The Harvest of Shame

Remembering What Middle-Class Americans Were Introduced to on Thanksgiving Day, 1960

Thanksgiving 1960 was a time for delightful feasting and familial socializing for many, much like it is today. But at the same time, throughout the U.S., there were thousands of men, women, and children struggling to get through the day, hoping they work a little to earn some daily bread. American middle-class folks were gorging themselves on all those iconic Thanksgiving foodstuffs. Meanwhile, their brothers and sisters in the human family were bearing with subhuman living conditions, many on the brink of starvation.

This classification of poorer people was in a true state of despair. They were in need of work, in need of decent wages, in need of toiletries and proper sewage disposal systems. Blacks, whites, Mexicans; men, women, children: all these people felt it. They felt the burning heat on their backs and the emptiness in their stomachs. CBS released their audio-visual report Harvest of Shame on this very Thanksgiving day referring to the “migrant plight.”

These malnourished migrants had little money and were constantly on the move to find work in the farmer fields of America. They did whatever paid, and it did not matter how much. These migrant workers were desperate; their main concern was feeding and caring for themselves and their families.

But sometimes it was next to impossible to carry out this task adequately. Families lived under trees for cover, crammed onto buses after being hired for a season, and sometimes (if time and budget permitted) were able to send some of the kids to school but never to college.

In this documentary, we get a taste of just how distressing and how difficult it was to be a migrant field laborer over half a century ago. One farmer, an employer of numerous migrant workers, said in his interview that they love their work and many probably would not be happy doing anything else.

On the contrary, several of the workers themselves acknowledged how much they would enjoy leaving this kind of life behind them. I think many truly wanted this, but the pitiful wages given them was barely enough for a small family to live on. These workers were living day by day, week by week, trying to earn as many dimes as they could. Thus, few children from their families were able to get a thorough education.

Of course, some would not want to leave this line of work. Some found it bearable in certain regards and only knew this type of life. But they asked for simple comforts: clean drinking water and real toilets/outhouses. Americans in the comfort of their homes saw this Thanksgiving Day and hopefully were called to action as the CBS narrator Edward R. Murrow prompted them.

This documentary should not have just stirred emotions; it was enough to make people act. Things have become a bit better with the passing years in some instances. Despite that, the woes of the migrant workers could have been decreased long before.

(Editor’s Note: This article was originally published here at Of Intellect and Interest’s main site.)