…
But with the outbreak of the second world war, things changed. The Caldwell labor camp was soon repurposed to house detained Japanese Americans and to satisfy the US military’s thirst for sugar.In March 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9102, which ultimately removed Japanese Americans from their homes on the west coast to concentration camps. Just weeks before, the secretary of agriculture, Claude R Wickard, had demanded that the US produce an unprecedented number of sugar beets to provide fodder for explosives.
This unprecedented demand for sugar caused panic among growers nationwide who anticipated historic labor shortages. To guarantee production and profits, the military, state governments and growers all envisioned newly incarcerated Japanese Americans as an “available” labor force. They created the Seasonal Leave Program (SLP), which took Japanese Americans away from larger camps like Minidoka in western Idaho, which housed an estimated 9,000 people, and shipped them to smaller labor camps like Caldwell to plant and harvest sugar beets.
…
…
Beet work wasn’t only painful – it was also racialized. Fred Cummings, a Colorado sugar beet farmer and executive, pulled no punches about just who should do beet work when he addressed a congressional hearing on immigration in 1926: “… there is not a white man of any intelligence in our country who will work an acre of beets … I do not want to see a condition arise again when white men who are reared and educated in our schools have got to bend their backs and skin their fingers to pull those little beets.” As he saw it, lawmakers really had only one choice in the face of potential white racial degradation: to “let us have the only class of laborers who will do the work”, a class that consisted of Asian, Mexican and Indigenous farmhands.
…
ETA:
