G. Harold Powell and the Corporate Consolidation of the Modern Citrus Enterprise, 1904–1922

Abstract

This article answers, in part, questions raised by new rural and agricultural historians concerning how farmers interacted with the rise of large-scale organizational society in the era after the 1896 Presidential election. It argues that California citrus growers reacted by bringing the revolution of corporate capitalism to Southern California, 1893–1920. The article tests the activities of California orange growers against the theoretical models of Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. and Martin J. Sklar. It concludes that a pro-corporate group of orange growers embraced corporate managerial capitalism at a time when most other American farmers were in open revolt against industrialization. In 1912, these growers appointed G. Harold Powell, pomologist with the USDA's Bureau of Plant Industry, as General manager of their mammoth California Fruit Growers Exchange. By 1920, Powell and the Exchange board of directors completed the corporate consolidation of the citrus enterprise, and by example the reconstruction of California's potent agricultural empire.