Fruits of their labor: Atlantic coast farmworkers and the making of migrant poverty, 1870-1945.

(Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press 1997).

IN THIS FINELY CRAFTED STUDY of migrant farmworkers on the American Atlantic coast, Cindy Hahamovitch details how changing agricultural markets and production practices combined with labour distribution efforts

of private, government, and union agencies to create a permanent migratory labour force deprived of power and mired in poverty. In the process, the migrant workers and the fields they worked became the testing grounds for competing views about immigration, nationalism, race, unions, and ideologies, as well as for power struggles among various levels of government, public, and private agencies and unions.

Hahamovitch's most persuasive material is her contribution to the debates about the relative autonomy of the state in its relations with labour and capital. In the case of growers, farmworkers, and all levels of government, she argues for a complicated relationship, insisting that the state was neither the partner of capitalism nor completely autonomous. Rather, the state took on the role of padrone, regulating labour distribution and mediating between workers and growers to the strict advantage of neither. Increasing government intervention in the relations between migrant farmworkers and the east coast growers who hired them had ambiguous results, and by the New Deal era, she argues, "liberal reforms ... ultimately did farmworkers the most good and the most damage." (10)

Hahamovitch begins her examination of migrant farmworkers as the late-19th century American economy underwent dramatic change. Industrialization and urbanization in the northeast, combined with western agricultural expansion and technological developments, led to a shift in eastern agriculture to truck farming for the growing urban industrial workforce. Labour needs became increasingly seasonal, with sharply concentrated harvest demand, and areas such as the New Jersey berry fields witnessed the beginning of the migratory stream and attempts to regulate it. Reformers targeted the recent Italian immigrants who relied upon padrones, took their entire families into the fields, and resisted Americanization.

The reformers' concern with children in the fields transcended labour issues -- it distilled the tensions between Americans and newcomers, between rural and urban ways of life, in the context of burgeoning industrialization and the closing of the western frontier. At stake was not simply the working and living conditions of migrant farmworkers, but notions of citizenship, the strength of the agrarian myth, and the role of the state in social and economic development. When reformers failed to induce growers to provide educational facilities and better housing, they called on state officials to intervene. At the same time, growers' increasing reliance on migratory workers led them to appeal for state intervention to ensure a steady labour supply.

Progressive governments shared reformers' goals to protect and assimilate the immigrant migrants, to solve urban ills, to guard against radical influences, and to keep the wheels of commerce turning smoothly. With a shared vision of agrarian life and farm ownership as the foundation of nation and citizenship, federal and private organizations addressed the problem of labour distribution while urging an end to migrant labour. But the ideal of yeoman-style agriculture, based on a small full-time labour force working its way up the agricultural ladder, was already in decline. By 1914 the Commission on Industrial Relations saw agriculture as one more industrial enterprise, relying on a transient and impoverished workforce. In attempting to meet the needs of growers and workers, it recommended an extensive federal labour distribution system to coordinate labour needs with supply, and it urged migrant workers to organize for their own protection.

But with the outbreak of World War I, labour distribution became a matter of national interests and government intervention increased. As immigration halted, labour demands and wages rose, and southern African-American workers quickly moved to fill the gap. Migrant workers became defined by race, and labour distribution became a struggle between North and South. In the conflict between the federal Departments of Agriculture and Labor for control of labour and wages, the large, populist and southern based Department of Agriculture won out. African-American farmworkers were the real losers, with their wages kept artificially low and their movements strictly curtailed through extraordinary measures such as work-or-fight laws and coercive vagrancy legislation.

After the war, a dramatic drop in farm prices combined with large scale commercial agriculture in Florida to make it both possible and necessary for thousands of southern African Americans to become permanent workers, outnumbering all other groups in the migrant labour stream on the east coast. The migrant farm labour market became truly nationalized during the interwar decades, with factory farms and concentrations of labour demand, and a general levelling and lowering of wages and working and living conditions. During the 1930s, the collapse of cotton prices and federal crop reduction programs led both workers and employers to become more dependent on labour contractors and crew bosses. Fewer jobs, reduced wages, and employer-fostered competition between African Americans and West Indians resulted in even greater exploitation of migrant workers.

Meanwhile, the federal government not only continued to regulate the migrant labour supply for the benefit of growers, it exempted migrant workers from early New Deal ameliorative legislation and relief measures for transients, and denied them the right of collective bargaining under the National Industrial Recovery Act. When migrant workers began to form unions and strike, the US Conciliation Service refused them recognition. Instead, after a particularly hard-fought strike at Seabrook Farms in New Jersey in 1934, and the subsequent passing of the Wagner Act in 1935, migrant workers emerged not as workers entitled to the rights of collective bargaining, but as wards under the protection of the federal government.

Falling under the jurisdiction of New Deal programs designed to fight poverty, migrant farm workers became eligible for assistance under the Migratory Camp Program, which provided food, shelter, and medical care, and attempted to educate migrants in such matters as hygiene, thrift, and self-government. Benefits of the program were clear to the minority of migrants who sought shelter in the camps, and at times organized strikes, but Hahamovitch points out the "dangers inherent in policy of individual, without collective, empowerment." (162-3) During World War II, the government as padrone shifted its emphasis from improving migrant workers' lives to maximizing farm production. The strategic strength of farmworkers in the camps was again undercut as the Farm Security Administration used the camps to house farmworkers imported from Mexico, the West Indies, and Puerto Rico. And as in the previous war, farmers and government agencies used wartime exigencies and race as justifications for artificially low wages, regulated labour distribution, and strike-breaking.

Since traditional union tactics were clearly unsuccessful, a new relationship between migrant workers and unions emerged with a collaboration between the southern Tenant Farmers' Union and the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen in 1943. The union emerged as padrone, regulating labour distribution and protecting migrants. Union-supervised migration, particularly of African Americans from the south, benefitted growers, government labour supply agencies, the unions, and even the migrant workers, but the task was simply too large. When unions could not supply growers' labour needs, distribution returned to government hands, and migrant workers faced the perennial problems of relying on state power that could not be neutral.

Hahamovitch's study is a convincing argument for the uneven results of state intervention in improving farmworkers' lives and work. Although she concentrates much more upon the state and other regulatory agencies than upon the migrant farmworkers themselves, she contends that farmworkers' fate is in their own hands. In her epilogue, she insists that if they are to rise above their poverty and "enforce their own bargains," migrant workers must do so through their own organization and vigilance. (199)

Cecilia Danysk

Western Washington University