Settlers, Sojourners, and Proletarians: Social Formation in The Great Plains Sugar Beet Industry, 1890-1940

Authors

Dennis Nodín Valdés, University of Wisconsin

Date of this Version

1990

Document Type

Article

Comments

Published in Great Plains Quarterly [GPQ 10 (Spring 1990): 110--123].Copyright 1990 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska—Lincoln.

Abstract

The sugar beet industry was in the forefront of the opening of the northern Great Plains to commercial agriculture. At the end of the nineteenth century, massive expanses of cheap land with ideal climatic and soil conditions were available on the Plains, but the sparse population afforded few farmers or field workers to block, thin, hoe, and top the sugar beets. Between 1890 and World War II, the sugar corporations devised three labor recruitment strategies that created classes of settlers, sojourners, and proletarians on the Great Plains. This essay examines the interaction between the sugar beet industry and its field workers on the northern Plains in the early twentieth century.