 and 1941 had "the most generous local and state relief program in the US" (p164), which may have helped attract migrants to the state.
The Grapes of Wrath was published in April 1940, and President Roosevelt was quoted as reacting after reading it that "something must be done and done soon" to help California farm workers. (p174) Many schools and libraries banned The Grapes of Wrath, and Oklahoma Congressman Lyle Boren denounced it as "a lie, a black, infernal creation of a twisted, distorted mind." Steinbeck won the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for literature in 1962.
In 1939-40, two Congressional committees with opposing agendas held hearings in California. The US Senate's LaFollette Committee was guided by McWilliams, among others, to examine the power and anti-union activities of growers in 28 days of hearings, with over 400 witnesses. The US House Committee on Un-American Activities, on the other hand, focused on the communists who backed farm-worker protests. Loftis concluded that Taylor and McWilliams were motivated by the injustices of a farm labor system they believed badly needed change and that the "chief impact of their writing was its...connection with the events of the time it appeared," that is, its impact has lessened over time. Lange and Steinbeck, on the other hand, "gave history a human face;" both are far better known sixty years later than the social scientists with whom they worked. (p192)
Shindo's six-chapter book aims to debunk myths about the 1930s by showing how four American icons used the Dust Bowl migration to California to further their wider aims. He notes that only a third of the Dust Bowl migrants were farmers in the Midwest who became farm workers in California--other estimates put the farm workers among the Okies even lower, at 150,000 to 200,000 of 1.3 million migrants to the state. He argues that photographer Dorthea Lange, author John Steinbeck, director John Ford, and singer Woodie Guthrie used the plight of the migrants to urge changes in California's rural economy, to either accept a system of factory farms, and regulate the farm labor market as nonfarm labor markets were being regulated, or to break up big California farms and give land to the workers.
Shindo argues that the plight of the small Midwestern farmers who lost their land to banks in the 1930s and migrated to California was "communicated" to Americans by people with agendas that included using the plight of the Okies and Arkies to fundamentally restructure the US economy and political system. They were very successful: Shindo concluded that "the role of the Dust Bowl migrant as the representative American victim has completely displaced the Dust Bowl migrant of historical circumstance. " (p216) Two institutions played key roles in Dust Bowl migration: government-funded migrant camps and federal funds for artists and writers. Many of the camp managers and federally funded researchers agreed on the need for fundamental agricultural and economic reforms, but the Okies and Arkies often did not, since they were more likely to want to become small farmers than to become union members, and as likely to break strikes than to honor picket lines.
There was little housing in rural areas for the migrants arriving in California. Federal government camps were seen by reformers as the places in which migrants could be turned into "class-conscious agricultural laborer(s)." The migrants, on the other hand, were trying to avoid permanent employment as wage laborers "by saving enough to become small farmers in their own right." (p22) Dust Bowl migrants did not fit neatly into either the farmer or reformer boxes, and Shindo concludes that "The disparity between the 'plain folk Americanism' of the migrants and the dominant California outlooks of 'business conservatism' and 'urban liberalism' further alienated the migrants." (p34)
Shindo reviews the life and work of Dorthea Lange, who grew up near New York City and was a portrait photographer in San Francisco. During the Depression in 1932, she was standing outside her studio and took a picture of men waiting in a bread line. UCB economist Paul Taylor saw the photograph, hired her as a photographer for his study of California agriculture, and married her in 1935. They collaborated on several projects that, Shindo argues, aimed to convince opinion leaders that migrants were victims who needed government support. Their 1939 book concluded, according to Shindo, that "the Dust Bowl migration [was] the result of the battle between man and machine...the power of large landholders and giant corporations is represented by the tractor, while the hard-working tenant farmers and sharecroppers become refugees in their own country." (p38).
Taylor said that migratory farm labor was "an unwitting instrument in the breakdown of the traditional American ideal of the family farm [because] it slips through stable and often rich communities, of which it is never an accepted part. It offers a breeding ground of social unrest. ... It lends itself readily to the development of a form of agriculture which is not a way of life, but an industry." Describing the peak 250,000 migrants who harvested wheat from Texas to Canada in the first 25 years of the 20th century by riding the rails, Taylor noted that "The major portion of the harvest in each State was performed by men who migrated only within the State." However, many of the migrant harvesters became members of the Industrial Workers of the World or Wobblies, and migrants without an IWW red card were sometimes prevented from riding the rails. Taylor saw the combines that replaced migrants during the 1920s as a way to reduce the appeal of radicals in rural communities. Taylor quoted an Oklahoma Commissioner of Labor in the early 1930s who said that "an oversupply of labor in any locality is almost as disastrous as a shortage and more so as far as the community in general is concerned." (Taylor, 1937)
The J. Paul Getty Museum purchased a print of the "Migrant Mother," photograph for $244,500 at Sotheby's auction house in October 1998, and the photo became a US postage stamp. Shindo notes that Lange, who was returning from a month-long photo trip and had only six shots left, did not talk to Florence Owens Thompson, the woman in the picture, or to other pea pickers in the camp. According to the now adult girls in the picture, the Thompson family was from the San Joaquin Valley, not the Midwest, and the reason they became farm workers was because their father died of an asthma attack, forcing the family to go on the road in search of farm work. The family stopped migrating in the 1940s, when Thompson found work in a state hospital in Modesto.
Shindo reviews John Steinbeck's 1939 novel, "The Grapes of Wrath." Steinbeck, born in Salinas to a father who was a high-level county employee, went to but did not graduate from Stanford, and was greatly influenced by biological theories in which the whole was greater than the sum of its parts. The 1936 novel, "In Dubious Battle," shows how apple pickers striking for higher wages become something more than dissatisfied workers. The Grapes of Wrath, written between May and October 1938, borrows much, according to Shindo, from notes provided to Steinbeck by the manager of a federal farm labor camp near Arvin. The Joad family was forced off their Oklahoma farm, drove to California with all their belongings, enduring hardship along the way, and pulled into a "Hooverville" or federal migrant camp, which provided clean housing and democracy. However, there was no work available locally, so the Joad family moved on, breaking a strike at a peach farm. Vigilantes attack them, Jim Casy is killed, Tom Joad must go into hiding, and the family slides down hill, living an abandoned rail car where Rose of Sharon delivers a stillborn baby.
In his 1962 Nobel acceptance speech Steinbeck said that a writer must believe in "the perfectibility of man." Steinbeck's farm labor writings can thus be considered pleas for reform: alleviate the misery of migrants and teach them democracy and how to live correctly in government-run camps, and stabilize the labor force needed by large California growers. According to Shindo, the purpose of The Grapes of Wrath was to teach "a middle class, progressive audience its role in the shaping of American society," that is, they should answer the Joads' question of why there are not more government-run labor camps by demanding that the government build them (p69).
John Ford was the director who made "The Grapes of Wrath" into a movie in 1940, starring Henry Fonda and Jane Darwell. Ford was especially well known for making films about the myths of the American frontier, showing "the world--its good side through its bad." (p154) Ford said he was attracted to the challenge of making a film that would show the Joad "family going out and trying to find their way in the world." (p160) The Joad family endures hardships on the road to California, finds happiness in the government-run camp, and then unites with other Okies against the very low piece rates paid to peach pickers at the Keene Ranch. Tom, wanted for killing a vigilante, leaves the family, and Ma Joad says that "we're the people" and will survive, as the Joads truck joins a parade of other trucks going on the road in search of farm work.
Woodie Guthrie, the singer and song writer who turned folk songs into a vehicle to express the Okies' concerns to themselves and other Americans, was born into a relatively well-off Oklahoma family, and lived in a frontier oil-boom town. He left his wife and baby in Oklahoma and traveled to California, where he had a radio show that appealed to Midwestern migrants who wound up in Los Angeles. In 1938, he traveled through California, seeing first hand the conditions of Okies and Arkies, and writing songs that accused greedy bankers and agribusiness of taking advantage of "ordinary folks." In 1940, Guthrie moved to New York City, where he achieved his fame as an interpreter of the Okie experience for Americans. Always flirting with Communism, he began to write the Woody Sez column for People's World, which he described as "a Hillbilly's Eye-View of the hole (sic) Migratious Labor movement from the South to the Pacific Coast." (p176). Guthrie during this period wrote his best-known song, "This Land is Your Land," which ended, "this land was made for you and me." Shindo contrasts Steinbeck's belief that the Okies had to become modern to effectuate reform with Guthrie's use of traditional values in support of change. (p186)
Shindo next turns to the uses of American culture, quoting Frederick Jackson Turner that the frontier, with new land to settle, led to an American social development marked by fluidity, new opportunities and, in the west, reminders of connections with "savage nature." (p196) California in the 1930s had government-run labor camps filled with Americans who had experienced considerable hardships, and government-funded researchers went from camp to camp collecting stories and songs. Shindo argues that, in several cases, government funds offered outsiders a chance to collect "their version" of the Okie experience, so that, the "Songs of the Okies" broadcast in New York City over three weeks were structured to reflect the reform goals of their producers, such as the hardships of the migration west, the goal of owning a small farm, and the clash of traditional values and the realities of California agribusiness.
Shindo's book raises questions at two levels: what are the facts, and how have those facts been assimilated into American history. Shindo argues that reformers wanted to use the plight of the migrants to further their own causes, or to educate Okies in government-run camps. Most analyses concluded that farm worker strikes were protests over low wages, especially the failure of farmers to raise wages as their own prices rose because of government farm programs. But conservatives in California argued that, given the often radical leadership of unions attempting to organize farm workers, farm worker unions risked revolution in the state, and thus farm worker strikes needed to be crushed.
Labor historians often distinguish between types of farm workers but lump all farmers together as distant entities out to exploit workers. Historian Vaught argues that turn-of-the-century "horticulturists" saw themselves as producing unique crops while building healthy and prosperous communities. Over time, Vaught shows how labor relations, market imperatives, and changing political conditions undermined the growers' horticultural ideal in four central and northern California agricultural communities.
Loftis, Anne. 1998. Witnesses to the Struggle: Imaging the 1930s California Labor Movement. University of Nevada Press. http://www.nevada.edu/press/