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Chapter 8 The New Deal Farm Programs Looking for Reconstruction in American Agriculture Mary Summers The people speak of being "on the government" and "off the government." They speak of "government farms," "government chickens," "government men." They say: "We belong to the government "; "The government never turns us down." The phrase "before the government came" is as definite a way of speaking about time as "back in slavery times," and "before the boll weevil." People feel they are in a new era. And some do not like it. -Arthur Raper, Tenants ofthe Almighty (1943:322) For the last several decades conservative and liberal scholars alike have promoted a view of the New Deal Department of Agriculture as having set the precedents and developed the constituencies for farm programs that benefit large commercial farmers and agribusiness at the expense of consumers, the environment, the rural poor, and the public treasury (Daniel 1985; Galston 1985; Paarlberg and Paarlberg 2000). This essay argues that it was not New Dealers but their opponents who institutionalized the narrowly framed, conservative, classbased politics that have so often defined the nation's farm programs in the postwar period.l A brief review of the careers of two individuals will explore this proposition. The work of one suggests that some men and women went to work for the New Deal agriculture department in part because they cared deeply about such issues as economic and racial inequality . The achievements of the other explain much of why we have forgotten the work of the New Deal reformers today. 148 Mary Summen First, however, Jess Gilbert's (2000a) article, "Eastern Urban Liberals and Midwestern Agrarian Intellectuals," provides an excellent introduction to much that is now missing in our public historical memory of the New Deal Department ofAgriculture. Why is it that the personalities and programs Gilbert discusses seem so new-so difficult to put together with what we think we know about the New Deal? Why have we not learned more both from New Dealers themselves and from some of the excellent scholarship of the last several decades? Richard Kirkendall's Social Scientists and Farm Politics in the Age ofRoosevelt (1982 [1966]), for example, first published more than thirty years ago, describes passionate debates over government policy in which some readers may sympathize with both positions: the Tugwellians' argument for the "big democracy" necessary to override the power of local elites on the one hand; M. L. Wilson and Henry Wallace's commitment to "grassroots democracy" and wide ranging debate and discussion at every level of government on the other. According to Kirkendall's account, some of the arguments within the New Deal Department of Agriculture sound at least as interesting as the federalist-versusantifederalist and liberalism-versus-republicanism debates that frame so many classes in American history and politics. Today, however, Kirkendall 's book is seldom assigned reading in surveys ofAmerican political history. Instead, figures such as Grant McConnell (1963, 1968) and Theodore Lowi (1979; see also Summers 1996) and their theories of interest group politics have long dominated what discussion there is of the New Deal farm programs. As a graduate student in political science, I was troubled by the prevailing accounts of the agricultural New Deal in part because it was the family farm movement of the 1980s that had first interested me in agricultural politics. I knew that many of its leaders, such as then Texas Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower, held up the New Deal as a time when farm programs had actually helped the nation's farmers (Summers 2001). On a more personal level, however, I also noted that the prevailing paradigms did not have a place for the stories my mother had told me about her work with the USDA in the early 1940s. In the summers of 1941 and 1942, the Rosenwald Fund paid my mother, then U. 1: Miller, to work as a research assistant to the southern sociologist Arthur Raper in Greene County, Georgia on a study of its Unified Farm Program. This was a national USDA demonstration project to establish county planning committees to coordinate the work of all government programs.2 The stories from my mother's work with Raper that stuck with me over the years were not about policy debates, but about talking to women who lived in shacks: women who spent hours in Georgia sum- New Deal Farm Programs 149 mers over wood stoves, using the "precious cookers" and glass jars bought with their Farm Security Administration...

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