The Tensions, Contradictions, and Visions of the Agricultural New Deal

On March 9, 1933, The Country Home journalist Russell Lord and his editor had lunch with United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Secretary Henry A. Wallace and Assistant Secretary Rexford Tugwell. It was the day after Franklin Roosevelt had summoned farm leaders to Washington to discuss proposals to address the prolonged bankruptcy of the nation’s agricultural economy. Lord reports that their conversation focused on the New Dealers’ domestic allotment plan. This agricultural adjustment program—the key form of farm relief with which they proposed to address these desperate times—would provide government payments to farmers who signed contracts agreeing to reduce their acreage or cutback on production for market, thus reducing the surpluses that were continuing to drive down the prices they received for their products.

Both Wallace and Tugwell saw such a program as a “necessary and inevitable” consequence of government policies that encouraged farmers to go into debt to expand production “to feed the world and win the war” during World War I but failed to offer farmers support when commodity prices plummeted with the abrupt loss of foreign markets at the war’s end. In this context, individual farmers had tried for twelve long years to compensate for their losses by producing more commodities and, thereby, greater surpluses. As a result, long-standing USDA investments in promoting the development of the agricultural sciences and increasing agricultural production were serving to drive down crop prices to levels that made even the most scientific farming a bad investment.1 Wallace and Tugwell saw an agricultural adjustment program as the only available, realistic means of addressing these conditions. At the same time, however, they also expressed “repugnance” at the idea of “administered programs of farm and industrial scarcity.”2

Lord, who had been following these issues for many years, mentioned a letter he had seen “from a cotton-stricken Arkansas farm wife” to M. L. Wilson, one of Wallace’s key advisors and the nation’s leading proponent for an agricultural adjustment program. Such a program, this woman had written, would give her family a chance to “rest part of our land each year, and … rest ourselves. We can use the time that we used to spend in speeding up production in living and developing our own possibilities as human beings.” Wallace was “fired up” by her words, ready to “make a religion” of her plea. “My God, Henry, no!” Tugwell groaned. “[W]e can’t make a religion out of growing or making fewer goods with this whole country and the whole world in bitter need” (W, 328–29).

This conversation in the early days of the New Deal spoke to issues with which many agricultural New Dealers would continue to wrestle. They had strong misgivings about implementing programs to cut back on production. At the same time, however, as the Arkansas farm wife’s letter suggested, many were convinced that a more planned agricultural economy would enable farmers to make a living without exhausting their families and the land itself.

Ever since farm commodity prices had started to fall after World War I, Henry Wallace, M. L. Wilson, and colleagues in the USDA’s Bureau of Agricultural Economics (BAE) had wrestled with developing research and policy proposals that would address the increasingly disastrous consequences of all-out production during the war. M. L. Wilson, in particular, a former tenant farmer and county extension agent in Montana who had become a farm economist, had seen many of the worst of these consequences in a state where thousands of farmers had been attracted to making investments in land and machinery by wheat prices during the war and then driven off the land by drought, pests, and wheat rust while prices fell. After the onset of the Great Depression, Wilson crisscrossed the nation, speaking about conditions in the countryside to farm and business organizations, policymakers, and journalists. To all these audiences, he held up the need not only for a domestic allotment plan to rescue the commercial agricultural economy but also for government support for subsistence homestead programs that would buy out and resettle small farmers and tenants living on unproductive land.

Wilson’s and Wallace’s engagement with policy proposals like these reflected the fact that both men had grown up on farms in Iowa, attended Iowa State, and lived lives immersed in the problems faced by the nation’s farmers. While deeply interested in such topics as institutional economics and the educational theories of John Dewey, they continued to work closely with the USDA’s researchers and programs throughout their adult lives. Both were determined to put what they saw as the best of those researchers’ proposals to work in ways that would improve the conditions faced by the nation’s farmers.3

Even though his background and many of his intellectual and political commitments differed from theirs, Rexford Tugwell was attracted to many of Wallace’s and Wilson’s ideas and proposals. The son of a successful businessman who had earned his three academic degrees at the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce at the University of Pennsylvania, Tugwell was an institutional economist at Columbia and one of the original members of Franklin Roosevelt’s “Brain Trust.” A sharp critic of “laissez-faire” capitalism with a strong commitment to expert-led industrial and economic planning, he ensured that Wilson presented his ideas and proposals as strategies to address the crisis in the countryside to Roosevelt. He also worked with Wilson to incorporate them into the Democratic Party’s platform and FDR’s speeches in the presidential campaign (W, 308, 310–11, 317–18, 322–23; PD, 65, 68, 71, 75–77).

During Roosevelt’s first term in office, Tugwell continued to play a critical role in implementing Wallace’s and Wilson’s proposed programs. As Assistant and then Under Secretary of Agriculture, he oversaw the development and implementation of most of the commodity programs of the AAA. As the Director of the Resettlement Administration (RA), he put Wilson in charge of a Subsistence Homesteads Program. He also played a key role in establishing the Soil Conservation Service (W, 300, 343–46, 372–74, 418–30).

Tugwell, however, was also far less invested than Wilson and Wallace in programs to stabilize the incomes of more established farmers and make it possible for tenants to become landowners. He was far more keenly interested in addressing the problems of rural poverty and the exploitation of farm labor by establishing large-scale cooperative farms and communities, far more drawn to addressing the problems of cities with planned suburban communities than the problems of sharecroppers with subsistence homesteads (PD, 68, 75–77). He was also deeply skeptical of Wallace’s and Wilson’s efforts to achieve their goals by working with agricultural organizations and institutions. He simply did not share—or want to share—in their longstanding relationships with farmers’ organizations, USDA bureaucrats who were not strong supporters of the New Deal, the Extension Service, land grant universities, and the older traditions and commitments of rural life (W, 347–48, 381–82, 395–96, 399–400, 428–29, 459–60).

Quickly targeted as “Rex the Red” by enemies of the agricultural New Deal, Tugwell was, in short, a sometimes uncomfortable if critical ally for many of its friends. The controversies stirred by his public arrogance and many of his favorite initiatives, which Congress was increasingly unwilling to support, were also increasingly wearing for Tugwell. As a result, by late 1936, towards the end of Roosevelt’s first term in office, he decided that he could best serve the future of the many New Deal programs he had helped initiate by resigning from the government (W, 429).

Many contemporary and subsequent critics have highlighted Wallace and Wilson’s failure to consistently support Tugwell and other “urban liberals” at the USDA in their battles with plantation owners, food processors and distributors, farm organizations, and “farm-bred” USDA bureaucrats in the administration of the New Deal’s farm programs. Pointing to landlords who used their AAA benefits to displace their tenants and failures to adequately fund and defend the embattled programs of the Resettlement and Farm Security Administrations, such critics continue to argue that the agricultural New Deal worked primarily to serve rural elites and agribusiness at the expense of small farmers, tenants, sharecroppers, and farmworkers.4

This article counters such views, focusing on the relative success with which Wallace and Wilson established a remarkable range of agricultural policies and programs throughout the New Deal, both with Tugwell and after his departure. Despite many tensions and contradictions, they continued to develop and implement their broader visions for a more balanced, secure agricultural economy over the course of the New Deal. I also argue that their success in doing so was largely due to the sympathy, knowledge, and skill with which they appealed to and built on the work of earlier generations of farm organizers and agricultural state builders.

It is undoubtedly the case that many (although far from all) agricultural New Dealers failed to challenge the ideology and institutions of white supremacy and Jim Crow. Like most of their predecessors in American farmers’ organizing and state-building efforts, they also failed to challenge many forms of economic exploitation despite the best efforts of some of their contemporaries to point to these realities. My exploration of their achievements is not intended to excuse or justify these realities. It is, however, based on a conviction that focusing only on their failures and shortcomings robs subsequent generations of tools and opportunities to build on the best of their aspirations and accomplishments.

This article argues that many New Dealers fought hard for programs that they hoped would represent a transition to more opportunities for human flourishing in a more “secure” (in today’s parlance, economically and environmentally sustainable) agricultural economy: a real alternative to the horrific consequences of ever more eroded land, bankrupt farms, and homeless families. In doing so, Wallace, Wilson, and their allies drew on the achievements of earlier farmers’ organizing efforts—together with more modernist strains of economic and social democratic thought—to establish planning, relief, conservation, and education programs that better served rural people and the land itself. In the later New Deal, Wallace and several of his key aides also advocated for policies to ensure a full employment economy as the best means for promoting security and opportunity in the nation’s countryside as well as its cities. Wallace’s embrace of such policies (despite the dismay of many of his USDA colleagues and former farm organization allies) reflected his ongoing commitment to working for “an educated democracy” capable of handling “gigantic economic forces for the common good.”5

The strategies with which Wallace, Wilson, and their allies pursued their goals both reflected and challenged their conflicted relationships and ideas about race and class, as well as those of the voters, politicians, and bureaucrats they appealed to. As a result, they ran into fierce opposition. New Deal programs that focused on serving tenants, sharecroppers, and farmworkers were race-, labor-, and red-baited into oblivion within a decade’s time. Scholars have nonetheless found evidence of these programs’ ongoing impact: isolated rural communities in the South, for example, where Black women and men whose parents and grandparents were participants in New Deal Resettlement communities, played key roles in voting rights campaigns without fearing eviction because their families continued to own their own land.6 Migrant farm workers, who played leadership roles in the Farm Security Administration’s labor camps, subsequently led struggles for labor, civil, and housing rights in the decades that followed.7 These stories—together with Richard Kirkendall’s research on the New Deal Bureau of Agricultural Economics, Sarah Phillips’s on the New Deal’s multi-faceted work on conservation, and Jess Gilbert’s on agrarian New Dealers’ programs to promote democratic engagement in economic and land-use planning—offer us a complex and often inspiring view of the agricultural New Deal.8

To my mind, these works and many texts written by New Dealers themselves represent a significant challenge to the anti-statist tropes that have dominated discussions of the New Deal farm programs. It remains the case, however, that an image of the New Deal USDA as driven by bureaucratic, industrializing elites in ways that benefitted wealthy farmers has continued to assert a firm grip on many scholars’ imaginations.9 Such criticisms are undoubtedly appropriate to some New Deal farm programs (the AAA cotton program comes immediately to mind) and to many developments in the nation’s agricultural programs after World War II. When it comes to the broader goals and accomplishments of the agricultural New Deal, however, they represent an exercise in blaming New Dealers for their defeats, as opposed to engaging in a serious analysis of their admittedly far-from-perfect ideas and programs.

In short, as opposed to conflating the agricultural New Deal with the worst of postwar developments in American agriculture, this article argues for a view of the New Deal farm programs—and their roots in the work of previous generations of farm organizers and agricultural state builders—as an important but far-from-unique lesson in political and economic history. Movements around the world have fought powerful elites in the name of emancipatory state projects only to create new elites who stunted and distorted their achievements. Given the economic and environmental crises of our own times, it is as important to analyze—and build on—many of the agricultural New Dealers’ goals and accomplishments as it is to recognize their limitations and defeats. To make a more extended case for these arguments, I turn now to a broader overview of the history of the agricultural New Deal that starts with a focus on three generations of Henry Wallaces, their allies, and their roles in the development of the United States Department of Agriculture and the programs of the agricultural New Deal.

Three Henry Wallaces, “Equality for Agriculture,” and the Sources of the Agricultural New Deal

When Henry A. Wallace took office as FDR’s Secretary of Agriculture in March of 1933, he identified with the lifelong battles of his father and his grandfather, also both named Henry Wallace, for what Wallace called “agricultural equality.”10 Broadly speaking, all three Henry Wallaces, like other leaders of the mass farmers’ organizing efforts of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, both inherited and shaped several different traditions of farmer organizing and agricultural state-building. Originally identifying as progressive Midwestern Republicans and increasingly iconoclastic Presbyterians, the Wallaces used their paper, Wallaces’ Farmer, and its predecessors to speak to a large base of farming households in the Midwest in a fairly wide range of registers.

In hard times, the Wallaces evoked Isaiah and the fury of the prophets against the depredations of trusts and monopolies and the impacts of farm bankruptcies. They also preached everyday lessons about the care of land, animals, family and community. They urged farmers to become seed selectors, animal breeders, and practical account keepers; to practice crop rotations and diversification; and to grow clover and grass. They also championed the importance of organization. Farmers, they argued, must match the power of the trusts and monopolies with their own cooperatives and organizing efforts. They must work to pass legislation that represents their interests and ensure that accountable political leaders enforce it.

The Wallaces identified not only with those organizations, farm leaders, and professionals who fought to regulate the trusts, democratize the nation’s politics, and conserve the nation’s soil and natural resources but also with those who wanted to ensure that farmers had the scientific, technical, and business skills and tools to compete in a modern, industrializing economy. For the Wallaces, the differences between these outlooks were subsumed in critiques of laissez-faire ideology and a status quo that benefitted eastern banks, trusts, and corporations at the expense of farmers (whatever their income and land holdings).11

The Wallaces and their allies’ efforts to ensure that farming households benefitted, rather than suffered from advances in science, technology, education, commerce, and industry focused on three key goals: first, government regulation of industries and corporations in ways that would benefit farmers and the general public; second, the development of agricultural sciences in ways that would result in more abundant agricultural production; and third, the development of social sciences and government policies that would provide tools for managing the growth of industry and more abundant agriculture in ways that enhanced, rather than destroyed, the well-being of people living on the land and the land itself.

Henry A. Wallace’s grandfather, “Uncle Henry” Wallace, a leader of Iowa’s Farmers’ Alliances in the 1880s and 90s, and his friends and fellow farm paper editors in that era, “Tama Jim” Wilson and Seaman Knapp, played important roles in working for the first two of these objectives. Uncle Henry’s son, Harry C. Wallace, Secretary of Agriculture under Harding and Coolidge, and grandson Henry A. Wallace, Secretary of Agriculture during the New Deal, focused on—and to a large degree, ultimately lost—battles to achieve the third. They all had a significant impact on the development of the Department of Agriculture and American agriculture more generally.

The intertwining of the roles of the Wallaces and their allies in farm organizing and agricultural state building began in 1879, when Uncle Henry Wallace, Tama Jim Wilson (nicknamed after his home county; also known as “the Granger Congressman”), Seaman Knapp (founder and president of Iowa’s Stock Breeders Association), and a handful of other Iowa farm paper editors forged a Farmers Protective Association that engaged in prolonged battles with the railroads and a barbed wire monopoly (W, 87–92). They also participated in the agitation of farmers’ organizations across the country with regard to the priorities of many state land grant colleges and universities. Farmers argued that these institutions were failing to follow the mandate of the Morrill Act, establishing their land grants. The purpose of that 1862 legislation was to establish at least one college or university in each state serving the “industrial classes.” The era’s farmers’ organizations were therefore outraged that as opposed to offering the programs in agriculture and the mechanic arts mandated by the legislation, many of these institutions were offering the same kind of theoretical, abstract, classical curriculum as private institutions.12 Wallace, Wilson, and Knapp participated in the focus of such agitation in Iowa: the inadequate agricultural program at Iowa State Agricultural College (W, 93–98).

The college’s board responded by appointing Seaman Knapp (a man with a college degree and experience as a farmer) as their professor of Practical and Experimental Agriculture in 1879. Knapp developed a robust agricultural curriculum and field work but was frustrated by the lack of funding for any experimental work. Working with some fellow faculty members, he wrote a draft of legislation with some faculty members to provide federal funding for establishing agricultural experiment stations, which he submitted to their congressman. Years later, a much-amended version of this legislation would be passed as the Hatch Act of 1887. By this time, however, Knapp himself had become so weary of the relentless toll of the college’s lack of funds and the infighting on the college’s board that he had resigned his position and moved to Louisiana, where he took charge of a large land reclamation and farm development scheme in 1885.13

Without Knapp, agricultural education at Iowa State once again deteriorated. In 1891, however, Uncle Henry Wallace succeeded in working behind the scenes of an advisory board of farmers to engineer the appointment of Tama Jim Wilson as the new head of the college’s agricultural faculty—despite Wilson’s lack of a college degree. He also persuaded Wilson to accept the appointment in a year. Most significantly, because of the passage of the Hatch Act of 1887 and the Morrill Act of 1890, 1891 was a year when the college finally had more resources for agricultural education and experimentation because of the passage of the Hatch Act of 1887 and the Morrill Act of 1890. Tama Jim Wilson’s tenure at Iowa State as the director of agricultural education and the college’s newly founded experiment station was therefore far more pleasant and productive than Knapp’s.14

Moreover, just six years later, a presidential election gave Wilson an opportunity to put his experience at Iowa State to work on a national scale. In 1896, William McKinley won the state of Iowa, where Wallace’s Farmer tacitly supported him with editorials against free silver. He also knew Tama Jim Wilson, as they both served in Congress in the late 1870s. It seems likely that some combination of these factors, together with Wilson’s connections with farmers’ organizing efforts and his Iowa State credentials, resulted in Wilson’s nomination as McKinley’s Secretary of Agriculture.

In this position, Wilson enjoyed his alliance with farm organizations in their battles with the nation’s “professional classes” over whom state agricultural institutions should serve and how. “I took charge of my work at the College with great hesitation, but I have no hesitation in taking hold here,” he wrote Uncle Henry Wallace. “I find in many directions places where I can infuse some prairie breezes into these abstract sciences ….” He would make it his mission, he wrote, to ensure that the USDA’s scientists were doing “something for the fellow who works in the field with his coat off” as opposed to “brother scientists” (W, 134–35).

With the support of allies in Congress and the nation’s farm organizations, Wilson set out to reorganize the department’s work around problem-solving bureaus. As opposed to the priorities that academic scientists had set for work in botany and entomology, cataloging and illustrating families of plants and insects regardless of their relevance to commercial agriculture, the department’s scientists now worked to address issues relevant to plant and animal breeding and diseases and insects that attacked farmers’ crops. Their “practical” results won increasing congressional appropriations, expanding the department’s budgets and personnel. Reappointed by Theodore Roosevelt and Taft, Wilson became the longest-serving cabinet member in American history. By the end of his long tenure, Wilson had successfully transformed the USDA from a handful of embattled scientists with a large seed distribution program into one of the biggest departments in the federal government.15

In addition to his focus on the agricultural sciences, in 1902, Wilson appointed Seaman Knapp as the department’s one Special Agent for the Promotion of Agriculture in the South with a mandate to address the region’s issues with eroded soil, one-crop farming, and rural poverty. Still deeply critical of the land grant colleges’ failure to work more effectively with the nation’s farmers, Knapp used this position to develop and implement a model for using farmers themselves as “demonstration agents,” involving fellow farmers on their own farms in promoting such relatively simple practices as seed selection, diversification, and crop rotations. These “cooperative demonstration methods” proved extraordinarily successful in increasing crops and profits even in boll weevil-infested territories.

As a result, Congress provided ongoing funding for this work throughout the boll weevil-infested states. In addition, the Rockefeller-funded General Education Board (focused on increasing agricultural productivity to improve the tax base for public education in the South) provided the USDA with funding to support Knapp’s supervision of cooperative demonstration agents throughout the rest of the South. By 1914, Congress had passed the Smith-Lever Act, which established a national Cooperative Extension Service with a mandate to provide federal funding to states and counties that wanted to employ male and female demonstration agents using Knapp’s methods under the supervision of land grant colleges and universities across the nation.16 In short, between the late 1880s and the first decades of the twentieth century, Uncle Henry Wallace and his friends Tama Jim Wilson and Seaman Knapp played key roles in working with farm organizations, state and federal legislatures, and the USDA to establish, develop, and expand the work of the nation’s key state agricultural institutions throughout the country.

After Uncle Henry’s death in 1916, his son Harry C. Wallace and grandson Henry A. Wallace became co-editors of Wallaces’ Farmer, which was by then well-established as one of the nation’s leading farm papers. Harry, who had inherited his father’s position as Secretary of the Corn Belt Meat Producers’ Association, also became increasingly involved in working with farm organizations to advocate for government policies that would serve farmers’ interests. Deeply concerned by the economic conditions that farmers faced after the war, he raged against the way that the USDA, the extension service, and the land grant colleges continued to focus on increasing agricultural production while failing to acknowledge that if farmers were to make a better living, they must get a better price for their products.

Henry A. took over more of the research and writing for the paper. As an essentially self-taught statistician, he analyzed land and farm costs and prices, providing his father with arguments and figures that made his organizing efforts ever more urgent (W, 201–3). Warning that land values had been inflated during the war, Henry A. himself embarked on a campaign in Wallaces’ Farmer, urging a corn acreage reduction and soil conservation campaign with the slogan “Less corn, more clover, more money” (W, 202, 234).

Harry C. Wallace meanwhile played a key role in the organization of the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) from the state and county farm bureaus, which had been initially established because of county extension agents’ efforts to encourage better farming practices at the local level. At the organization’s founding convention in Chicago in 1919, he urged that their purpose must be to achieve political power. Rather than degenerating into “an educational or social institution,” they must establish “the most powerful business institution in the country” (W, 204–5). In the fall of 1920, Harry C. worked with the leaders of Iowa’s Farm Bureau (who by then claimed a hundred thousand members) to win a “bipartisan pledge of allegiance” from almost all of the state’s Congressional delegation to support “economic justice for farmers”: a major step towards initiating what would become the increasingly powerful Farm Block in Congress (W, 215–16).

When Warren Harding appointed Harry C. Wallace his Secretary of Agriculture in 1921, Harry prioritized research addressing farmers’ economic survival and wellbeing. One of his first acts in office was to recall W. J. Spillman, who had initiated the department’s work in farm management in 1902 but was forced to resign by Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of Agriculture David Houston in 1918 after Spillman responded to a request from Congress for his data on the costs of farm production as commodity prices were dropping. Wallace, however, saw Spillman’s research as exactly what America’s farmers needed most—similar, in fact, to what his son Henry A. had been developing in Iowa.

Secretary Wallace subsequently worked with Spillman and Henry C. Taylor (whom Houston had hired as Spillman’s replacement from the University of Wisconsin) to consolidate the work of what had been the department’s Bureaus of Markets and Crop Estimates and the Office of Farm Management in a newly established Bureau of Agricultural Economics under Taylor’s direction. Both Spillman and Taylor sought to define key factors that shaped the economic conditions faced by farmers. Differences in their backgrounds and careers, however, also spoke to significant changes over time in how Tama Jim Wilson and the Wallaces defined farmers’ interests—and what kind of government policies and research were necessary to advance those interests.

Spillman was in many ways an archetype of the farm boys (and some girls) with relatively little formal academic education who played key roles in developing the applied agricultural and social sciences at the land grant colleges and the USDA. A Missouri farm boy, the eleventh of fifteen children, whose father had died of sunstroke while working in the fields, Spillman worked his way through school, earning a BS from the University of Missouri and an MS in absentia in 1890. He was employed as a normal school science teacher with no formal training in the agricultural sciences beyond several weeks of observation at the University of Wisconsin when he started a job teaching agriculture at the newly founded Washington State Agricultural College in 1894.

Deeply interested in working with the state’s farmers to determine what methods and choices made the most difference in successful farming in different regions of the state, Spillman embarked on a project that involved breeding varieties of wheat suited to different climates, which ultimately involved independently rediscovering Mendel’s Law of Heredity. In 1902, he published an article on this work, which resulted in his recruitment to the USDA’s Bureau of Plant Industry. Once at the Bureau, Spillman received permission to pursue his interests in interviewing farmers, collecting statistics, and analyzing variables related to farm costs, production, and prices: what mixes of crop rotations and animal production, inputs, and potential markets were most suited to different regions of the country. Impressed by his work, Tama Jim Wilson established an Office of Farm Management under Spillman’s direction within the Bureau of Plant Industry in 1905.17

On the other hand, Charles Taylor had essentially been forced into an academic career by Tama Jim Wilson’s fierce resistance to the idea that a field as abstract and theoretical as “economics” could be useful to farmers. The son of a successful Iowa farmer, Taylor had become deeply interested in the “economic context of farmers’ work” due to the depression of the 1890s. After graduating with an MS in agriculture from Iowa State in 1898, he pursued another year of study in institutional economics with Richard Ely at the University of Wisconsin. At the end of that year, he wrote to his former Iowa State professor Tama Jim Wilson, expressing his hope that Wilson would establish a Bureau of Agricultural Economics at the USDA where he could be of service. Wilson’s reply was affectionate but firm. “Your aspirations are high, holy and noble,” he wrote. But if Taylor wanted to eat three meals a day, he should “learn how to do something that somebody wants done” in fields such as “soil physics, biology, and plant physiology and pathology.” Wilson could easily find a position for him at the USDA if he pursued studies in one of these fields.18

Unwilling to abandon his chosen field, Taylor returned to Wisconsin to study for a PhD and was hired there in 1901. In 1909, he established the nation’s first university department of agricultural economics. Despite these accomplishments, however, he was still eager for his work to have a national impact, so he took the position that Houston offered him at the USDA at a significantly reduced salary from what he had been earning at Wisconsin.19

In his position in Washington, Taylor noted that Secretary Wallace had to gently prod him away from his more conventional, academic laissez-faire view that the BAE should engage only in researching and publishing economic “facts” (trends in costs and prices) that would help individual farmers make their own decisions about how to adjust production and market their products (W, 243; PD, 55). As opposed to such views, Wallace was increasingly convinced that the problems farmers faced could not be addressed with changes in individual farm practices. Under his leadership, Taylor, Spillman, and a cohort of both more and less conventionally educated and unorthodox economists at the BAE (including such future leaders of the New Deal USDA as M. L. Wilson, Mordecai Ezekiel, and Howard Tolley) wrestled with research and recommendations on how to save farm households’ livelihoods at a time when falling commodity prices were forcing more and more farmers into bankruptcy.20

Wallace’s decision to expand the work of the department’s longstanding office of Home Economics by establishing a Bureau of Home Economics (BHE) was another example of his focus on encouraging research and government programs that addressed the needs of farming households (and in this case, American households more broadly) in a society increasingly driven by the growth of industry and commerce. The research of the Office of Home Economics had long been directed at supporting farm women’s responsibilities in feeding, clothing, and supporting the health, well-being, and cash income of their families. To underline the importance and expand the scope of such work, Wallace chose to appoint as the department’s first female bureau chief Louise Stanley, professor and chair of the Department of Home Economics at the University of Missouri, who had an MS from Columbia and a PhD in biochemistry from Yale. She was also a strong advocate for a broad public, social, and educational role for research in Home Economics.

Over the next twenty years, the BHE would employ more women scientists than any other institution in the country. Their work would develop new fields of professional employment, research, and training to address key social and economic issues from the viewpoint of consumers. Alongside their research on nutrition, the role and sources of vitamins, food preservation, and the qualities of different types of textiles, the BHE’s staff tested recipes, clothing patterns, and the many new industrial products designed for American homes. In later decades, the question of whether the government should offer consumers advice about purchasing such products would be far more contested. In these earlier years, however, its staff were responsible for research that would assist farm women in making decisions about spending what cash they had in ways that might lighten their enormous workloads.21

At the same time that Secretary Wallace was establishing the work of these new Bureaus, Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover was arguing fiercely that the USDA should focus only on helping farmers save themselves by developing and promoting better agricultural methods. All the USDA’s work on any topics related to economics and trade, he declared, should be turned over to his department. Looking back at Hoover’s unrelenting campaign against their work, however, Henry Taylor, then director of the BAE, described it as actually “just the thing that was needed” to strengthen a sense of unity and purpose in Harry Wallace’s BAE and USDA and to mobilize support for their work from farmers’ organizations and Congress itself.22

Wallace himself thought he was coming closer to convincing President Harding that government intervention in the farm economy was necessary (despite Hoover’s fervent opposition) when the president collapsed and died. It was then Calvin Coolidge—who had no sympathy with such views—became president in August 1923. Grimly undeterred, Wallace announced to Coolidge’s cabinet a month after Harding’s death that he would support a plan for “equality for agriculture” endorsed by a growing number of farm organizations and legislators: a proposal establishing a government-led corporation to use export subsidies to establish a “fair price ratio” between farm commodities and the goods that farmers paid for (W, 243–49; AD, 58–63).

Wallace put his BAE staff to work researching and writing legislation to establish such a program. By November, Senator Charles McNary of Oregon and Representative Gilbert Haugen of Iowa had agreed to sponsor the bill. Both Hoover and Coolidge bitterly denounced the bill, but given an approaching election and Wallace’s popularity in farm states, Coolidge never asked Wallace to resign (W, 249–56). When the bill failed in the House after six months of bitter debate, Wallace, in addition to his other duties, took on writing a book, Our Debt and Duty to the Farmer, to explain the extraordinary nature of the past four years of depression in the countryside and the danger of its growing impact on the country at large.23 With nine of the book’s eleven chapters completed, Harry died in office ten days after having undergone gall bladder surgery in October 1924.

Harry Wallace’s wife viewed him as “a martyr to the cause of agriculture”; his son privately asserted that Herbert Hoover was “the main cause of his father’s death” (AD, 64). In a memoriam for Wallaces’ Farmer, Henry A. Wallace wrote that his father had “died with his armor on in the fight for the cause which he loved …. The fight for agricultural equality will go on” (AD, 64–65).

Five years later, when Hoover was president, Wallace told the journalist Russell Lord that he now recognized that his father had died from medical causes, but he still saw Hoover’s ideas on “agricultural recovery, and general recovery” as “99 per cent wrong” (W, 285). With the onset of the Great Depression, conditions for farmers—still 30 percent of the nation’s workforce—had worsened dramatically. In Iowa, “[t]otal farm income fell by two-thirds between 1929 and 1932” (AD, 99). Farm families were also facing environmental catastrophes: dust storms from the West as a result of ploughing up fragile lands when the demand for wheat was high; gullied, deeply eroded soil as a result of poor men working poor land. More than a third of farmers had lost their land.24 By the time Franklin Roosevelt and his Agricultural Secretary Henry Wallace took office in March 1933, the nation’s farmers had faced more than twelve years of economic and natural disasters.

The Agricultural New Deal: Wrestling with Bankruptcy and Abundance

In taking up these challenges, Wallace hung his father’s portrait across from his desk and pursued his father’s battles side by side with many of the men and women who had worked with Harry Wallace in the BAE and the BHE, as well as the nation’s farm organizations. With support from the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF), Wallace and his allies persuaded both the emergency meeting of the nation’s farm organizations and Congress itself to vote for an Agricultural Adjustment Act that gave the administration broad powers to address the nation’s farm crisis. This legislation included a domestic allotment plan, a proposal that had actually been developed by W. J. Spillman (who was still at the BAE in the late 1920s but had since died in 1931). Alongside their confidence in Spillman’s research and analysis, Wallace and Wilson also had longstanding experience with working with the county extension agents and local farm bureaus which, they were convinced, could provide the personnel and networks necessary to implement such a program at the local level (W; ND).

This confidence proved warranted. Within the first six months of the passage of the 1933 Agricultural Adjustment Act, the USDA’s newly established Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA, led in large part by former BAE staff) had established the guidelines for programs for multiple agricultural commodities. The Farm Bureau and county extension agents had set up 4,000 farmers’ committees to sign contracts and distribute government checks to farmers across the country. A program of non-recourse price-support loans also provided participating farmers with an immediate source of cash (ND, 152–56). Three million of the nation’s six million farmers, “representing more than three-quarters of its agricultural output had signed up to participate in various AAA programs.” Within the year, the price of cotton doubled. Farmers’ cash income rose 30% (AD, 124–25). The mutually beneficial strategies of the partners involved in the program’s implementation raised commodity prices and farmers’ incomes, promoted soil conservation, and increased the Farm Bureau’s membership. After establishing the Federal Surplus Relief Corporation in October 1933, the New Deal also began distributing surplus food to the hungry and unemployed.

These were astonishing achievements. At the same time, however, some progressive critics, both inside and outside the department (and ever since), raised the reality that the programs of the AAA profited large commercial farmers far more than most people who worked the land. Owners of big farms could cut back further on their acreage in production, thus receiving more AAA benefits (as well as profits from higher commodity prices) than owners of smaller operations. Especially in the South and West, despite AAA regulations to the contrary, many landlords refused to share their benefits with their sharecroppers and tenants and achieved their acreage reductions by evicting those who protested. Many local extension and farm bureau agents, furthermore, as well as some USDA staff supported the landlords who took these actions. In the West, many large growers refused to raise farmworkers’ below-starvation wages even after some commodity prices more than doubled. Most fundamentally, these New Deal farm programs set a far higher priority on bankrupt farmers’ need for higher commodity prices than on millions of poor and unemployed Americans’ need for food.25

All these observations are true. They were also true, however, of many of the organizing efforts of previous generations of farm organizers and agricultural state builders who subsumed class and racial inequalities within agriculture in their broad campaigns for “equality for agriculture” in a rapidly industrializing economy. Since the Civil War, national farm leaders had focused on uniting and “uplifting agriculture,” speaking to and for the nation’s farmers in ways that rarely addressed—and sometimes exacerbated—differences within agriculture between large and small farmers, farm owners, and farm workers. The strengths and limitations of the themes and institutions developed by these previous generations of farm organizers and agricultural policymakers were what the New Dealers had to build on.

In addition, Henry A. Wallace, M. L. Wilson, and many of their allies recognized these limitations. They never wanted the AAA’s programs—and saving the nation’s commercial agricultural economy (as important as that was!)—to represent the sum total of their achievements. They paid ongoing attention, for example, to developing the New Deal farm programs in association with programs of soil and water conservation and land-use planning programs (W; PD). Furthermore, as Wallace and Tugwell’s conversation with Lord suggested, they hated that their efforts to help desperate farmers “adjust” to falling prices required cutting back on production when they knew that many people at home and around the world were going hungry. Their significant (if limited) efforts to address this issue included their surplus distribution program and the nation’s first Food Stamp Program.26

Quite early in the New Deal, Wallace suggested to Louise Stanley at the BHE that the AAA and the department’s planning efforts needed assessments of “minimum American food requirements and maximum possibilities of healthful consumption” (W, 386). By November 1933, BHE nutritionist Hazel Steibling had developed Diet at Four Levels of Consumption. BAE staff members used her work to develop calculations demonstrating that in an economy where consumers could afford to buy the food their families needed, farmers would actually need to expand production: a “nutritional yard stick” pointing to a far more compelling vision for the nation’s economy than programs to restrict production. Over time, these findings helped two key Wallace advisors, Mordecai Ezekiel (who began his career in Harry C. Wallace’s BAE in the 1920’s) and Paul Appleby convince Wallace that to achieve his goals for agriculture, he must work for policies and programs that would promote full employment (W, 386–87; ND, 163–64; SS, 79–80).

Some members of the department also worked closely with the nation’s robust consumers and labor movements and a few with the nation’s Socialist and Communist parties as well.27 Most importantly, many New Dealers were impacted by the extraordinary organizing efforts of tenants, sharecroppers, and farmworkers determined not to lose their homes and watch their children starve, while their landlords and employers reaped the benefits of higher commodity prices. In a speech celebrating the achievement of “parity” and “equality for agriculture” with the higher commodity prices of 1936, for example, Wallace went on to raise the importance of a new goal: “agricultural security.” It was not only “fair and stable farm prices” and the opportunity “to organize effectively in their own interest” that the nation’s farmers needed, he urged, but also “increased security of tenure” and “increased opportunity for those farm people whose standard of living is now on a subsistence basis.”28 By 1937, Wallace was speaking repeatedly about his view that the keys to establishing “agricultural security” were programs like those of the Rural Resettlement Administration (RA) and its successor the Farm Security Administration (FSA).29

In addition to providing land, supervision, and reasonable terms of credit to enable former tenants and sharecroppers to establish their own farms, FSA agents worked with their clients to promote public health initiatives: the use of screens and sanitary privies, home gardens and canning, and veterinary and medical cooperatives. In short, these programs served to extend some of the educational, scientific, technical, social, economic, and political benefits that many white farming households had come to enjoy as a result of USDA and land grant initiatives to at least some smaller black and white farmers, tenants, and sharecroppers. In the West, the RA and FSA established camps with decent housing and living conditions for some of the hundreds of thousands of displaced “Okies” and migrant farmworkers flooding the countryside. The FSA’s small but dedicated photography section also engaged in extraordinary documentation of the people that they served and the conditions they sought to address in ways that sought to win political support for such efforts.30

By 1938, Wallace and M. L. Wilson had also decided to make the BAE the USDA’s central planning agency for all the department’s research and action programs. In doing so, they set broad mandates to ensure that the department’s programs would “raise rural standards of living, supply farmers with a fair share of the national income, and also serve the interests of the consumers of farm products.”31 To achieve some of these objectives, the BAE established a program of county land-use planning committees in 1938–39 involving local farm people in working with extension agents and USDA county administrators to integrate and set priorities for federal programs in their communities. By 1941, more than 200,000 farmers were engaged in developing cooperative land-use planning programs concerning such issues as soil conservation, commodity production controls, firefighting, farm forestry, and numerous other policy reforms (W; PD; PP; SS).

With the goal of developing mutually reinforcing, bottom-up, and top-down planning efforts that made high-quality research both available and responsive to local needs and conditions, the BAE employed close to a thousand social scientists by the early 1940s. These men and women studied community, economic, and household conditions; land use patterns; nutritional and employment needs; and trends in international and domestic markets important to framing and evaluating longer-term agricultural policies and programs. Sociologists and anthropologists in Carl Taylor’s Division of Farm Population and Rural Welfare analyzed living and working conditions in representative rural counties, as well as those of migrant workers, sharecroppers, and people living on relief. A Division of Program Surveys, established in 1939 under social scientist Rensis Likert, used techniques developed for the new Gallup Poll to survey farmers’ opinions on different topics and government programs (SS, 78–81, 185–86, 220–23; PD).

In addition, Wallace and Wilson’s ambitious efforts to make the USDA—with the BAE as its flagship—“the most democratic spirited department in the Government or any other government” recruited leading intellectuals such as Charles Beard, Thurman Arnold, Ruth Benedict, George Gallup and John Black, as well as many of the Department’s own officials and social scientists, to lead “schools of philosophy” and programs of study and discussion on key community and national issues for department personnel, rural professionals, and communities.32 By 1941, a BAE Division of Program Study under the direction of Carl Taeusch was conducting twenty-five such schools a year, attended by thousands of extension workers, teachers of vocational agriculture, rural librarians, clergy, USDA staff, teachers, librarians and members of AAA, land-use planning committees, and national farm organizations (PD; SS, 40–143, 183–85, 187–89). In short, both before and especially after the AAA had helped to stabilize the nation’s commercial farm economy, Wallace, Wilson (who became Under Secretary of Agriculture in 1937), and their allies established government programs focused on a range of goals beyond those of the AAA’s crisis-driven price and production control policies.

The American Farm Bureau Federation Goes to War

Many of these developments in the later New Deal USDA were deeply threatening to the leaders of the American Farm Bureau Federation and the priority the AFBF placed on working with large farmers, especially in the South and West. The AFBF benefited greatly from their work with the Wallaces, the Extension Service, the AAA, and soil conservation programs during the early New Deal, especially in the South. Their numbers had tripled from about 150,000 members in 1933 to 450,000 in 1940. By the early 1940s, however, the AFBF rightly saw the FSA’s and the BAE’s efforts to work with tenants, small farmers, the Farmers Union, USDA staff from other agencies, and members of local communities in county land-use planning and other programs as an effort to limit the power of Farm Bureau agents, their relationship with the Extension Service.

Many Farm Bureau allies, Southern planters, Western growers, and Congressmen who had at first welcomed the influx of federal program funding in support of their regions’ desperately impoverished agricultural economies were increasingly infuriated by FSA and BAE initiatives that they saw as a threat to their cotton-based plantation economies, access to low wage labor and domination of their regions’ racial and economic hierarchies. Some made claims that the FSA was spending taxpayers’ dollars in supporting “socialist” cooperatives and paying their clients’ poll taxes. The Mississippi congressional delegation was outraged by a leaked draft of a Division of Farm Population study of Coahoma County, Mississippi, focused on the ways that its plantation agriculture and race relations were defined by white supremacy and racial segregation. Most threatening were BAE proposals to lower price supports for cotton in the light of world market conditions and many New Dealers’ conviction that diversifying Southern agriculture would help to address the critical issues of rural poverty and soil erosion (PP; SS).

In the West, where ongoing waves of farmworker strikes interrupted harvests of cotton and vegetables throughout the 1930s, angry growers claimed that the Resettlement and Farm Security Administration’s camps for migrant farmworkers were supporting the work of communist labor organizers.33 They were also outraged by a study conducted by a team from the BAE’s Western regional office of two counties in California’s Central Valley, one based on large land holdings and the other on smaller farms, in response to a request from the Bureau of Reclamation for an evaluation of whether to enforce a long-standing provision that federally funded irrigation projects should provide individual landowners with only enough water to irrigate 160 acres in a giant project in the Central Valley. The team found far greater economic, social, educational, infrastructure, and political inequalities in the county with large landholdings and recommended that the provision be applied.34

As these issues escalated in the early 1940s, the leaders of the AFBF launched campaigns accusing the New Deal USDA—especially the BAE and the FSA—of having abandoned the causes of farm parity and economic justice for farmers. “The farmers’ department,” they trumpeted, was now dominated by urban liberals, allied with the rural poor, urban consumers, and organized labor. They argued that organized farmers (meaning essentially themselves) with aid from extension agents should be in charge of state and regional agricultural planning as opposed to government agents, who did not have farmers’ experience and knowledge or their interests at heart (SS, 195–254).

With Roosevelt and his now Vice President Henry Wallace increasingly focused on the war effort and broader struggles over the future of the New Deal, the AFBF succeeded in convincing an increasingly anti-New Deal Congress to cut the budget for the county land-use planning programs in 1941. They slashed the budget of the FSA and forced the resignation of its director, C. B. Baldwin, in 1943. By 1946, opposition to the BAE’s planning programs and its sociological studies had persuaded Secretary of Agriculture Clinton Anderson to confine the agency’s work to “fact-finding” and statistical research. Later that year, Congress shut down all the BAE’s regional offices and specifically banned its engagement in “cultural” surveys. The 1946 Congress also completely replaced the FSA with the Farmers Home Administration, essentially a federal mortgage agency dedicated only to financing farm purchases by tenants. In 1953, Eisenhower’s Secretary of Agriculture, Ezra Taft Benson, closed down even the “fact-finding” and statistical work of the BAE (PP; SS; PD).

Alongside these fierce political battles, the industrial economic boom of the war years had encouraged a mass exodus of small farmers, sharecroppers, tenants, and many farmworkers to better paid factory jobs in cities. Technologies developed during the war also resulted in an increasing use of powerful new pesticides, fertilizers, and machinery. In an increasingly conservative, industry-dominated post-war/Cold War environment, commitments to regional and community planning, small farms, diversification, and cooperatives sounded increasingly old-fashioned. As a result of these post-war trajectories, a very long era of American agricultural state building, founded on broad if sometimes sharply conflicting arguments about how best to define and serve the wellbeing of farmers and their families (the majority of the nation’s citizens for much of this time) and the land itself, was to a large degree over.

The Legacy of the New Deal Farm Programs

Given the original Agricultural Adjustment Act’s requirement for the reauthorization of a new Farm Bill every five years, there have continued to be debates in Congress over farm policies. In the 1970s, these bills finally began to include the critically important Food Stamp (now SNAP) Program. Their focus on agriculture, however, has been primarily on fairly arcane commodity policies that became ever more important to commercial farmers as capital-intensive production methods provided ever greater advantages to large-scale operations. As a result, these bills increasingly reinforced the tendency of both liberals and conservatives to blame the New Deal for all those features of the post-war agricultural economy and politics they disliked the most: economic concentration and industrialization, narrowly focused interest group politics, and an expanding bureaucratic state.35

In the countryside, however, there were still some “old timers” who remembered the agricultural New Deal quite differently. In the 1980s—another period of plummeting commodity prices and the loss of hundreds of thousands of farms—these old-timers played a key role in inspiring the young activists in the Family Farm Movement who first interested me in the New Deal farm programs. In the age of Reagan, I found this movement’s fight to re-establish the New Dealers’ approach to restoring a more stable agricultural economy by supporting commodity prices with programs of supply management at home and negotiated trade agreements abroad truly astonishing.36

At a time when Reagan’s popularity had most Democrats as well as Republicans proclaiming that government was the problem and markets were the solution to every conceivable issue, these activists argued the critical necessity of government farm programs designed to support more stable rural communities, more dependable markets, and more environmentally sound agricultural practices. Against the administration’s claims that they would “get the government out of farming” and thereby enable American farmers to take over markets abroad, the Family Farm Movement argued the benefits for farmers at home and abroad, consumers, and the planet of a more planned agricultural economy (HS).

In the face of that era’s rising interest rates, falling commodity prices, farm bankruptcies, and ever more expensive farm programs, the movement’s leaders and their allies urged the need for supply management programs that would maintain commodity prices and, thereby, farmers’ incomes, purchasing power, and rural communities. Taxpayers’ dollars, they urged, should be spent on an expanded Food Stamp Program rather than the ever more expensive subsidies required to compensate for the falling commodity prices that resulted from all-out production. They argued for government support for a more balanced program of agricultural production that would also protect the environment with mandates for a decrease in pesticide use and the conservation of wetlands and rural habitats. In addition, they urged that such a program would also protect the livelihoods and food production of small farmers around the world who would not survive in markets flooded with cheap American commodities.

These arguments and the movement’s outreach and organizing efforts established far-reaching alliances with environmentalists, labor unions, the Black Congressional Caucus, anti-hunger organizations, international farmers’ organizing efforts, and perhaps most astonishingly a few state Farm Bureaus as well (HS)! In farm states across the Midwest, the campaigns of the Family Farm Movement repeatedly out-organized right-wing groups like the Posse Comitatus who were also seeking to appeal to desperate farmers. Many of the mainstream Democrats who campaigned enthusiastically for their proposals and programs continued to be elected to local, state, and federal office throughout the decade—despite Reagan’s popularity (HS).

The movement’s court cases, coalition building, and legislative strategies achieved some significant reforms. They stopped the Reagan administration’s draconian Farmers’ Home Administration (FMHA) foreclosure policies. A Conservation Title in the 1985 Farm Bill with sodbuster and swampbuster provisions protected fragile lands and ecosystems. Their fierce resistance to the Reagan administration’s initial proposals for sharp reductions in farm programs also provided some relief for farming households across the country.37

At the same time, however, the movement lost its key policy objectives regarding the nation’s farm programs. In battles over the Farm Bill of 1985, the Reagan administration’s retreat towards supporting higher farm subsidies to compensate for low commodity prices won enough votes in Congress to defeat Iowa Senator Tom Harkin’s proposal for a supply management program. Renewed efforts to pass the Harkin-Gephardt Family Farm Bill in 1987 also failed. The movement’s broader organizing efforts began to dissipate in subsequent years, especially after commodity prices rose again in the 1990s. Over the years since then, the nation’s agricultural commodity price and insurance programs have, for the most part, primarily served to guarantee the profits of the increasingly integrated corporations that supply farm inputs and process and sell their products, regardless of the consequences for the environment, health, and stability of rural communities at home and abroad.38

As is the case with New Deal farm programs, however, there continues to be evidence of the Family Farm Movement’s impact even after its defeats. Some of its leaders and activists played critical roles in building coalitions with environmental and labor activists in the growing anti-globalization movement against GATT and NAFTA in the 1990s. Others led and supported domestic and international anti-hunger, organic agriculture, local food, and rural environmental initiatives. Black and Native American farmers have pursued ongoing campaigns and won important lawsuits against longstanding injustices in the USDA’s credit policies. Some farmers, rural activists, and farmworkers also continue to engage in ongoing battles to protect their health, land, water, and communities from the impacts of giant hog farms and feed lots.39

In short, the Family Farm Movement of the 1980s was undoubtedly the last generation of farm activists to be directly inspired by the stories of agricultural New Dealers. Their ongoing legacy, however, continues to be determined.