Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
town-level antipicketing ordinances, with severe restrictions on rights of
public assembly and protest. Although these antipicketing laws were even-
tually struck down by the Supreme Court of California in the early 1940s,
local judges sympathetic to the farm industry initially upheld the laws,
effectively making public protest illegal in many California counties during
the second half of the 1930s.
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These local efforts were supported by racist state and federal immigration
and citizenship policies that accorded recent immigrants few or no legal
protections, drawing on and contributing to the larger discourses of racial
hierarchy and biological determinism current in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. These policies legitimated the exploitation of
immigrant groups by stereotyping immigrants and their labor. As an
example, a 1904 USDA report on the beet sugar industry emphasized the
importance of getting labor for beet work that would not compromise
American values, such as the importance of education:
In those old [European] countries the farmer and every member of his family were
workers in the beet fi elds. Here the farmer and the hired men do the work; the
children attend public schools and colleges....It is evident that if sugar beets are
to be produced in this country it must be done by a system of labor which is in
harmony with American ideas, conditions, and aspirations. We could not adopt to
any extent the family labor system prevalent in Europe. Our young people must not
be deprived of educational advantages. (14-15)
But fortunately, in the eyes of this author, there existed in the United States
groups of people who could be exempted from adopting these American
values. These included recent European immigrants living in urban areas
and other “foreigners” who were more suitable for this type of labor
because they and their families could “secure immediate employment of
the kind to which they were accustomed”:
There is another class of foreigners, not previously experienced in growing beets,
who readily adopted it on account of their natural adaptability to the system. As a
class, they are accustomed to hard drudgery work of any kind, spending their lives
during their stay in our country in work on public improvement, railroads, large
contracts, etc., requiring hard manual labor. In this class come the Scandinavians
(a few of whom have grown beets), Italians, Japanese, Chinamen, Portuguese, etc.
Large numbers of these, annually increasing, take contracts in the beet fi elds. (37)
Racializing work and workers in this way provided a powerful cultural
framework for legitimating inequalities.
