AS THE CROW FLIES
Meyer, Ernest L.
As the Crow Flies By ERNEST L. MEYER MAYBE the story of the plight of the sharecroppers and migratory workers in America has been overdone. Maybe "The Grapes of Wrath," in book and in picture,...
...Since those early days the process of building tip huge larm factories has progressed enormously...
...The workers are not represented at the meetings...
...he said, "the migratory worker problem is not a phenomenon confined to California...
...Nor is the present clash in California of recent origin...
...What i.s happening out there i.s a preview of what might very well happen in the great agricultural areas of the Midwest...
...I used to teach people how to die, and I'd prepare them for death...
...The owners maintain a private army of vigilantes and undercover agents...
...That strike set the pattern for all the labor upheavals which followed, and all were based on the same evils...
...This same 3 per cent of the farms receives 47 per cent of the Triple A payments from Washington...
...The workers, many of them famished after the season is over, take a long pole with a nail fitted at the end, and try to retrieve the dumped fruits and vegetables...
...It goes way back to 1880...
...West...
...the year of the first California agricultural strike...
...He has an inordinate interest in statistics, a hunger for historical research...
...a very low piece rate and a very large mass of available unemployed labor...
...McWilliams is no sentimentalist...
...Break them down in terms of human relationships and you find this: a small, closely-knit and organized group of farm owners, and a vast and relatively inarticulate and unorganized army of farm workers...
...He is national chairman of the National Council to Aid Agricultural Labor, Washington, which i.s raising funds to aid the sharecroppers and migratory workers...
...But all doubts I might have had in the matter were dispelled the other day when I met Carey McWilliams, commissioner of immigration for California...
...No...
...That's farming in California...
...McWilliams I met another interesting man, the Rev...
...In that year 200 Chinese workers on the Bidwell ranch protested the low piece work rate for fruit picking and went out on a strike...
...Maybe, as Mi ""arst charges, all the todo is the work of sentimentalists and the reds...
...He is a sober and spectacled fellow, this Carey McWilliams, a little on the solemn, professorial side, and hi.s words are measured and carry conviction...
...Two-thirds of all labor employed in agriculture works on 3 per cent of the farms...
...The owners keep up the prices of produce by dumping the surplus into the sea...
...He wrote a book last year called "Factories in the Field," which is solid McWilliams factual background for Steinbeck narrative fantasy...
...Maybe "The Grapes of Wrath," in book and in picture, presents a prejudiced view and one which is applicable only to a i small segment of our population in the far and distant...
...Most of my life I had the wrong tack," the preacher told me...
...These are the statistics...
...The system of the 'industrial farm' is expanding...
...The ranch owner fired the Chinese and hired a gang of hungry Indians...
...neither is he a soap-boxer...
...It rests on land ownership or control by the few, and a large pool of surplus labor which seasonally can be exploited...
...With Mr...
...Mr...
...Now I teach them how to live, and prepare them for life...
...The owners meet every year and set the basic wage rates and product prices...
...O. H. Whitfield, Missouri Negro preacher, father of 11 children, and for a long time active in organizing the sharecropper...
...Today 10 per cent of the California farms control 57 per cent of the state's agricultural industry...
...McWilliams holds that workers' organizations holds the only way out of the morass...
Vol. 10 • March 1940 • No. 12
