The day after Thanksgiving, 1960, millions of television viewers came together in living rooms across the United States to watch CSB Reports. Edward R. Murrow’s venerable documentary, “Harvest of Shame,” opened with a black-and-white image of farm laborers being recruited for work, while the narrator intoned:
This scene is not taking place in the Congo. It has nothing to do with Johannesburg or Cape Town. It is not Nyasaland or Nigeria. This is Florida. These are citizens of the United States, 1960. This is a shape-up for migrant workers. The hawkers are chanting the going piece rate at the various fields. This is the way the humans who harvest the food for the best-fed people in the world get hired. One farmer looked at this and said, “We used to own slaves; now we just rent them.”
After examining the plight of the workers across the nation, including Mexican Americans in California, the program ended with this sobering reality:
The migrants have no lobby. Only an enlightened, aroused and perhaps angered public opinion can do anything about the migrants. The people you have seen have the strength to harvest your fruit and vegetables. They do not have the strength to influence legislation. Maybe we do. Good night, and good luck.
“Harvest of Shame” succeeded in pricking the conscious of individuals across the nation. Activists showed the documentary in church basements and union halls from coast to coast, contributing to a social movement demanding better treatment for farm workers. These efforts arguably had their greatest impact in California, where the call to aid migrant workers was answered with the formation of the Emergency Committee to Aid Farm Workers.
The Emergency Committee to Aid Farm Workers was clearly inspired by Murrow’s broadcast, but it was also shaped by the long history of union efforts to organize farm workers in California, dating back to the 1930s. The Emergency Committee to Aid Farm Workers organically grew out of the California Committee for Fair Employment Practices, a labor-based civil rights coalition that had successfully lobbied for fair employment in 1959, and had then shifted its focus towards promoting state fair-housing legislation.
The catalyst for this effort was William Becker, secretary of the California Committee for Fair Practices and its chief lobbyist in the State Capitol. He had moved to the state a decade earlier to work for the AFL National Farm Labor Union (NFLU)., whose members were then on the strike against DiGiorgio, near Bakersfield
Becker was ultimately hired as a civil rights organizer for the Jewish Labor Committee (JLC), and assigned to staff the California Committee for Fair Practices from the San Francisco office of the California Labor Federation, AFL-CIO.
Becker’s office mate was John Henning, who President John F. Kennedy appointed Undersecretary of Labor in 1961.
On January 10, ten days before Kennedy’s inauguration, Becker queried Steve Allen, the first host of the Tonight Show and a socially aware celebrity, asking him to chair a new statewide group. “I have become quite actively interested in the plight of the migratory farm worker, as a result of witnessing Edward R. Murrow’s recent television documentary, ‘Harvest of Shame,’” replied Allen. Allen ultimately declined to serve as chair, citing time constraints; but he lent his name to the cause.
The Emergency Committee to Aid Farm Workers recruited more than two dozen prominent members, their names listed on the stationery under that of the chairman, Rev. John G. Simmons, a Methodist minister. The committee included five other men of the cloth, including Rabbi Leonard Berman and Chris Hartmire, the Presbyterian heading the U.S. Council of Churches–sponsored Migrant Ministry in California. Three renowned writers lent their names: Carl Sandburg, John Steinbeck, and Rod Serling. The lone Latino on the initial committee was Los Angeles city councilman Edward Roybal; he was also the only committee member holding an elected office. Former Los Angeles County Supervisor John Anson Ford, a liberal icon since the 1930s, chaired the newly formed Fair Employment Practices Commission for Governor Pat Brown. Frank Mankiewicz, a Los Angeles-based political figure, soon went to work for President Kennedy.
President Kennedy and Congress ultimately ended the Bracero Program due to pressure from a broad national coalition, including the California-based Emergency Committee to Aid Farm Workers in California. Throughout the 4-year campaign to end the Bracero Program, the organization coordinated its efforts with three prominent Mexican Americans: Edward Roybal, who was elected in November 1962 as one of only three Mexican Americans in Congress; Anthony “Tony” Rios, president of the Mexican American–oriented Community Services Organization (CSO), and Eduardo Quevedo, president of the Mexican American Political Association (MAPA).
The Emergency Committee to Aid Farm Workers, staffed by Becker in San Francisco and by JLC organizer Max Mont in Los Angeles, has received too little recognition; it provides evidence of Mexican Americans working in coalition with other groups to change a federal policy that primarily affected Latinos, but was of concern to a wide range of liberal, labor, and religious communities.
The end of the Bracero Program was the necessary precondition for the unionization of farm workers in the 1960s. Moreover, this coalition provided the nucleus for the United Farm Workers’ grape boycott started in 1965.
Steve Allen chaired the first UFW boycott committee in Los Angeles. In 1966, he published The Ground is Our Table. He used his knowledge of the farm workers’ plight and his celebrity status to help introduce the Delano grape strike to the American people.
For more Mexican American and coalition politics in this era, see Kenneth C. Burt’s The Search for a Civic Voice: California Latino Politics (2007).
To view “Harvest of Shame” go to special CBS site.
