Angry Reader

Re: A Classicist Farmer: The Life and Times of Victor Davis Hanson

There is an active discussion in circles I travel regarding the difference between abject ignorance, and willful exploitation of that which a speaker may know to be true, but choices to frame in a way that serves a political purpose. When one reads the bios of DeSantis, Cruz, or Hawley for example, they include graduation from the most elite institutions of higher ed. I assume they “know” better when they set forth; let’s call them alternative facts.

My peeps are concerned about ethical courses that seems to be missing from the university curricula. Those that might inform codes of conduct throughout fields of inquiry and carry on into praxis.

In the current example with which I want to comment, the bios of the discussants of the history of the Hanson family, these men are Stanford’s finest. To summarize the conclusions of their recent discussion we can conclude that Hanson family history is an example of bootstrap, early American hard work, and a do it yourself endurance that paid off. As opposed to the new generation of immigrants, know nothings, and elite who can’t change a tire.

I want to remind the discussants of facts that I know they know of, but in the course of a form of historical negationism simply avoided being shared with their audience. The following are but a few of the government subsidies the Hansons’ enjoyed on their quest for success.

Under the provisions of the Army Appropriation Act of March 1853, Secretary of War Jefferson Davis was directed to survey possible routes to the Pacific. Four east to west routes, roughly following specific parallels, were to be surveyed by parties under the supervision of the Topographical Corps. The disruption the patterns of life, through the lands of the indigenous people, are common knowledge.

The Railroad Act of 1862 put government support behind the transcontinental railroad and helped create the Union Pacific Railroad, which subsequently joined with the Central Pacific at Promontory, Utah, on May 10, 1869, and signaled the linking of the continent.
https://web.stanford.edu/group/chineserailroad/cgi-bin/website/virtual/

And then the sale of adjacent property, which Hanson ancestors took advantage of: this from the library of congress re land grants
https://www.loc.gov/collections/railroad-maps-1828-to-1900/articles-and-essays/history-of-railroads-and-maps/land-grants/

And this regarding water: The Delano-Earlimart Irrigation District operates in the area and serves over 450 landowners through 172 miles of pressurized pipes. The source of the irrigation water is the Friant Dam and Millerton Lake behind it, located on the San Joaquin River in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains twenty-five miles northeast of Fresno. To suggest that Hanson farm is watered from a bubbling pond is ludicrous.

The omissions of the above create a distortion of the truth that paints a very skewed portrait of life on the farm; I believe equal to all the Professor Hanson fears from the excesses of the maddening crowd. At a time when there are active attempts to suppress the record, requires the discussants to face the truth and allow us to conclude what we might from the narrative.

Respectfully, Will Watman

Response to Angry Reader Will Watman

The “distortion” is all Mr. Watman’s. His pseudo-intellectualism reveals the unfortunate combination of ignorance and arrogance. His rant is full of factual errors and completely unreliable, as well as biased and intellectually dishonest.

At no point did I say or write that our farm relied on a pond for irrigation. How ridiculous. The pond acreage in question was sold off by a sibling and is no longer on my own property. It once served and does today as a recharge pond to aid the water table and thus aid ground water pumping due to insufficient district surface deliveries.

Nor did I ever state that our former artesian pond watered our farm even 150 years ago. How absurd to imagine that impossibility of 135 acres drawing pipe from a one-acre pond—a fable which again displays Mr. Watman’s ignorance about the realities of California farming.

The point instead that I articulated was that prior to the creation of the irrigation districts, the eastern Central Valley’s rare natural artesian ponds were coveted by early pioneers because they provided clear evidence of a surrounding high water table—in some places a mere ten feet or even lower from the surface.

Thus, such acreages provided a means of survival by allowing farmers initially to plant unirrigated crops that could naturally draw on a shallow water table. Later, even before the formal creation of irrigation districts, early primitive pumps were able to tap shallow water tables that surrounded ponds.

The writer is utterly ignorant of the geography of our Consolidated Irrigation District that draws water from the Kings River and was created in 1921 before the construction of the Pine Flat Dam on the Kings. Does he believe his nothing phrases “operates in the area” and “450 landowners” mean anything specific in the case of hundreds of thousands of differently irrigated acreages. thousands of farm owners, and dozens of quite different irrigation districts?

Farmers originally and collectively had created their own ditches by their own hand labor. They later assessed themselves taxes when their hand-built projects were formally “consolidated,” and the ensuing taxations were based on formulas of the size of their acreages.

We have never drawn water from the San Joaquin River nor has anyone in our immediate locale. A brief minute or two of research would have enabled Mr. Watman to study the acreages covered by San Joaquin River irrigation districts and confirmed that the Selma area is not included in them.

The district originally was fearful of the city of Los Angeles that was securing river rights far from southern California at the expense of local farmers. Consolidated had obtained and aggregated others’ riparian rights from the Kings, and after the 1954 dam construction, recalibrated allotments from the Pine Flat reservoir.

Each district acre is assessed a tax for maintenance of the irrigation system that was originally built by collective farmer labor without government help.

The writer’s disjointed sermonizing is marred by still further errors. The main deliveries of the district’s chief laterals to individual branches from the river remain the original open ditches built by the farmers before and after the 1921 creation of the formal district.

“Pressurized pipes”—a term no farmer in these environs uses—are still rare for any district in the Consolidated domain for its main delivery systems. That academic term might mostly refer to the efforts of private farmers who at their own expense often put their own take-off small ditches on their own property underground via small 8” to 14” or even larger diameter terracotta and later concrete pipe to facilitate planting and having alleyway access over the former ditch spaces, and for the safety of children who often swam and do still swim in irrigation ditches. The flows are gravity fed, so “pressurized” is a misleading term, given the pipes are under very little direct pressure but simply underground small concrete conduits that emulate open ditches of the district’s main laterals.

The writer surely knows that the original homesteader lands and purchases from the railroad’s vast land speculative purchases (that went far behind what was gifted by the government) had conditions.

In the case of railroad purchased lands in our vicinity—and we were well beyond the government gifted sections directly adjacent to the railroad line—farmers in the 1870s bought supposed rail lands that were either gifted or purchased by the rail consortium for investment and speculation purposes and which had been advertised nationwide, as a way of luring farmers to come west and become dependents both on rail-delivered supplies and shipping for their then largely wheat and later dried fruit and nut crops. The terms of the “sale” and status of the lands that settlers “bought” were litigated, but expulsions of families were later frequent and led to violence.

The railed “octopuses” required controversially adjudicated improvements on their “sold” land and often then reneged on the definitions of both “sold” and “improved”—of the sort outlined in the novel The Octopus (1901) by Frank Norris and the violence that ensued not far from our farm during the Mussel Slough Tragedy (1880).

In short, my family did not buy government gifted land to the railroad, whose nearest line is well over three miles distant, but rather from additionally purchased rail land designed to be sold cheaply to farmers, and whose details of sale were often misleading and deliberately so.

In sum, early irrigation districts were farmer-financed. Our farm never drew on the larger San Joaquin Irrigation District. Our earliest ad hoc irrigation rights preceded the Consolidated Irrigation District. Our family did not buy land adjacent to the railroad that had been gifted to it by the government, but rather investment land additionally purchased by rail corporations for speculative purposes. In sum, all of Mr. Watman’s contentious assertions are inaccurate and reflect his unfamiliarity with California history and farming, as well as his motivations in writing such a diatribe.

Respectfully, Victor Davis Hanson