Abstract
In 1933 the plight of farmers was of more immediate concern to New Deal policy-makers than the problems of industrial workers. Farmers still constituted 30 per cent of the nation’s workforce. Farm pressure groups commanded far more attention in Washington than did trades union leaders. Farm politicians in the South and West were Roosevelt’s earliest and strongest supporters both in the Democratic Party and amongst progressive Republicans. Their demands for immediate action to rescue farmers from rock-bottom prices and from crushing indebtedness were endorsed vociferously by businessmen whose success in insurance, banking, and the mail-order business depended on farm prosperity. As Roosevelt took office, the militant Farmers’ Holiday Association in the Midwest was calling for a national farm strike if relief legislation was not forthcoming. This compelling need to do something about agriculture enabled Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace to persuade Roosevelt to keep Congress in session after the emergency banking legislation had been enacted.
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Bibliographical Essay
In The Coming of the New Deal (Houghton Mifflin: Boston, 1958), pp. 27–84, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr devotes the first section to agriculture, giving farm policy the same high priority New Dealers gave it. In Frank Freidel, Launching the New Deal (Little, Brown: Boston, 1973), pp. 83–101, 308–39 the Agricultural Adjustment Act is quite overshadowed by devaluation.
Gary M. Walton (ed.), Regulatory Change in an Atmosphere of Crisis: Current Implications of the Roosevelt Years (Academic Press: New York, 1979), does not even discuss agriculture — the area where the federal government most directly regulated the daily economic lives of individual Americans. Fortunately declining interest in New Deal agricultural policy has been offset by three first-rate surveys:
Richard S. Kirkendall, ‘The New Deal and Agriculture’, in John Braeman, Robert Bremner, and David Brody (eds.), The New Deal, vol. I The National Level (Ohio State University Press: Columbus, 1975), pp. 83–109,
Theodore Saloutos, ‘New Deal Agricultural Policy: An Evaluation’, Journal of American History 61 (1974), pp. 394–416, and
Gilbert C. Fite, American Farmers: The New Majority (Indiana University Press: Bloomington, 1981), pp. 40–79.
Theodore Saloutos, The American Farmers and the New Deal (Iowa State University Press: Ames, 1982), prepared for publication after the author’s death, is a slightly disappointing testament to a great farm historian. It contains masterly judgements and much valuable information but it is inevitably patchy, unbalanced, and often confusing.
Richard S. Kirkendall, Social Scientists and Farm Politics in the Age of Roosevelt (University of Missouri Press: Columbia, 1967), pp. 11–60, discusses the idea of the agricultural economists who shaped the 1933 Farm Act. M. L. Wilson’s particular role in devising the voluntary domestic allotment and selling it to farm politicians and Roosevelt and his advisers is fully covered in
William D. Rowley, M. L. Wilson and the Campaign for the Domestic Allotment (University of Nebraska Press: Lincoln, 1971).
John L. Shover, Cornbelt in Rebellion: The Farmers’ Holiday Association (University of Illinois Press: Urbana, 1965), pp. 98–167, discusses the FHA threat of a farm strike in both the spring and autumn of 1933.
Van L. Perkins, Crisis in Agriculture: The Agricultural Adjustment Administration and the New Deal, 1933 (University of California Press: Berkeley, 1969) is the definitive study of the passage of the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the establishment of the individual commodity programmes, and the triumph of the production control advocates. There is no comparable study of any other aspect of New Deal farm policymaking.
The lack of interest in the farm recovery, as distinct from rural poverty, programmes means that for individual commodities we still have to rely on the Brookings Institution studies carried out in the 1930s. The most useful of these are: Joseph S. Davis, Wheat and the AAA (Brookings Institution: Washington, D.C., 1935),
D. A. Fitzgerald, Livestock and the AAA (Brookings Institution: Washington, D.C., 1935),
Edwin G. Nourse, Marketing Agreements under the AAA (Brookings Institution: Washington, D.C., 1935), and
Henry I. Richards, Cotton and the AAA (Brookings Institution: Washington, D.C., 1936). These studies led to an evaluation of the AAA which is still relevant,
Edwin G. Nourse, Joseph S. Davis and John D. Black, Three Years of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (Brookings Institution: Washington, D.C., 1937), especially pp. 449–79 on ‘The AAA Philosophy in the Light of Experience’.
There are more recent studies of the commodity programme. For wheat and corn-hogs, see Michael W. Schuyler, ‘Agriculture Relief Activities of the Federal Government in the Middle West, 1933–1936’ (University of Kansas: Ph.D. dissertation, 1970), and
Don F. Hadwiger, Federal Wheat Commodity Programs (Iowa State University Press, 1970). For corn-hogs and cattle, see
C. Roger Lambert, ‘New Deal Experiments in Production Control: The Livestock Program, 1933–1935’ (University of Oklahoma: Ph.D. dissertation, 1962), and ‘Southwestern Cattlemen, the Federal Government and the Depression’, in Donald W. Whisehunt (ed.), The Depression in the Southwest (National University Publications, Kennikat Press: Port Washington, N.Y., 1980), pp. 42–57.
For tobacco I tried to study both national policy-making and local implementation in my Prosperity Road: The New Deal Tobacco and North Carolina (University of North Carolina: Chapel Hill, 1980). Pete Daniel, Breaking the Land: The Transformation of the Cotton, Tobacco and Rice Cultures since 1880 (University of Illinois Press: Urbana, 1985) is a pioneering study of the way in which the impact of New Deal programmes varied according to the degree of technological innovation and mechanisation available to the growers of particular commodities.
Gilbert C. Fite offers a characteristically thorough and sensible assessment of the relationship between AAA programmes and change in southern agriculture in Cotton Fields No More: Southern Agriculture, 1865–1980 (University of Kentucky Press: Lexington, 1984), pp. 120–62. For an example of the local operation of the cotton programme, see Michael S. Holmes, The New Deal in Georgia: An Administrative History, pp. 209–69.
There is no authoritative account of the 1938 Farm Act but see Dean Albertson, Roosevelt’s Farmer: Claude Wickard in the New Deal (Columbia University Press: New York, 1961), pp. 111–17,
Christiana M. Campbell, The Farm Bureau and the New Deal: A Study in the Making of National Farm Policy, 1933–1940 (University of Illinois Press: Urbana, 1962), pp. 111–14,
Hadwiger, Federal Wheat Commodity Programs, pp. 137–53, Badger, Prosperity Road, pp. 144–9 and Donald R. McCoy ‘George S. McGill of Kansas and the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938’, The Historian 45 (1983), pp. 186–205.
For Henry Wallace’s slow shift from ‘agricultural fundamentalism’, see Richard S. Kirkendall, ‘Commentary on the Thought of Henry A. Wallace’, Agricultural History 41 (1967), pp. 138–42. For the tentative New Deal steps towards food for the needy, see
Charles R. Lambert, ‘Want and Plenty: The Federal Surplus Relief Corporation and the AAA’, Agricultural History 46 (1972), pp. 390–400. Campbell, The Farm Bureau and the New Deal, shows how the Farm Bureau capitalised on its links with the AAA and then turned against it. For the politics of policy-making and the strong position of commodity interest groups, see Badger, Prosperity Road, pp. 210–19,
Grant McConnell, The Decline of Agrarian Democracy (University of California Press: Berkeley, 1953),
and Graham K. Wilson, Special Interests and Policymaking: Agricultural Policies and Politics in Britain and the United States of America, 1956–1970 (Wiley: New York, 1977).
Richard S. Kirkendall outlines the long-term aims of the New Deal agricultural economists and chronicles the planning efforts of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics in Social Scientists and Farm Politics, pp. 63–192. Otis L. Graham Jr. shrewdly comments on the limited scope of rural planning in Towards a Planned Society: From Roosevelt to Nixon (Oxford University Press: New York, 1976), pp. 35–44.
John A. Salmond, The Civil Conservation Corps and the New Deal, 1933–1942: A New Deal Case Study (Duke University Press: Durham, N.C., 1965), is the standard history of the CCC. See also Kenneth E. Hendrickson, ‘The Civilian Conservation Corps in the Southwestern States’, in Whisehunt, The Depression in the Southwest, pp. 3–25.
For soil-conservation efforts in the Dust Bowls and the Great Plains and the more grandiose plans of The Future of the Great Plains, see Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (Oxford University Press: New York, 1979), pp. 183–229, Gary L. Nall, ‘The Struggle to Save the Land: The Soil Conservation Effort in the Dust Bowl’, in Whisehunt, The Depression in the Southwest, pp. 26–41,
Richard Lowitt, The New Deal and the West (Indiana University Press: Bloomington, 1984), pp. 35–64, and Theodore Saloutos, ‘The New Deal in the Great Plains’, Agricultural History 48 (1969). For the Taylor Grazing Act and irrigation projects in the West see Lowitt, The New Deal and the West, pp. 65–96.
Kirkendall, Social Scientists and Farm Politics, pp. 165–92, offers a favourable assessment of the local planning committees. Mary W. M. Hargraves. ‘Land-Use Planning in Response to Drought: The Experience of the Thirties’, Agricultural History 50 (1976), pp. 561–82, and
Graham D. Taylor, ‘The New Deal and the Grass Roots’ (University of Pennsylvania: Ph.D. dissertation, 1972), pp. 228–314, emphasised the difficulties faced by these committees. Taylor’s dissertation offers a thorough-going analysis of the practical and theoretical difficulties of implementing programmes of grass-roots democracy.
For the more ambitious attempts to eliminate the structural flaws of inadequate demand and high-cost farming, see Kirkendall, Social Scientists and Farm Politics, pp. 79–80, 227–32. Allen J. Matusow, Farm Policies and Politics in the Truman Years (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Mass., 1967), pp. 191–221, describes the failure of the Brannan Plan.
George Brown Tindall, The Emergence of the New South, 1933–1945 (Louisiana State University Press: Baton Rouge, 1967), pp. 447–57, offers a lucid assessment of the Tennessee Valley Authority. For the general history of the TVA, see Paul K. Conkin, ‘The Intellectual and Political Roots’, Richard W. Lowitt, ‘The TVA, 1933–1945’, and Wilmon H. Droze, ‘The TVA, 1945–1980: The Power Company’, in
Edwin C. Hargrove and Paul K. Conkin, TVA: 50 Years of Grass-Roots Democracy (University of Illinois Press: Urbana, 1983), pp. 3–85. The conflicts among the directors and with the power companies are detailed in
Thomas K. McGraw, Morgan vs Lilienthal: The Feud Within the TVA (Loyola University Press: Chicago, 1970), and TVA and the Power Fight, 1933–1939 (J. B. Lippincott: Philadelphia, 1971). William E. Leuchtenburg discusses the failure to extend the TVA to other regions in ‘Roosevelt, Norris, and the Seven Little TVAs’, Journal of Politics 14 (1952). The debate over the impact of grass-roots democracy within the TVA is carried on in
Philip Selznick, TVA and the Grass Roots: A Study in the Sociology of Formal Organization (University of California Press: Berkeley, 1949),
R. G. Tugwell and E. C. Banfield, ‘Grass-Roots Democracy — Myth or Reality?’, Public Administrative Review 10 (1950), pp. 46–55 and
Norman I. Wengert, Valley of Tomorrow: The TVA and Agriculture (University of Tennessee: Knoxville, 1952).
For the REA, see D. Clayton Brown, Electricity for Rural America: The Fight for the REA (Greenwood: Westport, 1980). For the difficulties of establishing a coherent, planned, national power policy, see
Philip Fungiello, Toward a National Power Policy: The New Deal and the Electric Utility Industry (University of Pittsburgh Press: Pittsburgh, 1973).
David Murray, Modern Indians: Native Americans in the Twentieth Century (British Association for American Studies: 1982), pp. 13–18, succinctly sums up the impact of the Indian New Deal. For John Collier, his hopes and misconceptions, see
Kenneth R. Philp, John Collier’s Crusade for Indian Reform, 1920–1954 (University of Arizona Press: Tucson, 1977), pp. 113–213. The difficulties of convincing the largest single tribe of the wisdom of change is shown by
Donald L. Parman, The Navajos and the New Deal (Yale University Press: New Haven, 1976). The difficulty of the ‘grass-roots democracy’ approach to Indian reform is fully explored by Graham D. Taylor, ‘The New Deal and the Grass Roots’, pp. 133–220, and The New Deal and American Indian Tribalism: The Administration of the Indian Reorganization Act, 1934–1945 (University of Nebraska Press: Lincoln, 1980).
Cletus E. Daniel, Bitter Harvest: A History of California Farmworkers, 1870–1941 (Cornell University Press: Ithaca, 1981), pp. 141–285, expertly traces the protest of California farm labourers, the inadequate New Deal response, and the violence of the vigilante and police repression.
The southern sharecroppers may have been ‘Forgotten Farmers’ of the New Deal, but contemporary neglect has been compensated for by the attention of historians since 1965. For the impact of the AAA on the sharecroppers, the indifference of the Cotton Section to their plight, and the purge of those ‘urban liberals’ who tried to help them, see David E. Conrad, The Forgotten Farmers: The Story of Sharecroppers in the New Deal (University of Illinois Press: Urbana, 1965), pp. 40–153,
Donald H. Grubbs, Cry from the Cotton: The Southern Tenant Farmers Union and the New Deal (University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill, 1971), pp. 1–61,
Paul E. Mertz, New Deal and Southern Rural Poverty (Louisiana State University Press: Baton Rouge, 1978), pp. 20–44,
Peter H. Irons, The New Deal Lawyers (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1982), pp. 156–80 and Daniel, Breaking the Land, pp. 90–109, 155–83.
The sharecroppers’ protest is vividly described by Grubbs, Cry from the Cotton, pp. 62–192, and Louis Cantor, A Prologue to the Protest Movement: The Missouri Sharecropper Roadside Demonstration of 1939 (Duke University Press: Durham, N.C., 1969). See also
Jerold S. Auerbach, ‘Southern Tenant Farmers: Socialist Critics of the New Deal’, Labor History 7 (1966), pp. 3–18, and Labor and Liberty: The La Follette Committee and the New Deal (Bobbs-Merrill: Indianapolis, 1966), pp. 33–47, and
Lowell K. Dyson, ‘The Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union and Depression’, Political Science Quarterly 88 (1973), pp. 230–52.
H. L. Mitchell recalls his leadership in ‘The Founding and Early History of the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union’, Arkansas Historical Quarterly 32 (1973), pp. 342–69, and Mean Things Happening in this Land: The Life and Times of H. L. Mitchell, co-founder of the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union (Allanheld, Osman: Montclair, N.J., 1979).
The New Deal’s discovery of rural poverty, the history of the resettlement communities, and the rise and fall of the Farm Security Administration are covered in excellent monographs: Mertz, New Deal Policy, pp. 45–220, Donald S. Holley, Uncle Sam’s Farmers: The New Deal Communities in the Lower Mississippi Valley (University of Illinois Press: Urbana, 1975), and
Sidney Baldwin, Poverty and Politics: The Rise and Decline of the Farm Security Administration (University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill, 1968). For the bias towards recovery programmes of New Deal agricultural spending, see
Leonard J. Arrington, ‘Western Agriculture and the New Deal’, Agricultural History 44 (1970), pp. 337–53, and
Don C. Reading ‘New Deal Activity and the States, 1933 to 1939’, Journal of Economic History 33 (1973), pp. 792–807. Donald Worster’s alternative vision of what agricultural policy should have done is laid out in Dust Bowl, pp. 43, 63, 140–7, 159, 163, 196–7, 242–3.
Pete Daniel develops his alternative in ‘The Transformation of the Rural South: 1930 to the Present’, Agricultural History 55 (1981), pp. 231–48, ‘The New Deal, Southern Agriculture and Economic Change’, in
James C. Cobb and Michael V. Namaroto, The New Deal and the South (University of Mississippi Press: Jackson, 1984), pp. 37–61, and Breaking the Land. For the hopes of decentralist intellectuals, see
Edward S. Shapiro, ‘Decentralist Intellectuals and the New Deal’, Journal of American History 58 (1972), pp. 938–57.
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© 1989 Anthony J. Badger
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Badger, A.J. (1989). Parity and Poverty: Agriculture. In: The New Deal. American History in Depth. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18848-2_5
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