The dissertation deals directly with the intersection of nature, labor, race, and the carceral state on America’s home front. It specifically focuses on how federal bureaucrats used precedents set by New Deal nature programs to create an agricultural labor force out of variously unfree groups – Latino migrants, Japanese Americans, and European prisoners of war from Germany and Italy.
Prior to the war, during the Great Depression, agriculture depended on a surplus of unemployed migrants to produce and conserve in rural America. Though these arrangements served bureaucrats and growers well during the New Deal, they no longer applied in the wartime economy. So, the government worked with local communities to create a food army for the home front. This dissertation collects the traces that the food army left behind. It combines disparate historiographic fields to study the lives of unfree farmworkers through newspapers and websites, archives and oral histories, revealing a carceral labor system built to fit the needs of American agriculture. Rather than focusing on individual cohorts, this dissertation assesses the force as a whole. In case studies from Maryland to California, it reveals how local communities used race, religion, and food to differentiate farmworkers’ local status on a spectrum from prisoners to denizens.
Samuel Klee successfully defended his dissertation on March 1 2024.
Trial lecture
The designated topic: "The Vietnam War and American Society"
Evaluation committee
- Professor Stephanie Hinnershitz, Air Command and Staff College Associate (first opponent)
- Professor Greg Robinson, L'Université du Québec à Montréal (second opponent)
- Associate Professor Stefan Rabitsch, University of Oslo (committee administrator)
Chair of the defence
- Professor Anne Birgitte Rønning
Supervisors
- Professor Randall Stephens, University of Oslo
- Professor Jason Morgan Ward, Emory University