I'm John Batchel. I welcome Professor Daniel Rood, his new book, In the Shadow of the Great House,

a history of the plantation in America, plantation system in America. We begin, however,

during the depths of the Great Depression. It is 1933, I believe, in California. And there is a group of men who are very much in charge of cotton in California.

And they call themselves the Associated Farmers of California. They have been cheating and not following through on verbal contracts with the workers in the cotton fields of California.

And one day there's a confrontation on the road between the striking farmers.

There's a photograph in Daniel's book about this, facing off against armed men who are led

by Wofford Camp.

Professor, a very good evening to you. Thank you. Congratulations. Who is Wofford Camp. Professor, a very good evening to you.

Thank you.

Congratulations.

Who is Wofford Camp and this showdown?

What's it about?

What's at the center of it?

Because I think I read about this and the Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck.

Good evening.

Oh, good evening.

Thanks for having me.

Wofford Camp is an agronomist from South Carolina, who moves out to California in the 1920s to basically pioneer a sugar boom, a cotton boom to replace the declining cotton production of the old South states of Georgia, South Carolina, and Alabama.

So by the end of the 1920s, California actually produces more cotton than the state of Georgia.

And so my argument in the book is that we actually have probably the cutting edge of plantation capitalism at that moment is actually in the Central Valley of California.

So it is no surprise that so many of the planters in California actually came from the deep south.

The one I follow most closely is a guy

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