Hop riots' aftermath echoes in Wheatland, 97 years later

The dance platform near where the district attorney, the deputy sheriff and two other men died is gone — and so are the hop fields of what's been called the most notorious farm in California.

Only a stone marker in Wheatland and the memorial at the Yuba County Courthouse to slain law enforcement officers note the deadly conflict that once led to two murder trials and protest rallies in San Francisco and New York.

Ed Manwell, 45, the father of eight and former county Superintendent of Schools before he began as district attorney, Deputy Sheriff Eugene Reardon, 57, and two hop pickers whose names remain unknown were shot and killed at the Durst Ranch in Wheatland on Aug. 3, 1913.

Ninety-seven years ago, hop pickers who had arrived to harvest the crop used in making beer gathered around the dance platform where Richard Ford, an organizer for the militant Industrial Workers of the World union, stood on a fiddler's stand. Ford, 31, wearing dark pants and shirt sleeves, was there to make a speech, not music. He had mastered the rhetoric of revolution, a prosecutor in Ford's first murder trial in Marysville would later argue.

"He had the crowd with him and he understood how to control that crowd," the prosecutor said.

The judge at Ford's sentencing cited the organizer's same ability.

"With the art of a demagogue he inflamed the minds of his hearers," the judge said.

Ford had stood on the platform, held a baby aloft and announced to hop pickers of the strike he wanted them to join that, "It's for the children we're doing this."

Bloody Sunday

On what became known as "Bloody Sunday," Ford said he faced arrest at the 641-acre ranch — and that if the workers had any nerve they would prevent police from taking him. If officers arrived, he said, the workers "should tear them into dog meat," the prosecutor would recount.

Ford and his defenders said he was organizing hop pickers over wages and conditions at what the IWW would call Durst's "rotten ranch," where for decades workers from around the West came for the three-week long harvest. Only about a dozen toilets were set up for the more than 2,000 people who came to pick hops in 1913. Workers in the fields during 100-degree summer heat could get water only if they bought food. Garbage piled up.

On the morning of the fatal shootings Ford led hop pickers to a meeting with Durst to demand better working conditions and higher wages.

Durst agreed to improve conditions but wouldn't boost wages to the $1.25 per 100 pounds picked that hop pickers wanted. All the ranches in California paid "dollar hops," Durst said. He ordered Ford off the ranch — but the Ford returned to the dance platform.

At 5 p.m., two car loads of law enforcement officials arrived and stopped within 30 yards of the dance platform. District Attorney Manwell, Deputy Sheriff Reardon, and George Voss, the 52-year-old sheriff of Yuba County, emerged.

Voss walked toward the crowd gathered around the dance platform.

"I am the sheriff of Yuba County and I call upon you to preserve order," Voss said. Wheatland resident Manwell, a cigar in hand, followed and told hop pickers, "Keep the peace boys, keep the peace."

Voss took two steps and was knocked down, struck by at least one of the hop pickers. The sheriff tried to get up but his leg was fractured. Voss said everything turned black.

"When I came to," he would testify, "both my billy club and my pistol were gone."

Manwell, about a dozen feet away, was shot and killed. Reardon suffered the same fate, his body found near Manwell's about four feet from the dance platform. Two hop pickers were dead. All the men had been shot in less than 5 minutes.

'A pretty rough bunch'

A Wheatland resident, whose interview is at the California Room at the Yuba County Library in Marysville, worked with her father selling bread at the Durst Ranch. She said IWW agitators with clubs and butcher knives told her family that because of a boycott nothing would be sold at the ranch Aug. 3.

They were, the woman said, "a pretty rough bunch."

The IWW that came to organize Wheatland hop pickers began in Chicago in 1905 and had two principal enemies — capitalists and the American Federation of Labor, the trade union that the Industrial Workers of the World thought too tame and too accommodating to employers.

"A greasy tool of Wall Street," the IWW called the federation of labor's leader.

The IWW was going to make a new world, a cooperative commonwealth where equality and peace would reign because capitalism — and the rich and poor classes it created — would end.

"We are forming the structure of the new society," the union proclaimed.

The AFL thought otherwise. The trade union's publication said the IWW wanted to "divert, pervert and disrupt the labor movement of the country" and referred to the "henchmen" of the rival militant union. Paul Scharrenberg, a California Federation of Labor leader, called the IWW "that impossible cult" and referred to the intellectuals he said posed as its leaders.

An editorial in the Marysville Appeal about the IWW called them "professional Weary Willies who make a living by their jaws instead of their arms."

Ford brought to trial

Ford fled Wheatland after the deadly riot, as did IWW organizer Herman Suhr, who hours before the shootings had sent telegrams to San Francisco asking for help for the radical union whose members were known as "wobblies."

"To IWW W Hall, 3345 17th Street, San Francisco," Suhr wrote. "Strike on in full. Demands turned down. IWW ordered off the grounds but are here to stay. Send all speakers and wobblies possible. Money needed, lots of families destitute, boycott all employment sharks. Answer."

Suhr also sent a telegram to the San Francisco Bulletin newspaper.

"Twenty-five hundred hop-pickers out on strike at Durst Bros. ranch," Suhr said. "Strike conducted by IWW. Send reporter to take news."

Apprehended and charged with murder in the death of Manwell, Ford and Suhr's fate spurred rallies calling for their release. Austin Lewis, a socialist attorney from the Bay Area, represented Ford and Suhr along with two other defendants in the murder trial that began January 1914 in Marysville. The Marysville Evening Democrat newspaper said that Ford — based on the handshakes, smiles and nods of recognition with writers who had come to Yuba County to cover the murder trial — had a very close acquaintance with certain literary circles of the country.

"One would almost be led to believe that this instigator of bloodshed," the paper wrote, "was some kind of hero or 'artist' himself."

The Evening Democrat complained that certain papers, notably the San Francisco Bulletin, "glorify every criminal as a martyr."

Supporters of the defendants said newspapers had demonized the four.

E.B. Stanwood, the Yuba County District Attorney who succeeded Manwell, said Ford had announced that if Durst didn't meet the IWW demands, the Wheatland ranch would go up in smoke. W.H. Carlin, a Marysville attorney who was the special prosecutor in the trial, had been a school teacher.

He noted Ford's defense attorney had referred to modern psychology and the French revolution. Carlin in his closing argument said that's not what he thought of.

"My mind was on constitutional government," Carlin said. "My mind was on order."

Carlin, quiet and iron-gray of hair, the Evening Democrat said, leaned over the rail in front of the jury, looked at one juror and then another in the still courtroom.

"We've heard a lot about psychology and things in this trial," he said in a near whisper. "A lot about psychology and every other 'ology' in God's world except theology."

"And you've been sitting here listening to the story of the French revolution. I wonder what you were thinking about as you listened. Do you know what I was thinking about? I was looking out that window and I could see the old schoolhouse down at Wheatland where I taught Ed Manwell when he was a boy and where I taught the lovely girl who became his bride, and where I taught a lot of you men and your children."

"The learned counsel who has been talking to you has had in his mind's eye revolutions, red flags and blood. There was another picture in my mind, maybe in yours too — that little schoolhouse where Ed and his wife sat at my feet, and at your sides, and the field outside that was their playground, that same field that one Sunday swallowed up Ed Manwell's life blood."

Carlin was so quiet, the newspaper said, that at times only the jury could hear him speak about the hop vines in Wheatland.

"They were going to tear down the vines," he said. "Until someone stopped them, saying 'What's the use. They'll only grow again next spring."

"Yes, the hop vines will grow again in the spring and the grass will grow up from the grave of Ed Manwell too, Carlin concluded. "Remember that."

Guilty verdicts The jury returned guilty verdicts of second-degree murder against Ford and Suhr but found the other two defendants not guilty.

Judge E.P. McDaniel in sentencing Ford and Suhr, said the case was not about conditions at the Durst ranch or the right of labor to organize.

"Every normal mind sympathizes with honest labor and with the honest laborer," McDaniel said. This case is simply "sordid murder."

The two defendants were professional agitators, he said, who fanned discontent over conditions at the Durst Ranch. Ford encouraged the crime while Suhr participated in the fatal shooting, the judge said in sentencing the defendants to life in prison.

Defense attorneys, in an unsuccessful appeal to the California Supreme Court, contended that "Only the jury biased by local prejudice would have found either Ford or Suhr guilty. The sentence, we think, is extreme."

A 1914 report by the state Commission of Immigration and Housing concluded that Durst Ranch conditions were intolerable — but typical of such California ranches accommodating large crowds of workers.

After Ford was paroled in 1924, the Yuba County District Attorney's Office charged him with the murder of Reardon — and Ford again stood trial for murder. After record deliberations lasting 77 hours, jurors returned a not guilty verdict. Ford was freed. Suhr was soon paroled as well.

Historian David Vaught, who has written about the Wheatland Hop Riots, calls what happened "a very complicated event" and cautions against making comparisons between the 1913 riots to later times or to today.

"History is not sitting there, so we in the present can grab at it to make a point," said Vaught, a professor at Texas A & M University. "You could pretty much find whatever you want."

Marysville City Councilman Ben Wirtschafter, who is the Yuba County public defender, calls the hop riots "one of the most significant events" in local history.

But as Bloody Sunday approaches its 100th anniversary, the deadly shootings and the trials that followed have faded from memory.

Mention the event, said Yuba County District Attorney Pat McGrath, and "most people wouldn't have the faintest idea of what you're talking about."

CONTACT Ryan McCarthy at 749—4707 or rmccarthy@ appealdemocrat.com.