They did find a niche. Cotton had but recently been introduced, and the Okies knew about cotton. During that decade an almost total change occurred in the labour pattern in rural California. The Anglo-American took over from the Mexican who, displaced, retreated across the border. The final external factor which crucially affected the man from the Dust Bowl was the outbreak of World War II, when booming defence factories - aircraft plants and shipyards - lifted him off the soil of the Valleys, and the Mexican came back.
The Grapes of Wrath sold 420,565 copies in its first year. So in 1939 the Okies were suddenly renowned and their plight sent a quiver through the nation. The novel, the release of the film in February 1940 and the publication of Carey McWilliams’s Factories in the Fields, had an earthquake effect on state politics, and the commotion aroused throughout the country brought the La Follette Committee investigations into being.
Yet a year later retaliatory propaganda by the Associated Farmers (who denounced The Grapes of Wrath as obscene, vulgar and immoral, and got it banned from libraries) and public boredom had largely killed the issue, and the Okies were, if not forgotten, relegated to history and not regarded as a continuing, unsolved problem - for the drift of migrants had not stopped.
In California as the ‘Migrant Menace’ cooled off there was some grudging acceptance of them. They integrated, after a fashion. They were not proud of their famous sobriquet, and a large number submerged their Okie name and their Dust Bowl background as soon as they could. Small islets of them are still to be found, in Colorado, in New Mexico, in the Pacific North-West, as well as in California. A post-mortem study at the end of the decade found that in a sample group in Monterey County a majority were ‘somewhat better off financially’ than when they arrived (not difficult) but a third were worse off. Ninety per cent declared their intention of staying in California but their outlook on their future was ‘generally coloured by pessimism’.
Subsequently some dug themselves in with relative security. Some even prospered.
Their methods of attaining security and prosperity would not in every case have been the right material for a Woody Guthrie song. When in 1941 Mexican citrus workers struck in Southern California, Okies from the San Joaquin Valley - who themselves had fought in many a strike and pay dispute - enrolled as strike breakers, and, says McWilliams, ‘promptly attempted to drive the remaining Mexicans from the fields’.
The family of man is frail in its kinship loyalties; the oppressed often learn not only dignity and courage but also the technique of how to oppress others.
‘It’s a funny thing,’ a Baptist migrant missionary said as we drove through the fat vineyards of Kern County, ‘but some of the very nicely off fruit farmers around here who are most guilty of exploiting the Mexican field hands are old Okies and Arkies, who were taken to the cleaners in exactly the same way when they got here. Maybe they feel they’re entitled to their turn, because they showed like real Americans that they could pull themselves up by their bootstraps.’
In the ballad Tom Joad, on the run again from police and the vengeance of authority, he bids his mother farewell:
Wherever little children are hungry and cry
Wherever people ain’t free
Wherever men are fightin’ for their rights
That’s where I’m gonna be, Ma,
That’s where I’m gonna be.
34 Rentaslave
Between Augusta and Charlotte I met a man, his wife, and
seven children … The family was stranded on the highway.
It was late evening, and neither the mother nor the father
seemed to know what to do. They just stood there on the
outskirts of a little town, hoping.
The American Worker in the Twentieth Century
Fidel Menchaca is 2,400 miles from his home in McAllen in the extreme foot of Texas. He is as usual spending the summer months in the state of Washington, which he reached after a seventy-two hour trip by Greyhound bus with an overnight stop in Salt Lake City.
He is not a bracero, one of the 180,000 Mexicans who until 1965 were given permits to enter the United States for the seasonal stoop labour in the fields (or, permitless, came across the river border). Fidel Menchaca, makes it understood that both his grandfathers were born in Texas: he is officially described as a Spanish-American. It was in fact the braceros who pushed him and his father and his brothers on the exploration North. The cheap labour flooding across the Rio Grande and the eager undercutting by local farmers so depressed wages that the Menchacas and their kind had to range ever farther afield to maintain their rates.
This is Walla Walla, one of the first settled stages on the Oregon Trail beyond the Rockies, battleground in bloody skirmishes with the Cayuse Indians and a roughneck frontier town during the 1860s gold mining. Now the Blue Mountain valleys are rich with grain and vegetables. At this time the pea, asparagus and beet harvests are finished and the plums and tomatoes not yet ready, and the migrant labour camp four miles out of town is only half full. Most of the occupants are Spanish-Americans from Texas, and about ten per cent whites who have converged in from Missouri, California and Illinois. The single men have signed on for the wheat cutting, bunkhouse-living out on the ranches all week. Others are temporarily in the processing plants, where each year seven million cases of vegetables are canned and 165 million pounds frozen.
This is a long haul to find work,’ Menchaca says, ‘but it is worth the trip. Around home until May there are the citrus seedlings to be transplanted and grafted, but after that work is rather sad down there. Mechanization is coming in and reducing the old jobs. Here there is clipping the apple trees to start with, then the peas and spinach and lima beans and prunes and onions to pick. Some, the beet blockers, move on North to other beet fields when they’ve finished, but you can earn the whole summer through just staying here, maybe working in the canneries too.
‘I began coming to Walla Walla with my father in 1958. It was necessary because the braceros were entering Texas and taking jobs at thirty-five cents an hour and we could not afford to accept that. The end of the bracero programme has not made much difference. They still pay more up here.
‘We could stop earlier, in California, but none of us like the attitude of the people there. They try to cheat you in the stores, at least that is the feeling I get, and the rents they charge are extortionate. My father has always been very distrustful of the gringo. He is growing out of that, with my help.
‘But, let’s face it, he learned from experience that the gringo are always out to get you. It is why we live in the labour camp and not out on the farms if we can help it. No, my gosh, we are not slaves. They squeeze all they can out of you. It is a better bargaining position, living away from the farm.
‘Most of my group get here in cars, in family groups, or in pickup wagons. Some come up in crew buses run by contractors. It was pitiful the way they used to bring our people up here, like cattle. It used to be wide open.
‘But now in Texas they are stricter about conditions. Even so it is a very long way from home, it is a long way to come for work, and my father is getting old; yet the way we feel, we would rather do this - starve, even - than go on public assistance.’
Daybreak in Cottonwood Row (Dingetown, you’re likelier to hear it called), the Negro ghetto of Bakersfield, California, and the clumpy shadows of hundreds of waiting men - Negroes, Mexican, a few white - dissolve as they hasten to the farmers’ buses pulling up: pay rates stated, no argument, and they bear off their day-haul gangs for picking the plums, nectarines and peaches, for cutting cotton field weeds, thinning grapes and topping sugar beets. But many are left behind, no work that day, so most probably no food.
On Highway 441 approaching Athens, Georgia, and the Oconee River peanut plantations, is an old truck with smooth tyres, canvas sides and a Florida number plate, and brimming over the tailgate with Negro men, women and children: their grand tour, of which each stop for them is the middle of another field, t
he tin shack corner of another town.
In New York State, around Rochester and Utica where the snap beans and tomatoes are being gathered, across in South-Western Idaho where this is the time for onions and sweet corn, in Maryland where the peppers and squashes are ripe, in Minnesota for the cucumbers and potatoes - in almost every state in the Union except perhaps Nevada and Montana in these late summer weeks the migrant pickers are out, working usually from ‘can’t to can’t’ - from when you can’t see the sun in the morning until you can’t see it any more at night, getting money which forbids an adequate existence, living in shelters which stink and crawl.
At any given daylight moment in the fruitful seasons there are perhaps two million bent backs in the fields of the Great Society, an African servitude in the meadows of plenty.
Statistics differ uncertainly in these shifting sands for the population of this America is never permanently still enough for a head count - between crops, shaking along the roads in those rattletrap trucks - but there appears to be no official disagreement about that two million. They are a petrol-driven peasantry living in a sort of revolving slum which never more than brushes the suburbs and towns of affluent America. They are destitute and sunk in a way that the old harvest force of ornery individuals never was, in a way that the surviving hobo with his prickly, even pathological, pride in his own volition is not. The hobo has always hung on to the conviction that the next train ride may have a special significance; even the Okies had an objective, that dream California. These migrants cannot raise their eyes above the next row of beans.
During all the emerging mobility patterns of the unmarried hobo worker of the West, who made his presence known by his invasion of main street and by raising his voice loud in song and self-aggrandizement, in protest and boasts of prowess, other movements of Negro labour were starting up their present paths, but these were passive herds. When the U.S. Industrial Commission reported in 1901 on changing employment conditions, it found that thousands of Southern Negroes were already in worn grooves. The movement from Virginia up to Rhode Island and other New England states, ‘from crop to crop and area to area’ was established, a custom which apparently began in the 1880s when Negro battalions were imported by steamboat from Norfolk to gather vegetable crops around Providence. At about the same time the Mexican shepherds and cowboys who had begun crossing the border to the new Texan ranches beat the path for the foot labourers who entered the East Texas cotton fields in increasing numbers.
These trickles became the sluggish flood. Each spring now 50,000 Negroes move up from their winter jobbing in the Florida glades, 50,000 from just one part. Until the ending in December 1964 of the bracero programme (the licensed admittance of Mexicans approved as an emergency scheme in 1951 and indefinitely extended, to the detriment of American wage standards and opportunities) the annual influx reached 178,000 - and they still come in, as ‘wetbacks’, illegal job-hunters who, figuratively anyway, swim the Rio Grande. Now, since 1950, the Puerto Ricans are found drifting in the Middle Atlantic States, originally transported by farmers’ agents direct from their homeland and left trapped in the tide.
*
There are in present-day America six major streams of seasonal migrants in constant monkey-on-a-stick movement. All have Southern sources and they flow Northward and ebb back when the crops are in.
There is the one originating in Florida, mostly Negroes, which climbs the Atlantic Seaboard, through the Old South into Delaware, New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania, engaging in a great variety of harvests. There is one of Mexican-Americans which goes from Texas up into the North Central and Mountain States, most of the way on sugar beet but also picking vegetables and fruits. There is another wholly Mexican-American stream which leaves Texas and passes through Montana and North Dakota on wheat and small-grain harvests. There is a third from Texas, Spanish-American and Negroes, which splits - one working the cotton crops Westward to New Mexico, Arizona and Southern California, the other making for the Mississippi Delta. There is one, mainly whites of early American stock, which goes from Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Western Tennessee, and fans North and West on fruit and tomatoes. There is the sixth, composed of migrants of mixed races, which shuttles up and down the Pacific Coast, harvesting and processing fruits and vegetables.
They go in families, even in communities, in single cars, in motorcades, in buses and trucks led by middlemen crew organizers who contract with farmers to deliver the manpower, and the woman and child power, and collect the better part of the financial reward. The migrants move because they have no other way of earning any money.
Since 1940 two and a half million farms have gone, simply wiped off the agricultural map of America by being either wrung dry and returning to scrub or being cannibalized by agribusiness units. The expropriated tenants, sharecroppers and small owners have been sucked into the migrant streams.
There are about three million Americans doing some work for wages in agriculture but only a fifth of those are in employment of nominal regularity. There are also 1,400,000 unemployed farm workers, some of them partly and patchily migratory in an increasingly mechanized and automated food-producing industry which needs occasional snatches of manual labour.
Among these migrants there are about 75,000 working, school-less children over ten years of age. The number under ten who work is not known, but one indication of the volume of child labour in the ‘blue-sky sweatshop’ (There are no sweatshops on the farms of America,’ said North Carolina’s Congressman Cooley. ‘On the farms of our nation, children labour with their parents out under the blue skies’, a viewpoint not unanimously concurred with) is that in 1964 five- to nine-years-olds accounted for one-fifth of all the agricultural child labour violations found under the very limited protection of the Fair Labor Standards Act.
In point of fact farm workers continue to be excluded from virtually all workmen’s compensation laws. They have no minimum wage, no unemployment insurance, no right to collective bargaining. As disenfranchised non-residents of anywhere, they have no vote and cannot make their wishes felt. President Roosevelt placed importance upon this when Congress was debating the Fair Labor Standards Act, and he called for minimum wage coverage for both ‘those who toil in factory and on farm’. That was in 1937. The farm workers were left out.
In this century there have been in the neighbourhood of 150 separate attempts to improve the conditions of farm workers through legislative and administrative action, with scant success. For nearly thirty years one of the most adamant and bellicose Washington employers’ lobbies, composed of the American Farm Bureau, the National Association of Manufacturers and similar groups has succeeded in keeping the land worker just about where he has ever been. Against this (the ‘toughest lobby I have ever met,’ James P. Mitchell, former Secretary of Labor, described it) the land worker has had neither the economic nor the political power to mobilize in his own defence. He has always been somewhere in the middle of a field, stooped.
His insecurity is extreme. At the end of a 1,000 mile trip he can discover that the crop is late or failed or already hired for. If he hands himself over to a crew leader he is often in all senses taken for a ride. If there is work it is for piece-rates which pin him firmly to a degraded standard of living. He can find himself staying in this type of accommodation, a Baedeker compiled by National Association for the Advancement of Colored People investigators: dilapidated barns, chicken coops, old school buses, tents, shanties, tar-paper shacks, barracks, machine storage sheds and pigpens. Ordinarily there are no windows, no heat, no cooking facilities, no sanitation. Rent is charged by the farmer or land steward on the luxury level of the prices charged at the company store for groceries.
Conditions are not always so foul. The camps vary. Some are moderately maintained and reasonably clean. Also the migrant hand can, in short bursts, earn enough to get by if he picks his steps carefully. The U.S. Department of Labor issues guides to peak areas and the better camps, a necessarily skeleton map, which
is an acceptable but apologetic substitute for real action.
Some young whites, reared to it and relaxed about a feckless, unambitious life they can enjoy, ride the bad breaks philosophically; it is among the Negroes that there is encountered what appears to be a mass psychological depression and loss of contact with hope. But adjustment, even when it can be and is made, cannot justify the toleration of poverty of this ingrained quality in a society of such abundance. In any event, however fly the migrant’s planning and however happy-go-lucky he manages to stay, it is a beastly, disproportionate way of staying alive, for there are seldom the means, once in the migrant stream, of avoiding fourteen-hour days when employed and desperate scourings of the country when not employed, of seeing your children inexorably drawn into the same bondage of poverty, of having no comforts or background or local attachment, of having no future expectations, of being shackled to an inhuman level of labour whose wage status is actually declining. In the 1910-14 period the farm labourer’s average hourly wage was sixty-seven per cent of the average factory hand’s; by 1945 it had dropped to forty-seven per cent; by 1963 it was down to thirty-six per cent.
‘A hundred years ago we owned slaves,’ a Congressman from a South-Western state-said of the contract labour system. ‘Today we just rent them.’
There seems no defensible cause for conditions to be such. The small grower a lot of the time shaves the economic danger line uncomfortably close, but agriculture is America’s largest single industry, whose productivity is rising faster than almost any ether, whose overall labour costs against production costs steadily fall (barely eleven per cent a year), and it is the industry which rakes in more than forty billion dollars a year from marketing and government subsidies.
Hard Travellin Page 39
