In 1965, the government tried replacing migrant workers with high-schoolers. It was a disaster.

Washington Post

7 days ago

Roy McNutt was 17 when he spent a summer picking pickles for America.
'It was lousy,' he said.
McNutt, now 77, joined thousands of high school teens harvesting cucumbers, melons, strawberries and carrots during the summer of 1965. That was after Congress cut off the pathway for millions of migrant workers from Mexico to cross the border and bring that food to the nation's tables.
The Mexican Farm Labor program had been created in 1942 to address the World War II labor shortage. Known as the bracero program. it allowed generations of manual laborers to work in the United States and was set to expire in 1964. A revival of the program, the Bracero 2.0 Act, was introduced in Congress last week.
'It was a time of both heightened xenophobia and heightened critique of foreign guest workers,' said Lori Flores, associate history professor at Columbia University. The migrant workers were 'either taking jobs away from citizens in various spheres or draining public aid and resources.'
So U.S. officials let the program die. They were convinced that unemployed, domestic workers would fill those jobs. They did not.
The fields of unpicked produce began rotting.
'Farm Work Builds Men!' read one of the fliers that the Labor Department began sending to schools, with the image of Heisman Trophy winner John Huarte urging high school jocks to spend the summer saving the 1965 crop.
The government plan was for thousands of athletes to sign up for 'Join A-TEAM' (Athletes in Temporary Employment as Agricultural Manpower). The Labor Department urged the coaches to become field supervisors and bond with the players, who would surely get stronger and more disciplined toiling in the hot sun. As the school year ended, hometown papers ran glowing stories about the boys, capturing their toothpaste smiles as they prepared to set off on a noble adventure.
'We were getting away from our parents for the summer,' said Randy Carter, who was 17 when he got on a bus with his Catholic school pals in San Diego and headed to Blythe, California, to pick cantaloupes. 'We thought, maybe there would be some girls! Maybe we could get beer!'
Carter wanted to earn money for a surfboard. One of the guys had a guitar.
It would be fun, they hoped. But the entire program was a disaster.
The article in McNutt's hometown paper, the Springfield, Ohio, News-Sun, said his group would be in the Heinz cucumber fields.
The group left the farm in Michigan after only a week.
The labor was slow, and growers quickly complained that the cucumbers grew faster than the boys could pick them and got too big to pickle.
'That's a truckload of garbage I've got,' Hank Keytylo told the Detroit Free Press that August, pointing to a load from his 20-acre cucumber patch.
'I'll get $50 for the whole truckload,' Keytylo said. 'Any other years, I'd get $150 for a truckload.'
Meanwhile the boys, stunned at the living conditions and the backbreaking work in fields from Michigan to Texas to California, complained.
'They were fed food that was unfit for human consumption,' Rep. Teno Roncalio (D-Wyoming) said of his state's A-TEAM members who were sent to Salinas, California. In a speech on the House floor on June 29, 1965, he said that they 'lived in beds filthy with bedbugs; they had to associate with switchblade knife carriers.'
At least one of his colleagues was thrilled with this testimony.
'I am delighted to hear the gentleman from Wyoming give this report to the House, because the conditions he described are the conditions I and others have been describing and deploring over many years as they applied to other workers,' said Rep. Jeffery Cohelan (D-California).
The 37 boys all paid their own way back to Wyoming, and Roncalio wanted the growers or the government to pay them back.
Most of the program went like this.
And because America's corn-fed boys complained about working conditions, the nation finally listened to the grim reality about the way food gets to the table.
'In denouncing these conditions as unacceptable for U.S. workers, Roncalio failed to acknowledge that braceros had endured these exact conditions since 1942,' Flores wrote in 'Grounds for Dreaming,' her book about Mexican workers and immigrants in the California farmworker movement.
'It had taken young citizen athletes complaining of similar sufferings to alert him and others to the mistreatment of farmworkers,' she said.
That was just as Cesar Chavez was beginning to organize farmworkers to protest the low pay and deplorable working conditions they faced.
The influx, then rejection of migrant labor forces is a familiar cycle in the United States.
During the late 1900s, most farmworkers in the U.S. came from China, Japan and the Philippines. Xenophobic hysteria spawned the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and the U.S. turned to Mexico and South America to replace the banned Chinese workers.
During the Great Depression, President Herbert Hoover ordered the deportation of nearly 2 million migrant workers who had come from Mexico. The creation of a border patrol in 1924 tightened the U.S.-Mexico border.
Then, during World War II, the government changed its mind. Farm labor was desperately needed to harvest the crops, which is what spawned the bracero program to bring Mexican laborers to the U.S. on short-term contracts. It lasted until 1964, when America again became averse to migrant labor.
So, Congress let the program die. And growers again pleaded for help, saying the domestic workforce was uninterested in their minimum-wage jobs. Extensions of the visa programs for non-U.S. workers would be the only things that would save the American produce aisle.
'Crops are rotting, and they are rotting because of a genuine labor shortage in spite of all the efforts by responsible growers to recruit and maintain a domestic labor force,' O.W. Fillerup, executive vice president of the Council of California Growers, said to the Associated Press for an article published May 5, 1965.
W. Willard Wirtz, the U.S. secretary of labor, said the growers weren't trying hard enough to hire domestic labor and announced his A-TEAM program.
Carter was among the 3,300 boys who were all in.
Sandy Koufax, Rafer Johnson — 'big athletes did these press conferences,' he said.
So he got on the bus to Blythe, a stretch of agricultural nowhere far from the ocean and closer to the Colorado River.
The program promised good pay, good food, good housing conditions. But the first meal they were served was boiled tongue, which many weren't used to eating. The bunks were made of hard metal.
'You're wearing an overcoat before dawn, since it's chilly,' said Carter, who went on to work in Hollywood and has written a screenplay about his time as a melon picker. 'And by 9 o'clock, it's 120 degrees.'
More than half the kids quit. And only one high school team — the guys from Cresco, Iowa — finished with all 31 boys who started, the AP reported in the autumn of 1965.
The boys were horrified by the food and living conditions. Some got milk after making demands for more nutrition. One boy from Utah, Ed Carlson, said his cafeteria had a riot after they all threw down their trays filled with slop. In some cases, the growers ended up having to foot the bill at local cafes, which served the only palatable food for miles.
Growers complained of flying melons and strawberries — food fights in the fields. They were teens, after all.
Many of the boys said they were never paid.
'Not a dime,' said McNutt, the pickle picker.
After most of the crew of boys from Wichita quit, one of the bosses was circumspect about the program. He said that part of the failure was undervaluing the work of the braceros.
'It takes skill,' Bill Pihl told the Beacon. 'It's cold in the morning and hot in the afternoon. It's rough work.
'And for kids who never did it, it's impossible.'