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

7. Uncle Sam as Padrone: The Politics of Labor Supply in Depression and War

_ _____1.... ~ 222M. ___~~ UnclesamasPadmne The Politics ofLabor Supply in Depression and War THE WAGNER ACT, which was signed into law in July 1935, excluded field workers and domestics - some 65 percent of Mrican American workers - from its provisions.l Still, field workers were not abandoned by the state. If New Dealers were unwilling to redress farmworkers' powerlessness , they were gearing up to do something about their poverty. The agency that would take up their cause was the Resettlement Administration and its successor, the Farm Security Administration (FSA). The FSA's mission was to serve the nation's poorest rural people, including those excluded from or further impoverished by the administration's recovery measures. The FSA took 10 million acres of marginal land out of production and resettled the families that had worked them. It created suburban "greenbelt" developments that were designed to increase rural income by combining cooperative farming and small industry. In one year alone it lent tenant farmers $260 million in low-interest loans to enable them to buy farms and gave out over $800 million in rehabilitation loans to prevent failing farmers from joining the ranks of the migrant poor. For those who had already gone bust and hit the road, the FSA began in 1935 to build migratory camps that would house and feed farmworkers in truck farming regions on both coasts. Yet farmworkers enjoyed the guardianship of the FSA only temporarily . It was not long before the agency succumbed to the attacks of its congressional enemies. It was, in fact, the first casualty of the growing tide ofanti-New Deal conservatism unleashed by the Second World War. As the "economy bloc" in Congress hammered on the need for cutbacks in nondefense spending and demanded the elimination of New Deal "experimentation," FSA advocates argued for the agency's preservation on the grounds of the Migratory Camp Program's contribution to the war effort. In a sense this argument worked too well. By the spring of 1942 the FSA's resettlement projects, cooperatives, land purchase, and small loan programs had all succumbed to the budgetary axe; the migrant camp program was the only FSA project left intact.2 With the nemesis agency out of the way, the U.S. Department ofAgriculture (USDA) might simply have disbanded the Migratory Camp Program , but it did not. The camp program survived not only intact but vastly expanded. New camps drew migrants to areas where farmers would not or could not house them, and a transportation program helped move migrants immobilized by gas and tire shortages. Instead of serving the needs of America's migrant poor, the camp program retooled to serve the needs of the nation's labor poor. Yet even though growers benefited from the services ofthe FSA's labor supply program, they complained of labor shortages. Farmworkers had not vanished; they were using the security afforded by the federal migrant camps to wage informal but effective strikes. Though they proclaimed neutrality, FSA officials found themselves in the middle of a bitter struggle between farmworkers and truck farmers, and in the end they would be caught in the cross fire. In the spring of 1943 the nation's largest growers responded to farmworkers ' militancy by wresting control offederal farm labor policy. Bowing to their demands, Congress did two remarkable things: it took the Migratory Camp Program away from the FSA and denied farmworkers the right to migrate without the consent of county authorities. While American farmworkers were "frozen" in place, the new Emergency Farm Labor Supply Program filled FSA migrant camps with farmworkers transported by the FSA from Mexico, the West Indies, and Puerto Rico, as well as with 120,000 prisoners ofwar. While during the First World War the agencies charged with rationalizing and mobilizing the nation's farm labor supply had attempted, unsuccessfully , to build an administrative apparatus from the ground up, the agencies of the Second World War had in the FSA's Migratory Camp Program an administrative structure that could be easily converted to their use. Thus, instead ofstemming migrancy as it had planned, the FSA spent its last years in existence facilitating migration, literally shuttling farmworkers from harvest to harvest. Created to protect and defend the UNCLE SAM AS PADRONE nation's poorest rural people, the FSA ended up playing a large part in opening the nation's borders to the poor of other countries. THAT THE WAGNER ACT would exclude...