Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Winter 2005
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 25, No. 4, Winter 2005, pp. 29-38.
Abstract
Children working in agriculture have always been a part of the rural culture and work ethos of the United States, especially on the Great Plains. Many teenagers still detassel corn or walk the beans in the summer months to earn spending money or money for college. But what about the children who work as migrant laborers in commercialized agriculture? These children, even today, typically go untracked by governmental agencies. The children may lag behind in school because of their family's migrations and their frequent absences from school to work in the crops. Unlike the child who works during the summer to earn supplemental income, the migrant family's wage is often tied to the labor of the child worker. While the majority of commercially grown crops today are worked by migrants on the coasts, the use of child labor in commercialized agriculture in the Great Plains has a long and checkered history.
A history of child labor in the early sugar beet industry in the Great Plains traces two different trends that intersect in the period between 1890 and 1920. The first trend was the movement of sugar beet production away from small family farms to large commercial farms in the North Platte Valley of Nebraska and the South Platte Valley of Colorado in the 1890s. The Great Western Sugar Company and the American Sugar Company, among others, owned the land and recruited the labor to work the beets. The second trend was the arrival of German-Russian families in the 1890s, and later the arrival of Mexican workers in the Midwest, especially after the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Both groups with their large families played leading roles in the cultivation of this important American crop. Sugar companies hired heads of families knowing that children would also be employed in the fields in order for the families to earn a living wage. In 1905 the private New Yorkbased National Child Labor Committee (NCLC) began looking at child labor in berry picking, and by 1911 had expanded their investigations questioning whether the work of child beet workers was simply family farm chores or actually a form of industrialized agricultural child labor.
The investigations of the NCLC, which often included photographs by Lewis Hine, became a part of a decadeslong effort to include agricultural workers in child labor reforms. The legislative highlight of this reform effort was passage during the New Deal of a federal child labor law called the Jones-Costigan Act of 1934. JonesCostigan and the subsequent Sugar Act of 1937 restricted subsidies to farmers who used children in cultivating sugar beets. This legislation did more to protect children in the sugar beet industry than did efforts to unionize agricultural workers in the 1930s or the mechanization of sugar beet growing during World War II.
There was no labor organization among sugar beet workers in the period between 1890 and 1920. Labor organization among agricultural workers has an irregular history, with efforts to organize on the Great Plains even more sporadic than those on the coasts. Before World War I the radical labor union, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), attempted to organize bindlestiffs, mostly wheat harvesters, in the Midwest and Western states through their Agricultural Workers Organization. Bindlestiffs were adult male harvest hands who carried all their goods in a bundle, or bindle. On the East Coast, the IWW looked into conditions of migrant workers on the truck and tobacco farms through its Agricultural Workers' Industrial Union. Because of the crackdown on radical organizations after the war, most of the IWW's successes involving migrant workers were short-lived at best, and none specifically involved sugar beet workers.
Comments
Copyright 2005 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln