Wrong Man, Right Valley

Eleven years ago, John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath carried the hapless Joad family westward on highway 66 to a life of debased poverty on California's big, corporate-owned farms. Since then the story of the impoverished migrant worker in the rich San Joaquin Valley had been told with seasonal regularity in fiction and fact. And sometimes the two got badly mixed, as a congressional subcommittee on education and labor reported scathingly last week.

The committeemen had gone into the valley last November to investigate a two-year-old strike of the National Farm Labor Union (A.F.L.) against the biggest ranch of them all, the n,000-acre Di Giorgio Fruit Corp., producers of $5.9 million worth of grapes, plums, potatoes and asparagus each year. The union complained formally that Di Giorgio had refused to negotiate, then treated the Congressmen to its own 25-minute propagan da film called "Poverty in the Valley of Plenty." The camera poked into sordid one-room shacks, lingered on a leaky shower that served 25 families, studied hollow-eyed, ragged youngsters, while a commentator described a sordid way of life that added up to virtual peonage.

Behind the Screen. Then the Congressmen went after facts, and what they found told an entirely different story about the domain of old Joe Di Giorgio, the Sicilian immigrant who had drilled wells, laid miles of underground pipe and invested $9.7 million to turn a plot of arid land into a production line of agriculture (TIME, March 11, 1946). Di Giorgio wages had always been as good as any in the valley (currently 80-c- to $1.10 per hour); Di Giorgio had voluntarily carried workmen's compensation insurance for his employees. His homes for workers were no palaces (some were made out of old refrigerator cars), but they were clean, whitewashed and handy to running hot & cold water. He had installed plain but serviceable concrete swimming pools, had contributed land and $150,000 for a grammar school adjoining his property. And--most important of all--he had worked hard to take the curse off highly seasonal work by planting crops in sequence, giving year-around jobs to a permanent force of 1,200 (although 1,300 more were needed for peak harvests). The committee's verdict on the N.F.L.U. film: "A shocking collection of falsehoods."

Between the Crops. But nobody denied that the union had the right valley, if the wrong man. Last week an estimated 40,000 farm laborers were jobless, watching their savings melt away between the early cotton and the delayed potato crop. A small fraction of them lived passably well in the former Government camps, now run by growers' associations, but an uncounted number were living as the U.S. likes to think none of its citizens lives--in corrugated tin hovels or sagging tents, with no capital left to drag a flock of youngsters to the next harvest area, and no claim to relief. For some, only federal surplus foods staved off actual starvation. With the onset of tireless, efficient mechanical picking machines and the growing influx of unemployed from the cities, their numbers were swelling again to the highest figure since the days of the Joads.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.