In the Friday Footnote last week we learned that high school students were recruited to work in farming jobs during World War II because of the labor shortage. To facilitate the work of students, schools in many states excused students from classes, dismissed classes for a few weeks during harvest time, or changed the school start dates or vacation times. There was no systematic, organized approach to facilitating student labor in agriculture.
Because of the haphazard approach to using high school students for farm labor and the dire need for this labor, government officials in Washington engaged in meetings and conversations that led to the creation of the Victory Farm Volunteers (VFV) in late 1942 and 1943.
But the predecessor of the VFV was the Volunteer Land Corps (VLC) which was created in 1941/42. Rasmussen (1951, p.106) reported “The program was extensively reported in the press and stimulated much thinking about the possibility of a similar Nation-wide program.” In this Footnote we will explore the creation and implementation of the Volunteer Land Corps. Next week we will finally learn about the Victory Farm Volunteers.
A Women Leads the Way
Dorothy Thompson, a well-known journalist and radio broadcaster, came up with the idea that eventually became the Victory Farm Volunteers. She was born in New York in 1893 and graduated from Syracuse University in 1914 where she studied political science and economics. After graduation she became involved in the suffrage movement (the right of women to vote) and contributed articles to various newspapers about social justice.
In 1920 she went abroad to pursue a career in journalism where she worked first in England and then in Germany. In 1927 Thompson was appointed to head the New York Post’s Berlin Bureau (Day, 2020).
On a visit back to the United States in 1928, she and her husband, the famed novelist Sinclair Lewis, bought a 300 acre farm in Vermont on a spontaneous whim (Bushnell, 2017). After purchasing the farm and fixing it up, the couple split their time between Twin Farms (the name of their farm), New York City and Europe. When the couple divorced in 1942, Dorothy kept the farm.
Thompson returned to Germany in 1930 as a journalist. In 1934 Dorothy was expelled from Germany (by Adolph Hitler) because of her anti-Nazi journalism and writings about Hitler. She was the first journalist expelled from Germany. Her expulsion from Germany made front page news across the country and made her an instant celebrity. She even had the expulsion order framed. After her expulsion she spent time in London and then returned to the United States.
In 1936 Thompson started writing a syndicated column for the New York Herald Tribune. This column was read by millions of people. She also wrote a monthly column for the Ladies’ Home Journal. At about the same time NBC hired Thompson to be a news commentator. An article in 1939 in Time magazine declared that she and Eleanor Roosevelt were the two most influential women in America.
Figure 1. Dorothy Thompson. Image from The Attic website.
The New York Times carried an article written by Thompson on December 7, 1941 in which she outlined her plan for youth to work in the fields of Vermont during the summer. Her plan appears to have been influenced by the depression era Civil Conservation Corp, various programs utilizing school age children for agricultural work in England, and the German Voluntary Work Service where young men of all classes went to work on the land. What is ironic is that it was on that day that Japan bombed Pearl Harbor which led to the involvement of America in World War II.
The Volunteer Land Corps
The Volunteer Land Corps (VLC) idea as espoused by Thompson in 1941 was implemented in 1942. Arthur Root, the Executive Officer of the Volunteer Land Corps, wrote a report summarizing the first summer of operation. In the first page of the report he states (Root, 1942, p. 1):
The Land Corps undertook this land service as an experiment towards the establishment of a national land service composed primarily of pre-draft age boys and of young women.
When the program was started, we were told at every turn that the government must do the job. We agreed that a national program must be undertaken by the government, but since the government was not doing it yet, we, and groups like ours, would have to undertake the job.
And they did. Thompson was able to find private funding to start the Volunteer Land Corps in 1941/42 and a public corporation was created (Heller, 2016). The Volunteer Land Corp program was launched in the summer of 1942.
At first the plan was to recruit college students from places like Harvard, Dartmouth, and eastern cities to help with routine chores such as milking, mowing, and baling hay, primarily on Vermont dairy farms. However, the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the extension of the draft prompted the VLC officials to recruit high school students also. The students would live with farm families. The students were paid $21 a month for their work and received room and board. However, in some instances, the students who excelled were paid more.
Dorothy’s regular newspaper column and the publicity generated by an article Dorothy wrote in the May 1942 issue of the Reader’s Digest titled “A Call For Young Workers on the Land” aided greatly in the recruitment effort. There were 2,500 applicants from 26 states for the volunteer work before applications were cut off. The great majority (94%) of students selected were interviewed by program officials with the exception being students from states far away. Students from 19 states were accepted. See Figure 2 for details about the VLC.
Figure 2. Article from The Bethel (VT) Courier, January 29, 1942.
Many of the young workers were from the New York City area and Boston and had never seen a farm. Thompson was pleased with the volunteers and wrote “They have been quite easily persuaded that they might as well pitch in with a pitchfork as with a golf stick. The work on the end of the fork, however, will be just a bit heavier. And there won’t be any caddies” (Berman, 2015). One recruit, Margot Mathewson, said “I hadn’t been any closer to a horse than I’d been to an elephant,”
There were two induction meetings (rallies) held in New York and one in Boston for the volunteers before they were sent out. In these meetings the reality of farm life in rural Vermont was explained. Root (1942, p. 7) explained “We hoped to prevent anyone from going up to a Vermont farm, thinking he would work six hours a day, get time and a half for overtime, go swimming in the evening, and have the week-end off.”
Root (1942, p. 16) reported that:
Many of the boys and girls commented later that if not for these rallies they never would have been able to face the period of initial adjustment as well as they had. Others said they would not have stuck the first three weeks at all, had not they been warned of the difficulties of being “broken in.”
The identification of farms on which to place the students was handled by the United States Employment Service in Vermont and the Vermont Extension Service with input from VLC field representatives. The VLC field representative was crucial in facilitating the travel plans for the volunteers and communicating that to the farmer.
The primary criteria for selecting cooperating farmers was (Root, 1942, p. 12):
First and foremost, the character of the people involved was considered — how understanding and patient they might be to inexperienced city youth, how pleasant to get along with, to what degree they could treat recruits like their own sons and daughters. In other words, how “decent” they were.
The cooperating farmers were prepared for their volunteers through Farm Bureau meetings, talks by County Agents, and a bulletin sent out by the Extension Service titled “Be Patient with the Boys.” Some of the “Don’ts” in the Extension bulletin were (Root, 1942, p. 100):
- Don’t give a boy a full day’s work in the manure pit under the barn or other similar disagreeable jobs on the first day he reports for work.
- Don’t forget that the boy may be unaccustomed to farm work.
- Don’t start him in with too long hours.
- Don’t forget to praise him for well done work.
- Don’t forget that a boy gets hungry between meals and after supper.
- Don’t forget that a boy is young and may get lonely.
- Don’t forget that you were young once and that someone was patient and tolerant with you.
- Don’t use harsh criticism, caustic remarks or profanity.
- Don’t lose your temper.
- Don’t forget that boys are boys and like to get a lot of fun out of life.
This is good advice also for agriculture teachers and extension agents.
In the first summer of the program (1942) 550 boys and 76 girls were placed on farms in Vermont and New Hampshire (Twenty-four boys were placed in New Hampshire but they were on the Vermont border). There was an acute shortage of farm labor in these two states.
The Volunteer Land Corp had 11 field representatives who worked with the farmers and volunteers. In addition to supervising the work, the field representatives organized Sunday gatherings and other social events for the volunteers.
The work proved to be too hard for some of the youth. Or perhaps they were homesick. However, eighty percent of the volunteers worked the entire summer and a handful stayed on after the summer and worked the entire year (Root, 1942). Seventy-seven percent of the boys and ninety-three percent of the girls made good on the farm and completed their jobs. However these figures include those who left for legitimate reasons such as being drafted or getting sick.
Figure 3. Victory Land Corp volunteers at work in Vermont. Image from Alfred Eisenstaedt—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
Overall, the VLC program was a success. A detailed report of the Volunteer Land Corps for 1942 can be read on the HathiTrust web site. At the end of the summer of 1942 four Volunteer Land Corp recruits and a VLC field worker appeared with the Governor of Vermont, William Wills, on a radio program. Wills said (Root, 1942, p. 72):
“I don’t know just what we would have done without your help. Some of us, perhaps, have seemed to expect too much from you boys and girls, but I believe the great majority of our Vermont farmers are well satisfied with your contribution. You have made a real contribution to the nation’s food production effort by coming to Vermont this summer.”
A Teaching Suggestion
A film “Farm Work is War Work” about the Volunteer Land Corp, produced in 1942, is available at https://archive.org/details/FarmWorkIsWarWork. The script was written by Dorothy Thompson. It depicts a city boy and girl working on a Vermont farm. This film is also available on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeIqYY8ok80. I would encourage you to show this to your students and get their reactions. An advertisement for the Victory Farm Volunteers appears at the end of the film. It apparently was added to the film after Congress established the VFV program in 1943.
Epilogue
On October 14, 1942 Dorothy Thompson met with Secretary of Agriculture Claude Wickard and a group of high ranking USDA officials including M. L. Wilson, the director of the Extension Service to share the details of the Volunteer Land Corp (VLC) in Vermont. Eight days later (October 22, 1942) M. L Wison sent a letter to the state directors of Extension Work commenting about the favorability of Thompson’s plan.
Later in October (28-30, 1942) Dorothy Thompson presented the VLC plan at a national meeting of state Extension Directors. The Directors voted (Wilson, 1946) “that the use of urban labor on farms in 1943 should be encouraged by the Extension Service in all appropriate ways.”
I will not describe all the meetings and actions that occurred after October 1942 regarding the use of volunteer youth labor other than to say Congress passed Public Law 45 on April 29, 1943 officially creating the US Crop Corp which included the Victory Farm Volunteer program.
Next week we will learn about the US Crop Corps and the Victory Farm Volunteers.
References
Berman, Eliza (2015, June 15). How Summer Jobs Once Kept America’s Farms From Failing. Time.com. https://time.com/3892364/volunteer-land-corps/
Bushnell, Mark (2017, August 27). Then Again: Barnard Farm Lured Famous Couple, But Couldn’t Bind Them. Vtdigger. https://vtdigger.org/2017/08/27/barnard-farm-lured-famous-couple-couldnt-bind/
Day, Kiara Brynne (2020). “A Mighty Woman With A Torch: Dorothy Thompson’s Call For American Action Against Nazism And Jewish Persecution, 1931-1945″ Graduate College Dissertations and Theses. 1275. https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/graddis/1275
Heller, Paul (2016, December 23). Young Workers Came to VT in ’42. Rutland Herald Online. https://www.rutlandherald.com/young-workers-came-tovt-in-42/article_f4c6151e-1e9c-57e6-bffc-9f0c67eb5488.html
Rasmussen, Wayne (1951). A History of the Emergency Farm Labor Supply Program, 1943-1947. Washington, DC: United States Department of Agriculture.
Root, Arthur (1942). Report on the Volunteer Land Corps Summer 1942,
Wilson, M. C. (1946, January 3). Early Chronology – Extension Farm Labor Program. Federal Extension Service.