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section of this treatise outlines the establishment of the California Cooperative both as an idea and as an entity. It provides excellent background information by which to better understand, evaluate, and place into proper historical perspective, the growth and development of the Irvine Valencia Growers in relation to larger international and national issues and movements.

With all the fervor of rural reformers, California fruit growers united to make the American economy a safe place for specialized crops. They proceeded with the blessing of the Country-Life Movement whose motivating spirit, Theodore Roosevelt, exhorted American farmers that their future prosperity lay in forming an effective counterbalance to the power of the industrial trusts. Careful to express the proper deference for "rugged self-reliance,"

Roosevelt offered that the farmer "must learn to work in the heartiest cooperation with his fellows, exactly as the business man has learned to work." Others also proposed that farmers acting in combination might derive some of the advantages of big business while maintaining themselves as independent producers. Kenyon L. Butterfield,... a professor of agriculture and an advocate of progressive rural life, argued that "the farming class must produce as a unit"

and encouraged the formation of a coordinated agricultural industry that would protect farmers against big business.

Roosevelt and Butterfield took up the trope of cooperation. For them it described any farm-based organization that made no claims on Wall Street, railroads, urban consumers, or government. "Cooperation" sounded like good old-fashioned pulling together to help out neighbors during hard times. To others it signified a belated attempt by farmers to join industrial capitalism. Edwin G. Nourse wrote extensively on the subject of cooperatives, often asserting that they presented decentralized farmers with a scheme of organization that enabled them to participate in the economy as equals along side colossal, managerial firms. Through Nourse’s lens, cooperation delivered a prosperity to farmers that populism had only promised, and it left the politics out. In this way, it seemed to represent a final coming to terms with the world as it is and the end of agriculture's prolonged adolescence. That Roosevelt, Butterfield, and Nourse mostly agreed about the apolitical ends of cooperation suggests its appeal to progressives. Though the various supporters of the Country-Life Movement never approached the subject with one mind, many recognized cooperation as a blending of rural organization with business pragmatism -- a conservative response to populism.

Liberty Hyde Bailey also made comment on cooperation, but while other country-life leaders feared populist politics, Bailey feared industrial capitalism. Though certainly no populist, he seemed more comfortable with the idea of a farmer's party than he did with the idea of farmer corporations. Bailey's brand of rural romanticism brought him to recommend cooperation only as a tool to unify economy and society in a fractured countryside: "The essential thing is that country life be organized: if the organization is cooperative, the results -- at least theoretically -- should be the best; but in one place, the most needed cooperation may be social, in another

place educational, in another religious, in another political." The cooperative, in Bailey's corrected form, brought farmers together to make agriculture more pleasant and less tedious; it facilitated social contact and helped to spread practical knowledge; and it functioned best when it resembled the local grange. What this hesitant endorsement does not allow is for the cooperative to act as an agent for farmers in the marketplace. Such an organization might help to solve certain commercial problems, Bailey believed, but a cooperative was "properly a society, rather than a company." Any federation of farmers that produced and sold as a corporation could be considered cooperative "only in name."

None of this mattered very much to orchard owners in California who combined their numbers and pooled their crops for the sole purpose of improving the outcome of sale. The form they adopted can be traced to Rochdale, England, where in 1844 a group of English textile workers went into business for themselves to secure their independence from low wages and tyrannical employers. With only slight modification, the same “Rochdale Fundamentals” that founded the first such association founded the marketing cooperatives that appeared in California beginning in the 1890s.

First a definition. True cooperatives return all profits to members after deducting operating expenses. Cooperatives distribute earnings pro rata, or according to the amount of business each member transacts through the association, and keep nothing for themselves. Only those who produced the commodity that the cooperative is established to distribute can become members and stockholders; no one outside of the association can own its stock. All members hold the right to vote, but some cooperatives set voting power proportional to the number of acres or the amount of business that each of its members contribute, suggesting that more affluent growers would have more influence. A cooperative contracts with its members for a specified amount of fruit to be delivered to packinghouses and shipping points. The central organization then advertises, bargains for prices, searches for new outlets, arranges for sales, and remits profits.

Put in other terms, a cooperative is a nonprofit collective. The marketing association serves as a commission house that takes only enough commission to maintain its services. In the words of G. Harold Powell, general manager of the California Fruit Growers' Exchange, “a co-operative organization ... is not a corporation in which the capital is contributed primarily in order that it may earn a profit , . . nor one in which the producer’s product is handled by a corporation for the benefit of the stockholders rather than for that of the members.” Typically, they owned no capital stock, issued no tradable shares, and thus never acted in the interests of anyone other than their grower-owner-members. Control vested in the membership maintained the independence of the association from shippers, canners, speculators and others with diverging interests. Fruit growers in California applied these principles to the necessities of their own time and place and founded a series of companies that the Rochdale textile workers would have barely recognized.

More than any other person, G. Harold Powell defined the philosophy and the goals of cooperation in California. Born in New York, Powell graduated from Cornell University in 1895 where he studied horticulture with Liberty Hyde Bailey. A master's degree followed and then a position at the newly created Bureau of Plant Industry at the United States Department of Agriculture. Powell first became interested in the California orange industry while studying cold storage in 1904, and he made a visit to Riverside that year to advise growers on

refrigeration. He moved his family to Pasadena in 1911 and took over the management of the California Fruit Growers' Exchange in 1912.

Powell and the orange growers gave flesh to the conception of cooperation as a collective business enterprise without (explicit) political aims. In a word, he argued that any successful federation of farmers should be business-minded and highly specialized. Powell wanted no one to confuse his industrial capitalists with the advocates of free silver and the subtreasury.

He believed that cooperatives should be founded for tangible economic reasons, not out of principled outrage. "American agriculture is strewn with the wrecks of associations that were the outcome of high motives and impractical enthusiasm," thumped G. Harold Powell. And he called the Farmers' Alliance and the People's Party evolutionary dead ends in American agriculture's politically charged history. Individualist growers did not unite to beat the trusts but to join them as a means of survival in a world where only combined capital survived.

Sounding like the economist Nourse, Powell insisted that "capital has been concentrated around gigantic undertakings," and individuals stood not a chance in the shadow of Leviathan enterprise. The tiller reborn would be a stockholder - producer in his own rural corporation, a new identity in changing times to bring him closer to integration into the nation's industrial sector. "In place of transacting business man to man as his father did before him," Powell wrote, the farmer "has become a more or less important part of the scheme of modern industrialism. He is no longer isolated. He is a link in the modern industrial and social chain."

Powell called "common purpose' the first foundation of cooperation, by which he meant a shared experience with the many difficulties of horticulture and a shared desire for pragmatic solutions. The fruit union had been an experiment in common purpose. Its failure convinced growers that general marketing made about as much sense as general farming. No single agency could master the complexities of selling products as diverse as almonds, lemons, and plums. Rather than organize around common problems, said Powell, growers needed to organize around specific commodities. Powell asserted regional specialization as the key to successful cooperation: "It is only when they become specialists in a crop ... and have to develop special facilities for the handling and distribution of the crop, that a group of farmers have a common purpose comparable to the aims of a large manufacturer." Any lasting agricultural industry "must be founded on a special industry," such as oranges, pears, or raisins.

The hard-nosed demeanor of the California cooperatives prompted economist Ira B. Cross of Stanford University to point out that "even among the cooperators themselves a surprising lack of the true spirit of mutual helpfulness is evident." Cooperative enterprises in California, wrote Cross, "seem to have been organized with but one object in mind, and that is to make money for their stockholders. They are mere profit-making associations." Powell would have agreed. Suspicious of ideological fervor, he stripped the cooperative of high motives. Under his leadership and with urban, sophisticated growers as owners, a vehicle for rural uplift became a single -minded business venture.

Progressive government in California quickly recognized the power of pragmatic cooperation and moved to support it. Where Powell gave the marketing association its philosophy, Harris Weinstock gave it the assistance of the state. In 1916 Weinstock became the first state market director. The appointment came from Governor Hiram Johnson, who surprised no one by naming a dry-goods merchant to pursue the state's interest in agriculture. Weinstock recognized that the benefits of cooperation had not spread far beyond oranges and raisins.

Through his bureau, the state of California expressed its interest by extending help to new associations at the moment of their formation.

The producers of peaches, prunes, apricots, and pears still sold fruit the old way, without exerting influence over commission merchants and without promotion. Weinstock's office, the administrative arm of the State Commission Marketing Act Of 1915, brought government into the business of agricultural marketing. After wrestling with the legislature for a year to redefine the goals of the bureau as well as its name, and with the advice of the chief council Aaron Sapiro, who served as the attorney for many California cooperatives, Weinstock found himself in a position to bring order to the countryside in a way that no country-life reformer could have imagined. As head of nation's first state market commission -- charged to advise, promote, assist, foster, and encourage "the organization and operation of cooperative and other associations " -- Weinstock's purpose was nothing less than to change the relationship between California and the American economy and to build agriculture on the West Coast into a major industry. He acted on the premise that what minimized "the waste and expense of distribution, [worked] to the benefit of the consumers." Along with Powell, the market director defended the cooperative as a tool in the public interest and envisioned a collection of regionally based agricultural companies geared for the steady distribution of the American food supply.

Yet the rise of cooperation had a more subtle effect. Like any other corporation, the cooperative set out to standardize the quality of its product and exert greater control over every stage of the process and promotion. In this way, the cooperative confirmed the single crop, making it the very preamble of its charter. The American food supply and the California landscape reflected its efficiency and simplicity, a necessary transformation, perhaps, in the conquest of distance (Stoll, 1998: pp. 74-78).

Summary Statement: A Background History of the California