University of California Bancroft Library/Berkeley Regional Oral History Office

Frank T. Swett

CALIFORNIA AGRICULTURAL COOPERATIVES

With an introduction by Henry. s. Erdman

An interview conducted by Willa Klug Baum

Berkeley 1968 This manuscript is made available for research purposes by an agreement with Frank T. Swett dated March 20, 1968. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to The Bancroft Library of the University of California at Berkeley. No part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of the Director of The Bancroft Library of the University of California at Berkeley.

Requests for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to the Regional Oral History Office, 486 Library, and should include identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated use of the passages, and identification of the user. i

FOREWARD

The name of Frank Swett as one of the pioneers of the

California agricultural cooperative movement had come up again

and again in my research and interviewing on California irrigation

districts and farming for the Regional Oral History Office. Urged

on by professors Frank Adams, Henry Erdman, and Paul Taylor, each

of whom has rendered invaluable advice to this Office in the

selection of interviewees and in the preparation of interview

questions, I wrote to Mr. Swett in September, 1961, asking if I might come to talk to him about his role in cooperatives. His

immediate answer read, "We1come--bring your pick and shovel and we will study "Archeology of California Agricu1ture"--and you may dig up interesting stories--some fictional and some more-or-1ess authentic."

Our first recording session took place in the afternoon of

September 28, 1961, at the old Swett home on Hill Girt Farm in the Alhambra Valley near Martinez. This is a two-story brown house set in a pear orchard; the front porch is overhung by a huge wisteria. Mr. Swett's daughter, Mrs. Howard (Peggy) Plummer, met me at the door and took me in to her father's study off the living room. This is a comfortable old fashioned room, dark of wood and wallpaper, solidly furnished, its most important piece a roll top desk which holds the records of many years of Frank Swett's life. ii

As elsewhere in the house, there are family portraits and oil paintings on the walls. A fat old dog returned to his nap on the floor as I set up the tape recorder and Frank Swett began to recount the early days of agriculture in California.

Mr. Swett, then ninety-two, was a slight man. His hair was white and sparse, and he wore silver rimmed glasses and a hearing aid. For this first interview he was dressed in a grey suit and grey tie which he loosened slightly as the afternoon wore on; at the session the following afternoon he had de-formalized his appearance to the extent that he wore a flannel shirt with the suit.

It was apparent that Mr. Swett enjoyed telling about the events he remembered, both agricultural and familial, and that he chose his words as skillfully as any writer. The first afternoon session and the two following ones were full of chuckles and fun; seven years later as I reread the transcript I can still hear the wry mirth with which he told those stories and I hope this will come through to the reader.

A portion of the second interview was, unfortunately, lost due to machine failure. However, the transcript of the first and part of the second interview was mailed to Mr. Swett in November,

1961, with the hope that he would repeat in writing some of what had been lost on the tape. A week later Mr. Swett replied,

"I think some of the paragraphs should be revised. The responses of 'nonagenarian' F. T. S. afford an illustration of iii

kaleidoscopic prolixotic, loquacitic confusion--and I shall try to

make the remarks of ninety-two-year-old F. T. S. a bit more

intelligible. I shall try to substitute a few paragraphs in less

jabberwocky language. You should hear from me in a week or so."

In December he wrote,

"The more I tried to clear up my helter-skelter remarks, the

more confusion I added to my loquacious ramblings... It's like

trying to glue together the dilapidated fragments of pottery in

ancient cave dwellings~"

In January 1962 Mr. Swett came to the Office with his daughter,

Mrs. W. C. (Elizabeth) Knoll, and we agreed to a further recording

on January 19, in part to get the stories that were lost on the

previous recording and also because Mr. Swett had prepared a list

of additional anecdotes he wished to include.

This interview took place during one of the fiercest storms

of the year; crashing thunder drowned out some of the words on

the tape.

A transcript combining in chronological-topical order the

results of the three recording sessions was sent to Mr. Swett.

His reply was the first of a series of letters which we exchanged

over the years, all of which indicated his concern for checking

the facts before releasing the material. In his letter of March

5, 1962, he wrote,

"I've tried to check my 'mythology' with Walter Packard, and iv

Professor Cruess, and the Gianninni Foundation, and some day when it's not raining I will try to see myoId friends Frank Adams and

Dr. Erdman and switch some of my fantastic miss-memories."

Several times a year thereafter I sent a note to Mr. Swett asking him to read over the manuscript, but not to feel responsible for checking any official records as this was the job of the historical researcher. In the fall of 1964, instead of a manuscript there arrived in the Library mailroom a large box of Concord grapes, specialties of Hill Girt Farm, which were shared with the Walter

Packard and Frank Adams' families.

In early spring 1967, when Mr. Swett was almost ninety-eight years old, several calls to his daughter, Mrs. Knoll, started the ball rolling again. The transcript was found among Mr. Swett's papers in the roll top desk and it was apparent he had gone over much of it and had made some corrections. He had also written some notes for further chapters and some of these have been included in the appendix. Even in their incompleted form, they are still full of the flavor of Frank Swett's sharp wit and keen observations.

Two interviewers from Radio Station KPFA had tape recorded

Frank Swett's memories of John Muir in May of 1964. This tape, along with several others on John Muir, was donated to the Regional

Oral History Office, and Mr. Swett gave his permission to have the transcript made available to researchers. It is bound in a volume on John Muir.

Willa Baum , Head Regional Oral Hfst ory Office l5-'July 1968 Regional Oral History Office 486 The Bancroft Library University of California at Berkeley v

INTRODUCTION

Frank Swett became a prominent figure in California when,

in the summer of 1918, he became president and general manager

of the newly organized California Pear Growers Association-­

two positions he held until the association passed out of the

picture in the middle thirties.

Who was he?

Frank was one of two sons of John Swett, the prominent and

often controversial educational pioneer in California public

education in a period when school teacher's jobs were often

considered legitimate political spoils. His father had bought a

farm near Martinez--presumab1y as a place for retirement. But

just as Frank was half way through his college course at the

University of California, Frank was called upon to manage the

farm for a year when his father was called back to work. It proved to be longer than intended. Frank never did get back to school.

But he established himself in the community as a successful farmer and as a public spirited citizen who often had a fresh approach to a current problem.

I first met Frank soon after I came to California in mid­

1922--1 cannot recall just where or when. I was eager to learn what made California cooperative associations "tick." So I used to drop in at his San Francisco office, meet him at luncheon vi

sessions of the Agricultural study section of the Commonwealth

Club of California, or chat with him during his occasional visits

to the U.C. campus. I always found him an interesting source of

information and often a bit of cooperative or political philosophy-­ or even gossip.

I recall one such visit when he recounted the results of his attempts to get growers to slow down on new plantings. The market, he argued, would be swamped with surplus pears when all present acreage reached the bearing stage. To learn how his argument was received by the growers he stationed in the back of the audience an associate who was not known by the growers.

After the meeting Frank asked how the speech went.

"Fine," was the answer. But some of the growers were saying,

"that man Swett has a lot of pear trees. Of course he'll not want us to plant any more trees and spoil his good market."

Frank early became alarmed at the continued threat of surplus production. As early as 1912 he castigated those who led newcomers to plant fruit already in oversupply. It was in this connection that he suggested establishment at the University of "a chair of agricultural and horticultural economics."

In his attempt to slow down new plantings he became critical of three groups which promoted increased production. One was the

U.S. Reclamation Service, which was spending huge sums on new irrigation developments; a second was the California Land Settlement vii

Division, which brought new settlers to such lands, and a third

was the Agricultural Extension Division of the College of

Agriculture. He kept up a running attack on these for about a

decade.

I recall an incident of about 1925 after he had made some

criticisms of the Agricultural Extension Service for putting so

much attention on production of bigger fruit crops to the neglect

of better marketing. The occasion was a session of the annual

conference of county farm advisors. These meetings were announced

as "not open to the public." Mr. Swett resented being "uninvited"-­

so decided to hear what was being said. He walked into a morning

session just as the meeting was getting under way and sat down on

a front seat. The presiding officer quietly explained that this was not a public meeting. Mr. Swett pretended to be hard of hearing, thanked the director with a gracious laugh, and kept his

seat.

Frank had become a great advocate of advertising for pears-­ whether canned, dried, or shipped fresh. He hoped to get a membership of 85 per cent of all California pear growers. With

that volume a small fee would cover advertising in all these areas. Bu~ growers tended to hold back. The Association contract covered only canning pears on which the Association bargained with canners. But it "released" any quantities individual growers shipped to market for fresh consumption, or to drying yards. He viii

succeeded in getting enough money for advertising fresh pears in a few cities, and gave publicity to increases in these cities as compared with others. When it became clear that most growers preferred to let "the other fellow" pay for advertising, Frank and his successive boards of directors discontinued that activity-­ they would not "carry the umbrella for the non-member."

I had urged the Regional Oral History Office to interview

Frank, first, because he has such a wide range of interests and second, because he has been such an interesting raconteur. It is good to know that the work is nearing completion.

Henry E. Erdman Profess9r of Agricultural Economics, . Emeritus ix Biographical Sketch·

Frank Tracy Swett Born November 22, 1869 SaD Francisco, California Son ot John Swett, educator, born in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, July 31<, 1830 . Arrived in San Francisco February 1, 1853 Mary !louisa Tracy Swett, born in Thompson, Conneoticut, Dec. 8, 1839 Arrived in San Francisco in 1854 Brother ot Em1J.y Tracy Swett (Mrs. John W. Parkhurst) teacher and writer a founder of the Pacific Coast Woments Press Association Helen Swett (Mr's. Gregorio Artieda) social service executive and worker John French Swett - horticulturist

Education san Francisco public schools and University of California 1887-1890

Married July 15, 1897 to :rtrrta Wallace More, 41 hembra Valley teacher who was born in P1attsmou~h, Nebraska, November 26, 1871 Children: Marg~et Swett (Mr~. Howard Plummer) Elizabeth Swett (Mrs. W. Curtis Knoll)

Fruit Grower - 1890 to date

Home - Hill Girt Farm, Alhambra Valley, Martinez, Cal.if'ornie. * * * Horticultural Commissioner Contra Costa County 1905-1909 1915-1919 President California Grape Growers Association 1916-1920 President Contra Costa Fruit Growers Association 1915-1920 President Contra Costa Farm Bureau 1917 President and General Manager california Pear Growers Association 1917-1935 Vice-President california State Viticultural Commission 1913-1919 Member ot Board of Directors ot California Canning Peach Association 1921-1925 Reorganization Manager 1935 California Prune and Apricot Association 1922-1925 California Cherry Growers Association 1922-1929 Contra Costa County Soil Conservation District 1935-1940 Editor Pacific Rural Press 1923 National Horticultural Council 1929-1935 Chief of Farm Debt Adjustment - Resettlement Administration tor tive southwestern states 1935-1936 Contra Costa County Grand Jury - two terms

A member of Commonwealth Club of California Chairman of Section on Agriculture for six years Hillside ClUb, Berkeley Jawbone Club Layman t s .. League Foreign Trade Club, San Francisco Kiwanis Club, Martinez Contra Costa Grange Sierra Club - life member TABLE OF CONTENTS

FOREWARD i

LIST OF AGRICULTURAL INTERVIEWS

INTRODUCTION v

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ix

PART I: EARLY DAYS OF FRUIT COOPERATIVES 1

BEGINNINGS OF CALIFORNIA AGRICULTURE 1

E. F. ADAMS AND THE COMMONWEALTH CLUB 5

CALIFORNIA ASSOCIATED RAISIN COMPANY 13

CALIFORNIA PEAR GROWERS I. ASSOCIATION 15

POST WAR DEPRESSION, 1920-21 24

CALIFORNIA CANNING PEACH GROWERS 34

COMMENTS ON AGRICULTURAL SURPLUSES 49

GIANNINI FOUNDATION 58

PART II: BIOGRAPHICAL 61

PACIFIC RURAL PRESS 61

RANCH IN ALHAMBRA VALLEY, MARTINEZ 66

FATHER, JOHN SWETT 70

SAN FRANCISCO GRAFT 73

ANECDOTES ABOUT SENATOR SAM SHORTRIDGE 76

GRANDFATHER, FREDERICK PALMER TRACY 83

COMMENTS ON HERBERT HOOVER 88

TESTIMONY IN FAVOR OF THE 160-ACRE LIMITATION 95

FARM ORGANIZATIONS 97

APPENDIX 99

INDEX 124 PART I: EARLY DAYS OF FRUIT COOPERATIVES

BEGINNINGS OF CALIFORNIA AGRICULTURE

Mrs. Baum: Mr. Swett, The Bancroft Library is gathering, from "pioneers", stories of adventures in marketing fruit crops of California. May I ask "What have been some of your experiences?" Swett: I have some memories, but like other men, now that 92 years have rolled by I have a lot of forget-eries. I'll just touch upon some past occasions, otherwise I would be apt to bore my listeners. Suppose we start with agriculture in California. In the early days, when the Americans came in and began to set up farms, they didn't know what would grow best in California. They knew from the history of Mexico and Spain and the Spanish settlers that cattle were all right, but that was about all. There wasn't a market for anything except hides and lard. Two Years Before the Mast gives a picture. When the Americans began to settle in California, what would grow? A lot of people had come from back East. They brought cuttings of grapes that grew in 2

Swett: the East, and the trees and the plums. California really became a great big experiment station. The State Board of Agriculture, of which there's a series of reports up there at Sacramento, gave prizes for the farm that had the widest variety of products, and it was amazing. Some farms like General Bidwell's up at Chico were growing most everything. Dr. Strenzel near Martinez had about forty varieties of grapes, and plums of all kinds and pears of all kinds. It took twenty years to find out what would do best in California soil and climate. The California State Library at Sacramento would have a picture of California agriculture prior to the transcontinental railroad. By 1860 the Southern Pacific was hauling fruit to Eastern markets. Commercial fruit companies began to provide packing sheds and loading facilities. Shipping companies attempted f.o.b. sales, and com­ peted with each other. If a carload couldn't be sold f.o.b. it was consigned. In the Eastern markets auctions were organized, and wi thin"a few ;wears most of the shipments to at least the eleven biggest cities were being sold at auction. South of Tehachapi, after many attempts at 3

Swett: cooperative marketing, Charley Teague organized the California Fruit Growers Association. He was a man of ability and brought order out of chaos. In Northern and Central California growers organized a similar cooperative California Fruit Exchange. This helped. Both organizations had lots to learn. The first few years there were no iced cars, but the Earl Fruit Company and Armour Company after many experiments provided refrigerator cars, and improved in effi­ ciency year after year. The problem of getting fruit to Eastern markets in good condition was settled. But too many people were overly optimistic ­ "We have the whole United States for our markets." "We'll have the World for our market." Mrs. Baum: Mr. Swett: I'm told you have been a fruit-grower quite a while. How many years? Swett: About 79 years - ever since I left school. I have grown crops on my own and I have helped market crops for many other farmers. I have helped organize co­ operatives to market pears, cherries, peaches, grapes, wines, prunes. I have seen ups and down in California agriculture, 4

Swett: many achievements, many failures. Several booms, and several busts. Nowadays a lot of us are asking a $24 question. What can be done to produce foods and fibers in adequate supplies, but not in disas­ trous excess? Congress has been trying experiments ever since World War 1. Billions of governmental dollars haven't given answers. Will Rogers, one of the wisest of critics, once said: "They are funny people up on Capitol Hill. First they spend 200 millions of dollars to build more dams and to grow more crops and immediately spend another 200 million dollars to get rid of surplus crops. Does it make sense?" And now government is still continuing experi­ ments not merely by millions, but by billions! I'm not attempting to give a history of Cali­ fornia's cooperative endeavors for each co-op has had varying experiences, and it would consume too many days and months. Imperfect memories are often misleading. But a few listeners may be interested in a few "Random Recollections". 5

E. F. ADAMS AND THE COMMONWEALTH CLUB

Swett: You know, one of the best books on agriculture ever written that mentions some of the early market­ ing cooperatives is The Modern Farmer, by E.F. Adams. (The Modern Farmer in His Business Relations, N.J. Stone, Co., San Francisco, 1899.) The Modern Farmer is valuable because Adams understood human nature, the reasons that people bought one thing and another. The author, Edward F. Adams, was a representative of book publishers, a farmer-owner of a fruit farm in the Santa Cruz mountains, a volunteer advisor in market­ ing dried fruit, prunes, raisins, apricots. He had sound philosophy, a belief in establishing coopera­ tives; at that time his was a voice crying in the red-ink jungles of attempts to find ways of surplus control. The paths were thorny. Some new crops failed in their aims, raisin co-ops, dried fruit co-ops. Adams started something which has been of enor­ mous value, I think, to California education, not only technical education but economic education. He started, with a few of his friends, the Common­ wealth Club of San Francisco. And it worked. There 6

Swettr were twenty-five members originally; now there's ten thousand. It was entirely different from any club I ever heard of because the platform was "Find the Facts." F-a-c-t-s. The club organized itself into sections -- one on education, one on agriculture, about ten or twelve different projects. Each one was a little debating organization to find the facts, without bias. They didn't carry any bias for any particular theory. They'd take a subject like the California Water Plan, irrigation, and in that section­ meeting about once a month -- somebody who was in favor of certain legislation would present his views and then it was the duty of the chairman to hunt up somebody to present the opposition view, like the debates in the British House of Commons. They would debate one subject for, say, twelve meetings in a year and invite in different people, or permit different people to talk to them. Baum.: One subject all year? In each section? Swett: One subject ordinarily, at the discretion of the chaarmanand the members of the comma ttee • In other words, they never presented just one side only. That was unusual. Most organizations have an axe to grind, this didn't. Most organizations would 7

Swett: swing their support to this candidate or that; they endorsed no candidates whatever. They kept out of hot water, and that's one reason it grew, and grew. Baum: Did you know E.F. Adams? Swett: Yes, yes. He and my dad were great friends. He and my dad had adjoining property in the Santa Cruz moun­ tains. Adams was interested, among other things, in agriculture, and he went around and talked at what they called Farmers' Institutes.* He was interested in any form of agricultural education, and if he thought it was wrong he'd criticize it, and if he thought it was right he'd speak in favor of it. But he pUlled out of agricultural education. He got dis­ gusted. There weren't enough" people interested in it to give him a living out of it. He'd been a very successful publisher's agent and he made good money out of it. But he became agricultural editor of the San Francisco Chronicle for many years, and that kept him in touch. Now, I think he was one of

*The researcher is directed to the following: Adams, :~:Frank, "Frank Adams, University of California, on Ir­ rigation, Reclamation, and Water Administration," typed transcript of a tape-recorded interview conducted by Willa Klug Baum, University of California General Lib­ rary Regional Cultural History Project (Berkeley, 1959) pp •. 491. In Bancroft Library. Adams, Frank, Edward F. Adams, 1839-1929, privately printed, Berkeley, California, 1966. Copy in Bancroft ,Library. 8

Swett: the most valuable men that ever lived. Baum: Tell me something about his personality. What was he like? Swett: Well, he was full of fun, oh yes, I think he indulged Elbert HUbbard's eleventh commandment. You know some­ thing about the ten commandments? Well, Elbert HUb­ bard said that they were all right, these ten, but that there should be an eleventh commandment. "Thou shalt not take thyself too damn seriously. '.' Baum: Was Adams a good speaker? Swett: Well, he wasn't an orator. He just talked to the point. He was a good debater, but not an orator. California was lousy with orators in those days •. I got a lesson as to the value of oratory once. I attended a meeting of the national association of chemists in San Francisco. Oh, there were organic chemists from allover the world, including every state in the Union, I think, where the chemists could get enough money to take the trip. But it was very interesting. And a dear friend of mine, who was a young man, a recent graduate of the University, Dr. William Cruess -­ now emeritus -­ was to speak. His job was investigating the chemistry of the things we grow 9

Swett: and eat, a born research man. Well, I went down especially to hear what Bill had to say, and I had a seat up front, about three rows back. Well, Bill was new at talking in pUblic and he had his nose down in his manuscript and he didn't emphasize and he didn't shout, and I only heard about half of it (in those days I had pretty good average hearing). But it was all right, and he didn't make any bad breaks. The next day there was a trip around the Bay on a launch, and we all had a chance to get acquainted. I sat next to Dr. Alwood, the presi­ dent of the national association, and he said, "By the way, what do you think of that paper by that young man, Cruess." "Well," I said, "he's a friend of mine. And I didn't hear all of it, but I heard most of it. He didn't raise his voice enough to carry across, but I got most of it." "Well," he says, "that was a wonderful paper." "I'll take your word for it," I said. "You were on the platform and could hear it. But you know, I think a man who appears on a platform ought to be taught to open his mouth and put his message across. I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings, 10

Swett: but I wonder if maybe I ought to caution him to take a few lessons in speaking." "Oh," he says, "don't do it. Why, that young man is a born research man. They're scarce as hen'S teeth. And I've noticed, in my career, that a good many research men have been ruined by turning them­ selves into orators. They get to know what makes a hit with an audience and pretty soon they're turning their thoughts not to finding out about molecules but to influencing audiences. The United States is just lousy with dumb orators." Well, I never said a word to that young man, though I always thought I ought to. But at the end of a couple of years I went to another meeting, and Bill, he didn't orate, but he held his manuscript up and looked at the audience and opened his mouth and talked clearly. That was fine! And I happened to be at his home later and thought "Now, I can tell my story of Dr. Alwood's views -- "research vs oratory". ······But what had happened? Bill had gotten married! And Marie (she's the one who painted that landscape behind you which she presented to us) she said, "Oh, you noticed that? After I married Bill I heard him lecturing on a scientific subject. When 11

Swett: we got home I said, 'Bill, you're going to get some lessons. I've taught school. May I teach you? If you go to a meeting it's part of your duty to put your message across; otherwise you're failing in your duty. Now, stand up in the corner of the room, hold your manuscript up, open your big mouth, and put it over'. Well, he's done beautifully and now he's a reasonably good speaker." Baum: Was Mr. Adams a good persuader? Did he try to per­ suade people? Swett: Well, he must have. I never heard him in action. His theory was "Give them the facts and let them do whatever they darned please! You can't bulldoze them into doing your way; if you do bulldoze them it's just temporary, and they get over it." He was right! Now, if I have qualified may we return to the subject of agricultural education and cooperative marketing, etc. I was manager of one -- California Pear Growers, for eighteen years. I have helped start some others -­ Cherry Growers Association, Cling Peach Growers Asso­ ciation, Grape Growers, Wine Makers Association, Prune and Apricot Association. I have seen plenty of "ups 12

Swett: and downs". Apparently, cooperatives are here to stay. Most of them have been born at times of farm depression, in undertaking to counteract surplus crops and disastrous price depressions. 13

CALIFORNIA ASSOCIATED RAISIN COMPANY

Baum: All right. Let's get back to the early marketing co­ operatives. You mentioned the California Fruit Ex­ change. Swett: Well, the raisin people had their ups and downs. Under Theodore Kearney they tried to pool all Cali­ fornia raisins. It maybe helped a little, but that experiment blew up. Then they organized another raisin association, and another and another. There was internal friction, jealousies and commercial. warfare. Finally, Ralph Merritt, who had been the business manager for the University of California, a very able young man, licked it into much better shape. The war came on, prices zoomed up, and every­ body thought they were going to get rich. Ralph Merritt was looked up to as a hero. Money was pour­ ing into the growers' pockets. Ralph was wined and 14

Swett: dined and worshipped enough to turn any young man's head, because if all your friends and acquaintances say, "He's done wonderful work", pretty soon you be­ lieve it yourself! He built a $60,000 house, people said, which was some house in those days, because lum­ ber had not gone up too much. Just about that time the market broke, and I don't know whether he ever lived in the mansion or not. Merritt, at the outset of World War I, did patri­ otic service, heading a part of the Food Administra­ tion. We growers owe a deep gratitude for his remar­ kable skill and energy during the war. After the war prices of most commodities slumped. Some growers blamed Merritt - most unjustly. So he resigned, and devoted his ability to developing Nevada mines. 15

CALIFORNIA PEAR GROWERS' ASSOCIATION

Swett: The first year of the Pear Growers, World War I had come on and there were a lot of the pear growers that were under term contract with the big canners, at about $35 a ton, which was a fairly good price at the time, before the wartime costs of production in­ creased. Canners had a beautiful spread between their costs and their sales. Growers got together, a kind of "gentlemen's agreement"; they called it the California Pear Growers' Association. They quoted prices to the canners. They were brave enough to ask for $10 a ton more than the term contract prices canners offered. But it was only a "gentlemen's agreement", The head of the California Packing Cor­ poration, the largest chain of canneries in Califor­ nia told me, "Swett, you growers can't make it go •. It's just wishful thinking!" Why don't you organize? If all canners pay the same price, provided it's 16

Swett: within reason, we would welcome organization." Baum: Of the growers? Swett: Yes. President R. I. Bentley told me that. I was chairman of this "gentlemen'S committee". But wish­ ful thinking didn't do any good! I knew it wouldn't, but the growers were afraid to organize. But we got it in the neck. Next year, why, with the assistance of the State Market Director, Harris Weinstock, we called meetings and Aaron Sapiro, a young attorney, drew up a market­ ing agreement and he was very helpful. We called meetings, and I could say, "Last year we didn't spend any money in organization, and how much did it cost not to organize? Well, it cost at least $10 a ton not to organize, and a grower with forty acres of pears and a couple of thousand tons, it cost him a lot not to organize!" And the grower with only ten tons, maybe it cost him $10 a ton because there was no organization. And we asked a fair price. We got it -- and we not only did but with the help of Ralph Merritt (Who wasn't working for us but was on a national food-con­ trol committee under the auspices of the Army and Navy 17

Swett: purchasing agency), we finally got 5,000 acres into the organization. We were successful the first year. We didn't make enemies of the canners, either. There were a lot of growers who would curse the canners up and down, and I'd go to the meetings and say, "Well, I don't blame some of you for feeling sore at past history, but Marshall Field or the wholesaling firms, do they cuss their customers? These canners are our customers. Does it pay to curse your good customers?N You can be friendly unless they do something outrageous. It's all right to fight if you've got something to fight about, but don't fight on the basis of a grudge of ten years ago. Forget it." So we organized. Baum: This was the California Pear Growers Association in 19l7? Swett: Yes, 1917. We got along on the whole pretty well those years until everything blew up at one time, "the hard times". The difficulty we had was in edu­ cating the growers some of the enthusiastic grow­ ers were people who would get up and make speeches, "We can make our prices. The public has got to have our product and we can create prices". 18

Swett I I said, "No, we can't create prices. We can arrive at a price that'll move our crops from the orchard to the consumer through the canners. The association marketed not all of the members' pears. At that period about half of California's pear

crop was shipped to e.ast ez-n markets through the Fruit Growers' Exchange or through various shipping cor­ porations -­ Earl Fruit, Pioneer Fruit, Pacific Fruit, and others. Our members had freedom of choice and could withdraw all or a part for shipment. We mar­ keted to canneries whatever we didn't withdraw for shipment. On the Sacramento River district most growers would ship about one half. In the big Santa Clara dis­ trict, nearly the entire tonnage we sold to canners. Baum: Could you control prices on pears shipped East? Swett: No. Shipments were sold at auction. If arrivals were light, bidders bid high; if too many, buyers bid low. Supply and demand operated daily. Baum: Did the association own the crop? Swett: Yes. But every grower had the privilege of notify­ ing us and withdrawing for eastern shipment. He could withdraw all, or none. We marketed the residue, what was left after withdrawals, to our customer canneries. 19

Baum: Did you market them, or did you just set: the price, and let the canners go around and -- Swett: We set the price, and we asked the canners "How many thousand tons do you want?" "About two thousand tons". So we would go over our list of tonnage that was left in our pool and feed the various canners from that. This cannery two thousand tons, this two hundred tons. It was our business to give each customer, as far as possible, what he wanted. Baum: Did the canners have any preferences as to which ranch they wanted the pears to come from? Swett: Oh, yes. Baum: Did you satisfy their requests? Swett: As far as possible. We tried never to break up exist­ ing business friendships. Sometimes we had to. Baum: Did you ever have the situation where there wa:sn' t enough demand from the canners for your total crop? Swett: Yes, we had a couple of years when that situation arose -­ And we had an agreement with the'canners, a guarantee against our own decline in prices. Now some years we had, apparently, say ten thousand tons and no customers. What were we going to do with it? Well, we could turn it over to some dry yard to have 20

Swett: them dried. Or we could borrow money and have them canned ourselves, even though we'd take a licking going into the canning business. But we wiggled around; we never had to destroy a surplus, fortunately. Baum: You never ended up with some farmers left with their crop on their hands. The association took it from the farmers and sold the total crop as best they could? Swett: Had such a thing happened, why they would participate just as if they had delivered. Every grower shared the loss from destruction, that was the only fair way. Baum: So no grower who had, say, a slightly poorer quality crop was left holding his whole crop while other far­ mers sold their crops. Swett: Our guarantee was merely against the price on pears that were of given grades. If they were below grade, then we were not responsible. We had certain descrip­ tions, and we had photographs of different kinds of

deformities and troubles. These were not canner~ pears. We'd sort them over and pick out those that did con­ form to the contracted grades. If there were too many, maybe he didn't harvest all his crop. Baum: In Contra Costa County did many of the pear growers withdraw for eastern shipment? 21

Swett: About two-thirds of them in this county. Baum: So these pears were good. Swett: They were all right. Baum: Would they withdraw their total crop, or just a por­ tion of their crop? Swett: Most of them withdrew their whole crop. But my policy on this ranch was half for the East and half for the cannery, regardless of expectations, because you never knew. If everybody thought "Oh, the East is wonderful" -­ they usually were being told the prospects for the year were good by the fruit shipping companies be­ cause they wanted as much tonnage as possible. I think the most successful growers in Contra Costa and on the River went fifty-fifty regardless of expecta­ tion on prices. Baum: If the grower sent his crop East, did he take the whole risk for selling it? Or did he sell it to the shipping company here and let them take the risk of selling it? Swett: Well, there were all kinds of deals. To the company that wanted to ship pretty heavily, the grower would go and say, "I need $10,000. Can you advance me $10,000? He could easily be induced to ship more East. It was a gamble, because you never knew what the eastern 22

Swett: price would be. Baum: They sold them at auction, so you couldn't tell from day to day what the price was going to be? Swett: Yes, from day to day it varied. There were some f.o.b. sales -­ that means "freight on board". That was the most desirable. I worked on our crops here in the valley with a neighbor and we loaded cars and shipped them East, but we quoted prices. But we didn't know what prices were going to be; it was a gamble. How did we arrive at the price that would move ourGstuff? Well, I found Alfred Holman, he'd send a wire to, say, eight different markets, offering a few carloads of pears at so much a box. If they didn't give him any answer he'd know they were not interested. Then he'd send another telegram the next day offering a little lower price, and finally he'd get to a price that would move our stuff, f.o.b. That was better for us, we thought, than taking chances on the auction. I don't think it made much difference, but we felt more secure, if we could sell that way. Baum: If you waited until you got to the auction, you could lose your shipping charges and everything,

couldn't you? I think you said you could come out 2)

Baum: with red ink. Swett: Oh yes, during gluts. 24

POST-WAR DEPRESSION, 1920-21

Baum: When you said the market went bust, when was that? Swett: The big market was during World War I and for a year afterwards. Baum: After World War I didn't prices fall? Swett: Not immediately. The canners had paid $100 a ton cheerfully, during the war, and they had made a lot of money in 1919. They were all going to get rich. There you have the same cycle, same as ordinary folks. "Why, we ordered three times the tonnage from you, and you wouldn't give it to us". "Maybe before you marketed it you'd be glad you hadn't got it, but we gave you the same pro rata" every canner was treated alike, at pro rata, while each one wanted about twice as much as the year before, at $100 a ton. They got the fruit into cans and then there was a break.

Sugar went down from 26~ a pound to 7~, I 25

Swett: guess. There was a cargo of sugar from Java outside the heads of San Francisco Bay: there was fog coming in and the consignees were just hoping that they

would~:~run into the rocks or something and get sunk, because then they wouldn't have to pay for it. But it got in and the brokers were very much distressed. I was in the office of the California Packing Corporation with Roy Pratt, their sales manager. "Oh," he says, "Frank, I'll show you our problem. People are blaming us for it•. 1'11 show you; my desk here is piled up. We had all our pack sold. We thought we were secure and solvent allover the United States. Then came the bust down, and if we make that shipment we'll have to go into insolvency. We can't pay. How much time can you give us?" Baum: Just a minute. I don't quite follow that. Cal Pak had bought your pears and they thought they had con­ tracted to sell all the canned goods. And was it that the grocery stores or whatever were not able to bUy as they expected? Swett: The contracts were with wholesale jobbers. It would have ruined many of them to have lived up to the contract. 26

Baum: I see. The jobbers were not able to buy what their contract called for. Swett: Not able to receive. And Roy Pratt had his desk piled up with contracts. They had tried to cancel, which was all right. They asked to cancel part of the contract. "We can't use so many". And the packing corporation Cal Pak wasn't going to sue these customers. They had a pretty broad-gauge policy. It even went so far -­ when they had a meri­ torious, a good customer in temporary difficulties through no fault of his own, I think they lent him money and helped him out. Baum: In other words, they didn't force them to take what they had contracted for, because they didn't want to drive their customers into bankruptcy. I see. What did Cal Pak do with those pears? Swett: Oh, they put them in their warehouses, until times picked up, and they cut prices. Baum: And I suppose they took less from.you, too, next year. Swett: Well, they'd already "took" them, and they were in their warehouses and they couldn't sell them. They kept them until they could sell them. Baum: Would this hold over to next year so they wouldn't

take your next crop? 27

Swett: If there was a big holdover the canner wouldn't want to can as much. That year I had a collection of special reports through Bradstreet and Dunn on each canner that canned pears or peaches, and it totaled up about $24,000,000 red ink for that fraction of the canning industry. I didn't have a list of the pineapple industry, which probably had many millions of dollars, but the Dole Canning Company of Honolulu I think lost ten or twelve million dollars. Libby McNeil and Libby, about ten million dollars; Cali­ fornia Packing, about twelve million red ink. Baum: That was 1921, 1920? After the war? Swett: Well, maybe the end of 1920 and splitting into 1921, something like that. But I don't want to be a liar. If you're inaccurate, somebody says, "Well, that blankety-blank liar." Baum: Was this surplus due to a drop in demand, or had more fruit been planted during the war than the normal mar­ ket could absorb? Swett: Many more acres were planted. The growers of peaches and pears and other fruits had seen that fruit grow­ ing was profitable. They'd figure, "We've got twenty acres, we'll plant five acres more", that was more

or less a legitimate thing. But here in the wartime 28

Swett: prices, $100 a ton, all those fellows are getting rich. because it didn't cost over $50 a ton. Well, I'll plant 300 acres up in Berryessa Valley. An Oakland banker, I think his name was Erickson, he put down his own money and his friends' money into an immense planting up in Berryessa Valley. So many or­ chards -- city people taking a chance -- they thought it was like buying stocks, you know, buying the thing that had the biggest dividends that year. And so the tonnage of peaches and pears was being multiplied, and grapes the' same way. If anybody called attention to the fact that there was overplanting and that a day of reckoning would come, why, he became most un­ popular. There was one of my neighbors. She was a widow. Her husband had been a very successful engineer, helped put in the Niagara Falls power plant, and he analyzed everything. He had qUite an acreage over here near Concord, and he died, and his wife had never been consulted on business. He was self-sufficient on business and he was all right. I guess he left her half a million dollars. Everybody offered her advice. Somebody told her, "Good pear land here, why don't you plant?" 29

Swett: "Well, how much have pear orchards been making

the last five year~?" "Probably so much an acre." "Well, I'll plant a hundred acres." So the poor woman started to plant a hundred acres, but before

she planted ~he and my wife were very good friends, they used to go out driving! They got a new Pierce Arrow every year). But anyway, she was going to put a hundred acres in pears. She'd have 500 to maybe a thousand tons of pears, and she said, "Well, I'll be immensely wealthy." She asked me, and I said, "I can't advise you. I never would advise anyone else. what to do. But here's the picture. If you plant that orchard, it'll cost so much and you'll be spending money for at least six years. It's going to cost you a whole lot, and it ought to, if the markets are still good, begin to pay back divi­ dends. But if the market is glutted it won't pay expenses. I don't know. You'll have to judge for yourself." Well, she hired a young man, a general foreman, to start planting this big orchard. She put in, I guess, a hundred acres. None of it came into bearing. She ran out of money and the market went bust, and it 30

Swett: was a total loss. But she was sore at me. She says, "That Frank Swett, he's got an orchard and he's in the pear business, he doesn't want anybody else butting in. He's got a good thing.1I That was an answer every real estate man or broker could give. Baum: Well, when this break in the market happened did it help bring the growers together or did it separate them? Swett: Well, things blew up, for the time being, as far as the California Pear Growers' Association was con­ cerned. The orange people didn't blow up; they had oranges and they had to be rolled East, they kept rolling them. They put on restrictions as .t o size and quality, but a good deal of fruit went to waste. Now if somebody were to go to the office of the Gian­ nini Foundation, they have a file that shows what happened, let's say, to the pear crop each year: total production in the orchards, so many acres, so many thousand tons; harvested, so many thousand; wasted, no market at all. It would flood the market, and it cost $40 a ton to pick them and ship them, and you'd have been out the cost of that. But there was 20,000 or 30,000 tons of good fruit de­ stroyed, gone to waste. You didn't shake it off, 31

Swett: it just dropped off, and a lot of big growers went broke. Two of the largest growers in the state, Hayward Reid and Howard Reid, they planted big orchards at Marysville and Sacramento. The Earl Fruit Company financed them from year to year in shipping East, but they lost both places. Howard Reid thought he was go­ ing to become a millionaire. He was very worthy, no bad habits, except planting little trees in the

groun~ on a big scale and borrowing money to do it. And Hayward Reid's family, I don't know what became of them. He was a good man, a tremendous worker, but he lost a fortune •. But anyway, the growers were dissatisfied, and I was. We didn't have a contract that would hold growers together. Otherwise, we could have done something about it, but we couldn't control the release for so-called eastern shipment. And we notified the growers that under the conditions, without absolute control of tonnage, we couldn't --. do much until other arrangements were made. We weren't broke, we had a quarter of a million dol­ lars on hand from our earnings. We had been spend­ ing money on advertising and all that, but we had a 32

Swett: quarter of a million dollars and no debts, we didn't owe a cent to anybody. Maybe you think it was an easy job to return that money, because each grower had been credited with the dividends of his shipments, some with little ones, some as high as $1,000 or $2,000 accumulated over several years. And we had sent annually a certificate showing their interest in the associa­ tions assets. Well, they just filed them away in a lug box and lost them. When it came to paying off, we'd say, "Where are your certificates?" "Oh, did you send --" Well, it took our secretary, Mr. Hamil­ ton, almost a year to settle the accounts. We could­ n't find all of the people, people had sold their places or something, or lost their certificates, and while we had the records there were a few who could not be located. They'd gone with the wind. So we had $5,000 with no.iowner-s , and we turned it over to the University of California for experiments on fruit products. Baum: How did your ranch fare during this post-war glut? Swett: This ranch, well, when nobody else was making any money, we didn't make any. We paid alimony to the

ranch! But we had several irons in the fire. I JJ

Swett: operated a winery here and we were building up a market -­ until prohibition came -­ for the wines, and that brought in some income. Then I started a nursery, growing grapevines on resistant stock. We were selling about $12,000 a year to vintners who ,were planting grapes. We got by. Baum: I understand you had a very fine quality of wine. Swett: We planted Sauvignon and choice varieties of grapes, and we did produce a good quality wine. At the time we planted there was no phylloxera here, none of this little louse that lives on the roots. Contra Costa was apparently immune. But our vineyard, like all the other vineyards, began to die out by degrees. In Napa County the vineyards all died, those on their own roots. Now they've been reconstituted on resistant stock. But anyway, we got by. Baum: But not on your pears and peaches? 34 CALIFORNIA CANNING PEACH GROWERS

Baum: Tell me about the California Canning Peach Growers Association. Swett: The peach growers had a varied experience and made a venture in canning peaches which turned out badly and resulted in very considerable losses to the members.

Baum: You were a director for a while, weren't you? ~192l-l925. Swett: When they were organizing, yes. Just when they;were started. I was director for a couple of years. Baum: Mr. Swett, can you add here why you were director of Peach Growers, and what you were doing about the Peach Growers at this time. Swett: A queer thing happened. They had a board of directors who started out apparently honestly co-operative, but they saw devious ways of making a little more money on their own orchards. There were some large growers in Marysville and up the Valley, and they didn't like Aaron Sapiro or Milton Sapiro, who'd been attorneys for the Peach Growers and were absolutely fair and square. The Sapiros advised the board of directors, "Don't do anything questionable or illegal", but a bunch of directors were elected who said, "To the devil with the Sapiros. We want results." So they got a man flexible enough to advise them,

you can draft a contract that a leased vineyard does not have to participate in the general pool and can 35

Swett: be marketed independently, which was not co-operative law at all. But it went because they did it. There was one honest director who believed in sticking to the law and telling the truth, but the others, the less said about it the better. They wanted to do their own canning with what they called "released tonnage," that is, not held by legal restrictions. They made a deal with the Fleishhacker bank; Fleishhacker loaned them money when nobody else would. Well, why did Herbert Fleish­ hacker see his way to loan them money? Because his bank was renting them two canneries at a magnificent rental. The bank had had loans on one cannery, owned by a Chinaman, in Oakland. He couldn't repay it all so they took the cannery. Fleishhacker did the talk­ ing; it was the funds of his bank that went into it. To be more precise, the Pacific Coast Canners was organized, I'm not sure that's the exact name, and they got this cannery and I think another down in Santa Clara. Baum: And the Oakland cannery had been owned by a Chinaman before? Swett: Yes, he was·a good Chinaman. He'd made a lot of money. His word was as good as his bond. 36

Swett: But the management of the cannery fell into the hands of a young man who had visions of grandeur. He was a graduate of the Harvard College of Business. He was attractive, a great big fine looking fellow, a good mixer. The young man's father was an astro­ nomer at the University of California, Leuschner, a very able and honest man. The young man was a magnificent talker. He could talk money out of a pump-handle, you know. "I'll take hold of these canneries and build up the biggest chain of canneries in California, the packing corpora­ tions and Libby won't be in with it," and "I'll put in modern methods of canning and marketing and all." Well, I guess it didn't take too much to hypnotize old Fleishhacker but apparently he was hypnotized. He thought this young man was his salvation. Leuschner came over to see me about getting pears for the cannery. The first introduction, he blew in. "Why, Mr. Swett, I've never been introduced to you, but I brought something to show you." A nice basket of raspberries. Well, I'm suspicious of people who

.,:)'·~bring me :presents before they know me. "I'm the manager of the Pacific Coast Canneries

and we're going to grow and I expect we'll be only 37

Swett: second in importance to the California Packing Cor­

poration, tI Leuschner said, tlNow, these two canneries under Ring, the old Chinaman, have been getting so many tons a year. Now we want four times that tonnage." "Well," I says, tlwe're just pro rating in pro­ portion to past history, We're not playing any fa­ vorites. We can't do it." "You won't? You going to throttle us? When we're on the pathway to the biggest chain of can­ neries in California? If you know what's good for you, you hustle around and make adequate deliveries to us," "Well," I says, "I'm sorry, Mr. Leuschner, but that's the only way that I know. We cannot do any different. We may not be able to supply all our customers with what they've had on the average. We can't increase it. If you want to increase, there are lots of pears outside the Association. You buy those." "You mean you're going to turn us down. You're going to lose a good customer now and in the future?" He began to bluster. Well, I took the wind out of his sails. "Now, 38

Swett: Mr.,Leuschner, if you have such enormous plans, it looks dangerous to me. We'll give you the ordinary allotment, but you get an irrevocable letter of credit from some bank. Then you'll be safe and we'll be safe." That was kind of insulting because most of the canners had open credit with us. We'd study the Dun and Bradstreet reports and if they,-:were A-lor even B-2, that meant they were good risks. If ablank rating, we wouldn't do any business except with a bank guaran­ tee, a letter of credit. Well, he was mad as a hatter. "We're going to make progress regardless of your unfriendly attitude." I said, "We're good friends as long as we do business along the ordinary lines. But we can't experiment too much in business." He said, "You'll see. We'll buy direct from your members." Well, our members were contracted to us. He offered them a premium, many dollars a ton over the commercial price, which was crazy. These members were mostly up in a district of small growers. First thing we knew, one of our field men said, "The Pacific Coast Cannery is sending checks direct to these growers

on account." Well, we were already sending pro-rated 39

Swett: payments. If a man got checks from two sources, it was rather mysterious, but he wouldn't know. He'd buy a piano or something else. I called up the cashier and I said, "I under­ stand you're paying some growers you think you have contracts with, but we're paying them. They're part of a pool. If those are Christmas presents, it's all right, but it isn't business." Baum: The canners were supposed to pay you.

Swett: Yes. They were ~ pears, picked and delivered. So they quit making direct payments to these growers. They got their specified allotment from us. They then had the job of going around to the growers and trying to get the crazy money back. It took two years for them to recover all those crazy payments. But how a bank could fall for an orator and a get-rich operator, who was honest enough, I think, but he didn't have any common sense! So the Pacific Coast Canners lost. He overloaded the cannery, which had a poor cold storage department. He bought twice what they could digest. They bought some from us and they bought outside in immense quantity and Leuschner hadn't figured right, because 40

Swett: pears -- you keep them too long before getting them into cans, they'll just rot. Sometime later I saw the previous manager (they had fired the man who ran the cannery for the old Chinaman) and I asked him, "How's the cannerY>'" getting on?" "Well, I pass by there now and then. I was canned, as you know." He was a good man, but too conservative for the young Napoleon of finance. "They have trucks hauling to the garbage dump, trucks taking delivery from the orchard and trucks going to the garbage dump, a grand procession." The young man's father was a director of the Fleishhacker bank and also a first-class astronomer but he had this flaming comet of a little boy who never grew up. Young Leuschner later lost his job, but he went down to Fresno and organized a company to plant figs on a big scale. That blew up. I don't know what happened to him. I hope he settled down. Well, the board of directors of the Canning Peach Assoeiation were implicated in this cannery business and the Peach Growers lost a lot of money. 41

Swett: The flexible directors, we called them, I won't say crooked -- they just evaporated. They took to the woods. And Percy Hanks, he was one of the direc­ tors who had been unable to check up the crooked directors didn't tell what they were doing. Pretty soon he came over, he says, "Frank, couldn't we merge what's left of the Canning Peach Growers with the Pear Growers?" I says, "No, we can't." "Well, we think maybe the Peach Growers could be saved. Would you take the job of manager at an advance salary over what you have been getting from the Pear Growers?" "No," I says, "I'm getting gray hairs now. I want to have a rest and travel around and have a good time. But I will do this: I will take the job as manager pro tem and look around for somebody who can handle the thing, but I do not want any part of the job. " I thought I saw endless litigation for growers who had broken their contract, or the smaller canners andrsome of the larger ones like Mr. Fleishhacker -­ I didn't want to dance attendance in court for other

people. 42

Swett: I had nothing to do with it, but anyway, I went over to see what was left of it. The place was empty. The directors, nobody knew where they were. They were all out in the country. Some fellow, he went East; so-and-so is in the hospital -- they were afraid. The only person that knew the combination on the safe, which was empty of money, was a stenographer, a clerk, a nice gal, but she was the only one to hold the fort -­ she told us everything, she was all right. The thing was apparently hopeless, because the peach growers said: "We will not deliver a single ton to the Peach Association. They done us dirt." Well, I thought it would be just chaos there. I had a hunch that most of the canners would not coun­ tenance buying bootleg stuff, stuff that was contracted elsewhere, so I called a meeting in the Peach Growers' office of half a dozen of the big canners. I said, "Now what's going to be your policy? This can be liquidated, but maybe that means a year or two of chaos and no stability. Some of these growers want to break their contract with the Peach Association." One of the canners said, "Mr. Swett, our business is based on the integrity of contracts. We live up

to our contracts with other people. We do not want 43

Swett: to do business with anybody who's under other con­ tracts." Well, that was all right. We notified the growers that the canners would accept shipment; the growers would be held legally responsible if they delivered outside. The only canner that was recalcitrant was Fleish­ hacker, he still was living in the clouds, he thought he had a contract for those two canneries, there would be 30,000 tons deliverable to him, and Mr. Leuschner would handle it. So I went over to Fleishhacker's office. I knew that we didn't have anything for him, so I went over. I knew he had men at work in the Oakland cannery, patching up the machinery and trying to get it into shape. "Mr. Fleishhacker, I came over to talk with you. Are you expecting a tonnage of cling peaches?" "Oh, yes, I have a contract with the Association and I expect to put up a full pack." "Well, now, as far as the Association goes, we haven't any peaches to deliver to you." "What?" he says. "I thought you had 30,000 tons in your pool."

"Oh," I says, "we':.. did have, but it's been placed 44

Swett: already, been promised to other canners. We have nothing left. You can buy all you want outside, there are a lot of peach growers who are not members, but I thought I'd give you the opportunity of not spending too much money on the expectation of hand­ ling a big pack." "My goodness," he says, "you surprise me. Tell Mr. So-and-so, he's handling all this cannery business." One of the "subordinates came in the office and said, "Why, I thought we'd have a full pack sure." "But Mr. Swett here says he hasn't got any peaches for us." "No? Well, we'll see about it. We'll consult --" I says, "I want you to consult your attorney. We'll be good friends with your attorney, but no peaches." I thought Fleishhacker would be wild, seeing his profits go out the door. Well, I'd taken over four of the new directors of the Peach Association with me; I wanted a witness to any conversation, because I thought Fleishhacker was just a little bit flexible, you know, to use the complimentary word. So they filed out and I was in the doorway. "Oh," he says, "Swett, come back a moment." Swett; I thought he was going to give me a dressing-down. "I kind of wish you'd warned me that there were breakers ahead." I says, "You didn't ask. Your buyer was out trying to buy from our members who had already con­ tracted. I'm sorry, Mr. Fleishhacker." He says, "That's all right. You know, you mis­ led me the firstJ.time you came in here. You said, 'now, maybe we'll be doing some business. I'm just a hayseed from up-country, fruit grower, and I'd be appreciative of any advice that you may give me, and on legal matters I'd be glad to have your attorney advise me. I'll take under advisement whatever he tells me.' "That was very nice on your part," he says. "You said you were a hayseed. Hell, the seed has sprouted, I guess. And say," he says, "this was one on me and the bank. You. know, what do you do on Saturdays?" "Well," I says, "Saturday I go to the ranch." "Well, now," he says, "every Saturday I pick up John McLaren (who planted Golden Gate Park) and we go out to the zoo and the park and I love that Saturday afternoon trip, and I'd like to have you go out once

in a while. How about next ·Saturday?" 46

Swett: . "Well," I says, tlI'm doing my potatoes." I never went. But you know, sometimes a man like that, you get the best of him -- I got the best of him, I de­ ceived him, or I let him deceive himself -- and they'll be friendly. They might as well be friendly. The very sugar wouldn't melt in their mouths. Some people are vindictive but some are not vindictive; they're out for the dollar whether they get it with vinegar or with sugar. Another thing, when the Peach Growers' board of directors fled, we went over to the office and got the book of minutes. We were looking for the author­ ization to have a separate pool. There was one page that e.mpowered the directors to deviate and permit tenant farmers to have their stuff marketed, you might say, on an agency basis instead of participating in the pool. Well, there was the official authorization, ap­ parently passed four years previously. I couldn't believe my eyes, that a co-operative would authorize such an unco-operative thing. Then we noticed the typing loaked a little different. Well, a new page had been inserted.

The new board of directors, all of whom were 47

Swett: honest and capable and wanted the association, they wanted to file suit for damages against those who had falsified the minutes and had done this. The growers had been getting five dollars a ton less for their fruit than these outlaws. So I paid $250 to have a documents expert ad­ vise as to whether that page of the minutes was genu­ ine or not. And his report said that the typewriter that typed it hadn't been built then. It was on a typewriter which was built afterwards. It couldn't be an original document. Well, I asked a lawyer. I said, "That showed me that was a fake, just inserted there to cover somebody's crooked ideas. Is it the equivalent of forgery?" "No, it's not, minutes are not, because no min­ utes can be exactly unreservedly truthful. They're simply some secretary's picture of what was done, what was carried. And without fair testimony for or against -- you get some member of the old board of directors who knows about that meeting four years previous." We couldn't get anybody: they'd all disappeared. They had a trial down in Santa Clara. They had 48

Swett: lawyers for the prosecution. I wasn't there. The new attorney charged that it was a substituted docu­ ment and -- who substituted it? A gal, a nice looking young lady, tripped up to the stand and she said, "I put it in," Well, [laUghing] our attorney nearly dropped dead. "Well, how did you come to do it?" "Well, Mr. Schmidt, the assistant secretary, said that this page had got worn. He told me to copy it on good paper and put it in. So I copied it and inserted it." Well, there was nobody that could testify to the ,contrary, and in law if there's no testimony to controvert a witness, the witness's testimony stands. So our new association couldn't collect $30,000 damages.

Baum: Who would they have collec~d from, the old directors? Swett: I don't know. I was stepping out of it. Well, the Canning Peach Growers, they got a young man in, a good manager, and haven't done any; canning on their own, and they're getting by. They quote a price to the canners, and I guess they'll last a long time. COMMENTS ON AGRICULTURAL SURPLUSES

Baum: I wonder if we could talk a little bit about the sur­ plus problem and what efforts were made to deal with that. Swett: Well, the surplus problem has been with us for many years -- a serious surplus problem all the way since World War I, and nationally and locally it has been a problem for farmers and for all people that had to do with agricultural education. And nobody's been able to solve it so far. As time went on, pear prices became lower and lower. There were, in years of heavy crops, hundreds or even thousands of tons of surplus above all existing market needs. Why were we growing such excess fruits -- not only pears, but peaches, prunes, apricots, raisins? Moderate surpluses are not dangerous, but great surpluses sometimes result in disasters.

Many of us think~.the University of California was partly, and innocently, responsible for the in­ creasing surplus. How will I put it? I don't want to open my big mouth and put my foot in it. The Congress passed a bill setting up funds which would establish in every public university professors of agricultural education who would disseminate agri­ cultural information throughout the state by means 50

Swett: of county agents. Almost every county in California in 1917 got started, and most of the counties contri­ buted funds and in almost every county there was a county agent, sometimes called a county farm advisor. In the University of California they engaged a very talented, energetic man, Dr. Crocheron, imported from Louisiana, where his experience was in running a military school, not a farm. But he was brilliant. He could make a wonderful speech. He could get a big audience enthused. The only trouble, the main trouble with Crocheron was he wanted to do all the thinking, not only for himself, but for all these employees in the different counties; the farm agents, they were sUb­ ordinates, and he kept track of them. They reported by mail and by telephone daily all the details of each day. Heaven help 'em unless they preached his program. And what was his program? I felt that he was really doing a disservice by leaving out the dollars and cents portion, because farmers are not satisfied to merely lead a way of life; they want to make a living, and pay the grocery bills, and take care of their families. I think that this/program of Crocheron's would seem to be "Production-Production-Production." I took it up with Crocheron, I said, "Well, 51 Swett: you're telling all the people in California we're going to make growing fruit safe through scientific methods. You don't say a word about how many acres are already planted to come into bearing in a year or two. You don't touch on the economic outlook." He said, "Mr. Swett, agriculture economics is entirely different from my responsibilities. My pro­ gram is mapped out at a general meeting. Myself and all my employees from the different counties meet once a year in Berkeley and map out a program." "Well," I said, "that's very interesting." And we didn't agree at all. I failed to make much 'headway, because there was not only Crocheron, but another man, Dr. Elwood Mead, and the two men were advocates of "Production-Pro­ duction-Production." Mead figured, "We'll show the growers how to produce. The state should buy large tracts of land, sub-divide, and get farmers' sons as purchasers on the land. As a rule, fathers haven't enough money to buy an acreage for their boys. But the boys were the finest boys in the world, and by giving credit terms and instruction, and different details, it would be a remarkable asset to the whole state of California." 52 Swett: Between Crocheron and Dr. Mead they started one project. which wasn't too bad. This was up at Stan­ ford University's property at Delhi, north of Sacra­ mento. The earliest project was at Delhi. They bought six or eight thousand acres of land. They were going to colonize it with farmers' sons. It had been offered, according to the information I had from a land appraiser, at $19 an acre two years pre­ vious, but nobody bought it then. But the state came along and they bought it. Why? What was the reason

for picking that land, and paying $93 an ac~ for what had been $19 an acre, because it started them with a heavy handicap. There was another item that made trouble: it happened to be largely blow sand, and blow sand is sandy soil with so little clay loam in it that when the wind blows the land moves. It'll move north or south. A man may have forty acres; that south wind may come up and blow his top soil a half a mile or a mile up to the north against some other fellow's barn. Sometimes it can be used. It had been used for growing rye, because rye is the crop that does fairly well on sandy land. Well, then came the practical operation of getting 53 Swett: settlers. So the plan was announced, and speeches were made allover California, and lots of farmers who had grown sons said "Fine, we'll go up and look at that land." So they went up, and took their sons to see where their future home might be. "Why, this is blow sand. This isn't fit ground." And they went back. I think not a single farmer bought. The farmers were sophisticated. There were lots of unsophisticated people, .. and I have a list of people who did buy. They'd saved up enough money so they could pay a little down and have ten, twenty, or thirty years to pay the balance. And there were retired ministers, retired teachers, and Christian Science practitioners, retired tailors, seamstresses, all kinds of people who -- Baum: But not farmers. Swett: Not farmers. And it didn't take long before, having incurred installments which took much of their ready cash, the citrus planters had ,;to put in irrigation ditches. Well, the water would drop right through the sand in the irrigation channel. So they had to buy concrete pipes so that the water could be trans­ ported. The sand dunes had to be leveled off, and that unexpectedly cost a lot of money and Dr. Mead, 54 Swett: at a time when I'm told nearly thirty thousand tons of cling peaches were going to waste unharvested in California, told them, "plant peaches., This is the type of soil to grow peaches on." So a lot of them planted peaches. It wasn't in the hands of practical men who knew farming. They were talented orators and talented speech-makers. And the state had to come to the rescue and cancel a large portion of the indebted­ ness. The people, instead of moving onto their land, the poor fellows moved off their land and it was left for years largely unsold, and it was a disaster. As an experiment of how not to do things it was worth the million or more dollars that the state of California lost. That didn't hurt any­ body very much. But do you think it;,was good agri­ cultural education? At the time the plan of farm advice was adopted I thought it was a good thing, and I helped organize it in this county. Baum: Was this Extension? Swett: Yes. I was talking with a professor with,·;whom I'm

friendly. 1 He says, "Frank, mark my words, this Ex­ tension plan is going to entail a good deal of 55 Swett: hardship; the hardship and the damage may be far greater than the earnings of the plan." We argued , . I thought he was wrong, but he stuck to his belief. I've come to the conclusion that in a general way he was more or less right. At first they called them county agents but somebody in the Extension said "Well, these employees are not exactly agents, to do business. They're ad­ visors, to tell the growers what it is safe to do." So they called them advisors afterwards. I said, "If you're designated an 'advisor' once in a while you get a swelled head. It's different. If you're merely an agent, you're just;:.a subordinate." But a great advisor! And the directors of this policy were Dr. Mead and B. H. Crocheron. I said indirectly they've been one of the factors tending towards disastrous surpluses from time to time, not all the time, but in years of reasonably good crops. That's a problem of every cooperative in California, some twenty or thirty cooperatives. "What shall we do with the surplus?" It's a problem with Congress. They don't know yet. Now they're spending billions of dollars. Some of us thought that the best way was to chloroform all the optimistic 56 Swett: orators and put them in cold storage. Population will cure surpluses. The growth of population in five, ten, twenty, fifty years will outweigh, to some extent, the surpluses. But we'll have to wait quite a while •• Fortunately, the University of California no longer is supporting two optimistic orators. They supported them very nicely. The chief culprit, in my mind, was B.H. Crocheron, who -- because the Board of Regents (they didn't know much about agriculture or surplusses), paid this man about double the salary that they paid research professors. During the time when a dollar was a dollar, and not a mere dollarette, he was drawing over $9,000 a year, while ordinary valuable professors were getting $4,000 or $5,000. Almost double! But he had eloquence, and his eloquence must have worked with some of the members of the Board of Regents. So they put him as a chief potentate of agricultural control, a man who had experience as a teacher in a military school, a millionaire, very much a gentleman, whose relatives died and left him a quarter of a million dollars. So he was indepen­ dent. He didn't have to listen to the criticisms of we ordinary farmers. We wore blue jeans. He didn't. 57 Baum: Crocheron was independently wealthy? Swett: He had a legacy of $250,000. He didn't buy farms. He bought a yacht, a motor-boat. That was his re­ creation. He had one good point, and I think we ought to be grateful, we who've often sat on hard benches through long sessions of committee meetings. Instead of coffee-breaks, as we have nowadays, he knew that people did weary sitting on hard benches, and in the middle of each session he would say, "Well, now, everybody stand up, turn around, relax your musc­ les," and you were grateful to the man who did it.

It was:··,a fine thing, and I hope hiscsuccesaor-e keep

it up. ~aughterJ. 58 GIANNINI FOUNDATION

Baum: You were speaking of Mr. Crocheron and A.P. Giannini. Swett: I don't want to criticize anybody in the University. Baum: Oh, we've got a lot of criticisms of Mr. Crocheron. Swett: Oh, you have? ~hUCkli~ Baum: He was a good man, but everybody has their faults. Swett: In his own estimation he was greater than the Czar of Russia or the Emperor William or What-have-you. He had a keen brain. And he was the finest chairman of a big meeting I ever saw. The farm advisors from the various counties had to toe the mark. Well, something happened that same year; the Bank of Italy was taking over some of the banks in the San Joaquin Valley. It was considering taking over a number of banks down at Lindsay and Exeter. The Bank of Italy had no experience with citrus fruits, so Giannini called in John Fox and called back A.W. Hendrick, who had been in charge of 50,000 mortgages. Hendrick had been a professor of English in a university in Canada. For-isome reason he came to California, and got a job with the Federal Land Bank. He functioned, and in the meantime he studied ir­ rigation law and California law, and became wonder­ 59 Swett: fully well qualified. He was Giannini's right-hand man as long as he was able to cross the Bay and show up at the bank. Then after that Giannini would cross the Bay when' he wanted to see him. But at any rate, Hendrick took it up with Cro­ cheron, got absolutely no satisfaction. It was like water on a duck's back. Giannini checked up and he said "Who'd you talk to, Hendrick?" "I talked with Mr. Crocheron." "Oh," he said, "that tall man, that conceited 'blankety-blank'. He looks like a French pimp, I've seen them on the boulevards in Paris. We'll wash our hands of that 'blankety-blank'. We need those eco­ nomic studies, but not with that fellow." We'll or­ ganize a separate foundation, entirely separate from the University of California, where there's danger of that man muddling in." Well, they argued, more or less, and finally one of the advisors said, "A separate foundation -- you want something that will endure. Foundations are made, they spend their money, and they go out of business. The University of California will always be there! You have good attorneys. We'll tie up the funds. 60

Swett: We'll give them a building, we ~l tie up the operating funds so that that blankety-blank never can touch a penny." So that was the agreement. Baum: So that's how the Giannini Foundation got set up? Swett: Yes. I've never publicized it, I wouldn't. But my friends over at Berkeley, they all know it. Baum: Mr. Hendrick told you this? Swett: Hendrick and Giannini and John Fox, who was an ap­ praiser for the bank. John Fox kept me posted. I didn't have to go and see Hendrick very often because we had a little club in Berkeley, we called it "the Jawbone Club." 'rhere were five members. One member was a newspaperman, Frank Honeywell, who owned the Pacific Rural Press. Afterward it changed its name, it bought the California Cultivator and changed the name to an old name, California Farmer. Our club met once a month usually, in each other's houses, and we'd have a confab. It was understood that no­ body talked outside, whatever we discussed was cur­ rent news, and confidential to ourselves. It was lots of fun and interesting, and I learned things that I never would have learned otherwise. 61 PART II: BIOGRAPHICAL PACIFIC RURAL PRESS Baum: You were editor of the Pacific Rural Press for a while, weren't you? swett: A very little while. Honeywell asked me to become editor, and I started and wrote some editorials and I was considering -- I knew it was a darned good opening, and my wife liked to live in Berkeley. I guess I overworked, for one thing, and didn't sleep very well, and I had to go East, and I had tonsillitis and indigestion and grippe and I came back from the East and I was way down in the dumps. I had a very good doctor, I thought. He was a leading doctor. He said, nOh, I'll give you a tonic, you'll be all right. But I wasn't. I thought I'd just resign, but I was up in a drugstore getting some prescription. The drug clerk was quite an intelligent young man and I said "Who's the best-known nerve specialist in San Francisco?" "Well," he said, "Dr. Alvarez. He's a young man, he's not been practicing long, but he's very thorough. I consider him the very best." So I went and saw Dr. Alvarez, and my goodness, the 62 Swett: questions he asked! He had one of these folders. "How about your,:grandfather and your grandmother," and this, that and the other. "What children's diseases did you have?" A complete history. "And," he said, "how about your teeth?" "Well, there's nothing the matter with them." "Why," he said, "have you had any extractions?" "Yes." "Had any X-rays?" "Yes. Dr. Pfister said it was all right now. They used to kill the nerves." "I want to see those X-rays." So I took the pictures over. He looked at them. "Oh, these are all right for a dentist, but you go to McCormick. I'll write you the note. This isn't what I want. I want some

better on~s. No wonder you've been ill!" The new X­ rays showed a pus pocket at the bottom of each of those dead teeth. They used to put poison in the teeth and this was supposed to kill the nerve all the way, but this hadn't, and it was pumping a little pus into the circulation right along. So Alvarez said, "Well, you tell your dentist to take a look, scrape the bone, and you take a vaca­ tion. You say you don't sleep? I'm not going to pre­ 6.3 Swett: scribe any sleeping powders. Before you go to bed, take a tepid bath, not hot and not cold, but you just soak for fifteen minutes to half an hour. It'll just soothe you." Then he said, "I guess you've been working too hard. You go up to the Sierra, you take a couple of weeks of vacation. If possible go to some place where there isn't a damn telephone. You come back in two weeks or a month and if you need anything further, why, I'll let you know." Well, at the end of ten days I never felt better in my life. I was okay. And I was very grateful to the doctor. He didn't charge me much. I think it was $50, some doctors would have charged a couple of hundred for a thorough diagnosis. But anyway it was fine. Once in a while I've been a "heel", not that I want to be a heel but just through neglect; I ought to have thanked him and showed him I appreciated it, but four years after that I got a mimeographed letter he was sending a letter to each of his former patients he said, "I'm going to do some research work at the Mayo Institute and I want to wish you luck," and so forth, "I hope to add something useful to medicine." 64 Swett: That woke me up, so I wrote him a letter in care of the Mayo Foundation and I got a very delightful letter from him. I said in my letter to him, "You won't remember me, but I was so-and-so. You pre­ scribed no medicine, but a vacation at an altitude 10,000 feet in the air, and it cured me. I've always been grateful and never got around to thank you until now." So I got his nice letter. And then I had occasion, in connection with the Sierra Club, not that I was an official but as a member, I wrote to Dr. Alvarez, "Would you say something about the mountains? The Sierra Club may get out some little cards, quoting John Muir about the therapy of the mountains." He wrote back, "You know, I'm sorry, I'm too busy, but if you start a thing you never know how much the one activity will attract a thousand others. I have too many activities already; I have three secretaries, I'm writing a syndicated letter, and ••• " Baum: Oh, Dr. Walter Alvarez. Swett: Yes ••• "and one syndicated letter to physicians in America and one to European physicians. I'm going to have to curtail. I'm not as young as I used to be." He was a delightful man with a photographic memory. 65 Baum: Did you continue as editor of the Rural Press? Swett: No. I couldn't sleep and I got to the end of my string. I said "You get another editor, I can't continue. My health is the first consideration. He sent East and he got a man who had been editor of the Country Gen­ tleman, John Pickett, who made good, and whose son has continued as editor when John Pickett died. The son is editor now and a very able young man. 65a The Swett Farm

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RANCH IN ALHAMBRA VALLEY, MARTINEZ Baum: You used to live in Berkeley, is that right? Swett: Yes. Baum: When did you decide to move out here? You always had the ranch out here, though, didn't you? Swett: Dad bought it in 1882, and I ran this ranch. Yes, Dad, looking forward to retirement from educational work, bought a 2)0-acre farm in 1882 in Alhambra Valley, Contra Costa County, adjoining the orchard and vineyards of his close friend, naturalist John Muir. We had twenty acres of tree fruits. In 18$0 I was twenty-one, and I took charge of the ranch. I also ran a nursery up at Lodi and one down in the San Joaquin Valley, mostly grapes and walnuts. Market troubles began about the time Dad bought the ranch. When Dad in 188) planted wine grapes, almost everybody in California looked forward to good profits. Great acreages were planted, but growers learned there were limits. Prices dropped from a profitable $25 a ton to a disastrous low of about $7 a ton out of which must come costs of planting, cultivation for three or four years, pruning, picking, and hauling to a winery. Some growers faced fore­ closures. 67 Baum: . You mentioned earlier that you had a winery. Where was it? Swett: Right across the creek. My brother and I inherited fifty percent each of the old ranch, which was 173 acres. When Prohibition came we quit, because by that time I was living in Berkeley and I didn't want to try and operate a winery under Prohibition, be­ cause the south side of the jail down here is too warm and the north side is too cold. I could have made lots of money. I had a neigh­ bor who operated right through Prohibition, one block away from the main thoroughfare. He wanted me to go in partners. "Why," he said, "Frank, come down. We can make $25,000 or $50,000 a year." I said, "Nothing doing! I looked at the out­ side of that jail, I don't want to be looking out from within." "Oh," he said "I've got everything all right. I'm protected, I'm within my rights." I said, "How do you mean, you're protected?" He'd become mayor of the town and he was making money hand over fist, and everybody knew that he was not only making wines but was operating a little still, and selling whisky as well as wine. The son of the 68 Swett: probation officer of the county was one of his de­ livery men, so it was under semi-legal auspices, eh? He was asking a banker about investments. "Well, why don't you buy P.G.&E.?" "Well, I've got $20,000 of stock in that already." "Well, how about DuPont?" "Oh, I've got a bunch of that." Well, he was getting rich, wasn't he? He said "My attorney is Sam Short­ ridge, Jr., the son of Senator Shortridge, and I'm absolutely protected." "Well," I said, "you should quit! You must have at least $150,000 and you've got enough to live on comfortably, and keep out of jail too." He said, "I wouldn't know what to do! I like to go down to the old dump and have a few friends in and a few drinks" -­ he'd get half-soused every afternoon and drive home in his air-cooled car, which he always drove in second gear around town. He was notorious. But he drank too efficiently. Baum: How come you were living in Berkeley? Did you have business interests in Berkeley? Swett: Had an office in San Francisco, the Pear Growers, and lived in Berkeley for eighteen years. Baum: Did your children go to school in Berkeley? Swett: Both my daughters are graduates of U.C., and I have 69 Swett: one grandson who's fallen from grace. He is a graduate of Stanford and he's taking a year's graduate course there. He had two years in Berkeley, but he said, "Those big classes, you can't get the individual attention that you do down in Stanford." 70 FATHER, JOHN SWETT Baum: Your father, John Swett, was one of California's greatest educators. He was state superintendent of schools from 1863 to 1868, deputy superintendent of schools in San Francisco from 1870 to 1873, prin­ cipal of the Girls High School and Normal School in San Francisco from 1876 to 1889, and San Francisco's superintendent of schools from 1891 to 1894. Most of those years I expect you were too young to pay much attention to what he was doing. Swett: Well, that brings to mind a story about my dad and Leland Stanford and the founding of Stanford Univer­ sity. My dad and Leland Stanford were unfriendly. Dad had been State Superintendent of Schools while Stanford was Governor and he and Dad had a constant set to. Stanford wanted all the money from the sale of public lands to be used to subsidize the Southern Pacific in building the transcontinental railroad. Dad wanted a certain small fraction set aside to be distributed to school districts. Many were so poor that the only money they had to pay teachers and build buildings with was locally and in a poor district ••• it was after the Gold Rush, in 1860 on. There was a scrap. 71 Swett: Dad visited almost every school district in California and found their problems. He was active, he didn't sit in an office. He drafted a bill dealing with a certain allotment, a small amount, but it would help out, it was an entering wedge for state aid to all schools. Dad had made friends in his trips around: he knew people all the way from San Diego to Siskiyou. He wrote letters to them and they wrote letters and sent telegrams to the legislature, some of them sent committees down, and Dad won a considerable portion of what he wanted. And Stanford never forgave him. Years later, some educator from back East would come to California and Dad would invite him up to the house for dinner and they would talk. They would say, "That's a wonderful new university that Stanford has founded. What a wonderful friend to education!" Dad would get red in the face. "Friend to edu­ cation! Let me tell you, he was no friend to the free common schools. If his son had lived, educa­ tion never would have received a penny of the Stan­ ford fortune." "Well, but didn't he found that university, give a fortune to it?" ,

72 Swett: "Yes, but it was three women that started it." \"Who?" "Sarah B. Cooper, the wife of a customs house officer; she was no millionaire but she was a woman with her heart in education, she helped the kinder­ gartens, she was a kindergarten advocate in San Francisco. She and Mrs. Stanford, a wonderfully fine conscientious woman, and Mrs. Phoebe Hearst. No better woman ever lived than Mrs. Phoebe Hearst. The three women talked it over. Leland Stanford had large ideas. He wanted to own the biggest vine­ yard in the world. He started one up at Vina in Tehama County. He wanted to have the finest trotting horses in the world. He started that project down in Palo Alto. He had never shown any interest in public edu­ cation, but the three women educated him. They said, "Why not start a great new university in memory of our son who died?" What could the poor man do! Not only one woman to influence him, but three of the finest women in the world asked him to do something. So he did. And that's the inside story. 73 SAN FRANCISCO GRAFT Baum: Your father was superintendent of schools in San Fran­ cisco and then he became a fruit grower. Did he move to the farm, or did he continue to live in San Fran­ cisco and just operate his farm?" Swett: Dad lived in San Francisco and commuted to Alhambra Valley. The family commuted with him, week-ends and vacations. He bought it as a place to retire to when he reached the age of retirement, but the board of

education kicked him out as principal of~the Girls' High School. That's a story in itself: Dad believed that anybody teaching children ought to know something about how to teach, and as far as credentials, being acquainted with a politician wasn't really a suffi­ cient credential, but the politicians didn't look at it in that way. The appointments were their currency, whereby they'd build up votes. There was growing in San Francisco close affili­ ation between the Nob Hill railroad magnates and the Barbary Coast. That alliance could carry most any election, because they were experts at that and the more reputable citizens didn't get registered and didn't vote. John Swett organized one class in the 74 Swett: Girls' High School building -­ The S. F. Normal Class. They had a course in teaching, and it worked. The graduates, most of them, could get jobs, but whenever one of them got an appointment, why, :some politician', s lady""friend- couldn' t;-ge-t one. 'They wanted to control every job in San Francisco, whether it was a police job or a street-cleaning job or stevedore -­ they were powerful. They had a school board of five directors. The president of the board was, I guess, a millionaire, but he hadn't been entirely educated, he knew how to make money but he completed his education in the penitentiary. He'd stolen too much forest land in Oregon and Washington. Meanwhile he was quite a hero in San Francisco. People didn't know him, he was an "educator", yes -­ not a trained educator but a businessman at the head of the school department. The board needed an attorney. They got a young man with an "incomplete" education, Abraham Ruef, and they made it so hot that they compelled Dad to resign. He was a thorn in the side of the machine. Baum: Your father resigned in 1894, I think.

Swett: I think so. You've got a better memory than I. Baum: No, I just looked him up. 75 Swett: Have you seen those old John Swett scrapbooks? Baum: No, I haven't. Are those in Bancroft? Swett: Yes, they're at Bancroft, a whole packing-case full of them. I didn't know the inside history. Dad never talked much about it, but it's in those old scrap­ books. A lot of John Muir's stuff is there, too, at Bancroft. There's going to be some moreLstuff that I'll send down there some day. 76 ANECDOTES ABOUT SENArOR SAM SHORTRIDGE Baum: I believe you have an anecdote about a relative of yours and Sam Shortridge to tell. Swett: Well, I had a cousin, Fred Tracy, in San Francisco, whose father died and he became a half-orphan., He had to go to work to help support his mother., He started in a book bindery making paste. He did pretty well. Finally his boss said, "Fred, you've got more cheek than anyone else here. We've been turning our bills over to a regular bill collector, but could you collect bills from our customers? We bind a lot of law books, and some lawyers are pretty slow pay. We never sue a lawyer, it'll cost us more money than the bill. You go out and see what you can do. We've got a whole collection of old bills against a few lawyers." Fred said, "I'll try anything once!" The boss said, "Now, here's a bill against Sam Shortridge. He owes us $67.50 and it hasn't outlawed yet, but it will outlaw before long. See what you can do on this." So Fred started in. He said to me, "Frank, you know, I've been up those office steps of Sam Short­ ridge's a half a dozen times. The girl tells me, 'Mr. 77 Swett: Shortridge is in Sacramento.' 'He's on a case in court elsewhere.' I can't get anywhere there, but I'm going to bawl him out up at his club, the Olympic Club. He goes up there and shoots billiards Saturday afternoons. I'll get that bird. A couple of weeks after I asked, "Fred, how'd you get on with Sam Shortridge? I made inquiries and people tell me he is allergic to bill collectors. He likes to show his ability in evading, and he's execution proof. He does make a lot of money and im­ mediately when he collects a fee he puts it in his wife's name." "Frank," he said, "I did it, I collected that bill from Shortridge." "How'd you do it?" "I watched across the street and finally I saw him go into the Olympic Club. Across the street you can look right into the billiard room. There he was leaning over the table shooting a ball. I had the bill and I got a Western Union telegraph envelope and I put the bill in the envelope and I wrote on it 'Honorable S.M. Shortridge.'" I went in. The doorkeeper said, 'What do you want, kid?' 'Why, I have a message for Mr. Shortridge.' 78 Swett: 'Oh, he's right up there.' "I went up. He was shooting billiards all right. There were three or four other fellows around. He said, 'What do you want, kid?' 'Oh, Mr. Shortridge, I've got a message here for you.' He straightened up, laid his billiard cue down. 'Pardon me, I have a communication here which requires my attention.' He ripped the envelope open and looked at the bill and got red in the face just like a turkey gobbler. And he said, 'You infernal urchin, what do you mean by bringing that thing up here?' I just grinned. He was mad, but I wasn't. His friends were all listening. I said, "'Now Mr. Shortridge, I've been carrying this bill around for a long time. I knew when I'd see you it would require your attention. Give me some money to take down to the shop. Mr. Shortridge, if you pay us we can buy some more leather to bind more law books for you. We can even buy paste to paste your pages in your law books. ' "His friends began to joke. He turned to one of them and he said, 'Lend me some money. This damned fresh kid.' "I got a $20 gold piece. I took it back to the 79 Swett: shop. They said, 'Fred, you're the best collector we know. Nobody else in San Francisco could do it.'" The story got around and C.W. Ford, who was a wholesale silk dealer asked my father, "Mr. Swett, do you mean your nephew actually collected a bill from Sam Shortridge?' 'Yes.' 'Well, he's a hero. I'll give that boy a job any time he applies.'" So Fred went to work in the wholesale silk business. He was a success as a salesman. Later on he went to Alaska, handled transportation of ore for the Guggenheim railroad interests, and made good. He became a valued officer for the Alaska Steamship Company, and during the war superintended overseas transportation for his company. Baum: I've heard a lot about Sam Shortridge, but I've never heard about him avoiding his bills. Swett: Maybe ten years ago I met a young man who married a girl who was the daughter of a winemaker. He said, I'm a bill collector now in San Jose." "How are you getting on?" "I'm making headway, I'm making a living. Sometimes its kind of hard sledding." Well, I told him the story about how Fred col­ lected that bill. "Oh," he said, "Sam Shortridge, I collected a bill from him last week." "How'd you do s.o Swett: it?" "Well, other bill collectors tried, but he's judgment proof, but I watched the law cases. When a case he was on was finished, I went down; I knew he wouldn't have time to shoot the money into securities. I attached it, and we got the money." I told this story to a friend, an appraiser, he appraised irrigation districts. He said, "I know Shortridge. I had to see him in Washington after he became senator. It was Saturday and I located him. He was upstairs in the backroom of his senatorial office; he wasn't feeling very well. I went up there. His secretary said, 'Come in. The Senator's not very well." So I knew what his trouble was because I smelled it, either Bourbon or Scotch, but he was well lit up. He said, 'What are you after me for. You come and see me next week.' I said, 'I'm sorry but I've got to go back to Sacramento day after tomorrow. They told me to get your signature on this contract. He said, 'I don't know who wrote all this. Who drew this up?' 'Why, John Partridge, the city and county attorney.' A man of highest standing. 'Oh, you look like an honest man. Tell me, you say you're 81 Swett: sure he drew this up?' 'Well, he put his name on it.' 'Oh hell, I'll sign anything that good old Jack fixed up. I don't even need to read it.' And he signed it." Baum: Wasn't Shortridge known as a Southern Pacific attorney? Swett: I don't know about that. He and his partner Dunlap were in on a lot of big cases. They could handle juries to beat the band. Shortridge was attorney for the people who bribed the supervisors. He made lots of money, but he had this obsession, stave off any and all bills. Strange a man like that can get elected to a very high position. And you know why? Baum: Why? Swett: The public is a big dunce. D-u-n-c-e. The wets and drys were fighting over Prohibition. There were several senatorial candidates and the dry organization wanted somebody on their side. It was a mystery why they picked Shortridge. The man who donated Muir Woods to the state, a Congressman Kent, was aspiring to the senate seat, and he wasn't fanatically dry nor fanatically wet. They asked him to pledge himself. Kent told the drys he was in favor of strict control but not in favor of strict prohibition because it never could be enforced where a majority wanted to drink. So he was out. 82 Swett: Another candidate who was pretty dry, was not a Re­ publican, I think it was John C. Works. Shortridge would sign anything to get the dry vote. He got his share of the dry vote and he was elected United States senator. Baum: He was elected on the dry platform? Swett: He had the support of the drys. I was told that by a friend of mine, a very reliable man who usually kept track of politics. I haven't made it up and I

haven't exaggerated it, at least not consciously~ Baum: You got some of this inside information through your Jawbone Club, didn't you? Swett: Not this one. I was a member of the State Viticul­ tural Commission, and we were on the wet side in the campaign. Our secretary was a great friend of Gover­ nor Hiram Johnson. He told me that story. 83

GRANDFATHER, FREDERICK PALMER TRACY

Baum: Were you a Republican from the beginning? Swett: My grandfather was one of the founders of the Republi­ can Party in California. Grandfather Tracy started out as an itinerant Methodist preacher in New England. He was very active, and very impecunious. Conditions in New England were pretty tough and he hit on the idea he wrote to John Greenleaf Whittier -- that he would take settlers into the Northwest Territory. That was, disputed territory between Britain and the United States and he wondered what protection American set­ tlers would get there. So he got enough money to go down to Washington and he interviewed the British authorities and the American president and everyone gave him "the run­ around". The politicians talked out of both sides of their mouths. President Polk wrote him, "With regards to your communication in which you asked what protection would be afforded by this government to American settlers in the Oregon Territory, let me say that American settlers will receive the same protection as other American settlers in any other locality 84 Swett: similarly situated." [LaughteIj That was in 1839. So he didn't come to California for a number of years. I also have the letter that my grandfather wrote after he'd been in San Francisco for a week in 1849. He wrote a long, long letter to his wife and family back in New England describing it. Among other things, he said '''rhis is a strange town, different from any city I've ever seen. It's the worst possible location for a city." He said, "It's subject to raw winds from the ocean, sand storms from the sand dunes, from the streets that are six inches deep in dust, He says "South San Francisco, which is two miles south of here, is an infinitely better location, but nobody goes there." "The city is built of wood and canvas. If a fire starts, it'll cause millions of dollars of damage, and it's apt to start at any time." And he was right. They had five fires in suc­ cession. But it's a brilliant description. I think a copy should be in the Library. Baum: We will certainly deposit a photographic copy of the letter in Bancroft Library if you will let us borrow the original. swett: All right. When Grandfather Tracy came to California he didn't have any visionary schemes for settlement. 85 Swett: He practiced law. They say he was a good speaker, he could capture the attention of big audiences, and that was his undoing. He and Leland Stanford went from one end of the state to the other making poli­ tical speeches. They started the Republican Party as an anti-slavery party. In 1860 California elected four or five delegates to the national Republican con­ vention. Stanford, I think, was governor at the time, or he was a candidate for governor. He wrote my grandfather saying, "Dear Tracy, Enclosed is my proxy. I trust you will use it, if possible, for Senator

lUlliam H. Seward. I do not favor the Pathfinder. It (That was John C. Fremont) It was a very short letter. But he had the proxy. Baum: Your grandfather was a delegate himself, and he was

also a proxy delegate fo~ Stanford? So he had two votes. Swett: Yes, and when the delegation arrived, why Seward, he thought that was fine. They were pledged to vote to Seward -- not first, last, and all the time, but they had a pledge to vote for Seward. And he staged a fine dinner at a leading hotel there. They had fifty-seven varieties of drinks. They had partridge and quail and venison and all kinds of delicacies, all kinds. It was I I I '';~

~~~~ ~?;~ .Y"r~·"hi§'~ J~)\ ~"~\.;;\ji'~:If~ !, 1./...../(. DINNEI-{. >''- _.;;(0:,. -.;;;.0" 'V .. 4 ""'~ \t(· I~~:'~~ I., ,~,. ''''; " ~l ~~®/~~ . ,~B SOUP. ~-,,-.)" " .~.. 'lock Turtle. Puree of Vegetable•. ' ~;; 'fR1r~1~ 1'1 .~ ~'r~Y'('~r , u ----...--­ ? 'L rr . r I S lI. ~;.\ .:'rl'.J!\~\i~1\'-' - ,).' ~. .... ~'cJ.1ll:'(:Jrrn!'~[1 ~'~.' Boiled Hallbut, Ojster l'auee. ~ ~(j ~ Baked Brook Trout, Madeira Sauce.. ,;r; .\.II] ID TO Til' l!J .' ---.... ----­ ~ , ' BOILED. Chicago Cured Ham. LeI\'of Mutton. Caper Sauce, I Corned Beef and Cabbage. 'l'arkey. Chicken, with Purli, E;;J;Sauce. trl \; . \\~~~ \ AUf (J ~ -.­ § lE II. .. .I ROAST. .0 ~\.~ 81rloln of Beef. Saddle of Muttlln. Loln of '"eal, s:: i . TO THk fcf i I I ChIcken. Turkey. 8part:.rih of I'\,rk. Lamn, )tint Sauce. (1) I ~.:.. :':'~-'-= ,."~ •._.,. .' c+ ---.~ COLD DiS H ES. p:l i Beef Tongue, Glacie, wlrh Jelly, Ham, Decorated. ~VJ~~IfJ __ 'I Round of Htd, a la Chusseur, Lobster 8al ..d, with Jelly. c+ r ---- ,.­ ...... - c+ . l£.'-\''''''''' ,I (1) ~Ty;~~f'j~'::5r~ EN T R 1,' .If E r S. ::s Larded Filet of Beef, Tomato 8,.uee. Compote of Piceon, with Ham. Po ~·:C.~~' ~.~: .•.. l lireaded Lamb Chup. whh Green l'eus. Frtcandeau of \"cal, Larded, with Spinach. (1) >1 ! Apple t'rilters, with Rum. ChlckenPor Pic, N'~~' York ~t)·le. . p. Small Patties, )'ilIetl with ~fiIICt'd Turkey. Sweet Bl'eiHI~f with Truffles. I i Carbonnte of Lamb, with )lushrouUlS, Lamb Fries UJams. Fried in llattcr. hj cr' ~ ~ I (J .-1 .1/ e. (1) I Itoa.~t Pigeon, Port "·ine Sauce. Po hj (1) ~ . II -- ---.--.... --~.- RELIS 1i E.':;. ~ p:l I 1-" 1 I Raw Cucumbers, l\~ orcester-hlre Sauce. ::s . ! I Raw Tomutoes. Mixed Pickle•• 0 ~ )'rench Mustard. French Olives. t'Qld ~Iaw'. Uhow Chow. ~ 1 '! Kadish es, Lettuce. Sardines. en '"d ::: .: I VE,G ETA BLES. (1) 'i • . Green Pea •. .·otatot·:4 ~Ia~hrtl, VeW"IRhle OYl-1er:s. , Boiled Hominy, c+ TI' . '017 (111 ~T ('{t\·'T-":f.\1i.:r '1:(1'1l1..1' ~ Stewed Toruutoes. I'otat'le~ Buill'd. }o'rll:ll Pal~nip3. Boiled lac~.. 1--3 c+ 'R U..... 1 T··. IIt,t ~1:L w, ~pilJ:!t"h. .cd? M.k.\u_),,);.) \iVJ,) \L'c' (~al\l" Orlla:r'l'lI!«·tl. FOl,lllluill llf Lilll·rt.L :Y I (1) 0") May 1.8, 1860. .. OrllllIlH.'lllt:d :'!'i\hi...h l'ak,·. (.rll;1l11t'1l1l'.1 I't'llllli l:dl,~. v~ tn-" • 1-"'''1'',)" I'.' ralllill nf :\LIt'.,n U:I~. ~ ~:~e" __ . /" r.:.'&~" ! 0 • .. 00 ~ ~ ;~.~.~; :-~:.. ,~~ V\ . .I. e-,r- t-vv (i' ~"P~ 1:'Q, -{,I) II 1,'88FI: 1'. ~,,(.;.. '" \,.l~i ..\J.,Q) /0/'/) v/_" 1',-,' ,... ~ >• ,...... 0'0 .. ' '.~ ~'!j ~~! ~)f#' :'1[')?); Villt'."f'l'h·... o. ;Hl.~n;:. l'lIllillla~ ;\!lIillI1d.". F'j!"O_ 1"'1"'11:01. r.II::Ii.~!1 '" :,hl1lts.. ,-,·~i .,."",,;.: '.r·U)'~Vlit' ••••VGl~ FI·•.:~h l'dld~I':'. \\!tll t"l't':i111. Fro'!i\'h t'ld!n... ~t1f1w!H.lnl'~. \4ifh Crt',lItt,:­ ..p.­ . "';~1 t J. ,Y. 1IYATT. JR,. rnU'iTE:n-, 2f3 Lu,;&. l~__.. ~·!:.·--:...~':--:::-~_':~ ~ . ~._. t.i~~.:.~::·::;J ~ .... "~=.'"".~~=~----~-=~~ 86 Swett: a wonderful dinner. And that was only a delegation, eating and drinking at the expense of Mr. Seward. And they voted for him on the first ballot, and I think on the second ballot, also. Then they switched, and voted for Abe Lincoln, and it carried. My grandfather never got back to California be­ cause unfortunately for his health he was a pretty good speaker, and he was asked to stump the state of New York in the Lincoln campaign, and he went out in New York and he got pneumonia and died. So that was the end of that chapter. Baum: What was your grandfather's full name? Swett: Frederick Palmer Tracy. Baum: So your family has been Republican from the beginning of that party? Swett: Yes. By the way, if you had asked me if I was a pioneer, I would say there are different definitions of "pion­ eers," according to age and occupation. I received these verses from a friend of mine in England, an edu­ cator, been in education for fifty years, and he's still on informal committees. That is, he taught in schools and high schools for fifty years, and was super­ intendent for twenty-five years.

Swett: ~eciting poe~ 87 Old age is golden, I've heard it said, But sometimes I wonder as I go to bed, My ears in a drawer; my teeth "in a cup; My eyes on a table until I get up, Ere sleep dims my eyes I say to myself, Is there anything else I should lay on the shelf? But I'm happy to say as I close my eyes, My friends are the same as in days gone by. I get up each morning; dust off my wits, Pick up the Guardian and read the obits. If my name is missing, I know I'm not dead, So I eat a good breakfast; and go where I'm led. ~aughte~ So now you're leading me, and I'm barely alive --

Baum: Well, let me lead you to the next question then. You have told me of your Republican family, and yet I know you are a Democrat. Were you a Republican once?

Swett: Yes. And I was on an agricultural campaign committee for Herbert Hoover. But after I heard him speak in Washington I was cured. 88 COMMENTS ON HERBERT HOOVER Swett: There were many admirable things about Hoover, his feeding of the Belgians, but he played up to the one big fruit shipping company, DiGiorgio's. Charley Teague used all his influence for DiGiorgio's great chain of auctions in eleven cities. California growers were afraid of the big marketing corporation. The Earl Fruit Company was DiGiorgio's. It wasn't so bad, but it got a tough reputation, perhaps unjustly. Well, Hoover had an idea, or someone put the idea in his head, to get all the fruit shipping com­ panies to join in a vast super-cooperative that could regulate and give each market what it wanted instead of glutting it. I never saw the details of the plan. Hoover had this vision of an immense cooperative covering the distribution of all fruits and vegetables. It's an intricate story. But a large part of the crop is -- as you know -- sold at auction. DiGiorgio, who was a very enterprising man who'd made a fortune on banana sales and the sales of all fruits, including California fruits -- he would sell his auction houses to the new agency, at a pretty high price, they thought. And he would go out and he would confine himself to being a producer, instead of a merchant. 89 Swett: Well, that sounded good on paper, but people were suspicious. First, if such a concern were established, would it do the growers dirt, or not? Would it abolish most competition, or not? Well, I talked to the heads of cooperatives in Michigan, Washington State, Oregon, and different parts of California. And they said, "Well now, we've got to be courteous, but this don't smell good to us, we're afraid. But what are you going to tell them tomorrow at the meetong?" "Mr. So and So of Wenatchee, Washington, will you sign up?" "No, I want to go back and talk to my board of directors." "Jack Nagle (manager of the California Fruit Ex­ change, a deciduous cooperative), how about the Cali­ fornia Fruit Exchange?" "I'm going to say, 'Well, I can't give you an answer now. I obey the instructions of my board of directors. I'll go back to California and take it up with them.' That won't hurt the President, and no government officials can take exception to that." But they all said the same thing, and this Hoover­ DiGiorgio-Teague plan died very quickly. Baum: The people that were there were each representing a 90 Baum: producers' co-op? Swett: Generally speaking, yes, but also representing com­ mercial shipping companies. Baum: Surely the commercial shipping companies wouldn't favor the plan. Wouldn't that put them right out of business? Swett: I think so. But I never saw the text. That was just a general version. Baum: What were you doing there in Washington? Swett: My board of directors asked me to go to the meeting. Baum: It was a meeting called in Washington for all the growers! cooperatives and shippers? Swett: All the growers cooperatives I knew were invited. Well, I know one exception, the American Fruit Growers, which was a nationwide organization with a good repu­ tation, they were not invited. Still, their president went to the meeting anyway. And we went in at nine o'clock and we sat there, and nothing doing. Nobody called the meeting to order. We waited a half an hour longer, and thought "What's the matter?" Well, apparently the word came down that as long as the representative of the American Fruit Growers was present the meeting would not convene. In other words, he was black-balled out. Well, we never knew just why. 91 Swett: But he had visions of if the thing went through they'd become a competitor of DiGiorgio, DiGiorgio would have theoretically retired and sold his auction houses, but everybody believed that it would be a retirement on paper only, and that he would be the big emperor, Baum: That he would really run it, Swett: They thought so, I don't know, Baum: Was that going to be a shipping company, or just an auction company? Swett: Everything, as far as I know, Baum: The whole thing. You thought they were going to buy the fruit from the grower -­ the growers would main­ tain title, but they would market through this Swett: No, I shoUldn't say too much because I never saw, I only saw a blueprint. We don't know, but that was what was told us, Baum: Was DiGiorgio a supporter of Hoover? Swett: I presume so, because Hoover's close friend, C,C, Teague, of Southern California, a very influential man, and the head of the citrus co-ops was a suppor­ ter -­ people used to say, "Well, Charlie Teague and DiGiorgio, they both came from the same valley in Sicily," Baum: Teague did! Swett: That's what they said. That was a joke. They were very friendly. Baum: Teague was a big supporter of Hoover, and through Teague, DiGiorgio. Swett: That's the idea. Baum: It was because of this exclusion of the American Fruit Growers that you turned against Hoover, is that right? Swett: That was just one reason. Baum: What fruits did the American Fruit Growers represent? Swett: At that time they were doing a tremendous business in apples. Outside of that -- well, they handled all fruits, and they were trying to break into California, get a big line of California fruits. They never were very heavy shippers from California. Baum: Was it a shipping company? Swett: It was not a private company; it was cooperative. I don't want to talk too much about it because I don't know, I don't know the details, and really just a blank statement doesn't mean anything. Baum: I'd say the use of your statements would be that if somebody were doing some research, on your clue they would have to go back and find out exactly 93 Baum: what the facts were about this, but without your clue they might not even know where to look. Any­ thing like this would only be a beginning clue. Swett: That's right. And it wouldn't be much of a clue, because those things were not documented even at the time. But it was charged that Mr. Hoover had tried to hold a secret meeting with hand-picked officials, and if someone wasn't hand-picked, he was not consulted. Baum: Was that typical of Hoover? Swett: I don't know what was typical of Hoover. He had some good points, and some little ones. I knew a man who ran the Sacramento Union which apparently represented the Hoover interests. The Sacramento Bee, the other paper, was Democratic. The Republican campaign committee wanted its views represented and they subsidized the Union, somebody subsidized it•. After the election was over the Union gradually shrank and became hard up. Ben Allen, the editor-publisher, went down to see Hoover. "Well, Ben, you'll have to see Mrs. Hoover. I had nothing to do with it." That was Hoover. Ben was a talented man, a superior man. He had a family to support. It would have only taken a few Swett: thousand dollars to buy some more paper and print some more Sacramento Unions. The paper companies wouldn't give him any more credit. Baum: So I take it you cooled on Hoover. Swett: Oh, when I came back to California, it was time for registration. I went down and said "Democrat". "Democrat! I thought you were a Republican. II III was, but I'm cured. II It made a little local gossip. Baum: Are you still a Democrat? Swett: Yes. Baum: Did you take any part in the framing of New Deal legislation? Swett: No. 95 TESTIMONY IN FAVOR OF THE l60-ACRE LIMITATION Baum: I believe you went to Washington to testify in favor of retaining the l60-acre limitation. Swett: Yes. Paul Taylor was very much exercised by the gob­ bling up of the water supply by the big landowners and I went to testify before a senate committee. I had a real wild adventure. Before I went I looked up all the figures and prepared a speech that would take about fifteen minutes to read. I was to speak on Friday, but I went to the hearings ahead. On Tuesday one of the speakers couldn't make it and they called on me. Well, there was my manuscript in my briefcase in the Roosevelt Hotel a mile and a half away. Should I back down? No, I had to talk. I couldn't remember my speech, so I took a different tack. So I kidded them, I talked about the big land­ owners and the Junkers in Prussia. It came easy. There was a representative from Bakersfield who told them no man could make a living on 160 acres. I said I would have to take issue with my esteemed friend, but I was living on 160 acres in California. Of course, it was hard work, and you don't expect a politician to do hard work. Baum: You didn't get to deliver your prepared speech? Swett: No. Baum: Didn't your stand put you on the outs with many of your old friends? Swett: Oh yes, the Farm Bureau, which theoretically represents all the farmers, one of their men talked to a group of graduate students down at the YMCA, and they asked him some questions about Frank Swett. He said, "No­ body goes to Washington unless they're paid for it." I told a graduate student, "Yes, I was paid. The pay I got was one glass of beautiful, rich sherry wine at the Cosmos Club in Washington. I bought my own ticket, I paid for my meals, but I got a beautiful glass of Spanish wine, that was all." 97 FARM ORGANIZATIONS Baum: Well, you were active in the Farm Bureau for many years, weren't you? Swett: I helped start it in this county. Baum: Oh yes, you were president of the Contra Costa Farm Bureau in 1917. Swett: But after my trip to Washington I cancelled my membership. Baum: Was this because you felt they only represented a part of the farmers? Swett: I was a bit bad-tempered. I thought they should have apologized. I wrote to headquarters and said I ob­ jected to criticism that was based on lies. Baum: This is with regard to the charge that you were paid? Swett: Yes. Baum: Are you a member of the Grange? Swett: Yes. Down in Bakersfield, the barons of Bakersfield had no use for the Grange, they couldn't attend Grange meetings (not being members). And I asked George Sehlmeyer, "Why does the Grange have so much ritual, to go to meetings you have to know the password and all that. Why don't you cut it out, have open meetings?" "Because," he said, "the interests that are opposed to the Grange, they would have somebody attend every

meeting. This way they can't get in." 98 Baum: Back in 1910 were you a Hiram Johnson Progressive? Swett: Yes. Baum: Were you active for him politically? Swett: In a limited way. I never stumped the state. He wanted to appoint me president of the State Viticul­ tural Commission, but I had too much to do. Baum: Well, you were vice-president of the State Viticul­ tural Commission from 1913-1919. Swett: Yes. Baum: You were a director of the California Cherry Growers' Association from 1922 to 1929. Did you grow cherries? Swett: Not many. But a lot of growers looked on the Pear Growers as a successful organization. "Well, Frank Swett, could you help us to organize? We don't know how to go at it." Baum: Well, it's getting pretty late, Mr. Swett. Thanks for your reminiscences. Swett: Oh, you're welcome. You're the best audience I've had in ninety-two years! 99

APPENDIX

A chapter on Frank Swett, written by Henry E. Erdman, from the 100-104 book Great American Cooperators, Biographical sketches of 101 Major Pioneers in Cooperative Development. ·1

Notes On Commonwealth Club by Frank Swett. 105

Letter of F. P.Tracy, January 14, 1839. 106

Letter from Frank Swett to his daughter, 1935. 107

Letter of F. P.Tracy, August 26, 1949. 108-115

Letters of Frank Swett to Willa Baum. 116-119

First Annual Statement of California Pear Growers Association. 120-123 105

Notes Regarding the Commonwealth Club

by Frank Swett

Also "Things are seldom what they seem

Skim-milk masquerades as Cream"

from Gilbert and Sullivan

(an educational suggestion~)

Also from his address to the Commonwealth Club of California on Agricultural Education (delivered about 1932 by the Secretary of the California Packing Corporation) "California has many good educational universities, a bit inadequate - We need a great new University of.UN LEARNING. We have learned too many things that aren't so~"

But this salute and slogan was short and sweet. We are approaching its philosophy.

In the Commonwealth Club there are about twenty different groups. The Chairman of each group arranges with approval of its members for contenders for or against, at the end of twelve or more months for an evening meeting open to all Club members to report what facts have been found. Such general meeting may approve the Report, or disapprove - by a recorded vote.

The Club keeps out of hot water by never endorsing nor opposing political candidates, measures only - it has stuck to this policy for fifty-seven years.

Ambassadors, Presidents, Governors, notable personages are delighted to address the big Friday meetings. The list of past speakers is impressive. I have heard Theodore Roosevelt, Taft, Franklin Roosevelt, and I'll probably hear some day, President John F. Kennedy.

I trust you'll agree that the Club is not only unique, but promotes sanity of thinking.

The file of Club proceedings, covering over a half century, should provide rich material for historians or for students of civic or agricultural problems. The slogan "Find the Facts" has been a precious one. We cherish the memory of Father Adams.

Adams endowed a useful University of Unlearning. 106 Copy of a letter from F. P. Tracy, grandfather of Frank Swett, to his wife. Written in Washington D.C. January 14, 1839.

Washington City Jan 14, 1839

My dear Emily:

Here I am at 8 o'clock P.M. in Washington at Browns hotel, for I didn't get here until 7 and have had no chance to look up anybody, way up in a cockloft of a chamber without a fire, writing a letter when I'm sleepy enough to be in bed.

Next the journey. Oh what a journey••• But all's well that ends well. I left Boston at 3 P.M. ar'rived in New York at 7 the next morning, the passage of the Sound was good and I slept comfortable. I took passage for Philadelphia at 12 yesterday. The boat was old and dirty, the meanest craft I've been in lately. We reached Amboy 20 miles at 2 and took the railway. The cars are the most rickety things you can imagine. The car houses are actually not as good as northern barns and are whitewashed instead of painted.

We got on 10 miles and met the train coming from Philadelphia. It had n~t stopped at the right place and had it been in the night we should have come in contact. We were however extricated from our difficulty by running backward about six miles to a turnout. The train passed us and went by.

We had reached Camden and were within ten rods of the depot when crash went the cars in front of us. We rushed to learn the cause and found the engine had either been checked too suddenly or had run against something and the baggage car which was next ahead of ours was drove up so close carrying away steps and all that we could not get out that way, but had to crawl out through a hole which led to the refreshment car. And thus we escaped from our beast cage.

This morning at 8 I took the cars for Baltimore. We came on well until we reached Havre De Grasse. The engine had left the cars, as we changed at this place and they were descending a little inclined plane into the carhouse. At the proper time the brakemen attempted to stop them but the ice on the brakes prevented them from working well and the cars instead of stopping in the carhouse strove through a door in the other end, the first I knew I saw the front of bur car was coming in, the timber breaking and the glass flying in every direction••• The passengers crowded to the back end where I was, and I seeing the top ot the car flying away, crouched on the bottom, thinking it best to let the evil pass over. It did not however reach me. I escaped unhurt. Many, had been sitting would have been seriously injured, but as we were all standing just ready to jump out when the train stopped, only one fellow was hurt. He had a rib broke and his breast cut badly and a slight gash on his forehead. He will doubtless recover. At Baltimore I took the Railroad for this place where I came safe to hand as I aforesaid. You will say, "Why Frederick, you will be killed before you get home." No my dear, I shall not. I WAS NEVER KILLED IN MY LIFE. And as the logicians say there is a presumption against every charge. Besides I've no doubt the Lord will take care of me while I am faithful in the cause of Oregon settlers. I am cold and can't write strait and I'm tired, so goodbye. Your Affectionate husband, F. P. Tracy 107

FRANK T. SWETT. GENL. MANAGER TELEPHONE GARFIELD 8720 A. H. HARRISON. AS:

CALIFORNIA PEAR 6RO\Y/ERS' ASSOCIATION

BOARD OF DIRECTORS Room 414 Exposition Building P • .I. HUTH. PRESIDENT A. F. MOULTON. VICE·PRES. 216 PINE STREET F. A. EDINGER. SEC. It TREAS. PHILIP BANCROFT K.E. BRACHER JOS. A. CONNER F. W. DORN M. B. HESTON San Francisco, Cal., W. M. HOTLE E. A.JACKSON DENNIS W. LEARY N.L. MEADS W. T. OGIER W. s. SCARLETT FRANK T. SWETT L. W. VEERKAMP A. C. WILCOX

::. !

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~"~. 'f\l'~, " • 'to, ,This letter was addressed to ~IFrank Swett's sister, ·Mrs. Helen S. Artieda 1000 Elbert St., Oakland, I California. Postmarked 5-2 9-35 . ':':~ 108

Copy of letter from F. P. Tracy, grandfather of Frank Swett, to his wife. Written in San Francisco, August 26, 1849.

San Francisco, Upper California, Sunday, August 26, 1849.

My dear Emily:

As the work of cleansing myself of a week's dirt kept .me till I was too late to go to church this forenoon, I have set myself to the next most sacred duty I could think of - that of writing to my family.

As I wrote that we should do, we left Panama in the Steamship Panama on Sunday the 29th July and landed here on Saturday afternoon, August 18, having made the passage in 20 days. For the first few days out from Panama I was quite well. On the fifth, I was taken with dysentary, which continued for four days and greatly reduced me. I have succeeded in checking the dysentary, but fever immediately set in ­ the same fever I had at Panama, and for eight days I had to struggle again with that terrible disease. The physician who had attended me at Panama was on board, but the ships doctor objected to his attending me and he then refused to do so, and I was thrown into the hands of the ships doctor aforesaid - a perfect ignoramus - no more fit to prescribe for a sick man that I am to direct an astronomical observatory. What I suffered through those dreadful days I can never tell you. The sun was almost directly overhead pouring the hottest rays of the tropics full upon us.- The decks and cabins and steerage were packed with more than 350 passengers so closely that no one could walk about, but only elbow his way through the crowd, and in the midst of this crowd I was sick. My stateroom had no window - no ventilation whatever, except by the door and even that was usually closed up by the door of the next stateoom opening against it. It was close to the engine and the water was con­ tinually dripping from the ceiling. In so close, so foul e and so damp a dungeon I should have died without fail. I had slept there four nights absolutely naked, but when I was taken sick I fled to the deck and under the awning when the officers allowed the awning to be spread out in any sheltered nook, when they did not I caused some friendly hand to spread my blanket and there I lay day and night panting through the horrors of a tropical fever with the idea of being thrown over­ board hovering like a demon round my half-crazed brain. There were two or three men who kept kindly about me, and did all they could for me, but I cannot say that I received the most attention from the quarter where I might properly have looked for it. I will not however, com­ plain of that. Some men were not born to be nurses of the sick and they are not to be blamed.

Four days before we got in, thanks for a constitution which I -2- 109

begin to think of iron, I began to mend. The fever left me and a little strength and appetite returned, though I was still unable to digest almost the simplest thing. When I reached this place I was able to superintend the landing of my baggage and from the moment my foot touched the soil I have been gaining strength and life. At this time I am perfectly well, though much unnerved. You can see by this writing how my hand trembles. Indeed, sometimes I can hardly sign my name, but I am getting over it every day and you may believe, when I tell you, that three days ago it would have been impossible for me to have written to you at all for the shaking of my hand. The climate here is, I am confident, going to agree with me, though it is a most abominably dis­ agreeable climate as I will describe before I get through.

In coming up from Panama we stopped at Acapulco, San Bias, Mazatlan, San Diego and Monterey. Acapulco is one of the finest harbors I ever saw, and we went into it of a calm summer evening. I forget if there was a moon but if there was not the stars supplied the want of light and winding up through a broad channel among the hills we reached the town which lies upon a beautiful slope at the right hand side of the bay. The steamer California, which preceded us, had been full of sick­ ness and death and that brought the news of the prevalence of cholera at Panama. The Mexican authorities had become frightened by these reports, and when we reached the town a boat came off and ordered us to leave the harbor as there were some forty unfortunate Americans on shore who wished to get passage to San Francisco by the steamers. The Captain hesitated and asked that they should be sent off first, but another boat came off and ordered us peremptorily out of the harbor saying that if we did not leave instantly, the Castle would fire upon us. As Captain Bailey did not relish the idea of a half dozen round shot among 350 men, and lin the midst of his machinery, he prudently put on steam and we left the waiting passengers without either delivering the mail or receiving the waiting passengers. Poor devils, they felt badly enough with a file of Mexican soldiers drawn up between them and our boat when we attempted to land ready to fire upon us if we dared to touch our bows to the shore. Some of them had been six and eight months on their way to California. They may be six months more.

San Bias is a small settlement, but an important one, lying in a little bay opening on a broad roadstead. We stopped there to get stores and four or five bullocks; as many pigs, a few fowls, bushels of onions and any quantity of plantains and bananas, limes, and oranges crowded the deck of the steamer when we sailed. Some thirty passengers also were here wedged in amongst us.

At Mazatlan we stopped only to land the mails and receive a few more passengers. Mr. Merrill, who had some business went on shore and spoke in high terms of the town.

At San Diego, which by the way has a small but excellent and beautiful harbor, with a town lying over the hill out of sight, we took 110 -3­

on board among others, Hon. J. B. Weller, the U. S. Commissioner, to run the boundary between Mexico and the U. S. Here also came on board several who had crossed the country from Santa Fe and San Antonio de Boxan. They gave us a very favorable account of the parties which are crossing from the U. S. by the Gi1as route. Those who had sense enough to stay by their parties and not go off on any Tom Fool tangent of self direction, were getting on well. The Indians had stolen some mules and other property but nothing worth note had taken place and one of the most remarkable events possible had occtlrred in a happy time for the immigrants. About thirty miles southeast of Carison Creek, nearly in the middle of the Jornada de los Muertos, the desert of the dead, a stream of pure fresh water ten feet deep 'and twenty yards wide has sprung up this summer. It ie exactly at the point where thousands of mules and men have died in for­ mer years for want of water and this year it will save hundreds of lives. It was wonderful providence. The Mexicans say that about eighty years ago a similar event occurred, but they look superstitiously upon it and regard it as a proof that destiny is with the Americans.

Monterey is a small American looking place. At present the Governor of the territory, Gen. Riley, resides there. It can never rival San Francisco in any respect whatever, except its climate, and any climate is better than this.

It was a joyful hour to me when the ship's head was turned shoreward and I saw the Golden Gate of the bay of San Francisco opening before us. High lands on either side towered over a strait some three miles wide at the entrance while full in front a point on which one thousand guns can be mounted fully protected the entrance to the finest bay in the world. Doubling this point we began to see the shipping lying at anchor in the harbor, if it may be called a harbor, of Yerba Buena or San Francisco. The U. S. ships of war Ohio, Warren, Fredonia and Ewine, and more than two hundred square rigger vessels with a host of schooners and ships filled the anchorage ground from Yerba Buena Island to the landing place. We were glad to get on shore at two dollars apiece and as I landed I met Mr. Chaney, President of the Northampton Holyoke Mining Company who started from Northampton in February and reached San Francisco three days before me. Luck threw us into the hands of Bingham, Reynolds Bartlett & Company, our Consignees, and we have since the first day, been lodged in their new store, paying something like a dollar a day for a place on the floor, where we might place our blankets and seventy-five cents a meal for beef, bread and coffee or tea, by no means of the first quality. For my own accomodation I have now hired a room in the attic of B. B. Reynold's store for which I pay fifty dollars per month. A monstrous rent you will say, but I assure you a cheap one here. It is a room under the roof ­ a perfect attic. This room I share with Edmund Otis, a grandson of Harrison Gray Otis, who pays half the rent. Otis is an odd mortal, but a good hearted man and he is the very best friend of a sick man that I ever fell in with. He has come with me from New York and I know him well. You would laugh to see our room, but it is no laughing matter I assure you, but is a sober matter to us who have to live the life. As -4­ 111

soon as we get settled we shall cook our own breakfast and we shall make . our own coffee, and this with bread and a bit of cold meat will make our breakfast. Butter and cheese is fifty cents, and eggs are three dollars per dozen. Our dinner we shall eat at a restaurant, and it will cost one dollar. Supper we do not expect to eat at all, as at the lowest count a man must spend not less than from three to five dollars per day merely to live here and hardly live at that. For an office that Mr. Merrill and myself have hired we have to pay $235 per month. Rents of all kinds are horribly high. No one can have any idea of it.

Let me tell you of rents here. There are single tables which rent for $300, $600, $1,000 and $2,000 dollars per month. These rents are mostly taken by gamblers who open to the public every evening not less than two hundred tables at which all the gambling games are carried on. I never saw gambling till I came here. A crowd are around the tables. The simple men who have been to the mines and dug a thousand dollars, and seeing a door stand open to enter and a gambling table is before them - they bet a little and a little more until at last their whole earnings are gone and they are obliged to return to dig. It is nothing remarkable for a man to lose large sums to these scoundrels. One Mexican merchant lost here the other day, $112,000 in a single afternoon. I think there are more than 200 gambling establishments in our neighborhood of the public square open day and night and constantly thronged. For one of these tables for gambling it is not rare that the tenant pays one or two thousand dollars per month rent. Such rent for single tables make the whole rent of a house enormous.

The Parker House rolls up a rent of $274,000 a year; the City Hotel rents for $65,000, and the U. S. Hotel for $42,000. Such rents are not paid in any other city in the world. It is wonderful state of things. The prices of houses and lands for sale are as much inflated as the rents. Land here in the Central parts of the city is sold at a higher price than in the centre of New York, or even London. The result of all this will be that in a few months there will be the most tremendous crash here that the world ever saw. Look at our position. Here are goods and merchandise in such quantities that at this moment there are millions of dollars worth lying out of doors for which it is impossible to find the shelter of a roof. When the rainy season begins, vast quantities of goods must be ruined. Every day new cargoes are arriving, crowding every street and yard, and blocking up all the landing places. The merchants who send these goods will never get one-half the original cost for them, and many a Boston and New York merchant will bitterly regret having sent his goods to California for the goods here can never be sold and paid for. Then again these enormous rents and prices of lands cannot be maintained. The monthly rents in San Francisco equal the amount of money in circulation here and lessees will soon be unable to pay. So hardly the speculators begin to be pressed that ten percent per month is now the common rate of interest for money and a great deal is hired at that rate. Everybody is mad with speculation. Everybody as in Maine Land, and Morus Mu1ticau1is, times -5­ 112

is making a fortune in one hour, but when the crash comes, as come it shortly must, the great majority will find themselves as poor as ever. In saying this, I do not say that there is no real business done and no money to be made. There on the contrary, if a man can keep from being crazy, he can make more money here than in any other place I ever saw. Especially all kinds of mechanics command what wages they will. Carpen­ ters are paid $14 to $16 per day, and other trades get on the same pro­ portion. Some goods also sell well, but what brings a high price now may fall in a week below New York prices.

I sold some tin ware we had that cost $335, for $600; a keg of saleratus, 125#, which cost me 4 1/2 cents per lb. I sold for 60 cents per pound, and everything we had to sell has been sold well, but there is nothing which I could advise anyone to send here to sell except build­ ing materials. These must be in demand at a high price for a long time to come. Lumber is now worth $350 per M and lumber, brick, tin and all other building materials, but especially neatly made houses will continue to command high prices.

Provisions will also pay well, though there is a surplus at the present moment of all staple articles, but the abundance cannot last.

San Francisco is a strange straggling town, built, or rather squatted upon the two sides of a valley, which comes down upon Yerba Buena cove. These hills on the northern side are very high and it must cost immensely to grade them for building. On the Southern slope the hills are also very high, but are sandy and can be dug down more easily, but in any case the town has a miserable situation and how such a place ever came to be pitched upon I cannot think. South San Francisco, a few miles South of this is a thousand times better placed, but nobody goes there. I suppose that there must be a population of from eight to ten thousand in the City. Some days however, there are thirty or forty thousand in town, but they are off next day to the mines. Many hundreds here live in tents and those who live in what are called houses, have a shelter which in all respects is less comfortable than a Yankee barn. There are a few good houses, but most are shanties and it will be a long time before this great City will be a decent town with regard to its houses. Built as it is, it will be burned down within a year - goods and all. Nothing could stop a fire here, if it should break out in the afternoon when the wind always blows furiously from the Northwest, filling the air with clouds of dust. I look for such a fire every day. It will destroy five millions of property when it comes.

There is no good water here. Fifty cents per ten-gallon keg is paid for water from the wells. Washing is from six to eight dollars per day, and no man can live for less than about from three to five dollars per day. If you ask me how I like the place, I answer - for a residence not at all; for a place to speculate in, and to make money, in, it is -6­ 113

well enough - indeed it might be a great deal worse.

The climate is exceedingly disagreeable, but is I think, very healthy, at least I know that so far it agrees wonderfully with me. It is cold in the morning - hot at 11 o'clock, and the wind is blowing a hurricane at 3 o'clock, cold as September. I have worn my winter woolen clothes every moment since I have been here and have seen no minute when they ever too warm. I wear my thick grey overcoat every evening. No one who intends to live here should bring any thin clothing. We will never wear it. Woolen is the only thing. Up in the country at the mines it is different. There it is hot enough for thin clothing.

Of California I now know nothing which is not known to all. I can see that the country produces little or nothing, while it is capable, with proper cultivation, of producing almost everything. New potatoes are eight dollars per bushel; onions thirty cents apiece; turnips and squashes seventy-five cents each; cucumbers do; wood forty dollars per cord, and everything else the farm produces is in proportion. Yet any­ body can have a garden full of vegetables, if he has land and is willing to cultivate it.

The mines are producing a great deal of gold, but it is, as I often told you, two-thirds of all who go to them will never return the richer. Hardworking, patient, and intelligent miners get on the average about an ounce a day, but there are hosts of inconstant men who do not work all day, or who change places too often, or are interperate and imprudent. These get far less - some of them next to nothing, and I am satisfied that taking all classes together, the miners do not average more than from five to eight dollars worth of gold per day. It costs about two dollars a day to live in the mines, and there is all the expense of get­ ting there besides. I would .advise no man to come here for the purpose of digging, and yet I have seen a man here who dug up with his own hand, five thousand dollars in three weeks, and had just come down with it. Gold dust is used here commonly in trade. Every merchant weighs it and takes it at $16 per oz. for goods. It sells at $15 for specie. The amount of specie in circulation is limited, for the post-office, the custom house, and the gamblers have gathered up the greater part and withdrawn it from circulation.

As to myself, I am trying to do a little to profit while I wait for the boys in the Alice Tarleton to get here around Cape Horn. Hallock will not show his face here before the last of November, or the first of December, and until he comes I have nothing to do in the Company's ser­ vice but to get ready for him. This will require but little time for there is not much that can be done until the machinery is on the ground. Until then I am going to open an office ,for the purchase and sale of land, letting houses, etc. People here put their lands into the hands of agents to sell and the agents of course charge a round commission. I do not know how much I can do in this line, but I hope at least to earn my living. -7­ 114

In a day or two I am going up to Sacramento City, what was Sutters Fort, with about $2,000 of goods to sellon commission. The merchant pays the freight and I take half the profits. I hope to make something out of it and do not doubt that I shall do so. I shall be gone about a week.

While I am speculating in this way and trying to pick up a little money, Mr. Merrill has stuck out his shingle as a lawyer, and is wait­ ing patiently to see his fortune come in, in the hope of a great case. He has some business already and will, I have no doubt, make his living.

The prospect for our business, when the Company gets here, is I think, reasonably good. One Company here which is doing the same thing we propose to do is said to be getting rich. The merchants are opposed to them because they interfere with their profits, but still their coin circulates freely, as far as I can judge. It may take sometime for us to become known to get a character established, but when we do our coin will circulate, and if it will circulate, we can make money as fast as we please.

It has been rather hard for me getting here sick, obliged to wait for our regular business, and with very little of the Company's, or any other funds actually in hand. It has indeed been very hard for me to begin, but I have begun. I have made money. I can make mine, and provi­ dence permitting, I shall make more. Hope, and believe, Emily I am making money, and are going to make money. How much I cannot say, but I shall work hard, live cheap, save everything, and get rich, if possible.

I have written something of our voyage from Panama here. I ought to say more, much more, in condemnation of the Pacific Mail Co's steamers. Of all steamers I ever saw, and I have travelled on board those of almost every nation, I never saw such shameful mismanagement - not only by the agents on shore, but by the officers on board. The steamers are every way unfit for their service - single engines make them unsafe, and cabins and a steerage almost absolutely without ventilation make them dangerous to health. The lower cabin of the Panama is a place in which a man could not live for want of air. He must spend most of his time on deck and disease is often the consequence of even sleeping below. The ships are filthy ~n the extreme - more like beast pens than packets for the trans­ portation of passengers, and the fare, whether in the cabin for $300, or in the steerage for $150, is so wretchedly bad in every respect what­ ever, as to disgrace both the officers, who are the immediate providers, and the owners who employ them. Such ships are fit to be officered by such men as are found on board of them, men who could never make a second voyage upon the Atlantic, if they ventured upon the same con­ temptuous and cowardly treatment of their passengers there, which is their daily habitude here. Such brutal officers, filthy, half-starved, sickly; and miserable steamers are a disgrace to the American Flag, and ought to be driven from the ranks by some better line. I have a long -8- 115

story to tell you of these scoundrals who manage this worst line of steamers in the world.

My letters dear Emily is hardly such a one as in some respects you would wish, but I have put a little of everything into it, because every­ body will be asking you questions, and I would like to answer them all. I attend the Episcopal Church service here. The meeting is in the large hall of a hotel - a very good place, and a very respectable congregation. I saw a few ladies at meeting, but there are few, very few here. I have spoken to but one woman since I have been here and she was one of our passengers by the steamer.

I received your letter of June 16th, the day after my arrival here. It had come in the steamer with me from Panama. This is the only letter I have received from you since I left New York. I wrote you from New Orleans, one from Panama, two letters I am not sure whether I wrote from Havana or not. I hope you will never fail to write me every month. Think how much a letter from home is worth to one away in this howling wilder­ ness. Tell me all the news when you write - all about the children, how much they learn and how well they behave. I want to hear all about them and you. Tell me all.

I think a great deal of home nowadays and of you. In those long, weary, sick days, and nights, as I lay panting on the ships deck, with no one to bathe my burning brow, or even give me a glass of cold water, how much I missed your kindly care. I miss you everywhere and in everything dear Emily - more than I did in Europe, for there money would get at least the things necessary to life and comfort - but there is no such thing as comfort - such a thing as home is out of the question. I am not homesick, do not think that I am, but I feel the loss of home and when I have got money enough I shall be glad to get back to you all.

Kiss all the dear children for me - Mary, Willie, Grace, Garnier, and believe me,

Truly yours,

(Signed) F. P. Tracy 116

FRANK T. SWETT dldi{jiJdt4aMn MARTINEZ. CALIFORNIA R. F. D. 2. SOX 296

~e.vrtL/ 7}'J­ clLi~h:J- C{i-.~1t·~ 7?Jrrn"':;.£.d..­ ...-- ., J(; / 117

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120

FIRST ANNUAL STATEMENT

CALIFORNIA PEAR GROWERS' ASSOCIATION

Room 240, 5 1°Battery Street San Francisco, Calif.

FRANK T. SWETT. President F. A. EDINGER. Secretar]) and Treasurer

BOARD OF DIRECTORS EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE

R. J. COGGESHALL HENRY C. MELONE FRANK T. SWETT. Chairman , R. C. DORSEY E. A. SMITH R. C. DORSEY F. A. EDINGER FRANK T. SWETT F. A. EDINGER JAS. F. ELLIOT G. W. WHITMAN HENRY C. MELONE

P.]. HUTH F. A. WILCOX F. A. WILCOX,

RECEIVED FROM CANNERIES AND DISBURSED TO OUR MEMBERS FOR CANNING PEARS $390.108.44 OUR MEMBERS SHIPPED TO CANNERIES ~ . ~~~:~RS:~::E~~~TS ' · 61.766.383 pounds

DRYING PURPOSES I --_.. _---­

121

~embership Statement

Certificates issued, Nos. 1 to '323 inclusive No. 26 cancelled __ 1

322 Members no certificates issued 3

Total Members ....._...... 325

1918 Active Members __ .257 1919 Member joined late 1918 68

~25

J918 Members 257, total fees _ , ______.._ . $3,759.98 Paid by cash , _ _ $3,274.02 Paid by note _., _...... 405.00 3,679.02

Unpaid _ _ _ _.. ~ _ _.. ._ . $ 80.96 1919 Members, 68, total fees _ _ _ _ _ $ 341.50 Paid by cash ; _ : _...... 251.50

Unpaid _ ,._._ _ ,... 90.00

Total Unpaid $ 170.96

--.'--­ Financial Statement· ASSOCIATION RECEIPTS Fees 1918 Members _.._ __ .._.._ _ _ _.._ _ $3.679.02 Fees 1919 Members .. _ _ _ _ _.._ :..... 251.50 Santa Rosa Selling and Shipping expenses :..: _ _ , _ _:..... 93.06 Commissions from Canneries ._.._ _ _.._ _ __ .. 3,174.34 Commissions from Eastern Shippers _._ _ __ .. ~ _ _. ._...... 5,224.94 Commissions from Local Shippers _ _.._..______. 705.63 Commissions from Dried Pears _ _ _._._ _ _...... 165.52 $13,294.01

DISBURSEMENTS Legal Expenses _._ _ __ _._ .._ _ _ $ 400.00 Organization Expense ______.._... 2,586.35·. Board of Directors Expense. _.._.._ _ _ _ , 1.290.00 Office Furniture and Fixtures , _ _._ _ _ _._...... 423.50 Salaries _._ _._ __ _ _.._ _ _ _ _.._. __ .. 2,512.46 Office Supplies __ _ _.._.._ __ 289.38 Telephone and Telegraph ~ _ _ _.._.. __ ..__ __ _...... 137.04 Rent ._ _ _ _._ _ _.._ ~ _._._ __ _ _... 200.00 Printing _ _ _ _.._ _._ .._ _._._ : _. 208.75 General Expense ._._ _ _ _ _ ~ _..... 145.87 8,193.35

. Balance _ _ __ ; _.._ : _._ _ _ _.. $ 5, I00.66 Anglo & London Paris National Bank_ ~ ~ _ _ $4,595.66 Liberty Bond _ :._.; _ _ __ _...... 100.00 Notes Receivable _ ~._ _ _...... 405.00 .

$5,100.66 .".:,

122

Report of Manager

To the Members of the CALIFORNIA PEAR GROWERS' ASSOCIATION: Upon the walls of the office of one of the great merchants of California is this motto: "Never sal' IT CAN'T BE DONE. for some da)} )}OU will wal~e up and find that SOMEONE HAS DONE IT." In 1916 and 191 7 it was quite generally believed that it was impossible to organize the pear growers of Cali­ fornia. It was said that they were too prosperous and that they were therefore indifferent to organization. Awakened by unsatisfactory conditions in the summer of 1917; a few leading pear growers gottogether, started a campaign for organization. and by June. 1918. the horticultural world woke up to the fact that at last the pear growers were actually organized. Someone had done it! . . Because the leaders of the movement freely gave time and talent without a cent of pay. the expense of organ­ ization was astonishingly low. While several paid solicitors were employed at the finish. the total expense was only $2586.35. We secured 325 members. controlling 6000 acres of the best pear orchards in California. The Association has been managed upon an economical basis. In June. 1918. we rented modest quarters for our offices at a monthly rental of $25 a month. One bookkeeper and one stenographer have been continuously employed. and the writer acted as sales manager for the months of July and August. ' The price of cannery pears in 191 7 was $25 to $40 a ton. an unremunerative figure at the present high prices of labor and materials. After careful studies of costs the Directors set the 1918 price at $ 70 a ton .for No. I pears delivered to nearest cannery. with San Francisco as a common point. While some members feared that buyers could not be found at that price-the highest known in the history of the industry. by the end of July we had. with the exception of one district. sold every ton at the full Association price. One district. owing to lack of rainfall. showed crop after crop running to very small sizes,. In this district it was impossible to set definite prices. as each orchard varied. but finally all the pears of the district were placed at an average of about $60. for No. I pears and $30 for No.2 pears. f. o. b. As the Army and Navy were in the market for a large tonnage of canned pears. it was necessary to show the Food Administration that our price was a fair one. After an exhaustive showing of costs of production. the price was approved by the representative of the Government on this Coast. We found that many pear growers. some members and some not yet members. had during past years. signed long term contracts at prices which although they once would have netted a fair profit. yet under the enormous in­ creases in the price of labor and materials of recent years. now meant disaster. being actually far below the cost of production. We made a showing of facts. at a meeting with the canners in the offices of the F ~od Adminis­ tration. The canners met us in a friendly and broad-minded way. and agreed to advance the price on contract 1918 pears an average of $10 a ton. They were under no legal or governmental obligation to do so. It was voluntary. It was for the good of the industry as a whole. The action was appreciated by nearly all growers, and although many are contracted for some years to come, and though they wiII have no pears to market directly through the Association. some of them are becoming members and contributing to the Association. realizing that it means safety for the industry in the future. The raise in price of $ lOa ton on about 6000 tons of contract pears meant $60.000 to the growers concerned. In 191 7 the industry was unorganized. Let us compare 191 7 and 1918: I. The raise on contract pears amounts to _ _ __ _._ $ 60.000.00 2. In 1918 we sold cannery pears. value $390.108.44. The same tonnage if sold at 191 7 prices would have brought only $210,­ 000. Therefore. the gain to growers over 1917 was...... 180.108.44

The total gains to growers over 1917.. $240.108.44 These gains were in very large degree due to the work of the Association. They were secured at a wonder­ fully low cost. Docs organization pay? ' Due to the satisfactory cannery prices, Eastern shipments were lighter than they otherwise would have been. and through most of the season, prices ran higher than ever before. Unfortunately. however. the railroads. due to war conditions and the rush of troops and supplies to the front. were unable during the middle of the season to move fruit promptly. . Hundreds of cars instead of reaching Chicago and N ew York in ten or twelve days as in the past. took eighteen to twenty-one days. sometimes being sidetracked for days at a time. The ice melted in the bunkers. the fruit became heated. and pears which should have brought. under normal conditions. from $3.00 to $4.00 a box. arrived "cooked" and sold for little more than freight charges. It is to be hoped that the railroads may make adequate adjustment on these delayed shipments. 12.3

While the Association had no jurisdiction over Eastern shipments. we are keeping in touch with the situation regarding claims, and hope in the course of a few months to be able to report some prospect of adjustment. We call the attention of the members. however, to the fact that had not so many growers insisted on shipping at least 80 per cent of their crop East. that we could have placed hundreds of tons of these unfortunate pears shipped during August and September with the canners at a remunerative figure. This coming season, fortunately. the trying war conditions will no longer prevail. The grower will be in a position to choose between a safe price in California. through the Association. or a prospective good price in Eastern markets. as settled by supply and demand. We look forward confidently to better railroad conditions. to better icing, and to better time between California and Eastern railroad points. ! I Hoover says the whole world will be hungry for two years to come. In the past. before the war, Great Britain was one of the principal markets for California canned pears. There has been an embargo on shipments of canned pears for the civilian population of Great Britain. We look for the lifting of the embargo. and trust our British friends will make up for lost time by using their full quota of our delicious fruit. Ir While the Association. through its crop-contract. is empowered to handle and sell the dried pears of its mem­ [ bers, we did not see our way to do so this last year. Final organization was not effected till June, and in the limited time before crops moved it was thought best to concentrate efforts on one project alone. the sale of cannery f pears. During the coming year. however. we will be in a position to secure for every member the full market value • ~ of his dried pears. if the members so desire. The outlook for dried pears is beuer than ever before in the history of the industry. Shipments to European countries. which in the past have used the bulk of our pears. have been impossible. As a result. the crop has been consumed in America. and many consumers for the first time have learned that dried pears are a palatable and ! i 1 nutritious food. . i During the coming year we shall have not only the United States as a market, with its newly taught consum­ t ers. but we shall get back our former customers in Europe. It seems reasonable to expect a most material increase I in demand. at fair prices. The Association, during the coming season expects to do considerable missionary work f in bringing about better methods of drying pears. and later on a bulletin will be issued on the subject. There are too many low-grade, off-color pears on the market. Ten years from now the dried pear. instead of a side issue. should become a great staple. and should utilize a considerable portion of the entire crop of the State. During the year the relations of the Association with the various canneries to whom we have sold your pro­ duct have been friendly and harmonious. We have used every effort to deliver fruit up to the contract standards. Unless we maintain careful methods of picking and sorting our fruit and making absolutely honest deliveries. we l cannot expect to succeed. I am pleased to report that there were very few complaints by canners. The great I majority of growers made deliveries which were above question. This is most creditable, for with the great labor I: shortage. it was almost impossible to hire skilled pickers. There were only a half dozen instances of poor deliveries. I and these cases were promptly and fairly adjusted by the Association. the canner and the grower. f A business of nearly $400.000 has been handled without the loss of one cent in bad accounts. The growers [ have received their money with greater promptness than ever before in the history of the industry. although it was r difficult at times for the canners to finance themselves. owing to the unusual ruling of the Government in comman­ ~ deering nearly half the output. with payment only in sight at some distant time in the future. t While we have a growing membership roll. we need. for the fullest success, the membership and co-operation of every pear grower in California. Each member who induces his neighbor to sign is adding to the value of his own and his neighbor's orchard. He helps reduce the overhead expense of the Association and his own proportion. He is saving the expense of paid solicitors. Write to us for blanks. and co-operate in adding your neighbor's co-operation to the efforts and work If of all the growers. There are now about 17.000 acres of pears in bearing. Within ten years there will be in all likelihood at f: least 47.000 acres in bearing. This will mean finding markets, not merely for the present 80.000 tons. but for r nearly three times that quantity. It can be done. but only through concerted effort. year by year. if disaster is to be avoided. Without adequate and complete organization a slump in prices will some day take us unawares. With f adequate organization present markets can be broadened and foreign markets built up, and the industry kept on a 1 sound and satisfactory basis. i If we continue the policy of reasonable prices to manufacturer and consumer. high quality of product, fair dealing with our customers. extension of markets for canned and dried pears, and collective efforts for the general I good of the industry, we may be sure of maintaining a great industry on a sound and satisfactory basis. L Respectfully submitted, FRANK T. SWETT, ,t . President. California Pear Growers' Association. 124

INDEX

Adams, Edward F., 5-8 Allen, Ben, 93 / Alvarez, Walter, Dr., 61, 62, 64 Alwood, William Bradford, 9, 10

Bentley, R. 1., 15, 16 Bidwell, General, 2

California Associated Raisin Company, 13-15 California (State) Board of Agriculture, 2 California Canning Peach Growers Association, 34, 40-44, 46 California Packing Corporation, 15, 25, 27, 37 California Pear Growers Association, 15, 30 California Fruit Exchange, 3, 13 California Fruit Growers Association, 3, 18 Commonwealth Club (of San Francisco), 5 Cooper, Sarah B., 72 Crocheron, B. H., 50, 51, 52, 55, 56-59 Cruess, Marie, 10 Cruess, William, 8-10

DiGiorgio, Joseph, , 88, 89, 91

Earl Fruit Company, 18, 31 Erickson, 28

Fleischhacker, Herbert, 35, 36, 43, 44, 45 Fox, John, 58, 60

Giannini, A. P., 58-60

Hamilton, A. D., 32 Hanks, Percy, 41 Hearst, Phoebe, 72 Hendrick, A. W., 58-60 Hing, 35, 37 Holman, Alfred, 22 Honeywell, Frank, 60, 61 Hoover, Herbert, ~8-94

Kearney, Theodore, 13 Kent, Congressman William, i8l

Leuschner, 36-38, 43

Mead, Elwood, 51-53, 55 Merritt, Ralph, 13, 14, 16 125

Pacific Coast Canneries, 36, 38, 39 Partridge, John, 80_, 81 Pickett, John, 65 Pratt, Roy, 25, 26

Reid, Hayward, 31 Reid, Howard, 31 Ruef, Abraham, 74

Sapiro, Aaron, 16, 34 Sapiro, Milton, 34 Seh1meyer, George, 97 Seward, William H., 85, 86 Shortridge, Sam, Jr., 68 Shortridge, Senator Sam, 76-82-­ Stanford, Leland, 70, 71, 85 Strenze1, John. 2 / Swett, John, 70-73

Taylor, Paul, 95 Teague, Charles C., 3, '88, 89, 91, 92 Tracy, Fred, 76-79 Tracy, Frederick Palmer, 83-86

Weinstock, Harris, 16 Willa IG.ug Baum

Grew up in Middle West and Southern California.

B.A., Whittier College, in American history and philosophy; teaching assistant in American history and constitution. Newspaper reporter. M.A., Mills College, in American history and political science; teaching fellow in humanities. Graduate work, University of California at Berkeley, 1949-1954, in American and California history; teaching assistant in American history and recent United States history.

Adult school teacher, Oakland, in English and Americanization, 1948-1967; author of teaching materials for English, and summer session in­ structor in English for foreign students, Speech Department, University of California, Berkeley.

Interviewer and then department head of Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, Uni­ versity of California at Berkeley, 1954 to present.

Active in developing the techniques of oral history through practice, participation in pro­ fessional association meetings and training workshops, and writing and speaking on oral history. Author of Oral History for the Local Historical Society, an oral history manual published by the American Association for State and Local History, fourth printing, 1975. Member, Oral History Association (council member, 1967-1969; co-chairman, Colloquium, 1970); Western History Association; Conference of Cali­ fornia Historical Societies; Society of American Archivists (committee on oral history); Society of California Archivists; International Associa­ tion of Sound Archives.