In 1939, a group of about 140 Madera County farmers left their fields and came to town armed with ax handles. They thought they had endured enough agitation, intimidation, and harassment; they intended to settle the score on that Saturday afternoon in October.
Someone saw the farmers coming and shouted the alarm to the 400 people who had assembled in the park. The warning went unheeded. After all, it was almost four to one, and besides, if they were to have it out, why not right then and there?
This imbroglio began when the National Workers Alliance and the C.I.O. began to press for higher wages for farm workers. A concentrated effort was directed towards the San Joaquin Valley, with Madera as a major target. The national groups demanded that farmers pay their cotton pickers $1.25 per hundred weight. The farmers set their heels in at 80 cents.
On Oct. 10, 1939, the CIO called the Madera cotton pickers to come out of the fields, and the next day an influx of professional labor leaders held the first of many informational meetings in Courthouse Park.
Prominent Madera County farmers were assailed at the meeting as “men who are making life miserable for the workers.” When Carl Patterson, a “self-styled volunteer organizer,” took the rostrum, he proclaimed that, “We’re not interested in what the farmer calls his cost of production, but in the cost of living.” Not even Dr. Lee A. Stone was immune from attack, as Patterson charged the county health officer with complicity in allowing the existence of unsanitary cotton camp housing in the larger farms, while “making the smaller farmer literally toe the mark.”
Patterson went on to assert that, “This strike was not called by the workers, but by the farmers who refuse to pay a living wage.” He suggested that any farmer caught importing farm labor from other states to break a strike should be imprisoned for life.
For all of their breast beating, the labor leaders did little at first to affect the cotton harvest. Less than 8 percent of the county’s cotton pickers walked out of the fields. Clearly the situation called for extreme measures. That was when the professional strikers were called in.
Within a few days, Madera County gins were feeling the impact of the strike. Workers by the hundreds were leaving their jobs in fear of retaliation by the professional strikers. Caravans of 60 to 70 cars were reported roaming the county roads intimidating those who remained in the fields. By October 16, less than a week after the first call for a strike, cotton picking in Madera County was almost completely suspended.
It all came to a head on that Saturday afternoon. The farmers decided to put an end to their crop loss once and for all. If the law could not protect their workers, they would. Armed with ax handles and clubs of various sorts, the outnumbered farmers laid into the strikers. Only quick action by the state police, using tear-gas, averted a real bloodletting. The strikers were chased from the park and their leaders were arrested. A.L. Wirin of the A.C.L.U. was escorted out of Madera by Sheriff W.O. Justice to the Fresno County line on the premise that his safety could not be guaranteed.
With the strikers in disarray and their leaders in jail, the strike was broken. The caravans of disruption moved south, sensing greater opportunities in Kern and Tulare Counties. The jailed organizers of the unrest put out an olive branch from their cells. They suggested reducing the wage demanded from $1.25 to $1 per hundred weight. Madera County was unimpressed.
By the end of the month the storm had blown over. More than 5,000 workers resumed the cotton harvest in Madera County, and the farmers turned to more pressing concerns, such as the rain that had just fallen.
In time, technology would render the human cotton picker obsolete, and the memory of the strife of 1939 would dim. Today, as one walks through Courthouse Park, there is no indication that the site was once the Waterloo of organized farm labor in Madera County.