Densho Digital Archive - Frank Miyamoto Interview IV (denshovh-mfrank-04-0019)

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FM: Subsequently, however, it turns out that these same conditions, which of course created America of the Coolidge/Hoover days, led to the condition where the system no longer functions effectively. As you know, the Depression came in 1929. And the Depression came not only in the United States but worldwide because the kind of system, kind of laissez faire individualistic capitalism that was characteristic of the world system as it was moving ahead at that time, was not really well-suited, well-suited to take care of all the conditions which need attention if the system is to work effectively over time. And therefore, the Depression occurs here in the United States. The Coolidge/Harding kind of system, it is found, is not workable and somebody else has to come in and change this world. You will notice that Franklin Roosevelt had a quite different kind of philosophy as to how the society should be organized than did Hoover and his predecessors.

So, something was happening in the, not only America but in the world capitalistic system that was changing even the world of the cannery system, if you look at it from that point of view. What happened was that the, for example, in 1930s, early 1930s, although labor in the United States was already organized under the AFL, the American Federation of Labor, this system called trade-, trade unionism was being undermined for the same reason as I have just mentioned, the breakdown of the old capitalistic system and a new type of union was rising, a mass union, a more democratic union, if you, if we might put it that way, namely the CIO, the industrial --

AI: Congress of --

FM: Co-,

AI: -- Industrial --

FM: Yeah.

AI: -- Organizations?

FM: Conference?

AI: Congress?

FM: Congress. Yes. Congress. Couldn't think of... my brain doesn't function effectively any longer, Congress of the Industrial Organization. Anyway, CIO took over, became a very powerful union movement in the 1930s and really came to dominate the American scene for many decades. Because, as I say, the system was no longer what it had been before. And accordingly, you're gonna get a change in the cannery system as well. And what happened then was that in the 1930s, which is a period when I was working in the canneries, I saw that something was happening there which I had not anticipated when -- well, I was only fourteen when I first went to the cannery. But I, nobody, I think, really anticipated what was going to happen there. What happened was that the, in line with the changing atmosphere, the changing climate of worker/management relations, the management, in this case the contractors, no longer were -- proved to be as acceptable as they had been before. And I've tried to outline the conditions which made the management as contractors effective. But now then, in the 1930s you've got the situation where the system has been stabilized, but stabilized under conditions which the workers no longer are willing to accept. The CIO and the labor union movement, at least in the United States, came about as the result of protest.

Of course, labor protest was always in the air in the United States dating back into the 19th century, and certainly in the early 19th -- 20th century, why, you had some major labor protests that, that... achieved considerable prominence in the media, but it was not until the Depression that the protests came to take on new significance. Given the Depression and the rate at which workers were being... being discharged, unemployed and so on, and threatened in their security, then, given that situation, the nature of the protest changed so that mass movements of laborers seeking more power than they had before began. And this, as I say, is the setting within which the cannery situation produced a different kind of circumstance.