A Sugar Imaginary: Creating the American Farmer Through Images

• In Event: Exploited Bodies: Race, Environment, and Visual Culture

Abstract

Shortly after World War II, the Great Western Sugar Company published a promotional and educational pamphlet titled “The Story of Beet Sugar.” The brochure boasted about their beet sugar factory in Billings, Montana, and proclaimed that their sugar beets were an “All-American” crop “grown, processed, and consumed by Americans.” These seemingly simple and benign images contributed to the creation of an American farmer archetype and simultaneously hid the role of Japanese and Mexican labor on the beet fields.


My paper examines images of sugar beet agriculture and farmers from Extension bulletins, FFA educational materials, and agricultural advertisements from the 1930s and 40s. These images defined what proper "American" agriculture was. As previous scholars have examined, the emergence of the U.S. “sugar state” was apparent by the mid-1940s. My paper will also consider the role of mechanization in the erasure of nonwhite peoples from the communities of the Northern Plains.


From soil to factory, the USDA and the beet sugar industry marketed plants, people, and product as clean, tidy, systematic, and white. By doing so, statist agriculture rose to prominence after World War II. The atomized, scientific, and systematic form of agriculture defined the correct type of American body, crop, and environment. However, the entire agronomic process relied on the bodies of Mexican and Japanese laborers, not a singular Euro-American farmer atop a tractor. These images obscured entire labor systems and groups of people and served the purpose to create what I call a sugar imaginary.

Author

• Micah Tianfong Chang, Assistant Professor