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The Depression and the New Deal 257 13 ThE DEpRESSION AND ThE NEw DEAL In 1909, Walter Packard, the son of a suffragist and a wealthy Chicago lawyer, came West to work as an extension agent in the Imperial Valley. There, amid the green fields and squalid labor camps, Packard embarked on an intellectual odyssey that was common during the first half of the twentieth century. He started out as a progressive reformer and a protégé of Elwood Mead, who believed that federal reclamation projects would create commonwealths of small farmers in the Great American Desert. He ended up as a leftist technocrat who wanted big agriculture without the evils of agribusiness. Packard never joined the Communist Party, but he did become a true believer in agricultural collectives. He spent most of his career fighting for that ideal in California’s Central Valley, where he envisioned farmers organized into work brigades “with the normal democratic machinery for protest.” But Arizona was the only place Packard ever had a chance to put his ideas into action. In 1936, at the height of the New Deal, he became the director of the federal Resettlement Administration in central Arizona. There he designed the 3,200-acre Casa Grande Valley Farms Project—one of only four agricultural collectives developed by the Resettlement Administration across the country. Packard and his colleagues selected the first seventeen families in 1937. All were Arizona residents, and many had lost their land during the Depression. The government built sturdy three-bedroom adobe houses for them and provided them with seed, fertilizer, machinery, irrigation water, and a monthly advance on expected annual profits. “We did a swell job,” one of the original settlers recalled. “We really pitched in and worked. . . . Some of us have had more and want more. We’re all failures or we wouldn’t be here, but we try to do better.” The following year, however, thirty-nine more families from Oklahoma, Texas, and Arkansas moved into the project, and the first group took an immediate dislike to them. “There are two classes of people here,” the same Arizona settler continued. “The other type are the ones who never made much in 258 arizona their lives before and they’re satisfied if they have their bellies full and can lie around on Sunday and booze.” For the next five years, the two factions sniped at each other as the nation made the transition from depression to war. And even though they ran their enterprise as productively as their private neighbors , their infighting played into the hands of enemies of the collectives in Congress and the Roosevelt administration. In 1944 the Farm Security Administration put the collective up for sale. Six of the original settlers stayed on the land, but the rest left to work in the defense plants of California. Packard’s dream of a democratic collective was dead. That was the end of New Deal experimentation in Arizona. Despite the intentions of Packard and others, the New Deal did not transform agribusinesses into collectives or bring about a renaissance of small farmers and ranchers across the state. On the contrary, the federal programs of the 1930s contributed to the growing scale of the agricultural economy, which was driving small producers out of business. Ranches and farms grew larger and more capital intensive, while the Big Three copper companies—Anaconda, Kennecott, and Phelps Dodge—gobbled up their competitors, producing 80 percent of Arizona’s copper in 1940 compared with 40 percent ten years before. The New Deal may have provided temporary relief for the destitute, work projects for the unemployed, and loans and grants for businessmen and municipal governments, but the structure of the extractive economy—and the policies of the federal government—continued to place more of Arizona’s land, water, and mineral wealth into fewer and fewer hands. The Depression and the New Deal The late 1920s were boom years for Arizona’s extractive industries, particularly copper mining. The New Cornelia Copper Company built a leaching plant in Ajo in 1917 and followed with a concentrator seven years later. By 1930 the plant had transformed the little desert community into one of the most important mining districts in the state. Production also intensified in established areas such as Bisbee, Jerome, Superior, and Morenci. The boom peaked in 1929, when sixteen thousand miners blasted more than $155 million worth of copper and its by-products from Arizona ground. Arizona continued to be the leading copper...

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