Interpreting American History: The New Deal and the Great Depression

3. Agriculture and the New Deal

cHApter tHree Agriculture and the new Deal todd holmes when Franklin D. roosevelt promised a new Deal for the nation during the 1932 Democratic convention, few could have realized that within the next year his administration would embark on some of the most revolutionary government programs of the twentieth century. to be sure, the new Deal had numerous facets. But beneath the mantra of “relief, recovery, and reform,” the crux of roosevelt’s programs relied on government intervention in the economy. In so doing, the new Deal placed the role of the federal government in the crosshairs of political and historical debate—a debate most fully seen in the realm of agriculture and agricultural policy. like other new Deal initiatives, roosevelt’s agricultural policies centered on Keynesian economics—the concept that spending or pumping money into the economy was the key to recovering from a downturn. with a federal price tag of over $8.6 billion, the government established and bankrolled a host of agricultural programs in the 1930s to stave off plummeting crop prices and farm foreclosures. such programs included the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, the Farm security Administration (FsA), the soil conservation service, the Farm credit Administration, and the commodity credit corporation. many components of these programs , as well as the role of the federal government in the lives of American farmers, have continued into the twenty-first century. 49 todd holmes 50 Despite these clear links to the past, agriculture and national agricultural policy as topics within the historical discourse of the new Deal have remained overshadowed by more popular topics like wpA projects, union labor, and roosevelt himself, and isolated within the regional contexts of the west, south, and midwest. to understand the scholarship of new Deal agriculture, it is necessary to bridge such regional demarcations and trace the development of the literature chronologically. Indeed, agriculture offers a much fuller view of the historical debates about the new Deal. As the nation’s primary industry, agriculture occupied an important place in the debates on the depression and recovery. Following world war I, sectors of the American economy declined. As early as 1920, farmers were affected by the economic downturn . yet these discussions did not fit squarely within the historical mold of the new Deal. traditionally, the historiography of roosevelt’s policies has been characterized by a linear trajectory that, after the 1960s, largely oscillated within a conservative–radical dichotomy. In the realm of agriculture, however, right, left, and center interpretations developed. For the right, the government did too much; for the left, it did not do enough; and for the center, the government, with some blemishes, did the best it could and did it well. In charting the literature from its origins in the south and west to the national debates of the late twentieth century, the discussion captures both the political influence of the times and the peculiar interaction between this tripartite of interpretation.1 the literature on the south and west sowed the earliest seeds of critique of new Deal agriculture. while developing alongside the conservative criticism of anti–new Deal organizations like the American liberty league, the leftist interpretations of the south and west represented the first scholarly work on roosevelt’s agricultural programs. to be sure, both regions were unique as areas where roosevelt confronted the issues of economy, race, labor, and the cultural idyll of the American farmer. And it was the examination of these unique areas—especially race and labor—in the literature on the south and west that established the leftist critique Agriculture and the New Deal 51 of new Deal agriculture, and created the paradigms that would profoundly shape the historiographic trends of the respective regions. During the 1930s southern sociologists took the first scholarly look at new Deal agriculture. The Collapse of Cotton Tenancy (1935) by charles Johnson, edwin embree, and w. w. Alexander, offered the earliest critique of roosevelt’s agricultural policies, arguing that the new Deal did not do enough. the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), established in 1933, sought to correct the problem that plagued American agriculture since the end of the civil war: surplus and overproduction. covering eight commodities— corn, wheat, cotton, rice, peanuts, tobacco, milk, and hogs—the AAA subsidized farmers to limit their supply and production in the hopes of achieving higher and more stabilized prices. yet, as Johnson , embree, and Alexander argued, the AAA in the cotton south favored planters...