This book is a history of the men, women, and children who worked in the fields and orchards of California from 1870 to 1941, and the businessmen who hired and fired them. Large farms were a dominant feature of its agriculture when California became a state in 1848. The owners of those farms embraced the values of profit and productivity that had come to be associated with the burgeoning industrial order, and chose to employ an easily exploitable work force of immigrants. Several organizations--among them the American Federation of Labor, the Industrial Workers of the World, and the Communist Party--tried to unionize the workers but failed, usually because they were more concerned with realizing their own goals than with meeting the needs of the farmworkers. Based almost exclusively on primary sources, including extensive oral interviews, Bitter Harvest will interest students of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American history, of the American labor movement, and of radical thought.--From publisher description.