Thirty Cents an Hour, for Imported Workers Only. Robstown, Texas, 1942.
The film of this episode premieres January 19, 2027 on YouTube. The documents, the transcript and the sources are below now.
In January 1942 Arthur Rothstein spent part of a month in Texas with a camera loaded with Kodachrome. Fourteen of his slides are the Farm Security Administration's migratory labor camp at Robstown, in Nueces County — row shelters, a community laundry, a community clothesline, gardens planted out front, boys flying a kite in front of the…
Transcript
R001 Boys sitting on truck parked at the FSA labor camp, Robstown, Tex.
Arthur Rothstein · Robstown, Texas · January 1942 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
Four boys at a federal camp for families who follow the harvest. In fifteen months, Congress banned its own money from setting their wage.
The camp at Robstown
R002 Families of migratory workers in front of their row shelters, FSA labor camp, Robstown, Tex.
Arthur Rothstein · Robstown, Texas · January 1942 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
Robstown, Texas. January nineteen forty-two.
R003 Row shelters, FSA labor camp, Robstown, Tex.
Arthur Rothstein · Robstown, Texas · January 1942 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
Arthur Rothstein worked for the Farm Security Administration, and the government owned the camp he was standing in.
R004 Gardens are planted in front of the row shelters, FSA labor camp, Robstown, Tex.
Arthur Rothstein · Robstown, Texas · January 1942 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
These are Kodachrome slides. Nothing here is colorized. That is the blue the sky was in January 1942.
R005 Community clothesline, FSA camp, Robstown, Tex.
Arthur Rothstein · Robstown, Texas · January 1942 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
The description on this one is two words. Community clothesline.
The agency had written down what a camp like this was: shelters or tent platforms, grouped around sanitary facilities and community buildings.
R006 Young woman at the community laundry on Saturday afternoon, FSA camp, Robstown, Tex.
Arthur Rothstein · Robstown, Texas · January 1942 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
Young woman at the community laundry, on Saturday afternoon.
R007 Woman at the community laundry on Saturday afternoon, FSA camp, Robstown, Tex.
Arthur Rothstein · Robstown, Texas · January 1942 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
Woman at the community laundry, on Saturday afternoon. Same tubs, same afternoon, and neither of them has a name in the record.
The report is specific about what went in a permanent building. The day nursery. The laundry. The community center.
R008 Migratory worker, FSA camp, Robstown, Tex.
Arthur Rothstein · Robstown, Texas · January 1942 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
Migratory worker. That is the whole caption, and it is also the phrase the law is about to use.
What it was for
Displaced farmers, the agency called them. Migrant workers who have lost their foothold on the land as the result of mechanization, or natural disaster such as drought.
Through the camps, it wrote, the refugees reach at least a minimum standard of decent living while they are on the road. The quotation marks around refugees are the government's own.
Fifteen thousand families at a time. Camps finished in California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Texas, Arizona and Florida.
Saturday
R009 Boys playing marbles, FSA labor camp, Robstown, Texas
Arthur Rothstein · Robstown, Texas · January 1942 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
Boys playing marbles.
R010 Boys flying a kite in front of community center, FSA camp, Robstown, Tex.
Arthur Rothstein · Robstown, Texas · January 1942 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
Boys flying a kite in front of the community center.
R011 Boys flying a kite in front of the community center, FSA camp, Robstown, Tex.
Arthur Rothstein · Robstown, Texas · January 1942 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
He photographed the kite twice.
R012 Boy building a model airplane as girl watches, FSA camp, Robstown, Tex.
Arthur Rothstein · Robstown, Texas · January 1942 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
A boy building a model airplane, as a girl watches.
R013 Boy building a model airplane while other children look on, FSA labor camp, Robstown, Tex.
Arthur Rothstein · Robstown, Texas · January 1942 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
And again, with the rest of them watching.
R014 Child of a migratory farm laborer in the field during the harvest of the community center's cabbage crop, FSA labor camp, Tex.
Arthur Rothstein · Robstown, Texas · January 1942 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
Then this one. Child of a migratory farm laborer, in the field, during the harvest of the community center's cabbage crop.
Three hundred and fifty miles north
R015 Civilian pilot training school, returning from practice flight, Meacham Field, Fort Worth, Tex.
Arthur Rothstein · Fort Worth, Texas · January 1942 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
Three hundred and fifty miles north, in the same month, Rothstein pointed the same camera at an airfield.
R016 Student pilots, Meacham Field, Fort Worth, Tex.
Arthur Rothstein · Fort Worth, Texas · January 1942 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
Meacham Field, Fort Worth. Student pilots.
R017 Civilian training school, students and instructors, Meacham Field, Fort Worth, Tex.
Arthur Rothstein · Fort Worth, Texas · January 1942 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
The Library's own bracketed title calls it a civilian pilot training school. Students, and instructors.
R018 Instructor and students studying a map, Meacham Field, Fort Worth, Tex.
Arthur Rothstein · Fort Worth, Texas · January 1942 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
An instructor and students studying a map.
R019 Instructor explaining the operation of a parachute to student pilots, Meacham field, Fort Worth, Tex.
Arthur Rothstein · Fort Worth, Texas · January 1942 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
And then, for the rest of the assignment, one sentence.
R020 Instructor explaining the operation of a parachute to student pilots, Meacham Field, Fort Worth, Tex.
Arthur Rothstein · Fort Worth, Texas · January 1942 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
Instructor explaining the operation of a parachute to student pilots.
R021 Instructor explaining the operation of a parachute to student pilots, Meacham Field, Fort Worth, Tex.
Arthur Rothstein · Fort Worth, Texas · January 1942 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
Instructor explaining the operation of a parachute to student pilots.
R022 Instructor explaining the operation of a parachute to student pilots, Meacham Field, Fort Worth, Tex.
Arthur Rothstein · Fort Worth, Texas · January 1942 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
Again.
R023 Instructor explaining the operation of a parachute to student pilots, Meacham Field, Fort Worth, Tex.
Arthur Rothstein · Fort Worth, Texas · January 1942 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
Again.
R024 Instructor explaining the operation of a parachute to student pilots, Meacham Field, Fort Worth, Tex.
Arthur Rothstein · Fort Worth, Texas · January 1942 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
Seven of the eleven Fort Worth captions mention the parachute. Six of them are that same sentence.
R025 Instructor explaining the operation of the parachute to students, Meacham Field, Fort Worth, Tex.
Arthur Rothstein · Fort Worth, Texas · January 1942 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
The seventh swaps two words.
The year after
A year on, the agency's annual report said the labor had gone. War industries and the armed forces have tapped this heretofore surplus supply of manpower.
So the camps changed meaning. Established in a time of labor surplus, the report says — their role in a time of labor shortage has become increasingly apparent.
There is now stationed at each labor camp a Farm Placement Supervisor of the U.S. Employment Service, responsible for receiving orders for workers.
By this arrangement, it goes on, a proper rationing of labor is accomplished. Hoarding and pirating of workers is held to a minimum.
Ninety-five centers by then. Nineteen thousand four hundred and thirty-two families at a time, in eighteen states.
Where the work went
R044 Workers leaving Pennsylvania shipyards, Beaumont, Texas
John Vachon · Beaumont, Texas · June 1943 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome transparency. View the original.
The shortage had somewhere to be. John Vachon, June 1943: workers leaving the Pennsylvania shipyards, Beaumont, Texas.
D04 Workers leaving Pennsylvania shipyards, Beaumont, Texas (detail)
John Vachon · Beaumont, Texas · June 1943 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome transparency. View the original.
Hard hats and shirtsleeves, and not one person in that crowd named.
R043 House, Houston, Texas
John Vachon · Houston, Texas · May 1943 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome transparency. View the original.
House, Houston, Texas. Washing strung the length of the upper gallery, and a wagon of corn in the street.
R026 Southland Paper mill, Kraft (chemical) pulp used in making newsprint, Lufkin, Texas
John Vachon · Lufkin, Texas · April 1943 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome transparency. View the original.
Two months before that he had been in the pine woods at Lufkin. Southland Paper mill — kraft pulp, used in making newsprint.
R027 Southland Paper mill, Kraft (chemical) pulp used in making newsprint, Lufkin, Texas
John Vachon · Lufkin, Texas · April 1943 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome transparency. View the original.
Bale on bale of it, stacked in the open.
R028 Southland Paper mill, Kraft (chemical) pulp used in making newsprint, Lufkin, Texas
John Vachon · Lufkin, Texas · April 1943 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome transparency. View the original.
The same wall, closer.
R029 Southland Paper Co., Kraft pulp mill under construction, Lufkin, Texas
John Vachon · Lufkin, Texas · April 1943 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome transparency. View the original.
And beside it, another pulp mill going up.
Hoskins Mound
R030 60 foot high sulphur vat, Freeport Sulphur Co., Hoskins Mound, Texas
John Vachon · Freeport, Texas · May 1943 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome transparency. View the original.
Then Hoskins Mound, on the coast below Houston. A sixty-foot-high vat of sulphur.
R031 Sulphur vat 60 feet high, Freeport Sulphur Co., Hoskins Mound, Texas
John Vachon · Freeport, Texas · May 1943 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome transparency. View the original.
Sulphur vat, sixty feet high. He wrote the height into three of the nine captions.
R032 Freeport Sulphur Co., 60 foot high vat of sulphur, Hoskins Mound, Texas
John Vachon · Freeport, Texas · May 1943 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome transparency. View the original.
Freeport Sulphur Company.
R033 Nearly exhausted sulphur vat from which railroad cars are loaded, Freeport Sulphur Co., Hoskins Mound, Texas
John Vachon · Freeport, Texas · May 1943 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome transparency. View the original.
Nearly exhausted sulphur vat, from which railroad cars are loaded.
R034 Nearly exhausted sulphur vat from which railroad cars are loaded, Freeport Sulphur Co., Hoskins Mound, Texas
John Vachon · Freeport, Texas · May 1943 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome transparency. View the original.
Nearly exhausted.
R035 Loading sulphur from vat, Freeport Sulphur Co., Hoskins Mound, Texas
John Vachon · Freeport, Texas · May 1943 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome transparency. View the original.
Loading sulphur from the vat.
R036 Loading box cars with sulphur, Freeport Sulphur Co., Hoskins Mound, Texas
John Vachon · Freeport, Texas · May 1943 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome transparency. View the original.
Loading box cars with sulphur.
R037 Railroad cars loaded with sulphur, Freeport Sulphur Co., Hoskins Mound, Texas
John Vachon · Freeport, Texas · May 1943 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome transparency. View the original.
Railroad cars loaded with sulphur.
R038 Melted sulphur from the wells pouring into relay station, Freeport Sulphur Co., Hoskins Mound, Texas
John Vachon · Freeport, Texas · May 1943 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome transparency. View the original.
And the other end of it — melted sulphur from the wells, pouring into a relay station.
R039 Geologist examining cuttings from wildcat well, Amarillo, Texas
John Vachon · Amarillo, Texas · 1943? · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome transparency. View the original.
Amarillo. A geologist examining cuttings from a wildcat well.
R040 De-waxing plant at Mid-Continent refinery, Tulsa, Okla.
John Vachon · Tulsa, Oklahoma · 1943? · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome transparency. View the original.
Across the state line, at Tulsa, Oklahoma: the de-waxing plant at the Mid-Continent refinery. It sits inside the same run of film, so it is here too.
R041 Employees at Mid-Continent Refinery, Tulsa, Okla.
John Vachon · Tulsa, Oklahoma · 1943? · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome transparency. View the original.
Employees at Mid-Continent Refinery. Five men, no names.
R042 Worker at carbon black plant, Sunray, Texas
John Vachon · Sunray, Texas · 1942 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome transparency. View the original.
And in the Panhandle, at Sunray, a worker at a carbon black plant.
The schoolrooms
R045 Rural school children, San Augustine County, Texas
John Vachon · San Augustine County, Texas · April 1943 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome transparency. View the original.
In April 1943 he had also gone into the schools of San Augustine County, in East Texas. Three boys, and a poster: Schools at War.
R046 Rural school children, San Augustine County, Texas
John Vachon · San Augustine County, Texas · April 1943 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome transparency. View the original.
Rural school children.
R047 Rural school children, San Augustine County, Texas
John Vachon · San Augustine County, Texas · April 1943 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome transparency. View the original.
Rural school children. Buy war bonds.
R048 Rural school children, San Augustine County, Texas
John Vachon · San Augustine County, Texas · April 1943 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome transparency. View the original.
A girl showing two smaller ones the globe.
R049 Rural school girl, San Augustine County, Texas
John Vachon · San Augustine County, Texas · April 1943 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome transparency. View the original.
Rural school girl. She is standing at a map of the world.
R050 Dr. Schreiber of San Augustine giving a typhoid innoculation at a rural school, San Augustine County, Texas
John Vachon · San Augustine County, Texas · April 1943 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome transparency. View the original.
And Doctor Schreiber of San Augustine, giving a typhoid inoculation at a rural school. He is the only person named in any of these fifty captions.
Three days in April
The month before Vachon walked into those schoolrooms, the Secretary of Agriculture had gone to a Senate subcommittee about a bill.
The House, Claude Wickard told them, wrote in a provision prohibiting the fixing of any standards for wages, housing, and other working conditions.
D02 Migratory worker, FSA camp, Robstown, Tex. (detail)
Arthur Rothstein · Robstown, Texas · January 1942 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
And a second clause, which stopped the money moving a farm worker out of the county he lived in without his county agent's signature.
That amendment, Wickard told them, will freeze the normal movement of migratory labor.
Then he said the other thing. The prohibition against any wage and housing standards will invalidate the agreements which we have with Mexico and the Bahama Islands.
Not everybody thought that was a loss. In the House hearings, a congressman from Oklahoma had already put the Mexican contract to him.
It is mandatory that he treat all farm workers exactly alike, in all respects. That just won't work in Oklahoma.
On the twenty-sixth of April 1943, the United States signed the revised agreement anyway.
Its text stops to define one word. When the word employer is used hereinafter it shall be understood to mean the Farm Security Administration.
The same agency that built Robstown. And these are the terms it agreed to. Wages equal to the local rate, and in any case not less than thirty cents an hour.
Hygienic lodgings, furnished without cost. Medical and sanitary services, without cost.
D05 Young woman at the community laundry on Saturday afternoon, FSA camp, Robstown, Tex. (detail)
Arthur Rothstein · Robstown, Texas · January 1942 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
Robstown already had that, and the government had photographed it.
Groups of workers shall elect their own representatives to deal with the employer.
And: work of minors under fourteen years shall be strictly prohibited — with the same schooling opportunities as other agricultural laborers' children.
D03 Child of a migratory farm laborer in the field during the harvest of the community center's cabbage crop, FSA labor camp, Tex. (detail)
Arthur Rothstein · Robstown, Texas · January 1942 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
Fifteen months earlier, in a cabbage field in south Texas, the government had photographed that too.
One more clause. Mexicans entering the United States as a result of this understanding shall not suffer discriminatory acts of any kind.
That clause is in there for a reason. Three months later the State Department wrote of the reluctance of the Mexican Government to make these workers available —
— because of the reported prevalence of racial discrimination against Mexicans in Texas.
Three days after the agreement, Congress passed the bill. No funds may move a worker out of the county where he lives without the written consent of the county extension agent.
And then the paragraph Wickard had warned them about.
No federal money for recruiting, transporting or placing farm workers may be used to fix, regulate or impose minimum wages or housing standards —
— or to regulate hours of work, or to enforce collective bargaining, with respect to any agricultural labor.
Except with respect to workers imported into the United States from a foreign country.
Four sections later the camps appear in the same statute one last time. Receipts from agricultural labor supply centers, including camps heretofore used by the Farm Security Administration —
— shall be deposited in the Treasury as miscellaneous receipts.
Texas, 1941
D01 Boys sitting on truck parked at the FSA labor camp, Robstown, Tex. (detail)
Arthur Rothstein · Robstown, Texas · January 1942 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
So: thirty cents an hour, a clean bed and an elected representative, if you were brought from Mexico.
D12 Boys sitting on truck parked at the FSA labor camp, Robstown, Tex. (detail)
Arthur Rothstein · Robstown, Texas · January 1942 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
If you were already here, in a truck with a Texas plate, following the cabbage — the government had just forbidden itself to say what any of it should be.
Sources
- Farm Security Administration / Office of War Information colour slides and transparencies collection, Library of Congress: https://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/fsac/
- Arthur Rothstein, January 1942 — 25 slides, LC-USF35-279 to 303. Eleven at Meacham Field, Fort Worth (279–289) and fourteen at the Farm Security Administration migratory labor camp at Robstown, Nueces County (290–303).
- John Vachon, 1942–43 — 25 transparencies, LC-USW36-819 to 842 A. Hoskins Mound sulphur (819–827, May 1943), San Augustine County rural schools (828–833, April 1943), the Southland Paper mill at Lufkin (834–837, April 1943), a house in Houston (838), the Pennsylvania shipyards at Beaumont (839, June 1943), an Amarillo wildcat well (840), the Mid-Continent refinery at Tulsa, Oklahoma (841, 841 A) and the carbon black plant at Sunray (842).
- Two frames in this film are Oklahoma, not Texas. LC-USW36-841 and 841 A sit inside Vachon's call-number run between the Amarillo well and the Sunray plant, and the film says so on screen and in the credit line.
- Counted mechanically across all fifty captions: one person is named — Dr. Schreiber of San Augustine. Seven of the eleven Fort Worth captions mention the parachute and six are the same sentence; three of the nine Hoskins Mound captions give the vat's height.
- The black-and-white file of the same camp is far larger and says more. A `co=fsa` search on "Robstown" returns 281 records, 169 of them of the camp, against fourteen in colour, and their captions name a nursery school, a mothers' committee, a women's committee, a Red Cross first aid class, a clinic, a bathhouse, a woodworking shop and a camp manager. Two of them identify children as "Latin-American", which is the period term in the Library's caption; no colour caption records anyone's origin. Examples: the nursery school, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2017775300/ · "Latin-American child at lunch", https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2017775324/ · the whole search, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/search/?q=Robstown&;co=fsa
- Example frames used here: the boys on the truck, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2017877659/ · "Migratory worker", https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2017877658/ · the child in the cabbage, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2017877660/ · the parachute, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2017877637/ · the sulphur vat, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2017878835/ · the Beaumont shipyard gate, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2017878839/ · Dr. Schreiber, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2017878819/
- Report of the Administrator of the Farm Security Administration, 1941 (GPO), p. 21 — "MIGRATORY LABOR CAMPS": the camps as "temporary shelters or tent platforms grouped around sanitary facilities and community buildings", so that "the 'refugees' reach at least a minimum standard of decent living while they are on the road"; accommodation for about 15,000 migratory farm families at any one time; completed camps in California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Texas, Arizona and Florida. https://archive.org/details/CAT11115696004
- Annual Report of the Administrator [Farm Security Administration], 1942, pp. 20–22 — "War industries and the armed forces have tapped this heretofore surplus supply of manpower"; "While these centers were established in a time of labor surplus … their role in a time of labor shortage has become increasingly apparent"; a U.S. Employment Service Farm Placement Supervisor now stationed at each camp, "responsible for receiving orders for workers and for the selection and referral of all workers from the center", by which "a proper rationing of labor is accomplished, hoarding and pirating of workers is held to a minimum"; 95 centers, 19,432 families, eighteen States; and the day nursery, laundry and sanitary facilities housed in a permanent structure with the community center. https://archive.org/details/CAT11115774
- Legislative History, Public Law 45 — 78th Congress, ch. 82 (H.J. Res. 96), the bound GPO compilation. Secretary of Agriculture Claude R. Wickard before the Subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Appropriations, March 22, 1943 (*Farm Labor Program, 1943*, p. 4): the House "wrote in a provision prohibiting the fixing of any standards for wages, housing, and other working conditions"; the county-agent amendment "will freeze the normal movement of migratory labor"; "the prohibition against any wage and housing standards will invalidate the agreements which we have with Mexico and the Bahama Islands". Mr. Johnson of Oklahoma to the Secretary, Subcommittee of the House Committee on Appropriations (same title, p. 180): "It is mandatory that he treat all farm workers exactly alike, in all respects. That just won't work in Oklahoma." https://archive.org/details/PL7845
- Agreement between the United States of America and Mexico revising the agreement of August 4, 1942 respecting the temporary migration of Mexican agricultural workers, effected by exchange of notes signed at Mexico City April 26, 1943 — E.A.S. 351, 57 Stat. 1152. "When the word 'employer' is used hereinafter it shall be understood to mean the Farm Security Administration of the Department of Agriculture of the United States of America" (p. 1159); wages "not less than 30 cents per hour" and "Work of minors under 14 years shall be strictly prohibited, and they shall have the same schooling opportunities as those enjoyed by children of other agricultural laborers" (p. 1160); "hygienic lodgings" and medical and sanitary services "without cost to them", and "Groups of workers … shall elect their own representatives to deal with the employer" (p. 1161); "shall not suffer discriminatory acts of any kind in accordance with the Executive Order No. 8802 issued at the White House June 25, 1941" (p. 1158). https://archive.org/details/us_stat_57
- Public Law 45, ch. 82, approved April 29, 1943 — 57 Stat. 70, a joint resolution "Making an appropriation to assist in providing a supply and distribution of farm labor for the calendar year 1943". Sec. 4 (a), p. 71: no funds for the transportation of any worker out of his county "without the prior consent in writing of the county extension agent of such county". Sec. 4 (b), p. 72: no such funds "shall be used directly or indirectly to fix, regulate, or impose minimum wages or housing standards, to regulate hours of work, or to impose or enforce collective-bargaining requirements or union membership, with respect to any agricultural labor, except with respect to workers imported into the United States from a foreign country". Sec. 5 (d), p. 72: receipts from "agricultural labor supply centers, including camps and facilities heretofore used by or under the control of the Farm Security Administration, shall be deposited in the Treasury as miscellaneous receipts." https://archive.org/details/us_stat_57
- The Secretary of State to the Ambassador in Mexico, No. 3871, July 31, 1943 (file 811.504 Mexico/28a), on "the reluctance of the Mexican Government to make these workers available because of the reported prevalence of racial discrimination against Mexicans in Texas" — *Foreign Relations of the United States, Diplomatic Papers, 1943*, vol. VI, doc. 475, a GPO publication: https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1943v06/d475 No page-image scan of that volume was located that is reachable without a Cloudflare challenge, so the film quotes the despatch and does not show it.
- Nothing here claims that the Robstown camp ever housed workers brought from Mexico under the agreement. No source consulted says so, and the film does not imply it.
- Vachon's Beaumont frame is captioned only "1943 June". On June 15–16, 1943 a walk-out at the Pennsylvania shipyards became the Beaumont riot and the Governor declared martial law. Because the caption carries no day, nothing is said or suggested about when in that month the photograph was made, and the episode does not use it.
- Rothstein's Fort Worth frames are described exactly as the Library describes them. The film does not assert what programme paid for the flying school.
- Every quotation above was read off the page image, never off the text layer. The OCR of the Statutes at Large scan doubles and interleaves its tokens, and document crops here are anchored on short OCR fragments and then checked on a contact sheet rendered from the source scans (`research/rothstein-vachon-texas/sheet-docs.png`).
- Framing, freshness counting and the full vet are in `research/rothstein-vachon-texas/VET.md`.