The summer Fresno’s crops did not get picked until the ‘Victory Harvest Army’ showed up

In mid-1942, the San Joaquin Valley faced an unprecedented — and largely forgotten — crisis, one that threatened to devastate the region’s economy and undermine the fight against the Axis Powers.

The United States’ entry into World War II in December 1941 had prompted a major farm labor shortage. By the following summer, many of the workers who typically would have harvested the Valley’s raisin grapes, cotton, and other crops were headed off to fight or to work in wartime industry jobs. This labor shortage was exacerbated by the federal government’s tragic decision to evacuate Japanese Americans living on the West Coast, quite a few of whom worked in agriculture.

If Valley farmers didn’t find thousands of additional laborers, they would lose tens of millions of dollars worth of food and fiber. How did our community respond to this daunting challenge? In both admirable and ignoble fashion.

First, the bad news.

Valley growers’ initial solution was to try to tap into a labor source close to home: the 10,000 Japanese Americans being held in Fresno assembly centers after their forced removal from their homes. Farmers reasoned that while these internees awaited relocation to permanent internment camps, they could be compelled to pick crops under armed guard.

Some Fresnans bristled at this notion, but not out of sympathy for the prisoners. “It burns me up,” fumed one Madera woman in a letter to The Fresno Bee, “to hear some selfish Japanese lover rave about turning them loose to help with the farm labor.”

Military officials ultimately decided that this proposal was too dangerous. And by mid-July — when authorities began moving the Japanese internees out of the Valley — the solution became moot.

Valley leaders then pivoted to a second answer to the labor crisis: importing workers from Mexico. This idea elicited the same sort of xenophobic response as had the proposal to employ Japanese American internees. “Keep the Mexicans out of our U.S.A.,” Mrs. M.L.K. proclaimed in a letter to The Bee.

She and other like-minded locals had little to fear, at least in the short run. The United States and Mexico did forge a bilateral agreement to permit Mexican laborers to work in the U.S. on short-term contracts. Yet only 500 braceros, as they came to be known, came to the Valley in 1942.

A third labor source — indigent and incarcerated individuals whom authorities tried to coerce into the fields via promises and threats — proved equally insufficient.

But the 1942 farm labor crisis was not all bad news.

From August through December, thousands of students, housewives, and other volunteers rallied to save the Valley’s lucrative grape and cotton crops — a phalanx of pickers dubbed the “Victory Harvest Army.” Business owners permitted employees to leave work for the fields, and a New Deal agency coordinated their transportation. The Fresno Bee also helped, running stories that encouraged locals to fulfill their patriotic duty by picking crops.

Bess Middleton, The Bee’s social news editor, wrote a column chronicling a day she spent in the fields. Middleton worked alongside “a true cross section of democratic America,” in her estimation—including a dentist, a Fresno State College instructor, and two dozen high school boys and girls.

Students, in fact, proved crucial to this volunteer effort. Schools across the Valley delayed the start of the school year, implemented crop holidays, or otherwise excused older students to go pick.

Our friend Vernon Selland, one of the Hamilton Junior High School students who participated in the harvest, remembers those days fondly. He was happy to miss some school and play a role, however small, in the war against fascism. And the modest wages he earned “seemed really swell at the time,” he recalls.

In the 80 years since the farm labor shortage, the Valley has endured numerous crises, including, of course, the recent COVID-19 pandemic. We would do well to remember — and learn from — such moments, which can inspire both the better and the worse angels of our nature.

Ethan Kytle and Blain Roberts, history professors at California State University, Fresno, adapted this essay from their 2021 Boom California article, “‘Our Job Is to Get It Picked’: Volunteerism, Coercion, and the California Farm Labor Crisis of 1942 .”