Later career
During World War II, Taylor was one of a small number of prominent whites to protest the mass incarceration of Japanese-Americans.
In 1943, he became involved with protests against federal provision of vast quantities of water to agribusiness at the taxpayers' expense. After 1950, this became the major focus of his work. The federal Newlands Reclamation Act of 1902, which provided funding for dams and canals to bring water to parched southwestern farms, had limited the amount of subsidized water for irrigation to 160 acres (0.65 km2) per person. But this restriction was systematically violated, so the reclamation programs constituted huge subsidies to the biggest growers and enabled them to squeeze out small farmers. In 1944, Taylor led opposition to the insertion of an exemption from the 160-acre (0.65 km2) limitation into the U.S. Senate bill authorizing the Central Valley Project to bring water into the San Joaquin Valley. For the rest of his life Taylor fought a losing battle against this policy.
From 1952 to 1956, Taylor served as chair of his department; he then headed the university's Institute of International Studies until his retirement in 1964. Beginning in the late 1950s, he served as a consultant for the U.S. State Department and the Ford Foundation, investigating land tenure and advocating land reform in Vietnam, Egypt, Colombia, Korea, and Ecuador. He applied to the Third World the principles and knowledge he had developed from decades of work on U.S. agriculture and rural poverty. Always strongly anticommunist, Taylor argued for land reform and community development, in the conviction that the concentration of vast landholdings in a few hands and the severe exploitation of farm labor made the development of democracy impossible and made communist popularity grow.
