Arthur Harvey and the Greenleaf Harvesters

Arthur Harvey was the founder of the Greenleaf Harvesters, a guild of blueberry and apple agriculture workers named after the New England Quaker poet abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier. Read about Whittier’s connection to Hampton Falls, NH at
http://www.ritro.com/sections/people/story.bv?storyid=3649 .

Anyways, the guild “twithed” its earnings each season (20%) and pooled the money into a fund. At the end of the year, the workers would consensually agree to donate designated portions of the fund to selected projects brought forward by individual members. I was first introduced to the Harvesters as one of those recipients for The Prisoners Family Center in Concord NH in 1975 when I first met Ron when he first joined the group.  Ron and I both worked with the Harvesters for several years afterwards.   
 Arthur was also, at one point, a mail order dealer of books and pamphlets about and by Mohandas Gandhi and nonviolence.  I heard of Arthur’s Gandhi collection while I was with the Catholic Worker in Michigan in 1970.  Arthur was an ardent organizer and practitioner of federal tax resistance later to be joined by Elizabeth Gravalos.

As you will probably recall, Arthur and other Harvesters organized one of the early marches from Manchester PSCo Headquarters to the Seabrook site in April 1976.  The US Department of Labor would later come after Arthur in 1977 for operating an illegal contract labor organization and demanded his records.  Arthur’s reply was to say that each guild member was an independent contractor and brought his records to the Federal Building in Concord and publicly burned them in the plaza before the proceeding with Judge Hugh Bownes began. I worked with the Harvesters for two more seasons after that event.