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  • Back to the Land: Arthurdale, FDR's New Deal, and the Costs of Economic Planning by C. J. Maloney
  • Timothy Kelly
Back to the Land: Arthurdale, FDR's New Deal, and the Costs of Economic Planning. By C. J. Maloney (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2011. ix plus 292 pp.).

The Great Depression hit most Americans very hard, and none more intensely than the bituminous coal miners of West Virginia and western Pennsylvania. They had struggled, even in boom times, with exploitive living conditions in company towns, low pay (often in company issued script), dangerous working conditions, and indifferent regulatory authorities. Their depression began in the early 1920s when the demand for coal declined following World War I. By the time the stock market crashed, they had lived for years in great deprivation. C.J. Maloney's Back to the Land focuses on one New Deal effort to ameliorate their struggles, the Subsistence Homestead program, and its application in a small community in West Virginia. Maloney's larger purpose, though, is to advance a libertarian interpretation of the broader New Deal and subsequent American history. He does so with such a tendentious style that he undermines his own position and fails to provide a meaningful history of the people that he professes to admire.

Coal miners presented a special problem in the 1930s because they lived in largely remote rural areas, far from the relief networks centered in urban areas. But they owned no land on which to grow their own food. They were literally "stranded" in islands of poverty. The New Deal offered a small Subsistence Homestead program aimed at helping some of these impoverished workers and their families. The program used federal dollars to build homes for families on small plots of land (ranging from one to five acres). These homesteads typically included a house, barn or garage, chicken coop, and a variety of other things such as grape arbors, cold storage sheds, and the like. They also included land for a subsistence garden in which residents were to grow food to feed the family. The idea was for each family to provide enough of their own food to diminish the need for wages by roughly half. Each of these communities also included cooperative enterprises such as dairy farms, poultry operations, schools, and small factories. Policy makers hoped that the homesteaders could stay out of the cities and live decent lives in relative comfort by sustaining themselves with garden produce and the modest wages that cooperative enterprises and small factories might generate. The federal government began this program with a small community near Morgantown, West Virginia that would take the name Arthurdale.

Though Maloney does not emphasize this dimension, the program is really an early example of a "faith-based initiative." The American Friends Service Committee both designed and administered the program as an effort to employ Christian ideals of caring and community. The Quakers sought communities that included Jews and atheists also, and the Division of Subsistence Homesteads later established a community of unemployed Jewish garment workers in New Jersey. The idea was not only to offer dignified relief to the few residents lucky enough to make it into these communities, but to provide models for new approaches to living that did not grind workers and their families to the edge of existence. Were they to succeed, they might light a new path for Americans all over the country, a new way of life that anticipated the [End Page 1106] post-World War II middle class abundance leveraged by substantial and sustained federal investment in its citizens' welfare. Not surprisingly, such an ambition drew many powerful critics.

Some worried that providing small homes with furnaces, indoor plumbing and toilets eroded the residents' character, their will to work hard and strive to better themselves. They saw in these small communities of a few hundred households a creeping socialism that would create a sense of entitlement among those Americans who needed the strong lesson of deprivation that working class life had so long provided and the Great Depression spread so efficiently.

Seen through this lens, Arthurdale, West Virgina took on a role far larger than its...

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