JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
Surfacing today in the warehouse was a collection of papers, all bound together punch-bound in a makeshift manila binding, all on the subject of mechanization and its impact on the migrant worker, and all from 1936-1938 or so.It was the mechanization of farming chores following the recession after WWI which contributed to over-farming and over-production of farming land, and that, combined with with this soil erosion with drought, contributed to the Dust Bowl and the vast migration of the Great Depression.
Among the papers on new farm implements and the millions of people on the move was “The Child in the Migratory Camp—Health”, by Edward J. Rowell, a slim but telling four pages on the plight of kids in migrant camps. This paper was published in California Children, Sept 1938, pp 1-4, and is referenced in James Noble Gregory, American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California, p 289. It is a very sobering read, and I reproduce it below in full as there are but a few references to it.
- [As one migrant child told John Steinbeck, "When they need us they call us migrants, and when we've picked their crop, we're bums and we got to get out" (Steinbeck, "Harvest Gypsies" 1. after his In Dubious Battle, a work that deals with the migrant worker and which was published in 1936, Steinbeck was given an assignment and space to further document the situation of the mobile workers in the San Francisco News, the stories appearing October 5-12, 1936. These seven articles were later published together—along with 22 photographs by Dorothea Lange—in a work called Their Blood is Strong, appearing in 1938.)]
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