The Fruits of Their Labor: Atlantic Coast Farmworkers and the Making of Migrant Poverty, 1870-1945

2. The Sacrifice of Golden Boys and Girls: The Padrone System and New Jersey Agriculture

_or ..... _ • .-.._~ _":1W ....._~~ Thc S3cnficcofGoldcn BOysandGins The Padrone System and NewJersey Agriculture ITALIAN FAMILIES disembarking from the trains that transported them to NewJersey's berry region brought feather beds, baby carriages, sausages, loaves of bread, and an entourage of reformers, photographers , state immigration authorities, and federal investigators. Fresh from a victorious fight to restrict child labor in industrial workplaces, the men and women ofNew York and NewJersey's progressive reform movements were appalled to find immigrant children at work alongside their parents on the large and lucrative cranberry bogs of SouthJersey. Convinced ofthe necessity and efficacy ofan activist state, they declared farm labor migration a new and insidious trend in modern agriculture, demanded state action against it, and brought the issue to the public's attention. l Concern for Italian berry pickers in NewJersey was a small part of a much larger and more sweeping "progressive movement." Reformers were concerned about so many social ills that historians have had a hard time identifying a coherent movement. If anything united the myriad causes that animated turn-of-the-century reformers, it was concern for order and stability and a willingness to reconsider the relationship between the state and society. The reformers who took up New Jersey's berry pickers as their cause stood firmly within that camp. However, most of the social workers, philanthropists, and clergy who constituted the foot soldiers of the progressive movement were haunted by urban, not rural, issues. They wrestled with the associated problems of unregu- lated immigration and industrial unrest, attributable, they believed, to the urban character of the "new immigration." Overcrowded slums bred disease and crime. Immigrants huddling together in alien neighborhoods assimilated slowly, if at all, and the influx of unskilled workers depressed wages and continually refilled the nation's pool of unemployed . So obsessed were progressive reformers with urban ills that they might not have stumbled on the squalid berry pickers' camps had they not followed their charges from the Italian tenements of Philadelphia to the cranberry bogs ofSouthJersey. Latecomers to the farms of New Jersey, progressive reformers were also not interested in all agricultural workers. While both Mrican Americans and Italians were at work in NewJersey's fields, only the latter group attracted notice and concern. The southern migrants who worked in the potato fields usually came singly and worked on smaller farms, unlike the Italians, who arrived by the hundreds. The southerners were usually single men or at least men traveling without their children, and it was child welfare that most concerned the particular reformers who made rural NewJersey their cause. Moreover, black men traveling alone across the rural counties of the Georgia of the North were far more likely to encounter hostility and fear than sympathy or concern. All of these factors probably played some part in the reformers' neglect of black migrants. But the result, in any case, was that the leading opponents of migrant farmwork ignored one of the leading groups of migrant farmworkers . As far as Progressive Era reformers were concerned, Mrican American migrants were invisible. What reformers did see, and what became the focus of their opposition to the berry industry, was child labor, or as they put it, the "Sacrifice of Golden Boys and Girls" to berry growers' profits. The employment offamilies in NewJersey agriculture not only subjected children to long hours of work and unsanitary conditions, according to its critics; it threatened to produce a generation of unassimilated, uneducated, and uncontrollable immigrant children. Reformers blamed the presence of children among New Jersey's berry fields on the padroni - the labor contractors or "bosses" who recruited, transported, and supervised Italian farmworkers. Moreover, they demanded not just state regulation of child labor but a complete prohibition against the use of children in agriculture.2 Had they asked the pickers about their views ofthe padroni, reformers might have been surprised to find the relationship less exploitive or at least more complex than they had imagined. Indeed, the workings ofthe turn-of-the-century padrone system reveal a great deal about the dyTHE PADRONE SYSTEM 39 namics of farm labor supply and the extent to which labor contractors served or defeated the interests offarmworkers. In any case, reformers' demands forced the berry farmers into a defensive position. When the reformers called on the state to enforce health and housing regulations on berry growers' farms, growers insisted that they could not afford to build...