The Wheatland Hop Riot of August 3, 1913 was one of the first major farmworker uprisings in the United States and a turning point in the Industrial Workers of the World's efforts to organize migratory agricultural labor. It took place on the Durst Ranch near Wheatland, in Yuba County, California — at the time the state's largest hop-growing operation.
Seeking to drive down wages, the grower Ralph Durst had advertised far more picking jobs than actually existed, drawing some 2,800 workers of many nationalities to a camp with almost no sanitation, scarce drinking water in temperatures well over 100 degrees, and pay that was partly withheld until the end of the harvest to discourage workers from leaving. A minority of those in the camp belonged to the IWW, and organizers Richard "Blackie" Ford and Herman Suhr led mass meetings demanding better wages and conditions.
On August 3, as the workers gathered, a Yuba County sheriff's posse arrived with the district attorney to arrest Ford and break up the meeting. A deputy fired a shotgun blast — reportedly "to sober the crowd" — and in the gun battle that followed four people were killed: the district attorney, a deputy sheriff, and two workers.
In the crackdown that followed, hundreds of workers were detained and the camp was dispersed by force. Ford and Suhr were convicted of the second-degree murder of the district attorney and sentenced to life in prison, even though neither was shown to have fired a weapon; prosecutors argued that their role in organizing the meeting made them responsible for the deaths. Their imprisonment became a long-running IWW defense cause.
The riot drew national attention to the brutal conditions in California's fields, spurring the state's newly created Commission on Immigration and Housing to investigate farm labor, and it became a rallying point in the IWW's agricultural-organizing and free-speech campaigns. Both Richard "Blackie" Ford and Herman Suhr appear in the coalition's prisoner database.
Further reading: Wheatland hop riot (Wikipedia).
