In the summer of 1937, the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO), a breakaway faction from the American Federation of Labor (AFL), chartered a new union to organize agricultural laborers, from fields to processing factories, from Florida to Alaska, from California to New Jersey. This union, the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA), had a difficult, urgent mission: to represent and empower “hundreds of thousands of workers in the most bitterly exploited and least organized industries in America,” according to union president Donald Henderson. These people, who were not landowning farmers, harvested and processed the nation’s food, fibre, and tobacco for wages. They represented the full diversity of the American working class: African Americans, Mexicans and Mexican Americans, native- and foreign-born whites, Japanese Americans, and Filipinos. Women performed a large share and in some cases a majority of these low-paying, difficult jobs. Some were American citizens, but many lived under undemocratic regimes; others were immigrants, some subjects of American empire. To do so, the union faced off against a growing agribusiness industry, dominated by national and international corporations, that commanded what Henderson called one of the most “powerful lobbies in Congress, a lobby that controls the entire southern bloc of reactionary Democrats and Dixiecrats.”1 That lobby had shaped federal law, including the recent New Deal, to ensure the continued exploitation of these workers. No union, at the time or arguably since, attempted anything as audacious as what UCAPAWA tried to do.

The New Deal labor regime that proved so crucial in improving the lives of American workers, beginning with the National Labor Relations Act, or Wagner Act, in 1935, excluded “agricultural labor.” This meant that all field workers—whether landowning farmers or farm laborers—were denied the new federal right to join a union, to seek remedy for unfair labor practices, and to collectively bargain. The 1935 Social Security Act also excluded “agricultural laborers” from disability, old age, and unemployment insurance. In 1938, the Fair Labor Standards Act, which created overtime, the federal minimum wage, and the ban on child labor, followed suit. While the explanations for these exclusions vary, scholars have identified a devil’s bargain at the center of the story: the New Deal improved the lives of workers in most industries but only by accommodating agribusiness interests and segregationists, usually represented by the same people, to deny crucial protections and rights from the workers who needed them most.2 The effort to unionize agricultural laborers among whom were large numbers of racial minorities and women thus faced off against ruthless opponents playing with a stacked deck. The odds were long.

The men and women who built UCAPAWA were ideologically committed political actors; they were radicals—mostly Communists but also some Socialists and Filipino nationalists. Few could be considered liberals. To make UCAPAWA work, they set out to organize all agricultural laborers writ large: those who worked for wages in the fields and those who packed, processed, and canned what came from the fields. Their strategy was to build a stable base of union locals among the latter group because they were not deemed “agricultural laborers” under the Wagner Act. The scope of the landmark 1935 labor rights bill reflected New Deal preoccupations with separate recovery strategies for industry and agriculture, as well as deference to the AFL’s organizing priorities. Workers who processed agricultural commodities were deemed industrial because they worked in factory-like settings usually removed from the fields, and the AFL had shown interest in them; they were covered by new federal collective bargaining rights and the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) that protected those rights.3 UCAPAWA strategists hoped that organized processing workers would aid the unionization of field workers; those with rights would help those without. In time, UCAPAWA leaders aimed to use the machinery of the New Deal, however incomplete, to expand its benefits to those who had been excluded—to not only improve pay and working conditions but also to expand American democracy.

Donald Henderson declared in 1937 that the organization’s founding purpose was to challenge “the disgraceful and contemptible neglect and discrimination against agricultural workers” in obvious places like the Jim Crow South but also in the labor movement and the New Deal itself.4 The New Deal was not only incomplete, Henderson asserted, but it had been built on a faulty premise—that some workers could be advanced by sacrificing other workers deemed hopeless or beyond saving. Rather than reject the New Deal, however, as one might expect from labor leaders shaped by revolutionary Communist ideas, Henderson and other UCAPAWA strategists believed it had radical potential. They grappled with the New Deal in real time as a political process without a predetermined outcome, not the fixed, failed policies often portrayed in hindsight. UCAPAWA’s leaders believed their efforts could unlock that potential and thus radically transform American society. Henderson understood the union’s mission was bold since it challenged liberals and conservatives alike; he called it “political dynamite.”5

UCAPAWA fought on two fronts. As Henderson’s imagery suggests, one was through mass action—strikes, protests, NLRB votes—to win union representation and contracts with improved wages, hours, and benefits. This was surely explosive: helping people use New Deal rights to directly challenge the powers that kept them down.

The second front was not nearly as alluring, but it was equally potent: political action within the system, particularly at the federal level, on behalf of agricultural laborers. From 1938 to 1950, UCAPAWA (after 1944, the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural and Allied Workers of America [FTA]) led the political fight to stop or roll back the exclusion of these people from the New Deal. It did this conventionally through the political education and mobilization of its members and allies in conjunction with Labor’s Non-Partisan League and, later, the CIO’s Political Action Committee. Most importantly, the union also served as a direct representative of agricultural workers in hearings before congressional committees and new administrative agencies. The latter were essential to the definition and delivery of New Deal rights and benefits because they were often tasked with hammering out the practical details of broad legislative language. From the beginning of the New Deal, these administrative agencies created a new front, particularly in the rule-making process, for labor organizers to fight on behalf of working people.6

UCAPAWA-FTA’s main Washington representatives—Clyde Johnson and Elizabeth Sasuly—worked relentlessly for twelve long years: submitting briefs and testifying, pestering and persuading congressional progressives, and arm-twisting labor and civil society allies for support. They confronted congressional representatives, hostile and indifferent alike, with evidence of the conditions that agricultural laborers faced and the effect that legal inequality had on them, consistently arguing for an end to New Deal labor exclusions. They kept inconvenient truths in the light, shaped the implementation of legislation, and over time helped change that legislation for the better well after 1938, when many scholars declare the New Deal finished. They won important victories for agricultural laborers in their own time and introduced arguments that would win broader inclusion for these workers in the decades that followed. Their arguments, radical in the 1930s and 1940s, would become liberal common sense by the 1950s and 1960s. Johnson and Sasuly performed an important representative role on behalf of workers denied a democratic voice (and often the vote) and materially harmed by the law.7 No one else did this work; there was no playbook. They improvised on a shoestring budget with few reliable allies and in the face of powerful, hostile opponents. UCAPAWA’s legislative representatives creatively and faithfully, even though no faith was warranted, used the new administrative state to generate democratic pressure and influence legislation on behalf of people considered outcasts. Their efforts offer an important lesson on the radical efficacy of relentless, principled engagement with flawed political systems.

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The new union, despite strong opposition, won significant early victories in 1938, some through strikes, others through the representation machinery of the NLRB. The most notable were a pecan shellers’ strike in San Antonio and an NLRB election victory in Alaska salmon canning and dozens of others that followed.8 In short, UCAPAWA-FTA racked up a string of NLRB victories across the country in 1938 that brought it to life and realized the benefits of the Wagner Act for thousands of workers who processed, packed, and canned agricultural products.

Following these early shopfloor victories, the union expanded its presence in Washington in the late spring of 1938 by hiring Clyde Johnson as its first research and legislative director. Johnson, who hailed from northern Minnesota, was only twenty-nine years old. In the early 1930s, he had dropped out of junior college to seek work in New York City, where he ended up back in classes at City College. There, he joined a Communist Party (CP) student group that connected him to Donald Henderson, then a PhD student and economics lecturer at Columbia University, and his wife Elinor Curtis, a Barnard and Columbia-trained social scientist and CP organizer. Student radicalism would soon get Johnson expelled (and Henderson fired), after which he went south as a CP organizer with the Alabama Sharecroppers Union. It was hard, dangerous, low-paying work. Henderson and Curtis, meanwhile, began creating the network that would become UCAPAWA. Johnson jumped at the chance to represent the union in Washington, not least because it was not Alabama and came with a much-needed $35 weekly paycheck—his wife Anne had just given birth to their first child.9

Johnson’s first task in Washington was a big one: representing the union’s workers in congressional hearings over the Fair Labor Standards Act, which had passed in June 1938 after a tortured, year-long legislative process. The bill established a federal minimum wage, maximum hour limit (and overtime), and a prohibition on child labor. The CIO fought hard for the bill, which seemed like it would mirror the Wagner Act with agricultural field workers excluded but cannery, packing, and processing workers covered. Last-minute congressional dealings, however, introduced a larger agricultural carve-out. The final bill excluded from the wages and hours provisions anyone who worked in fishing, including packing and canning, and anyone who worked in the “handling, packing, storing, ginning, compressing, pasteurizing, drying or canning of farm products”—within something now called “the area of production.”10 Big agricultural interests—growers and canners—were behind the carve-out; some said they were protecting small family farms, and others said they were protecting the South from higher labor costs. The New York Times explained the widened exclusions as “a very strange assortment” best “understood on political than on either economic or administrative grounds.”11 Although Johnson arrived after the bill became law, UCAPAWA vowed to “fight these conditions” in the bill’s crucial administrative implementation.12

How far the bill’s exclusions reached depended on what was meant by “area of production.” The man who introduced the term, Washington Democratic Senator Lewis Schwellenbach, a New Deal stalwart who would later serve as Secretary of Labor under President Harry S. Truman, admitted that he could not define it but had meant to shield small apple growers and not large-scale processing and canning facilities. It would be up to the newly created Wage and Hour Division of the Department of Labor to fix a definition. Elmer Andrews, the first administrator, convened a series of hearings in Washington in the summer and fall of 1938 to study the impact on different industries. With no staff, Andrews’s hearings relied on testimony and evidence from industry representatives. Johnson got himself and UCAPAWA on the docket, representing 30,000 processing and canning members as well as the hundreds of thousands of nonunion workers implicated by the bill.

To build his argument for a narrow definition, Johnson had to “familiarize himself as much as possible with each crop area and processing practices”—how fruit and vegetable packing differed from nut processing, for example.13 Meanwhile, large, well-funded legal teams pushed on behalf of corporate interests for an expansive definition. With only part-time help from the union’s office secretary, Johnson did his own research at the Department of Agriculture, analyzed the testimony of industry lawyers, prepared his own briefs, and advocated directly in industry-specific hearings. He was on the front line defending some of the most exploited workers in the country. “I was the only labor representative at any of the hearings,” he said. “It was an exhausting, lonely and nerve-wracking job”—“killing work” that pushed him close to a mental breakdown. Johnson’s condition was so bad that he almost missed the final hearing—“I couldn’t pull myself together to dress and leave our house.”14 But he had proven effective in the previous hearings with research presentations leavened by rural Alabama experiences that offered a compelling contrast to southern industry representatives who argued that the law would bring ruin to the region. Wage-Hour administrators wanted to hear more from Johnson. Someone called his wife Anne and urged her to get him there. She did. The result was a definition of “area of production” that limited exemptions to a) processing that occurred on a farm and involved only crops grown on that same farm and b) processing that involved crops raised in the “immediate locality” of “rural communities.” Subsequent deliberations that lasted into early 1939 narrowed those parameters to plants operating in the open country or in towns of fewer than 2,500 residents and no more than 10 miles from the point of harvest. This definition was a lot narrower than it could have been. “The general result,” Johnson concluded, “was good for workers.”15

But 1938 was a consequential election year for New Deal possibilities: a conservative coalition of Democrats and Republicans won effective control of the 76th Congress. In 1939, this coalition looked to weaken labor rights with proposed revisions of the Wagner and labor standards acts—but it was not completely anti-New Deal. Perhaps the biggest piece of domestic legislation aimed to expand Social Security coverage.

The first hearings covered Social Security amendments, which would ultimately expand coverage by creating dependent and survivor benefits as well as increasing benefit amounts. Johnson testified twice before the House Committee on Ways and Means in March 1939. His main argument was for the inclusion of all farmers and farm laborers, which was in line with the general spirit of expansion. However, agricultural industry lobbyists were pushing to increase exclusions—particularly targeting those who worked in the canning, processing, and packing of farm products. Johnson found himself playing defense. Conservative representatives grilled him not on the merits of his arguments but on his own farming experience. He might have spent time in the rural South, but had he ever worked on a farm? Johnson argued that his personal experience did not matter; he was representing people who had very little representation in Congress. “They have no Federal or State laws to protect them, and they are the people most exploited of anybody in the country. I don’t think anybody could deny that,” he declared. “If anybody needs protection …”—“Have you ever worked on a farm?” Minnesota Republican Harold Knutson interrupted again. This went on and on. Johnson seemed to crumble under the onslaught, but he had clearly hit a sore spot. New York Republican Daniel Reed, an excise lawyer and former college football coach, finally called his testimony “absolutely worthless”—“it is an insult to this committee to have to sit here and listen to a man who has had no experience trying to tell us what to do with regard to this farm situation under the social security.”16

Industry lobbyists got their way. The 1939 amendment adopted a broad definition of agricultural labor that excluded almost all workers in agricultural processing and packing. Overall, about 600,000 workers originally covered by Social Security lost it in 1939. The hardest hit were those in fruit and vegetable packing. One critic of the bill said the new exclusions made it nearly impossible for those workers to “really enjoy economic liberty or exercise effectively their civil rights” and that the insecurities it created threatened “our social and political institutions.” This was not Clyde Johnson, but A. J. Altmeyer, chairman of the Social Security Board, who called on Congress to reverse the exclusions and to expand Social Security to cover all agricultural laborers—effectively repeating arguments Johnson had made in 1939.17

UCAPAWA and the CIO had more success stopping challenges to the Wagner Act and FLSA. The enemies of labor standards attacked too quickly in 1939—administrative rules, including the “area of production” definition, were too fresh and confusing. Companies could not decide if they benefitted or lost out clearly enough to back specific changes. Meanwhile, the heavyweights of organized labor fought hard. CIO president John L. Lewis himself testified against the labor standards restrictions bill—the CIO’s first major show of political support for UCAPAWA.18

By the summer of 1939, however, Johnson had had enough of Washington. He asked for a reassignment. “I nearly lost my mind listening to all the crap that those Congressmen said,” Johnson later recalled.19 Henderson sent him to help Texas pecan workers. While the union’s early results in Washington were mixed, its uncompromising stance won the confidence of thousands of agricultural workers across the country. Membership numbers, NLRB victories, and union contracts all increased—especially in industries targeted by conservatives.20

UCAPAWA went without a full-time legislative representative until October 1942, when it opened a full-blown Washington office. The union chose Elizabeth Sasuly to run it. She was born in 1911 in Chicago to Russian Jewish parents. As a PhD student at Columbia in the mid-1930s, she got interested in labor organizing and dropped out to work for the new CIO. UCAPAWA hired her as an organizer in 1938 and assigned her to a fruit and vegetable packing local in California. For two years she did grueling, dangerous grassroots work before being laid off during a round of budget cutting. She then worked for the California Farm Legislative Committee before Henderson rehired her in 1942.21

Sasuly’s first few years were spent dealing with new wartime administrative agencies, particularly the War Labor Board. The WLB had unprecedented power to impose labor agreements in vital war industries. The union made substantial headway with the WLB that yielded new strongholds among tobacco workers in the Carolinas, cotton processing workers in Memphis and Houston, and oat processing workers across the Midwest. “In the early days of the War Labor Board,” Sasuly reported, “the procedures were not too well set and it was possible being in Washington to get very substantial and unusual gains simply because things were in a fluid state, and you could move around and get things done.” It was a very personal job: “people are human, you have got to deal with them,” making the case on paper as well as “by personal contact.” She lobbied, testified, and brought union members themselves to Washington to gain favorable rulings—“pulling rabbits out of the hat,” as she put it. Sasuly had less success helping field workers, however, because they were under the Department of Agriculture-controlled War Food Administration, which answered more readily to agribusiness interests than labor unions.22 Sasuly also worked hard on political education. In 1943, she began writing a regular column, “This is Washington,” in the union newspaper. In 1945, she expanded outreach by publishing a monthly newsletter, “Political Action and Education Notes,” and then “FTA Washington Newsletter.”

While FTA pushed for a progressive postwar agenda that included a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission, a higher minimum wage, affordable housing, permanent federal price controls, and an end to all exclusions in New Deal labor and social security coverage, Sasuly also found herself on defense in Washington. In 1946 the House attached a rider to the National Labor Relations Board’s annual appropriation that would prohibit it from handling cases involving agricultural laborers as defined by the 1939 Social Security amendment—the broad exclusionary standard Clyde Johnson had tried to stop. According to Sasuly this would remove the right to organize and bargain collectively from 750,000 processing, packing, and canning workers who made up FTA’s core membership. It meant “life or death for FTA.”23

The rider passed the House but met opposition in the Senate where Sasuly had assembled a supportive coalition led by Senators Robert Wagner and Claude Pepper. While they could not stop the rider, they held the bill up in conference long enough to force a compromise. The final bill dropped the Social Security definition of agricultural laborer in favor of the definition in the Fair Labor Standards Act. This was substantially the same “area of production” definition that Clyde Johnson had helped win in 1938, although the Supreme Court had modified it in 1944.24 It was less a victory for FTA than it was dodging disaster.

That disaster followed in 1947 when Republicans, who won majorities in both houses of Congress in the 1946 election, passed the Taft-Hartley amendment to the Wagner Act, which placed a raft of restrictions on labor unions, opened the door for right-to-work laws, and required all union officers to sign affidavits confirming that they were not members of the Communist Party. The latter caused the biggest problem for FTA since all its national officers were Communists (including Sasuly, it seems). This opened the door for more conservative unions in the AFL and the CIO to launch membership raids on FTA locals, often with the support of employers.

FTA lost members amid the anticommunist furor. To cut spending, the union closed the Washington office and reduced Sasuly to part-time status. Meanwhile, union leaders became more sharply critical of the Democratic Party, particularly President Truman. FTA backed Henry Wallace’s third-party presidential bid in 1948, which outraged CIO leadership. Despite a lack of confidence in Truman and most Democrats, FTA continued to advocate for agricultural laborers as the Truman administration pushed Fair Deal proposals after Democrats took back congressional majorities in 1948. In April 1949, Sasuly represented the union in hearings as Congress prepared to enhance the Fair Labor Standards and Social Security Acts. Again, she called for the blanket inclusion of all agricultural workers in both laws, whether they worked in the fields, packing sheds, or processing factories—as FTA had since its founding.

In the labor standards hearings, Sasuly attacked the “area of production” distinction itself—demonstrating with razor-sharp analysis how capricious and unworkable the rule was. The current law imposed two completely different standards on people who did the same work in the same industry, often for the same companies. She recounted the legal history of the rules and showed its impact with statistics and charts, flaunting a definitive grasp of a confusing issue that few people understood. Senator Pepper helped by admitting that he thought the Court outlawed the “area of production” rule. Sasuly corrected him, driving home her point about its injustice and indefensibility. Who benefitted, she asked: some of the largest corporations in the United States such as the Associated Growers of California, tobacco companies, and Proctor and Gamble. They hid their interests under the “smoke screen” of protecting family farmers. Who was harmed: migrant workers, a majority of them nonwhite women and children, were denied minimum wages and overtime.25

Perhaps Sasuly’s best argument stemmed from FTA’s own collective bargaining history. The union’s contracts had rescued thousands of packing and processing workers from labor standards exclusions with higher base and overtime pay. Their employers, Sasuly reported, showed no signs of suffering. Agribusiness could afford to pay a minimum wage and overtime to all agricultural laborers. Any Fair Deal had to include them.26

At the Social Security hearings, Sasuly sparred with the powerful chair of Ways and Means, 86-year-old Robert Lee Daughton, a North Carolina Democrat named after the Confederate general. “Farmer Bob,” who was born a few months after Lee’s defeat at Gettysburg, challenged Sasuly’s authority to speak on the subject. “I do not suppose your husband, or your sweetheart worked on a farm for a day in his life,” Daughton declared. “Did you ever have any connection with farmers yourself in any way?” he asked. “I have lived on a farm all of my life and have one now and am trying to run it, but I suppose you know a good deal more than I do about it.” Sasuly pushed right back, explaining that she worked for a union that represented tens of thousands of agricultural workers and had spent many months living among them in itinerant camps “under industrial conditions that come very close to being slave labor.” Surely, she supposed, this “is not the committee’s idea or Congress’ idea of what living on a farm should be like.” To bolster her arguments, she quoted Altmeyer’s denunciation of Social Security exclusions at length.27

Sasuly and FTA were no longer fighting alone. CIO president Philip Murray and AFL president William Green both called for the inclusions of agricultural laborers in their testimony, as did other representatives of labor and civil rights organizations.

For a time, it seemed both bills might meet some FTA demands. Pepper’s Senate Labor Committee reported out a version of the labor standards bill that gave farm processing workers minimum wage coverage. That provision did not survive debate on the Senate floor, where food company allies defended “area of production” exemptions.28 The final bill raised the minimum wage to seventy-five cents an hour but continued to exclude agricultural laborers. Truman expressed regret for those left out when he signed the bill in October but called the measure “wise and progressive”—it would help individuals and also boost the economy.29 On Social Security expansion, the House approved a bill that covered eleven million more Americans, including 200,000 food processing workers excluded in 1939. The Senate, however, did not take up the bill in that session.30 Pepper was disappointed but promised to “go ahead. We are optimistic as to the future and hope to extend coverage to the great mass of workers.”31

However plodding the process, FTA’s radical arguments about agricultural workers had become mainstream liberal views. Congress actually followed through in 1950 with Social Security amendments that extended coverage to regularly employed farm workers. Sasuly contributed a brief with her well-rehearsed arguments at those hearings. A 1954 revision included even more agricultural workers.32 FTA leaders and members had won significant legislative gains on agricultural worker issues once considered political dynamite—a remarkable feat for a Communist-led union in Red Scare Washington.

By then, however, FTA no longer existed. Anticommunist pressure from the FBI, Congress, and the labor movement—including expulsion from the CIO—destroyed it. One of Sasuly’s last congressional appearances was in the summer of 1949, not long after her testimony on social security and wages and hours, but this time before the House on Un-American Activities Committee as it investigated Communist activity in Washington. Like most witnesses, Sasuly pled the fifth but not without some argumentative jousting over the meaning of the constitution. In 1950, what was left of FTA merged with two other unions. Sasuly had been promised a job in the new outfit but downsizing left her on the outside, unemployed. She left the labor movement. “I hated getting out,” she recalled in 1980. Clyde Johnson fared better; he worked as a carpenter and again emerged as a union leader in that industry. Henderson did not. In 1954 he was selling appliances in Queens; he would soon disappear into obscurity in Florida.33

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Agricultural workers still do not have full federal labor rights, although the scope of exclusion was narrowed in 1966. Most farm workers are now covered under minimum wage provisions, but not on hours. Where the federal government has failed, many states have stepped in—fourteen now guarantee agricultural workers collective bargaining rights.34 Most agribusiness firms rely on foreign workers to fill these jobs now, enabled since the 1940s by federal guestworker programs that enhance employer power while offering minimal real worker protections. Of course, undocumented workers have even fewer protections.

This record informs a pessimistic school of thought about the New Deal: its full promise disfigured to malignancy by the Southern legislative cage; organized labor stupefied and tamed by its narcotic bureaucracy; progressive possibilities swallowed by its liberalism. The story of UCAPAWA-FTA should caution against such categorical condemnation. The union would not have existed without the New Deal—the Wagner Act, NLRB, and WLB made its survival possible when previous similar organizations had been destroyed. For years this union was the only consistent representative for agricultural laborers in Washington. Union leaders used the federal administrative state in creative ways to push back against obvious injustice and to pull allies into the struggle. They lost a lot, including in the end their jobs and the union’s existence. But they also fought. They complicated and delayed and resisted relentless efforts to make the New Deal more unjust. Conditions would have been worse for agricultural laborers without them. Their arguments, which seemed so unlikely at the time, became widely accepted, even obvious, if not completely realized in law. There is a valuable lesson, I would argue, in that obstinacy, in the fight—and especially in the role of the union-as-institution in facilitating it. UCAPAWA-FTA is a great example of a radical group with transformative ideas that forced itself into the room of decision, providing opposition and alternatives, offering voice to the dispossessed, struggling and arguing but not compromising with people who wanted it defeated. Their most radical position perhaps was their earnest use of administrative bureaucracy. At FTA’s 1950 CIO expulsion trial, Donald Henderson rested his defense on the union’s surprisingly successful record. “Speaking for the rank and file of our Union,” he declared, “we defy any union or union leader to produce a better one in the things that count—fighting and winning for the workers.”35