Top Highlights

• For a hundred and fifty years, Americans had been telling themselves a story about the virtues of life on the land. The tillers of the soil, as Thomas Jefferson had put it, were God’s chosen people, the most pure embodiments of democracy.
• Writing bluntly of “farm fascism”
• Farm life that had become strictly a business affair.
• McWilliams took on America’s agrarian mythology,
• A landmark of socially engaged history, Factories in the Field showed how the relationship of America’s many peoples to the land shapes and is shaped by the dynamics of class, race, and citizenship.