“Nature's Workshop”: The Work Environment and Workers' Bodies in California's Citrus Industry, 1900–1940

Abstract

Not content merely try feed the physical bodies of the one-third of a nation that he saw as ill-nourished, Franklin Delano Roosevelt also offered up images designed nourish local communities and thereby fortify the body politic at large. The director of the Fine Arts Section of the Treasury Department, which commissioned over eleven hundred murals in post offices across the country between 1934 and 1943, wanted to keep away from official art and develop local cultural interests throughout the country., The images would be rooted in the countryside, in the hope that this would help connect the people each other and the land. When the postmaster in Seneca, Kansas, objected that the mural design for his town's office (a portrayal of a wheat harvest on a flat landscape) was more appropriate for parts further west, the artist readily revised his work. He wanted his audience-the working people, the people producing useful things with their hands be able see themselves in his landscape. When muralist Paul Julian saw his space on the wall of the Fullerton post office in the California county of Orange, he did not have look far find his subject: Orange Pickers. Though painted with the brush strokes of realism, Julian's mural depicted a scene that did not correspond any actual grove. All of the elements were real enough, but his picture was a composite. It brought together a range of representative figures, all of whom might have picked oranges at a particular time, though not likely at the same time: a white male high-schooler wearing a sweater embroidered with an F for Fullerton; a young white woman with bobbed hair and a