The program was an installment of the television documentary series CBS Reports, widely seen as the successor to Murrow's highly regarded 1951–1958 CBS program See It Now. Murrow's close associate, Fred W. Friendly, who coproduced See It Now, was the executive producer of CBS Reports. Their colleague, Edward P. Morgan, had taken up the issue of migrant labor in his CBS Radio Network commentaries. Morgan's assistant had visited Senator Harry F. Byrd's Northern Virginia farm during the apple harvest and was outraged by the conditions of the migrant laborers working there. According to Murrow biographer Joseph Persico, Friendly decided that the issue was a natural for Murrow, long seen as a champion of the oppressed.[2]
While Murrow and Friendly are often seen as the forces behind the show, broadcast historians such as the late Edward Bliss, Jr. have also given credit to "Harvest of Shame" producer/reporter David Lowe. Lowe did much of the legwork, including a number of the interviews featured in the installment.
The program originally aired just after Thanksgiving Day in November 1960. The December 5, 1960 edition of Time quoted producer Lowe as saying,
We felt that by scheduling the program the day after Thanksgiving, we could stress the fact that much of the food cooked for Thanksgiving throughout the country was picked by migratory workers. We hoped that the pictures of how these people live and work would shock the consciousness of the nation.
Summary
The opening is voiced over footage of migrant workers, including a number of African-Americans, being recruited:
This scene is not taking place in the Congo. It has nothing to do with Johannesburg or Cape Town. It is not Nyasaland or Nigeria. This is Florida. These are citizens of the United States, 1960. This is a shape-up for migrant workers. The hawkers are chanting the going piece rate at the various fields. This is the way the humans who harvest the food for the best-fed people in the world get hired. One farmer looked at this and said, "We used to own our slaves; now we just rent them."
Murrow describes the story as an American story, which moves from Florida to New Jersey. Murrow calls it a 1960s Grapes of Wrath of unrepresented people, who work 136 days of the year and make $900 a year. Throughout the documentary are numerous interviews, conducted by David Lowe in his nine months of field reporting, of people working in the industry.
The report starts in Florida. There, Mrs. Doby, the mother of nine children, describes picking strawberries and cherries. The children work with her except for her baby. Her average dinner consists of a pot of beans, fried potatoes, or corn. She cannot afford milk more than once a week for her children.
Jerome, a 9-year-old child, is taking care of his three infant sisters while his mother is at work. The family sleeps on a bed with a hole in it because of rats, as Jerome says. The mother cannot afford daycare, which costs $0.85 per day. After working from 6 a.m. to 4 p.m. she has made only $1.
The people travel on buses for thousands of miles to look for work and sometimes sleep outside during their travels. They often have too little food for dinner. The travels can take up to four days, with rides lasting about ten hours each, without stops for food or facilities.
The story moves from Florida to North Carolina. A camp in Elizabeth City has one source of water for the whole camp and no sanitary facilities. Mrs. Brown, 37, started working in the fields when she was 8. She hopes to get out of the work but does not think that will happen.
Murrow describes the complaints most workers have, such as bad housing, flies, mosquitoes, dirty beds and mattresses, unsanitary toilets, and the lack of hot water for bathing. One employer of hundreds of workers is asked, "Are the [migrant workers] happy people?" He states, "They love it."
The trucks move north from North Carolina to Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware for beans, asparagus, tomatoes, and potatoes. Every year, there are accidents on the road that often result in injury or death since workers are very compactly packed into the backs of trucks. There is no interstate standard for the transportation of migrant workers.
Murrow then describes the conditions in labor camps. In New Jersey, a labor camp has two outhouses and two water taps. Families live in one room and often sleep in one bed. Lunch is served to children in the camp: a bottle of milk and a couple of crackers. In Cutchogue, New York, 300 migrants live in a camp owned and operated by the Potato Growers Association of Long Island.
Children of migrant laborers have low levels of literacy, and out of 5000 children of migrant workers, only one finishes high school. The children are anxious to get an education, but they cannot get help from their parents, often illiterate themselves.
While federal legislation is hoped for by the workers, issues include the variability in terms of wages, types of labor, and the transient nature of the lives of migrant workers. For example, the crop does not always sell at the same price because the largest purchasers can dictate the prices from their buying power, which affects how the workers are paid. Farm labor is excluded from federal legislation despite the fact that the laborers travel from state to state every year. In November, the cycle starts all over again, the migrants moving back south.
Murrow's closing words are these:
The migrants have no lobby. Only an enlightened, aroused and perhaps angered public opinion can do anything about the migrants. The people you have seen have the strength to harvest your fruit and vegetables. They do not have the strength to influence legislation. Maybe we do. Good night, and good luck.
Murrow and National Security Council
After Murrow joined the National Security Council as a propagandist, his position led to an embarrassing incident shortly after taking the job when he asked the BBC not to show Harvest of Shame to avoid damaging the European view of the US. The BBC refused, having bought the program in good faith.[3] British newspapers delighted in the irony of the situation, with a Daily Sketch writer saying: "if Murrow builds up America as skillfully as he tore it to pieces last night, the propaganda war is as good as won."[4]
Edward Roscoe Murrow was an American broadcast journalist and war correspondent. He first gained prominence during World War II with a series of live radio broadcasts from Europe for the news division of CBS. During the war he recruited and worked closely with a team of war correspondents who came to be known as the Murrow Boys.
Agriculture is a major industry in the United States, which is a net exporter of food. As of the 2017 census of agriculture, there were 2.04 million farms, covering an area of 900 million acres (1,400,000 sq mi), an average of 441 acres per farm.
Peon usually refers to a person subject to peonage: any form of wage labor, financial exploitation, coercive economic practice, or policy in which the victim or a laborer (peon) has little control over employment or economic conditions. Peon and peonage can refer to both the colonial period and post-colonial period of Latin America, as well as the period after the end of slavery in the United States, when "Black Codes" were passed to retain African-American freedmen as labor through other means.
Fred W. Friendly was a president of CBS News and the creator, along with Edward R. Murrow, of the documentary television program See It Now. He originated the concept of public-access television cable TV channels.
The Bracero Program was a U.S. Government-sponsored program that imported Mexican farm and railroad workers into the United States between the years 1942 and 1964.
A migrant worker is a person who migrates within a home country or outside it to pursue work. Migrant workers usually do not have an intention to stay permanently in the country or region in which they work.
A pea-picker is a derogatory reference to poor, migrant workers during the Great Depression. These people were unskilled, poorly educated workers, employable only in menial jobs, such as harvesting crops and, as such, received poor wages for working long hours under dreadful conditions. Some of these people were photographed by Dorothea Lange.
The Office of Migrant Education (OME) is a program within the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Elementary and Secondary Education (OESE) that administers grant programs that provide academic and supportive services to the children of families who migrate to find work in the agricultural and fishing industries. OME also administers several contracts and special initiatives.
Thanksgiving is a federal holiday in the United States celebrated on the fourth Thursday of November. Outside the United States, it is sometimes called American Thanksgiving to distinguish it from the Canadian holiday of the same name and related celebrations in other regions. The modern national celebration dates to 1863 and has been linked to the Pilgrims’ 1621 harvest festival since the late 19th century. As the name implies, the theme of the holiday generally revolves around giving thanks with the centerpiece of most celebrations being a Thanksgiving dinner with family and friends.
Contemporary slavery, also sometimes known as modern slavery or neo-slavery, refers to institutional slavery that continues to occur in present-day society. Estimates of the number of enslaved people today range from around 38 million to 49.6 million, depending on the method used to form the estimate and the definition of slavery being used. The estimated number of enslaved people is debated, as there is no universally agreed definition of modern slavery; those in slavery are often difficult to identify, and adequate statistics are often not available.
CBS Reports is the umbrella title used for documentaries by CBS News which aired starting in 1959 through the 1990s. The series sometimes aired as a wheel series rotating with 60 Minutes, as a series of its own, or as specials. The program aired as a constant series from 1959 to 1971.
The Harvest of Hope Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit foundation which provides emergency and educational financial relief to migrant farmworkers and their families. Federal, state and other public aid to migrant farmworkers has become increasingly restrictive, and in many cases, not available at all. The goal of the Harvest of Hope Foundation is to fill in the gaps in service to this most hard-working and deserving, yet needy group of laborers.
Shine Global Inc, is a non-profit media company that was founded in 2005 by Susan MacLaury, and Albie Hecht. Susan MacLaury is the Executive Director of Shine Global. Shine Global has produced projects including War/Dance, a 2008 Academy Award Nominee for Best Documentary and Inocente, the Academy Award Winner for Best Documentary Short Subject in 2013.
The Harvest is a 2010 documentary film about agricultural child labor in America. The film depicts children as young as 12 years of age who work as many as 12 hours a day, six months a year, subject to hazardous conditions: heat exposure, pesticides, and dangerous work. The agriculture industry has been subject to significantly more lenient labor laws than any other occupation in the United States. As a result, lack of consistent schooling significantly limits their opportunities of succeeding in high school or more. The hazardous conditions threaten their health and lives. The purpose of the documentary is to bring awareness of the harsh working conditions which tens of thousands of children face in the fields of the United States each year and to enact the Children's Act for Responsible Employment which will bring parity of labor conditions to field workers that are afforded to minors in other occupations.
The "Faces of Freedom" photo exhibition is a collection of photographs captured by photo-journalist, filmmaker and human rights educator U. Roberto (Robin) Romano, during his travels to India, Nepal and Pakistan. Romano explores the exploitation of child labor in the production of handmade rugs in coordination with multiple international organizations, such as the World Bank, UNICEF, International Labour Organization and others to reduce the number of child laborers in that industry. The exhibit has been shown in many United States cities since its first exhibit in 2009. Faces of Freedom has been included in CNN Freedom Projects of modern slavery.
Children's Act for Responsible Employment (CARE Act) is a United States bill that would address the labor conditions of child field workers by imposing the same age, work hour, and pesticide exposure limits as other occupations and increasing the penalties for child labor violations. Representative Lucille Roybal-Allard introduced the Children's Act for Responsible Employment (CARE Act, HR 3564) bill in September 2009 and has subsequently reintroduced it.
The Harvest Gypsies, by John Steinbeck, is a series of feature-story articles written on commission for The San Francisco News about the lives and times of migrant workers in California's Central Valley. Published daily from October 5 to 12, 1936, Steinbeck explores and explains the hardships and triumphs of American migrant workers during the Great Depression, tracing their paths and the stories of their lives and travels from one crop harvest to the next crop harvest as they eked out a stark existence as temporary farmhands.
Labor trafficking in the United States is a form of human trafficking where victims are made to perform a task through force, fraud or coercion as it occurs in the United States. Labor trafficking is typically distinguished from sex trafficking, where the task is sexual in nature. People may be victims of both labor and sex trafficking.
Howard Van Smith, was an American journalist. A longtime staffer for The Miami News and several other newspapers, he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1959.
Human Trafficking or "trafficking in persons" is the recruiting, harboring, transporting, providing, or obtaining a person for mainly the purposes of forced labor or prostitution. Other reasons for human trafficking are the removal of organs, forced marriage, and other exploitations. South America is one of the biggest source and destination locations in the world and has struggled with the issue for many years. The ILO estimates that of the 20.9 million victims of human trafficking in 2012, 1.8 million were from Latin America. There are many factors that cause human trafficking, like a high demand for domestic servants, sex laborers, and factory workers, the existence of already established trafficking networks that often take advantage of young women and children, corruption in the governments and local law enforcement agencies, a governmental disinterest in the issue and a lack of opportunity for women in South American regions where trafficking occurs. People exploited in human trafficking are often impoverished, members of indigenous peoples, unemployed, victims of abuse, illiterate, substance users, homeless, or involved in gang activity. Research by the United States Department of State has also found that LGBTQ+ people are vulnerable to human trafficking. By far, sex trafficking is the leading type of human trafficking, making up 79 percent of all human trafficking. This is then followed by forced labor at 18 percent. About 20 percent of trafficking victims are children. Primary destinations for trafficking and illegal immigration are the United States, Spain, Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Canada. Globalization, capitalism and societal attitudes facilitate and reduce the barriers to human trafficking.
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