Ten Thousand Thousand Fruit to Touch

Late June is cherry season. Many of us who grew up in the orchard belt that stretches along the south shore of Lake Ontario landed summer jobs picking fruit. Besides earning a little spending money, we learned something about work.

Life may be a bowl of cherries, as the song says, but harvesting required a tough and sweaty effort. At dawn the leaves were clammy with cold dew, by ten the sun was baking the sticky mixture of juice and pesticide onto hands and arms. Wrestling with pointed ladders, climbing, filling buckets—the hours passed slowly and the money was hard-earned.

Local kids did not perform the bulk of labor. In 1960, the nation was offered a glimpse of those who did. They were mostly African American migrants from Florida. Just after Thanksgiving that year, CBS aired a documentary called “Harvest of Shame.” The narrator was Edward R. Murrow, a legend in broadcast news. Many Americans were shocked by what they saw.

Murrow’s message was grim. One farmer was quoted as saying, “we used to own our slaves, now we rent them.” The implication, to the Black workers, was noxious. And while a southern grower avowed of the migrants that “they the happiest race on earth,” the truth was very different.

The cameras followed the migrants northward from their rented homes in Florida as they harvested crops in Georgia, North Carolina, New Jersey, and finally New York. Beans, potatoes, strawberries, cherries, apples. Long hours of stooping, picking and lifting to provide for “the best fed people in the world.”

A few owned cars, most traveled in buses if they were lucky, packed into the backs of trucks otherwise. A highway accident in 1957 killed twenty-one migrants. Federal law regulated the interstate transportation of cattle, not of people.

Along the way, the workers and their families lived in housing barely fit for animals. Often they had no running water, a single tap served a whole camp. They were given straw to sleep on. For sanitation, not even an outhouse.

The accommodations in upstate New York varied from primitive shacks to more substantial barracks. A World War II prisoner-of-war camp was converted to migrant quarters. One farmer purchased obsolete city buses, parked them in a field, and painted them silver to provide cheap shelter.

Migrant farm worker housing.

Crew bosses served as middlemen. They transported the pickers to the fields and were paid by the farmer. Some were honest; many handed over as little as possible to those who did the work and pocketed the difference. Farmers said they were constrained by the prices dictated by supermarket chains. This system, which gave the nation cheap food, was invested with unfairness. Any effort by workers to obtain better conditions was met with howls of protest from powerful farm lobbyists.

Continually on the move, the children of these families suffered more than anyone. They had to mind younger children while parents worked. By the age of eight or nine, they began to help out in the fields themselves. They had little chance for the education that would have broadened their opportunities.

Murrow noted that only one of five hundred migrant children finished grade school. One in five thousand received a high school diploma. He included interviews with bright-eyed kids who hoped against hope to become teachers, nurses, doctors. The crushing of those dreams was part of the cost of supermarket abundance.

Ed Murrow had been a pioneer of radio journalism, starting at CBS in 1935. As a youth laboring in the truck farms and lumber camps of the West, he had developed a sympathy for working people. When he moved to television in the early 1950s, his hard-hitting approach to news frequently pitted him against network executives. “Harvest of Shame” was a deeply personal project for him—and his last. After it aired, he left television for good. A three-pack-a-day smoker, he died five years later at the age of fifty-seven.

The documentary was dominated by Murrow’s resonant narration and tragic eyes, but its story was told in the faces and voices of its subjects. The determination and fragile hopes of America’s working poor made heartbreaking viewing. A minister who worked with migrants asked on camera, “Is it possible to have love without justice?”

In the final moments of the show, Murrow faced the camera and read a list of reforms that had been suggested to improve migrants’ lives. “There will of course be opposition to these recommendations,” he said. “Too much government interference, too expensive, socialism.”

Edward R. Murrow

More than six decades have passed since the documentary aired. Today Hispanic workers harvest most of the crops. The work remains difficult, the housing substandard, benefits nonexistent. Only in recent years have a few laws passed to offer migrants hope. In 2020, farm workers in New York State were finally given access to overtime pay and permission to join a union, rights taken for granted by others.

“The people you have seen have the strength to harvest your fruits and vegetables,” Murrow intoned. “They do not have the strength to influence legislation. Maybe we do.”

He signed off, one last time, with his signature phrase: “Good night, and good luck.”

[To watch “Harvest of Shame” click HERE.]