How California got its owners

An intercalary chapter giving the history behind California's hostility. Americans took the land from the Mexicans by hunger and force; their descendants lost the hunger, reckoned crops in dollars, and the farms passed to whoever was the better shopkeeper. Farming became industry, worked by imported labour and owned by men who had never seen their land. Then three hundred thousand dusted-out families arrive and are hated by owners, storekeepers and labourers alike. They settle in the Hooverville on the edge of every town, and a man who clears a secret patch is run off, because a crop raised makes ownership and a man will fight for land he has eaten from. Health-department raids burn the camps at half an hour's notice. The great owners spend on arms and spies while ignoring the facts of history: hungry people take what they need, and repression only knits the repressed together.