Recovering the Agricultural New Deal: Its Foundations, Legacies, and Losses
As opposed to prevailing accounts of the New Deal farm programs as serving big farmers, this article argues that they were rooted in long standing traditions of farm organizing and agricultural state building, benefitting many farming households and the public good. It was the defeat of New Dealers’ efforts to develop programs that would promote the well-being of people who worked the land and the land itself that underwrote the corporatization of American agriculture.