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"THAT THEY MIGHT HAVE VITALITY”
Suggestive Thoughts on Migratory Labor in Light of the Christian Tradition
Read to a Church group in Berkeley, California
in the Fall of 1936
by
Eric H. Thomsen
Assistant Regional Director of the Resettlement Administration
in San Francisco, Calif.
LIBRARY
UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON SEATTLEIntroduction
If I were asked to choose a text for what I plan to say to you on the subject of migratory workers, it would he the famous "abundant life” passage (John:10:10). Only I should want to use the rendition of T. E. Glover, lecturing at Yale a few years ago — "I have come that they might have vitality and overflow with it.” I like this strikingly fresh translation all the more because it better than anything else summarizes what I understand to have been Jesus1 conception of his own life purpose. In addressing a group of Church members I should like to bear that purpose clearly in mind as we think of the conditions under which migratory laborers live and work.
Lest I make our problem seem easier than it is, let me add that I am well aware of the difficulties that confront anyone who would study our present serious social economic questions with a view to determining what should be our attitude as Christians» Our quest is hindered rather than helped, for example, by the discovery that Jesus looked with indifference upon nearly all — property, money, social prestige ■— that ordinary men and women mean by the good life. He pitied the wealthy whom he found almost incapable of the simplicity which is characteristic of the Kingdom of God, and he evidently thought his disciples could not afford to seek any surplus in worldly goods because possessions tend to separate men from God and from their fellow men. He warned them alike against greed and against lording it over others. We should not be disappointed, therefore, though we are often bewildered to discover that whatever should be done on purely practical grounds to change our system of economic distribution, Jesus has nothing to say which bears directly on the problem. But his teaching does have much to say about the relative importance which we ought to attach to that in life in which "one man's gain is another man's loss.”
The immediate impression one gets from reading the gospels is that Jesus
is
CLASS CONSCIOUS AMONG THE POOH
though he maintains friendly relations with those whom he mentions as rich. We may he sure, however, that the frankness of Jesus offended many of those who, being wealthy and influential, feared his teaching; otherwise, there is no explaining their hitter resentment of him, for the world is not in the hahit of persecuting the tame and commonplace. It was probably true then, as Lean Inge has since said of Christianity, that it ”is a revolutionary idealism, which estranges revolutionaries because it is idealistic, and conservatives because it is revolutionary.”
The gospels presuppose a background of relatively simple rural living among comparatively self-sufficient country towns. We shall nowhere find the sharp contrast between employer and employee which a more recent industrial order has brought about, and neither Jesus nor his early followers had any specific teaching on the subject of industrial relations any more than on slavery, neither of which were recognized problems in their day. What we do find here and there may be taken as occasional clues as to what has probably been their general attitude. In Jesus’ parable of the unemployed, for example, the implication appears to be that since those who had been idle, from no fault of their own, were as much in need of general . maintenance as those who worked all day, a responsible steward of the provisions which God had made for all his children, would volunteer to pay each according to
his needs.
It probably never occurred to Jesus to ask the question ”Am I-my brother’s keeper?”; bat it seems implicit in all his life and teaching that he might have said "Surely, I am my brother's brother.” Hence the chief indictment against Lives was
not his riches but his indifference to or ignorance of the misery into which Lazarushad fallen. He had failed as a "brother toward the poor man. The oejection to the rich young ruler was that he had been so preoccupied with his possessions as to "become remiss in his relations to God and his neighbors. The danger about wo 1 shaping Mammon was the possibility of forgetting God since most people are single—tranked, and "where your treasure is, there will your heart be also."
Nevertheless, since our religion will not command the motives of men except as it commends itself to their imagination and challenges their volition, if we still insist that Jesus is "the wisdom of God", we must find ways of demonstrating to a skeptical world what we mean by that. Let us gather out of the total record
A FEW FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES
to guides us in our quest for reality in religion and sanity in industry. (l) In the first place Jesus insisted on looking upon humanity as God’s great family, whose individual members should cease all self-seeking and should seek the good of all.
This implies at once a condition under which no one has to do without his daily needs, but by the same token a world of men and women who will be content to receive their diverse daily needs, and no more.
(2)	In the second place, Jesus never ceased to stress the priceless value of personality. Only fools would think that the success of a man’s life consisted in the amount of his possessions. All other values are compared with man and man found infinitely superior, more valuable even than the most sanctified institution, surely worth more than the Sabbath, or than property, because man is God's closest km.
(3)	The whole relationship of God's family is summed up in tne Golden Rule. Men must learn to love - "not money but God, not self but other men"; there must be a readiness on our part to put out selves in the place of others, and a willingness to put ourselves out for them, refusing to consider anything good enough for others which we are not content to accept for ourselves. Anger, lust, falsehood,retaliation and. violent dislike are outlawed. because they are not consistent with the family affection. Even if Jesus did not baldly so state it, the failure of the rich man was early interpreted to he economic indifference to the poverty and wretchedness around him. And while Jesus did not recommend that all his friends of means sell their possessions, the final test divided on whether or not men had fed the hungry, clothed the naked, satisfied the thirsty, entertained the strangers and visited the sick and imprisoned - services which had distinct economic implications
then as now.
He gradually came to think of his Messiahship in terms of the Suffering Servant of the Lord, and it was this very suffering servitude which the apostles found so preposterous in the Messiah that they shrank from the idea in horror and insisted that he must he mistaken. We can only understand how shocked they were when we recall that THEY thought of the Messiah as an influential Ruler, and of themselves as the favored few whose inside track gave them access to special privileges in his Kingdom, until they were rudely awakened hy his constant insistence that their standing in the new order would he measured hy their capacity to serve usefully and effectively, more precisely their capacity to forget themselves, to become fellow-burden-bearers, and in that manner to identify themselves with him. They thought to dominate as they themselves had already been dominated, and had to be reminder that though their rulers lord it over them, they were not so to be; whoever would rank first among them must qualify by first ranking also in useful service willingly rendered to all. For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve and to spend his very life in redemptive work, ” I have come tha.t men might have vitality and overflow with it.,!
However, before you have gone very far in promoting vitality in the modern world you discover that you will be compelled to decide what to do with the mosti. depository copy
sanctified institution of your own day. What of the ’’right” to unlimited private gain? Or the "right” to ruthless exploitation of natural resources or of your fellow men for personal profit? Jesus said of the most sanctified institution of his day that it was, of course, subject to human control: "The Sabbath was made for man,
not man for the Sabbath.” You are not entitled to assume, on the basis of his
record, that he might have been influenced to say today: Man was made for slum living, for low wages, for stunting drudgery, for cannon fodder. Man was made for a life bubbling over with vitality, not for subsistence living. Men are, of course, the masters and not the slaves of the entire social organism. Moreover, to Jesus faith appears to have been not primarily belief about anything; primarily faith involved courage to take the next step toward that ideal order which he insisted could only come about by patient search and steady growth among men who cared greatly that it should come, anxious to commit themselves and willing to pay the price of excellence. In thus pursuing his life goal he was constantly restrained and opposed by those who in his day would keep the world unchanged. Ultimately they had him executed as guilty in religion of blasphemy and in matters of the world of insurrection and civil disobedience. The evidence throughout supports the assumption, however, that both Jesus and his disciples were revolutionaries bent on functioning like yeast in an organism which must needs become drastically though gradually
transformed.
THE DISTURBING FACT OF MIGRATORY LABOR
It is in the light of this venerable Christian tradition that we must study the disturbing conflicts with which our industrial age is ridden, putting ourselves honestly and intelligently in the place of the workers, managers, owners and consumers who together constitute society and maintain industry. Everything we consume is substantially the labor of fellow humans, and we cannot afford to be indifferentto what we eat or drink or wherewith we clothe or amuse ourselves. If we manage the
fine art of putting ourselves in the place of others, we shall think of child labor
in terms of our own children forced into wage labor in factories or fields at an age
when they should be in school or at play. We must think of our own boys and girls,
handicapped, for example, by the conditions under which migratory laborers live and
work in California as indicated in the following quotations from an official report:
’’The Parent-Teachers’ Association members felt that the migratory children were responsible for the frequent epidemics breaking out in the schools. The school authorities stated that children of the migratory families often came to school hungry. In fact, one of the school clerks reported that two or three families each week complained that it was impossible to send the children to school as they had no food."
I am deliberately not putting any names to these records, for conditions among migratory workers, while worse in some localities than in others, are sufficiently degrading and inexcusable in general so that matters of geographical location become entirely subsidiary. A different government agency, for instance., visited another county and reported:
"We found filth, squalor, an entire absence of sanitation and a crowding of human beings into totally inadequate tents or crude structures built of boards, weeds, and anything that was found at hand to give a pitiful semblance of a home at its worst. Words cannot describe some of the conditions we saw ... It is horrible that children are raised in an environment as pitiable as that which we saw in more than one locality."
Surely we must judge of these conditions in the light of the possibility that the children exposed to them are our children and in any case, insofar as they survive, the citizens of tomorrow. So, likewise, we must think of unemployment not only as we conceive ourselves standing in breadlines for a handout, but consider the accumulative effect on our entire life and character of receiving inadequate charity reluctantly dispensed, in place of wages honestly earned for useful work cooperatively rendered. We shall imagine our fathers and mothers incapacitated for work andleft without the provision of their needs because we have lacked, the courage and.
social intelligence to provide for adequate old age pensions. Let me quote again from recent official records:
’’During the time of the study, a man, 73 years old . .. asked for help (and was sent to the V.O.A. which did not open until 7:30 p.m.)
... he had to listen to services lasting an hour. He was then offered food, but begged only to be allowed to lie down. At 6 o’clock in the morning, when all of the men were told they must leave, he was not able to rise. A police doctor was called and he recommended hospital care. Several hours elapsed before the man reached the County Hospital, where he died ... The man was buried in the Potter's Field.”
In one of the studies of the State Emergency Relief Administration it was found that ’’over two per cent were 65 years of age or over, an age when they should have been eligible for state or Federal aid to the aged if they had a fixed residence or place of abode” — a luxury which a great many of them no longer afford.
The same study records an incident from the "Vag war” which the Los Angeles police
force carried on for a while:
"The other jailer was less considerate of the other prisoners.
He fingerprinted them, and. those who were awkward and slow with their hands he cursed loudly as ’god-damned dumb bums’. One old man, at least seventy, was treated worse than a dog. He was feeble and shaky and his ancient horny hands were hard to ’print’. The officer swore and raged at him, and by the time he got through the old man was almost in tears. He made a pitiful picture - small, stooped and gray, standing there in his dirty ragged clothes, beside the big, robust officer in a uniform. As he tried to obey the cop’s sharp orders, he became more and more confused and nervous; his ragged knees shook and there was panic and stark fear in his old, blue eyes. I found myself gritting my teeth before the ordeal was over, and several of the other men mumbled subdued oaths at the cop. When we were taken into the mess room for our lunch of brow beans, dry bread and coffee, the old man ate as if he were starving, and stuffed five slices of bread after tne beans and coffee were all gone.”
This is not in any case a pretty picture; but when you see in the form of the old man in distress the shocking presence in his dire circumstances of your own closest kin, then the whole episode takes on some of that heartbreak and cruel agony which is inherent in the entire migratory labor problem at almost any time.
We mustlook upon the old. men no less than upon the young children in migratory labor as if, hut for the accident of superior economic advantage, they might have been our children or our parents. So, likewise, we should be able to consider intelligently though vicariously the effect on us or on our fellow men of irregular work in coal mines, textile mills, fruit orchards, vegetable fields, or in any other set of circumstances which involve inadequate pay with all of its attending evil consequences of malnutrition, insanitary housing, imperiled health, unsavory personal relations, perverted instincts, and all the other sorry and shocking inheritance
which we will to the poor.
Should we care to be share croppers, landless tenant farmers, hired country laborers without a home of our own, without even a legal residence, lacking most of the opportunities which lead to normal development and the enrichment of family life? How should we like hours of monotonous piece work in canneries or packing sheds or ten to twelve hours in baking sun in fields and orchards until our very bones ached with weariness and the setting sun found us no longer any good to ourselves or to our families? Would we submit to the dehumanizing factors which still obtain in many industrial fields despite the honest and sincere efforts of many owners and managers, to serve their workers and consider them as partners? How should we like to work for those who think of labor only as a commodity to be bought in the open market as cheaply as possible, and who would rather die than admit workers to common council or collective bargaining? Where growers or any other kind of employers organize in order to compel labor to render as much as possible for as little as possible, the not uncommon reaction of workers is to organize to get as much money for as little work as they can be made to render, a combination which in its net results is socially wasteful and disastrous. The community as a whole has obvious rights which
transcend the rights of any group within it. In seeking responsible and effectivesolutions of the intricate problems which trouble us, we are surely entitled to look upon the social order as a farmer looks upon his fields. Both are meant to be productive in response to intelligent cultivation. Even as a matter of good business sense, cooperation for maximum human wellbeing commends itself as superior to unrestrained competition for private gain regardless of social consequences. Meanwhile, let the records speak for themselves so that you may view some of the grim background on which the contemporary drama of migratory laoor is being played. It is proper that we should let the California Division of Immigration and Housing take the lead with its description of what Dr. Paul Taylor has graphically called "these social pock-marks":
"G-roups of persons arrive at any given community and start a camp.
No provision is made for sanitation, water supply, or even general camp cleanliness. Such housing accommodations as they may have is eked out by wood, tin, or such cast-off material as can be obtained in the vicinity.
A sorry picture is presented of a condition that threatens to be a serious menace to those communities where squatter camps exist. Moving the occupants away simply spreads the condition and local authorities are loath to act against people who came there in the hope of securing some employment. The division's attention has been called to a number of these squatter camps during the last winter, but has no legal authority to take remedial steps..."
The annual report of the County Health Department for 1935 stated:
"The large population of migratory workers in Kern County ... (who) liv*e under unsanitary and crowded housing conditions, where families of eight, twelve, or more members are often crowded into single or two-room cabins or tents without adequate water supply and excreta disposal facilities, and with no provision for screening against flies, contribute a disproportionately large part of the incidence of sickness and deaths from communicable diseases in Kern County. It is recognized that the improvement of living conditions under which the migratory workers in Kern County vzork is a community problem and one of the biggest public health problems to be met in Kern County."
One of the studies of the State Emergency Relief Administration records the following incident which illustrates the precarious margin under which the lives of migratory workers must often be lived both in regard to wages, employment andfamily health:
’’One blind baby was not able to sit up. The mother said, ’Vie’ve never had enough money for doctors. I don’t know what’s the matter vrith baby or why she’s blind. She certainly is poorly. I don’t know what the relief will do...My husband does farming or anything. Vie picked cotton in Arizona for a little while after we left Oklahoma but didn’t earn much. Vie thought if we came to California we would be able to pick peas, but when we arrived all the company camps were full and they wouldn’t let us in. Vie have been here a month and my husband hasn’t had a thing to do yet. Uow the heal oh doctor gave us notice to move not later than today. I wonder where we can go. Vie haven’t a drop of gas in the car and there’s a flat tire.”
It Is not only that health breaks down under malnutrition, lack of sanitation, and inadequate medical care. Character eventually deteriorates, though one wonders how, in spite of harrowing experiences and cruel privation, the migrants manage to sustain their fundamental decency and high moral character as long as they do. Possibly the experience works greater hardship among the young. The Chief Probation Officer of Kern County reported:
”2200 cases a year came to the attention of the department, and sixty per cent of the children came from the transient families.” Living conditions arc deplorable; employment is intermittent and must
usually bo pursued through constant travel from place to plaoo, following the crops
in season; even when employment has boon secured, much of it is done on a contract
basis; but whether or not the contractor or the farmer himself is the employer of
labor, the compensation law's of the State arc compulsory for neither of thorn:
’’The Viorkm.cn’ s Compensation Laws of California allow the employer of agricultural labor to post notice on his promises to the effect that ho has rejected the compensation provisions of the State.”
Some of tho additional hazard to the worker involved in those dealings
with labor contractors may be gathered from the following quotations from a report
on Filipinos by the State Department of Industrial Relations (1930):
’’Since the labor contractor is very seldom bonded, and is usually a financially irresponsible man, his workers are dependent entirely on his honesty in getting their wages. It happens not infrequently that-li-
the labor contractor absconds with the payroll entrusted to him by the grower, especially toward the end of the harvesting season when the Contractor receives the final payment, which is biggest because- it contains the money withheld by the grower as a guarantee of fulfillmen" of the contract."
The time comos when both living and working conditions become intolerable and when desperate men, worried about their wives and children, take advantage of their age-old American rights of free speech and assembly to organize into labor unions "nd to try to obtain by collective bargaining the advantages of which as
individuals they have boon deprived. It may take a long time to get that far . I have an interesting biographical sketch of one migrant who lived for eighteen years as a renter in Oklahoma, chiefly by raising cotton. In ISIS he became ill and went to Colorado for three years until he moved to Western Oklahoma because of his wife’s health. His wife died there the following year; he re-marriod and rented a farm in Oklahoma, but after two years we find him working for wages as a farm laborer in New Mexico and Western Oklahoma. In 1932 he was picking cotton in Texas and in subsequent years, strawberries, beans and back to cotton, following cotton into Arizona in 1935 and into California in January, 193G. Here, twenty-five years after his first start, under the impact of the anxieties and the insecurity of a quarter of a century, for the first time wo find him "on strikers’ bargaining committee”; that this should be in Imperial Valley is perhaps not accidental. Yet eventually, following the migratory cycle, he arrived in the Poach Cowl and lived in the migratory labor camp operated by the Resettlement Administration. At the end of the season our manager there recorded his impression of the same family in
the foilowing words:
’’The whole family works at every opportunity.. .He is a man of great integrity. Ho and his wife are good parents and very considerate of their children. While at camp ho and his family were a decided stabilizing influence. B. always kept well up on his rent. He was ever ready to lend a helping hand when needed.”Yet he was the same man who less than a year before, under different circumstances, in the Imperial Valley, had been on the ’’strikers’ bargaining committee Thio is somewhat easier to understand when you recall that the serious labor disturbances in Imperial County two years ago resulted in the following reports to the
National Labor Board:
’’There is a legitimate complaint about the water that is taken from the irrigation ditches. It is muddy in appearance, liable to contamination from the people who temporarily reside on the banks of the streams, and is not purified by chemical, treatment, as in the cities. This is not only a serious health problem for those who use the water, but there is a distinct menace to all the people of the Imperial Valley. Typhoid fever is not unknown. The diseases that follow the uso of impure water are prevalent.”
’’Living and sanitary conditions are a serious and irritating factor in the unrest we found in the Imperial Valley..."lords cannot describe sone of the conditions we saw’. ..It is horrible that children are raised in an environment as pitiable as that which we saw in more than one locality. But worse than that is the harsh suppression of that which we in the United States claim as our birth-right, the freedom of expressing our lawful opinions and legally to organize to better our lot and that of our follow men.”
That is to say, not only are living and working conditions in spots so intolerable as to provoke just resentment on the part of the workers, but attempts to organize to improve thorn are mot by fascist methods which'have boon known to turn into practical civil war with tho forces of law and order lined up with the big growers to defeat justice and promote chaos by terroristic methods characteristic of professional gangsters. If this sounds like the Ill-advised utterance 'of a casual observer, consider the impact of this official pronouncement by the Major-General 171-0 as special Labor Conciliator reported to the United
States government in these words:
’’After more than twzo months of observation and investigation in Imperial Valley, it is my conviction that a group of growers have exploited a. ’’communist” hysteria for the advancement of their own interests; that'they have welcomed labor agitation, which they could brand as ’rod’, as a means of sustaining supremacy by mob rule, thereby preserving what is so essential to their profits - che.ap labor; thatthey have succeeded, in drawing into their4 conspiracy certain county officials who have become the principal tools of their machine."
Such incidents by the frequency of their occurrence and the viciousness
of their nature have caused a growing number of responsible citizens to conclude that the issue is so large and so menacing as to constitute more than a problem for tho State. The State Emergency Relief Administration has pointed out the impossibility of solving tho problem on a state-wide basis; but tho problem itself :tho SERA study admirably summarizes in these words:
"It has been said, with some degree of truth, that our resident unemployed, through no fault of their own, have boon reduced to a state of pauperism. The lot of the transient has boon even worse. There is no room for him even in the poor-house, in the county hospital, or on tho so-called dole. Ho is reduced to the status of a beggar. Ho must panhandle on tho city streets, ask for food from door to door — or starve. In good weather he can sleep under tho suars; but in cold, damp weather he must construct a rude, unsanitary shack from scrap material in a jungle, crawl into an empty box-car or a deserted building, find shelter in some other manner - or suffer from exposure. There is no method by which he can procure new clothing or needed medical care,
"Robinson Crusoe, on a desort island, could at least make use of ■whatever he could find and sot up housekeeping in one permamont spot.
The transient, in the midst of a civilized society, is forbidden by law from settling down in a vacant lot or by tho side of a road. "Good citizens" - that is, persons who still have jobs— arc apt to blame the transient for every delinquency or disorder, for the spread of disease, for his own shabby appearance, for difficulties in harvesting pcrishablo crops, for the over-supply of crop harvesters. Thus the victim becomes the villain."
"he is an out-cast, driven from tho cities, from the small towns, from the desert and farming communities. Although ho Is able and vrilling to work, ho cannot find work or even shelter. Nowhere is there food for him. VRcn his health is gone, nowhere can he find medical care. Even his final resting place is grudged him in the potterTs field."
"it must be remembered .also that while public aloofness from the problem of the transient may be excused on the grounds of lack of responsibility for his welfare or his future, such excuse is not available when public self-interest enters into the picture.,.continued neglect of the transient and his problems cannot help but rebound to the active detriment of the health, morals and welfare of the State, lie do not live or die in a vacuum—nor does the transient."Do wre need to be especially sensitive to hear a calm but steady voice calling to us down through the ages: BEHOLD YOUR TRAPSlENT BROTHER • Vihat shall we do with him if in the light of Jesus’ conception of the Family of God we become primarily concerned vdth the status of producers and consumers, migratory workers as well as growers, as sons and daughters of God?
Dr. William Temple (Archbishop of York) was recently quoted as having
said:
11 If ' anyone feels that the language which the Church asks him to use is exaggerated--”we do earnestly repent, and are heartily sorry for these our misdoings. The remembrance of them is grievous unto us; the burden of them is intolerable”— then let him think of slums, and sweating, and prostitution, and war, and ask if the remembrance of those is not grievous and if the burden of them is not intolerable.
Let him remember that these horrible things are there, not because some men are outrageously wicked, but because millions of men are as good as we are and no better
Let us think of squatters camps; of malnutrition; of overworked and underpaid women and children in fields, orchards and canneries; of families iorcod in spots to obtain their drinking water from rivers and irrigation ditches; squatting in the open from, lack of toilets, denied the benefits of adequate bathing and laundry facilities, the comfort of necessary medical care and the security of workmen’s compensation; let us think of the whole sordid picture surrounding migratory labor and ask if the remembrance of it is not grievous and if the burden of it is not intolerable, not because some men are outrageously wdeked, but because millions of people are as good as we are and no better. Lust we not look for solutions which will give men something to say not only about the conditions they work under but the goals they work toward? Must we not each within our own capacity and opportunity become pioneers in social change?
Perhaps we should not be surprised to discover how warped by self-inter-
est men’s attitude to every problem is apt to be. Truly ’’vrhero your treasurealso.” Wilberforce fought all his life against Slav-ado unions at home ho regarded as economically unsound One of his biographers (R. Coupland, P. 265) says of
is there will your heart he ery abroad, and won, hut tr and politically dangerous.
him:
"Genuinely anxious as he was that the State should relieve the poor he would not allow the poor to use the one weapon by which they could relieve themselves."
Tolstoy put it even, more grimly when ho said of the reactionary forces in Czarist Russia that they wore willing to do everything for the poor except to get off their backs.
THE CHALLENGE TO LIBERTY
Liberty is being challenged by every reactionary so blinded by self-interest as to overlook that he is bound by the fact of life to all men, and that
we must manage to enable everybody to satisfy their needs or risk having our own
needs left unfulfilled®
We began by recalling the purpose have vitality, and overflow with it." That I have no doubt. But to speak of the equal
of Jesus: ”l have come that men might this motive should dominate our quest, righto of migrants and millionaires
to a life of overflowing vitality is to ignore the basic inequality of opportunity which governs their lives. "While there may be equal opportunity for the strong to rise to the top, there is neither equal opportunity for all to become strong nor for those v/ho do not rise to live an abundant life." John C. Bennett (in "Social Salvation") recognizes the challenge to liberty in all this for he goes
on to say:
the
but
"How much liberty of
real liberty is left in a system which carefully guards the business mm to buy and sell and invest md produce
which does, not guard the security of the mass of the people?
Without such security those people arc
slaves of fear, tied to the
conditions of their jobs for fear of losing them if they arc employed; and tied to their communities as recipients of relief if they are
j16-
unemployed. And yet this confusion of economic individualism with liberty provides the chief social argument for the present order.”
It also constitutes the real challenge to liberty, and it defeats every
real attempt at introducing overflowing vitality into the lives of men now largely sapped by exploitation.
The food of the human brain is lactic acid. On the formation of lactic acid in the muscles of our bodies chiefly depends our physical vitality. Thus a substance which until quite recently was considered by some a waste product, by others a useless or even harmful by-product of metabolism, is now found to be the chief source of our intelligence and vitality. What if our social vitality should
depend on our recognition of the humblest elements in society, the very human beings whom wo now presume to exploit or ignore as irrelevant. To the biologist life is an urge for harmony, for vitality; cancer, whatever else it may prove to be, is a
diminution of vitality; death spells disharmony, the reduction of dynamic energy to static energy, the loss of vitality. Systems, like people, unless they move toward closer harmony and increased vitality, become devitalized and die.--
Dean Dickinson of the University of California Lav; School, addressing
the State Bar Association in San Diego, October 1, (according to the San Francisco
News, October 3, 1936) made this Interesting observation:
”l am going to suppose that Lincoln had been born 100 years later. Without doubt he would have been born In California. This conclusion Is amply supported by what we know of the migratory tendencies of his family and of California’s attractions for the inhabitants of less favored lands.”
This seemed at first a fantastic supposition until I came to think of those in our migratory labor camps whom Dr. Paul Taylor characterizes as ’’long, lanky Oklahomans with small heads, blue eyes, an Abe Lincoln cut to the thighs®«» bronzed Texans with a drawl, clean-cut features and an aggressive spirit,”— people among whom might well be another Tom Lincoln or a Nancy Hanks, ’’gaunt, self-reliant,hardship-hardened Americans possessing very little encept character." Sonetim.es I marvel at the vitality of their functional democracies wherever they have a chance to function. It Is more than likely that by leaving migratory labor entirely out of our social and political life we are depriving it of much needed vitality without which it must ultimately stagnate and deteriorate.
At any rate the critics of organized religion do well to doubt the reality of any spiritual claim of ours which fails to deal realistically and effectively with such conditions as govern the lives of migratory laborers with an ultimate determination to overcome them. Dr. Henry Sloane Coffin has well said that
"if there be a shortage of a staple commodity, if there be a human being in physical want, if is not God’s will, but the result of man’s ignorance or foolish or unjust management. God may use poverty, as He employs every circumstance, for our education....Poverty is oftenor to bo set down to the unbrotherly social conscience which in the midst of God’s plenty allows some of His children to be born disinherited, to grow up unendowed, to labor insufficiently rewarded, to become ill or old, uncared for. Our Father is Himself open-handed; the pinch of penury comes from the slothful or grasping hand of man."
If such words still seem to some "dangerously radical," that cannot be
helped. All true Christians must needs go "to the root of things," partly because they have seen the ideal and know it Is practicable, partly because m the light of the possible they know the present to be intolerable. From such contrasts spring religion’s radicalism, "the point where ethical devotion actually quickens insight, and quickened insight controls action."
In accepting your courteous call to speak this afternoon on migratory labor I have tried, however inadequately, to state sone of the aspects of this tremendous problem. Our dilemma, you will have gathered, is this: California must continue for some time to depend for mass-production on the seasonal work of migratory laborers in need of steady work and dependable living standards, and on the other hand must depend for its own immediate survival on unpredictable prices andfluctuating markets. Ultimately we shall have to be concerned also vdth the price problem; meanwhile we are forced to conclude that the immediate effects of unstable employment, intolerable living conditions and inadequate wages, together with their probable issue in labor disturbances, arc socially and economically bad for workers and growers as well as consumers, which means that they are bad for all of us. The total effect is ruinous conflict rather than profitable cooperation. Economic maldistribution and industrial inefficiency. Waste, not only in dollars and cents, but in terms of ill health, cultural, retrogression and frustrated lives.
Spea.king to a. church group, 1 have ventured to sketch these problems to you on the background of cherished historic Christian principles that the conure.st between the two might seem to you, as to me, all the more glaring, constituting a challenge which we dare not refuse. Wile the Church has often been content to ”go by on the other side” and has refused to become interested in such social conflicts, many guided by keener understanding of the true scope of religion1s task have done isolated good jobs as pastors or local church groups. Conspicuous, however, have been the efforts of the Home Missions Council and the Council of Women for Home Missions, who, since 1920 have done a. progressively useful job in relation to migratory laborers and their families in twelve states from California to Hew xork, and from the Canadian border to the Mexican, rendering these underprivileged families valuable service in medical cane, child care, education anti recreation, seivices which have been all the more valuable because broadly religious rather than narrowly denominations.!. These agencies of the Church seek to worn with the growers in their efforts to improve camp conditions so that ultimately, with the aid of local responsibility and, if necessary, by now legislation, ba.sic injustices may be
corrected and present evils overcome. This sort of work is valuable and could be continued on a much more a.dequatc scale, but I also hope that you clearIp see the3 9352 07408350 2
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ultimate limitations of the service thus rendered. In the end you will discover that the problem involves basic social injustice which we may not expect to correct entirely or permanently through charitable channels alone. It is a case for incisive social surgery rather than for philanthropic mustard plasters. What, specifically, the Church can and must do in the meantime (beyond seeking all the facts and insisting that the solutions to our problems must be consistent with the lofty Christian principles we profess) Is not for me to say; those who make
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up the Church must work that out for themselves in their own experience, carefully guided not only by all the menacing facts of today—pertaining to prices and markets as well as to wages and living conditions—but guided also by the
torch of One who walks, still a solitary figure in a world of crosses, far ahead of us, ever reminding us that religion, in the Christian tradition, ’’begins in the conviction that what should bo, can bo, and continues, tireless and indomitable,
in tho determination that what can bo, shall bo
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