Today is the second installment in the Leader‘s “Song of the Week” series. Today we feature “Do Re Mi”, penned by singer, songwriter, and working-class prophet Woody Guthrie. If Guthrie’s lyrics still feel as fresh today as it did in 1940, that’s probably because the song tells a story about labor and migration that is as relevant today as it was nearly a century ago.
A MOBILE WORKING CLASS has been a regular and, from the point of view of the capital-owning class, necessary feature of capitalism since at least the 18th century, when British peasants were forced off the land and into the cities to sell their labor, forming an urban proletariat. Having a mobile working class assures owners that there is neither too small nor too large of a workforce in a particular area.
From the businessman’s point of view, there needs to be just enough surplus labor to let workers know they are expendable. A labor shortage in a particular region forces employers to compete for workers, thus driving up wages and making workers selective about what conditions they’re willing to put up with. Even Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson, certainly no scholar of political economy, seems to recognize this dynamic. When asked about his indifference to Oshkosh Trucks opening up a plant in South Carolina, said “It’s not like we don’t have enough jobs here in Wisconsin. The biggest problem we have in Wisconsin right now is employers not being able to find enough workers.” Shipping jobs elsewhere is one way to reduce labor power and cost (especially when “elsewhere” is a plant with non-organized labor).
On the other hand, a large labor surplus creates social problems, like poverty, homelessness, hunger, and unrest, which eventually have to be dealt with through governmental action, whether that’s economic assistance or policing. It’s much more preferable that at least some of the excess workers just leave. As put in the particularly fatuous 2018 World Bank study Moving for Prosperity: “The rich have many assets; the poor have only one—their labor. Because good jobs are slow to come to the poor, the poor must move to find productive employment. Migration is, therefore, the most effective way to reduce poverty and share prosperity, the twin goals of the World Bank.”
In spite of the glib attitudes of Senator Johnson and the World Bank, a mobile workforce is not something that can be pushed around like water in plumbing, shifting here and there to meet needs and regulate pressure as the economic masters see fit. These are real human beings. Moving may mean the disruption of extended families and the loss of friendships, and all the mutual aid they can render each other. It means attempting to reestablish those connections elsewhere. It has consequences for those places left behind, and for those places that receive them. Entire cities may irrevocably change on both ends creating wide areas of abandoned housing or overcrowded slums.
Migration on a large scale can be the result of a number of broad factors. In a capitalist economy, it can be from technological changes brought on by efforts to reduce labor costs, rendering certain labor skills obsolete and wide swaths of the population redundant, changes that left weaving communities starving in early 19th century Britain. It can come from moving jobs out to other locations to take advantage of cheaper, unorganized labor as happened in the Rust Belt cities in the post war period, leading to steady population declines. Grotesque inequalities across borders may induce transnational migration, such as what we see today, from the global south to Europe and North America. Or it may be caused by an ecological crisis, caused or compounded by unsustainable economic practices, rendering an area uninhabitable for the size of the population living there. This latter situation is what brought on the migration addressed in today’s song of the week.
RELEASED IN 1940 on Woody Guthrie’s album Dust Bowl Ballads, Do Re Mi documents the trials of Dust Bowl refugees, specifically those roughly 350,000 migrants that looked to California for work, caught between an economic and environmental catastrophe behind them, and a hostile government and spotty relief in front of them. What is striking in the story is the familiarity of it, of how closely it parallels the situations of refugees caught in this impossible situation today.
The Dust Bowl was the result of several problems that came together all at once. First, the farming practices of settlers on the Great Plains, and the type of crops they grew, were not suitable for that environment. Second, improved farming technology led to lower crop prices. Lower crop prices forced expansion into more marginal land to pay for the improved technology. More land under cultivation led to lower crop prices, and so on (i.e., the classic contradiction of capitalism). The final problem was a severe decade-long drought that covered 3/4 of the country, from 1930 to 1940. So, in summary, more and more increasingly unproductive land was being plowed to plant crops unable to thrive in normal natural conditions, let alone more extreme conditions, leaving nothing to hold the dirt in place. This impacted farmers first, of course, but that rippled through the economy. The region was becoming rapidly unsustainable for the population living there.
California is a Garden of Eden, a paradise to live in or see
While migration out of the region started early in the 1930’s, it became serious in 1935, peaking in 1937 and 1938. California was a popular destination because, as Guthrie put it in his autobiography, “…they’d seen all the pretty pictures about California and they’d heard all the pretty songs about California, and they had read all the handbills about coming to California and picking fruit.” That is, California had been promoting immigration and tourism, or to put it another way, skilled labor and money. Of course, as California was experiencing the Great Depression as much as anywhere else, jobs were as scarce there as anywhere else. Starting in 1933, the federal government provided relief under the Federal Transient Service to provide the basics to the migrants (food, shelter, medical care, etc.). This was ended in 1935. Individuals in the service were to be transferred to employment in the WPA. However, people had to apply for WPA jobs in the state of their legal residence, and transients weren’t there. They were soon to be homeless, in California, leaving the state to pick up the cost of relief.
But believe it or not, you won’t find it so hot
If you ain’t got the do re mi.
An early response to this by the state of California was the Jones-Redwine bill, aimed at preventing the entry into the state of individuals who could not show a means of income, or were without assets, i.e., people who would become an economic burden on the state. This passed the State Assembly in 1935, but didn’t pass the California Senate until 1937. Seeing this bill stalled, the LAPD under Chief James Davis, with the permission of Los Angeles mayor Frank Shaw, decided to take matters into its own hands by creating what would come to be known as the Bum Blockade. In November of 1935, the LAPD sent officers to major highway crossing points into California to set up roadblocks, refusing entry into the state of people who didn’t appear to be able to support themselves, and asserting the right to check railroad cars for stowaways. Arrested individuals were given the choice of turning around or being sentenced to hard labor. This lasted until early April of 1936. Nevertheless, the efforts to harass and police the migrants continued.
It was easier to justify these actions to the public if the public didn’t see the migrants as sympathetic, as victims of circumstances. The language used by governments at various levels, by the police, and by the press to describe them was meant to undermine that natural feeling. Dust Bowl refugees were described as dirty, lazy, criminal, spreaders of disease. In the words of the supporters of the Jones-Redwine bill, the migrants were the definition of the “undeserving poor”; their presence would only overwhelm social services and take away jobs from the locals. The fact that they were fleeing a catastrophe was denied or ignored. As Guthrie put it, “I’m against the law, they tell me”.
WHILE FREE MIGRATION OF LABOR is fundamental feature of capitalism, the owning class hardly wants to pick up the tab when it becomes dysfunctional. That’s what the reaction to this “surplus” population is all about, the fear, the slurs, the legislative action, the police action. This should sound familiar to us all. It long preceded the Dust Bowl migration (you can see major elements of it in the British Poor Laws of 1834) and it has continued long since.
The fearmongering is also a handy tool for ruling classes wanting to perpetuate the division in the working classes, breaking down the empathy for and solidarity with their fellow workers in distress. This is not insurmountable, however. As a model for a different approach, we could look to the original Rainbow Coalition between the Illinois Black Panthers, the mostly Puerto Rican Young Lords, and the Young Patriots, composed of Chicago Appalachian migrants, who came together in recognition of their common struggle as outsiders, unwanted, seen as people needing to be monitored and controlled. Another example is documented in author and labor activist Jane MacElevy’s No Shortcuts (see chapter 5), where she describes how Smithfield Foods brought in migrants from Mexico to work in a meatpacking plant in North Carolina. In spite of efforts by Smithfield to play Mexican laborers off of the white and black laborers at the plant, they all organized a union together. We need to recognize that people on the move, particularly people with nothing to sell but their labor, have few choices. We need to recognize that the source of this problem is not the people themselves, but the conditions in which they find themselves.
