Yellen, Ben, 1907-

Historical Background

Ben Yellen, Imperial Valley physician and social activist, brought a lawsuit against the Imperial Irrigation Water District (IID) that asserted that the IID was violating reclamation law by giving project water to landowners owning more acres of land than the law permitted. In the mid-1960s, he was able to persuade attorney Arthur Brunwasser to join him in a lawsuit against the IID. Yellen reportedly found Brunwasser's name in a newspaper that stated Brunwasser was defending one of Cesar Chavez' union organizers arrested for entering a rancher's land to organize the farmworkers.

Arthur Brunwasser, a young San Francisco-based attorney-at-law, assisted Yellen in bringing suit against the Department of the Interior to force the government to enforce a Reclamation Act of 1902 provision that required that land receiving the water benefit of a federal reclamation project be limited to 160 acres.

Brunwasser attended Brandeis University (Waltham, MA) and the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law (1961), then began his practice in Beverly Hills. He then moved to San Francisco and became involved in the farm labor movement. In 1963, he lobbied in Washington, DC, at the House of Representatives, against extension of the "Bracero Program," the World War II program that allowed contract labor from Mexico to enter the United States and work as agricultural workers. The program, intended to be temporary, had been renewed every two years until Congress terminated it in 1964.

Brunwasser was also an employee representative on an agricultural occupations wage board of the California Department of Industrial Welfare Relations in the mid-1960s and a board member of Citizens for Farm Labor, a Berkeley group active in publicizing farm workers' working and living conditions. Brunwasser was also a volunteer lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Brunwasser became the lead attorney in the case that became Bryant v. Yellen, 447 U.S. 352, and participated in the case after the government received an adverse ruling at the trial level and the new Nixon administration chose not to appeal. The Court allowed Yellen to intervene and Brunwasser won at the Ninth Circuit appellate level. The case was appealed again, and, on March 25, 1980, Brunwasser argued before the United States Supreme Court. He was questioned by Chief Justice Warren Burger and by Associate Justice Byron White, who shortly thereafter delivered the unanimous opinion. The Court held that the 160-acre limitation did apply to lands receiving Federal Reclamation project waters, but that it did not apply to land whose owners had previously-established "presently perfected rights." Because the Imperial Valley had been irrigating hundreds of thousands of acres via the Alamo canal, a privately-funded canal which traveled through Mexico, the Court found that those lands irrigated prior to 1929 were exempt from the 160-acre limitation. Shortly thereafter, Congress passed a bill exempting the entire Imperial Valley.

During Yellen's last decade, he was struggling with two personal issues: a Department of Motor Vehicle's decision to revoke his driver's license after an accident; and retaliatory lawsuits against the American Medical Association and others, after he successfully won back his revoked medical license.

Additionally, Yellen continued to find ways to, as he described it, "harass the opposition," including bringing suit against the IID's brokerage and accounting firms (Paine Webber and Peat Marwick) for conspiring with the IID to continue charging illegal electric rates. He also filed complaints with the State Bar of California against IID's law firm, O'Melveny & Myer, including attorney (and future U.S. Secretary of State) Warren Christopher. Yellen also wrote letters urging continuing bribery-related investigations against Senator Alan Cranston, who had been instrumental in passage of the bill that exempted the Imperial Valley from the 160-acre land limitation provision.

From the guide to the Ben Yellen correspondence with Arthur Brunwasser, 1980 - 1992, (University of California, San Diego. Geisel Library. Mandeville Special Collections Library.)

Biography

Ben Yellen was born on July 2, 1907, in Brooklyn, New York, to Jake and Annie Yellen. He attended Boy's High School in Brooklyn, Columbia University and he graduated from Long Island College of Medicine, now called The University of the State of New York Medical School, in 1931. Given the economic conditions prevalent during the Depression, Yellen turned to the government for employment. For the next decade he worked as a physician for the Civilian Conservation Corps and served as a doctor in the Army. In 1942 he settled permanently in the town of Brawley in Imperial County, California. He chose Brawley largely for its warm, dry climate, which he thought would be beneficial for his health. Once settled in Imperial Valley Yellen found himself in one of the richest and most productive agricultural regions in the United States. Roughly a decade and a half after his arrival in Brawley Yellen initiated a protracted battle against the large-scale growers who dominated the region's economy and their representative institutions, including the Desert Growers Association and, especially, the Imperial Irrigation District.

At the time of his arrival in Brawley, Yellen joined the local medical society and established his own practice. He drew his patients primarily from the lower segments of Imperial Valley's economic system. His treatment of braceros (i.e., Mexican migrant farm workers) led him into the political activities that would occupy the last four decades of his life. In 1956, at the age of 49, Yellen began agitating against the big growers and brought suit against them and the Continental Life Insurance Company for defrauding migrant workers of their medical insurance benefits. This activity led to his expulsion from the Imperial Valley Medical Society in 1959 on the charges that his early morning addresses to migrant workers informing them of their insurance benefits were unethical attempts to build his own practice at the cost of the physicians hired to treat the braceros. Yellen continued to practice medicine independently, but his relationship with Brawley's Pioneer Memorial Hospital remained strained for the rest of his lifetime. Around 1959 or 1960 Yellen's attitude towards the braceros shifted, and he focused his writings and attentions on the domestic farm workers displaced by Mexican immigrants.

Although Yellen never abandoned his concern for farm workers, in 1961 his interests shifted as he expanded his attack on the big growers. At this time he embarked on the crusade for which he is most well known-- the lawsuits to enforce the Reclamation Law of 1902. The central case in this effort was the United States vs the Imperial Irrigation District in which Ben Yellen and 123 other citizens of Imperial County acted as amicus curiae, pushing the case through the legal system. In 1980 the Supreme Court ruled in this case that the Reclamation Law did apply in Imperial Valley and that all growers receiving federal irrigation water were restricted to 160 acres per person in the household. Before this ruling could take effect however, California Senator Alan Cranston passed an amendment in the last days of the session that year exempting Imperial Valley from the Reclamation Law, thereby nullifying the Supreme Court decision and Yellen's greatest victory.

In addition to his legal activities, Yellen actively engaged in local electoral politics beginning in the 1960s and continuing into the 1990s. Throughout these three decades, Yellen ran for almost every conceivable local office, always on a platform of restricting the power and influence of the big growers for the benefit of the "little guy." In 1964, in his only electoral success, Yellen won a four-year term as a Brawley city councilman. To get his views across to the public, Yellen distributed thousands of his own mimeographed newsletters, locally termed "yellowsheets" because of the yellow paper he used. With a canvas bag thrown over his shoulder, Yellen paced the streets of Imperial Valley placing thousands of yellowsheets on car seats or under windshield wipers. Yellen's pamphleteering lessened in the 1970s as his health and mobility declined; as a result he increasingly relied on local newspapers to publish his "letters to the editor" to disseminate his political ideas.

During the final decade of his life, Yellen found himself in a new battle as the result of a malpractice suit following the death of a two-year old boy he injected with a compounded prescription. Although he was ultimately cleared of wrong doing in the boy's death, his medical license was revoked by the state of California on November 16, 1983. He spent the remainder of his life trying to regain his license. In 1987 he succeeded, but the Board of Medical Quality Assurance placed so many restrictions on his return to medicine that he never resumed an active practice.

In 1993 farm workers reappeared as the focus of Yellen's attention when he initiated a lawsuit against Attorney General Janet Reno to stop the flow of illegal Mexican immigrants who took jobs from domestic farm workers. The suit never amounted to anything due to Yellen's death the following year.

Yellen died in his home in Brawley on July 1, 1994, one day before he would have turned 87.

From the guide to the Ben Yellen Papers, 1945 - 1994, (Mandeville Special Collections Library)

Biography

Charles L. Smith, of Berkeley, California, was a self-described "sympathetic fellow pamphleteer" and self-appointed bibliographer, who worked for the Planning Department at the Division of Highways (now Caltrans). In the 1960s, he first became acquainted with Yellen, an activist physician pamphleteer of the Imperial Valley, California, when Smith was working on a bibliography on rural water use and the 160 acre water limitation law. This law would later figure prominently in Yellen's lawsuits involving the Imperial Irrigation District. As part of Smith's work duties, he would read newspapers looking for local discussion of transportation projects, and during lunchtimes, would review these same newspapers for other items of interest to himself and to Yellen. He would send Yellen newspaper clippings or obtain and ship article reprints to Yellen via Greyhound Express and Yellen would reimburse him.

After Yellen's death in 1994, as a demonstration of Smith's admiration for Yellen's quest for justice, Smith attempted to get a statue dedicated to Yellen and worked to preserve his accomplishments. Smith collected correspondence that Yellen sent to him on small prescription-pad note paper that spanned two decades (1960-1970s), wrote essays critiquing Dr. Yellen's pamphleteering methods, prepared lists of articles about Yellen, and sent copies of Yellen's newsletters to various archives.

From the guide to the Ben Yellen / Charles L. Smith correspondence, 1960 - 2006, (University of California, San Diego. Geisel Library. Mandeville Special Collections Library.)