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

1. A Perfectly Irresistible Change: The Transformation of East Coast Agriculture

_______-1_ ___~___ "___ _.._~~ A perfectlyIrresisUble Change The Transformation of East Coast Agriculture THERE IS NOTHING particularly new about migrant labor in North America. The continent's earliest human inhabitants were nomadic hunters who crossed a land bridge from Siberia as early as 40,000 years ago in search ofcaribou and woolly mammoths. The first Europeans who came "to Plant an English nation" at Roanoke 500 years ago were followed by thousands ofimmigrant workers: farmers and artisans, servants and slaves. Indeed, American history is in large part the saga of successive waves of migrant workers and the conflicts and cultures they wrought. What distinguishes labor migrations in the "Age of Capital" from earlier movements of working people is less the total absence of woolly mammoths than the preeminence of wage labor. By the nineteenth century more people.than ever were moving great distances to sell their labor power at a price. l What was new also in the late nineteenth century was the growing importance of migrant labor to agriculture in the United States. In the hops fields of California, the beet farms of Michigan, the strawberry fields ofVirginia, and the potato farms and cranberry bogs ofNewJersey, farm owners relied on men, women, and children who would appear in time for the harvest and disappear thereafter. Agriculture the world over had always been characterized by short seasons of intensive labor. But in the decades after the Civil War two changes transformed agriculture more dramatically than anything since Jethro Tull invented the plow. The first was the widespread availability of horse-drawn agricultural machinery. The second was the rapid worldwide rise of cities, whose inhabitants had to be fed. These changes led American farmers to plant new crops in new ways and sent them scurrying in search of new sources oflabor. NewJersey farmers were particularly well placed to supply perishable produce to city people as their crops grew in the shadow of New York, Philadelphia, Newark, and a score of smaller industrial cities. Their success made South Jersey the ideological center of "progressive" agriculture and transformed farmers in the Garden State into buyers on the international labor market. The labor they bought was sold to them by Italian immigrants - mostly women and children who lived in nearby Philadelphia- and Mrican American men from the upper South. Farm labor was unpleasant work, but for those who enjoyed few other opportunities, it was a way to earn quick cash in a world ofaccount books, pawnshops, and eviction notices. THIS STORY BEGINS, however, not in New Jersey but in the vast, sparsely settled lands of the Dakota Territory's Red River Valley, where mechanized farm production first reached massive proportions. When economic depression struck in 1873, the directors of the Northern Pacific were left with railroad tracks that ended in what seemed to be the middle of nowhere. The Sioux had recently been expelled from the region, but the vast expanse of prairie that the federal government conquered and then gave to the railroad was uncultivated and apparently infertile. Not certain if they were optimists or fools, the railroad's directors and investors gambled that, if they could demonstrate the land's fertility, they could both profit from the sale ofwheat and attract settlers to the valley. Once settlers were ready to ship their own grain out of the region, the railroad would be back in business. Together the company's officers traded their nearly worthless bonds for large portions of the railroad's land, hired an experienced wheat grower and ex-lawyer to manage their operation, and ordered him to turn the land almost exclusively to wheat.2 Others soon followed their example. The Grandin brothers of Pennsylvania also exchanged their Northern Pacific securities for 100,000 acres of rich, black Red River Valley soil. Seemingly undaunted by the vicissitudes of a crash-and-boom economy, the Grandin brothers made the Dakota Territory their Palestine and reconsecrated their faith in the holy trinity of men, monopoly, and machinery. They hired the same exattorney and wheat grower to manage their colony, supplied him with TRANSFORMATION OF EAST COAST AGRICULTURE 15 steel plows, cultivators, and harvesters, and ordered the land planted, not with settlers, but with 61,000 acres of wheat. The seeds of hope and profit that had failed with the Northern Pacific were thus replanted on the enormous, highly mechanized estates that soon came to be known across...