Factories in the Field The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in California [Paperback]

This book was the first broad expos? of the social and environmental damage inflicted by the growth of corporate agriculture in California.Factories in the Fieldtogether with the work of Dorothea Lange, Paul Taylor, and John Steinbeckdramatizes the misery of the dust bowl migrants hoping to find work in California agriculture. McWilliams starts with the scandals of the Spanish land grant purchases, and continues on to examine the experience of the various ethnic groups that have provided labor for California's agricultural industryChinese, Japanese, Mexicans, Filipinos, Armeniansthe strikes, and the efforts to organize labor unions

Carey McWilliams's books includeCalifornia:The Great Exception(California, 1998),Ill Fares the Land: Migrants & Migratory Labor in the U.S.(1942),Ambrose Bierce: A Biography(1929),Brothers under Skin(1943) andSouthern California:An Island on the Land(1946).Douglas C. Sackmanteaches history at Oberlin College.

A masterpiece. . . . Two months after the publication ofThe Grapes ofWrath, Little, Brown issued the second controversial California documentary of 1939,Factories in the Field. . . . If John Steinbeck was a novelist seeking documentation, Carey McWilliams was a documentary journalist seeking the moral and imaginative intensity of art. Kevin Starr, author ofEndangered Dreams: The Great Depression in California

Factories in the Fieldis a true classic of the 'other California' that one rarely hears about. McWilliams chronicles the modern saga of industrial capitalism's transformation of would-be yeoman farmers into a low-paid, multi-racial army of farmworkers toiling on huge factory farms. From the start, McWilliams called for the abolition of the artificial distinction between factory and farm as the necessary first step in guaranteeing farmworkers the right to collective bargaining. His work is slƒš