The Farm Security Administration and Rural Rehabilitation in the South by Charles Kenneth Roberts (review)

The Great Depression dragged many rural southerners from lives of poverty and debt to the precipice of ruin. For tenants and sharecroppers especially, the financial crash, unstable crop prices, and disastrous policies made a difficult life even more miserable. In The Farm Security Administration and Rural Rehabilitation in the South, Charles Kenneth Roberts has written a thorough administrative history of the only New Deal program expressly created to address and alleviate rural poverty.

Depression-era rural resettlement and rehabilitation have factored into book-length studies for some decades, from Sidney Baldwin’s and Donald Holley’s classics to Jarod Roll’s recent work. Previous studies have usually either focused on the entire history of the Farm Security Administration (FSA), as in the case of Baldwin, or on one program under the aegis of the FSA. Roberts’s book should not be considered a corrective to previous studies; rather, it is a concise history that provides readers with both a top-down account and a ground-level analysis of this heady New Deal program.

The book is divided into two parts. Roberts begins at the macro level in Washington, D.C. The first half of the book focuses on the Resettlement Administration (RA) and the historical contingencies that led to its creation and eventual transition into the FSA. Roberts navigates the sometimes messy history of this New Deal bureaucracy while also exploring the various personalities and policies that came to dominate the often troubled administration. Even under the hyperorganized Rexford G. Tugwell, the idealistic yet pragmatic RA could not find its footing. Suffering from cumbersome bureaucracy and a lack of direction, the RA weathered a two-pronged attack from skeptical media and petty politicians. Roberts makes it clear that to conclude that rural rehabilitation was a failure is to miss the remarkable fact that, despite constant attacks, the RA and the FSA existed for a significant amount of time and were able to help many downtrodden rural Americans.

In Part 2, Roberts explains “the on-the-ground functioning of the Farm Security Administration in order to understand the effectiveness of federal rural reform efforts” (p. 89). In short, he argues, “The FSA should be understood as a local agency” (p. 90). Roberts reiterates to his readers that rural rehabilitation—and the various assistance it offered, including loans—was the most important FSA program. But Roberts also quantifies his assertion by demonstrating how loans and other aid affected more than one million families. His aim is to recover this understudied aspect of the FSA. For this goal, he should be commended. The history of supervised credit may not be as compelling as the photographic and community resettlement programs of the FSA, yet Roberts’s focus on loans is a reminder that “[d]espite popular recollections of the New Deal and rural America, rural rehabilitation was the broadest (and most broadly supported) effort to help small farmers” (p. xi).

Roberts’s book leans heavily on Alabama sources and examples. This concentration on Alabama is an asset in chapter 8, which focuses exclusively on Alabama resettlement communities as case studies. In other chapters, however, the overreliance on one state sometimes works against the author’s claim that the FSA should be understood within local contexts. This small drawback, however, does not take away from the fact that this book should be required reading for anyone seeking to understand the RA/FSA.

What this monograph does most admirably is construct a necessary top-down administrative history and wed it to local-level analysis. Institutional histories have become rare, and often for good reasons. But Roberts reminds us that we must look at government initiatives holistically in order to fully appreciate their historical and present-day impacts.