Ballis, George Elfie

Historical Note

National Land for People (NLP), founded under the leadership of George and Maia Ballis, Berge Bulbulian, and a handful of others, started in the 1950s under several different names, including Western Water Resources Council, before being incorporated as the National Land for People Foundation in 1974. George Ballis, a self-described "news reporter, news editor, community and union organizer, still photographer, film maker, organic gardener-farmer, shamanic guide, and teacher," from Faribault, Minnesota, lived in Chicago and San Francisco before accepting a position as labor editor for the Valley Labor Citizen newspaper in Fresno in 1953. In this position Ballis focused on covering the issues of farm labor and farm workers of the time. In 1965 Ballis worked as a part-time labor organizer for the AFL-CIO Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC), which worked with the National Farm Workers Union, led by Cesar Chavez. It was also during this time that Ballis and Berge Bulbulian became active in community organizing and that Ballis became the office manager for B. F. Sisk, who was subsequently elected to the House of Representatives to represent Fresno. Ballis was soon put in contact with Paul Taylor in Berkeley, and they began organizing around the state's water and farm labor issues. They produced maps showing the land ownership trends in the new Westlands Water District, which included many farms of surprisingly large size, including one over 110,000 acres owned by the Southern Pacific Railroad Company.

This was important because the Newlands Reclamation Act, passed in 1902 to fund large irrigation projects for 16 states in the American west, stipulated that federally funded water could only be used by landholders who owned 160 acres of land or less. However, for decades, large, corporate farming enterprises, as well as the Bureau of Reclamation charged with enforcing the law, were ignoring this restriction. National Land for People used the information they had gathered and maps they had produced to bring a bill to the Senate to force the Bureau to enforce the Reclamation Act's excess land law and break up the large farms and sell them in small parcels to farm workers.

George and Maia Ballis and National Land for People were organizing and gathering information in order to gain equality for working class people. At the same time, George Ballis was photographing farm worker conditions. He then started working with the Fresno Democratic Association, became president, and organized it into the second largest Democratic club in the state of California. When National Land for People became incorporated in 1974, Ballis and the others took their advocacy to Washington, D.C., trying court cases in an attempt to fight the injustices present in California farm labor and publicly-subsidized agriculture water. They succeeded in closing some of the loopholes in Reclamation law that allowed the Westlands Water District to remain exempt from the acreage limitations, but President Reagan thwarted National Land for People, promising that the excess land law would never be enforced. In the middle of the water fight, National Land for People started working with the University of California, Los Angeles, on a study about how the West side could be developed with small communities and small farms and succeed, and they organized farmer co-ops, consumer co-ops, and organic farm experiments. After the Reclamation Reform Act of 1982 raised the acreage limitation to 960, they realized that they would never win the big fight against the government and large, corporate farms, and so instead re-focused their energies on other initiatives. National Land for People converted over the course of the late 1970s and 1980s into Sun Mountain, George and Maia Ballis's artistic and environmental endeavor stressing eco-friendly technology, food and energy alternatives, organic gardening, community activism and organizing, and other related issues. George Ballis died in 2010. Maia Ballis continues the legacy of Sun Mountain in Tollhouse, California.

From the guide to the National Land for People collection, Bulk, 1972-1983, 1850-1991, (Special Collections Research Center, California State University, Fresno)