Cane sugar was primarily grown and harvested by slave labor in the Southern states before the Civil War. As a result, sugar beets were heralded by abolitionists as “free sugar” because it was not produced by slave labor on sugar plantations.
But was it indeed “free sugar”? In the 1880s, the soil in Nebraska was deemed suitable for sugar beet crops, and incentives were given to area farmers. These farmers used mostly German-Russian and Mexican immigrant families to plant, tend, and harvest the fields.
This practice was the norm for decades, where families worked from October to April in sugar beet production. The farmworkers lived in shacks, and children were pulled from school to work alongside their parents. The workday for everyone averaged 12 hours.
Because the American Dream is so tied to agriculture and farm life as the ideal, child labor practices on the farm had not even been considered as oppressive.
“Thomas Jefferson championed the notion that farm work was good for children and served as a bulwark of economic, social, and moral values. (Barrett).” Because working conditions in mines and factories had been deemed unsafe for children, farm work was considered character building, and many children went for extended stays to work on rural farms as a result.
Investigators had to find a way to convince the public that the labor expected of children on the farm was just as rigorous and harmful as that of the mines and factories. They settled on the practice of “thinning,” one phase in the sugar beet harvest, to scrutinize. “A day’s work during “thinning” season typically involved both children and parents walking through the rows of plants and bunching them with hoes, while smaller children crawled behind them and plucked out the plants (Sargent).” Parents or farm owners justified this practice saying that this work was hard on the backs of adults but did not hurt the children.
Investigators compiled what is known as the North Platte Valley report. To protect children, they were the first to demonize farmers, parents, and companies as proponents of unlawful child labor. One big mistake they made was not taking into consideration other forces at play, such as the idealization of the agrarian lifestyle and social constructs contributing to the misfortunes of the children and their families.
The amendment that finally ended child labor in the sugar beet industry was signed in 1934, the Jones-Costigan Amendment. This amendment did not allow children under 14 to work in sugar production. However, farmers’ and owners’ children were exempt from this amendment until 1970 when new age and hour restrictions were put into place.
Sara A. Brown and Robie O. Sargent, “Children in the Sugar Beet Fields of the North Platte Valley of Nebraska, 1923,” Nebraska History 67 (1986): 256-303. Reprint.
Mary Lyons-Barrett, “Child Labor in the Early Sugar Beet Industry in the Great Plains, 1890-1920,” Great Plains Quarterly, Vol. 25, No. 1 (WINTER 2005), pp. 29-38
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