The Migrants
Bresler, Harvey J.
The Migrants The Slaves We Rent, by Truman E. Moore. Random House. 171 pp. $4.95. They Harvest Despair, by Dale Wright. Beacon Press. 158 pp. $4.95. Reviewed by Harvey J. Bresler A mong the...
...President Johnson has made some modest but worthy gestures in that direction...
...The Jolly Green Giant may guffaw and the Campbell pixie smile beatifically, but the fact remains that here is raw exploitation, practiced with a finesse and a finality that would have won the approval of even the most cynical mineowner in Victor Hugo's day...
...It is interesting that two new books on an old problem should appear at the same time...
...Their children get little, if any, schooling...
...The poor have no lobby...
...Wright is a good newspaperman, and his book is a competent, if somewhat journalistic, expose, of the "I Was a 'Stoop' Laborer" variety...
...Furthermore, it can be argued that a precondition to any real improvement in this disgraceful situation is the complete eradication of the root causes of poverty itself...
...At all times they carry the stigmata of poverty...
...Their health is poor and they are prone to diseases stemming from inadequate diet, housing, and sanitation...
...Is not the condition of the farm migrant a challenge to that premise...
...Economist J. Kenneth Galbraith has said that ours is an affluent society...
...One of the worst is the situation of the migrant farm worker...
...As a Negro, writing principally about Negro migrants, he has a deep understanding of what it means to be exploited for one's color as well as calling...
...Their countenances display not bitterness but rather a benign resignation...
...His is a compassionate, restrained description of what is, without doubt, a national scandal...
...His book is a blow-by-blow account of how the farm migrant works, lives, and feels as he follows the "slave-trail" up and down the Atlantic seaboard...
...The author, a fine photographer, took many pictures of migrants working and living under unspeakable conditions...
...Wright spent several months working as an itinerant harvester...
...They neither belong to the land, nor does the land belong to them . . . They are the children of misfortune...
...Their average income is less than one thousand dollars per year...
...Senator Harrison Williams of New Jersey and other liberal legislators are trying to secure remedial legislation but results thus far have been only fair...
...Migratory farm workers move restlessly over the face of the land...
...They live in squalor and in hopeless family chaos...
...There are compelling reasons—not the least of which is the moral imperative involved—why we must do far more...
...There is a good chapter on the historical roots of the problem and an excellent discussion of the economic facts of life which underlie it, not the least being the corrosive effects of automation on the agricultural labor force...
...Gunnar Myrdal, the noted Swedish economist, argues in his provocative Challenge to Affluence that until poverty is eliminated completely, this country can no longer make substantial economic progress...
...Truman E. Moore's book, The Slaves We Rent, examines the migrant situation on both the East and West coasts, particularly the latter, where the great growers and packing companies have been signally successful in their no-holds-barred fight against attempts to reform Neanderthal labor practices...
...They Harvest Despair is a compilation of a series of newspaper articles which Dale Wright wrote for The New York World-Telegram...
...Moore traces and applauds the efforts of men of good will, including many clergymen, to bring both hope and help to the victims of a cruel exploitation...
...The books also, in a real sense, update the late Edward Murrow's graphic television documentary of a few years back, "Harvest of Shame," which made millions of Americans aware that too many of their countrymen still live in circumstances most of us thought had long since been consigned to the history books...
...They are not entitled to a minimum wage or to relief (because they do not live in any one place long enough to qualify...
...Reviewed by Harvey J. Bresler A mong the paradoxes of our pros-perous economy is the persistence of deep pockets of poverty...
...So reported President Truman's Commission on Migratory Labor in 1951...
...One inclines to the feeling that until this country is committed to a massive, crash program involving basic economic reforms, the most the migratory farm workers and similar victims of our society can hope for are palliatives...
...They are exploited by avaricious crew leaders, growers, shippers, packers, canners, local merchants, landlords, and assorted predators...
...Though they are written at somewhat different levels, they complement each other well...
...Today, many legislative hearings and reams of sociological studies later, there are more than a million migrants wandering across the land, moving from one poorly paid job to another...
...The powerful Farm Bureau speaks for the wealthy and conservative farmers and thus, indirectly, for the giant "agribusiness" groups, including the huge supermarket chains, whose economic health is tied to worker-exploitation...
...Together, they are a chronicle of the strange existence for the million or so Americans who pick our oranges and beans and reap for themselves a harvest of little money and less hope...
...Moore notes that recent attempts by organized labor to organize the migratory work force have been sporadic and dispirited...
Vol. 29 • July 1965 • No. 7
