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

by Hahamovich

This is the story of the farmworkers-Italian immigrants, African American laborers, and imported workers from the Caribbean-who came to work in the fields of New Jersey, Georgia, and Florida in the decades after 1870. In 1933 Congress granted American laborers the right of collective bargaining, but farmworkers got no New Deal. Cindy Hahamovitch's pathbreaking account of migrant farmworkers along the Atlantic Coast shows how growers enlisted the aid of the state in an unprecedented effort to keep their fields well stocked with labor.

Genres: Labor, Agriculture, History

302 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1997

Reviews

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cindy Hahamovich has written an outstanding narrative on migrant farm labor between 1870 and 1945. It's a shame that her book hasn't reached an audience outside academia. Hahamovich looks at the relationship between the United States federal government, farm workers, and the growers (both small-scale farmers and after the 1920s, commercial agriculture). She argues that the federal government played a decisive role in creating the permanent, transient class of migrant laborers through its efforts to placate farmers, who during the First and Second World Wars yelped about the scarcity of labor and rising wages on the farm.

When the First World War ignited in 1914 it drastically shut down the out-migration of Europeans into the United States—a diverse collection of Italians, Poles, Czechs, Russians, and other eastern and southern Europeans who worked on small-scale farms along the East Coast of the United States during the slack times in industrial work. With this population diminishing during the war years, the United States' declaration of war against Germany and the subsequent large-scale conscription of Americans only exacerbated the real and imagined labor scarcity on farms. Farmers lobbied the government for assistance with rising wages, falling profits, and the dearth of labor to pick berries, beans, and other crops that were not mechanized. The government responded. It threatened black migratory workers in the South with "work-or-fight" laws spelling out that if blacks did not show evidence of substantive employment (i.e. farm laboring) they would be conscripted and sent overseas to Europe. The First World War also threatened the hold of white supremacy in the South. As Hahamovitch shows, southern whites controlled black labor in the South primarily through debt peonage during Reconstruction and the latter nineteenth century. African-Americans realized that farmers needed them far more than they needed the farmers during the First World War and had effectively organized and struck for higher wages. This threatened to loosen to bonds of debt that held African Americans back socio-economically in the South. Alongside work-or-fight laws, Immigration Services (under the direction of the Department of Labor) opened the borders for Mexican and West Indian immigrants in the hopes that an influx of immigrants would offset the collective power of African-American laborers. The First World War fostered a "class struggle exacerbated by racial antagonism."

Hahamovitch briefly covers a number of others topics during the interwar period—the rise of commercial agriculture, the draining of the Everglades, and the rise of a permanent class of migratory labor that moved up and down the East Coast to make a bare subsistence living.

The New Deal and the Second World War proved decisive for creating a dependent class of migratory laborers. Most of the New Deal legislation that helped the working-class (or those working in factories and processing plants) excluded domestic labor and migrant labor. Thus, farm workers were denied collective bargaining under the Wagner Act of 1935 and could not organize into federally recognized unions. Instead, the federal government adopted migrant laborers as "wards of the state" by providing relatively luxurious migrant labor camps and shuttling migrants across the country. But those policies that most helped migrant laborers also proved the most detrimental. During the Second World War, the federal government denied farm workers freedom of movement and reached an agreement with Mexico and other countries to pour tens of thousands of new migratory laborers into the United States. This created a glut of labor and squashed a key moment when mostly African-American farm workers in 1943-1944 could have collectively organized (or voted with their feet) to demand higher wages and official recognition by the state.


My summary doesn't necessarily do justice to this book. It's clearly written, concise, and fairly entertaining despite its coverage of a depressing, declension narrative. It raises important issues about who constitutes the working-class and the scope of working-class politics in the United States. Certainly, the working-class is a definition that deserves some expansion to include migratory laborers, farm workers, and domestic workers—and today, those working in a service-based economy. Hahamovitch demonstrates in this work how limited definitions of "working-class" and "labor" have historically excluded non-whites who performed labor outside processing plants and industries. This is also an important work for understanding why the debate over illegal immigration is still a contentious issue today...

[Hayden Kesterson]

When people talk about the lack of a "free market" in agriculture they tend to point to the huge subsidies that wheat, soybeans, cattle, etc. get. This book points out that even the nature of largely unsubsidized truck crops (aka vegetables and fruits), with their short windows of intense work and unpredictable timing depending on weather, has lead to multiple attempts by progressive reformers, World War I agencies, New Dealers, and World War II bureaucrats to stabilize labor markets and ensure crop output. The book follows the ebb and flow of these attempts at labor centralization, tracing their ping ponging from worker-aligned to farmer-aligned and back again. The story Hahamovich tells is largely one of the north following southern legacies of labor practice, acts and threats of violence against their largely Black laborers and their families, punctuated by marked instances of worker solidarity and power in times when labor pressures put them in position to hold farmers to the fire by withholding their labor. The last of these instances, the pressures of WWII combined with an infrastructure of housing for migrant workers set up during the New Deal era, was eventually crushed by the introduction of foreign workers (and POWs) that set the stage for the contemporary labor regime on east coast farms, one marked by pitting multiple ethnic and national divisions against each other more reminiscent of the West's labor regime for more of the US's history. The author's tracing of the importance of worker organization, especially toward the end of the book, is really enlightening, and her conclusion that migrant farmworker's poverty is pretty much guaranteed (even in situations of government support) unless they are legally and physically able to stand up to their bosses is difficult to refute. I am very interested in reading more about the wartime attempts at labor market centralization as well as the alliance between the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen's cannery unions and the Southern Tenant Farmers Union during WWII.

[B · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an enormously important and profoundly challenging read, demystifying not just the progressive New Deal bend but also the agrarian idyll. Hahamovitch goes to great lengths to place ag workers’ fate in their own hands even as the determinants of their livelihood swirl out of their control. This is an artfully told and tragic history, and particularly timely as blue collar work like farming and manufacturing receive unearned sentimentality in 2025.