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

by Arax, Mark; Wartzman, Rick

• ISBN13: 9781586482817
• ISBN10: 1586482815
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-02-16
• Publisher: PublicAffairs

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