Abstract
Paul Taylor, an agricultural labor economist at Berkeley, worked, often with his wife, the photographer Dorothea Lange, to document the conditions faced by migrant workers during the Depression. In the 1940s, however, he turned to a focus on the Reclamation Act of 1902’s restrictions on federally subsidized water to owner-occupied farms of one hundred sixty acres or less. He campaigned for the enforcement of these provisions for four decades, until they were eliminated by the Reclamation Reform Act of 1982. This article explores the sources of Taylor’s attachment to small-farm ideology in his nostalgia for the stability and homogeneity of his childhood in Sioux City, Iowa, and his shock at the immiseration in the fields of California. It argues that his “small-farm essentialism” blinded him to the potential of farmworkers’ organizing efforts to address exploitation more effectively than “a law on the books” from a receding semi-agrarian past.
