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speculating about what other people might do better in their field. I made a kind of promise to myself that I would not barge into other fields, even though they were somewhat related to the Department of Labor, unless I had to.
It was only beginning at that time that anybody in this country thought of farm workers as labor. You read the act creating the Department of Labor and you thought of minerals, mines, factories, warehouses, ships, truck-drivers, but you didn't think of farmers. Farmers were farmers with their helpers, some of whom were their relatives, some of whom were their partners, and others of whom they hired. In the old farm pattern the hired man was a temporary member of the family. Of course, when they began to have the great wheat harvests and what we used to call the great bonanza farming, then you began to get these wandering farm workers who followed the crop from south to north. There were great hordes of people who were not in the steady employ of anybody. That's when the IWW started to get hold of them. At any rate, nobody ever thought of those people as wage earners, or laborers, or having anything to do with the Labor Department.
In no state that I know of was there ever any law
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