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

Charles Kenneth Roberts has written a fine institutional history of the Farm Security Administration (FSA), including its origins, administrators, policies, and the effects of those policies in the South. Roberts focuses primarily on the FSA’s rural rehabilitation program, a program of supervised loans for struggling farmers. Despite accounting for the bulk of the FSA’s work and its budget, this subject has been far less studied than resettlement and documentary photography, its more dramatic and visible programs, but Roberts argues that the FSA’s successful loan program has broader significance in understanding America’s current agricultural system, which he describes as “both hyper efficient and deeply dysfunctional” (xiii).

Roberts divides his study into two parts: first, the FSA’s policies, primarily from the view of Washington, DC, and second, the “practice” of the FSA. The FSA was born out of the desperation of the Great Depression and the boldness of the early New Deal. Roberts traces its origins from Division of Subsistence Homesteads to the Rural Rehabilitation Division to the Re-settlement Administration and finally to the FSA, part of the US Department of Agriculture.

In 1933, administrators, including Franklin Roosevelt, had romantic visions of farm life and imagined resettlement as a solution to industrial unemployment. With the back-to-the-land movement gaining popularity, many policymakers thought self-sufficiency a viable alternative to mass unemployment in the city, but the new subsistence homesteads both took too long and yet were hastily planned.

Increasingly administrators saw farm security as a solution to rural poverty and leaned heaviest on the federal government’s ability to provide loans to struggling farmers, which was not only easier than resettlement but less controversial. Alabama senator John Bankhead Jr. cosponsored the Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Act that ultimately gave the Farm Security Administration legitimacy and funding, making it a semipermanent agency.

In the second half of the book, Roberts focuses on the practice of the FSA, including more detailed examinations of rural rehabilitation, eligibility requirements for borrowers, structures of the loans, and success rates. One chapter details the tenant purchase program, controversial because of its focus on the neediest residents of the rural South.

The two strongest chapters of the book examine the FSA’s frontline supervisors and the subsistence homesteads around Birmingham. Roberts points out that regardless of the policy debates in Washington, on-the-ground supervisors had considerable latitude for implementing programs. Therefore, understanding their role, training, and experiences goes a long way toward understand the actual functioning of the agency. Readers also get a sense of how supervisors were hobbled by policy shortcomings and able to rise above them.

The creation of resettlement communities or homesteads around Birmingham was plagued by numerous problems of poor planning, and homestead residents—at least those who did not leave in the early years—had to overcome many challenges and work long days to make the experiment a reality. Those who endured felt a tremendous sense of pride and declared the communities successful. Planners and politicians almost universally declared them to be policy failures.

During World War II, FSA administrators were initially successful at arguing that their work dovetailed with the war effort, but their detractors in Congress and agribusiness proved more successful in arguing that higher prices would more effectively fix agricultural problems. The FSA was steadily defunded and its remaining functions parceled out to other agencies.

Roberts has done an admirable job of following the policy debates and Washington infighting while still keeping an eye on the effect of the FSA on the lives of farmers in the South. Yet, there is a gap between Roberts’s passionate concerns for rural poverty and the dispassionate recounting of mundane details of the FSA’s history. Also, the book’s organization resulted in repetition, and it is difficult to get a sense of the FSA’s influence on any particular community other than the homesteads. Nevertheless, Roberts has...