Book Review

While the Industrial Workers of the World has long been a favorite topic of historians, Harvest Wobblies is the first book-length treatment of the IWW's effort to organize agricultural workers, arguably one of its greatest successes. Most readers will already know much of the story. Like the Wobblies themselves, Greg Hall focuses his work on the wheat belt of the Great Plains, the fruit and vegetable regions of California's central valleys, and the apple orchards of eastern Washington. Stressing (perhaps too much) the development in those areas of industrial agriculture—large scale, specialized, capital intensive—in the late nineteenth century, Hall explains the concurrent development of systems of seasonal and migrant labor. By the early twentieth century, 150,000 agricultural workers labored in California, 35,000 more in Washington, and 180,000 on the Great Plains. They consisted of local residents seasonally employed in agriculture; urban workers temporarily drawn into harvest work but generally employed elsewhere; and migrant farmworkers who moved with the crops and seasons. California's workers were divided by race, ethnicity, and gender, while those in the two other regions were predominantly white, native-born single men.	1
Hall argues that despite some increasingly important differences, these workers shared a common class position, uncertain but arduous work, and exploitation by their employers. The IWW targeted these points in its attempt to bring farm workers into the One Big Union that could eventually destroy capitalism and create an industrial democracy. It began organizing migrant farm laborers in 1909, developing through trial and error a series of strategies appropriate for their particular circumstances. Wobblies first tried to reach and educate itinerant workers through the famous but not very effective free speech fights. They then experimented with mixed locals, which proved appropriate to migrant males but not other types of workers. Finally deciding that it was better to organize on the job than on the street corner, "job delegates" went into the fields, camps, and hobo jungles to build an industrial union. And the IWW's appeal, Hall makes clear, lay more in its immediate efforts to improve local wages and working conditions than in its revolutionary ambitions.	2
By 1915, the IWW established the Agricultural Workers Organization (soon renamed the Agricultural Workers Industrial Union), which quickly became one of its largest branches, with one-third of the total IWW membership. Despite its size, however, the AWIU had little success among the diverse farm workers on the West Coast. The Wobblies' inclusive rhetoric, Hall argues in his most important finding, foundered on their ties to an "exclusive worklife culture" that appealed to the young, unmarried white men riding the rails and living in the hobo jungles of the Great Plains (69). Unfortunately, Hall does less to develop than merely to reassert this worklife culture, which "embodied the virtues of manual labor, worker solidarity, masculinity, rebellion, tenacity, independence, mobility, camaraderie, song, and humor" (109). This worklife culture had little appeal in the Far West. Asian and Hispanic farm workers found employment, housing, and food through mutual aid societies held together by ethnicity, religion, and language; others worked as families and traveled by automobile and had little in common with Wobbly culture.	. . .