Rural America and the New Deal: An Experiment in Sustainability

Historically Speaking January/February 2008 Historically Speaking January/February 2008 Vol. IX No. 3 Contents RuralAmerica and the New Deal: An Experiment in Sustainability Sarah Phillips The Army's Way of War. An Interview with Brian McAllister Linn Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa The Sixties Reconsidered: A Forum How the Fifties Became the Sixties8 Stephen J. Whitfield How the Fifties Became the Sixties:1 1 A Response Terry H. Anderson Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes12 Alice Echols Response to Whitfield14 Paul Lyons PeopleAre Not Decades1 5 David Färber Response16 Stephen J. Whitfield Doing Justice to the Cold War1 9 A Review Essay William Stueck Illusions ofManaging History:23 The Enduring Relevance of Reinhold Niebuhr Andrew J. Bacevich Pentecost for the Southland27 Randall J. Stephens Hollywood Religion29 Matthew Avery Sutton Dangerous Conflation?A Review of32 Robert Kagan's Dangerous Nation: America's Foreign Policy from Its Earliest Days to the Dawn of the Twentieth Century Frank Ninkovich The Sunbelt Synthesis: New Histories of 35 theAmerican ConservativeAscendancy Alex Lichtenstein Cronyism and Creative Destruction in39 Pittsburgh and Beyond:A Review Essay Edward Balleisen Rome and Jerusalem43 Martin Goodman Why Family History?45 Joseph A. Amato Charlie Wilson's War:47 History as Romantic Comedy John Patrick Diggins Letters49 The Historical Society's 2008 Conference: 52 Migration, Diaspora, Ethnicity, & Nationalism in History Rural America and the New Deal: An Experiment in Sustainability* Sarah Phillips It is impossible to imagine the Great Depression in the United States without envisioning the era's environmental tragedies. Seared onto the national memory by novelists, filmmakers, and government photographers, portraits of uprooted and impoverished people mingle with images of scarred land, abandoned farms, and swollen rivers. Dust clouds darken the Great Plains and move threateningly toward the nation's capital. A lone, broken windmill looms over parched cattle and crumbling fields. Migrants, fleeing dirt and drought, trek along Route 66 to California's unwelcoming fruit orchards. A black sharecropper stands helpless beside the deepening gully that has stolen his farm's precious topsoil. Clutching their few belongings, refugees race the rising water and watch from a nearby hill as the river claims their homes. These images of environmental disaster are matched by equally familiar stories of state-sponsored environmental renewal. The president dedicates a new national park with a stirring address. Young men receive jobs battling soil erosion, replanting damaged forests, and constructing campgrounds . The federal government builds new farms for some, and manages migrant camps for others. High dams rise along the Tennessee and the Colorado . "Your power is turning our darkness to dawn," sings Woody Guthrie, "so roll on, Columbia , roll on." Despite the indisputable importance of these episodes, however, historians have never made them central to their interpretations of the New Deal or to their analyses of American political development. Such stories provide a colorful sideshow, and they often serve as evidence for the government's increased inclination to intervene, for good or for ill, in economic or environmental affairs ; but resource conservation never stands alone as an essential component of American liberal ideology . During the Depression of the 1930s many Americans felt betrayed by the sudden economic collapse, and they decided that a more interventionist federal government might provide some degree of protection from the unregulated free market. Though this ideological turn had been well underway for decades, the New Deal sealed the shift and ushered in the modern liberal state. Franklin Roosevelt transformed the political party system by assembling a "New Deal coalition" composed of groups that supported an active government, such * From This Land, This Nation: Conservation, RuralAmerita, and the New Deal Copyright © Sarah T. Phillips. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press. Woody Guthrie, 1943. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-USZ62-1 30859]. as farmers, urban workers, African Americans, and capital-intensive businesses. For the first time, Americans received direct aid in the form of welfare benefits and work relief, farm subsidies, and retirement pensions. Less successfully, the Roosevelt administration also attempted to introduce more far-reaching institutional and regulatory reforms. At the center of the New Deal's attempts at recovery and reform were the conservation programs of the 1930s and 1940s. These programs...