Cindy Hahamovitch’s moral clarity is refreshing. Without pausing to apologize or equivocate, The Fruits of Their Labor exposes the greed, oppression, conflict, and courage that characterized the world of migrant farmworkers along the Atlantic coast from Reconstruction to World War II. Thoroughly engaged in the story—Hahamovitch’s narrative clips along nicely—I was amazed that it had not been told before. If her hope is to convince that the plight of the migrant farm worker was, as she puts it, “a product of a specific and alterable relationship between farmworkers, farmers, and the state,” then she has succeeded (13). I am convinced.
In spite of the depressing plotline, her story is actually quite hopeful—the relationship is “alterable.” In this way The Fruits of Their Labor contrasts strikingly with David Vaught’s Cultivating California, a tale of California specialty crop labor relations from the angst-ridden perspective of the growers. In Vaught’s telling, the growers were much more complex characters, men of ideals, culture, and community who struggled to reconcile their bucolic vision with their need for cheap, seasonal, labor. (Perhaps this difference is due to the different geographic settings, but I think it has more to do with the authors’ predilections.) The reader is left with more sympathy for the growers, but also more pessimism that anything could have been done to right the situation.
Still, Hahamovitch’s explanations are simplistic at times. Her argument that the “experience of becoming employers, more than changes in methods, markets, and crops . . . made a business of farming,” is intriguing, but she fails to give us a sense of this transformation from farmers to businessmen (36). I suspect that it was more complicated than she makes it out to be. Frank Whitehurst alone of all the farmers in the book comes out as a reasonable man, although she concedes that “to make him out to be the only reasonable farmer along the East Coast is unfair” (164). If this is true, his uniqueness in Hahamovitch’s account is striking.
Workers, too, sometimes seem one-dimensional at times. When comparing New Jersey’s reliance on black southern labor in the 1890s and the 1930s, she makes little of the fact that the black southerners were coming from different parts of the South (upper South in the 1890s, cotton belt in the 1930s), and that their different characteristics may have contributed to their different reception in New Jersey. It is only the New Jersey farmers that have changed, taking up “the litany of the New South as their own”—meaning that they now blame blacks for their labor problems (135). (She also does not explain what exactly this has to do with the New South—but perhaps this just reflects my own ignorance.)
Hahamovitch starts off describing farmworkers as “movers, strivers, and self-exploiters” (36). While she demonstrates decisively the first two designations, the last is only implied. Presumably she is referring to the (reluctant) willingness of farmworkers to work for unreasonably low wages and their failure to organize effectively, but she leaves me curious as to what farmworkers contributed to their own exploitation.
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