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9781586482817

The King Of California J.G. Boswell and the Making of A Secret American Empire

by ;
  • ISBN13:

    9781586482817

  • ISBN10:

    1586482815

  • Format: Paperback
  • Copyright: 2005-02-16
  • Publisher: PublicAffairs
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Summary

J.G. Boswell is the biggest farmer in America. Over the past fifty years he has built a secret empire while thumbing his nose at nature, politicians, labor unions and every journalist who ever tried to lift the veil on the ultimate "factory in the fields." Now eighty years old, with an almost pathological bent toward privacy, Boswell has spent the past few years confiding one of the great stories of the American West to Mark Arax and Rick Wartzman.The King of Californiais the previously untold account of how a Georgia slave-owning family migrated to California in the early 1920s,drained one of America 's biggest lakes in an act of incredible hubris and carved out the richest cotton empire in the world. Indeed, the sophistication of Boswell 's agricultural operation -from lab to field to gin - is unrivaled anywhere. Much more than a business story, this is a sweeping social history that details the saga of cotton growers who were chased from the South by the boll weevil and brought their black farmhands to California. It is a gripping read with cameos by a cast of famous characters, from Cecil B. DeMille to Cesar Chavez.

Author Biography

Mark Arax is an award-winning reporter for the Los Angeles Times, and Rick Wartzman is the paper's business editor. Arax is the author of the critically acclaimed In My Father's Name, about his search to find his father 's killers. He lives in Fresno. Wartzman was previously with The Wall Street Journal, where for fifteen years he served in a variety of posts, including White House correspondent and founding editor of the paper's weekly California edition. He lives in Los Angeles.

Table of Contents

The Boswell Family Tree xi
Map of the San Joaquin Valley x
Winter
1 Winter
3(20)
2 The Cotton Kingdom
23(9)
3 The Little Sahara
32(14)
4 The Lake of the Tules
46(20)
5 The Little Kingdom of Kings
66(23)
Spring
6 Spring
89(24)
7 White Gold, Black Faces
113(24)
8 La Mordida
137(21)
9 "Goon-Squad Tactics"
158(19)
10 River of Empire
177(35)
11 Blue Blood
212(23)
Summer
12 Summer
235(21)
13 Boot Hill
256(30)
14 The Stud
286(30)
15 Truce
316(33)
16 Lobbyists, Politicians, Payola
349(12)
17 The View from the Forty-sixth Floor
361(27)
18 Death in the Homeland Canal
388(23)
Autumn
19 Autumn
411(20)
Notes 431(90)
Bibliography 521(12)
Permissions 533(2)
Acknowledgments 535(4)
Index 539

Supplemental Materials

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