Oil, Mexicans, and Nitrates: A Dual Energy-Labor Transition in Rural America, 1920-1950

Robert Suits, University of Chicago

Between 1920 and 1950, parallel dramatic shifts in energy and labor completely remade the rural American landscape. For the first time, oil allowed American farmers to use fossil fuels in the most basic aspects of agriculture work. Virtually simultaneously, itinerant “hobo” laborers gave way to an early Mexican-American migrant workforce and black sharecroppers escaped Southern farms in droves, while fertilizer use on American farms ballooned after decades of stagnant yields. In this paper, I investigate the connections between the adoption of oil-based technologies—most obviously trucks and tractors, but also irrigation pumps and artificial fertilizers—and the transformation of rural American labor. Using energy and demographic statistics along with qualitative evidence, I argue that this energy transition engendered major transitions in the nature and hierarchies of manual labor across the continent.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 12. Rural, Agricultural, and Environmental