جنگیدن با نظام‌های بد، انگار سرنوشت مردم مشرق زمین است. در غرب، مردم، به ندرت با نظام‌های بد می‌جنگند؛ چرا که خود را با جمیع بدی‌هایشان، جزئی از نظام می‌دانند. دموکراسی غربی یعنی همین: حمایت آزادانه‌ی بدها از بدها. جنایتکاران با جنایتکاران دست می‌دهند و لبخند می‌زنند. دزدان دزدان را به مجلس شورا، مجلس عوام و مجلس لردها می‌فرستند و به ریاست جمهوری انتخاب می‌کنند. نه حکومت‌ها از مردم سرند، نه مردم از حکومت‌ها؛ اما در شرق ما، ابدا این طور نیست.
ابراهیمی، نادر. آتش بدون دود. جلد سوم. تهران، روزبهان، 1394. ص 215.
… in California we find a curious attitude toward a group that make our agriculture successful. The migrants are needed, and they are hated. Arriving in a district they find the dislike always meted out by the resident to the foreigner, the outlander.
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If they attempted to organize they were deported or arrested, and having no advocates they were never able to get a hearing for their problems.
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It is difficult to believe what one large speculative farmer has said, that the success of California agriculture requires that we create and maintain a peon class.
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Social workers, survey workers have taken case histories. They are filed and open for inspection. These families have been questioned over and over about their origins, number of children living and dead. The information is taken down and filed. That is that. It has been done so often and so little has come of it.
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The large farms in California are organized as closely and are as centrally directed in their labor policy as are the industries and shipping, the banking and public utilities. Indeed such organizations as Associated Farmers, Inc. have as members and board members officials of banks, publishers of newspapers and politicians; and through close association with the State Chamber of Commerce they have interlocking associations with shipowners' associations, public utilities corporations and transportation companies.
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The will of the ranch owner, then, is law; for these deputies are always on hand, their guns conspicuous. A disagreement constitutes resisting an officer. A glance at the list of migrants shot during a single year in California for "resisting an officer" will give a fair idea of the casualness of these "officers" in shooting workers.
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The large growers' groups have found the law inadequate to their uses; and they have become so powerful that such charges as felonious assault, mayhem and inciting to riot, kidnapping and flogging cannot be brought against them in the controlled courts.
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The attitude of the large growers' associations toward labor is best stated by Mr. Hugh T. Osburne, a member of the Board of Supervisors of Imperial County and active in the Imperial Valley Associated Farmers group. Before the judiciary committee of the California Assembly he said: "In Imperial Valley we don't need this criminal syndicalism law. They have got to have it for the rest of the counties that don't know how to handle these matters. We don't need it because we have worked out our own way of handling these things. We won't have another of these trials. We have a better way of doing it. Trials cost too much."
"The better way," as accepted by the large growers of the Imperial Valley, includes a system of terrorism that would be unusual in the Fascist nations of the world. The stupid policy of the large grower and the absentee speculative farmer in California has accomplished nothing but unrest, tension and hatred. A continuation of this approach constitutes a criminal endangering of the peace of the state.
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The result has been more than could be expected. From the first, the intent of the management has been to restore the dignity and decency that had been kicked out of the migrants by their intolerable mode of life.
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In this series the word "dignity" has been used several times. It has been used not as some attitude of self-importance, but simply as a register of a man's responsibility to the community. A man herded about, surrounded by armed guards, starved and forced to live in filth loses his dignity; that is, he loses his valid position in regard to society, and consequently his whole ethics toward society. Nothing is a better example of this than the prison, where the men are reduced to no dignity and where crimes and infractions of the rule are constant.
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California communities have used the old, old methods of dealing with such problems. The first method is to disbelieve it and vigorously to deny that there is a problem. The second is to deny local responsibility since the people are not permanent residents. And the third and silliest of all is to run the trouble over the county borders into another county. The floater method of swapping what the counties consider undesirables from hand to hand is like a game of medicine ball.
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The history of California's importation and treatment of foreign labor is a disgraceful picture of greed and cruelty.
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From almost daily news stories, from a great number of Government reports available to anyone who is interested, and from this necessarily short series of articles, it becomes apparent that some plan must be contrived to take care of the problem of the migrants. If for no humanitarian reason, the need of California agriculture for these people dictates the necessity of such a plan.
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The cost of such ventures would not be much greater than the amount which is now spent for tear gas, machine guns and ammunition, and deputy sheriffs.
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And if the terrorism and reduction of human rights, the floggings, murder by deputies, kidnappings and refusal of trial by jury are necessary to our economic security; it is further submitted that California democracy is rapidly dwindling away. Fascistic methods are more numerous, more powerfully applied and more openly practiced in California than any other place in the United States.
Steinback, John. The Harvest Gypsies. Heyday, Berkeley: CA. 1988.
Photo by Dorothea Lange, Napa Valley, 1938.
