Protest
Frances Koral
— I don't know if anybody's told you that we had a little labor dispute.
Elliot Levine
— I remember the first assembly program we had the first week, the topic under discussion was farm subsidies. And I wrote a letter, countersigned by my three roommates, to Dr. Benedict saying that to me the meeting was a waste of time; that what we should have been talking about our own problems in the Farm Project. And he said, "I got a letter from you boys. And look! If you were studying the piano you wouldn't expect to play a concerto the first week. Would you?" He was comparing the two things.
Frances Koral
— We began to realize this thing is not going to save the Army. After two days we realized. We felt we were being cheated by the farmer, Hinman.
Marjorie Brockman
— And then we discovered he owned the whole county, the gas stations and the motels. Hinman. And he was not a very charming man..
Phyllis LeShaw
— We knew that he was a capitalist farmer. It wasn't for a war effort, let's face it. It was for his profit and we were savvy enough to know that.
Marion Greenstone
— And sometimes it was very hot. And there was resentment against the farmer. And all his shenanigans, you know, trying to get more money or to not be exploited. After all, we were radicals from Brooklyn. But nothing much ever came of it.
Elliot Levine
— I remember a number of vociferous statements that were made by various people on the Project complaining that we weren't given the best fields to work on. There were walk offs. People would walk off the fields in protest that they gave us lousy stuff to pick. We couldn't make enough money out of it. And I remember Mr. Booth saying, "from now on anybody who walks off the field can walk right back to New York." At one of the assembly programs, somebody gave him a gift of a whip. Well, he had a good enough sense of humor to take that.
Frances Koral
— This was the war. You couldn't strike. We all believed you struck but not during the war.
Phyllis LeShaw
— And we decided in the middle of the summer to go on strike. I think a few lefties there led the strike. And we all went on strike, marched up the mountain. We quit work and went on strike. I forgot why. All kinds of reasons, the money, not being on the fresh bean fields.
Marjorie Brockman
— I remember going on strike in the middle of the season. We had discovered that the beans were being dumped into local streams and rivers because it didn't pay for him to expend the gasoline, which was also rationed, to ship them down to New York since beans were getting such a low price on the market. And that infuriated us. It enraged us. We saw them. One day we were going home in the buses or trucks that picked us up and we saw the guys— the overseers— dumping the beans. It reminded us all of the scene of the oranges in The Grapes of Wrath which, of course, we had all read. So we were really in a "Grapes of Wrath situation".
Frances Koral
— Well, sometimes he permitted the crown to be this high and sometimes three inches high, and sometimes it had to be five inches high, and sometimes it had to be seven inches high and there was no explanation for this. And we said that's not fair. And we didn't quite know what to do but we insisted. Somebody came up with the brilliant notion: you're answerable to us. We're your Brooklyn College students. And when we go back and we tell them you permitted us to be cheated by the farmer you're going to be in trouble. So finally the farmer just brought a scale. Whatever he said became the standard. And so the whole dispute was over.
Marjorie Brockman
— We got a dollar a bushel. I think we got a dollar a bushel or we got seventy-five cents a bushel. We got a small increase. And the reason we went on strike was that somebody did the math and figured out the number of bushels we picked, what he was paying us for them, what the market price of beans were ... We were very economically oriented. I know the strike was successful. I think it lasted one day. And it was very embarrassing to Professor Booth. (chuckles) He was a very distinguished gentleman and he was not used to dealing with radicals in the corn and bean fields.
Phyllis LeShaw
— I could see her face. It was a woman who led it, fist in the air, and that was it. I don't remember what happened. I don't think we accomplished very much. But it was interesting.
Elliot Levine
— In the fall I was in Dr. Benedict's biology class and we were talking about it, and he felt that Communists, as he put it, were trouble makers and hoped that they wouldn't come back.