On the subject of Harvest of Shame, I did a research paper on the documentary some years ago in Vance Kepley's Documentary film class at UW-Madison. What I found was pretty eye-opening. The policy proposal which Murrow makes were in fact those already being advanced by the Eisenhower administration at the time and were being written into a bill which might have addressed some of those conditions. When the documentary came out, the American Farm Bureau, a powerful agribusiness lobby, launched a full-scale attack on HARVEST OF SHAME, which, however regrettable its origins, includes some pretty solid evidence of distortion, fabrication, and falsification in the film of the sort which would make the recent GM controversy seem mild by comparison. I don't have the paper in front of me, but one mild example: the famous sequence of the woman who has to leave all of her children at home to work in the fields. The famous pot of beans sequence. Turns out that, first, most of those children do not belong to that mother and are not her responsability. They were recruited from neighbors to add drama to the scene. Second, the woman is in fact married and does not rely soully on her income to support the children. Third, the woman's husband has a perminant job in a nearby town and therefore provides a fairly substantial income. All of this goes directly contrary to the impression Murrow sought to give to the scene. In any case, true or false, the charges were substantial and for the most part, neither Murrow nor the network made any serious attempt to refute any of them. Most of them, after some pushing, were conceded. The opponents of the Eisenhower Administration legislation, thus, evoked the film and the Bureau's report every time the legislation was raised in committee, on the floor, etc. with the result that the bill's proponents spent most of their time defending the documentary rather than advancing the cause of the migrant workers. In the end, the legislation was first gutted and then defeated. Murrow further retreats from support of the documentary when he comes up as a Kennedy Administration appointee and must face these same southern Senators again. The net result, I would argue, is that HARVEST OF SHAME probably did more to hurt the cause of reforming migrant labor than to help it. One of these days, I'll get around to revising and publishing that essay, but I am glad to share the information in more detail with anyone who wants to know more. I will have to dig it out of my files, though. Henry Jenkins