AGRICULTURAL laborers continue even under the New Deal to be America's worst-exploited workers. They lack even the moral support of the NRA codes and are not mentioned in the AAA program. Only when they organize and strike do they attain to some of the privileges enjoyed by industrial workers-the privilege of being enjoined, shot at by deputies, and mobbed by vigilantes. Landowners of the rich Scioto Marsh in Hardin County, Ohio, have learned the use of vigilantes in opposing the strike of farm laborers organized in the Agricultural Workers' Union, who have been out since June in a fight for union recognition and thirty-five cents an hour instead of the twelve cents or less previously paid. The struggle reached its climax when the strike leader, Okey Odell, while in the custody of Sheriff Wilbur Mitchell and twenty armed deputies, was abducted by 200 vigilantes.
On June 19 and 20 of this year Okey Odell, an onion weeder, and J. M. Rizor, an organizer for the International Quarrymen's Union, formed the first union of farm laborers to be affiliated with the American Federation of Labor. When the thirty members of the Onion Growers' Association operating the seventy square miles of marsh farms refused to deal with the union committees, a strike call was issued which was 100 per cent effective. The strikers, with the simple directness of new unionists, good-humoredly stopped all automobiles entering the marsh section and searched them for strike-breakers. There was no violence.
Two days after the beginning of the strike Common Pleas Judge Hamilton E. Hoge issued one of the most inclusive injunctions in recent labor history. Handed down on petition of the growers' association, it not only restricts peaceful picketing to groups of two but leaves to the discretion of deputy sheriffs the distance allowed between such groups. Thus thirty-four pickets were set at first twenty-five, then fifty, and later a hundred yards apart by successive groups of deputies, and were finally arrested by another group for "congregating in violation of the injunction." On other occasions pickets have been called together by the deputies and, when they obeyed, arrested for "congregating."
To enforce the injunction fifty-four deputies were immediately sworn in by Sheriff Wilbur Mitchell. The deputies are almost without exception members of the Hardin County detachment of the National Guard, "veterans of Toledo," according to the sheriff. When Governor George White was asked by the strikers why the deputies were recruited from the Ohio National Guard and why they were armed with riot guns, machine-guns, and tear-gas equipment from the Kenton armory, he replied that the guardsmen were there as "private citizens." That veteran of Toledo saw nothing strange in the use by "private citizens" of Ohio's paraphernalia of war. Officers of the National Guard directed the placing and drilling of the deputies and made several talks to them in their quarters on the property of the Scioto Land Company. Citizens complaining of being molested by the guards were referred by the sheriff to Brigadier General Connolly. The sheriff later learned the niceties of Ohio politics and ordered investigations which were never completed.
The strikers were not impressed by the impartiality of the law when their strike leader and president, Okey Odell, was arrested on complaint of Jennings Stambaugh, Scioto Land Company official. Stambaugh, according to testimony of the town marshal of McGuffey, approached the strike leader on the street and in the course of an argument flourished a gun in his face. Arrested by the marshal, Stambaugh retaliated by having Odell arrested for congregating a crowd in violation of the injunction. Odell served ten days, the limit for contempt of court in Ohio, on the testimony of Stambaugh, of a spraying-machine owner who works for the growers, and of a clerk in a hardware store owned by one of the growers who was two city blocks away from the disturbance. The charge against Stambaugh was thrown out of court.
Work in the marshes is uncertain at best. Because the growers prefer to use the cheap labor of children from nine to fourteen years of age, there is seldom as much as ninety days' work a year for adult members of families-at twelve cents an hour and less. The bulk of the work consists of weeding the onions after the planting season. Hand-propelled wheel hoes are run between the rows, followed by hand weeders who crawl on their knees all day in black muck which reaches a temperature of 170 degrees in the July and August sun. For this back-breaking work the strikers ask thirty-five cents an hour. Obviously, with ninety days' work a year at the best, this amount, even supplemented by relief, would not mean a comfortable standard of living.
Meanwhile the growers are as prosperous as they ever were. Prices of onions last season were nearly as high as in 1929, but present wages are less than half the rate of that "boom" year. The price per hundred pounds was $1.50 in 1929, $2.50 in 193], $1.45 in 1933. Wages were cut deeply in 1931, a most profitable year for the growers. In 1929 wages were around twenty-five cents an hour; this year they have dropped to $1.25 and less for a ten-hour day.
Homer J. Brown, federal labor conciliator, spent two days interviewing the growers and presented the proposal of the owners to the strikers-fifteen cents an hour and no recognition of the union. Had the conciliator consulted the strikers, he might have saved himself the indignity of being hooted as he left. Had he investigated, he would have found a condition of virtual peonage, described by a town business man as "the sweetest racket in the State."
In addition to work on the owner's plantings each tenant farmer tends a patch of onions for the rental of a shack unbelievably dilapidated, without heating facilities, and usually without windows. Theoretically the shares are fifty-fifty, but charges deducted from the tenant's share often leave him at the end of the season with nothing paid but his rent. In previous years the grower paid for "fitting" the land. that is, preparing it for use. Now the tenant is charged as much as $12.50 an acre for this service, the amount being deducted from his "share" at the end of the season, though the tenants claim, and they are supported by the figures of the few independent farmers in the marsh, that fitting costs the growers no more than $7.50 an acre. And the tenant goes on sharing to the end of the season, when he must pay for the crates in which his onions are packed. At harvest time the tenant trucks his onions to the huge warehouses maintained by the Onion Growers' Association. There his share is computed at a price set by the growers, through their ownership of the association. Culls and rejects, for which the tenants receive nothing; are sold by the association to canneries.
The Mayor of McGuffey, Godfrey Ott, who is also a grocer, claims to have bills outstanding against tenants to the amount of $4,500. Insurance men tell of industrial policies dropped these last two and three years until virtually no worker in the marsh has a reserve even for burial expenses. Almost all the small business men in McGuffey and Alger are caught in the same economic trap as the workers. Health conditions, as might be expected under the circumstances, are miserable. Six women in a random gathering of twenty at strike headquarters had suffered still-births or miscarriages during the previous year. But a miscarriage may be counted as good fortune if children must grow up in the marsh. A report on school attendance prepared and issued before the strike reflects the general conditions of ill health.
Fewer than 50 per cent of the pupils complete the eighth grade.... The intelligence quotients of the pupils in the marsh district vary from average to 20 per cent below average, as compared with the upland schools in the township [Marion].... In the opinion of Frank C. Ransdell, country superintendent of schools, the low comparative intelligence level of the marsh-district pupils is due to environment and malnutrition rather than to heredity. He estimates that under improved living conditions this district would compare favorably with the upland school districts in the township and county.
The growers have learned from industrial manufacturers how to persuade the State to do some "sharing" too. On petition of the growers an agricultural experiment station was set up in the marsh a few years ago to study rotation of crops in an attempt to revive the land, which is deteriorating because of one-crop plantings. Since the station has been established, it has been devoted to replenishing the land for the continued planting of onions; the growers are reluctant to abandon a crop over which they have monopoly control.
Evictions of tenant farmers have begun in the district. With their kitchen gardens confiscated by the growers in the process of eviction, the workers face a winter unequaled even in their experience of misery. But they remain militant. A written agreement entered into between officers and rank-and-file members of the union and officers of the Ohio and National Unemployed Leagues sets a precedent in relations between organized unemployed and strikers. The agreement provides for defense of both union members and Unemployed League members by the same legal-defense machinery; for representation of league members on committees of the strike; that the "strike will continue with militant tactics"; and that no settlement of the strike shall be made without agreement of the strikers, including league members active in the strike. The latter clause was inserted as a result of the rich experience of the leagues in winning strikes for A. F. of L. unions, which were settled over the heads of the strikers by federation officials considerably less militant than the body of strikers. ;
Sam Pollock, a district vice-president of the Ohio Unemployed League and a leader in smashing the injunction at the Electric Auto-Lite plant in Toledo, has been jailed and held in $1,000 bail. The charges against Pollock are "unlawful assemblage," "inciting to riot," and "malicious destruction of property" growing out of retaliation by strikers when a truckload of strike-breakers attempted to run down a group of pickets. Pollock's wife is denied access to him, and when defense lawyers were finally successful in seeing him they were hedged about by deputies during the entire conversation.
Following a conference between Okey Odell and Robert C. Fox, the federal labor conciliator who has been sent to the scene by Secretary Perkins, local newspapers carried stories to the effect that the strikers were willing to accept twenty-five cents an hour instead of the thirty-five cents demanded, though Odell authorized no such statement and the growers remain adamant in their refusal to recognize the union or make any concessions. The landowners are evidently depending on the vigilantes to do their conciliating.
