The Great Plains during World War II

7. Agricultural Labor

World War II brought unprecedented prosperity to Great Plains farmers but also considerable uncertainty and problems regarding agricultural labor. By 1940 many young men and women were leaving the farms for high wages and regular hours in warrelated industries in the cities of the region. After 1940 thousands of young men left the farms and rural communities for military service, and by 1942 farmers experienced a serious labor shortage for the harvest of their wheat, sugar beet, and cotton crops. Great Plains farmers attempted to solve their labor problems by drawing on the workforce that remained—students, housewives, and businessmen—but this solution proved inadequate and unreliable. Consequently, farmers quickly demanded deferments for their sons and hired workers from local draft boards, supported the Bracero Program (which allowed Mexican nationals to work legally in the United States), and, to a limited extent, accepted the organization and deployment of the Women’s Land Army (wla). Even though some men and women left the farms for the factories in the cities after the European war began, a farm labor surplus stemming from technological change, government programs, and the Great Depression continued to occupy the attention of economic planners in the usda. Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace maintained that too many people still lived on farms and earned an income too meager to provide them with an adequate standard of living. Although the Selective Training and Service Act, which President Roosevelt signed on September 16, 1940, together with seven | Agricultural Labor agricultural labor 190 the increasing buildup of the defense industries, soon removed many of Wallace’s surplus farmers from the land, usda officials believed that farmers would have enough labor for planting and harvesting to maintain the current level of production in 1941. Still, farmers would need a large number of migratory agricultural workers to meet their labor needs, particularly in areas near towns and cities with defense industries, where they could not compete for long-term labor. By December 1941, for example, Kansas war industries employed 26,623 workers, but the state Board of Agriculture estimated that at least 75,000 workers would be so employed the next year, resulting in a decrease of the farm labor supply to 51 percent of demand by July 1942.1 At the same time spot agricultural labor shortages began affecting farmers in the northern Great Plains. In mid-April 1941 Tracy N. Shaw, the director of the Wyoming Employment Service, and officials in the usda anticipated a 15.7 percent shortage of farm and ranch labor during the spring and summer. Each spring “transient workers” from Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas migrated to Wyoming to work in the sugar beet and hay fields, but they had not yet arrived because more-appealing job opportunities existed in their own states. Farmers in Colorado and Montana also experienced agricultural labor shortages, and Shaw did not believe that outside workers would be available because they had gone to war industries or been inducted into the armed forces. Shaw urged all men who desired farm or ranch work to register at the nearest employment office and announced that they would be hired quickly. In the meantime he told farmers and ranchers to take what they could get. Roy Sheer, Wyoming’s state labor commissioner, agreed and anticipated a shortage of three thousand farmworkers for the state. In South Dakota, despite higher wages the farm labor shortage became so acute in 1941 that Charles Newell, the state’s director of unemployment compensation, asked the Civilian Conservation Corps (ccc) to release its young men for work in the wheat fields, and the Works Progress Administration (wpa) agreed to shut down projects in the wheat areas to help farmers employ needed workers. The wpa also ordered its local offices to remove from its rolls those people who refused farm employment.2 agricultural labor 191 In June 1941 some farmers also complained that their sons had been drafted at a time when they needed them the most. Secretary of Agriculture Claude R. Wickard responded by warning the Selective Service System that the national defense program “has drawn heavily upon the supply of farm labor and maintaining the adequate supply of farmworkers for production of essential foods required for national defense is becoming a serious problem.” The Selective Service System responded by notifying local draft boards that they could defer men for sixty days to help...