U.S. At War: How Not to Get Workers

Samuel Freedman, who runs a scrap business in Newark, could hardly be expected to know what Georgia farmers are thinking. But Samuel Freedman did know that he was short of workers: he wanted to increase his hired hands from 50 to 70. When Floyd Weaver, one of his Negro foremen, suggested a recruiting trip to Georgia, Samuel Freedman was all for it.

If Floyd Weaver had kept his ear to the ground he might have heard Georgia cotton and peanut farmers grumbling: one time farm workers were making $5, $6, $7 a day, and more, at war plants; long-opened cotton was standing unpicked in the fields; peanuts were languishing underground. Farmers, putting their wives and children to work, could not pick all the cotton, dig all the peanuts. They could not even pay farm hands $2 or $3 a day. They did not blame the workers, but. . . .

Floyd Weaver kept strictly to his mission. Traveling through peanut-rich Crisp County (150 miles south of Atlanta), he offered remaining farm hands $30 to $40 a week; hinted about girls around Newark whose boy friends had gone into the Army. After a week he had rounded up ten Negroes. He sent for Harold G. Weston, the company’s personnel manager.

One day last week Weston and the Negroes were standing on the station platform at Cordele, the county seat, ready to take the train. Along came the sheriff, arrested them all. Next day in court, surprised Harold Weston found he was charged with violating an old Georgia law (passed in 1877), which aims to stop out-State labor recruiting by making “emigrant agents” register and pay a $1,000 fee in each county where they operate.

Flinty Judge Orion Thomas Gower, a strict disciplinarian, felt it was high time to hand down a lesson. He had lost his patience: it was ridiculous, he said, for the Government to ask housewives to save fats when thousands of tons of cottonseed oil and peanut oil were lost for lack of farm hands. He sentenced Weston to a year on a chain gang, fined him $1,000. The imprisonment was stayed on condition that Weston leave the State within 24 hours, stay out for at least 18 months.

In Newark, Samuel Freedman was out raged: “The South is still fighting the Civil War.” He called WPB, which sent a man to protest. Snapped Judge Gower: “WPB isn’t running this court.” Harold Weston thought it best to pay the fine and hurry home. The Negroes were released.

It was just an incident in the nation’s desperate and confused manpower muddle. Incidentally, just over the Hudson from Freedman’s company in Newark, U.S. Army Engineers in Manhattan were signing up men for $35 a week plus board & room to work in Hawaii.