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  • The Farm Security Administration and Rural Rehabilitation in the South by Charles Kenneth Roberts
  • Alyssa Warrick
The Farm Security Administration and Rural Rehabilitation in the South. By Charles Kenneth Roberts. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2015. xxx, 291 pp. $51.75. ISBN: 978-1-6219-0160-0.

Charles Kenneth Roberts wades into the lengthy historiography of the New Deal's agricultural and rural land reforms with The Farm Security Administration and Rural Rehabilitation in the South, a straightforward administrative and political history of the attempts by the Farm Security Administration (FSA) to improve the agricultural South. Roberts' extraordinary amount of research allowed him to trace the labyrinthine bureaucracy of no less than five different organizations charged with land rehabilitation, devising tenant purchase strategies, resettling displaced farmers, and overseeing loan programs. Beyond the ideological and structural history of this rural reform, Roberts also examines "how they translated into practical, on-the-ground solutions" (xviii). The first half of the book examines the "Origins and Evolution of New Deal Rural Poverty Policy," while the second half is dedicated to how those policies worked in practice.

Roberts introduces his reader to the Back-to-the-Land movement of the early twentieth century and the economic struggles of farmers and agricultural workers that the Great Depression exacerbated in order to provide an ideological backdrop for the reforms that would come in the New Deal. However, the author notes that many New Deal reformers, who maintained that farmers needed just enough assistance to get back on their feet and achieve self-sufficiency, failed to appreciate the dire scope of the economic situation in the rural South. Still, these reformers tried a multitude of programs.

Roberts connects the background of the Farm Security Administration to the Division of Subsistence Homesteads in the Department of the Interior, the Rural Rehabilitation Division of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), and the Resettlement Administration (RA), which was later folded into the jurisdiction of the Department of Agriculture. Roberts notes that the bureaucratic shuffling of each of these organizations hindered their effectiveness, [End Page 65] but there were some important programs. Roberts contends that the loan and grant program for tenants, sharecroppers, and low-income farmers was the "most important part of rural rehabilitation" (55).

In the second half of the book, entitled "Fighting Rural Poverty: Farm Security in Practice," Roberts moves away from the bureaucracy to examine how the Farm Security Administration actually helped (or did not help) rural southerners, particularly those in Alabama. While Roberts looks at statistics and some examples from across the South, he is chiefly concerned with Alabamians' experiences with the FSA, and with good reason. The Depression hit Birmingham harder than any other major city in the South (158). The FSA supervised the creation of several resettlement projects in the Birmingham area. Alabama Senator John H. Bankhead, II, wrote the chief legislation for the farm tenant purchase program, the Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Act of 1937.

Roberts identifies World War II as the beginning of the end for the Farm Security Administration. The war provided a reasonable excuse for critics to cut funding to a program they deemed "un-American and communistic" (189). America's entry into World War II occurred just as the FSA reached its "peak year" in 1941, with more than a million farmers receiving loans and grants, and more than 100,000 families getting medical and dental assistance from federal programs (74). The FSA's chief opponents included the American Farm Bureau Federation and outspoken New Deal critics like Virginia Senator Harry F. Byrd, who thought the programs to be expensive social experiments and believed any money spent on rural rehabilitation should go through state programs (which mostly assisted larger, more financially secure planters and farm owners). Contemporary critics did not comment on the systemic racial bias that largely favored white farmers over the thousands of African American tenants, sharecroppers, and farmers, which Roberts is careful to include in his assessment of the programs. [End Page 66]

Alyssa Warrick
Silver Spring, Maryland
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