Strike In Deansboro Over Conditions

By J.N. Cheney

World War II brought about conditions in the United States that, at the time, were unprecedented.

With so many either willfully enlisted or drafted to serve in the military, the USA faced a significant dip in the labor force.

This of course was the primary catalyst for the mass influx of women entering, or perhaps in some cases re-entering, the industrial workforce.

But women in the US weren’t the only group utilized to help alleviate the country’s productive struggles.

In the summer of 1944, as announced by the Oneida County Farm Bureau, a number of workers from the Caribbean were brought into the country, as authorized by the Department of Agriculture, to work as farm laborers.

Overall, this program brought in up to 75,000 people from the Bahamas and Jamaica to work throughout the east coast.

Deansboro was one of the areas in New York that received help from a large number of Jamaican workers.

Starting on July 1 of that year, a farm labor camp was set up in Deansboro to house 300 contracted workers from Jamaica to aid various farms in the area.

The workers from Jamaica were tasked primarily with picking peas and beans among other crops to help keep the harvest going smoothly.

For this project, buildings such as offices and mess hall buildings from nearby Civilian Conservation Corps camps were moved to Deansboro, and tents were provided by the US Army for the workers to bunk in.

The assistance was surely welcomed by the US government, but there did exist some underlying problems relating to how this program was formulated.

First of all, this program ...