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first operation, painstaking manual labor is called for. When the 
young shoots come up, they need first to be blocked, then thinned. 
“Blocking” means that most of the beets in the rows are cut out 
by a hoe, small bunches only being left, about ten inches apart. 
These bunches are then “thinned”; every plant is pulled out by 
hand except one, the largest and healthiest. Essentially the 
same situation appears when harvesting is reached. The beets 
may be first loosened by a plow and by a lifter ; but each individual 
beet must be pulled out by hand. Finally, they are “topped”; 
that is, the neck and leaves are cut off by hand with a large knife. 
In sum, the growing of the sugar-beet calls for a large amount 
of monotonous unskilled labor. Not only does the typical Amer- 
ican farm and farm community lack the numbers of laborers 
required ; the labor itself is of a kind distasteful to the American 
farmers. The way in which this need of dull labor has been met 
is instructive not only as regards the beet sugar industry itself, 
but also as regards a general trend in the United States during 
the generation preceding the Great War. Almost everywhere in 
the beet sugar districts we find laborers who are employed or con- 
tracted for in gangs, an inferior class which is utilized, perhaps 
exploited, by a superior. In Colorado “immigrants from Old 
Mexico compete with New Mexicans (z.e. born in New Mexico), 
Russians, and Japanese.” In Michigan, the main labor supply 
comes from the Polish and Bohemian population of Cleveland, 
Buffalo, and other large cities. As was said in a circular issued 
by the Department of Agriculture, “living in cities there is a class 
of foreigners — Germans, French, Russians, Hollanders, Austrians, 
Bohemians — who have had more or less experience in beet grow- 
ing in their native countries . . . every spring sees large colonies 
of this class of workmen moving out from our cities into the beet 
fields.” 
In the general economic organization of the great central region, 
labor conditions of this sort play no appreciable part. Here the 
one-family farm dominates; there is nothing in the nature of an 
agricultural proletariat. And here there is no sugar-beet industry 
of any moment. It pays better to raise corn; there is a clear