Jones-Costigan amendment

The Jones-Costigan Amendment, also known as the Sugar Act of 1934, passed on May 9, 1934 was an amendment to the Agricultural Adjustment Act that reclassified sugar crop as basic commodity, subject to the provisions of the Agricultural Adjustment Act enacted the previous year. Sponsored by Senator Edward P. Costigan (Progressive, Colorado) and Representative John Marvin Jones (Democrat, Texas), the act was a New Deal effort to salvage an ailing sugar industry by imposing protective tariffs and quotas along with a direct subsidy to growers of sugar cane and sugar beet.

Declining agricultural prices preceded the , commonly associated with the start of the worldwide Great Depression that lasted through the 1930s. By 1931, sugar prices had fallen from a pre-Depression level of 7 cents per pound to just one and one half cents per pound.

The US market for sugar was the largest in the world, consuming some 6,000,000 tons per year. Of this, the US sugar industry supplied only about a third, while the rest consisted of foreign imports. Within the US itself, sugar production was divided between two industries; sugar cane producers along the coast and on Caribbean and Pacific islands, and sugar beet producers on the mainland.

In the early 20th century, sugar beet workers were primarily Polish, Belgian, and Hungarian immigrant families. Following the Immigration Act of 1924, which cut off most European immigration, growers turned to workers of Mexican descent. The trend became still more widespread when American Federation of Labor organized beet workers struck for higher wages in Blissfield Michigan in 1935. These workers migrated from Texas and included individuals who had been born on US soil, those who had entered the US legally and those who lacked legal resident standing. Regardless of citizenship status, maltreatment of these workers was widespread by both employers and government authorities. Employer intimidation was commonplace and workers were often fined for made-up infractions so as not to receive even the low pay they had been promised. Overcrowding and unsanitary living conditions were pervasive. Such conditions received growing attention as public health departments became burdened with the cost of care and quarantine. In Saginaw Michigan the Mexican population, accounting for just one and one half percent of the population, suffered 25% of all tuberculosis cases, at a cost to the county of some $18,000 in 1937.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt outlined Six objectives of the Jones-Costigan Act: 1) To ensure “fair returns” to sugar beet and sugar cane producers. This was to be achieved through a two-pronged approach of limiting the sugar supply to aid in a recovery of market prices, and a direct subsidy to be given to sugar producers. 2) To assure laborers in the sugar industry a share in the benefits of the program, by conditioning benefits on the elimination of child labor and the payment of wages deemed fair and equitable. 3) To stabilize sugar prices by limiting production. 4) To “stabilize” or limit sugar production in the Philippines, Hawaii, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands at levels commensurate with US demand. 5) To stop the decline of Cuban sugar exports to the US. This was also to serve to rejuvenate Cuban consumption of American goods. 6) To enable the Secretary of Agriculture to mediate disputes between growers, processors, and laborers.

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