Orange Empire: California and the Fruits of Eden.

Jacobsen, Thomas P.

ORANGE EMPIRE: California and the Fruits of Eden

By Douglas Cazaux Sackman (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2005, 386 pp., $45 cloth)

Orange Empire goes well beyond a scholarly presentation of facts and figures about the rise and fall of one of California's mightiest and longest-lived institutions; it is a personalized and penetrating survey of California's citrus industry from the Mexican period to the present. It views agricultural "success" first through the lens of the commercialized glamour of the California Dream. It then peels back the story, layer upon layer, to reveal the underside of corporate-scale agricultural development. As Douglas Cazaux Sackman makes clear, agricultural success in California came at the expense of the land, farm labor, and other natural and human resources.

The author opens with a vision of California's citrus industry as seen through the bucolic images found on fruit crate labels, promotional publications, point-of-sale displays in the East, and railroad advertising campaigns. Miles upon miles of sun drenched groves, purple snow-capped mountains, alabaster-skinned women hand-picking luscious fruit from the cornucopia of California's agricultural Eden, fall away as the truth behind the industry that promoted these images comes into brilliant focus.

Douglas Sackman's portrait of the industry includes the challenges of the land, irrigation, insects, genetics, chemicals, and mechanization in the fields. It also includes the toils of farm laborers through the decades, including their mercilessly thwarted attempts at unionization. Boiled away in this literary crucible are the myths of California's idyllic advertising imagery and the slogans of Sunkist's corporate advertising claims, leaving the harsh realities of a century of brutally evolved mechanized corporate farming and its manipulation of the public's perceptions.

Sackman's passionate dedication to his subject is clear, as he works to dispel the myths portrayed in the advertising imagery of the past century; yet he also draws a parallel between myth and reality, leaving room for both to coexist. While it's true that a label with a pretty girl would sell oranges in the East; it's also true that farm laborers and packing-house women, ever-bending their arthritic fingers, would have had no jobs without the orange growers. Colorful brochures bellowed claims of prosperity, urging newcomers to journey to California, yet in the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s, thousands of tons of fresh oranges were destroyed before the eyes of starving immigrants because Sunkist "couldn't make a dime from them."

If millions of crates of oranges, lemons and grapefruits left California annually for half a century, then billions of labels carried the idyllic images to consumers worldwide. The images had a simple job: to portray the allure of citrus products and to motivate the consumer to buy. Orange Empire offers the reader the chance to climb inside these images and visit the groves, the workers, and the packing houses, and to meet the growers, the corporations and the advertisers. If the images were the window by which the product could be seen, then Douglas Cazaux Sackman's book is the window by which the citrus industry itself may be seen.

This reviewer is a twenty-eight-year veteran historian of California label art, lithography, and agricultural advertising. Orange Empire will remain a key reference in my library, and I enthusiastically recommend it.

REVIEWED BY THOMAS P. "PAT" JACOBSEN, AGRILITHOLIGIST AND FRUIT-CRATE LABEL HISTORIAN, WEIMAR, CA.