Planning Democracy: Agrarian Intellectuals and the Intended New Deal 9780300213393

Table of contents :
Contents
Foreword
Preface
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations Used in Text
chapter 1. Introduction
chapter 2. The Agrarian Intellectuals’ Vision: The Intended New Deal as a Planning Democracy
part I. Social Roots and Early Fruits: Collective Biographies, Alternative Modernisms, and the First Two Agrarian New Deals
chapter 3. Growing Agrarian Reformers in the Midwest: A Collective Biography
chapter 4. Modernizing Eastern Urban Liberals: A Comparison with the Other Progressive Group in Agriculture
chapter 5. Struggling Toward a New Deal Land Policy: The Agrarian Action Programs and Beyond, 1933–1938
part II. The Flowering of Democratic Planning: The Third and Intended New Deal in Agriculture, 1938–1942
chapter 6. Reinventing Education, Research, and Planning: The Cooperative Land-Use Program
chapter 7. Continuing Education For Citizens, Scientists, and Bureaucrats
chapter 8. Reforming Social Science: Participatory Action Research
chapter 9. Unifying Action: Results of Cooperative Land-Use Planning
chapter 10. Intended New Deal Defeated, Reassessed, and Reclaimed
Appendix
Abbreviations Used in the Notes
Notes
Index

Citation preview

Yale Agrarian Studies Series James C. Scott, series editor

The Agrarian Studies Series at Yale University Press seeks to publish outstanding and original interdisciplinary work on agriculture and rural society—for any period, in any location. Works of daring that question existing paradigms and fill abstract categories with the lived experience of rural people are especially encouraged. —James C. Scott, Series Editor James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed Steve Striffler, Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America’s Favorite Food Alissa Hamilton, Squeezed: What You Don’t Know About Orange Juice James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia Sara M. Gregg, Managing the Mountains: Land Use Planning, the New Deal, and the Creation of a Federal Landscape in Appalachia Michael R. Dove, The Banana Tree at the Gate: A History of Marginal Peoples and Global Markets in Borneo Edwin C. Hagenstein, Sara M. Gregg, and Brian Donahue, eds., American Georgics: Writings on Farming, Culture, and the Land Timothy Pachirat, Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight Andrew Sluyter, Black Ranching Frontiers: African Cattle Herders of the Atlantic World, 1500–1900 Brian Gareau, From Precaution to Profit: Contemporary Challenges to Environmental Protection in the Montreal Protocol Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt and Gopa Samanta, Dancing with the River: People and Life on the Chars of South Asia Alon Tal, All the Trees of the Forest: Israel’s Woodlands from the Bible to the Present Felix Wemheuer, Famine Politics in Maoist China and the Soviet Union Jenny Leigh Smith, Works in Progress: Plans and Realities on Soviet Farms, 1930–1963 Graeme Auld, Constructing Private Governance: The Rise and Evolution of Forest, Coffee, and Fisheries Certification Jess Gilbert, Planning Democracy: Agrarian Intellectuals and the Intended New Deal For a complete list of titles in the Yale Agrarian Studies Series, visit www.yalebooks .com/yupbooks/seriespage.asp?series=94.

Planning Democracy Agrarian Intellectuals and the Intended New Deal

Jess Gilbert Foreword by Richard S. Kirkendall

new haven & london

Published with assistance from the Mary Cady Tew Memorial Fund. Copyright © 2015 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office). Set in Ehrhardt type by Westchester Book Group, Danbury, Connecticut. Printed in the United States of America. ISBN 978-0-300-20731-6 Catalogue records for this book are available from the Library of Congress and the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10

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To Lizzy, Katie, and Dave

Finally there is the problem of coordinating [U.S. Department of Agriculture] work with the thinking, the attitudes, the ideas, and the ideals of farmers in local communities. . . . It is in essence the problem of democracy. How can a great national public agency work with people in thousands of local communities, carrying out their desires, yet also helping them to formulate those desires by giving them information they could not themselves collect? Or how can national agricultural programs be carried out so as to achieve such broad objectives as stability of farm income, conservation of resources, and security of tenure, and at the same time be adapted to the widely varying conditions of every locality? —usda workers milton s. eisenhower and roy l. kimmel, Farmers in a Changing World: The Yearbook of Agriculture, 1940

Contents

Foreword by Richard S. Kirkendall ix Preface xiii Acknowledgments xvii List of Abbreviations Used in Text xxi chapter 1. Introduction 1 chapter 2. The Agrarian Intellectuals’ Vision: The Intended New Deal as a Planning Democracy 13

p a r t i social roots and early fruits: collective biographies, alternative modernisms, and the first two agrarian new deals

chapter 3. Growing Agrarian Reformers in the Midwest: A Collective Biography 25 chapter 4. Modernizing Eastern Urban Liberals: A Comparison with the Other Progressive Group in Agriculture 60 chapter 5. Struggling Toward a New Deal Land Policy: The Agrarian Action Programs and Beyond, 1933–1938 80

p a r t i i the flowering of democratic planning: the third and intended new deal in agriculture, 1938–1942 chapter 6. Reinventing Education, Research, and Planning: The Cooperative Land-Use Program 115

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chapter 7. Continuing Education: For Citizens, Scientists, and Bureaucrats 142 chapter 8. Reforming Social Science: Participatory Action Research 179 chapter 9. Unifying Action: Results of Cooperative Land-Use Planning 212 chapter 10. Intended New Deal Defeated, Reassessed, and Reclaimed 238 Appendix. List of Program Study and Discussion Pamphlets, 1935–1945 261 List of Abbreviations Used in the Notes 265 Notes 267 Index 331

Foreword Richard S. Kirkendall

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his challenging and powerful book is not quite what I had expected it to be. My expectations were based on my awareness over many years that Jess Gilbert was studying a group of men I had focused on in my first book. I assumed he would revise my story. Then he surprised me by inviting me to write this foreword, and attached to his e-mail was another that referred to my book as a classic and my effort as magisterial but “little followed up, probably because it was so impressive and comprehensive.” These were generous words, and, in my experience, revisionists had seldom if ever been so generous. My first book was not what I originally intended it to be. I had begun to work on the topic while I was a second-year graduate student working on intellectual history with Merle Curti at the University of Wisconsin. The year was 1954; Sen. Joseph McCarthy was the most prominent politician in the state, and he represented American anti-intellectualism, so I chose to write a dissertation on a group of New Deal intellectuals known as the Brain Trust. I soon learned that the topic was too large, for men of that type appeared in every part of Franklin Roosevelt’s administration and scholars had not yet produced many helpful monographs on the New Deal. A decision had to be made; I saw that the best material I had was on farm policy, and by 1958 I completed a doctoral dissertation titled “The New Deal Professors and the Politics of Agriculture.” Then, eight years later, after doing much more research and making a major overhaul, I published Social Scientists and Farm Politics in the Age of Roosevelt.

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Even though I had taken on this project only a short time after the FDR years, the available sources were already numerous and rich. Unpublished records of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) in the National Archives became the main base for my book. Eight large interviews in Columbia University’s pioneering Oral History Collection were also important. In addition, the timing enabled me to interview twenty-one participants in the story, including ten of the social scientists. Most were retired, had time to answer my questions, and were eager to do so. One of them, M. L. Wilson, was especially cooperative. I visited with him several times, beginning in 1956, and in addition to telling me about himself he advised me about other people to see and on one occasion organized a visit with several of them in Washington, D.C. On a hot summer evening before the advent of air-conditioned homes, we met on F. F. Elliott’s porch; the assemblage included Bushrod Allin, and the group talked until midnight while I listened. After I returned to my hotel room, I stayed up most of what remained of the night, for I could now construct a chapter outline of my dissertation. Much later, after publication of the book, Wilson’s daughter told me that her father could no longer see so she read it to him, and he liked it. I liked and admired him and the others I interviewed. One might suggest that I became too close to my subject. My book’s major themes emphasized the experiences in the political arena of these intellectuals. I challenged suggestions that they were mere servants of power, seeing them instead as men with ambitions of their own who hoped to serve three sets of values—business, science, and democracy— and the needs of a variety of people. They did not want scientists of any type to dominate American politics any more than they wanted business elites to do so; they favored multigroup politics with social scientists as only one of the important groups, but the most powerful farm organization, the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF), insisted that the main job of social scientists involved with farming and rural life was to serve the need of commercial farmers for higher farm prices. In my telling of their story, the social scientists in farm politics enjoyed expanding influence and rising hopes from 1930 to 1940 and increasing frustration from 1941 to 1946, and that pattern was largely explained by changes in their relations with the AFBF, the secretaries of agriculture, and the presidents. That is the history I thought Jess intended to revise. His book is based on great research stretching over more years than I devoted to mine. He used sources I could have used but didn’t and many

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more primary and secondary sources than were available to me. He looked again at sources that I was able to use, including the records of the secretary of agriculture and the Bureau of Agriculture Economics (BAE) in the National Archives and also the oral histories. He benefited from other sources, ones that were not available to me, including recent and relevant scholarship by historians and social scientists. He also drew on the papers of Allin, Carl Taylor, and Wilson that were opened for research in the National Agricultural Library and other places after I finished my book. Although unable to interview the participants in his history, he admires them as much as I did. Jess focuses on six social scientists, all of them important in my book. They are Henry A. Wallace, Wilson, Howard Tolley, L. C. Gray, Taylor, and Allin. He calls them agrarian intellectuals. After a long and helpful introduction, Gilbert devotes two chapters to who his intellectuals were. The chapters define their vision of democratic planning and its social origins. The men were born and mostly raised on midwestern family farms and in Protestant families, formally schooled in midwestern state and church colleges and universities, and further educated in the BAE. He then compares his men with eastern urban liberals who also served in the USDA and were represented most prominently by Rexford Tugwell. They had more interest in the American class structure and less confidence in farmers than the midwesterners did. Jess devotes only one chapter to the programs that nearly all historians of the agrarian New Deal have emphasized. These are the programs of the agencies established by the First and Second New Deals from 1933 to 1937: the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, the Soil Conservation Service, the Resettlement Administration, and the Farm Security Administration. What most interests this author is what he calls the Intended New Deal. It flourished between 1938 and 1942. Aimed to advance democracy, this New Deal was, he argues, what the agrarian intellectuals really wanted, and he devotes five chapters, half of the book, to it. This agrarian New Deal attempted to bring the “action agencies” established before 1938 and the agricultural colleges into harmony with one another, made the BAE the USDA’s central planner, and, what was most important, worked to build cooperative land-use planning. This featured heavy participation by farm men and women working closely with the other participants in the program. It offered broad educational programs for farm people, extension agents, scientists, and administrators inside and outside the department, collaboration

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between social scientists and state and local citizens in research programs of value for planning, and state and local committees to do the planning. Jess regards this planning program as the most significant part of the agrarian New Deal. He recognizes that it had shortcomings, but he points out that the leaders were aware of them and worked on them, and he shows that “the planning program made real progress in its attempt to democratize rural America.” Furthermore, he deplores the fact that it had only a short life. Congress destroyed it in 1942 by declaring that no funds in the BAE’s budget could be used for state and local planning, and he places much but not all of the blame on the AFBF for this decisive ruling by the legislators. Regarding this planning as the most important part of the complex agrarian New Deal, Jess criticizes other policy makers and historians. He criticizes the makers of agricultural policy during and after World War II for moving in the opposite direction from what planners, including Wilson and Tolley, recommended in 1941. And he criticizes recent historians of the agrarian New Deal for ignoring this promising effort. Although Jess has good words for my book, he has revised my account, chiefly by offering a fresh, more fully developed interpretation of the Intended New Deal. Although I did include chapters on what he sees as the third part, I did not make such a bold claim for what my social scientists did between 1938 and 1942. Although he does not say so, I was one of those who missed “the larger meaning of cooperative planning.” Other historians of American agriculture completely ignored this story and limited their attention to the earlier years of the New Deal. Jess’s interpretation and large-scale development of this part of American agrarian history is his main contribution, and it is a big one. In addition, he enlarges my knowledge and understanding of the whole story and accomplishes that for me even though I had lived with the story for a decade a half century ago. For Jess Gilbert, the Intended New Deal had great but unfulfilled potential and now offers something the United States needs. During a time of rising concern about the increasing concentration of wealth and power in American society, he holds up for consideration a story from the 1930s and 1940s, a tale of an attempt to reform the nation, making it more democratic.

Preface

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n this book I seek to reclaim the democratizing features of the agrarian New Deal, especially during its last incarnation, from 1938 into 1942. During these years a county / federal cooperative land-use planning program embodied the participatory- and deliberative-democratic ideals and intentions of the main policy intellectuals in the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA); hence I label it the Intended New Deal. Although many participants and observers at the time knew this planning project to be the most significant initiative of the entire New Deal in agriculture, bar none, it will be news to almost all historians and social scientists who study 1930s America. These twin themes—USDA’s large-scale democratizing effort and its culmination at decade’s end— constitute a new view of the agricultural New Deal, one spotlighting what the agrarian intellectuals liked to call democratic planning. Over twenty years ago, a resurgence of interest in democracy, both theoretical and historical, sprang up. At that time, my own burgeoning interest in pragmatic philosophy (John Dewey in particular) and reformist agricultural history guided me through the early archival research upon which this book is based. I soon became taken with the New Deal agrarian intellectuals: Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace, Undersecretary M. L. Wilson, the leading economist Howard Tolley, and their colleagues in the USDA. A close study of their writings (published and unpublished, letters and memos) as well as of the programs they conceived and enacted made it difficult for me to recognize the portraits of them painted by historians and social scien-

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tists. One thing that became quite apparent in Wallace’s and the others’ work, both written and programmatic, was their preoccupation with the late New Deal project of cooperative land-use planning. Yet, other than Richard Kirkendall in Social Scientists and Farm Politics in the Age of Roosevelt (1966), few scholars attended to this extraordinary public policy undertaking. More generally, even those historians and social scientists studying New Deal agriculture seemed to have missed the underlying vision of deliberativeparticipatory planning, intended to foment the democratization of rural America. I decided to tell the policy, political, and intellectual story of the New Deal agrarians. This most important aspect of New Deal agricultural policy has been overlooked for a number of reasons. First, it lasted barely three years, ending as the United States entered World War II—an inauspicious time for preserving or even remembering foiled programmatic experiments, however noteworthy. Second, the agrarian intellectuals who led it moved on quickly to other reforms at home and abroad, rarely looking back. Unlike academics, they did not reproduce themselves in the next generation, so people soon forgot what they had undertaken and accomplished, especially in those programs that did not survive the war. The farm policies that did survive World War II became known as the agricultural New Deal, despite what actually existed on the ground as late as 1942. To the victor went the story. During the postwar period all talk of planning, democratic or not, conjured up images of Communist dictatorship and therefore could hardly gain a hearing in intellectual, much less policy, circles. Few wanted to recall the turn to planning in the thirties, however democratic. It took the 1960s to reignite commitment to participatory democracy, and by then no one looked to the USDA for guidance or inspiration. Moreover, the sixties radicals tended to distrust all big-government endeavors such as Progressivism, the New Deal, and the Great Society. They and their scholarly progeny can scarcely imagine the state-led but decentralized democratization efforts like those of the agrarian New Deal. It’s now past time to recover what we have forgotten, or misremembered, about New Deal democracy. Planning Democracy aims to spread the word. While several recent histories of the New Deal raise some of the core topics addressed in this book, they fail to recognize the centrality of agricultural policy to such issues as economic democracy, citizen involvement, and state reforms. As hard as it may be to believe today, the USDA of the late thirties was a veritable hothouse of public–intellectual engagement and pol-

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icy experimentation. Agriculture thus provides an illuminating angle from which to view democratizing policy. Recent histories also miss the unusual timing of the progressive agrarian reforms covered herein, which peaked only in the early forties, when by most accounts the New Deal had long since passed away. In drawing attention to the remarkable activities of the USDA during the very late New Deal, this book helps redress the scholarly imbalance. Although substantively restricted to agriculture, my work offers insights into broader issues evident today in all democracies, such as the divide between citizens and experts, the dangers of bureaucracy, and the local versus federal question. As a sociologist by profession and a historian by adoption, I hope it will prove useful to agricultural and environmental historians as well as rural social scientists. Policy makers and policy historians should also find in this book new ways of thinking about their craft; as much as anything else, the agrarian intellectuals were extremely innovative policy designers. In addition, Planning Democracy is relevant to students of modern reform and progressive movements, including those currently debating international development. For as I indicate in the conclusion, the agrarian New Dealers ended their long careers abroad, working on land reform, rural development, and community development projects in places far removed from their native Midwest. We can learn from them still. —JG, Madison, Wisconsin, March 14, 2014

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Acknowledgments

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want to thank many people who helped me with this book. First are Mary Summers and Richard Kirkendall. Mary and I have been plowing the field of agricultural policy history together for a long time. A continual inspiration, she has shaped my view of many topics in this book and contributed specifically to the conclusion. Her mother, U. T. Summers, worked with Arthur Raper in Greene County, Georgia, in the early forties, and U. T.’s recollections influenced my framing of chapter 9. Mary and I sometimes joke that we are merely rewriting Dick Kirkendall’s Social Scientists and Farm Politics in the Age of Roosevelt (1966). But it’s only half-joking: His classic study contains so much that we all need to remember, and it paved the way for countless historians and others, myself included. I have greatly benefited from several conversations I had with Dick and am delighted that he has written the foreword. David Hamilton has been important to my work for many years, always willing to comment on drafts and offer excellent advice. I am especially pleased that some historians of modern America have found my scholarship useful; this book has profited from the writings of as well as discussions with Sara Gregg, Cliff Kuhn, and Sarah Phillips for over a decade, and, more recently, Daniel Immerwahr, Andrew Jewett, and Gabriel Rosenberg. George Tolley granted me an interview about his father, Howard, and Thelma Allin about her husband, Bushrod. Todd Wildermuth shared his research on another of my subjects, L. C. Gray. I’ve never met Paul Conkin, but his New

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Deal history writing has inspired me for decades. Dave Gilbert and Marilyn Sinkewicz edited my near-final drafts, and I owe them more than I can say. I had the pleasure of working with a number of outstanding graduate research assistants, three of whom wrote master’s theses on topics herein: Margaret Christie (on the federal sociologist Carl C. Taylor), David Lachman (on USDA’s adult-educational unit), and Spencer Wood (on Rexford Tugwell and the Resettlement Administration). Ellen Baker studied the impact of the University of Wisconsin on some of the agrarian New Dealers, and Roy Barnes investigated Henry Wallace and social democracy. I wrote pieces with all of these former graduate students, as I did with Steve Brown, Carolyn Howe, and Alice O’Connor. While in graduate school, David Nowacek shared his paper on M. L. Wilson’s philosophical pragmatism. I served on the committees of four relevant history dissertations, those of Todd Dresser, Mary Neth, Kendra Smith-Howard, and Amrys Williams. Tom Beckley and Sandra Hoffman stimulated my interest in this topic early on. The book benefited from the research of all of the above scholars as well as from my numerous discussions with them. I single out Spencer Wood, from whom I have learned so much, as we continue to work on New Deal land reform. Several aging New Dealers or near–New Dealers shared their insights with me about that reform period and its aftermath: Howard Beers, James Bonnen, Harold Breimyer, Lee Coleman, Roy Huffman, Robert Lampman, James McCamy, H. L. Mitchell, Ed Moe, Ellen Parks, Robert Parks, Kenneth Parsons, Arthur Raper, William Sewell, Conrad Taeuber, and Gerald Vaughn. Olaf Larson deserves special mention: he worked with Carl Taylor in the Division of Farm Population and Rural Welfare (the USDA’s rural sociology unit), had a long, prominent career at Cornell University after the war, and in retirement wrote three books on the division, including its definitive history, Sociology in Government, with Julie Zimmerman. I value my many conversations with Olaf over the years. Other scholars have read various of my papers and made useful suggestions: Jane Adams, Hans Bakker, Karen Bradley, Ben Brown, Michael Burawoy, Richard Colignon, Kathleen Conzen, David Danbom, Pete Daniel, Emmanuel Didier, Bill Domhoff, Mil Duncan, Anne Effland, Greg Field, Deborah Fitzgerald, Bill Friedland, Harriet Friedmann, Archon Fung, John Gaventa, Chuck Geisler, Chad Goldberg, Linda Gordon, Doug Helms, Jeff Hendricks, Christine Hoepfner, Steve Hopkins, Allen Hunter, Harvey Jacobs, David James, Robert Johnston, Ira Katznelson, Jack Kirby, Mark Kleinman, Mark Lapping, Paul Lasley, Jon Lauck, Richard Lowitt, Jeff Manza, James Miller,

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Pat Mooney, Alice O’Connor, Scott Peters, Elizabeth Sanders, Jim Scott, Cathy Stock, Lou Swanson, Peter Vandergeest, Pam Walters, Regina Werum, Vicky Woeste, Erik Wright, and Julie Zimmerman. I also appreciate the support of colleagues in my department, particularly Samer Alatout, Jane Collins, Gary Green, Daniel Kleinman, and Randy Stoecker. More than individuals sustain scholarship. I have been lucky to spend almost all of my career at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The institution combines a land-grant college of agriculture with the liberal arts. My department (formerly known as Rural Sociology, now Community and Environmental Sociology) is in the “ag school” that includes the Wisconsin Agricultural Experiment Station. I began this investigation with a USDA Hatch grant from this research arm of the college, for which I am grateful. Not every state experiment station would have funded a project on the history of federal agricultural policy, but Wisconsin’s did. I have learned much from being part of the Center for Culture, History, and Environment (CHE) in the Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, an interdisciplinary gathering place for faculty and graduate students interested in a broadly construed environmental history that includes (CHE has convinced me) agriculture. Also on campus are Steenbock Library, which holds a rich collection of historical USDA documents, and the Wisconsin Historical Society Library and Archives, which houses several manuscript collections that I used. Two professional associations were instrumental in advancing my work, and one or the other counts as members most of the people mentioned above: the Agricultural History Society and the Rural Sociological Society. An early research trip to the history group in USDA’s Economic Research Service proved extremely valuable; thanks to Doug Bowers, Lowell Dyson, Anne Effland, Wayne Rasmussen, and Vivian Wiser for sharing their knowledge and their files. In writing the book, I spent a sabbatical semester in the Department of Geography at the University of Bristol in England (hosted by Sarah Whatmore and Nigel Thrift), another semester in the Department of Sociology at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge (Mike Grimes and Joachim Singelmann), and a sabbatical year in the Department of Sociology at Columbia University in New York City (David Stark). I am grateful to my hosts and to these institutions. I thank the staffs of the archival collections I used: the National Archives in Washington, D.C. (now in College Park, Maryland); the U.S. Department of Agriculture History Collection, National Agricultural Library, Beltsville,

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Maryland; the Rare and Manuscript Collections, Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University, Ithaca; the Wisconsin Historical Society Library and Archives in Madison; the Special Collections Department, W. Robert and Ellen Sorge Parks Library, Iowa State University, Ames; the Institute for Regional Studies, North Dakota State University Libraries, Fargo; and the Merrill G. Burlingame Special Collections and University Archives, Roland R. Renne Library, Montana State University, Bozeman. I am thankful to Jim Scott for considering my manuscript for the Agrarian Studies Series and to Jean Thomson Black and Samantha Ostrowski at Yale University Press for shepherding it through the publication process, along with the editors Dan Heaton and Lawrence Kenney. The two excellent outside reviewers (who turned out to be David Hamilton and Anthony Badger) offered extremely useful insights and suggestions; they improved the book greatly. I thank Bill Cronon and Gwen Walker for helping me understand the world of academic book publishing. I also appreciate the technical assistance of Lee Duong in finalizing the work. Finally, I express gratitude to my parents, Barbara Jane and J. C. “Sonny” Gilbert, and to Kathy, Dave, Katie, and Lizzy.

Abbreviations Used in Text

AAA AFBF BAE CCC FCA FSA IBCC RA REA SCS TVA USDA

Agricultural Adjustment Administration American Farm Bureau Federation Bureau of Agricultural Economics Civilian Conservation Corps Farm Credit Administration Farm Security Administration Inter-Bureau Coordinating Committee Resettlement Administration Rural Electrification Administration Soil Conservation Service Tennessee Valley Authority United States Department of Agriculture

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Planning Democracy

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chapter 1

Introduction The rightful focus of any seeming criticism of the past is our present. —paul k. conkin, the new deal

I

n 1943 a longtime federal bureaucrat named Howard R. Tolley published a remarkable but little-known book, The Farmer Citizen at War. Tolley raised two pressing “dilemmas of democracy.” First, he asked, how should we deal with the “giant complexities of modern economy without overcentralization of power”? Tolley worried in particular about large, distant, “intolerable bureaucracy.” Granted, the federal government could and should solve national problems, but the solutions must be “flexible enough to fit local exigencies.” The second problem of modern democracies spotlighted “the wide separation between the layman and the specialist.” Since 1933, Tolley argued, American agriculture had gone farther than any other sector in addressing these two issues. He believed that the agrarian New Deal had discovered the key to democracy’s future: local citizen participation in government programs. The answer to the problems of governing modern societies lay in deepening democracy, which, to Tolley, meant far more than periodic voting for political representatives. Rather, democracy demanded massive citizen involvement in the affairs of state: “In these first steps toward making the vast governmental structure of today as real and vital to the citizen as the New England town meeting used to be, in fighting for what [Vice President] Henry A. Wallace calls economic democracy, the right of all men to share in the making of the decisions that affect their economic welfare, the farmer himself has been deliberately drawn into the process.” Both experts and citizens should make and implement public policy; both national and local

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action were required. The New Deal experiments in agriculture, he urged, must be “more widely known, studied, and used.”1 Tolley knew he had something to talk about. Very late in the New Deal, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) set up an institutional arrangement never before seen in American history: a national network of local organizations that combined representatives of a major economic sector (here, farmers), researchers, adult-educators, and administrators to plan and coordinate public policy. It constituted a vast, unparalleled attempt at national– local planning. To inform this cooperative planning initiative, citizens, scientists, and bureaucrats joined together in discussion-based education and action research. By 1941 three-fourths of all rural counties in the United States were taking part in the program, which involved nearly two hundred thousand farm people as local planners. Tolley and like-minded policy intellectuals referred to this effort as “democratic planning,” which they knew to be the most significant endeavor of the entire New Deal in agriculture. Earlier, in 1939, Tolley referred to cooperative planning as the “big job . . . in which the Department of Agriculture, which administers so many action programs, is now primarily interested.” It was “far more important,” his USDA colleagues asserted in 1940, “than any single agricultural program” such as production control, farm security, or soil conservation. Others at the time agreed, noting that cooperative planning may prove “in the long run to be the most important agricultural development of the past few years—more important than any specific program.” Moreover, democratic planning embodied the long-term vision of the agrarian intellectuals; hence I call it the Intended New Deal. But the experiment ended just as Tolley was writing, and the remarkable policy innovations soon were all but forgotten. This book seeks to reclaim the democratizing features of the agrarian New Deal.2 Today, however, in contrast to Tolley, Wallace, and their colleagues, we might well wonder: Can government bureaucrats foment participatory democracy? Can they actually propel citizen participation? Have federal workers ever really done so, on a large scale, in modern America? In this book I say yes, yes, and yes. I show that USDA leaders in the late New Deal envisioned and implemented major democratizing programs in adult education, action research, and grass-roots planning—all joining public scientists and administrators together with local citizens. Wallace, Tolley, and others believed that these cooperative activities would lead to much-needed social reform throughout the countryside. I argue that they did indeed substantially advance democracy in agricultural policy and thence in rural America.

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Yet there remains a contradiction in the project of these agrarian intellectuals, or so most people nowadays would claim. How can democracy be advanced by a big, activist state? For the state is usually seen as a major impediment to democracy—indeed, as the prime case of its polar opposite, bureaucracy. The very look and sound of such terms as public administration, policy planning, applied research, and adult education often raise democratic suspicions. In particular, the state is home to planners, technicians, administrators, and other experts—in that ugly phrase, government bureaucrats. How can they possibly be drivers of democracy, of citizen empowerment? Isn’t scientific expertise antithetical to public participation, and democratic planning a contradiction in terms? I question such easy dichotomies by showing how some thoughtful New Dealers refused to see them as irreconcilable. In fact, they sought explicitly and with fervor to overcome the binaries of citizen / expert, local / federal, and even democracy / bureaucracy. They worked long and hard to transcend these dualisms ideologically as well as institutionally, with massive participatory programs on the ground. This book tells their political and intellectual story. The USDA in the 1930s was not the only New Deal agency to employ phrases like democratic planning and grass- roots democracy. In fact, in both the popular and scholarly imagination, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) pioneered the use of such grand terminology. David E. Lilienthal directed the agency during most of the New Deal, and his TVA: Democracy on the March (1944) set the rhetorical standard. Yet in his classic critique, TVA and the Grass Roots (1949), the political sociologist Philip Selznick admitted that the federal “Department of Agriculture has gone much farther in developing both the theory and the practice of citizen participation than has the TVA.” Here Selznick referred to the cooperative planning of the late New Deal— the subject of this book. He also made the useful distinction between meaningful, substantive citizen participation and “mere administrative involvement,” concluding that the agrarian planning effort partook more of the latter than the former. In a commentary on Selznick’s book, the old New Dealer Rexford G. Tugwell and the young political scientist Edward C. Banfield declared that “ ‘grass-roots planning’ is a contradiction in terms.” It is a core task of this book to counter Selznick’s and Tugwell and Banfield’s negative assessment of agricultural cooperative planning.3 In the midthirties, when Tugwell served as the number two official in the USDA, he wrote extensively on planning, as did most public intellectuals during the Great Depression. Talk of democracy and planning filled the air,

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both within and beyond the New Deal. The historians Charles A. Beard and Carl L. Becker, the economists John R. Commons and Mordecai Ezekiel, the sociologists Robert S. Lynd and Pitirim A. Sorokin, the cultural critics Lewis Mumford and Walter Lipmann, among countless others, weighed in and provoked heated debate. Visiting from England, the political theorist Harold Laski and the émigré sociologist Karl Mannheim lectured in America, influencing policy thinking; Mannheim promoted his own version of democratic planning. Titles such as the following appeared in magazines and crowded bookshelves: “A New Rural Planning” by Franklin D. Roosevelt, “A Plan for Planning,” “Planned Society,” “Planning for America,” “Political and Economic Democracy,” “Democracy in Crisis,” “The Modern Democratic State,” “Big Democracy.” 4 But since the early 1900s no one has had more to say about democracy, citizenship, science, and the modern state than two of the most important social theorists of the century—Max Weber and John Dewey—and they came down on opposite sides of the debate.5 The German sociologist Weber predicted the virtual impossibility of political projects like those of the agrarian New Dealers. He spoke of democracy as a formal, representative type of political domination. Weber believed that modern trends opposed participatory democracy and placed his money (if not his heart) on the former. Western history was moving inexorably toward the “iron cage” of increasing rationalization, especially in the commanding spheres of capitalist economy, scientific knowledge, and the bureaucratic state. Bureaucracies were instrumentally rational in their impersonal objectivity, technical efficiency, and specialized expertise—as well as antidemocratic in their interests, procedures, and outcomes. The growth of professionalized knowledge impeded meaningful citizen participation; public administration would not promote radically democratic ends. Weber wrote, “Bureaucratic administration always tends to exclude the public, to hide its knowledge and action from criticism as well as it can.” Further, social science served to expand the power of government to control its citizens. Under the modern state, then, participatory democracy had little prospect of survival, let alone proliferation. Far from creating or sustaining popular democratic institutions, bureaucracies militated against them. In his political writings Weber lamented the increasing bureaucratic fate of representative democracies yet put little faith in citizen participation.6 Although they were prominent rural social scientists, the New Deal agrarian intellectuals lacked the scope and stature of Weber. Not so their favorite American philosopher, the progressive John Dewey. Dewey offered a much

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more expansive view of democracy, which he conceived as participation in all aspects of social life that maximized individual self-realization. He vehemently disagreed with Weber on democracy’s modern promise, which must be extended to all spheres of society, including culture, education, mass media, and especially the economy. Dewey believed that science as well as the state could be democratized, open to control by citizens. Publics, for instance, could guide national planning, and experts serve the common good. People should take a large role in their own governance, for only they, not elites or bureaucrats, knew their own needs and interests. Like scientists, ordinary people could also reason together. Underlying this stance was Dewey’s deep faith that education helped create both intelligent citizens and progressive change and that common people could grow, learn, and make responsible decisions given proper social conditions. In contrast to Weber’s “heroic pessimism,” Dewey looked favorably upon the same modern trends but also hoped for the forging of a “Great Community,” an organized, participatory public to run the democratic state. Here, Dewey saw a crucial role for social scientists who studied specific problems or needs identified by citizens, and communicated with publics who would discuss, debate, deliberate, and decide how to improve or adjust their situation. Knowledge, Dewey held, was not abstract or theoretical but simply information useful for social action. Although more critical of industrial capitalism, he was also more optimistic than Weber about expertise and administration, especially when grounded in democratizing education and civic participation.7 While theorists like Weber and Dewey taught, studied, and debated such issues, the agrarian New Dealers actually implemented the kinds of experimental policies that the American philosopher advocated. In fact, they drew ideas and inspiration directly from Dewey. The central figure of this book, the institutional economist M. L. Wilson, told a USDA colleague in the 1930s that he was “a rip-snorting pragmatist. I’m a descendent of William James[,] and the two high priests of the only kind of philosophy that I think is worth a damn are John Dewey and my professor at Chicago, J. H. Tufts [Dewey’s coauthor].” Through large-scale federal programs, the agrarian New Dealers instituted key aspects of Dewey’s democratic philosophy of education, science, and planning in America’s countryside. They wholeheartedly sided with him, against Weber, on the possibility of a participatory form of rationalization, a democratic type of modernization that combined bottom-up (local citizen) and top-down (state expert) initiatives and that could result in progressive social reform. This book presents their attempt, through

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education, research, and planning, to bring federal scientists into closer touch with rural citizens, ideologically as well as spatially. As Tolley put it, “The scientist needs the practical expertness of the citizens, and the layman needs the special knowledge of the technician.” Although agricultural education and research obviously predated the 1930s, I show that the agrarian New Deal introduced radically new forms of continuing education and action research along with cooperative planning. During the late thirties, then, the USDA, along with two hundred thousand rural people all over the country, undertook this remarkable “experiment in democratic planning.”8 The project deserves the attention both of historians, who have usually overlooked it, and of social scientists and policy makers, who can learn from it. In the 1980s social and cultural historians came to dominate New Deal agricultural history writing. For the Cotton South, Pete Daniel and Jack Kirby emphasized the racial and class effects of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), revealing it as a racist and class-biased agency that disadvantaged black and white landless farmers. In the 1990s feminist historians added a gender perspective to the critique of the rural New Deal, which they showed to discriminate against women and reinforce patriarchy. The cultural historian Catherine Stock offered an innovative view of USDA policy makers as a “new middle class.” Others proposed a counternarrative of agricultural policy, that of the Farm Security Administration (FSA), which supported the rural poor. All of these race, class, and gender works evaluated New Deal policies from the bottom up, from the viewpoint of the dominated and putupon. The historians’ vision tended to be localist or regional (southern, midwestern) as well as antistate, antiscience, anti–New Deal. With the partial exception of the heroic FSA, agricultural programs were portrayed as anything but democratic.9 In the nineties, historical social scientists turned to the New Deal, beginning with the move to “bring the state back in.” Theda Skocpol and Kenneth Finegold emphasized the prior state building embodied in the USDA / land-grant college complex, including its socially autonomous economists who formed the AAA (such as Tolley and Wilson). Their state-centered approach took a generally positive view of the New Deal, at least in terms of administrative success and political survival; the USDA represented “an island of state strength in an ocean of weakness.” In sharp contrast, the political scientist James C. Scott decried the planning state as “high modernist.” He named the key New Deal agrarians Wallace, Wilson, and Tolley as statists in this mold, ones who exalted industrialized farming and scientific

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rationalization while denigrating historical tradition and local cultures. More broadly, high modernists tended to be authoritarian elitists who disdained religion and folk knowledge, detached “social engineers” who imposed giant public projects like the TVA on the grass roots. Scott identified the New Deal USDA as a prime site of high-modernist ideology, and the historian Deborah Fitzgerald leveled essentially the same critique.10 In between the state-centered and high-modernist interpretations were political historians who saw the agrarian intellectuals as rationalizing elites and technocratic modernizers, yet with a penchant for local participation. In the most balanced and thorough summary of New Deal agricultural policy, Anthony Badger held that it included the goals of national planning and even social justice but aimed first at raising prices, which succeeded and, ironically, precluded the longer-term aims. The New Dealers’ means to achieve an efficient, rational economy were to be scientific expertise joined with grassroots democracy. David Hamilton, like Skocpol and Finegold, traced prior state building in agriculture, but he specified a different kind of state—a corporatist or associative one, exemplified by the decentralized Extension services. Like Badger, Hamilton showed that the first, emergency phase of New Deal farm policy, with its local administration, was envisioned to evolve into voluntary, long-range planning. Yet such planning for modernization and rationalization never arrived. Almost alone in recent decades, Badger and Hamilton seriously raised the question of participatory democracy but ultimately came down on the agrarian New Deal as nondemocratic. Early environmental historians like Donald Worster grasped New Deal agricultural policy along similar lines, that is, as guided by experts and scientists seeking to control nature as well as local people.11 We all have learned a tremendous amount from these various approaches, whether by historians (social, cultural, feminist, political, environmental) or social scientists (statist, localist). The historians have taught us much about the biases of the AAA, especially in the race- and class-divided plantation South, as well as about gender relations in the family-farming Midwest. Yet there is still more to say. What else can we learn of the agrarian New Deal? Was there more to it than the AAA and the FSA, the conservation and environmental programs, the modernizing and rationalizing efforts? Were the New Dealers quite so elitist as portrayed? For one thing, almost all of the abovementioned treatments end in 1937–38. What might we gain by extending our gaze into the subsequent period, even all the way up into the early 1940s? The story I tell really gets going only in 1939; thus I aim to recast our temporal

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understanding of New Deal agricultural policy by emphasizing its last, most significant phase. Moreover, theoretically as well as empirically I question social-scientific interpretations of the agrarian intellectuals as being either autonomous or high modernist. Skocpol and Finegold’s state-centered view subordinated individuals too readily to institutions, specifically the USDA/land-grant college complex, dismissing a focus on “talented individuals” in favor of their “collective identity.” Why not both, combining personality and corporate factors? One venerable social institution ignored by Skocpol and Finegold was the family farm, which yielded all of their featured policy intellectuals like Wilson and Tolley, those state actors who were purportedly autonomous from such society-based forces.12 In contrast, I argue that the USDA’s leading agrarians were “organic intellectuals” of the midwestern family-farming class. Organic intellectuals identify with the class from which they emerge and which they serve. They create and promote an alternative understanding of reality, or counternarrative, that challenges the dominant society. The New Deal agrarian intellectuals came from and never forgot—indeed, worked primarily for—the interests of those farm people. They put forth an analysis of a unitary farming class exploited by the modern industrial economy and therefore deserving of special assistance from the federal government. Through this lens, we can better understand the intentions behind their favorite reforms. My interpretation also counters Stock’s new-middle-class view of the agrarian intellectuals as “urban outsiders” and antidemocratic elitists.13 To the extent that Scott and Fitzgerald identify the agrarian New Dealers as high modernists, I suggest they misinterpret Wallace, Wilson, and Tolley. Granted, the three men were expert economists, and the rural New Deal would seem to be a classic case in point, with its alphabet soup of bureaucracies, national planning, scientific research, and policy education for farmers. Yet the agrarian intellectuals opposed, both ideologically and operationally, authoritarian high modernism. Instead, they strongly supported historical tradition, local knowledge, regional cultures, cohesive communities, and other illegible (Scott’s term) practices like family farming. Nor did the agrarian New Dealers place “supreme self-confidence” in either states or science, much less in industrial farming. In fact, they held a deep localist bias against bureaucracies. Above all, the agrarian intellectuals acted simultaneously as federal bureaucrats and participatory democrats. Thus I propose another term to capture their brand of state-led reform: low modernism, meaning decentralized programs that involved local citizens in substantive, meaningful ways.

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They combined top-down (federal) and bottom-up (local) approaches to public policy. Science and technology played a role but so did religion and folk culture.14 The New Deal agrarians, then, exemplified both key concepts, organic intellectual and low modernist—interpretations advanced in this book. I claim that the New Deal agrarian intellectuals have been widely misunderstood and, moreover, that they can offer policy lessons for today. Their integration of adult education, action research, and participatory planning, along with local administration, went further toward democratizing public policy than any other effort of its time, and possibly of ours. They sought to balance expertise and popular control, the national state and community interests. Their vision of democratic planning stood second to none in its promise of transforming rural America into a more egalitarian society, turning it toward a wider distribution of power and resources for common people. The agrarian intellectuals believed that the federal government, the New Deal state, could move democracy forward, especially if scientists and citizens worked together. My book presents the story of their democratizing efforts and the resulting tensions that arose in the countryside and within the state as well as between government experts and local farmers. These tensions tell us much about the limits of American democracy. In this thematic way the book may be seen as something of a return to Dewey’s ideas and to Tolley’s Farmer Citizen at War. It also contributes to a current, wide-ranging revival of scholarly interest in American democracy, citizenship, expertise, and the state. Environmental historians are now reexamining New Deal conservation and rural planning and engaging broad, democratic themes in political history writing. Historical social scientists have contributed as well to the renewed focus on agrarian democracy in modern America. Actually this emphasis is older than all the interpretations cited above, including the turn to sociocultural history in the 1980s. Richard S. Kirkendall elaborated it in his classic Social Scientists and Farm Politics in the Age of Roosevelt (1966). In that magisterial effort he showed the interplay of science, capitalism (or business), and democracy throughout the entire agricultural New Deal. Kirkendall’s comprehensive work, however, was little used either in the sociocultural turn to come in agricultural history or in the broader debate on policy intellectuals. Not for over two decades were these themes taken up again by New Deal historians. My book addresses similar concerns, now evident in political-environmental history and historical social science.15

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I focus on the six agrarian intellectuals who envisioned and designed the cooperative planning program that institutionalized the Intended New Deal. The top three are obvious choices: Henry A. Wallace, the two-term New Deal secretary of agriculture who became vice president in 1941; M. L. Wilson, undersecretary of agriculture and later the director of federal Extension; and Howard R. Tolley, chief of the crucial Bureau of Agricultural Economics (BAE). Wilson and Tolley earlier held other key USDA positions. The other three individuals led major action-research units within the BAE during the late New Deal and helped formulate and implement the cooperative planning that lies at the core of this book: Lewis C. Gray, Land Economics Division and Assistant BAE chief for Land Utilization; Carl C. Taylor, Farm Population and Rural Welfare Division; and Bushrod W. Allin, State and Local Planning Division, which devised and carried out the planning effort. These three units both conducted policy research and engaged in programmatic action on the ground during the Third New Deal. More broadly, these six social scientists served as general idea men in the New Deal USDA, where they provided policy guidance and created new governmental institutions. Since their Intended New Deal project is so little known today, I begin by presenting their overall vision of democratic planning (chapter 2). But how in the world did they develop that vision? What were the social origins of their policy ideas? In chapter 3 I construct a collective biography of the six agrarian intellectuals, starting where they did, in the rural Midwest of the 1880s, and tracing their youthful influences, particularly civic republicanism, a crusading Social Gospel, and the one-class ideology of family farming. Then I follow them to college and especially graduate school, where they imbibed the radical-reformist lessons of the institutional economists Thorstein Veblen and John R. Commons. Their first jobs in state land-grant colleges of agriculture and the new BAE constituted the final training ground for the New Deal soon to come. In concluding chapter 3, I apply the concept of organic intellectual to the farmboys-turned-social-scientists. Next, in order to highlight their distinctive ideas and ideals, in chapter 4, I compare them with the other group of progressive reformers in the New Deal USDA, the eastern urban liberals. This contrast sharpens the picture of the agrarians; they shared many values with, but also differed significantly from, this betterknown style of American liberalism, personified by USDA’s second-incommand during the early New Deal, Rexford G. Tugwell. I argue that Tugwell and five of his comrades were more typical high modernists while the rural midwesterners merit the label low modernists.

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Chapter 5 shows how both of these reformist groups played major roles in the first two agrarian New Deals, which yielded well-known agencies like AAA, FSA, and the Soil Conservation Service (SCS) plus other innovative land-based programs. Unlike scholars who see these programs as the main acts, I present them all as stepping-stones toward a new national land policy. The chapter ends with several early intimations of participatory planning, which led to the late New Deal project that comprises the second half, and the heart, of the book. I present that Third, Intended New Deal as a unified policy of continuing education, research, and planning. Chapter 6 offers an overview of how these three modern state functions fit together in a new cooperative land-use initiative. It traces the beginning of this final New Deal to a formal agreement between the USDA and the land-grant colleges as well as to the consequent reorganization of the huge department to implement it. The chapter summarizes the planning organization from neighborhood to nation and the participatory procedures of the land-use program. Next follows a chapter each on the three main emphases of the Intended New Deal: adult education, participatory research, and cooperative planning. In chapter 7 I present the USDA’s remarkable educational activities, which included hundreds of thousands of rural people and tens of thousands of public officials: local discussion groups for farm men and women, and schools of philosophy for Extension workers and citizen planners. Equally astounding were the lectures on democracy to USDA employees, delivered by leading public intellectuals of the day such as the anthropologists Ruth Benedict and Robert Redfield, the sociologists Robert S. Lynd and Robert E. Park, the historian Charles A. Beard, and the economist John Kenneth Galbraith. Chapter 8 covers the participatory action research advanced by New Deal rural sociologists and land economists in the early phases of cooperative planning. They assisted hundreds of county- and thousands of communitylevel planning groups, in which local citizens and government officials performed work previously done by social scientists alone. First, they conducted local self-studies called community delineations, then constructed community and county land-use maps and reports that provided the basis for the final, action phase of planning. In the next chapter I present these results at two levels. Most of the direct outcomes and benefits of the program were local, and I feature some of the central stories, especially for very poor places like Greene County, Georgia. Greene and many other counties experienced tremendously positive social and economic transformation as a result of the

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planning program. I detail the one major national achievement, a planning exercise in 1941 that articulated an agrarian social-democratic vision for rural America. But it was not to be. Chapter 10 relates the demise of cooperative planning and ventures an overall assessment of the program. In conclusion, I draw together some of the larger theoretical, historical, and political issues raised by the agrarian intellectuals and their Intended New Deal. The heart of the matter transcends academic debate, important as that is, and focuses on a core political dilemma of modern society: How can policy intellectuals and local citizens connect with one another? What does this relationship hold for the possibility of greater democracy? And is there room, as the Progressive labor historian Leon Fink asks, for serious “democraticintellectual engagement” in the modern world? Despite often condescending scholarly tones (and tomes) toward Progressives and New Dealers alike, we have still not resolved these questions—any more, and perhaps even less, than they did.16 The New Deal USDA provides an opportunity to reexamine such pressing theoretical as well as political issues. The democratic questions Tolley raised in 1943—the danger of a distant bureaucracy, the expert–citizen divide, and public efforts to overcome them—remain vital concerns today. I believe that the New Deal agrarian intellectuals have much to teach us still. They show, for example, that a democratizing state is not just theoretically possible but actually existed on the ground in rural America circa 1940. As participatory democrats, the agrarian New Dealers conceived, designed, and implemented massive federal programs involving hundreds of thousands of local citizens. Yet their overall, motivating ideals—their intentions—are hardly known today.

chapter 2

The Agrarian Intellectuals’ Vision The Intended New Deal as a Planning Democracy But an immense difference divides the planned society from a continuously planning society. —john dewey, “the economic basis of the new society,” 1939

T

his book focuses on six policy intellectuals—five economists and a sociologist—who led the USDA during the late New Deal: Henry A. Wallace, secretary of agriculture; M. L. Wilson, undersecretary of agriculture and director of federal Extension; Howard R. Tolley, chief of the BAE; Lewis C. Gray, premier land planner; Bushrod W. Allin, top planning official; and Carl C. Taylor, leading rural sociologist. I call these USDA figures agrarian intellectuals because they advanced agricultural policies in the interests of family farming, land-use reform, and widespread landownership. Thus my use of the term has little to do with agricultural fundamentalism; indeed, these six characters more often than not opposed a traditional, backward-looking type of agrarianism. Rather, I employ the term agrarian intellectual as shorthand for policy intellectual in pursuit of progressive rural reform. A knowledgeable USDA journalist referred to their approach as “an agrarianism of new designs.”1 I present the political and intellectual story of these six agrarians, culminating with the policy they envisioned, designed, and implemented in the late 1930s—the Intended New Deal in agriculture. At its core stood the theory and practice of what they called democratic planning. Each of these New Dealers articulated his views repeatedly during the late thirties and early forties, but their statements have been little noticed since. Yet democratic planning provided the glue that held together all of their efforts and made

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sense of their numerous disparate initiatives. The phrase, though, probably strikes people today as paradoxical, if not outright self-contradictory. For how can planning, a seemingly expert function, be joined with democracy, which connotes citizen action at the grass roots? This is indeed the question, one that the agrarian intellectuals spent their political lives answering, even embodying, in the policies they conceived and carried out. They fully realized the significance of the problems involved. How to pursue national planning while respecting local control? Their deep concerns about bureaucracy gave urgency to a decade-long quest for democratic planning.2 In this chapter I introduce the agrarian intellectuals’ thinking, their overall vision for rural America. The intertwined issues that so engaged them—land (what today is called natural environment), democratization, scientific expertise, continuing education, progressive social change, the proper role of government— still remain of utmost importance for us today. Since the post–World War II era, the word development has been used for the kind of work the agrarian intellectuals performed in the New Deal. In truth, development probably captures better than planning what they had in mind and did on the ground. But that term was unavailable to them, as to everyone else in the thirties. In 1966, at the end of his career, Wilson identified the research, education, planning, and action programs of New Deal agricultural policy as amounting to “that group of complexities which we have come to call development.” And he clarified that, to him, development meant “organized and directed change,” his lifework.3 At the end of this book, I point out how, after World War II, Wilson and the others helped invent the international programs of rural development and community development, which they saw as global extensions of their domestic activities in the thirties and early forties. But in this chapter I outline the motivations behind those practices, the agrarian intellectuals’ New Deal vision for rural America. In 1940 Wilson, as USDA’s new director of Extension, presented a paper entitled “A Theory of Agricultural Democracy” to the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association. Since the rise of the industrial labor movement, the longtime bureaucrat declared, reformers had called for extending principles of political democracy, such as self-government and citizen participation, to the economy. Agricultural democracy was a sectoral instance of this “economic democracy,” a way of seeking and reconciling the collective interests of farmers with modern society. Here he cited the pluralist political theory of Harold Laski and the community studies of the sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd. To Wilson, as to his neighbor, collaborator,

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and close friend Tolley, democracy was not merely a form of government; it meant more than politics or even economics. Quoting extensively from the latest book by his favorite philosopher, John Dewey (Freedom and Culture, 1939), as well as drawing from the cultural anthropologist Ruth Benedict, Wilson saw democracy as a distinct pattern of culture that maximized individual and group participation in public life: “Participation is one of the most fundamental concepts or elements of the democratic pattern of culture.” The New Deal, he continued, exemplified four principles of agricultural democracy: 1. decentralized administration through local farmer committees, 2. referenda to determine administrative policies such as quotas and penalties, 3. group discussion and adult education to promote “intelligent participation,” 4. cooperative planning in policy formulation and localization of programs.4 Wilson knew whereof he spoke. Besides Secretary Wallace, no one was as important to the agrarian New Deal as Wilson. He had been the principal architect of the “voluntary domestic allotment plan” for production control that defined the AAA, the early New Deal’s main farm program. He had urged the AAA, in which he headed the crucial Wheat Section, to use local farmer committees and referenda (nos. 1 and 2 above). As assistant secretary and later undersecretary of agriculture, he launched group discussion and adulteducation projects for farmers and Extension agents (no. 3). Finally, in 1938, Wilson, Wallace, and the other agrarian intellectuals launched the cooperative county / federal planning program that integrated the above items with participatory action research by scientists and citizens (no. 4). Wilson’s innovative theory of agricultural democracy claimed that the “new institutions [offer] not only opportunity for, but encourage and add prestige to participation in these activities at the community level. I do not mean to imply that the score on participation is very high yet. I hope that it will continue to rise rapidly.” Again quoting Dewey, he added that democracy “cannot be superimposed by any set of agricultural officials or social experts in Washington, or any other center of government or of research and learning.” Nonetheless, one of the key national roles “involves stimulating the democratic process in the local community and on the different levels of government in the States, in the same proportion” as federal authority enlarged. That

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is, local say-so must grow along with the central state, combining bottom-up with top-down. Wilson sought to expand the power and participation of nonelites, both locally and nationally.5 The cooperative land-use planning program culminated a participatory vision of agricultural democracy. It connected the detailed administration of action agencies such as AAA to a wider educational effort: “Land use planning is based upon the definite recognition of the planning process in the formulation of agricultural policy. It is placed between the educational process with its discussion techniques and the administrative process which takes place after broad policies have been formulated.” Planning itself was based on cooperation and agreement among farm people, state college researchers, and federal administrators in the counties. These features—local administration, adult education, “integrated research” (his term), long-range planning—were essential to the democratic process, Wilson argued, and farm people should take a large hand in them all.6 Wilson’s paper delivered to the political scientists, while remarkable in itself, serves to introduce the agrarian intellectuals’ low-modernist vision for rural America: expanded citizen participation, reflecting their belief that full democracy had yet to be achieved; a developmental role for the national state; a combined federal (top-down) and local (bottom-up) approach to public policy; scientists, citizens, and administrators working together; the necessity for continuing education, action research, and cooperative planning around land use. As good New Dealers, they thought the Great Depression had certified both the death of the laissez-faire state and the call for an activist government. But what kind of new state were they birthing? Within agriculture at least, it was to be a deliberative-participatory state. The agrarian intellectuals knew that strong democracy required a more active citizenry. In 1940 Wallace wrote in USDA’s most popular outlet that Americans must “build an economic democracy that will match our political democracy.” Tolley recollected the situation as of 1938: “Planning in a democracy called for planning by the people, not just for the people. A wider democracy, not a narrower one, was viewed as a primary need of agriculture.” Democracy demanded “the active participation of the people. That does not mean just some of the people,” but included the poor. Allin concurred. Planning needed “the widest possible participation by farm people in the process” and “should be developed through widespread farmer participation.” And Taylor held “the definite conviction that our various levels of democracy, from local neighborhoods and communities on up, must be tied together in

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national planning and action.” Otherwise, “the Federal Government will tend to be an autocratic and not a democratic device for the operation of agricultural programs.” Wilson clinched the point: democracy “cannot be said to be succeeding unless the mass of the people participates in the affairs of government. Only their participation makes a democracy work.” The agrarian New Dealers advanced a participatory form of democracy that included planning, whereby the people affected by a decision would help make it. Tolley correctly called it “something new under the agricultural sun.”7 Moreover, consistent with Wilson’s and Taylor’s anthropological sense of local culture and social psychology, they all believed that government programs could help create a more democratic citizenry. Concluding a speech in 1939, Allin asserted that, in the local planning committees, “the farmers participate as citizens,” not merely as self-seeking individuals. “Farmers generally want to function as members of a group, as public-spirited citizens who are very much concerned about the implications of public programs that affect not only themselves as individuals, but their communities, their State and their Nation. They are just as much concerned about these things as they are about the size of a benefit check . . . [from a] government program. Land use planning offers them an avenue for expressing their concern through constructive service to themselves and the Nation.” Reflecting the lessons of the radical Dewey and the institutional economist John R. Commons (who had taught Allin, Gray, Wilson, and scores of other USDA workers), he noted a crucial dimension of cooperative planning: it provided an organizational opportunity for people to grow and develop, to become more democratic personalities. Allin averred: “There is no more effective method of learning than by doing.” His boss agreed. One of the best things to emerge from grass-roots planning, Tolley claimed, was an increased “consciousness of public responsibility.”8 Not that agreement was always reached. Common understanding was based partly on facts, which scientists could provide to citizen-planners. Although factual statements alone could not change people’s minds, Wilson knew, prejudice or preconception “is weakened by facts which have been made available . . . through the technique of open democratic discussion.” Agreement came as a “compromise in points of view, even if based on the same facts.” Allin and the other New Dealers sought “widespread farmer participation for its own sake.” Simply engaging in the planning and discussion process could broaden everyone’s horizons. Yet if no will existed to understand another point of view, there was no way to learn or agree. “Beyond this,” Wilson concluded,

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“policy judgments might differ for reasons no more tangible than differences in social philosophy.” While mutual understanding and unified action stood as the goals of planning, they were not assured. At best, the process would lead to gradual cultural change and long-term reform. The late New Deal cooperative planning program institutionalized such a commitment to open discussion and the interaction of farmers and scientists.9 Continuing education, then, was essential and should be participatory too. All of the agrarian intellectuals took a very broad view of education, which included fostering democratic citizenship and fomenting social change. Like Dewey, they understood that democracy required continuous learning, personal growth, cultural adjustment, and civic discussion. Citing Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, Wallace held that democracy “could not work unless there was popular education among the people.” In a speech to USDA employees, Wilson confessed, “I am a great believer in the ability of the average man to find his way if he is given light.” Tolley and Allin also assumed that democracy demanded an informed citizenry. They favored a participatory form of education, seeing a central role for “learning by doing” in governmental programs. All believed that participation in public policy created better citizens, plus it was educational in itself. Farmer “committees learned as they worked.” By the late thirties, the USDA leaders saw themselves as part of a “great democratic movement in this country,” a movement that put continuing education at its core. They aimed to create a public in the Deweyan sense, that is, citizens organized to move the state.10 Moreover, the agrarian intellectuals faced squarely the problem of expertise in modern society: how should experts relate to citizens? They consistently held that government administrators, research scientists, and Extension specialists must advise but not lead the farm people on the planning committees. The secretary of agriculture set the tone. Speaking to the Association of Land-Grant Colleges and Universities, which trained the agricultural scientists, Wallace was clear. “Too many of us” think that only experts should plan and “seem afraid of planning by farmers.” This was wrong. “We must see that our experts function primarily as technical advisors, and that they pass on to farmers the responsibility for making decisions.” Only in this way would the United States have “a genuine democracy in planning” and (his favorite phrase) “economic democracy in agriculture.” Wilson declared to USDA employees that farmers in the “democratic process,” not experts working in isolation, should formulate agricultural policy. He believed that technicians had “the modest role of advisor and assister” to

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planner-farmers. In 1939 Tolley forthrightly told southern Extension workers, “As I see it, the place of the expert is that of technical advisor; the place of the farmer is to make the final decisions.” Taylor, whose BAE unit conducted extensive action research with farm people in the cooperative planning process, often wrote that experts must yield their scientific plans to the views of local citizen groups.11 The New Dealers thought, however, that policy should be determined not by any single group—not even grass-roots farmers—but by a synthesis of the interested parties. Tolley wrote that technicians and citizens needed each other in the process of (to use his farm metaphor) “intellectual cross-fertilization in practice.” Taylor said that “joint effort” was needed “on the part of the experts and the group involved,” the latter “supplying the democratic action.” Allin spoke for the USDA planners when he posited this understanding of synthesis: “Free discussion is the technique for arriving at agreement among farm leaders, technicians and administrators. We think this is basic in policymaking under a democratic government.” Allin understated the Deweyan case when he remarked upon the benefits of group discussion: “You’d be surprised at how effective the procedure is.” As usual, Wilson put it best: “I do not think we should expect to make policy here in Washington, either here in the Department or in Congress; nor do I feel that policy should be made politically in the rural areas. The ideal situation to my mind is a relationship between the Department and Congress, on the one hand, and self-conscious, alert, wellinformed and socially inspired groups of rural people on the other.” Such “well-informed” people were the democratic citizens formed by continuing education and discussion. The envisioned policy process synthesized the different points of view of farmers, scientists, educators, and administrators.12 Along with democratizing education and citizen participation, the agrarian intellectuals exhibited a deep commitment to the study and sometimes the writing of history, one especially unusual for typically ahistorical social scientists. To them, understanding the past was not mere background but instead offered essential value for policy purposes. They grasped— indeed, exploited—the contemporary significance of history. Their economist mentors, including Richard Ely, Commons, Henry Taylor, Benjamin Hibbard, and Veblen, not to mention the historian Frederick Jackson Turner, assumed this approach and themselves all wrote major historical works. Wilson served as president of the Agricultural History Society in 1938, and, citing Turner’s work on the frontier and Commons’s on the labor movement, he claimed that “history is largely the result of such great social movements.”

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Speaking at the new Lincoln Memorial in Washington, Wilson offered a Lincoln for the 1930s, with his “conceptions of unified interests and progressive tenets, and a sympathetic understanding of common men.” In 1939 the undersecretary published his most important book, the aptly titled Democracy Has Roots (which I examine in chapter 7). Wallace also made history relevant to the democratizing efforts of the New Deal, which he presented as the latest in the living tradition of American agrarianism. Particularly fond of Turner’s frontier thesis, Wallace named his first New Deal book New Frontiers (1934). His Whose Constitution? two years later profiled five reform episodes in American history, culminating in “1936, Shake Hands with 1787!” Speaking at Monticello to commemorate Jefferson as farmer, educator, and democrat, Wallace concluded that, far from going back to Jefferson, as conservatives advised, “We must go forward to Jefferson.” Two of the other agrarian New Dealers wrote long books that stand as still-used classics today: Taylor’s The Farmers’ Movement, 1620–1920 and Gray’s two-volume History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860. To an extraordinary extent, all the agrarian intellectuals undertook their analyses of current or prospective policy by conducting a highly informed historical review of ideas, trends, and events leading up to that moment. They thus found a usable past in American agrarian history and made it new through their democratic-planning vision.13 Finally, to the agrarian intellectuals, land policy provided the programmatic site for democratization. In the late thirties they focused on land-use reform, promising to unify the disparate aspects of earlier New Deal agricultural programs. Specifically, cooperative land-use planning brought together and integrated acreage adjustment, soil conservation, tenure reform, farm credit, and other federal programs—all of which affected rural land and its use. Further, all the agrarian intellectuals hailed from midsized, landowning farm families in the Midwest. Their vision for rural America featured a system of family farms that showed little class stratification and approximated rough socioeconomic equality, especially in the widespread distribution of wealth, that is, land. Politically, they believed that such an agricultural system would bring about progressive social change in the countryside and serve even as the foundation of the agrarian wing of a European-style social democracy in the United States. A new national land policy tied together their ideals.14 In summary, the agrarian intellectuals shared a two-fisted commitment to democracy. First, they saw social science and the national state as

the agrarian intellectuals’ vision

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potential agents of progressive-democratic reform. If professionals and politicians extended power and resources beyond the elite to common people, then half the democratizing battle would be won. Second, the USDA leaders believed that expertise must join with the local knowledge of farmers and that federal authority should decentralize to citizens. They sought both to merge science with citizen knowledge and to integrate government action with local participation. Thus their distinctive vision of democratization, combining a top-down with a bottom-up approach to effect progressive reform. Allin stated this view explicitly in 1938: The new cooperative county / federal land-use planning initiative, he wrote, “must be done both from ‘the bottom up’ and from ‘the top down.’ Planning must start at both ends.” The project of democratic planning institutionalized the agrarian intellectuals’ vision of the Intended New Deal, which part 2 of this book elaborates.15 These ideals emerged institutionally in the late New Deal program of cooperative county / federal planning. Starting in early 1939, planning committees, which initially focused on land use, reached from the rural community and county on to the states and finally to the federal government. Farmers, technicians, and bureaucrats together engaged in innovative continuing education and action research to inform the planning committees. By 1941 over twenty-two hundred counties participated in the program, which involved nearly two hundred thousand farm people on local committees. The nested set of committees and partnerships worked relatively well—for about three years. In 1942 conservative anti–New Dealers in Congress and rural America killed the democratic-planning effort. Thus the agricultural policy that survived World War II was not the New Deal envisioned and implemented, however briefly, by the agrarian intellectuals.16 Despite its brief life, this “experiment in democratic planning” deserves attention today. USDA leaders and many others knew it to be the most important initiative of the entire New Deal in agriculture, yet the program is not very well known or even remembered. Yet I argue that participatory planning, along with the related adult-education and activist research, was indeed the most critical innovation in agricultural policy during the 1930s. What’s more, this New Deal was the one intended by the agrarian intellectuals who led USDA during the late thirties; it meant to achieve their long-term plans. And it shows that a democratizing state was not just possible but actually operated on the ground throughout rural America. It stands as a crucially meaningful but forgotten piece of America’s agrarian heritage. This book demonstrates that agricultural policy circa 1940 featured continuing

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education, action research by scientists and citizens, and participatory planning—all intended to democratize as well as modernize the rural United States. This, then, was the vision of the agrarian intellectuals. A fine vision, it shared characteristics with many progressive-democratic reformers, Dewey included. What’s remarkable about the New Dealers’ program of reform, though, is that they actually carried it out—with hundreds of thousands of farm people.

part i

Social Roots and Early Fruits Collective Biographies, Alternative Modernisms, and the First Two Agrarian New Deals

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chapter 3

Growing Agrarian Reformers in the Midwest A Collective Biography Everyone is a creature of his home environment, and as a child he develops in his mind stereotypes which he carries with him throughout his life. I was born in a community of corn belt farmers where the farms ranged from quarter- to half-sections in size [160 to 320 acres]. Therefore, instinctively when I am talking about farmers, I am actually thinking about the kind of farmers and farm families that live on the farms that you look down upon when you fly over the Corn Belt. —m. l. wilson, 1961

T

he agrarian intellectuals and their progressive reform vision did not materialize on the New Deal scene out of thin air. They grew from deep cultural roots. Where did the ideas for democratic planning come from? What kind of people, with what backgrounds, conceived and implemented the project? How did they relate to rural America? My approach to these questions is collective-biographical, using sociology as well as history to specify the social and institutional origins of the leading policy intellectuals in the late New Deal Department of Agriculture. Here I paint a broadbrush group portrait of six individuals born, raised, educated, and employed in the same or similar environments before coming together in 1933. I emphasize three formative periods in their pre–New Deal lives: cultural background, higher education, and early career.1 At each stage of family, university, and first jobs, the agrarian intellectuals were both enabled and constrained by specific forces in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century America. These prior influences constituted the root sources of the Intended New Deal in agriculture.

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The agrarian intellectuals grew up and matured within a series of formidable, preexisting institutions that channeled their thinking and framed their political lives: midwestern family farming, evangelical Protestantism, civic republicanism, agricultural land-grant universities, the Progressive “new social sciences,” and the federal BAE. Moreover, these institutions thrived within a broader political culture that encouraged certain ideologies and suppressed others, those, for instance, concerning class conflict and the proper role of government. These cultural and institutional forces led, in the 1910s and 1920s, to the rise of a particular type of agrarian social scientist, personified by Henry A. Wallace and the others. By the time of the economic crisis of the Great Depression and the political opportunity afforded by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, they (along with others, to be sure) were able and eager to create astonishingly innovative public policies.2 As an illustration of my approach, consider the prototype of the New Deal agrarian intellectuals, Henry C. Taylor. He was of the previous generation but exemplified most of the characteristics in the group portrait sketched below. Born in 1873 and reared on a Scots-Irish family farm in Iowa, he was smart, ambitious, and self-assured. He graduated in agriculture from Iowa State College in 1896, then entered the University of Wisconsin to study with the famous political economist Richard T. Ely and the rising American historian Frederick Jackson Turner. After earning a doctorate, Taylor joined Ely’s department but soon founded his own Department of Agricultural Economics, the first in the country. Later he moved to the USDA and established the crucial BAE. President Calvin Coolidge fired Taylor in 1925 for supporting interventionist farm legislation, but the economist’s organizations flourished. As land-grant professor, disciplinary founder, institution builder, policy adviser, and general “ideas man” (his term), Taylor mentored scores of economists who became agrarian New Dealers, including the ones featured in this book. His biographical pattern was repeated in the six lives I outline below (table 1).3 Sociocultural Origins: Midwestern Family-Farm Boys All of the future New Dealers were born and reared in the same time and place: the rural Midwest of the 1880s (except for Allin, born in 1899). All six grew up on family farms in adjoining counties in southwestern Iowa (Wallace, Wilson, Taylor), Indiana (Tolley), northern Missouri (Gray), and

agrarian reformers in the midwest table 1

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profile of the agrarian intellectuals in the new deal usda Birth Year/Place

Education

Early Career

Henry A. Wallace1

1888 Iowa

Iowa State ’10 Iowa State M.S. ’21

Iowa farm editor, geneticist, statistician, economist (BAE)

M. L. Wilson2

1885 Iowa

Iowa State ’06 Wisc. M.S. ’20

Montana State ag economist, BAE

Howard R. Tolley 3

1889 Indiana

Indiana ’10

BAE Calif. ag economist

L. C. Gray 4

1881 Missouri

Wm. Jewell* ’00 Wisc. PhD ’11

BAE land economist

Carl C. Taylor 5

1884 Iowa

Drake* ’11 Missouri PhD ’18

N.C. State rural sociologist

Bushrod W. Allin6

1899 Kentucky

Wisc. ’21 Wisc. PhD ’26

Wisc. ag economist, BAE

*Midwestern Protestant college. Their Positions in the New Deal: AAA = Agricultural Adjustment Administration, USDA BAE = Bureau of Agricultural Economics, USDA RA = Resettlement Administration (not in USDA until 1937) Notes 1. Secretary of Agriculture, 1933–40; U.S. Vice President, 1941–44. 2. AAA Wheat Section Head, 1933; Subsistence Homesteads Division Director, 1933–34; Assistant Secretary of Agriculture, 1934–35; Undersecretary of Agriculture, 1936–40; Federal Extension Director, 1940–52. 3. AAA Specialty Crops Section Head, 1933; AAA Program Planning Division Head, 1933–34; AAA Administrator, 1936–38; BAE Chief, 1938–46. 4. Founder and Head of BAE’s Land Economics Division, 1919–37; AAA Land Policy Section Head, 1933–35; RA Assistant Administrator, 1935–37; Assistant BAE Chief, 1937–40. 5. In Subsistence Homesteads Division, 1933–34; in AAA Land Policy Section; RA Rural Resettlement Division Head, 1935; BAE Farm Population and Rural Welfare Division Head, 1935–53. 6. In AAA Program Planning Division and the Secretary’s Office of Land Use Coordination; BAE State and Local Planning Division Head, 1938–42.

north central Kentucky (Allin). This social background plainly helped determine their careers as students of rural society; almost all agrarian social scientists of the time started life as farm boys. More than that, though, three related features of late nineteenth-century midwestern family farming affected

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their later work and politics: a one-class view of society, civic republicanism, and the reforming Protestant spirit.4 Americans are notoriously reluctant to broach the topic of social class. If pressed, most usually claim to be vaguely middle class. However, in discussing family farming, one must use more precise concepts that offer insight into the social origins of the New-Dealers-to-be and, by extension, how they came to see society, that is, what they noticed and what remained hidden from their view. Rural sociologists have theorized the historically and structurally specific class relations of modern family farming, and their work is useful here. The analysis starts with the dominant type of production: late nineteenthcentury America was becoming a capitalist society—a market-driven, politicaleconomic system based on the built-in, or structural, class division between property owners and wage laborers. Conforming to the typical two-class model of capitalism, many Americans possessed no productive property and therefore sold their labor for a wage, hired by the much smaller group of owners.5 Small family businesses, however, including farming, did not fit well into that theoretical mold. (My focus is agricultural although the following applies as well to nonfarm enterprises.) In the words of the historical sociologist Harriet Friedmann, late nineteenth-century family farms comprised a form of commercial “household production in the era of wage labor.” Enabled by growth in world trade, new technologies like railroads and two-person reapers, and federal land policies such as the Homestead Act of 1862, modern family farming arose around the time of the Civil War and afterward, depending on location. This form of production constituted a true middle, or in-between, class within the larger capitalist society, sharing features with both of the basic classes. Like capitalists, family farmers owned productive property, notably land, and produced commodities for sale on a market, along with subsistence production. Yet, unlike capitalists, they hired no appreciable wage labor. Instead, the family itself provided labor for the enterprise. And like wage workers, farm families performed the direct daily work that operated the business. Uniquely in capitalism, then, on family farms the workers were the owners, or at least they shared a household. There were no built-in class divisions based on the separation of property and labor on family farms and relatively few in the neighboring communities, which therefore exhibited little class conflict.6 Unlike the industrializing urban North and the plantation South, the late nineteenth-century rural Midwest was substantially a one-class society. Since most farm families joined their own land and labor, the family farm appeared as an anomaly in the emerging capitalist society. Some farmers

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owned more land than others, yet there was an underlying egalitarian distribution of wealth, at least in comparison to cities and plantations. The rural Midwest was thus not a deeply class-divided society, not a very capitalist place, so the region’s agricultural class structure stood out as quite distinctive. In 1961, after a long career of agricultural policy work, M. L. Wilson confessed, “Everyone is a creature of his home environment, and as a child he develops in his mind stereotypes which he carries with him throughout his life. I was born in a community of corn belt farmers where the farms ranged from quarter to half-sections in size [160 to 320 acres; his parents’ was 240]. Therefore, instinctively when I am talking about farmers, I am actually thinking about the kind of farmers and farm families that live on the farms that you look down upon when you fly over the Corn Belt.” Taylor wrote with some exaggeration but obvious pride, “There has never before been anything in the world like the rural culture of the corn belt, where farmers have attained the highest level of living . . . in the world for ‘dirt farmers.’ ” Growing up in such a milieu, the farm boys developed certain inveterate images of normal social relationships and the good society that did not altogether square with America’s rising urban-industrialism and its ideological predispositions.7 This is not to say that other classes such as farm tenants, landlords, and creditors were unknown in the Midwest, for not everyone fit securely into the propertied middle class. If farmers mortgaged land at the wrong politicaleconomic time, they chanced to lose the farm and sink into the subordinate class of tenants. Taylor remembered the story of how his parents started farming in Shelby County, Iowa, only to realize that what they supposed was their land had been granted to an ex-governor of New York for speculative purposes. Although the homestead price was $1.25 an acre, the Taylors wound up paying ten to twenty times that much, risking mortgage and loss of the land in the process. This bit of family lore influenced Taylor’s lifelong antipathy toward tenancy and land speculation, aversions shared by the other family-farm boys. Such sentiments led them to believe that most farmers should be of essentially the same class status as their own families of origin. Midwestern tenant farming and landlordism complicated but did not erase the one-class family-farm model.8 The unique social position of family farmers in the overall class structure fed particular political and ideological dispositions. The agrarian intellectuals traced their patrimony to Jefferson and Lincoln, who they believed had advanced democracy by providing generous land policies, albeit for white

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men only, infrastructural support, and some protection against exploitative urban employers, merchants, creditors, and the rising industrial monopolies. Family farmers, as opposed to urban industrialists and plantation owners, often espoused an egalitarian ethic, so a wider distribution of power worked to their advantage; as the large majority in places like the rural Midwest, they stood to gain politically as well as economically: thus the “natural” agrarian affinity between democracy and family farming. On this, as on most other points, the intellectuals-to-be agreed. Taylor noted that after meeting Wilson, he “got the impression fairly quickly that I’ve had ever since that M. L. and I always thought alike.” Another friend of both Wilson and Wallace wrote that “in terms of blood, soil, and spirit, [they] are cast in remarkably the same mold.” Once during the early New Deal, Wilson, the same friend observed, had just suffered a policy defeat and “wandered into the Secretary’s office. ‘Did you ever,’ he asked Wallace plaintively, ‘try to corner an ornery old sow in a fence-corner? First you whack her on the left side of her head, and she turns; then you whack her on the right side, then zip! she’s gone, right between your legs!’ ”9 The nineteenth-century Jeffersonian agrarian ideal extolled self-sufficient property owners in order to meet the prerequisites of democracy: landholding farmers, not beholden to either landlords or employers, could vote and speak their conscience, which safeguarded the republic. In addition to being democrats, Jefferson and other American revolutionaries were civic republicans who wagered that common citizens could and indeed must direct society, including their government. They held that a virtuous citizenry would pursue the common good, whose last great political exemplar was Lincoln. The material base for this republican ideal had disappeared from most of America by the late nineteenth century, yielding ground to scientific expertise and the specialized professions. However, it lived on in regions like the Midwest, with its rural communities and property-owning farmers. As youngsters, the agrarian intellectuals imbibed fading, unfashionable values like participatory democracy and citizen engagement and carried them into the New Deal. In the thirties, Wallace insisted that in principle “every right, every privilege has its price, its corresponding duty without which it cannot be enjoyed.” Not for nothing was Wilson’s middle name Lincoln; he was a lifelong avid collector of Lincoln memorabilia.10 The last critical element in the farm boys’ cultural background was their Protestant upbringing. They all came from such stock—Scots-Irish Presbyterians, Methodists, and Disciples of Christ—and recollected their church-

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going and religious instruction. In addition to duty to God, they learned a certain duty to their fellow citizens and society at large. Wilson’s remarkable “spiritual autobiography” relates the development of his deepest beliefs in tolerance, world brotherhood, and “democratic public service.” To his father, a Presbyterian, and his mother, a Quaker, Wilson attributed the goodwill and tolerance he later exhibited, which were considerable. His mother taught Wilson kindness toward their Catholic neighbors, whom many of his young friends called evil. From the Quaker tradition, Wilson gleaned his long-lasting commitments to compromise, cooperation, and consensus building. His father had a special interest in the religion of Jewish peddlers who visited their farm. Dinner with these strangers reinforced Wilson’s faith in “a real brotherhood of man here on this earth.” He generally opposed conflict and sought to avoid it, always preferring to talk through disagreements. It is no surprise that in the 1930s he became a national advocate of the discussion method of education and decision making.11 Tolley’s family, particularly his mother and her father, who farmed nearby, was quite active in the local Methodist church, and his own Christian interest kindled during his teenage years. As a young adult, Tolley made a career choice largely because of his religious impulse to better serve humanity. Taylor’s father served as an officer in the local Disciples of Christ church, and Carl remembered the positive impression that Protestant ministers made on him. They were “the majority of the above normal intelligent persons who visited our home. In my experience they were the people who saw beyond and reached beyond the local horizons in their conversations with Dad.” However, in religious matters Taylor was most affected by his older brother, Alva Taylor, who became a Disciples minister and taught at Vanderbilt’s seminary in Nashville. Alva distinguished himself as a controversial leader of the southern Social Gospel movement, which preached that biblical precepts of justice should be applied toward the betterment of society. As the Lord’s Prayer instructed, “Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven.” In fact, all six of the future agrarian intellectuals followed the Social Gospel spirit in early twentieth-century America. Further, some of their professors were national leaders in this reformist Christian movement, where their crusading Protestantism melded with progressive social change.12 Wallace’s childhood was an exaggerated version of all these cultural influences in the rural Midwest— exaggerated, in large part, because of the unusually strong impact of his grandfather, “Uncle Henry,” as he signed his column for farm boys in Wallaces’ Farmer magazine. Uncle Henry was

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father to one secretary of agriculture, Henry C., and grandfather to another, Henry A. A farmer and Presbyterian minister turned agricultural journalist and editor, the “first Henry Wallace” (1836–1916) supported President Lincoln and the Radical Republicans, the Farmers’ Alliance and Progressive Republicans, scientific agriculture and Protestant faith, agrarianism and industrial modernization. He opposed railroads and other corporate monopolies that exploited farmers and deserved state regulation. In 1899 he wrote (and his grandson quoted him in 1961), “Never in the history of the world has there been so extensive, so far reaching a plot to rob the producers of the nation of the fruits of honest toil as that now being engineered by the various trusts.” The New Deal Wallace admitted that his grandfather had “more influence [on me] than anybody else” in matters ranging from agriculture to politics to religion. The elder Wallace spotted something special in Young Henry, and he consciously shaped the spirit of his grandson (fig. 1).13 Thus the secretary of agriculture in the thirties had three generations of midwestern agrarian experiences and resources—intellectual, cultural, spiritual—to draw on. Nor was he alone, for as Wilson asserted, “The Wallaces helped form my mind and character, just as they did for hundreds of thousands of other folks in Iowa.” Wilson recalled his mother reading Uncle Henry’s lessons on their buggy ride to church every Sunday. And Taylor remembered the exciting occasion of the elder Wallace’s visit to his childhood home. This profound influence and effect may be summed up by a couple of stories about Secretary Wallace during the New Deal. At one meeting, a tired Wallace began to nod off. An assistant recalled that someone mentioned “certain data concerning the southern states. [Milton] Eisenhower, attempting to attract his attention, said, ‘Mr. Secretary, did you know that?’ Wallace, without opening his eyes, said, ‘Yes, Milt, I have known it for 20 years.’ ” Second, after Wallace had dismissed a corporate lawyer’s unscrupulous arguments about farm policy, the young Paul Porter, one of USDA’s urban liberal attorneys, exclaimed, “I never saw anything like it. Don’t it beat hell? He’s a Christian!”14 All aspects of midwestern family farming—its unique class location, democratic-republican ideology, and Protestant reformism—may be seen as “cultural lags” in relation to the increasingly dominant urban-industrial society of late nineteenth-century America. Each element could be dismissed, even ridiculed, by cosmopolitan sophisticates as being backward. Yet they persisted in the rural Midwest to form the bedrock values of Wallace and the other farm boys who became leaders of the New Deal USDA. Rather than

1. Henry A. Wallace, left, and Rexford G. Tugwell. National Archives at College Park, Maryland, photo 16-G-43 45497-B.

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social roots and early fruits

see them as antiquated, we can understand that the budding intellectuals drew continual inspiration from the grand American agrarian tradition, going back to Jefferson and Lincoln, the Populists and the Progressives like Uncle Henry. These values explain much about New Deal agricultural policy. We shall encounter such so-called lags twice more in this chapter: as university students, these six future agrarian intellectuals took on an unfashionable type of radicalreformist economics; and as young professionals, they extended the purportedly moribund spirit of Progressivism into the 1920s and beyond. In both cases, they insisted, against the cultural current, that their social-science knowledge should be useful to farmers and other citizens. However, the impression should not be left that midwestern family farming was all good, or even that it uniformly benefited the agrarian intellectuals during the New Deal. Indeed, it contained fatal flaws. Gender inequality was built into the family farm. The fact that these farm boys grew up in patriarchal households doubtless contributed to their lack of sensitivity or even awareness of gender bias in their New Deal. Moreover, since the rural Midwest was so racially homogeneous, its denizens often had little exposure to or sympathy with nonwhites. Such unfamiliarity was compounded when, in other regions, minority groups like black tenants and Mexican laborers tended to be poor and landless. The midwestern farm boys were not attuned to these groups or to the inequities they suffered. Finally, the views of those raised on the family farm encouraged an overly homogenized vision of a diverse agricultural sector, as if most farmers were of the midwestern type. Even in the 1930s the agrarian intellectuals often failed to evince an adequate analysis of the class structure of agriculture, differentiated as it was sociologically as well as regionally. This fateful liability traced back to their youth, a lack of perception that would limit their reaction to class and racial conflicts in the New Deal. They were ideologically predisposed to see social harmony rather than structural differences and to pursue consensus building instead of conflictual politics, preferences that held them in poor stead in the realpolitik of the New Deal when they came under attack.15 They thus shared the liabilities as well as the benefits of a rural midwestern upbringing. After a half century of participating in rural reform at home and abroad, Wilson spoke of his social and regional background, of a certain “consciousness of kind,” or “guild-like social structure in American rural society,” between public workers like himself and midwestern family farmers. Land-grant professors, agricultural researchers, and Extension agents were usually from such families. He noted the “lack of any social or psychological gulf between

agrarian reformers in the midwest

35

the people in professional agriculture and working farmers.” Agricultural teachers and scientists, he added, “feel a sort of moral responsibility for keeping in close touch with the farmers of their state.” Allowing for some middleclass bias (the farmers he had in mind were always landowning, above average, and relatively successful), Wilson’s point still applies to the connection between the agrarian New Dealers and family farmers in the 1930s. They were cut from the same cloth. The six policy makers examined here continued by and large to represent the type of farm families from which they sprang. The concept of organic intellectual thereby captures much truth about these midwestern farm boys made good.16 On the other hand, they did leave the farm and become modernizing social scientists, again, of a particular type. Education: Agricultural Colleges and Institutional Economics All of these bright farm boys, except for Allin, who ventured up to the University of Wisconsin, attended college in their home states. Two of them graduated from Protestant schools while the others finished in technical subjects at state colleges. Four earned graduate degrees in the new rural social sciences at leading midwestern agricultural universities. Most significant, all six students learned the radical-reformism and public policy lessons of institutional economics from the two reigning masters of the field, Thorstein Veblen and John R. Commons, who taught their alternative kind of social science emphasizing a problem-solving orientation (fig. 2). Even during Wallace’s undergraduate days at Iowa State, Benjamin H. Hibbard, a historical economist from Wisconsin, introduced him to institutionalism, especially Veblen’s, and to Turner’s frontier thesis, ideas that stuck with him for the rest of his life. Young Henry also purchased some Brown Swiss milk cows from the agricultural professor.17 For fifty years—from the 1880s through the 1920s—activist social scientists confronted the massive problems arising from modern capitalist society. How were the conflicting industrial classes of owners and workers to coexist? What changes were needed to assist the laboring classes, especially wage workers and farmers? What was the proper role of the state? Many believed that large group conflicts, especially class warfare, might tear the emerging industrial order apart, and many social scientists advocated reforms to contain them. Their answers usually involved a middle way between laissezfaire capitalism and revolutionary socialism. Collective action and structural changes were necessary, and new institutions must be created to bring the

2. Intellectual and professional influences on USDA agrarian reformers. Reproduced by permission of the Agricultural History Society.

agrarian reformers in the midwest

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subordinate classes into responsible positions of political and economic power, thereby saving while transforming capitalism. Such reform via compromise and cooperation required expanding governmental capacities, particularly the use of social-scientific expertise. The intellectuals advocated both economic justice and their own professional standing in society, but they never fully resolved the tension between these dual interests. It appeared, for example, in differing commitments to technocracy and democracy.18 No American university did more to create these ideas and institutions than the University of Wisconsin in Madison. The university developed a distinctive school of economics called institutionalism, which provided a solid base for the state’s reforms in the early twentieth century. A theoretical “neo- classical revolution” swept through economics during these years, but Wisconsin rejected it in favor of an explicitly statist, ethical, empirical, and problem-solving stance toward political economy. In addition to the middleway approach, these precepts defined the Wisconsin Idea that made the state as well as its public university a Progressive breeding ground for social and economic policies. Three of the future New Deal agrarians soaked up this milieu while earning graduate degrees in Madison, another effectively did so, and the other two were also deeply influenced by Wisconsin institutionalism.19 The founding figure in activist social science at Wisconsin was Richard T. Ely (1854–1943), who came to the university in 1892 to establish a School of Economics, Political Science, and History. Already a controversial figure in national cultural life, Ely took his graduate training in German historical economics and combined it with the Protestant Social Gospel to make himself into a radical of sorts. He championed Populism, the rising labor movement, Christian Socialism, plus the public ownership of railroads and other natural monopolies. With other young reformers, he looked back to a producers’ democracy and forward to the cooperative commonwealth. Ely made many early intellectual contributions, writing books on the labor question and varieties of socialism. In 1885 he helped form the American Economic Association, which endorsed “the state as an agency whose positive assistance is one of the indispensable conditions of human progress.” His hugely successful textbook Introduction to Political Economy (1889) excoriated the dominant individualistic, ahistorical, laissez-faire approach of Anglo-American economic theory and offered instead a historical political economy of social institutions.20 Ely saw his interdisciplinary school at Wisconsin as a training ground for engaged intellectuals, a civilian analog to West Point, that would increase societal efficiency as well as class harmony. His English friends

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the Fabian-Socialists Sidney and Beatrice Webb established the London School of Economics and Political Science along similar lines. Ely’s considerable zeal soon turned from radical reform toward professionalism, especially after his university “trial” for teaching anarchism and socialism in 1894, yet he always endorsed a major role for the state as well as for trained experts, believing that the economist could mediate social conflicts. Ely and his students virtually invented the applied field of land economics. In Property and Contract in Their Relations to the Distribution of Wealth (1914), he expanded his widely adopted theory of private property as a social institution. In the twenties Ely founded the Institute for Research in Land Economics, established the Journal of Land and Public Utility Economics, and coauthored three books on land economics. Assuming a typical middle-way position, he called for national land-use planning to rationalize the economy while preserving private property.21 Espousing such ideas and plans, Ely presided over the rise of Wisconsin institutionalism. His interdisciplinary school gave way to the Department of Political Economy, for which Ely hired some of his former students. One, Turner, actually preceded Ely at the University of Wisconsin and became the leading American historian of his generation. By 1906 Ely had hired two of his more radical students, both of whom had political trouble keeping academic jobs: the sociologist Edward A. Ross and Commons, who offered a somewhat different model than Ely for the engaged intellectual. As a policy expert, labor historian, and maverick economist, Commons (1862–1945) was most important. If Ely stood as the academic empire builder, Commons shone as the intellectual powerhouse. An advocate of labor unions and collective bargaining, he saw class struggle more clearly than most academics, having worked as a typesetter. One historian noted that Commons synthesized “European corporatism, voluntarism, and a uniquely American democratic collectivism that derived from nineteenth-century republican political theory and tradition.”22 These features he passed on to the numerous students of his who entered the New Deal and formed its measures for social security, labor relations, and agriculture. In 1904 Ely hired Commons, who recalled, “I was born again when I entered Wisconsin. . . . The State University and the State Government, only a mile apart in a small city, have been a focus, unique among the states, for instruction, research, extension, economics, class conflict, and politics.” Robert M. La Follette was governor, and the Progressive conservationist Charles Van Hise, a friend of La Follette, had just become president of the

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university. Together they made Wisconsin into a Progressive showcase, particularly in the state’s use of university expertise. Commons played a major role, drafting the state’s civil service law, shaping its regulation of public utilities, and designing as well as serving on Wisconsin’s prolabor Industrial Commission. He also organized and directed the Bureau of Efficiency and Economy for the Socialist mayor of Milwaukee and accepted Woodrow Wilson’s appointment to the U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations. In 1917 Commons served as president of the American Economic Association.23 Commons promoted social science and the state as mediators of class antagonism. Economists could study the “working rules” of a “going concern” and discover the best institutional arrangements for capital and labor. Commons reached this conclusion while producing, with graduate students, the ten-volume Documentary History of American Industrial Society (1910) and the four-volume narrative History of Labor in the United States (1918). His labor studies fueled substantial Progressive reform in Wisconsin as well as his theory and practice of the administrative commission, to be staffed by experts along with representatives of the parties involved. After World War I, Commons continued his policy work, which would later be seen as action research. In 1920 he drafted a workers’ compensation bill for Wisconsin that suffered annual legislative defeat until 1932, when the state became the first to adopt unemployment insurance. During these years Commons published his major theoretical books: Legal Foundations of Capitalism (1924) and the massive Institutional Economics (1934). Both illustrated his inductive, historical, interdisciplinary approach, so contrary to neoclassical economic orthodoxy. Commons’s last middle-way formulation focused on democracy during the early New Deal. Between Adam Smith’s individualism and fascism or Marxism, he wrote, lay “the theory of collective democracy,” expounded “recently by Henry A. Wallace, Secretary of Agriculture, in his New Frontiers (1934), and by myself in my Institutional Economics.”24 By this time, Commons’s influence as well as Ely’s resonated mainly through their students. Not so for the third major professor at Wisconsin who influenced the future New Dealers, Henry C. Taylor (1873–1969). Taylor’s younger generation of Progressive social scientists was more attracted to professionalized public service than to radicalism. Back in the 1890s Ely was looking for a bright young person to apply economics to agriculture and greeted Taylor with “You are the answer to my prayers.” From Ely, Taylor learned to value original thinking over existing knowledge; to view wealth and private property as social institutions amenable to improvement; and to work for the public, not merely

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the individualistic, interest. At Ely’s suggestion, the young Taylor went abroad, where he took courses at the new London School of Economics and the next year studied agricultural economics in Germany. He returned to Madison with dissertation in hand: “The Decline of Landowning Farmers in England.”25 Taylor followed his mentor’s designs for academic empire building. In 1902, after receiving his Wisconsin doctorate, Ely hired him to teach farm economics, and Taylor soon published America’s first text in the field. In 1909 Taylor convinced university administrators, over Ely’s notable objection, to establish the nation’s first Department of Agricultural Economics. In response to pressure from Progressive reformers to address the farm problems of marketing and cooperatives, Taylor signaled political savvy as well as professional acumen: he expanded his new department by hiring two more professors to conduct the necessary research. One was Hibbard, another Iowa farm boy and Taylor’s friend from undergraduate days in Ames, who in 1902 had also earned an Ely–Turner doctorate in historical economics from Wisconsin. Taylor also recruited Charles J. Galpin, a former student of the Harvard pragmatist philosopher William James and the acknowledged founder of an emerging field called rural sociology. When Taylor left for the USDA in 1919 he took Galpin along. These agrarian social scientists, along with Ely, Commons, and Ross in the Department of Political Economy (it became Economics in 1918), composed the unique school of Wisconsin institutionalism that so influenced the New Deal. They were all aided and encouraged, Wilson remembered, by President Van Hise, who contributed the popular Conservation of the Natural Resources of the United States (1910).26 The future New Dealer Lewis C. Gray received his bachelor of arts and master of arts degrees from William Jewell College near his hometown, north of Kansas City (fig. 3). When he arrived in Madison in 1908 to begin graduate study, Gray had taught history and economics at Oklahoma A&M for three years. At Wisconsin, Gray took courses from Ely on the distribution of wealth and the history of economic thought, and five semesters of “seminary” on economic theory. He complemented work in land economics with courses in agricultural economics with Taylor, labor economics and history with Commons, social psychology with Ross, and western history with Turner. Gray also participated in Taylor’s informal seminar on the Progressive “country life problem.” His dissertation on the history of plantation agriculture in the colonial South reflected the influence of these teachers. Gray’s combination

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3. Lewis Cecil Gray. Reproduced by permission of the Wisconsin Historical Society, WHi(X3)51085.

of land economics and agricultural history exemplified the Wisconsin tradition of policy-oriented research grounded in empirical study.27 M. L. Wilson graduated in agriculture from Iowa State College in 1906, then, refusing a teaching position there, struck out west, first tenant farming in Nebraska, then homesteading in Montana (fig. 4). Soon he was working for Montana’s new Extension Service and became head of the agency in 1915. Twelve years on the Great Plains convinced Wilson that he needed a better understanding of farmers’ social and economic problems, a desire that led him to Madison in 1919. By Wilson’s own account, agricultural economics played a less important role than other fields, institutionalism above all. Commons taught that the economy was not governed by fixed laws but was always changing and that ethics guided the scientist in evaluating the economic transactions. Wilson recalled that the institutionalist’s class on “the -ism’s”—socialism, anarchism, syndicalism—was “one of the best and most original courses that I ever took. It was institutional and psychological and historical and behavioristic.” He summed up Commons’s views on democracy as follows: “If you carried the idea of the individual to an extreme, you had anarchy.

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4. Howard R. Tolley, left, and M. L. Wilson. Reproduced by permission of the University of Missouri Press.

If you carried the idea of the group or the labor union to an extreme, you had syndicalism. If you carried the idea of the state to an extreme, you had socialism. But democracy was something that had involved in it the individual and certain degrees of liberty, . . . and group action, and . . . the state. These three forces were pulling against each other, so to speak, in democracy.”28

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Wilson also took from his professor the idea that farmers, like labor unions, needed to organize in order to exert their “institutional class pull” on the national income. Although he was a labor economist, Commons “talked a good deal with [Wilson] about agricultural problems, and . . . he had a great deal [of ] interest in cooperatives and knew a great deal about [their] history.” From Commons and James H. Tufts, the pragmatist philosopher and Progressive reformer at the University of Chicago, Wilson saw the need for “proportional increase in political education, in understanding the processes of democracy” as the state grew in size and scope. One “didn’t need to be afraid of the ‘state,’ ” Wilson realized, “if it was a democratic state.”29 These ideas held sway in the New Deal. Bushrod Allin began his undergraduate studies in animal husbandry at the University of Wisconsin in 1917 (fig. 5). He later recalled the cultural tensions he experienced in Madison: “There I was, a grandson of a Confederate veteran who loved Jerseys [milk cows] and [Democrat] Woodrow Wilson, moving in among a bunch of Yankees who preferred Holsteins and La Follette. . . . Wisconsin people produced milk, drank beer, and opposed Prohibition.” After graduating and finding himself unable to start up his own purebred Jersey herd, Allin worked as a farm accountant (at “twice a herdsman’s pay”), a position suggested by Henry Taylor. He went out to meet farmers to discuss improved technology but found that they “wanted to talk more about low farm prices, high taxes, debt, and high interest rates. Farm economics here began for the first time to take on [for Allin] a meaning much broader than farm technology or efficiency. It took on a living quality it had never possessed in the classroom.” These encounters with Wisconsin farmers convinced Allin of Commons’s approach to social study: to listen to the people themselves rather than to apply theories to them. He also witnessed his Kentucky grandparents buying overpriced farmland and losing their life savings, so when Allin returned to graduate school in 1923 he wanted to study farm problems. His adviser, Hibbard, agreed, and he wrote a dissertation comparing farm and city tax burdens. Allin never studied formally with either Ely or Taylor but always considered himself a disciple of Commons. Upon Wallace’s selection as secretary of agriculture in 1933, Allin wrote to Wilson, “If Wallace will surround himself with men of your philosophy—the philosophy of John R.—he will teach some economics to a lot of economic illiterates in high places. He must do so.”30 Late in life, all three old New Dealers—Gray, Wilson, Allin—spoke of Madison’s influence. Gray recalled that when he had been in graduate school,

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5. Bushrod W. Allin. Reproduced by permission of the Wisconsin Historical Society, WHi(X3)51185.

laissez-faire ruled the minds of economists, and no public action countered the disastrous federal land policy of rapid privatization: “At the University of Wisconsin, however, under the inspiration of Richard T. Ely and H. C. Taylor, far more attention was then given to land and its problems than in any other American institution. This was largely due to the influence on Ely and John R. Commons of the German-Historical School, with its emphasis on social objectivity, relativity, and the profound importance of man-made institutions.” Wilson similarly remembered graduate school: “At that time, the University of Wisconsin was called a very liberal institution in its economics, sociology, and political science, and these were views that I got pretty much there. . . . The things that fundamentally affected my thinking were these institutional ideas from Professor Commons’s courses, social psychology and social behavior from Ross’s course, and Ely’s philosophy, which was to quite an extent this historical-institutional type.” And in the 1950s Allin averred to a former classmate that “I, too, studied under Commons and considered him to be the genius of our age.” In sending a reprint of one of his institutionalist articles to Edwin Witte, the Wisconsin economist who helped

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frame and implement Social Security, Allin noted that the piece “represents the reaction to current events of one who took his work at Wisconsin at a time when Common’s [sic] ideas were ‘seeping through’ the heavy filter of the curriculum to some of the students.” In his presidential address to the American Farm Economic Association, Allin urged agricultural economists to live up to their applied heritage, citing Taylor, Wilson, and especially Commons.31 Doubtless “John R.” was proud of his Wisconsin students. In fact, at the beginning of the New Deal, Commons bragged that at least thirty of his former students were working in Washington or, as he put it, in “the New Whirlwind.” The aging economist added, “In thirty years I have seen little acorns grow into mighty trees whirling in a stratosphere of high wind. Whew!” Not everyone approved of Madison’s reformist influence on the New Deal, as this story about Herbert Hoover attests: “Sometime in the thirties, ex-president Hoover was a guest at a luncheon at Harvard. A lady assigned to entertain him, desperately seeking a topic of conversation, mentioned that the dinner plates being used were ‘Harvard plates.’ ‘Wouldn’t it be fun,’ she asked brightly, ‘to use different college plates for different courses? Soup on the Smith plates; meat or fish on the Yale plates; salad on the Vassar plates; dessert on the Stanford plates!’ ‘And,’ said the hitherto silent Hoover, ‘nuts on the Wisconsin plates.’ ”32 Carl Taylor studied with Veblen, the other brilliant institutional economist, who was more radical but less policy-oriented than Commons (fig. 6). Taylor worked on the family farm until he was twenty. Suddenly one day, he recalled, “cultivating the corn, I said to myself, I can’t live with this ignorance,” and he decided to go to college. He attended two Disciples of Christ schools, earning twenty-five dollars every Sunday “preach[ing] my way through college.” Taylor received a master’s degree in psychology at the University of Texas, where he also coached track and preached part-time, talking, as he recalled, about “social and economic and political problems” more than the Bible. In 1914 he entered the doctoral program in sociology at the University of Missouri, mainly to study with Veblen. The two shared an office, which helped Taylor get beyond the economist’s notoriously gruff manner, as did their common background on midwestern family farms. They also shared a personal distaste of land speculation, which had hurt the families of both. Near the end of his life Taylor remarked, “I wouldn’t take anything for the hundreds of hours that I visited with [Veblen].” From the professor, he gained a radical critique of the modern “price and market economy,” including Veblen’s disequilibrium theory of social change (“cultural lag”) and a penchant

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6. Carl C. Taylor. Reproduced by permission of the Rural Sociological Society.

for historical class analysis. (Wallace drew similar lessons from the institutional economist although at secondhand, via Hibbard.) Reminiscent of Allin’s praise for Commons, Taylor called Veblen “one of the greatest intellectuals in the world.” And like the Wisconsin students, he had other outstanding professors, studying with the national rural leader Kenyon Butterfield at Massachusetts State College, the sociologist Franklin Giddings at Columbia University, and the urbanist-reformer Robert E. Park of the University of Chicago. Taylor finished his dissertation in 1918, from which an article on the latest research methodology appeared in the premier sociology journal.33 Another major intellectual trend took root in the future New Dealers: American pragmatism. Dewey’s ideas specifically fit well with those of Veblen and Commons. Taylor absorbed pragmatist philosophy as an undergraduate, and Park, his sociology professor at Chicago, had studied with Dewey. Pragmatist philosophy strongly affected Wallace and Wilson as well. James’s Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) profoundly stirred both young men, helping them maintain Christian faith in light of modern science. In college, Wilson recalled, he “could almost but not quite say that I was a convert to the religion of William James.” Dewey loomed even larger for Wilson, who

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claimed the pragmatist as his favorite philosopher. In 1920 Wilson took Commons’s advice and began doctoral work in religion and philosophy at the University of Chicago, where he studied with Dewey’s collaborator (Ethics, 1908), Tufts. Conversations with this urban reformer helped lead Wilson toward “the development and the administration of [public] programs dealing with what might be called social justice for farmers,” as he recalled. Wilson kept up with Dewey’s inspiring public-intellectual output throughout the twenties and thirties, when he identified himself as “a rip-snorting pragmatist.” What Wilson called “a practical and peculiarly American philosophy of social reform,” based on pragmatist philosophy, cultural anthropology, and institutional economics, underlay much of the New Deal in agriculture.34 In sum, the future New Dealers received excellent, promising graduate educations from some of America’s best and most radical social scientists who also doubled as public intellectuals. However, their professors displayed certain blind spots. The institutionalists exaggerated the ability of experts to mediate social conflict and tended to minimize the political-economic power of dominant classes. In fact, like their students, they usually downplayed the role of class conflict, seeing no irremediable division within capitalist society, although Veblen proved a partial exception. Two of the Wisconsin economists, Ely and Henry Taylor, were quite elitist, arguing that farmers should follow the superior knowledge of scientists, and their protégé Gray tended toward this stance. The democratic teachings of Commons and Dewey affected the other young intellectuals, especially Wilson, Allin, and Carl Taylor, more. They began to envision a new relationship between expert and citizen, based on dialogue, cooperation, and mutual education. Both of these ideological tendencies, technocratic and participatory, would be reinforced as the agrarians took jobs in the land-grant colleges and USDA. Of special importance was their in-service training in the department’s new BAE. Early Careers: Statist Economists and Activist Professors Before the New Deal Howard Tolley did not attend the University of Wisconsin but attained its distinctive institutionalist education by other means. Joining the USDA in 1915 as a gifted mathematician, he learned agricultural economics after Henry Taylor became his supervisor. Tolley initially applied his quantitative skills to the development of new techniques, multiple correlation analysis and input–output studies. He rose rapidly in the BAE, becoming head

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of the Farm Management Division and then assistant chief for research in 1928. He expressed some surprise that Taylor promoted him since he “wasn’t an economist from Wisconsin.” But Taylor knew better: Tolley was a Wisconsin institutionalist, had become one by dint of hard work and study with the plentitude of Madison economists who dominated the BAE, including Gray and Wilson. Because of his obvious talents, Tolley became director of the new Giannini Foundation of Agricultural Economics at the University of California–Berkeley in 1930 and, three years later, president of the American Farm Economic Association. Tolley represents only one case, however impressive, of the BAE’s nurturing of first-rate social scientists who assumed major university posts and top government jobs in the thirties and forties. This remarkable, “all-important” federal agency was the final training ground for the economists who would lead the agrarian New Deal.35 The story of the BAE goes back to Wisconsin. Like Ely and Commons, Henry C. Taylor sought to merge theory and practice. Taylor’s Department of Agricultural Economics moved in that applied direction, but greater opportunity arose in 1919, when he went to Washington to direct USDA’s economic work. Taylor immediately placed three of his former students in key positions in the federal department, including Gray as the founding head (and twenty-year leader) of the Division of Land Economics. He also brought in his Wisconsin colleague, the sociologist Galpin, to lead a new Division of Farm Population and Rural Life. In 1922, Taylor, with Secretary of Agriculture Henry C. Wallace, both redheaded Scots-Irish farm boys from southern Iowa, consolidated three USDA units to create the BAE, which incorporated the above divisions plus others. It soon became the largest social-science research agency in the federal government and perhaps the largest body of economic experts in the Western world.36 The BAE of the 1920s was a continuation of Progressive-era reform. Chief Taylor and Secretary Wallace believed that the new science of agricultural economics, representing a movement to steer the middle course between laissez-faire capitalism and state socialism, could offer positive government action. The BAE reflected Taylor’s educational philosophy of “group thinking, in which the laymen groups had their minds fertilized more or less by the aid of experts.” He thought that farmers, if given proper economic information, would rationalize output and marketing on their individual farms. “These experiences in gathering facts,” Taylor wrote at the time, “have confirmed the belief that turning the light into dark places is an effective method

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of bringing about reforms.” Such social-scientific enlightenment depended on an activist, yet voluntary, state.37 With Progressive faith well in hand, the BAE sought to “make facts useful to farmers.” It gathered and publicized crop and livestock statistics, set and enforced uniform commodity standards, conducted studies of farm management and rural life, centralized and disseminated information on cooperatives, investigated foreign markets, expanded use of the state Extension services, and improved domestic marketing, with inspections and a news service that exploited that latest technological medium, radio. The Outlook Reports, begun in 1923, marked a major step forward. To assist farmers in adjusting their production, Tolley, Wallace, the son of the secretary, and other statistical economists forecast the outlook for future supply, demand, and prices of agricultural commodities. About this innovative applied research effort, which continues today, Taylor said, “The farmers were not told what to do but given the facts they needed in order to act intelligently.” In all such endeavors, Taylor emphasized, the BAE did not pursue a “purely agrarian standpoint,” that is, of farmers’ interests alone, but took “the national point of view,” that of general “social welfare.” In its early days, nonetheless, the BAE was still somewhat paternalistic: farmers, it was thought, could improve their situation if they followed the advice of USDA experts. Although these BAE programs of the 1920s were not as effective as intended, they did lay the research and policy foundation for planning American agriculture during the next decade.38 This extremely large group of economists aimed to expand not only the welfare of farmers, especially those of moderate property, but also their own professional status. In addition to making the new discipline policy-relevant, Taylor and his BAE led the way in professionalization. As a matter of fact, it is fair to say that the BAE essentially developed four new academic fields in the United States: land economics, agricultural history, rural sociology, and agricultural economics. The connection between research and the state, which hinged on the allure of scientific standards, grew out of what social scientists could offer the public as well as what the public could provide them: research funds and professional legitimacy. In 1919 Taylor played a central role in organizing the Agricultural History Society as well as the American Farm Economic Association, which elected him president in 1920. BAE members tended to dominate the latter’s annual meetings and its Journal of Farm Economics. The federal agency, according to one historian, “became the center of professionalism in agricultural economics.” Further, Taylor organized the BAE

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along the lines of a research university, Wisconsin in particular. Existing personnel who were not professionally trained in economics (say, agronomists) had to pursue such training or face transfer out of the BAE. Taylor also began the USDA Graduate School for the continuing education of his BAE staff. “Guest professors” were mainly institutional economists in the Ely-Commons tradition, including the two aging Madison professors themselves. Taylor later confided to Allin that “the BAE was modeled somewhat after the Department of Agricultural Economics at Wisconsin.”39 An activist-scholar, Taylor’s student Gray personified the Wisconsin Idea of public policy based on rigorous research. Like many Progressive intellectuals, Gray moved easily between academia and government service. After completing his doctor of philosophy degree in 1911 he taught land economics in both Ely’s Political Economy and Taylor’s Agricultural Economics Departments. Thereafter he studied southern land tenure for the Census Bureau, then taught rural economics at the University of Saskatchewan (1913– 15) and at Peabody College in Nashville (1915–19). During these years Gray pioneered the economics of natural resources by extending Ely’s work on conservation. The first volume of Ely’s Journal of Land and Public Utility Economics (1925) featured an overview of “The Field of Land Utilization” by Gray, who won the presidency of the American Farm Economic Association in 1928. Gray had become arguably the nation’s premier land economist and certainly the top federal land-use planner.40 In the movement, as several historians call it, for a new national land policy in the 1920s, Gray played the central role, with able assists from his old teachers Ely and Taylor as well as his colleagues Wilson and Tolley. The opening bell sounded in 1922, when the two Henry C.’s—BAE chief Taylor and Secretary Wallace—organized a National Conference on Agriculture. At this 330-strong gathering, Ely, the unrivaled dean of land economics, defined land policy as “a conscious program of social control with respect to the acquisition, ownership, conservation, and uses of the land.” He specifically lamented the plowing up of the Great Plains grasslands (over a decade before the Dust Bowl) and called for scientific land classification. The following year the BAE’s Gray and his USDA coauthors published the most comprehensive national land utilization study to date. In foreshadowing most of the federal land policies of the next fifteen years, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that here, in the dry pages of the 1923 Yearbook of Agriculture, concrete plans for the agrarian New Deal first appeared.41

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In this ninety-page piece, Gray et al. announced the second phase of the Progressive conservation movement, which must now advance from public forest land to private farmland. The core agricultural problem lay in landuse maladjustments. Far too much pasture and woodland had been plowed up and planted in crops. As with forests earlier, the nation was squandering its soil and water resources, with enormous wastage and consequent threats of food shortage. Gray stressed the limited supply of good land after the closing of the frontier in 1890, the classic theme of Turner, his history professor. With practiced ease, Gray identified the exploiting culprits: the laissez-faire market economy and misguided federal policies that rushed to privatize land. Conservation did permit some valid economic uses, but only if they involved efficient production over the long term. The main solution: a new national land policy, including scientific land classification in both economic and ecological terms, regional land-use planning, including submarginal land purchase, public grazing permits, directed settlement, and conservation measures for wildlife and recreation, all to be unified by “federal administration.” Gray expounded these “trend-bending” programmatic reforms continually over the next ten years—until the New Deal—when he and like-minded land planners began implementing them.42 One key step along the way was the National Conference on Land Utilization, held at the University of Chicago in 1931. With the deepening economic depression, Gray convinced the BAE chief, another of Taylor’s Wisconsin economists, and the secretary of agriculture to host a meeting of agency representatives, farm organizations, land-grant colleges, and business and conservation groups, over 350 people in all. Besides Gray himself, Wilson, Tolley, and Ely all presented formal papers. The conference as a whole effectively endorsed what Gray and the BAE had been preaching for a decade: national policies for land classification, natural-resource conservation, watershed protection, wildlife refuges, regulation of public grazing, reforestation, and government purchase of abandoned farms. Two public policy bodies grew out of the Chicago conference, a National Advisory and Legislative Committee on Land Use and a National Land Use Planning Committee, led by Gray. In the sentimental highlight of the meeting, an elderly Ely gloried in seeing so many of his former students: “Many years ago, back in the nineties,” he recalled, there had been no agricultural economics in America. “I was a voice crying in the wilderness. . . . Now as I look at this program of this 3-day conference, I feel that I am in sight of the promised land. . . . The

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inspiring idea is that it is called by the United States Department of Agriculture under the leadership of the splendid Bureau of Agricultural Economics.”43 As the font of institutional and land economics, Ely was justifiably proud of what he had wrought. And this conference in 1931 was just the beginning: Gray’s national land-use committee soon enough gave way to the New Deal’s National Planning Board and more. For his part, Wilson, after directing Montana’s Extension Service and earning his master’s degree at Wisconsin, jumped full force into agrarian policy experimentation. He chaired agricultural economics at Montana State College until Taylor brought him in to lead the BAE Division of Farm Management and Costs in the midtwenties, when Wilson also served as president of the American Farm Economic Association. His presidential address concluded that academic research was not enough; economists had to arrive “at a basis for action in the dynamic realm of economic life.” Returning to Montana, Wilson organized and managed a remarkable venture in industrial wheat farming. With a start-up loan of one hundred thousand dollars from John D. Rockefeller Jr., the Fairway Farms Corporation, which one historian aptly called a “cultural exploit in the form of a scientific experiment,” included Ely and Taylor on its board. Using economic rationality and the latest scientific research, the land-reform initiative assisted eight tenant farmers in becoming owners. It tested the notion that midwestern family farming could adapt to the semiarid plains as well as to the use of large-scale mechanization. Wilson and his coconspirators saw no contradiction in the term scientific family farm, believing that efficient farm management in addition to land-tenure reform could preserve the valued institution. The venture proved unsuccessful, a failure its advocates chalked up to drought and low wheat prices. The stress of managing the project gave Wilson stomach ulcers, but he lived on to envision another day, as “Fair-way” Farms became a model for some New Deal agrarian reforms. Wilson undertook an even more dramatic experiment in 1929, when he spent five months in the Soviet Union helping set up a gigantic collective, state-owned wheat farm of over four hundred thousand acres, an enterprise Wilson found both exhilarating and disappointing (more ulcers). In 1930 he remarked about Russian “overhead planning” as follows: “Those little Communists strutting! It has to be planned from the ground up.” From that experience he concluded that Americans must develop “some system midway between excessive communism and excessive capitalism.” 44 Henry A. Wallace, the only nonacademic among the agrarian intellectuals, continued his formal education with a master’s in animal science at

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Iowa State College, but more original work in genetics, statistics, economics, and journalism marked him as an unusually adept and wide-ranging intellect. His plant-breeding experiments with corn, which he began at the age of sixteen, yielded the first commercialization of hybrid seed and led to his subsequent founding of the Hi-Bred Corn Company. He taught himself statistics, then popularized the subject among the Iowa State faculty. An early farm economist, Wallance used correlation and regression analyses in his Agricultural Prices (1920), one of the first econometric studies. He spent time in the BAE in the twenties, which his father had founded with Taylor. From 1910 to 1933, furthermore, “Young Henry” worked on Wallaces’ Farmer. When Henry C. died in office in 1924, Henry A. became editor of the familyfarm magazine. He crusaded tirelessly for collective action to counter the farm crisis of the 1920s and emerged as a national leader of the agrarian cause. During these years he evolved (as he said) the slogan, “The farmers are entitled to the moral, legal and economic equivalent of what the tariff and the corporate form of organization give to industry and labor unions give to labor.” And he added: “This meant government action.” Wallace helped convince midwestern farmers to break with their traditional party and vote for Roosevelt, the Democratic presidential candidate, in 1932, even though he remained officially Republican until late 1936, just before FDR’s first reelection.45 Carl Taylor did not join the BAE until the New Deal. After earning his doctorate from Missouri, he taught economics and sociology there until 1920. He was considered to be radical by the administration, which did not object to his moving to North Carolina State College. In 1922, as a counteroffer from Cornell University, Taylor was promoted to dean of the new graduate school at N.C. State, which doubled his salary. He continued his research on farm tenancy, conferring with USDA’s land economist Gray. At first he seemed shocked at the desperately poor living conditions among southern sharecroppers: “I have seen families by the thousands living in houses in which an Iowa farmer wouldn’t house his hogs.” Taylor went on in this “campaign speech” for cooperatives and elsewhere to blame unfair marketing, ignorance, and “economic dependence” fostered by the crop-lien system. In 1926 he wrote an early textbook in the emerging field of rural sociology in which he proposed a progressive land tax to reduce tenancy. Taylor stated explicitly his family-farm ideal: “Any system of farming that depends on tramp labor is poor business, for farming, above everything else, ought to be an enterprise run by the family who lives on the farm.” 46

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Taylor joined as well as studied rural reform movements in North Carolina, delivering over two hundred speeches to farmers, for instance, advocating a tobacco marketing cooperative. In 1922 he published a sociological article, “Organizing Farmers for Economic and Political Action,” which argued for a distinct “farmer class consciousness.” Taylor developed the novel thesis that all the individual, episodic farm movements in American history constituted “one farmer movement” or “the Agrarian Movement,” analogous to “the labour movement” as analyzed by Commons. He also cited abolition, temperance, and woman’s rights as successful movements in American history. This social movement culminated in the present rush of farmers to organize— witness the Farm Bureau, the Non-Partisan League, cooperative community marketing associations, and the Agricultural Bloc in Congress. The impetus was easy to identify, namely, “that farmers are not participating equally with other classes in the economic and social dividends.” Once farmers entered “the price and market regime” (Veblen’s phrase, used by Taylor) of commercial agriculture, they found that they lacked both political power and economic control. One immediate demand was to put a “dirt farmer” on the Federal Reserve Board! Despite the varied types of American farmers, their shared core problems of “prices, markets, and credits,” or debt, created a relatively homogeneous “farmer class” with a “rising class consciousness,” in conflict with other classes. After Dewey’s The Public and Its Problems appeared in 1927, Taylor added a parallel analysis of “farmer publics” to his historicalsociological work.47 Taylor’s outspoken, radical views did not sit well with North Carolina’s agricultural elites. According to the American Association of University Professors, Taylor was N.C. State’s most distinguished faculty member when, in 1931, he was dismissed. One supporter wrote that he was “not a communist, anarchist, or socialist as some are charging.” For more than two years, until the New Deal, Taylor was without steady employment. He began writing a book elaborating his idea of a single, continuous agrarian movement throughout American history. Drawing explicitly on Veblen, Commons, and the historian Charles Beard, he specified the “revolutionary results of the evolution of ‘the price and market regime’ ” or “commercial capitalism.” Taylor urged a progressive interpretation of that history: “The Populist movement . . . was a people’s movement against concentration of power, whether in industry or politics.” 48 In a delay that some writers will appreciate, the large and still-impressive historical-sociological study The Farmers’ Movement, 1620– 1920 appeared just as he retired from the USDA, twenty-plus years later.

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The youngest of the agrarian intellectuals, Allin, received his doctorate in 1926 and remained at Wisconsin two more years teaching land economics, cooperative marketing, and the history of farmer movements. After winning his dean’s disapproval for criticizing land speculation in northern Wisconsin, he investigated taxation for the U.S. Forest Service, then joined the BAE in 1930. In a letter of self-introduction to Allin written in 1931, Wilson mentioned that friends had told him that no one “has a better slant on John R. Common’s [sic] ideas than you have.” Wilson invited Allin to an upcoming conference “to inject the John R. Common’s [sic] point of view.” Wilson went on to proclaim Commons “one of the great original and inventive minds of his period. I, therefore, feel that any discussion of national agricultural policy without bringing in the ideas of John R. Commons with reference to economic organization up to date is more or less incomplete.” After another exchange, Allin replied, “I am glad to see that you are planning to keep lined up with the farmers themselves. The most effective work in agricultural economics lies in the direction of guiding the farmers in their own actions, not in scientific aloofness. Yours for a more effective collective control of the individual.” Allin and Wilson obviously shared the “Commons point of view,” a penchant for working with social groups to form public programs. At the policy conference in 1931, held at the University of Chicago and chaired by Henry Wallace, Allin was surprised to hear serious talk about acreage allotments and production control, notions that, in his experience, agricultural economists had heretofore considered “either heretical or Utopian.” 49 He sensed that the times were transforming economic theory and policy. Although Henry Taylor had left the USDA five years before Allin arrived, the younger Wisconsin economist still felt his presence. In response to a review by John Kenneth Galbraith in the Journal of Farm Economics, Allin recalled the BAE’s early days: “Because [Taylor’s] Bureau was intermittently called upon to make analyses to provide a basis for action, its lasting and continuing service was its influence in giving research men the will to action by modifying their college-bred laissez-faire assumptions. These men can be found in influential and strategic positions throughout the government, in farm organizations, and in private business. Some of them have even gone back to the universities where they are teaching men to think about action as well as justifications for inaction.” Allin extended his praise of Taylor to the university in Madison for making the Wisconsin Idea a real force in American society. Like Ely, Commons, and Taylor, Allin believed that “science (both social and natural) is more than a body of knowledge; it is primarily a method of

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investigation by experiment.” The “look and see” method of Wisconsin social scientists provided the “final test of scientific standing” as well as the pragmatic basis for an integration of policy and research, best represented by Governor La Follette’s use of Commons “as America’s first ‘braintruster.’ ”50 This passage from Allin sums up what the young economists gained by their employment in the BAE before 1933: not only detailed information on the entire agricultural sector but also a dedication, with exemplary personal models, to activist research and public service. This knowledge and commitment proved to be excellent preparation for the New Deal soon to come. Nothing illustrates this better than Wilson’s nationwide radio address of 1932 entitled “Land Utilization.” Here, nearly a year before the New Deal began, Wilson proposed a drastic transformation of agricultural policy. He called for “a reversal of the basic land policy of this nation,” a reversal that struck at the root of a hundred years of public policy supporting private property and “frontier farm individualism.” Wilson had a disarming genius for clothing radical ideas in homespun fashion. Here he argued vigorously for a “new economic philosophy . . . a national system of land-use planning,” which “must be the foundation for any farm-relief program.” He outlined six steps in the plan: (1) repeal the Homestead Act and enact “a new land-policy bill embodying national land-use planning, federal–state relationships, conservation of land resources, and adjustment of the agricultural plant to national needs”; (2) classify lands in each state and develop a land-use action plan (Wilson held up New York under Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt as a model); (3) remove poor land from crop production, perhaps returning it to public ownership; (4) reform property taxes and consolidate local rural government; (5) encourage part-time farming and decentralization of industry, particularly for those families “released” from poor lands (#3 above): “In an industrial world part-time farming will mean greater security for the workers and constructive employment for leisure time”; (6) enact the “domestic allotment plan.” Wilson and others had been pushing this production-control measure for a few years; farmers would voluntarily decrease acres in particular crops in exchange for government payments.51 In his fifth recommendation Wilson displayed his broad agrarian streak, romantic as well as practical. The sixth proposal revealed predilections for both democracy and rationalized planning. The fertile American land yielded a large market surplus that drove prices down to record lows. The nation must decide, Wilson posited, whether it wanted to produce for “the world-economy” or only for the national economy. He himself believed that American

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farmers could compete well in the world market. “But many farmers . . . say ‘No.’ ” They were seeking federal assistance to raise domestic farm prices. Here, rather than insist on his own superior knowledge and position, Wilson abandoned his preferred solution, namely, restored world trade, and instead followed dominant farmer opinion. This stance signaled his profound democratic sentiments, assisting the majority even though he believed it to be misguided. The only course left open, Wilson continued, was national land-use planning in order to balance market demand with production: “The allotment system calls for careful planning of agricultural production of the nation with state and regional programs fitting into the general national plan.” At the end of 1932, after Roosevelt had been elected president but before he took office, Wilson repeated these proposals, hailing a “new frontier of national land planning.”52 Thus, over a year before passage of the New Deal’s Agricultural Adjustment Act, which implemented only the sixth plank of his plan, Wilson proposed a comprehensive new national land policy as the best attack on “the farm problem.” He and the other agrarian intellectuals evidently envisioned grander policy designs than simply a farm-relief program, ones that they would soon undertake in the New Deal. As in the case of their family-farm origins and higher education, the agrarian intellectuals’ early occupations in the BAE and land-grant colleges exhibited certain cultural and ideological blinders. These institutions often reinforced elitism, scientism, and economic rationalization, and they provided no serious analysis of the class structure of agriculture— other than the very definite sense that landowning farmers were the ones that mattered. At this time, the agrarian intellectuals, like the land-grant/USDA complex generally, gave little attention to tenant farmers or farmworkers. These familiar criticisms of Progressive and New Deal policy intellectuals hold some truth. However, it is also true that the BAE enabled a much more critical brand of policy thinking. Is there more to say about the agrarian policy makers? Can we add anything significant to their story? As the remainder of this book attests, I answer in the affirmative. Family Farmers and Organic Intellectuals I have specified the rise of a progressive midwestern tradition of agrarian social science and public policy. Reared on family farms, so to speak, it drew from the ideologies of Jefferson and Lincoln that insisted on equality, citizenship, and civic service. The rural Midwest in the late nineteenth

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century and early twentieth was a relatively egalitarian and very Protestant place; such class and religious origins stayed with the farm boys as they left home to seek higher education. At the land-grant universities in Missouri and Wisconsin, they learned from the brilliant progenitors of a peculiarly American brand of reformist economics called institutionalism. Some also picked up lifelong commitments to pragmatist philosophy. Owing to the state building of their immediate predecessors, the Iowans Henry C. Wallace and Henry C. Taylor, they inherited organizational encouragement for rigorous but applied research on public issues in the USDA’s new BAE. After prolonged apprenticeships sharpening their professional and policy skills in the BAE and land-grant colleges, they emerged ready to reform farm and society in the New Deal. Thus the agrarian intellectuals, along with others, to be sure, invented an alternative tradition of rural social science in an activist state. Their tradition was not one of “autonomous intellectuals” or “urban outsiders,” as some scholars have claimed. On the contrary, I suggest another interpretation of the background, schooling, and early careers of the six social scientists: They were organic intellectuals of the midwestern family-farming class.53 In this view, intellectuals denote those who lead, educate, and organize various social classes, and organic intellectuals identify with the class from which they emerge and which they serve. They create and promote an alternative understanding of reality, or counter-hegemony, that challenges the dominant society. The New Deal agrarians arose from and always remembered—indeed, they worked primarily for—the interests of family farmers. Growing up in the rural Midwest fueled their transformation of the nation’s political economy for the benefit of such farmers. Unlike most intellectuals, the agrarians maintained close ties to their social roots. Their connections with farmers were institutionally enabled, even required, by the whole land-grant/USDA system of applied research, teaching, and Extension. Comparable to Marxist intellectuals, they tried to integrate theory and practice but aimed for reform, not revolution. They argued that the modern industrial economy exploited a unitary farming class that therefore should receive special consideration from the federal government. With this understanding we can better grasp the intentions behind the New Deal’s effort to raise farm prices as well as the emphasis on citizens’ localization of national programs. The agrarian New Dealers were not tied to all farmers, though, only to the peculiar class of modern, successful, landowning family farmers from

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which they sprang. What most of them lacked, especially before the late 1930s, was a class analysis of the whole of agriculture in the United States, an appreciation of other, quite different classes, such as planters and sharecroppers in the South and capitalist farmers and wage workers in California. In particular they had no structural view of class and racial inequality. The South and the West were not their regions of origin and hence were too often outside their vision. As Wilson admitted late in life, to him farmer always meant the middle-class, property-owning kind he grew up with in Iowa. This inbred family-farm image could be a serious liability, politically as well as ideologically. It helps explain, for example, their policy rout during World War II by southern planters and capitalist farmers. Wilson and the others thought mainly of midwestern family farmers when in fact American agriculture was much more varied, conflictual, and divided by class. They knew this in their heads, but it was not part of their deeper, instinctive knowledge of rural life, which otherwise proved so beneficial. And when they did seek to turn tenants into landowners or give small farmers more say in policy planning, the political and economic elites of rural America attacked and defeated them. Admittedly, the agrarians count only partially as organic intellectuals, for they also became modernizing social scientists. As this chapter illustrates, they drank deeply from the well of scientific Progressivism. Early in their careers, for example, some of the future New Dealers advocated industrial farming and technocratic solutions to agricultural problems. They were young, aspiring economists, after all. But exactly what kind of modernists were they? The answer to this question is best revealed by way of comparison with the other progressive group of reformers in the New Deal USDA, the eastern urban liberals.

chapter 4

Modernizing Eastern Urban Liberals A Comparison with the Other Progressive Group in Agriculture In no part of our social life is planning so carefully and so democratically done as in agriculture; in no part does it so nearly approach the necessary completeness for inclusion in a national plan. —rexford g. tugwell, “a planner’s view of agriculture’s future,” 1949

I

n addition to being organic intellectuals of the midwestern familyfarming class, the six agrarian New Dealers were low modernists, an argument evidenced in part 2 of this book. Here, I make the point by way of contrast with the other tight-knit coterie of progressive reformers to occupy the USDA during the early New Deal. The so-called eastern urban liberals inhabited the Legal and the Consumer Divisions of the new AAA and included the attorneys Jerome Frank, Alger Hiss, Lee Pressman, Frederic C. Howe, the journalist Gardner Jackson, and their acknowledged leader, USDA’s second-ranking official, Rexford Guy Tugwell. They all worked with the midwesterners to launch the AAA in 1933, yet the groups retained distinct collective identities. In order to specify further what the agrarians brought to the New Deal, I compare them with this other set of more typical progressives. As in the previous chapter, I paint a broad-brush group portrait leading up to the New Deal, then contrast it with the agrarians, allowing further delineation of the latter’s core ideologies. I conclude that high modernists is a label much more applicable to the urban liberals than to the midwesterners, who are better seen as low modernists.

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Modernists High and Low The agrarian scholar James C. Scott popularized the term high modernism in Seeing Like a State. In that influential book Scott identifies Henry A. Wallace and M. L. Wilson as high modernists, and, in a later piece, adds Howard Tolley and Tugwell to the list. I disagree with the characterization of the agrarian New Dealers as high modernists and propose the counterconcept of low modernism to better grasp their stance. The concept of high modernism, however, does help us apprehend the USDA’s urban liberals, particularly their leader, Tugwell. The two groups’ ideologies diverged systematically, and their respective social and intellectual roots—their pre–New Deal backgrounds—largely explain these differences, summarized as high versus low modernism. But what is Scott’s notion of high modernism? In Seeing Like a State he explains “how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed.” High modernism is the ideology behind such catastrophes as Soviet collectivization and African villagization as well as lesser disasters like the planned city of Brasilia, rural resettlements, and agricultural modernization. He defines high modernism as “a supreme self-confidence about continued linear progress, the development of scientific and technical knowledge, the expansion of production, the rational design of social order, the growing satisfaction of human needs, and, not least, an increasing control over nature (including human nature) commensurate with the scientific understanding of natural laws. High modernism is thus a particularly sweeping vision of how the benefits of technical and scientific progress might be applied—usually through the state—in every field of human activity.” High modernists are fervently “optimistic about the possibilities for the comprehensive planning of human settlement and production.” Scott argues that this ideology, when joined with an administrative, authoritarian state and a weak civil society, led to largescale human tragedies and national development failures in the twentieth century.1 High modernism arose during the nineteenth-century period of European and American industrialization and culminated in the early twentieth century. Wars, revolutions, and economic depressions proved fertile for its development within strong administrative states. Productivism, for instance, grew out of the decade around World War I, most notably in military mobilization. In addition, the scientific management movement, led by Frederick W. Taylor, promised to enhance productivity and overcome crises as well as

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class struggle since both workers and owners would benefit from increased industrial output. Veblen, for one, preferred such productivism to its likely antisocial alternative, private profit maximization, and, according to Scott, put forth a version of “slide-rule authoritarianism.” Scott notes that high modernism per se is not authoritarian and can even lead to positive social reforms. Liberal democracies tend to resist authoritarianism, largely because of their representative institutions, which can be used to oppose it. Yet he names the New Dealer David Lilienthal and the American planners Robert Moses and Robert McNamara (along with Henri Comte de Saint-Simon, Vladimir I. Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and the Shah of Iran) to high modernism’s Hall of Fame—a dubious honor, to be sure.2 Scott argues that “state social engineering was inherently authoritarian.” He criticizes high modernism for its “radical authority” based on scientific rationality and its disallowance of other, competing sources for judgment. For instance, high modernism denigrates folk knowledge and local cultures and similarly breaks with history and tradition; the “past is an impediment” to be overcome. Myth, religion, other “irrational” superstitions, and “customary practice” are likewise to be transcended. Authoritarianism follows from this stance, Scott asserts: only the knowledgeable elite, that is, scientific experts separated from the people, ought to rule society, and the ignorant or recalcitrant need to be educated or rehabilitated, à la Lenin’s dictate. Thus, high modernists usually devalue or banish politics, with its give-and-take. High modernists assume that expert prescriptions for society “would necessarily be superior to . . . ordinary practice.” They also discount the skills, knowledge, and insights of ordinary people, whom they view as “the pupils, the trainees.” High modernists like to create new public authorities, or “super-agencies,” for giant development projects like the TVA, led by Lilienthal. It is not surprising that the ideology appeals especially to bureaucratic intelligentsia, technicians, and planners.3 Doubtless both sets of progressive reformers in the New Deal USDA, the midwestern agrarian intellectuals and the eastern urban liberals, should be classified as modernists. They all favored science and technology, rationalization and modernization, expertise and efficiency, organization and coordination, national planning and a strong central state, with massive public programs reaching down to the grass roots. But were the two groups the same kind of modernists? Scott categorizes the agrarians Wallace and Wilson as high modernists, spotlighting Wallace’s development of hybrid corn and Wilson’s planning of industrial farms. In 1929, as noted earlier, the

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Soviet Union invited Wilson to help design and build a gigantic collective wheat farm of some four hundred thousand acres. Scott focuses on the “tentative plan” Wilson concocted with others before ever arriving in Russia, without the benefit of knowing much about the local or contextual factors. He relies here on the work of the historian Deborah Fitzgerald, whose detailed research traces Wilson’s contributions to industrial farming in Montana as well as in the Soviet Union. While the late 1920s may be considered Wilson’s high-modernist phase (see chapter 3), the label captures little of his New Deal career. Yet in analyzing the New Deal’s “high modernist social engineering,” Scott identifies the USDA in the 1930s as a prime site of high modernism, specifying Wallace, Wilson, and Tolley as its practitioners.4 As mentioned above, I do not believe that the agrarian New Dealers were high modernists and propose a counter-concept, low modernism, to better characterize them. The notion of high modernism, however, may be quite applicable to the USDA’s urban liberals. A Collective Biography of the Urban Liberals: Business Families, Elite Schools, Radical Professionals The urban liberals were not as homogeneous a group as the agrarians, whether in terms of age, background, career, or ideology. Born in the East in towns and cities, they had relatively prosperous upbringings. Their fathers were successful businessmen, and they attended top private colleges in the Northeast and the University of Chicago. In the pre–New Deal years they worked in Boston and New York City as elite corporate lawyers and unorthodox Ivy League professors (table 2). The exception to this broad portrait was the Coloradan Gardner Jackson, whose family was extremely wealthy and who early on became a radical activist-journalist. As a group, they became more homogeneous by the early thirties. What they shared as well was a deep belief in rapid social transformation. Compared to that of the Midwest agrarians, the urban liberals’ vision of political-economic change was more collectivist and technocratic, more focused on subordinate classes, and less local, regional, and participatory. Hiss, Howe, and Tugwell had middle-class, Protestant, businessdominated upbringings. Howe, by far the oldest, grew up in a small city in Pennsylvania, “a comfortable little world, Republican in politics, careful in conduct, and Methodist in religion.” Evangelistic psychology and conformist morality ruled his youth. His family owned a furniture store and small

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table 2

profile of the urban liberals in the new deal usda

Rexford G. Tugwell1 Jerome Frank2

Birth Year/Place

Education

Early Career

1891 NY (Upstate)

Penn ’15 Penn PhD ’22 Chicago ’09

Columbia economics prof. Chicago and Wall St. lawyer, Yale Law prof. Boston and Wall St. lawyer Wall St. lawyer

1889 NY City

Chicago Law ’12 Alger Hiss 3

1904 Baltimore

Lee Pressman4

1906 NY City

Frederic C. Howe 5

1867 Penn. (small city)

Gardner “Pat” Jackson6

1896 Col. (small city)

Hopkins ’26 Harvard Law ’29 Cornell ’26 Harvard Law ’29 Allegheny* ’89 Hopkins PhD ’92 Amherst* Columbia Harvard

Cleveland lawyer and politician, NY City activist Boston and Washington journalist and activist

*Northeastern college. Their positions in the New Deal: AAA = Agricultural Adjustment Administration, USDA RA = Resettlement Administration (not in USDA) Notes 1. Assistant Secretary of Agriculture, 1933–34; Undersecretary of Agriculture 1934–36; RA Administrator, 1935–36. 2. AAA General Counsel (Head of Legal Division), 1933–35. 3. AAA Assistant General Counsel, 1933–35. 4. AAA Assistant General Counsel, 1933–35; RA General Counsel, 1935–36. 5. AAA Consumers’ Counsel (Head of Consumer Division), 1933–35; RA special assignment, 1935. 6. AAA Assistant Consumers’ Counsel, 1933–35.

factory, but they often fretted over money. Howe’s father loved horses and had a small farm, so young Frederic came to know “many of the joys of country life.” Mostly, though, he sought escape from the confines of his origin’s “respectabilities and illusions.” Hiss, too, hailed from a middle-class, Protestant (Episcopalian) household in the East. Religion played some role in the family, but, like Howe, Hiss soon gave it up. His father, a dry goods salesman and business owner, committed suicide when Hiss was two. Their oldtime Baltimore family was not wealthy but prominent enough, his mother being quite active in the best city clubs, and all her children took music and

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German lessons. Young Alger’s fondest summers were spent on an aunt’s farm, where he first noticed class and racial prejudices directed against the black farmworkers. As a teenager he attended summer camp in Maine, became an Eagle Scout, and spent a year in a prep school in Massachusetts.5 In contrast to Howe and Hiss, raised in urban settings, Tugwell experienced a small-town childhood in western New York. His mother, a former schoolteacher, enjoyed “the tempered pleasures allowed by Protestant rules” and oriented her only son toward cultural and literary pursuits. His father, an ambitious entrepreneur, excelled in cattle buying, banking, and fruit processing. Tugwell recalled, “I had no doubt that we were altogether superior people,” but he questioned the low wages his father paid his workers. He witnessed the consequences of deforestation, soil erosion, and competition from newer agricultural areas of the West: “The prosperous farms I had known as a boy and the great families of my neighborhood were by the time of my adolescence falling into neglect and poverty.” Young Rex took part in typical outdoor pursuits, spending summer days on a nearby lake. Once he raised a prize Holstein calf, an experience he later used, during hostile Senate confirmation hearings, to tout his true agrarian roots. (A friend called her “the most overworked heifer in the history of the United States.”) After attending a military academy for two weeks, Tugwell went to high school in Buffalo, where he wrote for the local newspaper.6 Like the others, Jerome Frank and Lee Pressman were very bright boys who had similar parental encouragement to shine, but their early lives differed substantially. Born to second-generation German-Jewish parents in New York City, Frank had an advantageous childhood. When he was seven, the family moved to Chicago, where he grew up near the exclusive University of Chicago. His mother, a highly cultured person with musical training, took the family to weekly concerts, and his father was a successful corporate lawyer. By contrast, Pressman’s parents were Russian-Jewish immigrants, his father a millinery manufacturer in Brooklyn. Their life was, in Pressman’s words, “lower middle class,” although a close friend in the AAA later described his background as meager and underprivileged. Pressman occasionally attended religious services but never took them very seriously, he recalled. As a youth he often played ball games in the streets until dinnertime, after which he read and studied. Both Frank and Pressman entered college at the age of sixteen.7 Although similar to the other urban liberals in business background, Gardner “Pat” Jackson experienced a unique childhood. His father, a wealthy entrepreneur in Colorado who owned interest in land, mines, banks, and railroads,

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had grown up on a Quaker farm in Pennsylvania and kept to the old religious ways, especially in terms of repressive moral codes and modesty in material display. His wife, the mother of his six children, killed herself when Gardner was three. Gardner enjoyed the annual four-month stay with his relatives on the farm back East and liked the nightly “family reading circle” with “Papa,” although the “forced Bible study” repelled him. His father’s constant talk of moneymaking disgusted the young boy. The Jacksons led an upper-class life in Colorado Springs, complete with maids, cooks, and private academies. From such upbringing, Jackson recalled, “I got a terrific resistance to the social privilege concept into which the accident of birth brought me.”8 All the urban liberals attended private colleges and universities (fig. 7). Howe later claimed that he got little from his Protestant schooling in Meadville, Pennsylvania, except for an antipathy to revival meetings. But in his graduate education at Johns Hopkins University, Howe said, he “came alive.” Tutored by Ely and the political scientist and future president Woodrow Wilson, two of the nation’s leading public intellectuals, Howe earned his doctorate in 1892, writing a dissertation on the political economy of cities. He attended law school in New York City and then moved to Cleveland, where he practiced law and entered Progressive politics. In 1910 Howe returned to New York, where he wrote The City: The Hope of Democracy and, after teaching briefly in Madison, Wisconsin: An Experiment in Democracy plus several other books on urban and state reforms in America and Europe, including a call for land reform for World War I veterans. Active in many reformist causes, Howe worked for the farm-labor cooperative movement and La Follette’s Progressive presidential campaign of 1924.9 Howe’s New Deal assistant, Jackson, also had a varied activist career before the 1930s. He failed to graduate from any of the three elite colleges he attended, including Harvard and Columbia. Through family connections, Jackson went first to Amherst College in Massachusetts, whose innovative president, Alexander Meiklejohn, befriended the young westerner and taught him philosophy as well as political liberalism. But World War I interrupted Jackson’s studies when he joined the army. In 1919 he decided to become a journalist, and a year later he was writing for the Boston Globe. A major turning point came in 1926, when he resigned his job to become secretary of the Sacco and Vanzetti Defense Fund, for the infamous trial of these two Italian anarchists radicalized Jackson. It also introduced him to leading eastern liberals, including the irrepressible Harvard law professor Felix Frankfurter and the Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, who became his good friends.

7. Intellectual and professional influences on USDA urban liberals. Reproduced by permission of the Agricultural History Society.

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In 1930 Jackson moved to Washington, D.C., to resume his journalism career.10 Tugwell earned all three of his academic degrees from the elite Wharton School of Finance and Commerce at the University of Pennsylvania, where the radical economists Scott Nearing and Simon N. Patten exerted the strongest influence. A historical-institutional economist and friend of Ely since their student days in Germany, “my Patten,” Tugwell wrote, possessed “the most profound mind of his generation.” He also studied the new, technocratic scientific management and related works by Veblen, another well-known radical. When Tugwell began teaching at Columbia University in 1920, he met Dewey, whose experimental pragmatism the younger professor adopted as “the essence of planning.” From these sources, Tugwell developed a coherent institutional economics that gave a dominant role to the state, a holistic and interdisciplinary view of society, and an economy of abundance based on technology. Unlike many intellectuals, Tugwell’s ideas were well formed by this time and changed little over his long life. During his stay in New York City, he wrote five books, edited two more (one based on his visit to the Soviet Union), and published forty-five professional articles, including some on America’s farm problem. In the late twenties Tugwell also started writing political pieces for the New Republic, mainly to criticize President Herbert Hoover. This attracted the attention of Governor Franklin Roosevelt of New York, whose “brain trust” Tugwell joined in 1932. He became one of FDR’s closest economic advisers during the planning and implementation of the early New Deal.11 Frank excelled at the University of Chicago. He studied literature, philosophy, and politics, taking several courses with the nationally known professor Charles E. Merriam. In addition to pioneering an empirical science of politics, Merriam served as a reform city councilman in 1909. Frank worked as his secretary for a year, then continued at Chicago Law School, from which he graduated with the highest grades in its history. One of his professors, Roscoe Pound, offered a “sociological jurisprudence” and soon became dean of Harvard Law School. Throughout the teens and twenties, Frank and his wife, Florence Kiper, a poet, were part of the Chicago literary scene with radical writers and activists such as Clarence Darrow, Carl Sandburg, Floyd Dell, and Max Eastman, who praised the city’s factories and workers. Philosophically, Frank preferred the pragmatists, particularly Oliver Wendell Holmes and Dewey. Frank’s first book, Law and the Modern Mind (1930), brilliantly applied Freudian psychoanalysis to judicial decisions, becoming a classic of

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legal realism. Frank also kept up a day job specializing in business reorganizations, but his wide-ranging intellect became bored with corporate law. In 1929 he moved to a Wall Street firm, where a law partner remarked, “It’s worth $50,000 a year to us to have Jerry around just to hear him talk.” In 1932 he taught part-time at both the New School for Social Research and Yale Law School, where he joined the innovative legal scholars Thurman Arnold and William O. Douglas (and brought them illegal liquor from New York). Frank also met Frankfurter, who admired his book and was a close friend of Governor Roosevelt. When FDR became president, Frank wrote to Frankfurter about a possible New Deal post and received an enigmatic reply: “If you get a curious offer, don’t reject it without considerable reflection.” Frankfurter knew that Tugwell was seeking an outstanding lawyer for the USDA and recommended Frank. Frank took a drastic pay cut and the top legal job in the new AAA.12 Frank’s top assistants in the AAA, Hiss and Pressman, met in 1927 as editors of the Harvard Law Review. Earlier, as scholarship students, each had a favorite radical economics professor. Although Hiss later claimed he was little affected by Broadus Mitchell’s purported socialism at Johns Hopkins, Pressman admitted that Summer Slichter at Cornell interested him in trade unionism. For them and many others, as conservatives like to say, the “most direct route to [New Deal] Washington was to go to Harvard Law School and turn left.” At Harvard, Hiss and Pressman encountered a major influence on their careers and on the New Deal: Frankfurter. At this time, his wife, Marion Frankfurter, was coediting the prison letters of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti with Jackson, a friend of Hiss’s sister.13 Five of the urban liberals had close ties to Frankfurter (see fig. 7). Born in Vienna, Frankfurter moved to New York, attended City College, and ranked first in his class at Harvard Law School. He befriended the Supreme Court justices Holmes and Brandeis, who urged his appointment as the first Jewish law professor at Harvard. Hiss recalled that Frankfurter’s “enthusiasm for high-principled federal service was infectious.” The Frankfurters held Sunday teas for favored students, affairs at which, it was said, political and intellectual conversation reached an art form. At Harvard he taught administrative law, public utilities, and federal jurisdiction and procedures. Like his friends John Maynard Keynes and Harold J. Laski, he revered the British civil service and sought to transplant its expertise to America; he thought that the Wisconsin Idea was the best start in that direction. A thoroughgoing Progressive reformer, Frankfurter passed on his ideology to several generations

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of legal technocrats and administrative experts. Within the New Deal AAA, amazingly, over half of the litigators hailed from Harvard, including John Abt, Thurman Arnold, Arthur Bachrach, Margaret Bennett, Abe Fortas, Leon Keyerling, Robert McCannaughey, Paul Porter, Victor Rotnem, Bruce Schachner, Francis Shea, Adlai Stevenson, Wesley Sturges, Telford Taylor, Sigmund Timberg, and Nathan Witt. Other New Deal lawyers included Frankfurter’s students Dean Acheson, Benjamin Cohen, Tommy Corcoran, James Landis, David Lilienthal, Charles Wyzanski, and Donald Hiss, Alger’s brother. Despite a decided preference for public service, he always instructed his students to gain some corporate law experience first, learning the trade and sharpening their legal skills.14 Thus the paradox that the AAA radicals-to-be followed Frankfurter’s advice: Pressman and Hiss spent their early careers on Wall Street. Pressman joined a prestigious law firm to become Frank’s assistant in corporate reorganizations. For Hiss, Frankfurter secured a coveted clerkship with Justice Holmes. Through him, Hiss met Justice Brandeis, who impressed him for being more liberal than Holmes and prounion. In 1932 Hiss moved to New York City with his wife, Priscilla, a Bryn Mawr graduate and writer from Philadelphia’s exclusive Main Line, and they began attending Socialist Party meetings and classes. Hiss and Pressman renewed their acquaintance in the International Juridical Association (IJA), whose journal published their articles for use by left-wing lawyers working on farm and labor cases. Hiss’s pro bono work for the IJA specialized in farm foreclosures. When the call came from Frank, at Frankfurter’s recommendation, to be his chief assistant in the AAA, Hiss accepted and secured a comparable position for his colleague Pressman, who again became Frank’s legal assistant. Pressman, in turn, got Frank to hire his comrade, the working-class New Yorker, Harvard Law School graduate, and IJA collaborator Nathan Witt, who also came highly recommended by Frankfurter.15 In 1933, as two young radicals newly hired into the AAA Legal Division, Pressman and Witt visited the newspaperman Jackson. They expressed admiration for his work in the Sacco–Vanzetti case and invited him to join the AAA, “to get into the show and help remake the world.” Frankfurter had already urged Jackson to sign on. Tugwell and Frank managed to introduce an unlikely concern for consumer protection and farm labor standards into the USDA, and the old but spritely Progressive Howe headed this AAA Consumer Division. Jackson became the assistant consumers’ counsel, nominally under Howe but he was understood, according to some, to be the real

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energy of the office. For years past, Howe and Jackson had personified the “old breed of radical,” that is, non-Communist, who advocated for social justice, and they continued their crusade in the New Deal USDA.16 I want to look briefly at how the urban liberals were received in the department, particularly by the old-line conservative hands. Their reception serves to highlight their cultural and ideological distinctiveness as compared to their erstwhile reforming collaborators, the agrarian intellectuals. While the latter group represented the left wing of the land-grant system, Tugwell and company constituted a hitherto unseen type around the USDA. “Boys with their hair ablaze,” the traditional farm leader and AAA’s first head George Peek called them. He went on: “A plague of young lawyers settled on Washington. They all claimed to be friends of somebody or other and mostly of Felix Frankfurter and Jerome Frank [head of AAA’s Legal Division]. They floated airily into offices, took desks, asked for papers and found no end of things to be busy about. . . . They were all chain talkers.” A more sympathetic observer wrote of “Washington suddenly full of eager-faced, immature technicians and academicians with lean bodies and no bellies, running around hatless, acting rather breathlessly mysterious and important, calling one another and the President by their first names, and more often than not, reaching his ear more readily than any of the old political hacks.” One of those chain talkers, Hiss, recalled, “My chief colleagues in Jerome Frank’s office and I were part of a legion of Young Turks who manned many of the legal jobs of the early New Deal. We were few enough in number and similar enough in backgrounds and beliefs to feel common bonds. We were a band of brothers—members of a citizens’ militia in mufti, mustered to fight the ills of the Depression.”17 Tugwell and the AAA lawyers were called cocky, tactless, elitist, condescending, unbearably arrogant, “unusually confident”— and this by their friends. Secretary Wallace, who liked and lived for a time with Tugwell and Frank, observed, “The trouble with Rex as a public man is that he exhibits disdain.” Once in 1933 as Wallace was leading a discussion with state Extension officials, Tugwell raised some piercing questions, then rose to leave for a meeting with President Roosevelt. Wallace mischievously remarked, “Dr. Tugwell seems to lack confidence in Extension Directors.” The USDA’s assistant secretary leaned toward Wallace and whispered loudly, “No, I haven’t a damn bit of confidence in Extension Directors, Henry.” As he later commented, all the Tugwells were extroverts. In addition to being roommates, Tugwell considered Frank to be his second at work.18

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The urban liberals exhibited other stand-out characteristics. The established USDA hands liked to poke fun at their ignorance of things rural. “City slicker” was about the worst name the old-timers could think of, or at least say in public. One brash AAA attorney from Brooklyn, in drawing up a macaroni code for processors, asked whether the code was “fair to the macaroni growers.” In criticizing the liberals’ proposal to take over some agribusinesses, an old USDA worker complained, “Hell! The Government’s got more hay down now than it’ll get up before it rains.” The metaphor may have been lost on the city-bred lawyers. Out in the country one night, one of them saw fireflies, apparently for the first time, and exclaimed, “Good God! What’s that?” Not all distinctions were so lighthearted. Several of the urbanites were Jewish, and many high officials, in USDA and elsewhere, disapproved of their presence in agricultural circles. Frank could refer jokingly to his “Polish corridor” of young attorneys. To Hiss, though, anti-Semitism was widespread and virulent, reflected in a popular label for Harvard Law’s numerous protégés in the New Deal: Frankfurter’s “Happy Hot Dogs.” Finally, some of the AAA lawyers were actually Communist Party members, although few people knew it at the time. The historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. summed it up: “There were too many Ivy League men, too many intellectuals, too many radicals, too many Jews.”19 A new hand had definitely been dealt the USDA.

Comparing Urban Liberals and Agrarian Intellectuals Collective Contrasts The roots of the differing ideologies of the urban liberals and the agrarian intellectuals may be discerned in the contrast between their collectivebiographical identities. The urban liberals grew up in more diverse settings than the midwestern farm boys. They were more cosmopolitan, not tied to their region or father’s occupation or to their class. While eleven of the twelve individuals had roughly middle-class origins, the regional dimension is significant, for middle-class in rural Iowa meant something quite different than it did in New York City. While all of these men’s fathers were property owners, family farmers did not share the worldview of city businessmen. In contrast to the agrarians, the urban liberals had no Lincoln-inspired virtuous citizenry in their background, but family business interests, which they rebelled against early on. Furthermore, they witnessed ethnic and class differences at an early age and later saw class divisions in the larger society as well

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as in agriculture, divisions the agrarians tended to overlook. Finally, none of the urban liberals retained any religious commitment. In a meeting with Tugwell and others early in the New Deal, Wallace joked, “They get awfully scared here when I as much as mention religion.” One of Wallace’s books of 1934, Statesmanship and Religion, arose from lectures he gave at a divinity school. His mysticism was particularly foreign to the urbanites, as it was not to Taylor, for instance, or Wilson, whose Quaker mother had introduced him to the spiritual mysteries.20 The groups had different but parallel educational and early professional experiences. Two figures born before the Civil War, Ely and Brandeis, served as their “intellectual grandfathers.” Immensely influential beyond the fields of economics and law, the two men counted among the original reformers in Progressive America. But it was their brilliant disciples, Commons and Frankfurter, respectively, who shaped the New Deal. The latter two each taught scores of graduate students, whether economists or lawyers, who staffed the new agencies in the 1930s. Commons and Frankfurter promoted the need for an activist state led by trained experts with specialized knowledge in policy making and administration. All held up public service as the highest-minded ideal. Commons’s and Frankfurter’s students came from different cultural and academic pools. At Wisconsin, Ely and Commons often taught agricultural graduates from midwestern land-grant colleges. They became empirical researchers, usually economists, in the emerging rural social sciences. The young easterners attracted to Brandeis and Frankfurter, on the other hand, attended exclusive private universities like Johns Hopkins and the Ivy League schools. Most went into law, again at the elite schools of Chicago and Harvard, where they entered Frankfurter’s orbit. A common influence on leaders of both groups was the distinctive philosophy of American pragmatism, but they read different Deweys, or at least took away contradictory lessons: the urbanites saw technocratic rationality, expert planning, cultural relativism, and a working-class orientation, whereas the agrarians perceived democratic participation, citizen planning, civic belief in education, plus a near-absolute faith in the rural middle class from which they sprang. Nonetheless, all concerned—led by Wallace and Wilson, Tugwell and Frank— claimed to be loyal democrats and reformers in the best American tradition. The two groups’ early careers, too, followed different trajectories. Professors Commons and Frankfurter encouraged—indeed, enabled—their students to gain extensive hands-on experience in applied research and problem

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solving. For the rural institutional economists, this meant working closely with farmers and farm organizations back in the state land-grant colleges and the USDA’s new BAE. Frankfurter, on the other hand, urged his law graduates to go first into private practice to perfect their technocratic expertise, which could later be helpful in public service. The young economic and legal experts developed divergent political and ideological outlooks based on these early professional experiences. As it happened, such seemingly mundane specialities as farm management and administrative law proved to be quite useful in the New Deal USDA. Still, more than miles separated Main Street from Wall Street. It is true that all of the agrarian intellectuals and urban liberals were cardcarrying progressive reformers who favored a positive, developmental state, national economic planning, and the self-organization of labor as well as of agriculture. Except for one or two of the most radical (Communists), they all sought a European-style social democracy in the United States and worked to foment its rural, agrarian wing. Yet the groups’ underlying visions diverged. The agrarians upheld the grass-roots ideals of successful property-owning family farmers and local citizen participation in public policy. The urbanites, by contrast, sympathized more with the dispossessed generally and with sharecroppers and farmworkers specifically, preferring federal policy making by rationalistic experts like themselves. They were centralizers and collectivists who urged rapid transformation to achieve social justice. The agrarians believed that social change, although inevitable, should occur more slowly, especially in traditional rural cultures. Some fundamental divergencies existed. The young urban liberals already exhibited high-modernist tendencies. Although arising from relatively privileged backgrounds, they rejected the bourgeois middle class and instead sought to uplift the rural poor and downtrodden, whom they knew mainly from a distance. Ideologically driven, they knew unquestionably whose side they were on. Their elite educations and early careers further distanced them from their families’ business backgrounds. They were all irreligious, preferring belief in themselves rather than deferring to any higher authority. The Ivy League and Wall Street gave them the self-confidence (some would say arrogance) to believe in their own abilities and expertise to reform and rationalize public policies for the evident good of all. Finally, they were in a hurry; the coming transformation of the country was long overdue and could not wait. They already knew what needed to be done, so why prevaricate? In college Tugwell had written a poem expressing his fervent desire to “make America over!”

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During the crisis-ridden 1930s, he and the other urban liberals chomped at the bit to do just that. In sum, they overflowed with “certain schemes to improve the human condition,” as the subtitle of Scott’s Seeing Like a State has it. The urban liberals deserve the high-modernist label much more than the midwestern agrarian intellectuals. Tugwell as High Modernist How exactly was Tugwell a high modernist? Ideologically and politically, he appeared made to order. An ardent statist, he elevated scientific reason and proposed to use it to plan the U.S. economy. He believed that technical progress could ensure economic stability and continual prosperity, as preached by one of his heroes, the scientific management expert Frederick W. Taylor (Veblen was another). Centralized planning could also overcome social conflict, including class warfare. In industry, agriculture, and government, Tugwell knew that bigger was better. Adopting the Progressive industrial policy of “concentration and control,” he regarded laissez-faire as a reactionary vestige of the best-forgotten past. He argued that enforced competition, via antitrust laws, held back the entire society and was bound to fail in the face of technological advance. He similarly denigrated many other American traditions as outdated customs, including the constitutional separation of powers that stymied the necessary planning function of modern government. The future lay with scientific collectivism. According to one historian, Tugwell “liked to describe those who, like himself, worked for a collective social management as ‘the middle-men of modernity.’ ”21 Starting in the 1920s Tugwell proposed a “planned capitalism,” or what he called “social management,” as a higher-level scientific management. The federal government would be the senior, controlling partner with business, along with workers, farmers, and consumers. Only the central state, he saw, could have a holistic view of the economy and thereby balance production and consumption. Tugwell believed that planning was the experts’ job and was beyond the capacities of ordinary citizens. Comprehensive planning should also be apolitical; it was a scientific matter devoid of politics and so should be separated from politicians, whose electoral time horizons were far too short. To accomplish this needed separation, he proposed a fourth branch of government, the “planning power,” which he labeled “the superpolitical,” inhabited by disinterested technicians who took the long policy view. Tugwell knew that such ideas were unacceptable to most citizens—because, he thought, of

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their misreading of recent historical developments and of planning’s potential. Americans needed reeducating, in his view. Finally, Tugwell most successfully advanced his ideas during the economic crisis of the Great Depression, when U.S. civil society was quite weak or “prostrate,” as Scott says. And Tugwell soon had the ear of the new statist president, who proved eager to undertake social experimentation.22 In the early thirties, lamenting the economic waste and inefficiency of the twenties as well as the injustice, inequality, and flat-out human suffering of the worsening Depression (“Farmers were being starved off their land; workers were denied access to idle factories,” he wrote), Tugwell urged deep structural reform alongside quick recovery. In a major book, The Industrial Discipline and the Governmental Arts, he spelled out his collectivist ideas for the institution of national planning. Intra-industry associations would voluntarily create planning boards, including workers and consumers, for each sector. For broader issues, an inter-industry central planning board led by the government would coordinate the sectoral plans into a national program. Tugwell’s proposal for planned capitalism had two main elements: centralized control of capital investments and price controls, which would result in balanced production and consumption. Effective direction and coordination of the national economy would thus be achieved, ensuring the general welfare and long-run stability. From Dewey’s pragmatism Tugwell had gleaned that “the future could be brought into focus, judged in advance as a working hypothesis, and altered before it was reached. That was and is the essence of planning.”23 Tugwell often spoke of “a concert of interests” between business and government. He stressed cooperation and interdependence and sought to avoid class warfare, saying that “class advantages are illusory and in the end destructive.” Public planning would provide the overall coordination necessary to make private industrial planning effective. National planning, that is, promised to save capitalism from the capitalists. To the charge of regimentation, Tugwell responded that, yes, there would be some, just as there already was. Now, though, regimentation was private and for selfish interests; the “heart of industry beats in the old dictatorial way,” he opined in the New Republic. Under his scheme, national direction would operate in the public interest. Tugwell described the planning process as “expert preparation, public hearings, agreed findings, and careful translation into law—which are in turn subject to legislative ratification.” Some such planning would be done in any case, even if by default, that is, left up to private businesses, which he

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publicly called “American dictators.” Nationalization of the “directive power,” now controlled by private industry, was essential to achieve America’s promise.24 Above all, Tugwell was a technocratic planner. Further, on the basis of Scott’s definition, he must be considered a high modernist, as should the other, like-minded urban liberals. They all preferred centralized statist planning by experts much like themselves. They saw that grass-roots efforts usually got captured by local power structures, which Tugwell called the “grass-tops.” Moreover, the urban liberals were more than willing to use the substantial powers of the federal government to reform traditional regional cultures that did not meet either their approval or democracy’s demands. They favored rapid social change and opposed the status quo. Consequently they held a dim view of existing, decentralized agricultural power-holders, especially the land-grant colleges and state Extension services as well as their many representatives in USDA itself. All of these political and ideological stances, personified by Tugwell, reflect Scott’s concept of high modernism. Yet Tugwell, along with other progressive New Dealers, also claimed a central democratizing thrust that seems to contradict Scott’s notion. Planning, Tugwell insisted, could be carried out democratically. It was an evolutionary, experimental process, not a dogmatic imposition, but should be done by a planning agency that was superpolitical— outside of politics but still under public control. Citizens had input at several stages of the planning process; the technical experts did not set goals but indicated how to achieve publicly determined aims. This is what made it democratic, he thought—as long as democracy was not identified with free-market capitalism, which exhibited “the venom of unrestrained competitive greed.” Tugwell always understood that democracy was not a fixed entity but must evolve with circumstances. Nor did he expect his plans to be accepted overnight: “Social change in America cannot go on any faster than the people who are affected want it to go on.” Tugwell aimed to make planning governmental, accountable, and above all in the general interest.25 Democratizing High Modernists and Low Modernists I have aimed to highlight the distinctive characteristics of the agrarian intellectuals by contrasting them with the urban liberals. I have pointed out differences between the two in terms of their social and familial backgrounds (family farming and its attendant ideologies versus city upbringings

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in business households), educations (state land-grant colleges versus elite private universities), and early careers (land-grant professors and public agricultural researchers versus Ivy League professors and Wall Street lawyers). These specific paths to the New Deal USDA framed the thinking and politics of the twelve individuals involved. While both groups comprised deeply progressive reformers who, moreover, cooperated in launching the AAA and other early New Deal efforts, they soon parted ways ideologically and programmatically. As representative of the two groups, a useful contrast pairs Tugwell and Wilson. In the New Deal, both served as assistant secretary of agriculture, then undersecretary, the first two in the department’s history. Tugwell favored centralized governmental planning carried out by trained experts; average citizens were simply not up to the technical tasks. In addition, he distrusted local power structures precisely because they were often so undemocratic (his primary exhibit being the plantation South) and sought to displace them with federal support for poor people and their oppositional organizations. By contrast, Wilson was more concerned with property-owning family farmers and more supportive of citizen participation in policy making. He believed that local farmers working with state experts could best plan public policy; grassroots democracy was not just a slogan to him. Wilson also respected regional differences and local cultures and thought that social change had to be gradual rather than imposed quickly from Washington. He was a product as well as a shaper of the land-grant/Extension system so was quite willing to work within it, in contrast to Tugwell.26 One way to capture these ideological and political differences draws on the concept of modernism. As argued above, Tugwell and the other urban liberals met all the requirements of high modernism—with one significant exception. They did lean toward elitism and technocracy, yet they also embodied certain democratizing tendencies. In fact, the urban liberals saw themselves as progressive democrats. Their commitment to and work for empowering the poor and the dispossessed revealed them as advocates of democratization, for “enlarging the boundaries of democracy,” as Tugwell put it in The Battle for Democracy. Yet in his elaborations of the concept in Seeing Like a State, Scott almost always employs the phrase “authoritarian high modernism.” To make the concept of high modernism apply to the likes of Tugwell more accurately, it must be expanded to include the possibility of state-led democratization. Otherwise, the concept unnecessarily restricts our view of the progressive-reformist New Deal, denying out of hand that

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Tugwell and others could be democratic agents. I argue, then, that the type of modernism embodied by Tugwell and the other urban liberals was a democratizing high modernism. Without some such revision, the concept of high modernism appears too blunt for the case of Tugwell, much less Wilson.27 For Wilson, the New Dealer, unlike Tugwell, was hardly a high modernist of any sort. Tugwell and the urban liberals clearly preferred the scientific and the national as opposed to the folk and the local— one indication of their high-modernist colors. As evidenced throughout this book, Wilson and the other agrarian intellectuals chose the scientific and the national along with the folk and the local. All the agrarians were modernists. They favored technology, expertise, rationalization, progressive reform, national planning, a strong central state, and the rest. But this tells only half the story. They also embraced what they saw as essential complements to modernism: history, tradition, folk knowledge, regional cultures, local planning, midsized family farming, strong rural communities, gradual social change, and meaningful citizen involvement in public policy. Above all, they were simultaneously federal bureaucrats and participatory democrats. The agrarians thus staked out a third position, beyond the binaries, a balancing of modernism with rural culture and local community.28 This synthesis created something new, best captured in their theory and practice of democratic planning. For these reasons, I submit that Wilson and the other agrarian intellectuals were not high modernists so much as low modernists.

chapter 5

Struggling Toward a New Deal Land Policy The Agrarian Action Programs and Beyond, 1933–1938 We [are] at last approaching the problem in the way we would have liked to approach it in 1933 had there been time. —secretary of agriculture henry a. wallace, november 1935

T

he New Deal changed the United States as few political regimes have ever done. Given the crisis of the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration rewrote the social contract between the government and the people. In unprecedented ways the national state reached (some said intruded) into the everyday lives of Americans, nowhere more so than in the countryside. The USDA forged new roles for the federal government in relation to both the economy and society. The First Hundred Days of 1933 yielded a panoply of relief and recovery measures, including the signal AAA, which paid farmers to produce less in order to raise farm prices. Two years later, the Second agrarian New Deal focused more on social and ecological reform, establishing, in the same week, the Resettlement Administration (RA) and the Soil Conservation Service (SCS). The Resettlement, later Farm Security, Administration (FSA) offered loans and technical assistance to poor rural families, while the SCS provided farmers with incentives and expertise to fight erosion. These and other new USDA agencies also built participatory institutions to carry out their activities on the land. Finally, in 1938 the Third New Deal launched the most ambitious program of all, cooperative land-use planning, intended to coordinate the efforts of the first two, and more.

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These agencies and programs constituted radically innovative ways for the federal government to connect with local farmer-citizens—“immediate action of a new kind,” as the USDA referred to them collectively. Prior to the New Deal, the USDA engaged primarily in research and education. It worked with the state land-grant colleges of agriculture and, mainly through them, with farmers. Beginning in 1933, for the first time the federal government bypassed the instrumentalities of the state colleges and established direct ties with millions of individual farms and families. The agrarian New Deal operated via a set of discrete direct-action or economic-action programs that, in effect, organized farmers into institutions of local–national collective action and induced them to alter their behavior, usually by changing their use of the land. One USDA hand called them “demo-collective actions.” According to the New Dealers, farmers would accomplish together what they could not do as individuals and thereby achieve higher public purposes, for instance, increasing consumption (AAA), attacking poverty (FSA), and preserving resources (SCS). The agrarian intellectuals thus implemented Commons’s view of institutions as “collective action in control, liberation, and expansion of individual action.” Of the 6.8 million farmers in the nation in the midthirties, the peak number in U.S. history, an astonishing 5.25 million signed up for the voluntary “action programs.”1 Equally remarkable, more than 300,000 farmers engaged directly in administering the agrarian New Deal at the local level. This is what Tolley meant when he spoke of “deliberately drawing farmer-citizens into the operation” of the new federal programs. This citizen engagement resulted from executive and administrative, not legislative, action, specifically, decisions by the USDA’s agrarian intellectuals who conceived and executed the participatory programs. Why did they involve local farmers in the new agencies? First, since almost all of the New Deal efforts were voluntary, farmers could choose to cooperate or not. They had to sign up for the various programs, which otherwise would not get off the ground. The agrarian New Deal sparked controversy because it affected landowners’ private property rights, to which the famously individualist farmer might well object. Only local approval and farmer assistance would allow the action programs to succeed.2 Another consideration for engaging farmers was that they possessed experiential knowledge that could prove useful in implementing the national programs on the land. American agriculture varied tremendously in its technical, economic, and cultural conditions, and USDA experts did not, indeed could not, know all the local ins and outs. According to the longtime USDA

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workers Milton Eisenhower and Roy Kimmel, they “knew how little they knew about many aspects of the intricate agricultural puzzle in this country, where the range of conditions is so great and the local variations are so numerous.” Finally, there was the ideological dimension: the New Deal agrarian intellectuals believed profoundly in democracy, which to them always included the grass roots. Exhibiting a deep localist bias against federal bureaucracy, they deemed active citizen participation in the new national programs essential in order to deepen the American democratic tradition. From the very beginning, then, the agrarian New Deal engaged farmer-citizens in its operations, and increasingly so as the decade wore on. Two federal sociologists summed it up by claiming that this participatory push occurred for “both practical and ideological reasons.”3 In addition to the action programs that directly involved farmers in the local administration of federal programs, the New Deal USDA advanced quite innovative forms of its traditional functions, applied research and adult education. The old individualist approaches proved inadequate to meet the problems brought on by the Great Depression. The new types of research and education not only forged closer ties between government experts and rural citizens, but also constituted different federally assisted activities, for example, local discussion groups and community self-studies. Then, late in the decade, the USDA attempted to coordinate all the diverse programs on the land by initiating an unprecedented additional function of the USDA/landgrant system: cooperative planning.4 Here I want to lay the necessary groundwork for understanding this culmination. I first trace the vagaries of agrarian policy development up to 1938. Although the New Deal USDA promulgated many varied programs, the three main “action agencies” were the AAA, the SCS, and the FSA. These agencies, although well known to historians and others, are rarely treated as eventual elements, however disparate, of a coordinated, comprehensive new land policy in the United States. I present the action programs in that light, as they contributed to the larger land-planning story, including their innovative “grass-roots administration.” Second, I go back to 1935, to the first inklings of that new land policy, when the six agrarian intellectuals envisioned and led key experiments in radically new kinds of adult education, participatory research, and local–national planning. These early intimations grew, merged, and eventuated in the cooperative land-use planning program, what I call the Third and Intended New Deal.5

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Land as the Core of New Deal Agricultural Policy The agrarian New Deal sought a new land policy for the nation, one designed around the idea of land-use planning. New Dealers, including President Roosevelt, saw the so-called farm problem as an outgrowth of land misuse. Low farm prices and incomes, rural poverty and regional inequities, and water and soil erosion were the central agricultural problems during the Great Depression, and they all pointed to the conclusion that some type of change was needed on the land. Secretary Wallace traced “the origins of the new land policy” back to Ely’s land economics a half century earlier and the subsequent movement for “cooperative land use adjustment.” Wallace reported to FDR in 1938 that “there are no separate problems of forestry, of wildlife conservation, of grazing, of soil conservation, and of regional crop adjustment. There is one united land-use problem, of which forestry, grazing, crop adjustment, and so forth are merely aspects.” Hence virtually every New Deal program altered the physical land or its social and economic uses: production control, soil conservation, tenure security, land planning, farm credit, debt adjustment, federal purchase of poor land, rural resettlement and rehabilitation, agrarian community building, farm forestry, rural electrification, flood control, public grazing, road building, and wildlife preservation, among others.6 At first these varied programs grew in divergent directions, but eventually they needed to be coordinated and unified into a single land policy— one rationale for the Third agrarian New Deal. By 1938, according to contemporary authorities on the USDA, the term land use implied “a comprehensive national land-use policy,” and land-use planning represented “the most significant group of the Department’s activities.” Such a viewpoint, noted by few historians although emphasized at the time, should cause us to reconsider what we think we know about New Deal agricultural policy.7 I follow this lead below in viewing the major action programs in terms of land policy and landuse planning.

Agricultural Adjustment The major program of the agrarian New Deal, at least until 1938, was agricultural adjustment, meaning production control. The Agricultural Adjustment Act, passed by Congress in mid-May 1933, aimed to raise farm prices and farmer incomes. The broader goal, however, was to bring farm and industrial prices into better balance, thus enhancing the political-economic

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power of commercial farmers. The omnibus legislation was wide-ranging, but the USDA’s new AAA soon focused on the “voluntary domestic allotment plan,” a drastic, innovative way to control farm production by limiting the acreage planted in major crops. Since the late 1920s the agricultural economists William J. Spillman, John D. Black, Mordecai Ezekiel, and M. L. Wilson had developed the proposal, intended for emergency economic conditions. Even so, production controls resulted in lasting changes on the land.8 In 1933 farm prices had never been so low, and many farm people were starving. In these dire circumstances, Secretary Wallace, Assistant Secretary Tugwell, Wilson, and other USDA leaders felt that production controls must be implemented immediately. Tens of millions of acres had already been planted by May, especially in the cotton and tobacco South. No one in Washington had ever tried to reach vast numbers of American farmers in an emergency, especially for the highly unorthodox goal of plowing up millions of planted acres. In an economic crisis in which farmers made too little money, it seemed counterintuitive to plant fewer acres. In exchange for restricting output, then, cooperating farmers received federal benefit payments, which made up for their lost income. This scheme would not only lower overall supply and, it was hoped, raise farm prices but also provide quick cash to desperately strapped farmers. And by spending the newfound funds, the nearly seven million farmers and their large families would help revive the national economy.9 But how could such a program be carried out? Since the AAA production controls were voluntary and operative on private land, it took some convincing. Rather than try to set up a vast federal bureaucracy overnight, USDA leaders employed one at their fingertips: the state Extension services with their county agents stationed throughout rural America. An adult-education agency that specialized in convincing farmers to adopt new ways, Extension had been federally established in 1914 in order to link farm people to the land-grant colleges and, secondarily, to the USDA. Wilson proposed using Extension to implement production control; during World War I he had been Montana’s first county agent, so he knew agents’ potential for reaching American farmers in a national emergency. Still, how exactly would the acreage reductions be implemented and enforced? Here again Wilson’s policy genius shone through, as he advocated the use of local farmer committees to help administer the program. Three farmers in each county would assist the Extension agent in carrying out the program, that is, establishing the historical base of production on each participating farm, allocating acreage allotments,

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measuring the contracted acres, distributing benefit payments, and adjudicating disputes. Sometimes elected by their peers, the AAA farmer-administrators were more often appointed by the county agent. Almost always they were above-average farmers: larger, more prosperous, better educated, and tied in with Extension. The AAA succeeded in raising farm prices, a huge, unprecedented job. Large majorities of farmers of all the major commodities signed up for the program. The AAA issued five million contracts in its first two years.10 The AAA can be seen as a project of landowning farmers, including family farmers as well as larger ones. Most of its framers, including Wallace, Wilson, Tolley, and Black, assumed in 1933 that propertied farmers should be helped first in the economic crisis. Indeed, this is what farmer meant to them, the neighbors they grew up with in the rural Midwest. The agrarian intellectuals sometimes spoke of a unitary farming class and may have fooled themselves into thinking that most American farmers were more or less similar, sociologically speaking. But they really represented midwestern family farmers, acting as organic intellectuals of that specific class. In forming and implementing the early AAA, they were not thinking of southern landlords or California capitalist farmers, much less of sharecroppers or farmworkers. In the early New Deal, the subordinate classes were virtually invisible to the agrarian intellectuals. They were politically and ideologically ill-prepared to confront divisive class conflict, yet their attention was soon directed to such protest and reaction, thanks in part to their erstwhile comrades in arms, the AAA urban liberals. As we saw in the last chapter, the midwestern agrarians were not the only reformist group in the New Deal USDA. More typically progressive were Assistant Secretary Tugwell and his band of big-city lawyers who occupied AAA’s legal and consumer units. These were the AAA legal officials who forced the USDA’s hand on race and class discrimination, and they suffered the consequences. Wallace and Wilson touted the AAA decentralizing strategy as grass-roots administration or, in their more fulsome moments, and less accurately, as “economic democracy in action.” Yet the AAA had a built-in bias in favor of the dominant classes in rural America, most obviously favoring landowners. In the Midwest and other family-farming areas, this was not a major problem since most farmers worked their own land. But in regions divided by class and race like the plantation South, the AAA’s property bias proved harmful to thousands of tenants and sharecroppers. AAA citizen committees hardly ever included subordinate classes, particularly

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African American farmers. As the historian of the South Pete Daniel said about the committee structure, “At best it was only a democracy of landowners; at worst it had the odor of oligarchy.”11 These class and racial biases did not go unnoticed. In the cotton South, tenant farmers organized to protest the AAA’s local implementation. When plantation landlords took land out of production in order to receive AAA payments, they often did not share the federal funds with their tenants. In addition, the acreage reductions sometimes led to displacement of landless farmers. In 1934 Socialists and sharecroppers in Arkansas organized the interracial Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU) to demand a fair share of the government benefits. Class conflict came to a head in early 1935 within the AAA itself. The STFU sued a plantation landlord for evicting union members and asked the AAA to intervene on their behalf. Frank’s Legal Division floated a tentative opinion in support of the croppers. The AAA administrator Chester Davis, however, agreed with the counter-complaints he received from Arkansas planters and Extension agents over the proposed pro-tenant ruling. Davis took the issue to Secretary Wallace, who rejected the lawyers’ stance. Thereupon, in February 1935, Wallace dismissed Frank, Pressman, and Jackson. Howe was demoted, and Hiss soon resigned. These notable departures immediately became known as USDA’s “Purge of the Liberals.”12 Administrative infighting, personality conflicts, and culture clashes played their part in the purge, but it was due more to the conservative influences on the AAA. The first voices heard were those of the Cotton Section head, Cully Cobb, and the AAA financial director, Oscar Johnston, both of whom were from Mississippi and tied to plantation owners. Johnston assured AAA leaders that a pro-tenant ruling would be “absolutely fatal to the success of the cotton program.” He and many others would resign; Wallace himself might be forced out by the powerful landlord interests in Congress. Planters rallied against the rabble-rousing tenants’ union, as it conducted strikes in the cotton fields, suffered terrorist attacks, and drew popular sympathy for “the plight of the sharecropper.” The USDA’s support of interracial unionism would have undermined not only the AAA but also the racism and labor control essential to plantation life. In early 1935, the ideological low point of his eight years in the department, Wallace was unwilling to challenge the dominant forces of southern society that favored the AAA cotton program but rejected any talk of social reform.13

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At the press conference announcing the firings, Wallace looked haggard and shell-shocked. He was dismissing loyal followers from the USDA, including one of his apartment neighbors (Frank), and antagonizing another, Undersecretary Tugwell, who promptly tendered his resignation, which FDR refused. In the midthirties Wallace and other agrarian intellectuals had no adequate class analysis of American agriculture. Both planters and tenants evidenced a much clearer view of the class warfare engaging them, whereas the agrarians seemingly believed, with a middle-class sense of classlessness, that they could all peaceably coexist. Unlike the urban liberals, the midwesterners were strangely ill-prepared for tough, plantation politics. Frank, Pressman, Jackson, Howe, and Hiss went to the mat for the downtrodden, while Wallace and company caved to dominant interests. Their class analysis would become sharper a few years later, when conservative farm groups turned against the reformist USDA itself even as the STFU supported it.14 Lamentable as it was, the purge of 1935 did not signal the last word of the agrarian New Deal. Nadir, yes; finale, no. It did, however, mark the end of the beginning. In January 1936 the U.S. Supreme Court, dealing a major blow to the New Deal, declared parts of the Agricultural Adjustment Act unconstitutional. Yet, remarkably, the USDA planners offered a quick substitute by which the AAA program could more or less continue, if under a different rationale. In fewer than seven weeks Wallace submitted and Congress passed the replacement Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act of 1936. The new feature, conservation payments, subsidized farmers for switching from soil-depleting crops like overabundant wheat and cotton to soil-preserving crops. Everyone knew this was a stopgap measure intended to keep the AAA going. Tolley took over as head of the refocused AAA, aiming to prevent its becoming simply a subsidy to large commercial farms. He also began voicing sympathy for poor, smaller farmers. To reform and rationalize the agency, Tolley reorganized it along regional rather than commodity lines, and, crucially, set up its own decentralized administrative structure instead of continuing to rely on Extension. Many hailed this bureaucratic separation, but others disapproved.15 Wallace and Roosevelt began work on a permanent farm bill in early 1937, but it was not introduced to Congress until midyear and became law only the following February. Hence the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938 essentially represented the USDA’s position as of a year earlier. The legislation contained several innovative features, notably Wallace’s favorite,

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an “ever-normal granary,” whereby (imitating the biblical Joseph in Egypt) surplus crops in good years would be stored for use in lean. Throughout the yearlong policy debate the secretary touted “progressive balanced abundance,” rather than AAA’s earlier “economics of scarcity,” as well as cooperative harmony, anti-individualist group consciousness, and, as always, economic democracy. The law continued production controls, price supports, and conservation payments, but with stricter congressional guidelines than in 1933. Even so, Wallace and Tolley insisted that local administration of the commodity programs be designed to treat small farmers more fairly.16 Although it changed names, the AAA provided the basic contours of farm policy for many decades—indeed, in some ways up to the present day. Unlike more progressive agencies of the New Deal (agrarian and otherwise), it survived, even flourished, politically and administratively. But as Wilson stressed early in 1939, the AAA “represents only one part of our national agricultural policy.”17 Along with the other agencies examined below, the AAA contributed to programmatic cross-purposes and policy confusion that eventually needed to be clarified and coordinated. Farm Security Unlike the early AAA, America’s first war on rural poverty was unified from the start by a zeal for social reform. Less than three months after the purge of liberals in early 1935, President Roosevelt established the Resettlement Administration (RA) by executive order and chose the visionary Undersecretary Tugwell to lead it. Although it existed independently of any department, notably USDA, Secretary Wallace and Assistant Secretary Wilson strongly supported the RA while the land economist L. C. Gray and the rural sociologist Carl C. Taylor led key parts of it. Tugwell hired two recently fired fellow urban liberals: Pressman, as his general counsel, and Howe, to spend six weeks in Europe reporting on land reform.18 They all believed that poor land caused poor people, and vice versa, and the RA focused on both problems. But as the historian Paul Conkin remarked, “Tugwell had more plans than funds.” Yet by year’s end, the RA had grown to over sixteen thousand employees in county, state, and regional offices. In 1937 the FSA replaced the RA, now inside the USDA. Over the next five years the FSA became one of the largest, most radical, and least racist of federal entities. It functioned effectively as a “poor man’s Department of Agriculture,” that is, as an educational, research, and action agency for small farmers,

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tenants, sharecroppers, and farm laborers. Its leaders and many local representatives carried out their duties with missionary fervor. The FSA earned many powerful enemies, both inside and out of government. A congressman complained, “Too much theory and too many professors.” Especially provocative in the South, which received most of its efforts, the FSA modestly challenged the racial status quo. It merited that rare appellation, “heroic bureaucracy.”19 The RA brought together three earlier New Deal efforts: a communal land-reform experiment, large-scale rural relief activities, and the beginnings of a federal land-purchase program. In June 1933 Wilson left the AAA to lead a utopian model-community scheme, the Subsistence Homesteads Division of the Interior Department. This controversial program did its small part to encourage the back-to-the-land movement of the thirties. Wilson believed that fresh air and part-time farming would be good for unemployed industrial workers and good for the country too. One of his assistants in Subsistence Homesteads, Taylor, had been unemployed since North Carolina State College had fired him in 1931. The two men managed to set up thirty-four communities before their decentralist vision ran afoul of Interior Secretary Harold Ickes’s administrative predilections. Wilson resigned in June 1934 and returned to the USDA as assistant secretary, agrarian faith in tow. Taylor left to join Gray’s AAA land-planning initiative and later to direct a major part of the RA.20 A second early program that wound up in the RA was the Division of Rural Rehabilitation and Stranded Populations of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA). It built twenty-eight planned communities, similar to the subsistence homesteads except more rural. Its main activity, however, was a massive undertaking of supervised credit, called rehabilitation. Third was Gray’s federal submarginal land-purchase effort. Initially FERA-funded and AAA-housed, it retired poor cropland by turning it to less intensive uses such as grazing and forestry. (Because of the long-term planning implications of this unprecedented land program, I treat it in more detail later in this chapter.) These three policy streams of subsistence homesteads, rural rehabilitation, and land purchase came together in May 1935 to constitute the RA. An editorial quipped that FDR’s executive order establishing it should have read, “To rearrange the earth and the people thereof and devote surplus time and money, if any, to a rehabilitation of the Solar System.” With the exception of Gray’s land-use planning, these core RA activities continued in its successor, the FSA.21

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Again unlike the situation in the divided AAA, a few people and ideas dominated the RA/FSA. To an extraordinary degree, the RA’s administrator, Tugwell, set the direction for years to come, even after he left the government at the end of 1936. He and his coworkers agreed that poverty was a social, not an individual, problem and thus a legitimate object of public policy. This was most evident concerning farm tenancy, for which they furnished courageous leadership. As discussed in chapter 4, Tugwell was the archetypical urban liberal: Ivy League, outspoken, iconoclastic. An ardent statist and collectivist planner, he obviously wanted to change the world in a hurry. In the RA, Tugwell’s main interest lay in land reform, by which he meant correcting land misuse and providing opportunities for poor families on better land or, more likely, in the city. He believed that land use stood at the root of the New Deal’s farm problem and, indeed, of rural poverty: “Poor land means poor people,” Tugwell wrote. Along with many other New Dealers, he thought that private landownership was often part of the problem rather than the solution. Tugwell was neither an agrarian individualist nor an advocate of family farming, preferring cooperatives and collectives, the bigger the better. He saw that small farmers had settled inappropriately on poor land, which fed poverty in regions like Appalachia, the Plains, and the Great Lakes “cut-overs,” areas that had been harvested of timber and left for poor settlers to try to farm. Now the government must buy back vast acreages and resettle the occupants, retraining them for industrial jobs. For those who remained on the land, security was a better goal than private ownership.22 In addition to being one of FDR’s closest economic advisers in the early New Deal, he was, as noted earlier, the first undersecretary in the history of USDA, where, to understate the matter, he did not fit in well with the traditional agriculturalists. Tugwell got on very well, though, with the secretary of agriculture. They shared a deep intellectual bent and the spirit of progressive reform (as well as adjoining rooms at the Cosmos Club). One of Tugwell’s last official acts, in late 1936, was to take Wallace on a tour to examine RA activities in the rural South. A small group of USDA leaders drove two thousand miles, stopping to talk with RA clients along the byways and dirt roads. The secretary often went off alone to visit with unsuspecting sharecroppers, black and white. A middle-class farmer, editor, and scientist from Iowa, visibly shaken, Wallace had never seen such poverty. Soon after the trip, he said, “That the conditions of these people is not usually a matter of deficient character can be shown by the results of a little dose of economic independence, decent food, and some

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educational guidance”—treatments provided by the RA, which Wallace moved into USDA in January 1937.23 At that time, Tugwell’s deputy, Will W. Alexander, took over the reformist agency. “Dr. Will,” as everyone called him, needed no tour to understand the problems of the South. He was a leading southern liberal and had devoted his life to improved race relations. A former minister and social worker, he led the Commission on Interracial Cooperation in Atlanta for decades and was a founder and first president of the predominantly black Dillard University in New Orleans. Early in 1935 Alexander coauthored with the head of the Rosenwald Fund Edwin Embree and the African American sociologist Charles S. Johnson The Collapse of Cotton Tenancy, a biting critique of the AAA, particularly its harmful impact on sharecroppers. Soon after its publication, Tugwell telephoned Alexander, asking him to become his assistant in the new RA. After the conversation, Alexander wondered, “Well . . . you criticize them up in Washington and tell what they ought to do, and then they ask you to come up and help them do it. What do you answer?” His protégé Arthur Raper replied, “You go!” Alexander directed the RA/FSA until 1940 and did as much as anyone to see that African Americans got their share of New Deal benefits.24 In midsummer 1937 Congress finally passed antipoverty legislation, the Bankhead–Jones Farm Tenant Act, which mandated a less radical RA. Six weeks later the agency became the FSA, lost the land-planning program, and added a small ownership initiative for tenants. The FSA head, Alexander, did not exactly follow the narrow provisions of Bankhead–Jones. Between 1937 and 1942 the FSA grew into a major federal agency, despite insufficient funds and ongoing attacks from conservatives. The latter had some cause for alarm, for the agency’s challenge lay precisely in its size and commitment to the rural poor.25 FSA’s statistics of accomplishment were impressive. Agency personnel numbered over 19,000, mainly in 2,300 county offices. Its major program was rehabilitation, or supervised credit, which reached 800,000 poor farm families— over 10 percent of all American farmers. “Rehab” clients received technical assistance from both farm managers and home economists, who worked with farm women. Through tenant-purchase loans, 12,000 propertyless farmers acquired land and other necessities to make a go of it. This was a woefully small number given the tenancy problem, but a start. Most FSA activity was in the South; 20 percent of its clients were black, roughly

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the proportion of African American farmers nationally. Another program set up 95 migrant labor camps, like the one favorably portrayed, with its citizenled Central Committee, in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939). The FSA resettlement program expanded earlier community-building efforts, culminating in over 100 land-reform projects around the country, complete with new houses, schools, and community centers: undreamed-of facilities for about 10,000 formerly landless families. The FSA set up more than 25,500 cooperatives, including the nation’s first public group health care for 142,000 poor families.26 Because of the specific needs of its clientele as well as predictable local opposition, FSA administration was more centralized than that of the AAA. Still, the county office constituted the spearhead of its programs. Like the rest of the agrarian New Deal, the FSA depended on local citizens to help administer them. In 2,300 counties the agency established separate rehabilitation, debt-adjustment, and tenant-purchase committees, each composed of three farm people from the area. They advised the county FSA supervisor as to availability of land, problems of tenancy, and suitability of applicants. They also encouraged clients in the cooperative and community-building programs. Nationwide, 16,000 farmers served on these local FSA committees.27 The FSA’s constituency was large and unorganized, a condition the agency meant to change. One official declared, “If out of all our work there does not . . . arise a leadership which can take over and carry on where our ‘management’ leaves off, our new white houses are destined to become tombstones for a great idea.” Moreover, the FSA often affronted southern racism. “Now comes the New Deal,” a Mississippi planter remarked, “with a law to acquire our plantations . . . and divide the land up again into family sized farms of 40 acres and a mule—the same promise the other Yankees made to the negroes during the other Civil War.” Such sentiments grew at the end of the 1930s, heating up with the entry of the United States into World War II. Conservatives and large-farm organizations blasted FSA’s innovative programs as being unAmerican, communistic, socialized medicine, and sociological experimentation. Like other progressive New Deal efforts, the agency came under fatal attack in 1943, when Congress, led by southern Democrats, effectively gutted the FSA by slashing funds and demanding liquidation of many projects. Three years later the moderate, well-heeled Farmers Home Administration replaced what was left, ending America’s first war on poverty. As in the case of other large-scale social-change efforts, however, there were lasting

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remnants: one of the FSA’s long-term policy effects culminated in the civil rights movement of the 1960s.28 Soil Conservation A third extremely innovative New Deal land policy, remarkable in both focus and process, concerned the conservation of soil and water resources, what today is called the natural environment. In 1933 Tugwell and Interior Secretary Ickes set up in the latter’s department a temporary Soil Erosion Service under Hugh H. Bennett, who initiated a public works program on privately owned farmland. “Big Hugh” had been preaching conservation since joining the USDA back in 1903; his popular bulletin Soil Erosion: A National Menace (1928) spread the gospel about the devastating waste of natural resources. Over half of the entire land base of the nation was susceptible to erosion, and nearly three hundred million acres had been ruined or severely damaged. The calamity of the Dust Bowl epitomized the issue. In 1935 FDR transferred the Erosion Service to USDA, and Congress soon established the SCS, with Bennett continuing at the helm. To its original mission, Secretary Wallace added flood control in 1936, small water facilities in 1937, farm forestry, irrigation / drainage work, and submarginal land purchase in 1938. By 1940 the agency boasted over ten thousand regular employees, including engineers, biologists, foresters, economists, and soil scientists, mostly in ten regional offices and every rural county. The SCS advanced major land programs in strikingly new ways, especially given that it operated on private property.29 The SCS concentrated on the physical aspects of land use, “the actual treatment and handling of land”—not merely dams and terraces, but crop rotation, ground cover, contour plowing, strip cropping, reforestation, wildlife habitat, and other land-use changes. At first the SCS promulgated such techniques through demonstration projects in selected watersheds. Over fifty thousand farmers signed five-year agreements to install conservation measures in exchange for SCS materials and technical assistance. Young men in hundreds of Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camps provided additional labor. Nearly two hundred demonstration sites represented every agricultural region of the country, each with distinctive soils, climate, and topography. The new conservation practices and land-use adjustments spotlighted in these projects spread to nearby areas.30

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Such education and “demonstration effects,” however, were limited and inefficient in reaching large numbers of landowners. The SCS chief Bennett and USDA leaders aimed to involve millions of farmers and hundreds of millions of acres. But how? The Extension service preferred an individualist educational approach, its own specialty, and strenuously opposed the SCS’s direct engagement with farmers. As in the AAA, personal and ideological differences mixed in with bureaucratic battles. Proposals came from many quarters, although no one knew quite what to do.31 Enter M. L. Wilson, master institution builder. Wilson conceived a collective means of helping farmers to conserve their soil and water. Working with the young USDA attorney Philip Glick, he knew that the federal government could not regulate private land use, but states could. Wilson believed that farmers as a group were intelligent enough to conserve land if they got educational, technical, and financial assistance from the government; to that end, he invented a new form of local government. Throughout 1935 Wilson, driven by his decentralized vision and deep policy experience, and Glick, using his superb legal training from the University of Chicago, drafted and redrafted a model state law to create the “soil conservation district,” a special-purpose public body whereby local farmers could collectively implement erosion controls, with support from the county SCS. The conservation districts, according to the USDA, amounted to “land use cooperatives in which farmers and ranchers pool their resources for community action.”32 Because of his democratic-agrarian sentiments, Wilson incorporated other beliefs into the proposed legislation for the states. First, farmers could not be forced to become conservation-minded. Rather, they should be educated, persuaded, assisted. Local control over organization and administration must obtain rather than a top-down bureaucracy; regulations from above would not work. The bill required “the exercise of local initiative and group responsibility,” as the USDA put it. Second, Wilson coined a new term, land occupiers, to include not just owners but tenant farmers, all of whom should be members of the conservation district. Wallace agreed that all users of farmland must be encouraged to vote in the district referendum, adding that even the poorest tenants should receive “the educational opportunities which come from such participation.” Third, they strongly urged that district boundaries be “over a naturally bounded area like a watershed” instead of existing governmental (county) lines. Finally and crucially, Wilson and the others held that the conservation districts should be able to regulate land use. Individual

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farmer-landowner action alone was insufficient to deal with the problems of conservation; social or collective action was required. Here as elsewhere, they always emphasized the public interest in private land.33 By late 1935 the draft legislation had been thoroughly vetted in Washington as well as in the states. Owing to the Supreme Court’s declaration in early 1936 that parts of the AAA were unconstitutional as well as other delays, the proposed state law was not published until May 1936. A thirty-page document, with attached legal opinion drafted by Glick from USDA’s solicitor on the proposal’s constitutionality, the model bill called for setting up a state soil conservation committee to encourage the organization of districts. Twenty-five farmers in any given area could petition the committee to set up a soil conservation district. Public hearings and then a referendum were to be held, and a majority of the land occupiers must vote it in. Each district would be governed by a board consisting of two experts, that is, SCS technicians, appointed by the state committee and three farmer-citizens, called district supervisors, elected by the area’s land occupiers.34 The districts would have considerable powers within their boundaries: education and research, demonstration projects, conservation measures, landuse planning and regulation (but only after public hearings and explicit, formal approval by a majority of land occupiers), construction of physical structures, and the purchasing and selling of seeds, equipment, and land. Thus the USDA erosion-control program would be administered not by a federal bureaucracy but by a decentralized, citizen-led unit of local government with regulatory powers. The soil conservation districts were a three-way collaboration on land-use adjustments between the district, state, and federal governments. According to its legal architect, the scheme had a purposeful, built-in “cooperative interdependence.” Rather than a layer cake of local-state-federal levels, it was concocted more like an intermixed “marble cake,” Glick noted. Wilson believed that the districts could exemplify “economic democracy in agriculture.”35 In February 1937, soon after his landslide reelection, President Roosevelt sent the model act to every governor, urging passage in the next legislative session. Most states rapidly adopted enabling legislation to allow the formation of soil conservation districts: twenty-two states in 1937, thirty-nine within two more years, and all by 1945. Conservation districts themselves grew steadily, from 113 in 1939 to 771 in 1942 and to 1,253 two years later. Most of the first soil conservation districts were organized around SCS demonstration areas, but supporting the districts financially and technically

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soon became the SCS’s major activity all over. The states, however, also adapted USDA’s proposed legislation. Two of the most consequential alterations were the following: almost all districts were bounded along county lines, not watersheds; and while a slight majority of states gave them regulatory powers, hardly any ever used them. Even Wallace’s and Wilson’s strong push to include all land occupiers, not just landowners, as voting members of the district got eliminated in many states.36 Despite these setbacks, the USDA agrarian planners considered it a good start. Working with the states and local farmers, they had succeeded in establishing a new form of local government that treated conservation problems on private land. In effect, the SCS provided operating funds, equipment, and expertise to the citizen-led conservation districts, which in turn directed the work of the SCS technicians. For a short while, during 1937–38, it even seemed as though the federal SCS and the local conservation districts could unify the diverse New Deal agricultural programs and coordinate them in the new land policy so ardently sought by the USDA’s agrarian intellectuals. While this integrative goal shifted to another land-use planning initiative later in 1938, the joint program of the SCS and the soil conservation districts was nevertheless a major mid-decade victory for the New Deal land planners.37 The districts in their various state guises and the SCS, rechristened the Natural Resources Conservation Service, live on today. Other Land Programs and Proposals The AAA, FSA, and SCS promulgated the major land-based New Deal policies that operated on a nationwide basis, but they were hardly the only ones. Many other action programs deeply influenced land use as well as rural people’s lives. The very month he took office in 1933, as farm foreclosures skyrocketed, FDR established a Farm Credit Administration (FCA) to combine Progressive-era federal land banks with new production credit associations and other agricultural loans. Congress soon passed a farm mortgage bill, enabling refinancing on favorable terms. The next year it funded the federal guarantee of land-purchase loans and related credit assistance, managed by the FCA. As in the other agrarian programs, local committees of farmers assisted in this debt-adjustment work. Another national agency dramatically affecting not only land but everyday life in the countryside was the Rural Electrification Administration (REA), created in 1935 the week after the RA and the SCS, when only 10 percent of farm families had electricity. The REA set

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up local farmer cooperatives and loaned them money to extend electrical lines. By 1939 the proportion of electrified farms had more than doubled, and 8,000 citizen-directors governed 550 REA cooperatives. Within a few years almost all farms had electricity, a remarkable technological achievement brought about by the equally remarkable social mechanism of the rural electric co-ops. In 1939, during the Third New Deal, the FCA and the REA became integrated into USDA and both continue today as central institutions of rural America.38 Other New Deal land programs focused on specific regions of the country. The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) had dramatic impacts on land in much of the southeast. Aimed at producing flood control, cheap electricity, and agricultural reform, the TVA allied with the Extension services and the AAA, virtually ignoring the SCS and the FSA. The head of TVA, David Lilienthal, popularized his claim of grass-roots democracy, yet TVA programs involved more the “grass-tops,” as Tugwell remarked. Two other new land policies applied mainly to the West. The Taylor Grazing Act of 1934 virtually closed the public domain to further settlement and established local grazing districts among ranchers to regulate grazing on public lands, another highly participatory land-use program. Also operative largely in the West, the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 ended the disposal of so-called surplus Indian lands. Under a federal law of 1887, Native Americans had lost an astounding ninety million acres. The “Indian New Deal” commissioner, John Collier, restored self-determination to the tribes and tried to balance the demands of traditional culture and economic modernization.39 Also regional in scope was a major presidential commission report, The Future of the Great Plains, released at the end of 1936. A product of the Great Plains Committee, the publication brought to a head one line of work by Gray and his staff of land economists. The two-hundred-page report identified the basic cause of the Dust Bowl as transplanting farm practices from the humid East to a semiarid region, where they manifestly did not apply. Yet the farming practices grew from cultural roots, or “attitudes of mind.” Eleven such assumptions had led to the “destructive effects of undesirable tendencies” on the land. Today the report’s critical discussion of these attitudes sounds surprisingly current and environmentalist—for instance, “That man conquers nature,” “That natural resources are inexhaustible,” “That [land and capital] values will increase indefinitely.” Other attitudes criticized in the report seemed to imply dramatic reforms: “That an owner may do with his property as he likes,” “That the factory farm is generally desirable.” But the analysis was more radical than the policy recommendations. A program of

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readjustment would have the federal government (1) acquire rangelands for use by the new cooperative grazing districts, (2) enlarge undersized operations to become family-sized farms, (3) conserve water supply, (4) resettle migrants from the region, and (5) study natural resources to determine their best long-term use. Some of these squarely New Deal notions went too far for the region’s residents and their political representatives. Only a few of the proposals in The Future of the Great Plains ever got implemented.40 During the same time, another presidential commission went further in leveling a full-bore critique of agriculture and land policy in the United States. In early 1937 the Committee on Farm Tenancy—which included Wallace, Wilson, Tugwell, Gray, Alexander, and Johnson as well as representatives of the Farm Bureau and STFU—issued a comprehensive report. While narrowly entitled Farm Tenancy, it remained for thirty years the best government study of rural poverty in the nation. Again, Gray and his busy staff did most of the work. They declared that fully half of American farmers lacked adequate security on the land. The national tenancy rate had steadily increased from 25 percent in 1880 to 42 percent in 1935. Even many families who owned their farms were seriously disadvantaged, especially those, over half a million, who farmed submarginal land, owned farms that were too small, and were deeply in debt. The report specified the causes of such insecurity as defective federal land policies, negative consequences of fee-simple ownership, and failure of the private sector to provide credit. Soil erosion and “social erosion” were intolerable, with one-fourth of all farm families poverty-stricken. The committee indicted the private property system itself and recommended a set of fairly drastic tenure reforms. It urged federal purchase of land for resale to tenants under long-term contracts, a program that would prevent uneconomic division of farm units, wastage of natural resources, reckless speculation, and absentee landlordism. Although viable family-sized farms stood as the chief objective, subsistence homesteads and large-scale cooperatives were endorsed. The committee called for rehabilitation loans to reach three million of the poorest farmers, mostly in the South. It advocated more and better migrant labor camps as well as land-use planning. The states were encouraged to improve landlord–tenant leases along with health and educational services. Thus the committee essentially proposed an expanded RA, perhaps under the name Farm Security Administration.41 As the historian Graham Taylor argues, the decentralization and citizen participation of these early New Deal agencies and programs—AAA, FSA, SCS, FCA, REA, TVA, and public grazing districts—all occurred because

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of executive and administrative action, not by legislative mandate. Only the Indian Reorganization Act enjoyed congressional leadership for decentralized tribal administration. The administrators of the agrarian programs themselves initiated the grass-roots involvement, which soon yielded momentous consequences. One was increased administrative flexibility but also confusion over lines of authority and responsibility. Another result was that the debate over citizen participation occurred not in public but within the bureaucracies. Important questions of public–private relations as well as policy coordination were fought and decided largely within the USDA rather than in Congress. It was these confusions and debates that led to the Third agrarian New Deal.42 Almost all historians conclude their treatments of New Deal agriculture at this point, in the period 1937 to early 1938, highlighting the first two New Deals: AAA, SCS, and farm credit all succeeded, at least politically, to lay the foundation for today’s farm policies, while the FSA suffered defeat. Further, REA, TVA, the Taylor Grazing Act, and the Indian Reorganization Act often receive scholarly attention, all as initiatives of 1933–35.43 Yet the core claim of this book is that the New Deal agricultural drama continued to build, with the final act just beginning. Indeed, the most exciting, promising story did not gain center stage until 1939 and rose to a climax only in the early forties (see part 2). Now, to set the policy stage, I want go back to 1935, to the prehistory of what became the Third and Intended New Deal in agriculture. Portents 1935: From Emergency Programs to Longtime Land Planning In October 1935 President Roosevelt marked the “transition from an emergency to a more permanent plan for American agriculture.” He said that in mid-1933, when the AAA was established, it faced dire conditions that could not wait. But “it was understood from the start,” FDR averred, that longrange planning should replace the stopgap measures initially undertaken. Referring to the secretary of agriculture and the AAA administrator, he added, “It was their intention—as it is mine—to pass from the purely emergency phases necessitated by a grave national crisis to a long-time, more permanent plan for American agriculture.” For this purpose he and Secretary Wallace had established the AAA Program Planning Division in 1934, under the direction of Tolley. Within a year, this division launched several experimental programs that lay the groundwork for long-term land-use planning, opening a new chapter in American agricultural policy.44

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A month after FDR’s statement, in a visionary speech ranging from economics and class conflict to philosophy and religion, Wallace elaborated the switch before the Association of Land-Grant Colleges and Universities. First of all, he admitted to considerable problems with the current AAA: “It is no news to you to hear that our agricultural adjustment programs thus far have had some serious shortcomings. The historical base, the flat percentage adjustment, the degree of centralized administration necessary in Washington, all made inevitable some injustices and some farm management practices which none of us approved.” In light of subsequent criticism by historians, this point needs stressing. Neither Wallace nor his lieutenants liked the early AAA program. They frequently criticized it, justifying it only as an emergency measure, an attempt to raise rock-bottom farm prices as quickly as possible. Now, in late 1935, Wallace announced his alternative: a “sound foundation for longtime agricultural adjustment. We [are] at last approaching the problem in the way we would have liked to approach it in 1933 had there been time.” 45 Wallace then referred to two recent projects envisioned by Assistant Secretary Wilson, undertaken by Tolley’s Program Planning Division, and implemented in part by Allin: regional adjustment and county planning. The planning division also incubated two additional policy experiments, another innovative endeavor of Wilson’s in adult education and Gray’s farmpurchase initiative, which instituted national land-use planning (and employed Taylor).46 Key parts of these four programs eventually crystallized into the showcase of the Third New Deal: cooperative land-use planning. Here, then, in 1935 were all six of the agrarian intellectuals who would conceive and implement that Intended New Deal, combining new types of continuing education and participatory research with unprecedented citizen planning. Regional Adjustment After two years of experience with the AAA’s commodity-based programs, both USDA leaders and farm groups felt that they were too inflexible and could be improved. Therefore, the AAA Program Planning Division undertook a Regional Adjustment Project that worked with all forty-eight agricultural colleges, asking, “What adjustments are needed in the different type-of-farming areas in each State in order to bring about conservation and good land use?” An unusual federal / state cooperative effort, the research project compiled regional and national data on such trends as farm size, land use, and commodity specialization. The study assumed that land-use changes

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could help balance supply and demand and thus contribute to solving the overproduction problem of American agriculture. It also held land-tenure implications.47 Between March and August 1935, the BAE as well as the AAA planning division and the land grants devoted considerable effort toward the Regional Adjustment Project. Researchers divided every state into type-of-farming areas and analyzed each, identifying about seven hundred subregions nationwide. Late that summer four regional meetings were held, the department being represented by Wallace, Wilson, Tolley, Gray, and others. Along with the expert land-grant personnel, they concluded that cash crops should be reduced and soil-conserving crops increased. Better conservation methods could bring supply into line with current demand, that is, the same adjustments could deliver both soil conservation and crop reduction, good for ecology as well as economy. Researchers presented these findings at the meeting of the Association of Land-Grant Colleges and Universities in November 1935. “The whole endeavor appealed to us,” Secretary Wallace remarked, “as a pioneer effort to synthesize on a national basis the knowledge already available from years of agricultural research.” 48 The Regional Adjustment Project signified the first transition from emergency to longtime programs. This “regional approach,” Wallace continued, “is one of the most significant and far-reaching developments in the history of American agriculture . . . , the beginnings of policies and events of surpassing importance both to agriculture and to the nation.” He added that the process must be democratic, which to him meant the wide participation of farmers in decentralized planning as well as administration. Tolley, then the director of the Giannini Foundation of Agricultural Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, said at the same meeting in 1935, “The work undertaken was unspectacular and necessarily somewhat technical, but I believe in future years it will be recognized as marking a milestone in the history of agricultural research in the United States.” He also agreed with his boss on the other point, that as “the farmers and these agencies assisting them gain in skill and experience, the objective of agricultural planning in a democracy will be more and more completely realized.” Wallace much later recalled that “one of the most profound experiences I enjoyed while Secretary of Agriculture was sitting in on the Regional Conferences and then discussing the problems at the national meeting of the Land-Grant Colleges and Universities in November of 1935. . . . We wanted in 1935 to get more and more onto the basis of proper land use.” 49

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The regional project expanded over the next two years, with more research by the land grants and the USDA. Such state / federal coordination was as new as it was promising. The Program Planning Division continued to focus on soil conservation and land-use adjustments. Its most immediate and impressive political feat came in early 1936, following the Supreme Court’s decision against the Agricultural Adjustment Act. The research already conducted by the Regional Adjustment Project led directly to replacement legislation, the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act of 1936, passed by Congress and signed by FDR just seven weeks after the Court ruling! Owing to this work and its policy impact, Tolley took over the entire AAA in June 1936. He had already been serving as acting administrator since early in the year, having been called back to Washington from California.50 Tolley had also been overseeing a second, even more significant planning experiment. County Planning Neither farmers nor the state Extension services played much of a role in the Regional Adjustment Project. At the regional meetings in the summer of 1935, Assistant Secretary Wilson proposed to draw both groups into the new national planning process. His initiative led to the Program Planning Division’s County Planning Project, directed by the young Allin, who aimed to “discover a sound basis for improving the AAA.” Active in fortysix states, this project became the main prototype of the cooperative landuse planning program in 1938. To the later effort, it furnished not only general ideas, procedures, and leadership but also ongoing county committees.51 The Extension services had long boasted county program planning by advisory citizen committees, but they had no link to the federal government. The County Planning Project joined local with national planning within the major New Deal action agency. It established a new educational flow of information and communication, a “two-way track” of facts and judgments between farmers and AAA administrators. Each state Extension director appointed a project leader for county planning and set up a college committee as well as a statewide farmer committee. At the county level, the Extension agent appointed a committee of the “agricultural leadership” of ten to twenty farmers, plus community-level committees. In each county, the planning committee considered these questions: (1) Assuming normal weather and prospective prices, what products and levels of farm output would be expected

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in 1936, if (a) federal controls on production and marketing ended? (b) “farming systems so adjusted as to maintain soil fertility and control erosion?” (2) What products and levels of output would be expected “after all land not adapted to agriculture has been shifted to other uses,” given sufficient time for such adjustments to maintain soil fertility and control erosion? Almost all of the county planning committees answered both parts of the first question, but few managed to address the second.52 Project leaders tallied the findings for each state and compared them to the Regional Adjustment Project. Under no federal crop controls (question 1a), the farmer committees nationwide projected 23 million (8 percent) more acres in soil-depleting crops, whereas their recommendation (question 1b) was 131 ⁄2 million acres (5 percent) fewer. The experts in the regional project had suggested a 7 percent decrease in such crops. The county planning and regional adjustment groups also recommended a similar decrease in total cropland while the farmers suggested increasing pastureland more than the government researchers did. For cotton and tobacco, the farmer committees suggested more than twice the reductions specified by the experts. For corn and wheat, on the other hand, Regional Adjustment recommended more than double those of County Planning. The two projects tracked closely on total recommended numbers of livestock, although the farmers preferred significantly more beef cattle and milk cows. Overall, farmers and scientists agreed on the direction of change for two-thirds of their 173 recommendations even when the degree of adjustments varied widely.53 Over the next two years, through mid-1938, twenty-four hundred County Planning committees addressed broader agricultural problems, particularly land use and soil conservation. The Program Planning Division increasingly saw that “farmer thinking” was essential to its work. It proposed that the committees be used as advisory groups to assist local AAA administrators in developing integrated policies aimed at “unified action programs.” The AAA planning division urged revisiting question 2 to focus on land-use patterns and adjustments. It also suggested that the RA’s (formerly its own) state landuse specialists could be especially useful to the county planning committees. The committees constructed local land-use maps, and by 1938 nearly one thousand of them sought to establish a longtime land-use program for their county.54 All of these features would be incorporated into the larger effort of the Third New Deal. Further, the County Planning Project experimented with the AAA program to improve soil conservation and land use. Eight or nine counties each

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year were asked to “localize” the AAA by testing diverse alternatives. If they agreed, the experimental counties varied benefit payments by local land use and type-of-farm areas as well as by kind of adjustments. Others asked farmers to prepare their own farm adjustment plan and to estimate its cost and likelihood of implementation. Such experiments were not only educational, but, according to the AAA administrator Tolley, they increasingly provided farmers with “a real voice” in reforming the action agency. In addition, ongoing evaluation led USDA to conclude that farmers demanded a more unified, comprehensive program at the county level. In fact, this growing realization soon prompted development of cooperative land-use planning in the Third New Deal.55 As Secretary Wallace had told the Association of Land-Grant Colleges and Universities in November 1935, the Regional Adjustment and the County Planning projects signaled the beginning of a transition from the emergency New Deal to a more permanent policy. The Program Planning Division saw the need for more nuanced adjustments, both on farms and in counties, than the stopgap measure of 1933 allowed and sought to avoid freezing agriculture into unsustainable historical patterns. Especially since the Court’s declaration that the AAA was partially unconstitutional in early 1936, local planning had become more urgent because of the emphasis on long-range conservation policy. Allin believed that such planning must be expanded to include “all agricultural land use and its implications for all manner of economic relations,” not just the AAA program. On a two-week field trip to the West, he wrote urgently to Undersecretary Wilson about democratizing the project. The planning committees must be elected, not appointed, if the project was to “fulfill your expectations [and] mine.” It was a “a job begun that can never be finished” since planning was a process, not an outcome. The states, Allin said elsewhere, regarded “it as one of the best efforts ever started.”56 One of the reasons for the states’ positive response was that public agencies needed to get more farmer input in order to make better policy. Nearly eight hundred different type-of-farming regions covered the country, and each held deep local knowledge that could make for more tailored, effective programs. The Regional Adjustment and County Planning projects showed that substantial agreement existed between the opinions of scientists and citizens. Neither individual farmers nor technical experts alone could solve farm problems like soil conservation or land-use changes. The philosophy behind the planning project was that farmers knew their own locality best, but they did not know the “outside forces” affecting them as well. The opposite was

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true of the state and federal experts. Wallace, Wilson, Tolley, Allin, and others believed that citizens and specialists could unite to improve agricultural policy.57

Adult Education The County Planning Project was particularly active in Montana, where thirty-nine of the forty-one counties participated. But the state agricultural leaders diverged considerably from USDA’s guidelines by joining the planning program to new adult-education work. In Montana the county planning committees sponsored community discussion groups of farm people, led by local leaders, around topics of interest. Hundreds of such discussions were held all over the state, and thousands attended, with an average of eighteen per meeting. Going beyond USDA protocol, Montana called the program the “Agricultural Discussion and Adjustment Project.”58 Montana took the unusual step of actually combining the planning and the discussion programs, but most other states participated in this, yet another offering from Tolley’s AAA Program Planning Division: an initiative in adult education for farm people and Extension workers. It was Wilson’s doing too. In 1935, with Secretary Wallace’s blessing, he established the Program Study and Discussion Section in the AAA planning division under Tolley. To run the unit, they hired Carl F. Taeusch, Wilson’s former philosophy professor at the University of Chicago. No one expected immediate payoffs from this educational effort; they saw it rather in light of a “long-time, more permanent plan for American agriculture,” as FDR put it at this time. (Because continuing education was so central to the Intended New Deal, I devote much of chapter 7 to this Program Study and Discussion unit and merely summarize it here.) Program Study and Discussion had two main programs: group discussions for farmers and schools of philosophy for Extension workers. The discussion groups emphasized broad social issues of agriculture and public policy. Through the state Extension services, the AAA educational unit engaged local farm men and women in off-season winter discussions of such topics as: Should farm benefit payments be abolished? Do farmers want the federal government to deal with farm problems? Is the farm laborer getting a square deal? Farm security: How can tenants find it?

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These and other subjects exposed the heart of the New Deal. For instance, the topic on benefit payments asked whether FDR’s key farm program, the AAA, should continue! The Program Study and Discussion unit prepared and distributed millions of copies of discussion guides, which offered diverse points of view on over fifty such topics. It also trained tens of thousands of local discussion leaders. Three million rural people took part in these discussion groups.59 Even more remarkable were the schools of philosophy, originally for Extension workers and later including local planning leaders. These four-day conferences provided, as Wilson said, an “orientation or background to the phenomena of democracy in rural society.” The general aim of these schools was captured in an early proposal: “The point of view of philosophy is not that of solutions but attitudes of individuals and groups toward the more fundamental problems in human and national life. It is necessary to consider these [agricultural] policies in terms of the philosophical aspects of western civilization and to secure therefrom philosophical aspects of economic democracy in agriculture.” At the schools, national luminaries in the humanities and social science lectured each morning and, with USDA personnel, led small-group discussions in the afternoon.60 The most frequent theme of the schools became, What is a desirable national agricultural program? Presumably the USDA did not claim to have all the answers. Speakers and participants were encouraged to question New Deal policies; well-known critics often numbered among the lecturers. One hundred and fifty such schools were held, attended by more than fifty thousand Extension workers and rural leaders. The intention of the discussion groups and schools of philosophy was to expand the cultural horizons of local and state leaders. Wallace and Wilson thought that exposure to new ideas could help democratize as well as modernize agricultural policy and rural society. Discussion and philosophy alone would not reform the countryside, but, as did Jefferson and Dewey, they believed that education could lead to positive social change. Wallace, Wilson, and the others were planting seeds.61 Land Utilization Even before this flurry of new educational, research, and planning activities, the USDA had undertaken another transition from emergency to permanent agricultural policy: buying up submarginal, that is, poor and unprofitable, farms. This initiative is important to the story of the Third New

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Deal because it contributed both techniques and personnel to the later cooperative planning program, plus an understanding of land-use planning itself. Like the other initiatives, this one originally resided in Tolley’s Program Planning Division. Early in 1934, when Wallace, Tugwell, and Wilson established the AAA planning unit, it included a Land Policy Section. Despite its complicated administrative history, Gray led the land-purchase program for the next five years and initially hired Taylor to work in North Carolina. Gray continued to head BAE’s Division of Land Economics, so the USDA housed two land-planning units, both under Gray—thus effectively integrated, although the AAA Land Policy Section was more action-oriented and had a much larger staff in Washington and the field (130 in total). Gray received $28 million from the Public Works Administration via the Federal Emergency Relief Administration to begin the nation’s first submarginal land purchase or land utilization program.62 In this endeavor, the USDA worked closely with the National Resources Board (NRB), which included Wallace. Wilson chaired the NRB’s Land Planning Committee while Gray directed its research. The successive national boards encouraged the creation of state and local planning agencies and placed land-planning specialists in forty-five states.63 Late in 1934 Wilson, Gray, his two USDA staffs, and others released a Report of the Land Planning Committee, the most comprehensive national survey of natural resources and land policy in American history to date. With strong support from Wallace and Tugwell, Wilson’s and Gray’s committee proposed that the federal government purchase 75 million acres of private farmland and 178 million acres of private forest land. Deemed unprofitable or submarginal, the farmland comprised 454,000 farms with a value of $683 million. This land was to be retired from growing crops and devoted to more conservational uses such as state and federal forests, regulated grazing, demonstration areas, recreation, particularly for the low-income urban population, wildlife refuges, public parks, and the enlarging of Indian reservations. Despite the grand design, the program ended up purchasing only about 10 million acres, mostly in the Great Plains dust bowl.64 In May 1935 Gray’s land-planning work became a core part of the new RA. Tugwell, the RA’s administrator, put Gray in charge of the Division of Land Utilization, where he assumed control of all federal agricultural landplanning and purchase activities. Taylor led the RA’s Division of Rural Resettlement to relocate the people displaced by the land program. Gray’s RA division absorbed the AAA Land Policy Section into its Land-Use Planning

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Section. This new section acquired and reorganized the National Resources Board’s consultants, who became the RA’s state land-planning specialists. The land-use work focused on problem areas and resource maladjustments and also created land-classification maps and joint citizen / scientist committees. It proposed “directional measures” or institutional adjustments and advocated policies like rural zoning, recently originated in Wisconsin, to direct farm settlement as well as tenure reforms to improve security for landless farmers. The land-use section also conducted intensive “area planning analysis” in at least one county per state. Overall, Gray’s RA division substantially advanced a program of national land-use planning.65 All these aspects of land utilization would later be taken up and extended by the cooperative land-use planning program of the Third New Deal. In July 1937 Congress passed the Bankhead–Jones Farm Tenant Act, which included land-utilization provisions, and five weeks later Secretary Wallace replaced the RA with the FSA. However, he did not put the RA’s landuse and purchase program in the new agency, but consolidated it with BAE’s Division of Land Economics, now led by M. M. Kelso, formerly of Gray’s RA unit and a Wisconsin institutionalist. Gray became assistant BAE chief for land utilization, thus uniting the two land research and planning staffs administratively for the first time into essentially a new division, greatly expanded because of the large RA staff. However, only a year later, in October 1938, Wallace reorganized the entire USDA (see chapter 6). He moved the BAE’s recently acquired land-utilization program to the SCS, and transferred the state land-planning specialists to the newly created BAE Division of State and Local Planning, led by Allin. The BAE Land Economics Division had other researchers in seven regional offices around the country, as did Taylor’s sociology division. All three large research units of the BAE began assisting the new cooperative land-use planning program in early 1939.66 The complicated administrative history of the land-utilization, or submarginal land–purchase, program may be interesting, but the substance of the consequent cooperative land-use planning program is even more exciting (see part 2). It is this later momentous initiative that attempted to coordinate and integrate the heretofore separate action programs of the USDA: agricultural adjustment, farm security, soil conservation, and all the others. I have also noted that the initial portents of long-term agricultural policy, including county planning, participatory research, adult education, and land utilization, emerged during the Second New Deal in that “hothouse of

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policy innovation,” the AAA Program Planning Division. They would all come to fruition in the Third New Deal. The Intent for a Third Agrarian New Deal By 1937 the USDA faced several large problems of coordination and cooperation, not to mention politics. A close observer of the department, the Wisconsin political scientist John Gaus, remarked that “the stage was not only set but even crowded for trouble.” First, there was no overall unity or integration of the agencies at work, either within the department or out in the counties. Through a dizzying array of action programs, the first two New Deals had impacted virtually every farm and family in rural America. Agricultural adjustment, soil conservation, tenure security, farm credit, land utilization, resettlement communities, crop insurance, commodity loans, marketing agreements, flood control, water facilities, farm forestry, public works, rural relief, wildlife management, surplus disposal, youth projects, civilian corps, rural electrification, road building—these were some of the federal activities that had covered the land since 1933. After four years of New Deal agencies operating independently and at the local level, many rural people were justifiably bewildered. Worse still, each of the new agencies saw the world through its own bureaucratic eyes only. Undersecretary Wilson argued forcefully that the situation had produced disorganization and made incompatible demands on the farmer. Allin noted that this administrative overlap led to “ineffectiveness, conflict, and duplication.” The AAA, for example, paid farmers not to plant major crops while the FSA urged increased production.67 Why could the federal government not get its act together and present a unified, coherent program? The mishmash of public agencies confused almost everyone. A second, related problem was that federal programs did not necessarily jibe with local or regional conditions; one policy size did not fit all areas. Milton Eisenhower, USDA’s director of information and also its coordinator of land-use planning, observed, “Nationally consistent programs were sometimes locally contradictory.” He offered an instance in the Dust Bowl: the FSA may make a rehabilitation loan to sustain a distressed family and prevent “a disastrous replowing of that land.” But then the farmer might apply for an AAA wheat subsidy payment and be told that he must plant a crop, even as the SCS advised him to sow grass. No one liked the resulting chaos. There

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were too many “buzzers-around”—waste and duplication of “government men and cars afield.” Given the vast diversity of American agriculture, federal programs needed to be more adaptable and localized. Further, none of the six agrarian intellectuals wanted to freeze inequitable or inefficient regional farm structures into place. The initial, emergency AAA had implemented uniform acreage reductions on a commodity basis. A favorite example of the problem concerned cotton’s westward move: the AAA was preventing the supposed natural movement of cotton, according to the economists’ theory of comparative advantage, out of the old Southeast and into the newer, more efficient Southwest.68 A third growing difficulty highlighted a recurring problem in American history: federal–state relations. By 1937 USDA’s relationship with the landgrant colleges evidenced increasing strain. Before the New Deal, Congress had long appropriated grants-in-aid for agricultural research and educational work to the state colleges, which operated with a high degree of autonomy. In sharp contrast, the new direct-action programs beginning in 1933 were entirely federally funded and the sole responsibility of the secretary of agriculture. Even so, at Wallace’s and Wilson’s behest, the state Extension services and their county agents in particular had successfully administered the New Deal AAA for four years. But this federal, even political, activity departed from Extension’s traditional role as educator. More broadly, the colleges claimed direct contact with farmers and rural communities as their bailiwick, and many felt keenly threatened by the flurry of new alphabet agencies that opened county offices with sizable federal funds and personnel. Two stalwart USDA workers noted, “Now, new and powerful Federal agencies were barging into almost every local community, administering action programs that strongly affected local affairs and dealt with things that were far from being noncontroversial.” Then suddenly in mid-1937, AAA head Tolley took state administration of his agency away from the Extension services and set up separate AAA state and county offices.69 Some college officials applauded and others protested, but all called for clarifying a new working relationship with USDA. A related problem concerned farmers themselves. Not only were they confused by the bewildering array of new federal agencies on the ground, but they also resented government bureaucrats telling them what to do, especially on their own land. Two sociologists who spent years investigating rural attitudes reported “strong opposition to at least some administration policies on the local level.” They added that USDA leaders themselves knew “something

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had to be done.” Moreover, many farmers saw the New Deal as too top-down, too expert-led. During 1936–37 they became increasingly critical of local USDA administration, and some started demanding more unity and coordination, at least at the county level. They wanted to adapt and select government programs that fit their own individual areas. Eisenhower observed that local communities felt they were being “thrust upon rather than initiating and carrying out what they themselves wanted to do.” Again, local farmer consent and more—administrative assistance and cooperation—were absolutely essential for the New Deal agencies to succeed.70 A final rationale for the Third agrarian New Deal was the progressively reformist stance taken by the leading USDA policy intellectuals in the latter 1930s. First, partly because of the criticisms by farmers, they realized that the decentralized federal programs were not democratic enough. They wanted deeper and broader democracy throughout the countryside. Ever since the end of 1936, when Tugwell had taken Wallace on the two-week driving tour of southern poverty, the secretary had become more committed to reform. He also began entertaining presidential ambitions, so he courted liberal constituencies like urban consumers and labor unions. Tolley accompanied Wallace on that trip, and he too moved to the left afterward. In 1938 Taylor published a major study, Disadvantaged Classes in American Agriculture, which detailed the plight of the rural poor. That same year Gray wrote “Disadvantaged Rural Classes,” excoriating the lack of public policies to assist poor farmers, especially compared to the benefits received from better-off farmers. Wilson soon published a similarly hard-hitting critique. And Allin gave increasing attention to the “paradox of poverty in the midst of plenty.” In 1939 Russell Lord summed up their new attitude by distinguishing “two concepts of agrarianism” then battling for supremacy within the USDA, two “agrarian drives”: one simply for higher farm prices, the other for family-based farming, “the security of freehold tenure.” Hence the meaning of his book title, The Agrarian Revival (1939), a revival that Wallace and colleagues embodied. Lord later specified: “the directed agrarian revival.”71 The USDA’s agrarian intellectuals clearly knew and voiced all of the above complaints about the first two New Deals, as I mentioned in the previous section. Indeed, they had been uttering them for years. The AAA had been hastily conceived in 1933; its own creators and implementors saw it as a stopgap, deeply flawed initiative. In New Frontiers, one of the three books he published in 1934, Wallace called the scarcity policy of the early AAA “a shocking commentary on our civilization.” He continued, “The plowing under of 10

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million acres of cotton . . . and the slaughter of 6 million little pigs [in 1933] were not acts of idealism in any sane society.” A major popular publication of the USDA added, “In the emergency period that began in 1933 the need for quick action made it necessary to rely on specialists in planning national farm programs. . . . Even after the immediate emergency phase had passed there remained a persistent tendency, however, to rely on expert opinion alone.” Many USDA bureaucrats themselves criticized the New Deal as too top-down, in violation of their democratic sentiments. Unusual for administrators in their high governmental positions, they admitted they didn’t have all the answers and needed local farmers’ opinions and advice. For instance, Allin berated “the present tendency for the expert to go it alone” in agricultural policy. His proposed a corrective: more farmer participation, a stance that Undersecretary Wilson vociferously backed. Moreover, they understood that plans worked best when local people had a large hand in their making. The agrarian intellectuals therefore sought more citizen involvement in policy making. These were common themes among the USDA and its policy intellectuals during the late 1930s.72 The several large problems facing the agrarian New Deal became increasingly pressing as the 1930s wore on. As early as 1935 Wallace evinced a growing concern with program coordination and appointed a Land Policy Committee to consolidate land use in the department. The next year he added another committee on coordination. Wilson chaired both efforts, which included Tolley, Eisenhower, and the outside adviser John D. Black, a key agricultural economist from Harvard. Gradually they realized that the solution to all the problems might be a cooperative approach to land-use planning. Consequently, in July 1937 Wallace created the Office of Land-Use Coordination and named Eisenhower as coordinator of land-use planning. This office housed regional land-use specialists for the Great Plains as well as a small central staff, including Allin. Their job was to integrate departmental land-use programs and facilitate cooperation between the action agencies and other federal, state, and local units, for instance, the National Resources Committee and the land-grant colleges. Much of Eisenhower’s focus, though, involved reconciling the USDA/land-grant college troubles. The Office of Land-Use Coordination represented the USDA’s penultimate attempt to solve the many difficult problems it faced in the late thirties—prior to, that is, the momentous Mount Weather Agreement of 1938.73

part ii

The Flowering of Democratic Planning The Third and Intended New Deal in Agriculture, 1938–1942

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chapter 6

Reinventing Education, Research, and Planning The Cooperative Land-Use Program Research, planning, and education come together in action. —a. p. chew, the united states department of agriculture: its structure and functions, 1940

B

y 1938 the agrarian New Deal exhibited an abundance of problems. For the past five years the USDA had multiplied its action programs in order to, among other worthy goals, raise farm prices, conserve the soil, and assist the poor. Yet these activities had grown in different, sometimes opposite, directions, often appearing to individual farmers to be contradictory. National programs rarely fit local specificities very well. The state land-grant colleges of agriculture increasingly begrudged the federal government’s role in the countryside. Experts tended to dominate discussion and decision making in their contact with farmers. The USDA agrarian intellectuals, however, knew that they needed the advice and consent of local farmers. They also wanted more democracy in agricultural policy and, indeed, in rural America. For all these reasons, then, they launched the Third agrarian New Deal. Secretary Wallace and his lieutenants concluded that the issues of coordination, localization, federal–state relations, bureaucratic domination, their own limited knowledge, and the desire for farmer participation— all had a single solution (as Allin said, “To kill several birds with one stone”): cooperative land-use planning to correlate the action programs in a given county and eventually throughout the nation. Planning thus became a third major function, along with research and education, of the USDA / land-grant college complex.1

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This idea of the integrative power of land-use planning went back to the land policy work of the 1920s. More immediately, it built directly on the largescale experiments conducted in the AAA Program Planning Division starting in 1935: regional adjustment, county planning, adult education, and submarginal land purchase. Secretary Wallace, Undersecretary Wilson, Tolley, the BAE chief, and the other agrarian intellectuals had conceived and implemented these endeavors, and now, in 1938, they expanded and consolidated them. The resultant program not only redefined agricultural education and research but also introduced widespread participatory planning in public policy, thus embodying the Third, Intended New Deal in agriculture. Forging a New Department of Agriculture, 1938– 1939 Between mid-1938 and early 1939 the USDA reinvented itself. Wallace reorganized it to advance the new initiative, cooperative land-use planning, which constituted the nation’s first attempt to link local citizens with the administrators of public policy at all levels of government. This program comprised a national network of grass-roots planning organizations intent on shaping agricultural policy from the rural neighborhood to the USDA, with its corps of adult educators, researchers, and planners—an “epochal experiment,” Tolley called it. To carry out the effort, the USDA forged a cooperative venture with the state land-grant colleges, beginning with the Mount Weather Agreement and followed by the major departmental reorganization, including reconstituting of the BAE and promoting it to the role of central planning agency. Then, in early 1939 the “new Department of Agriculture” kicked off its final New Deal project.2 The Mount Weather “Truce,” July 1938 The cooperative land-use planning program first achieved life, or rather a bony skeleton, on July 8, 1938, in the Mount Weather Agreement, the Magna Carta of the Third agrarian New Deal. Eighteen USDA representatives, including Wallace, Wilson, Tolley, and Allin, and about twentyfive state Extension directors and others from the Association of Land-Grant Colleges and Universities, gathered for an overnight meeting at an observatory in remote Virginia called Mount Weather. This abandoned weather station happened to be Wallace’s favorite hideout; it had no electricity, and the intense, candlelit sessions ran far into the night. Two attendees wrote that the

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participants “retired to the wilderness to wrestle with the problem, as the oldtime prophets used to do when they were especially in need of wisdom.” In 1936–37 each organization had appointed a federal–state relations committee (Wilson chaired USDA’s); the agreement was their joint product. Entitled “Building Agricultural Land-Use Programs,” the formal pact, called by some a truce, was an attempt to smooth frayed relations between the two institutions as well as to increase farmer participation in public policy. The traditional division of labor between federal and state governments in the areas of research and Extension, outreach and education, was not at issue; the problem was the sudden proliferation of action programs in the New Deal that had upset the intergovernmental balance. Mount Weather provided the framework for reestablishing institutional harmony via the new cooperative planning program of the BAE and the state land-grants’ Extension services.3 The agreement stated that the New Deal programs, administered as they were by the secretary of agriculture, “present an increased need for planning and action by farm people. . . . The Department feels the need for reasonably uniform procedures whereby farmers may take responsibility for the development of sound land-use plans, programs, and policies for the dual purpose of (a) correlating current action programs to achieve stability of farm income and farm resources, and (b) helping determine and guide the longer-time public efforts toward these ends. In order to function effectively and democratically in the national field, these procedures must provide for analysis, planning, and program building beginning in the communities and extending then to county, State, and national levels.” Land-grant colleges, for their part, would intensify their long-standing “efforts to help farm people build comprehensive programs for rural improvement.” 4 To address current issues, the USDA and the colleges agreed to set up “a cooperative plan for building land-use programs and policies and having such programs apply to varying local conditions.” In every rural county, the state Extension services would establish a planning committee consisting of at least ten farmers, a few forest owners if present, local representatives of the federal action agencies, notably AAA, SCS, and FSA, and the county Extension agent. A farmer would always chair the committee, and a substantial majority of its members would be farmers. These committees “shall correlate on a county basis, the land-use plans, programs, and policies developed by community and neighborhood planning committees.” The community committees were to be “the cornerstone of the whole planning organization.” In addition, each state would establish an agricultural land-use program or

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policy committee composed of the state heads of Extension, the agricultural experiment station, AAA, SCS, FSA; the state BAE land-use planning specialist, later called the BAE state representative; and other public agencies with land programs—plus several farm people representing the different type-of-farming regions in the state.5 The USDA and land-grant colleges also agreed that “in all States farmerthinking should dominate the work” of the county committees. Enough uniformity of methods should obtain at each level to permit correlation of plans on the next higher levels, community, county, state, national. Further, federal agency administrators at the state and county levels should coordinate their programs with the planning committees. Whenever the action agencies could not follow committee recommendations, they should explain why not, for “farmers must see tangible results from their work,” the document concluded. Secretary Wallace wrote that the department and the Association of Land-Grant Colleges and Universities had come to “a significant and farreaching agreement. They declared their intention to cooperate in establishing democratic and cooperative procedures and institutions that would give farm people an effective voice in formulating, correlating, and localizing public agricultural programs. . . . [These] new procedures and institutions must provide for analysis, planning, and program building beginning in the communities and extending then to county, State, and national levels.” 6 This, then, was the Mount Weather Agreement, the foundational pact that launched cooperative planning and the Third agrarian New Deal. Two longtime USDA participant-observers noted that “it became the symbol of the spirit of the next four years.” Planning thus emerged as a third major function of the USDA / land-grant complex, a “kind of planning,” others remarked, “that pools the experience and judgment of farmers, specialists, and administrators.” Two political scientists, close students of the USDA, saw Mount Weather as “a most significant effort to democratize the administration of national farm programs” since it opened up direct lines of communication between the department and local farmers. Planning henceforth was to have parallel significance to the long-standing areas of federal–state collaboration in research and education. Wilson noted that Mount Weather marked only the third new departure in the history of the Extension service, the others being its creation in 1914 and the New Deal of 1933. What made it so new, he stressed, was the great advance in program coordination as well as in farmer participation. He added, “In the history of agricultural relationships [between local farmers, Extension, and USDA] there has never been anything quite com-

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parable to the Mount Weather Agreement.” He and the other agrarian intellectuals discovered soon enough that its ideals proved difficult to realize.7 The Reorganized Department, October 1938 On October 6, 1938 (the day before his fiftieth birthday), Wallace reorganized the mammoth USDA, primarily to begin implementing the Mount Weather Agreement. Before announcing the reorganization itself, he set the stage by highlighting the “democratic and cooperative . . . place of farmers in the departmental structure.” He offered two “important considerations in the field of planning national and local agricultural programs which the recent experience of this Department has served to crystallize.” Most significant was the essential unity of the “farm problem.” All the different concerns, such as tenancy, erosion, prices, income, rehabilitation, flood control, and submarginal lands, affected one another: “Action programs cannot deal with one segment out of relation to the other parts of the whole problem.” Land use formed the commonality of this “complex of interrelated factors.” In addition, sound planning required not only technical research but also citizen involvement. Wallace thus addressed the connection between farm participation and expert knowledge: “Farmers need the help that specialists can provide, and specialists must draw on the experience and judgment of farmers. The need, therefore, is to provide for integrating and unifying the planning of both groups as a guide to all public agricultural programs.”8 Wallace then identified the immediate problem in the USDA, which reverberated throughout the countryside: Each action agency, such as AAA, SCS, and FSA, planned for itself in isolation from the others. He reasserted the necessity of general planning at the departmental level in order “to determine the major adjustments needed to promote a healthy agriculture.” He declared his present aim to develop “our broad objectives cooperatively, with all agencies agreeing upon the basic facts, accepting common standards, deciding upon priorities, formulating commonly accepted judgments. . . . We need, therefore, to establish departmental machinery which will enable local and State planning to reach the Secretary in a truly significant and usable form, and which will, at the same time, integrate the general planning and program forming activities within the Department; the combined results to guide all the action programs of the Department.”9 Thereupon Wallace announced that the BAE would serve as the general planning unit for the entire USDA. He transferred the main planning staffs

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of the action agencies to the BAE. Tolley, the current AAA head, would lead the new, empowered BAE and be in charge of “this over-all agricultural program planning work.” Moreover, to review the BAE’s planning recommendations before they reached the secretary, Wallace set up an Agricultural Program Board, chaired by the land-use coordinator, Eisenhower, and including the heads of all USDA action agencies and Extension (fig. 8). After evaluation by this department-wide board, particularly as to “administrative feasibility and practicality,” the secretary would issue directives to implement the recommendations of the land-use planning organization. This completed what the economist John D. Black, a close participant-observer of these changes, called “the final phase of ‘putting planning into action.’ ” In this manner, Wallace reoriented the USDA to the purpose of long-term cooperative, participatory planning.10 Several other points about the departmental reorganization are critical. First, Wallace, Wilson, and other USDA leaders sought to decrease the size and power of the AAA, effectuated by removing its general planning capability. Wallace thus transferred the work of the AAA’s Program Planning Division to the more reform-minded BAE, whose role he elevated, as the historian Richard Kirkendall put it. The AAA became a more strictly operational unit. It also lost jurisdiction over the important agricultural marketing and regulatory agreements, as Wallace created a new agency, the Agricultural Marketing Service, to be led by the former BAE chief Albert G. Black. The AAA’s operations were thereby simplified, according to Eisenhower and Roy Kimmel. In addition, the reorganization sought to reduce the number of agencies that most farmers had to deal with—perhaps only AAA and SCS.11 The agricultural historians Theodore Saloutos and John D. Hicks observed that the reorganization of the USDA was “the most drastic in a quarter century.” In the eyes of current observers as well, it amounted to a major transformation of one of the federal government’s largest departments. The contemporary political scientists John Gaus and Leon Wolcott noted that Wallace’s “fundamental reorganization . . . was to provide unified departmental planning as a guide to action, integration, and collaboration.” To mark the new departure, the USDA launched a small in-house journal, Land Policy Review, that soon attracted writings by some leading personages, including Eleanor Roosevelt (“Faith in Democracy”) and the public historian Charles A. Beard (“Government and the Humane Spirit”). Equally remarkable was the democratic rhetoric that Wallace used in effecting the

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bureaucratic shake-up, not the most likely spot for such soaring language. Whatever the outcome, its sheer ideological heights surely inspired its supporters. To its enemies, though, those same rhetorical tones threatened. It was left to Wilson, Russell Lord judged, “knowing no set boundaries, distrusting no one, and proceeding with his customary informality,” to do “most of the human negotiating in Washington and afield” that enabled the reorganization plans to click.12 The Reconstituted Bureau of Agricultural Economics As a result of Wallace’s departmental reorganization in October 1938, the BAE effectively became a new agency with the same old name. It continued as an economic research unit but lost its operational programs, mainly regulation and marketing activities, and, most consequentially, occupied a higher position in the USDA, that of the department’s central planning agency. Tolley, who took over as bureau chief to implement these changes, announced “a complete realignment of [the BAE’s] structure and functional segments,” what he and others called the new BAE. For the first time the agency’s mission was “to act as the general planning and program making agency in the Department, and to stimulate participation of farm people in building agricultural programs and policies.” The first of these mandates is fairly well known among New Deal agricultural historians, but the second, advancing farmer participation, is rarely remarked on. The BAE became a more activist agency, mandated both to tie its ongoing research to planning and to plan for action. At the heart of this reconstitution lay the local / national land-use planning program.13 In his first BAE annual report (1939), Tolley said that all the agency’s activities and functions, whether continuing or recently transferred, “have been recast or given new direction to conform to the Secretary’s intent to establish a general departmental planning agency that also would bring to a focus the results of economic and social research and the influence of farmer judgments as expressed through community, county, and State planning committees.” To carry out these new assignments, the BAE reconstituted itself. It created major new divisions (the largest administrative unit within the agency), expanded others, and incorporated still other units from the AAA Program Planning Division. The overall aim was to integrate representative farmers from local communities and counties into a national planning bureaucracy.14

8. The Cooperative Planning Organization, 1939–42. Adapted from “Cooperative Planning Organization,” box 8, entry 25, RG 83, NACP.

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In early 1939 Tolley established four new BAE divisions and redirected others to assist the cooperative land-use planning program. Most central was the Division of State and Local Planning, led by Allin, whose job was to promote farmer participation in the program, both organizationally and procedurally, as well as to advance planning at the county level. County planning went through a three-phase process, from organization and education to action, and Allin’s unit worked with localities at every step. To accomplish these tasks, the new division gained a field staff of about fifty farm and land economists, now called BAE state representatives, stationed in land-grant colleges to collaborate with the state Extension service and agricultural experiment station. They constituted the front line of the federal effort to implement the cooperative national / local planning program. In addition, Allin placed regional representatives of his division in the seven BAE research offices around the country. The Division of State and Local Planning also supported technical research that the county committees required or requested.15 This new BAE division combined the personnel and orientations of two earlier projects, both created by Tolley’s innovative AAA Program Planning unit back in the midthirties (see chapter 5). In his land-utilization program, L. C. Gray had developed a highly skilled, technically oriented cadre of land economist-planners known as state land-use planning specialists. Their job was to deal with problem land-use areas, especially those where Gray’s program was acquiring submarginal land, such as the Great Plains and the Lake States cutover region. These economists were expert at analyzing land problems and prescribing policy solutions. But more important to Allin’s new BAE division was his own previous work in the County Planning Project, concerned with policy synthesis and integration; it aimed to unify and localize AAA county programs. Combining “farmer thinking” with technical expertise, county planning experimented with local committees and participatory action research. It required government workers who saw the big picture, going beyond land use or even economics. The BAE’s new cooperative planning program of 1939 thus shared more with county planning than with land utilization. The trouble was that Gray’s technicians suddenly became the BAE state representatives in Allin’s new division (as of Wallace’s USDA reorganization in October 1938), and they were not very well prepared to carry out the much broader project.16 The marriage of generalist program and specialized personnel soon yielded serious tensions. The other new BAE unit connected to planning was the Division of Program Study and Discussion, previously a lower-level section in the AAA

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Program Planning Division and now “given to the Bureau as an aid to county agricultural planning development.” Its elevation in the new BAE signaled dramatically increased educational support for cooperative planning. From early 1939 until 1942, Program Study and Discussion functioned primarily as the educational arm of state and local planning; Allin saw “studying and discussing” as a key part of the overall planning effort. As it had done within the AAA since 1935, the adult-educational unit ran two basic activities, farmer discussion groups and leadership-training schools for agricultural workers and now citizen-planners. These latter, four-day conferences became more focused than the former schools of philosophy for Extension workers and involved more local leadership training. The major topic in 1939, for example, was, What is a desirable national agricultural program? This division was especially important to the planning effort because it provided education and discussion opportunities for both farmers and Extension workers. In particular, it raised “the social and economic implications” of the New Deal action agencies that the county committees were coordinating. One of its main missions was thus to “prepare leaders for county agricultural-planning activity.”17 The two other new BAE divisions were also related to land-use planning but more indirectly: Program Surveys and Program Development and Coordination. Originally called Rural Attitudes and Opinions, the Division of Program Surveys was led by the social psychologist Rensis Likert, who was developing techniques of survey sampling and opinion polling, the first such use of these new techniques in the federal government and among the first in the nation. Secretary Wallace occasionally wanted to float ideas among farmers and quickly gauge their reactions. This social survey unit worked closely with Carl Taylor’s large group of BAE social scientists, which changed its name at this time to the Division of Farm Population and Rural Welfare. The Division of Program Development and Coordination was led by O. V. Wells, who had previously directed a similar section in the AAA—another instance of its loss of planning capability. This new unit assisted in the BAE’s general planning role for the entire department. It kept in close contact with the action agencies about their programs, results, and problems. It also worked with the research units of the BAE, particularly in suggesting changes to the overall agricultural program.18 Finally, BAE chief Tolley set up an Inter-Bureau Coordinating Committee (IBCC), composed of the six assistant chiefs, the twelve division heads, and representatives from the department’s other agencies and offices concerned with land use. Functionally this large committee operated by

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smaller, topical, ad hoc subcommittees, which operated by consensus: “No report is submitted to the [BAE] Chief until all members of the subcommittee have approved it.” These IBCC subcommittees considered all plans to address a given problem, “whether the product of county planning committees, technical suggestion, or administrative proposal,” and, after approval from Tolley, sent their findings and recommendations to the secretary through the Agricultural Program Board. That was a major organizational innovation in the BAE, indeed, in the entire USDA.19 In 1940 the USDA workers Eisenhower and Kimmel advised the new BAE as follows: “It should at all times have the whole picture. . . . It should understand the problems of all classes and all interests in agriculture. It should have a grasp of all kinds of problems—soil conservation, land use, credit, marketing, and all the rest. It should know what information the natural and social sciences can furnish to help solve these problems. . . . Finally, it should know how to find out what the opinions and desires of farmers really are; for its activities and policies should reflect a profound faith in democratic methods as the ultimate basis for agricultural planning. . . . This is a counsel of perfection. The reorganized Bureau of Agricultural Economics is engaged in discovering how far it can live up to this counsel.”20 The reconstituted BAE was indeed engaged in achieving this “counsel of perfection.” How it all worked out comprises the remainder of this book. The Launch of Cooperative Planning, March 1939 In late March 1939 the USDA held a conference that launched the new BAE, and the national / local cooperative planning program in particular. The week-long meeting brought together the BAE field men (the landuse specialists who were federal representatives in the state colleges, recently transferred from Gray’s unit to Allin’s new division) and researchers in the agency’s seven regional offices, plus headquarters staff, over a hundred people in total. The purpose of the conference was to acquaint these workers with their new job following the departmental reorganization of October 1938, that is to say, with the cooperative planning program. It also introduced the BAE staff to the heads of all the action agencies seeking to reform rural land use in the United States.21 This kickoff was a major departmental event. Having been in his new position for several months, BAE chief Tolley opened the proceedings with an introduction titled “The Reconstituted Bureau of Agricultural Econom-

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ics.” He was followed by Allin, the head of the newly established Division of State and Local Planning, who discussed its organization and functions. After talks by other BAE personnel, the leaders of the three main action agencies spoke on how his agency fit into the new land-use planning effort: R. M. Evans for the AAA, Hugh Bennett for the SCS, and Will Alexander for the FSA. To wrap up the conference, most appropriately, the attendees were treated to a speech by Undersecretary Wilson on his favorite topic, “An Ideal Program for Agriculture.”22 The highlight, though, was a talk by Secretary Wallace. Exemplifying both his visionary thinking and his extemporaneous style, Wallace’s seemingly prosaic topic was the importance of planning in the development of agricultural programs. He traced the origins of this conference in 1939 back to World War I, the subsequent economic depression, and the emergency legislation of 1933. After six years of the agrarian New Deal, he felt “a great need for coordination,” reacting to criticisms from the land-grant colleges and from farmers themselves. In consequence he stressed the necessity “to get all of our people thinking on the departmental level” rather than just at the bureau or agency level. Such “bureaucratic thinking,” while crucial to large governmental programs, could not cope well in times of rapid social change. With the recent reorganization of the USDA, “we are trying to discover new bottles into which to pour the new wine” of a different kind of government, one which tries “to meet the expectations of the farmers” concerning administration and land use.23 With reference to the big job that lay ahead for the BAE, Wallace dwelled on Tolley and Allin’s dual task: to visit the “cloudy upper air” of federal planning as well as to “come down to earth frequently” to see the problems of dirt farmers. Wallace cited the instance of Young County, Texas, where farmers and action-agency officials focused on soil erosion as the major problem and set about addressing it. “You can, of course, depend on men who actually live on the land and make their living that way, to get planning down out of the upper air into very practical terms provided you give them a real chance to plan on the county level.” He emphasized the uniqueness of the BAE’s new cooperative planning effort: “There is no bureau carrying out a function similar to that with which this bureau is now charged, . . . making a new synthesis for many branches of Government.” Using an economics analogy from international trade, one of his expert fields, he reiterated his desire that “field thinking” influence the department: “There can be no worthwhile result unless there is just as great a volume of thought flowing into Washington as there

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is flowing out of Washington.” Wallace committed himself to seeing that the other USDA agencies cooperated with BAE in this momentous new undertaking.24 Wallace concluded with an extraordinary statement on democracy. The USDA’s new planning task is so significant, he said, “because democracy is so definitely on trial.” Both Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia were claiming that the old democracies like Britain and the United States were decadent and unable to handle the economic crisis, as the Soviet and fascist so-called full-employment economies had done. In clear reference to the darkening political cloud gathering over Europe, he posed a set of profound questions: “Is democracy destined continually to be self-defeating in the economic field? Can democracy be made to work after a country is mature? Is it only adapted to a frontier country? . . . Can it over the long years prevent soil and human erosion? Can it bring about sufficient balance between the regions and the classes so that disequilibria of a serious nature will not bring wreckage? I would say that the men in this room hold per capita perhaps a hundred times as much responsibility for the answer as most of the other men in Government per capita.”25 Here, in brief compass, Wallace raised a central issue of the modern state: how to combine effective government with citizen participation. Democracy must be shown to be efficient, he believed, and planning was the chosen means of achievement. Wallace didn’t answer these questions before the USDA conference in March 1939, but raising them in a positive spirit surely inspired the BAE field staff to set off on their new planning assignments with enthusiasm. Wallace ended his speech with rambling encouragements and a revealing personal invitation to the BAE field men: “When you get out by yourselves in the field and feel puzzled and alone in the world and nobody loves you, that some of the folks out there aren’t treating you right, that you write back to Mr. Tolley and Mr. Allin . . . and if they too get discouraged and run out of belief in their job, why, I hope you will come over and see me so we can all work together on a constructive solution.”26 A fitting counterpoint to the secretary’s paean to democracy was Gray’s even more dramatic dinner address at the Cotton Club two days later. Climaxing twenty years of leadership in the department, Gray had worked with “Young Henry’s” father, Secretary Henry C. Wallace, under President Warren G. Harding. Here in his swan song, the nation’s premier land-planning economist spoke effusively in a speech called “The Evolution of the LandUse Programs of the Department of Agriculture.” Like Wallace, he glanced

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backward, reveling in how the New Deal “brought the sunshine of Presidential favor to the various ideological seeds that had been planted during the [previous] two decades.” By turns nostalgic and expectant, he offered a different take on the citizen / scientist divide than Wallace.27 An earlier speaker had addressed the assembled economists, with implied criticism, as “superstratospheric planners.” Gray jumped in: “I recall the phrase now not humorously but with serious concern because I fear it reflects a point of view both plausible and popular, but contrary to all I have stood for and shall continue to stand for. . . . I am fully sympathetic with the concept of the ‘democratic process’ in land-use planning and recognize its necessity. . . . Nevertheless the phrase ‘superstratospheric planning’ was used to depreciate the importance of the role of the technician in land-use planning, to imply that committees of farmers operating at the local level are alone capable of finding the answer to problems of extreme complexity which exist at various levels— national, regional, watershed, county, community.” Such complications ranged from price trends, comparative advantage, and soil conservation to the “everpresent question of commercialism versus self-sufficiency and the associated problem of a surplus population” that cannot find nonfarm work. Gray held that specialists were essential, not just for their technical skills but also because they could be “reasonably detached and disinterested.” They rose above the “crazy quilt resulting from the conflicts and compromises of individual self-interest” and thus could see “all the relations and the interconnections of the planning process on the various planes.” Therefore, he concluded magisterially, the BAE land economists in the audience, whom he had led in conducting land-use planning for the past five years, should “regard the term ‘superstratospheric planners’ a term of honor and not of opprobrium.”28 Here in March 1939, embodied in Wallace’s and Gray’s speeches, the conferees were presented with two divergent perspectives on the proper relationship between experts like themselves and local farmers. Both speakers realized the need for collaboration and balance between citizen and scientist, yet they offered starkly differing ideas of just where that line should be drawn. Wallace emphasized farmer participation and democratic planning; in contrast, Gray highlighted the necessary, even dominant, role of experts in public planning. Their reflections led to larger issues. What exactly was the specialist’s place in land-use planning? Should they be on top or on tap? How much control should they have in the local citizen planning activities? In the thus-launched cooperative planning program, tensions arose immediately between the two points of view. And they were not limited to the USDA but

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emerged also in the state colleges as well as throughout the countryside. In fact, such key questions about modern democracy would dog the Third New Deal to the end, as we shall see. Educating, Researching, and Planning a Permanent Agriculture: Overview I want to describe first the local-to-national organization of the new planning structure and then the procedures that each county worked through. The treatment here of the three phases of county planning presents an overview of how the program was intended to operate on the ground. Organizing Neighborhood to Nation In his annual report of 1939 for the BAE, Tolley highlighted “planning for nation and neighborhood,” the new planning organization the BAE was developing with the state Extension services. The structure reached from rural neighborhoods and local communities to the county level, then on to states and the federal government. It operated as a network of nested committees, organized in cell-like fashion. This was America’s first attempt to link representative local citizen groups with policy planning at the national level.29 All farmers were to be represented on local and county committees. The base of the entire planning structure was the rural neighborhood, a small group of farm families, typically twenty to thirty, who lived near each other. Five to fifteen such neighborhoods formed a community, often based around a school or meeting place. At least one representative from each neighborhood sat on the community committee, which the Mount Weather Agreement referred to as “the cornerstone of the whole planning organization.” At these two lowest levels of the organization no government officials were involved; all members were farm men and women, who held public meetings to discuss committee business.30 Each community selected one person to represent it on the county committee, the operational unit of the planning system. All the communities in a county, usually nine to twelve, came together to form the county committee, which aimed for a “continual interchange of ideas and opinions” with its community members. The county committee consisted of ten to fifteen farm men and women, perhaps a few forest owners, and the local administrators of the new federal agencies (AAA, SCS, FSA, and so on) as well as other gov-

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ernment entities concerned with land use. A farmer chaired the committee while the county agent served as secretary. Two new planning positions in the college of agriculture—a state Extension leader in land-use planning, usually a rural sociologist, and a BAE state representative, an economist—had as their main charge to provide state and federal assistance to the county committee. In addition, researchers from the state college and the BAE worked with the committee when it requested more information on a particular topic such as soil conservation, population trends, or land-tenure problems. After considerable study and discussion, this committee developed recommendations about land-use changes in the county.31 The county committee reported its decisions to the state land-use planning committee, comprising the state-level heads of Extension, who served as chair, the experiment station, the federal action agencies, and other governmental units involving land use, plus farm men and women, normally six to fifteen, representing the different types-of-farming regions in the state. The BAE state representative served as secretary of the group. The state committee connected the county committees with the federal government and could also take action on its own, for example, recommending legislation. A subcommittee, called the Joint BAE-Land-Grant College Committee, assisted the state committee. It was made up of the state Extension leader for land-use planning, an experiment station representative for research on planning, and the BAE state representative, all of whom resided in the land-grant college. This informal working committee guided land-use planning throughout the state, including determining research needs, reviewing county reports, clearing them with state representatives of the action agencies, and generally assisting the larger committee in coordinating the statewide agricultural and land-use program. The state committee sent recommendations on to the USDA.32 The cooperative organization for land-use planning culminated in Washington. As discussed earlier, Wallace reorganized the entire USDA to ensure that it was able to implement the new planning program more effectively. The BAE chief chaired a set of new topical IBCCs composed of representatives from all the relevant action agencies as well as federal leaders of Extension, experiment station research, and subject matter specialists. When a county committee report came into Washington, the BAE Division of State and Local Planning first reviewed it, then passed it on to the appropriate IBCC subcommittee for evaluation, especially as to the program recommendations. The IBCC sent its determination on the county report to the USDA’s new Agricultural Program Board, consisting of the heads of all

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department agencies and chaired, as noted, by the department’s land-use coordinator Eisenhower. This top-level group made a recommendation to the secretary, who usually attended the monthly board meetings, and he acted finally on the matter. The Agricultural Program Board sought to coordinate all agricultural programs at the national level. Overall, then, a two-way channel of communication was established from neighborhood to nation, between local communities and the secretary of agriculture. Gaus and Wolcott concluded that “the object was to provide unified departmental planning as a guide to action, integration, and collaboration.” Wallace and the other agrarian intellectuals believed this top-down and bottom-up organizational structure to be a key element of democratic planning (see fig. 8).33 Participating in the Counties Preparing: Education and Organization In the planning process, each county proceeded through three stages. First, the preparatory phase included education and organization. Before actually organizing a county, Extension personnel and the BAE state representative stimulated interest in land-use planning. They advertised the program through public agencies, private groups, newspapers, and radio. They held meetings with rural people, and they related the planning program to other Extension work, such as demonstration projects, agricultural outlook reports, and farm management schools. They introduced local leaders, citizens as well as federal administrators, to the idea of planning and to the specifics of cooperative land-use planning. Preparatory work in the counties included organizing local committees, electing representative farmers, learning the philosophy of planning, gathering information, and introducing the group discussion method.34 The most effective and immediate way farm people participated in landuse planning was through group discussions. In the neighborhood council meetings, topics included planning itself (nature, scope, techniques), the local agricultural situation (crops, livestock, farm types, rural relief, current trends, etc.), soil conservation, public policies affecting land use, and their coordination. The group discussion method was deeply educational. The agrarian intellectuals saw study and discussion as core to the whole planning effort. Another early discussion topic was whether the farmer committees needed any research done on local conditions. If so, agricultural and social scientists from the land-grant college and the BAE answered the call. The BAE claimed that “enlightened farmer opinion is the best guide for planning.”

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To Wallace, Wilson, Tolley, Allin, and others, this meant farmer views based on factual information, which research could provide.35 The first research conducted in the counties frequently involved a new kind of participatory investigation called community delineation, which joined local people with BAE and land-grant sociologists. Together they determined the boundaries of rural neighborhoods and communities so that these local areas could be represented on the planning committees. Then local leaders, Extension, and BAE personnel organized planning committees at each level: neighborhood, community, and county. Ideally the committees met regularly over the year, at least eight or nine times. Preparatory work lasted no more than one year, after which the county entered the more intensive phase of planning.36 Mapping: Land-Use Research The second stage was intensive planning, which included mapping, analyzing, and classifying the different land-use areas in the county. The planning committees aimed to reach agreement on “basic facts and conditions of land use” as well as on desired adjustments. This mapping and classification exercise would be used in the final action phase of planning that carried out the recommendations. First, the community-level committees of farm people, assisted by the county agent, mapped local land-use areas. On the basis of similar physical, social, and economic patterns and problems, they described conditions in each locale. For example, they might take note of rich and poor soils, erosion, topography, types of farming, population centers, credit needs, and forest management practices. The committee then held an open community meeting with all concerned to discuss its tentative findings, followed by one or two additional meetings to revise the map and agree on goals for the various land-use areas. They posed the question, Were current land uses the best use? A second open community meeting considered the needed adjustments and recommended policies to achieve them. Finally, the community committee reported its findings and recommendations to the county committee, whose secretary and state planning leaders at Extension and BAE summarized the area reports for review.37 Next, the county committee classified the land-use areas and proposed adjustments for each type of area, frequently going back to the community committees. It used the expertise of specialists and administrators, some of whom sat on the committee, to provide and interpret maps, charts, statistics, and technical information. Using such data as well as their own knowledge of the area, the committee members then drafted a county report, including map, findings, and recommendations, and sent it to the state-level

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Land- Grant/BAE Joint Committee. The county committee considered the latter’s comments and revised its report, with assistance from the BAE state representative, then sent it formally to the state land-use planning committee. With county committee members in attendance, the state committee reviewed and acted on the county report, usually approving it, with possible revisions. The county’s intensive report became a reference source for public agencies’ work and for the county committee itself in “developing a program of unified action.” Copies of the report were distributed widely throughout the county, for instance, to all community committee members and in the public schools, and beyond, including state and federal agencies. The report was often the “best available source of information on conditions and problems” in the county, boasted the BAE.38 An example will clarify this process of intensive planning. At the first meeting of the Parke County, Indiana, planning committee, the twenty-four farmer members discussed the evident decline in the county and what had happened. After discussing the need for planning, the various agricultural agencies, and possible improvements, they started mapping the county. Help in this task was provided by the state BAE representative, a farm management expert, both of whom were based at Purdue University, and the county Extension agent. Based on cropping potential, all land was classified into five kinds, ranging from “submarginal for farm use” to “farm land,” which itself was subdivided into six soil types. Over several meetings the farmers and the experts discussed, argued, and disagreed with one another’s classifications and recommendations, but finally a preliminary land-use map emerged. It was taken to a meeting in each township of the county, where community committee members classified present land-use patterns in their area, colorcoded a map for the land uses, analyzed soil fertility, cropping practices, and socioeconomic data, and made recommendations. Each of these thirteen community meetings lasted between three and eight hours, and they were attended by the farmer-chair of the county committee and the Extension agent, who said he assisted but “avoided contributing to the conclusions.” The county committee combined the township land-use maps to revise the county map and wrote a report. One startling conclusion was that, in this above-average farm county, fewer than half of its cropped 280,000 acres “should remain in cropland use.” This finding was linked to the surprising extent of tax delinquency, public relief, soil erosion, declining population, inadequate financing, and faulty farm management in the county. Farmers and local agency personnel found the map helpful in directing them away from inefficient, submarginal lands. The committee went on to address other re-

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search questions that were prompted by the map and report. One was a detailed survey of the social and economic roles women played in the county.39 Acting: Unified Planning In early February 1939 the heads of all the major agencies of USDA proposed developing a coordinated agricultural program for one county in each state. The resulting document became the first report of the new IBCC. This experimental approach, approved immediately and enthusiastically by Secretary Wallace, integrated the federal programs for land use, soil conservation, agricultural adjustment, farm rehabilitation, and so forth into a single “unified county program.” The third and final stage of the planning process, in other words, translated plans into action. Local farmers and professional workers together directed this policy synthesis at the county level. The unified program encouraged farmer participation in planning, fomented local land-use changes, and coordinated the federal agencies locally. In short, physical, economic, social, programmatic, and institutional changes and reforms were the goal of unified development, especially in regard to USDA’s own action programs. Allin, in charge of the program, called this phase “planning-in-action” and added that eventually all rural counties would become unified in this way.40 At the county level, the planning committee, having mapped and analyzed land-use problems, now sought to solve them. It made specific suggestions for action. Since the local administrators of the federal action programs sat on the county committee, they were often able to implement the recommended changes directly. For instance, the committee might suggest that the AAA should not subsidize nor the FSA make loans on acres designated as unsuitable for crops. The farmer members of the committee worked hand in hand with the local federal administrative members. Other actions required more time as well as consultation with private concerns and county or state agencies. This local give-and-take between farmers and administrators was reenacted in the state planning committee. At this level, as the BAE put it, citizens and bureaucrats were again “thrown in contact, and agreement is expected by each agency upon those recommendations that affect it, in the light of State as well as county needs and wishes. It should be emphasized again that throughout this procedure, agreement is sought by the Federal operating agencies to local or State proposals or a suggestion of alternatives to which the agencies can agree.” At both the county and state levels, the BAE emphasized that “extensive informal discussion” occurred in the planning process in order to avoid likely misunderstanding and predictable disagreements. Here

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was an instance of antibureaucratic, deliberative democratic rhetoric (and sometimes practice) in the heart of a giant bureaucracy.41 Teton County, Montana, provides a good illustration of this stage. The local committees considered farmer experience and technical data to decide that land producing fewer than seven bushels of wheat per acre was unsuitable for cultivation. By mapping the location of low-grade land, they discovered twenty thousand such acres in the county. The county committee’s main recommendation was that this land be used for grazing only. The committee then worked with technicians from Montana State College and USDA to develop ways of implementing the recommendation. Within six months, the unified county report included the following suggestions to the local administrators of federal action programs, who also sat as members of the county committee: The AAA should disallow the submarginal twenty thousand acres from entering its programs as cropland; neither the FSA nor the FCA should make loans on these acres except as grassland. The unified plan also called on various state agencies and Extension to assist in this land-use change and encouraged the officials in Teton County to raise the tax assessment on low-grade lands being cultivated. “Mutual understanding and agreement among farmers and representatives of public agencies on ways and means of getting results,” the report concluded, “is the heart of this type of planning.” 42 The short-run administrative point was to test the unified county procedure against those of the separate existing programs. This experimental feature highlighted a Deweyan and institutional approach or, as one USDA planner put it, a “political-science experiment station.” The USDA’s longterm goal was to encourage participatory planning as well as bureaucratic coordination. Again, the agrarian intellectuals believed that scientific expertise and citizen participation were not incompatible; indeed, each could benefit the other in this process they called democratic planning.43 Progressing Through Numbers The BAE and the state Extension services hit the ground running to set up the multilayered planning organization. Even before the kickoff conference in March 1939 they began working out the details of “planning for nation and neighborhood.” By June every state except one claimed a BAE representative to lead the effort, stationed in the college of agriculture, and all but three, California, Illinois, and Pennsylvania (only the last refused to participate at all), signed planning agreements with the USDA. In addition, Extension began appointing state discussion group leaders as well as state land-

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use planning leaders. Also by June 1939, the preparatory or organizational stage of the program was under way in 830 counties, over one-fourth of all counties in the United States. The second phase, intensive land-use planning for area mapping and classification, had begun in 447 counties, while 44 counties, or 1 per state, signaled the final, unified action phase. The participation of farmers was high, Tolley reported, but needed to be “wider and truly democratic.” It was only a start, Allin allowed in his first progress report: an experimental year relying on “methods of trial and error in this uncharted planning field.” The agrarian planners knew that nothing like this had ever been attempted before, and they felt encouraged by the beginning.44 In January 1940 the planning program had expanded into 1,120 counties in 47 states. Nearly 70,000 farm men and women served on local planning committees: 19,000 on the county committees and almost 51,000 on 6,807 community committees. In addition, approximately 200,000 other farm people participated in local planning meetings. The 43 state planning committees claimed an average of 13 farmers each, for a total of 552 citizen representatives nationwide. All committees except those at the community level included members from the major USDA action agencies, including AAA, SCS, FSA, BAE, and Forest Service, as well as the state Extension services and research experiment stations. Other federal and state agencies were also usually represented.45 By June 1940, 1,540 counties, over half of all rural counties, engaged in the cooperative planning process. More than 125,000 people actively participated in local and state committee meetings, including 34,600 members of county committees, 24,800 of them farm people. A typical county committee was composed of 27 people, two-thirds of whom were farm men and women. The planning counties held 5,571 committee meetings. Texas claimed the most county committee members, with 5,327, followed by Indiana, with 2,565, Virginia, with 2,221, and Kansas, Iowa, Utah, Michigan, Tennessee, Nebraska, and Mississippi, each with between 1,000 and 2,000. At the low end, 7 states, Arizona, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Massachusetts, Nevada, and Rhode Island, had fewer than 100 county committee members. At the community level, where much of the detailed work was actually carried out, 7,310 committees held over 16,000 meetings, with an average attendance of 13 farm people and 3 government officials. In addition, they sponsored 10,484 open community meetings to involve and inform local citizens of the planning program.46 The zenith of cooperative planning came in 1941 (fig. 9). By June nearly three-quarters of all rural counties, over 2,200, were formally organized and

9. Map of the extent of cooperative planning in the counties, June 1941. Copy of “Status of Area Mapping and Classification Work by County and Community Committees, June 30, 1941,” from USDA, “Agricultural Planning in a World at War,” box 1, entry 25, RG 83, NACP.

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active in the planning process. Two-thirds of them had achieved the second, or intensive, phase, and two-thirds of those advanced to the final, unified stage. The state planning committees had a total membership of 1,371, including 565 farm men, 113 farm women, 304 USDA agency representatives, and 313 representatives from state and local bodies. The average state committee consisted of 29 people, about half farmers and half agency representatives. In 2 states the state committees met once a year, and in 4 states six times a year, the average state meeting lasting 2 days. Including executive and subcommittee meetings, the state planning bodies gathered from 20 to 25 days annually. Of the organized counties in the planning program, both county and community committees functioned in 1,113, while 691 had county committees only, and 87 had community committees only. Iowa, New Jersey, and New York chose to have only county committees. Twenty-seven states had organized over half their counties, and 13 of them reached 90 percent organization. All but 4 states had organized more than 20 percent of their counties in the planning program.47 At the end of 1941, nearly 200,000 farm men and women served on the planning committees, which also included roughly 18,000 federal, state, and local officials. Over 57,000 people served on county planning committees, including 40,000 farm men and women. The level of participation had more than doubled within two years. Women made up over one-fourth of the farm membership. The average county committee consisted of 17 farm men, 5 farm women, 2 Extension agents, local representatives of the USDA action programs, an agricultural teacher, a local government official, and 2 or 3 other agency representatives. The county committees held 5,966 meetings in 1941. Two-thirds of the planning counties were organized on a community basis. More than 10,000 community committees were active, involving over 82,000 farm members, compared to 51,000 in 1939 and 65,000 in 1940. They held nearly 27,000 community planning meetings, including 8,248 open community meetings. The open meetings averaged 35 people in attendance, totaling nearly 290,000 farm people. An outlier for sure, North Dakota alone held an amazing 2,379 community planning meetings in 1941!48 To sum up, very late in the New Deal, cooperative land-use planning became a large, rapidly expanding program, active in almost three-fourths of all the rural counties in the nation. But the above account is just numbers, based largely on administrative records and reports. More important, from 1938 until 1942 cooperative planning was the central concern of the USDA, and, further, it constituted the most significant thrust of the New Deal in

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agriculture, period. This is hinted at in a letter of 1939 from Carl Taylor to a former student, a rural sociologist at Harvard: “M. L. [Wilson] calls me every two or three days about something, and recently has finished each conversation with the statement: ‘Things are happening, Carl, and they are going to sugar off in a bigger way than even you think.’ I hope his faith is justified,” Taylor concluded.49 An understanding of what Wilson was so excited about, that is, what this Third, Intended New Deal undertook and achieved, must be sought in the substantive details of its major efforts of adult education, participatory research, and action planning.

chapter 7

Continuing Education For Citizens, Scientists, and Bureaucrats Free and full discussion is the archstone of democracy. —m. l. wilson, “discussion time is here”

P

robably the most unusual innovation of the New Deal USDA aimed to advance democracy through adult or continuing education.1 Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace and Undersecretary M. L. Wilson believed that farmers, Extension agents, scientists, and administrators needed to broaden their horizons on agricultural problems and policies. In particular, Wallace and Wilson thought that they all should have the chance to learn more about the historical, philosophical, and social-science aspects of the new farm programs. Inspired by Jefferson, Lincoln, and Dewey, the agrarian New Dealers undertook to expand democracy throughout rural America. They created tens of thousands of study and discussion groups involving about 3 million farm men and women, including the training of 60,000 local discussion leaders. They held 150 four-day schools of philosophy for more than 35,000 citizen-planners plus thousands of Extension workers. These were taught by the likes of the economists John Kenneth Galbraith and John D. Black and the philosophers Ralph Barton Perry and William Ernest Hocking, all of Harvard University. Within the USDA itself, Wilson sponsored lecture and discussion series on democracy and the social sciences, featuring leading public intellectuals such as the historians Charles A. Beard and John D. Hicks, the anthropologists Ruth Benedict and Robert Redfield, and the sociologists W. Lloyd Warner and Robert S. Lynd. Department leaders encouraged experts as well as citizens to see agricultural policy in wider social and economic contexts, offering a much larger intellectual vision than merely

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raising farm prices. Education was their chosen means. The project stands as a remarkable experiment in American cultural and political history.2 Wallace and Wilson understood education as a promising way to foster democratic citizenship and foment social change. Following Jefferson as well as Dewey, they believed that democracy required continuous learning, personal growth, cultural adjustment, and civic discussion. In the midst of the New Deal, Wilson confessed, “I am a great believer in the ability of the average man to find his way if he is given light,” and Wallace asserted that democracy “could not work unless there was popular education among the people.” By the late thirties the USDA leaders counted themselves among a “great democratic movement” that put continuing education at its core. They sought to revitalize the countryside with “cultural democracy” as well as the more familiar but still unobtained economic democracy. Their friend and colleague Howard R. Tolley, chief of the BAE, touted the same progressive view of education, as did the other agrarian intellectuals.3 They all believed that the times demanded unorthodox ways of thinking and acting, including in the educational realm. In 1939 Wilson concluded, “We may well resolve to accept the challenges to democracy that our day has brought.” A national and local conversation was needed in order to choose the way forward, and one way of starting it was through the New Deal’s continuing education programs of group discussions for farmers and schools of philosophy for Extension workers. In the late 1930s Wilson introduced serious talk about democracy and the social sciences into the USDA itself, hoping to enlighten government scientists and administrators. And finally, he and the other agrarian intellectuals produced, for the widest possible audience, an unequaled tome of over twelve hundred pages on the social, cultural, historical, psychological, and philosophical aspects of New Deal farm policy: the USDA’s yearbook of agriculture for 1940, Farmers in a Changing World. These efforts constituted an unparalleled attempt by the federal government to educate citizens, experts, bureaucrats, and educators themselves in the new “ways of democracy.” 4 M. L. Wilson’s Philosophy of Education While Secretary Wallace shared most of M. L. Wilson’s views and supported the educational programs, the assistant secretary (and later undersecretary) of agriculture held education in higher esteem. Wilson was the

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guiding light of all the USDA’s continuing education innovations. It is important to understand what Wilson had in mind, especially his underlying philosophy of education, an easy task since he was always eager to share. Like the other agrarian intellectuals, Wilson knew that the 1930s were a time of rapid societal transformation, and not just because of the Great Depression. They took a longer, cultural and historical view. For nearly a hundred years, science, material progress, and industrial technology had been driving social and economic changes. These forces became increasingly strong and widespread around World War I, yet American culture, the ideas and institutions that were supposed to absorb and guide this transformation, remained relatively static. The collective ability to handle major trends had not kept pace with the changes themselves, for example, those introduced by the new engineering and scientific agriculture, the latter including the USDA / land-grant research and Extension system. Contemporary culture, Wilson argued, must do a better job of adjusting to the new economic and technological realities. Rapid and drastic changes were coming no matter what, and the USDA leaders wanted the adjustments to be in a democratic direction. The “greatest need in agricultural education today,” he urged in 1939, was a turn toward “avocational, social, and philosophical education.” Wilson advocated an approach predicated on justice and morality, even religion. The desired result would be a “tolerant, reasonable and democratic adjustment with the new world that science has created.”5 A couple of stories illustrate his educational approach. In 1932 Wilson first presented his policy proposals to Franklin Roosevelt, a presidential candidate at the time. After outlining the domestic allotment plan which would become the AAA’s core, Wilson pitched his ideas for subsistence homesteads. Roosevelt asked with a laugh, “Have you been telling me your plan, Mr. Wilson; or have I been telling you mine?” In 1946 Wilson won New York City’s adult-education medallion. In presenting the award, Alvin Johnson, the retired director of the New School for Social Research, reported an experience similar to FDR’s: “I myself have come to you, M. L., my heart sufficiently hardened against you, as I thought, and have come away with your idea in my head instead of my own.” Johnson thus highlighted Wilson’s “native genius” for transformative give-and-take discussion, his “calm, modest yet bold” manner. Finally, at a regional college meeting during the New Deal, not everyone took to Wilson’s plea for state–federal coordination. A dean spoke after Wilson, ranting “against these Yankee overseers of Southern

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civilization and Southern education, come anew.” When Wilson regained the stage, he related, without making reference to the previous speaker, “a visit to Einstein at Princeton. As I was leaving, Dr. Einstein took me by the hand and said: ‘Mr. Wilson, it’s in truth now a race between “education and catastrophe”; between a growing understanding and tolerance, on the one side, and the forces of narrowness and hate on the other.’ ” A reporter noted that “the Southern audience stood up and cheered.”6 To preserve and expand democratic ways and institutions, Wilson believed, citizens should begin to study problems and discuss alternatives, eventually arriving at acceptable public policies. He said in 1935 that it was “necessary for the great mass of the people collectively and democratically to make some very fundamental decisions regarding economic adjustment in the future.” Wilson spoke with a sense of urgency, fearing that dangerous antidemocratic forces might prevail within America, a catastrophe that would be due, he avowed, to “prejudice and hatred and ignorance.” He called rather for a revitalization of democracy across the land and in fact saw himself among a vast “new democratic movement” for continuing education that had two sides, economic and cultural. Economically, poverty had to be overcome before democracy was secure. Farmers required “a satisfactory living, the physical comforts of life, and a fair share of the abundance that they produce.” By “cultural democracy,” Wilson meant education and philosophy, which addressed the “deeper meanings of life.”7 In 1936 he presented his philosophy of education to his colleagues in the USDA: “Education, you know, means . . . the drawing forth, the leading out of something. The Department’s role in this connection is that of drawing forth the best qualities and the greatest potentialities of the nation’s rural people and of helping in the process of utilizing these qualities in forming and shaping policy.” The USDA’s outlook on agricultural policy changed over the years. First, technical production had received priority, then economic and statistical analysis. Now, Wilson said, this “many-sided policy” must be viewed “in broad philosophical terms. Education is essential if the place of the more practical aspects of policy in the larger scheme of things is to be understood and comprehended by all citizens.” He soon delineated a comprehensive approach, ponderously but accurately labeled “political-social-economiceducational policies.”8 Like Dewey, his favorite philosopher, Wilson could be quite critical of traditional forms of education that mouthed conventional wisdom and reinforced

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the status quo. Both saw such education as undemocratic (“preaching-to and talking-to,” Wilson called it) and opposed to progressive changes that American society needed. What was called for instead amounted to a new kind of education, one committed above all to the growth of citizen participation. Wilson asserted that the “progressive view . . . holds that people learn by participating and by doing.” Again like Dewey, Wilson saw an intimate, necessary connection between education and democracy. His presidential address to the American Country Life Association in 1936 was entitled “Education for Democracy.” Wilson knew, with Jefferson and Dewey as well as Wallace, that democracy demanded enlightened participation. It was “impossible without intelligent[,] comprehending citizens.” Democrats, he continued, made three assumptions about average citizens: they possessed innate rational capacities that could develop and coalesce in wise collective decisions; their active participation led to social learning as well as to individual growth; and keeping faith in such human potentiality relied largely on education. As Wilson stated simply, “Education, with me, is the process of developing individuals.”9 In accord with his professed “attitude of experimentation,” Wilson ventured in 1935 that continuing education must be reoriented toward small discussion groups, which constituted a “great vitalizing movement in democracy at the present time.” He advocated “education through discussion.” Group discussions should be elevated to become one of the major pillars of agricultural policy, alongside farm credit, land tenure, foreign trade, and soil conservation. He concluded, “Those of us who have faith in educational methods and democratic processes can well regard the little discussion groups that I have talked about as a modern technique of education for democracy.” Five years later Wilson made the same point: “In this present emergency [World War II] discussion is a potent means of education for democracy. . . . The success of democracy depends upon the degree of enlightened participation of all the people.”10 To implement this philosophy, in mid-1935 Wallace and Wilson established a Program Study and Discussion Section within the Program Planning Division of the AAA. To run the educational unit, Wilson hired the Harvard philosopher Carl F. Taeusch, his former philosophy professor at the University of Chicago. Wilson considered his course on the philosophy of history “one of the most enlightening experiences of [my] life.” Taeusch held a doctorate in philosophy from Harvard, where he taught business ethics and

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edited the Harvard Business Review. In early 1939, as part of the overall departmental reorganization (see chapter 6), Wallace transferred the adulteducation unit to the BAE, where Tolley elevated it to division status. During the Third New Deal, Program Study and Discussion grew substantially in support of the USDA’s new initiative in cooperative land-use planning.11 Throughout its ten-year history, Taeusch’s unit oversaw two large, nationwide projects: local discussion groups for farm people and schools of philosophy for Extension workers and citizen planners. Educating Citizens: Discussion Groups for Farm Men and Women In formulating the study and discussion program, Wilson drew on his experience as a county agent in Montana, where he had organized community discussion groups among farmers. A few other states had undertaken similar initiatives in the twenties and early thirties. In late 1934 Wallace and Wilson sent their old friend George Russell, known as Æ, to several landgrant schools to gather their views on establishing rural discussion groups. An elderly Irish writer, Russell had earned some fame as a poet, mystic, and agrarian cooperativist who advocated community self-help and opposed large bureaucracies. Similarly, the USDA leaders sought to discourage overreliance on centralized government, so they determined that the new educational program should be placed in the state- and county-based Extension services. Wallace and Wilson wanted to avoid any appearance that the discussions involved government propaganda, so they mandated that the term discussion group not be used in meetings that advanced a particular program. Moreover, diverse points of view, including criticism of New Deal policies, would be encouraged. For example, an early publication of the USDA’s new educational program included ex-president Herbert Hoover’s recent attack on the New Deal, The Challenge to Liberty (1934), among its recommended readings.12 During the winter of 1934–35, Wilson conducted the first experiment in group discussion. Wallace appointed a departmental committee on discussion groups, chaired by Wilson and including the sociologist Carl Taylor. In early February 1935 they met with the ten land-grant colleges invited to participate. Each state agreed to start at least five local discussion groups. In impressively rapid action for such large bureaucracies, the USDA and state Extension services began the local discussions by month’s end. Some fifty

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discussion groups met over the next eight weeks and covered a wide range of topics, including: Is it in the interest of the nation to have more or fewer people living on the land? What share of the national income should farmers have? What kind of land policies should the nation have? Is the farm laborer getting a square deal?13 The USDA quickly prepared discussion guides to cover these and other topics. Their content seems consistent with the claim of nonbias toward the New Deal. For example, the guide for the last topic listed gave a wide range of facts, sources, and opinions. Several related questions were addressed, among them, What is a fair basis for determining farm wages? Should laws protect farmworkers? Should farmworkers be encouraged to organize unions? How can the relationship between farmers and their laborers be improved locally? What chance has today’s farm laborer to become a farmer / landowner? Each question received short pro and con answers in the discussion guide. The first response, for instance, said that wages should be determined “by the requirements of a decent standard of living.” Another suggested that wages are low because farmers cannot fix their prices; moreover, farmworkers usually get room and board in addition to wages. Different sides were also presented to the question of union organizing. The seventeen-item bibliography at the end of the pamphlet included USDA publications as well as works by critics of New Deal farm policy, including the southern liberal sociologist Rupert B. Vance and the African American historian Carter G. Woodson. Most notable, perhaps, was the inclusion of William R. Amberson’s radical attack on the New Deal USDA in a current issue of The Nation (February 13, 1935) as well as a recent critique by Norman Thomas, the Socialist Party leader, titled The Plight of the Share-cropper (1934).14 Most state Extension services gave favorable reviews of the experimental season of farmer discussion groups. The Wisconsin rural sociologist Arthur Wileden spent four weeks attending discussion groups in Iowa, Indiana, and Missouri and reported to Assistant Secretary Wilson that the educational method was needed, “especially if we believe in the idea of democracy.” The “people believe in it [the discussion plan],” seeing that it was based on “the ideas of free speech and democracy.” They were suspicious, however, that the discussion technique might be used for propaganda purposes, so it should be advanced by “a strictly educational agency,” Wileden urged.15

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Wallace and Wilson decided to expand the initiative and thus established the Program Study and Discussion unit in the AAA Program Planning Division. They hired Taeusch to run it, and he gathered a small but invigorating staff. One remarkable person was Helen Hill Miller, an adult educator with a background in Chicago’s labor movement. She and her husband, Francis Pickens Miller, were well-connected liberals who led the National Policy Committee, which Wilson had helped them organize; the couple wrote two books together on American political culture. Miller saw her USDA work with Taeusch as “adult education with a difference.” Another notable in Taeusch’s unit was a young John M. Brewster, a former farm boy from the Great Plains who studied at Chicago with the pragmatist philosopher George Herbert Mead. When Mead died unexpectedly, Brewster transferred to Columbia University and finished his doctorate in philosophy in 1936. Despite traveling in these rarefied atmospheres at elite schools, he maintained, according to a biography, “the language and mannerisms of the farmer . . . , always extremely conscious of his farm background.” He was an ideal candidate for teaching philosophy to rural people. In addition to a few others who composed the Program Study and Discussion staff, by 1936 Taylor’s BAE Division of Farm Population and Rural Life devoted five full-time sociologists to the discussion program.16 In June 1935 Taeusch and Wilson announced the discussion topics for the coming winter. They doubled the number of topics from seven to fourteen, including the following: Do farmers want the federal government to deal with farm problems? What is the chief cause of the farm depression? Should American agriculture seek recovery of world markets or live at home? What kind of land prices would be best for agriculture? For the nation as a whole? Should farm benefit payments be abolished? These topics cut to the heart of New Deal agricultural policy. The first and last, for example, questioned the core of the AAA. It is impressive that such issues were even on the agenda, much less thoroughly discussed, in this AAA educational project. Over thirty states, including all ten of the first experimental set, held local discussion groups during 1935–36, usually comprising most of their counties and hundreds of meetings. In some states, this

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continuing education effort was combined with the county planning project (see chapter 5).17 Group size and methods varied during the first year so as to determine the best approach, but gradually a pattern emerged for the discussion program. Typically the informal gatherings consisted of fifteen to twenty-five farm men and women, seated in a circle and facilitated by a local, trained group leader. For each week of the winter discussion season they selected a different topic. By design and requirement, no votes were taken and no conclusions reached. USDA’s Program Study and Discussion unit provided topical pamphlets presenting various arguments and divergent points of view. To stimulate rural interest, Wilson, Taylor, and others discussed the weekly topic on NBC’s nationwide “Farm and Home Hour” radio show.18 For sessions in winter 1936–37, Program Study and Discussion introduced new topics and corresponding publications, among them: How do farm people live in comparison to city people? What should farmers aim to accomplish through organization? Is increased efficiency in farming always a good thing? Should farm ownership be a goal of agricultural policy? What kind of agricultural policy is necessary to save our soil? What part should farmers in your county take in making national agricultural policy? The last four listed above proved to be the most popular of all topics for the discussion groups, at least as measured by requests for the accompanying publications.19 The content of these publications reveals much about the USDA’s continuing education program. One provocative title inquired, “What Part Should Farmers in Your County Take in Making National Agricultural Policy?” Like about half of the publications issued by the Program Study and Discussion Section during 1936–37, this fourteen-page pamphlet was presented in conversational form between farmers and other rural citizens, except for a short introduction and conclusion that consisted almost entirely of questions plus maps, charts, photographs, bibliography. They enacted a little exemplary discussion. After posing the initial query, the pamphlet claimed that farmer participation in public policy “has been increasing in recent years” and immediately asked of the New Deal program: “Do you think this tendency is good, or not? Why? If you approve, what form do you think policy-making by farmers should take?” Eight options were listed: individual farmers, county committees, Extension

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agents, state officials, agricultural colleges, federal administrators, farm organizations, or political representatives. These alternatives, introducing the topic of farmers’ role in setting national policy, also illustrated the USDA’s approach to continuing education.20 The fifty-plus pamphlets issued by Program Study and Discussion shared several important features (see the appendix for a complete list of Program Study and Discussion publications, which shows the impressive range of topics covered). Most notably, they presented an extremely wide range of opinion. Traditional conservative attitudes coexisted alongside progressive ones. In discussing tenancy, for example, a large landowner said that “tenants are sharecroppers because they are shiftless and no account!” Concerning soil conservation, another opined, “Subsidy to the farmer is just as bad as subsidy to industry.” On the other hand, “We’ve made property more important than the man on the property.” The publications raised big questions: “Are individual small holdings economically sound or should they be grouped and farmed cooperatively as a large plantation?” “In your opinion, what is there to be said for the effort to make two blades of grass grow where one grew before? What against?” “Are losses through soil erosion and soil depletion serious enough to require a continuous national policy? Can we work out our difficulties by using individual judgment on individual farms?” “How should farm programs be administered? Where do specialists come in?” At times the drift of the discussion veered toward more liberal views. The conclusion on soil conservation, for instance, encouraged public ownership of submarginal lands, “like our ownership of national forests.”21 But the larger point is that practically all views were aired. No one, whether pro-laissezfaire or pro–New Deal, came away without being challenged, questioned, argued with. The pamphlets also provided factual information on the topic at hand as  well as on current government programs. Maps, charts, figures, and images filled many of the publications. Should Farm Ownership Be a Goal of Agricultural Policy? included national maps of state farm-tenancy rates and their prevalence over time. A photograph of soil depletion in the Great Plains was captioned “Wind Erosion Caused This.” The pamphlet on efficiency offered a historical chart of production in agriculture and industry, 1880–1934, as well as a picture of a chemist at work: “What Is Science Doing to Agriculture? For Agriculture?” New Deal programs like soil conservation and county planning were referred to in the publications as ongoing efforts, but they did not escape criticism or complaint, as when a large landowner

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commented on tenancy legislation: “It looks to me like putting out a great deal of money to irresponsible people.”22 In addition to providing such topical publications, Program Study and Discussion trained discussion leaders. Taeusch numbered among those who were reviving adult education across the nation. His first task was to train the newly appointed state Extension discussion leaders, usually rural sociologists, in the techniques, and they in turn would train local discussion leaders. In conjunction with the BAE Division of Farm Population and Rural Life, Taeusch’s unit held a series of three-day regional training schools, typically attended by thirty or so new state leaders and other Extension personnel. These conferences first addressed “the present concern about democracy” and “the present emphasis on democratic processes in education.” They then covered processes of group learning, methods of informal education such as forums, panels, and discussions, organizing discussion groups, training leaders, and specific topics for the coming winter season. With proper deference to the more traditional Extension approaches, they pointed out that discussion was “actually an old method which we are using more intensively in the solution of some great new problems.”23 In these training sessions, Taeusch, Taylor, Brewster, Miller, and others hammered home the importance of getting farm men, women, and youth organized to talk about the social and economic issues implicit in New Deal agricultural programs. They advocated “increasing local participation in national planning. Here we need that conception of education which develops the highest potentialities of all individuals in a changing social picture. Discussion offers this conception, and assumes it.” They stressed the value of participation and the social-psychological virtues of group discussions such as tolerance, self-confidence, problem consciousness, and critical thinking. Taeusch and the others argued that group discussions helped build “an active citizenship,” a “sound public opinion” in preparation for “intelligent action,” or, in a word, publics in the Deweyan sense.24 This was the message they inculcated into the Extension leaders for group discussion. Along with the newly trained state leaders, six Program Study and Discussion field workers conducted hundreds of discussion leadership training sessions. These day-long meetings, usually held in a county seat, were typically attended by fifty or sixty prospective farmer–discussion leaders. In the morning a group of twelve to fifteen of the farm men and women conducted a demonstration discussion, and in the afternoon the whole group criticized its organization and discussion-leading techniques. The trainers always

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covered logistical matters such as arranging seating in either a circle or square and the leader’s role, which, among other things, involved not speaking much, encouraging everyone in the group to contribute, and preventing participants from monopolizing the discussion. They compared the pros and cons of panels, forums, and discussions. Program Study and Discussion also trained discussion leaders for many other groups, including churches, farm organizations, rural–urban clubs, professional and business groups, and government agencies. All told, they trained about sixty thousand discussion leaders throughout the country.25 Program Study and Discussion’s very first publication promoted the development of critical thinking; it and a few others focused on discussion methods. It encouraged every citizen to “look behind familiar phrases and see if they have meaning, analyze policies as stated by the groups or interests putting them forward, [and] formulate and express his own point of view on issues and policies.” Simultaneously, the discussion method “contributes to the enlightenment of the public and to the civic vitality of the community” by allowing “citizens to become active participants in public affairs instead of being mere passive recipients [and] by opening national problems to serious public consideration. This grounding of national, regional, and local issues and policies in the minds of the people is indispensable to the functioning of a democracy.”26 After discounting the methods of lecture and debate because they did not permit “hearing a wide variety of points of view,” the agency presented the pros and cons of three types of discussion: the panel, the forum, and the informal group discussion. The latter was generally preferred since it offered popular participation and the broadest range of viewpoints. It was more important to stimulate creative thinking and wide-ranging discussion than to arrive at definite answers or immediate solutions. Votes were never to be taken. The discussion guide included a list of source materials available, in the belief that “the importance of obtaining all possible light on the topic cannot be overemphasized,” and a bibliography.27 In both rhetoric and technique, this initial publication of Program Study and Discussion set the participatory tone of Wallace and Wilson, with a heavy dose of Deweyan deliberative democratic philosophy. Another discussion guide detailed “the discussion leader’s job.” It continued the participatory line, again encouraging critical thinking. The topics covered were group size (fifteen to twenty-five neighbors), making people feel at ease by supplying heat, lighting, ventilation, and seating in a circle, and

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the assets of a good discussion leader: asking questions that opened up discussion as well as analyzed and summarized it, knowing one’s group, and factfinding, via publications, radio, and experts. Procedural suggestions included keeping the conversational ball rolling between group members rather than being thrown back to the leader, helping members contribute their best by limiting big talkers and drawing out the reticent, offering summaries, and selfevaluating.28 These guidelines may appear obvious, even simplistic, but anyone who has sat through many misled meetings can appreciate them. After Secretary Wallace’s reorganization of the USDA in October 1938, in order to advance the new cooperative planning program its local committees became an increasing focus of the Program Study and Discussion Division, now, as noted above, moved to and elevated in the BAE. In addition to the expanded schools of philosophy (see next section), the other main cooperative effort between the educational and planning programs occurred in the early phase of county planning. The preparatory stage began with farmer discussions about community organization and the philosophy of planning, which Taeusch’s unit often led. This assistance to the planning program continued into the 1940s, as Program Study and Discussion increasingly conducted discussion-leadership training conferences at both the county and community levels with farmer-planners.29 One of the last highlights of the USDA’s discussion program came in 1941. Wilson and Miller brought together eight academics, including Ralph Barton Perry, the Pulitzer prize–winning biographer of the pragmatist William James, and Charles S. Johnson, the president of Fisk University and a leading African American sociologist. Their mission was to develop an outline for use by Extension and the farmer discussion groups on the topic “Democracy in the Present Crisis.” The resulting four-page pamphlet explicitly raised profound moral issues about the worldwide threat posed by totalitarianism and American citizens’ role in meeting that challenge. It painted a stark picture of the conflicting values of democracy and the “totalitarian revolution” on freedom of expression, minority rights, political authority, the distribution of power, and the place of the individual in the state. One of its sentences read, “Democracy . . . seeks to create through organized society an opportunity for the full development and free exercise of each individual’s inherent capacities.” Under the heading “The Meaning and Practices of Democracy,” the professors suggested questions for discussion by small groups. They touched on five areas, each prefaced by “What does it mean to you?”: popular government, liberty and tolerance (“In times of crisis and war, to what

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extent should civil liberties be abridged?”), equality (“What are the rights and responsibilities of organized labor?”), individualism, and America’s participation in a new world order (“In your opinion, does the history of the last two years show that a will to defense is indispensable to the survival of democracy?”). Wilson, then the USDA Extension director, wrote soon afterward that “farmers have been discussing [“Democracy in the Present Crisis”] in many parts of the country in the past few months.”30 Not surprisingly, the state Extension services had varied reactions to the discussion project. Not all of them participated, and some that did proved unenthusiastic. A few saw it as political propaganda, but others welcomed the material and the training, agreeing that up to now they had done a poor job with such subject matter. At the county level, agents often felt overwhelmed with yet another federal program they were expected to implement. County agents were trained to give immediate answers to practical problems, so discussion was outside their bailiwick, and they often dominated the proceedings. Others combined discussion with recreational activities for young people. One contemporary observer concluded nevertheless that many states “cooperated wholeheartedly, and county agents in most states are now [1938] introducing some of the discussion material into community meetings.”31 Few firsthand reports of the discussion groups have survived, but one is quite revealing. In January 1937 a Program Study and Discussion worker spent a week in South Carolina and documented his experiences. He conducted a day-long training session with ten Extension agents and twenty farm people as discussion leaders. The week’s topic was “How do farm people live in comparison to city people?” Two of the discussion groups, one led by a local woman and the other by a young male student at Clemson University, were composed of planters and well-to-do farmers. On another night, a cold and rainy one, thirteen middling farmers showed up, led by “a rather huge, red-faced, ‘honestto-God dirt farmer,’ as he characterized himself.” The discussion did not go well. The observer commented, “They were hard to start, and no wonder; few had ever asked their opinions; they were more accustomed to receiving advice than to giving it.” Yet at the end, a participant surprised the visitor by saying, “This discussion idea was worthwhile” and suggesting the group convene again in two weeks.32 The last meeting that week, at a dimly lit schoolhouse down seventeen miles of dirt road, was made up of poor farmers led by a recently trained, nervous farmer’s wife from nearby. The county agent did not expect much from this group. Yet, comparing rural and urban people, one farmer started

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by saying, “We get more to eat. City folks have to eat out of paper sacks and tin cans, don’t appeal to me.” Another said that country people were healthier and continued, “But the chances today as I see it are with city folks. Take myself the last few years. I’m just a laborer and country’s labor’s not compared with city labor. That’s why we see drift to the city. . . . If government is going to legislate for labor in the city and exempt farm labor we’ll have to move into the city.” A young farmer ventured, “The farmer has as much right to control farm products as the manufacturer, if they would just organize all the growers.” An old one countered, “Trouble is . . . the farmer ain’t got sense enough to be led and he’s too stubborn to be drove.” The discussion went on vigorously for another hour with barely any guidance from the relieved leader. Every man and woman present entered the fray. Later, the county agent and the federal representative wondered whether small farmers were “more responsive than well-to-do farmers, or more conscious of the problems which distressed them, or whether this was an exceptional group.”33 They didn’t know what to make of the spirited discussion among these poor folks. The experience of this “discussion barn stormer” echoes the overall assessment by a journalist who observed several other such meetings. “These discussion groups have bounced and ricocheted,” he wrote. “They are rather out of hand. When it comes to sticking to suggested topics and government outlines, they just don’t do it, most of them. To the extent that they do not, the organized introduction of free discussion into extension may be said to have advanced adult education.”34 Wallace and Wilson could be deservedly proud of these advances in “free discussion” among rural men and women across the country. But they also had other fish to fry, namely, the educators themselves. Educating the Educators: Schools of Philosophy for Extension Workers and Citizen-Planners In late 1934 Wallace and Wilson began contemplating a parallel educational program, this one for workers in the state Extension services. Wilson recalled that he and Wallace, both graduates of Iowa State College of Agriculture, had often lamented that land-grant schools taught little “history, philosophy, social science and that kind of thing that are related to social change.” They also wondered how the Extension services could “get a greater interest in and understanding of . . . the democratic process.” A survey of eighty-seven hundred Extension workers revealed that they

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almost unanimously agreed on their need for more study in economics and social policy. Wilson sought to educate government workers toward a more civic and institutional point of view. He emphasized how important the educational work was to Wallace: “I think Henry saw the possibility of this [project], and he told me once that I should give it a good deal of attention and that I could kind of put this number one on my agenda of interests and objectives.” The midthirties found Wallace himself ruminating on the positive value of education and philosophy along with widespread “study and above all dispassionate discussion.”35 The project Wilson conceived and placed in the AAA Program Planning Division’s new Program Study and Discussion unit was the remarkable schools of philosophy for Extension workers, later to include local citizenplanners. They were four- or five-day conferences intended to broaden the horizons of adult educators, particularly concerning the philosophical issues raised by the New Deal agricultural programs. An early formulation stated, “The point of view of philosophy is not that of solutions but attitudes of individuals and groups towards the more fundamental problems in human and national life. It is necessary to consider these [federal farm] policies in terms of the philosophical aspects of western civilization and to secure therefrom philosophical aspects of economic democracy in agriculture.”36 This was astounding language to hear within the halls of the USDA, even for activist philosophers like Wilson and Taeusch. Taeusch assumed leadership of the department’s adult-education effort in May 1935. One of his initial acts was to call together a select group of fellow philosophers, largely from, as one writer put it, “unagricultural centers— from Harvard, Yale, Chicago,” to address the topic, “The Need for Studying the Broader Social and Philosophical Implications of the Agricultural Programs.” Fifty other philosophy professors from leading liberal arts colleges were also consulted, as were some one hundred social scientists from the agricultural colleges and two hundred economists, sociologists, historians, and political scientists from non-land-grants. Those interested professors then became the core instructors in the forthcoming schools of philosophy. Over the summer, Taeusch held four regional conferences with state Extension directors to promote the schools.37 An early proposal for the schools highlighted the “present crisis of Western civilization,” citing unemployment, starvation amidst plenty, expansion of governments’ roles, and rising dictatorships in Europe. While it may not “supply the answers, philosophy has always undertaken to broaden,

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to deepen, and to clarify the issues. What has been the trend of human thought, especially during the last third of a century? What attitude of mind can be cultivated so as best to meet the many problems flooding us? . . . How can conflicting individual and group interests be integrated into a democratic pattern which contributes to the general welfare? Is man merely an ‘economic animal’? . . . Can we have ‘economic democracy’ similar to our political democracy? . . . Is the allotment committee [of the AAA] a democratic agency?” The last two questions struck at the core of New Deal farm policy: Was the highly touted economic democracy really possible? How democratic, after all, were the decentralized AAA farmer committees? These specific inquiries raised profound doubts and uncertainties about New Deal policy while the broader questions provided philosophical warrant for asking them. Wallace, Wilson, and Taeusch intended such critical questioning to be the very aim of the schools and discussion groups; farmers and USDA workers should be appraising the New Deal even as they administered it.38 Like farmer discussion groups, the schools of philosophy reflected unusually broad-minded thinking within the USDA. They revealed the ideological message that the New Dealers conveyed to educators as well as to citizens. The major themes presented and discussed at the schools were these: the critical, complex problems facing the modern world; the consequent need for group or collective action; the expanding role of the social sciences; the importance of philosophy, especially pragmatism; the necessity of continuing education in public planning; and the requirement to question government policies. Wilson, Taeusch, and many other school lecturers were also quite critical of the status quo in contemporary America, both political and cultural. From diverse social, economic, and philosophical viewpoints, the schools advanced an ideology of progressive reformism, with the New Deal itself often found lacking. After the program had been in existence for five years, Taeusch wrote, “Well-known critics and opponents of the national agricultural programs are invited to be perfectly candid in their remarks, and they usually are. Perhaps the point bears repeating: through the schools, the Department of Agriculture is conducting a forum in which friends, opponents, critics, and those who are undecided as to the wisdom of the agricultural programs are given complete freedom to discuss the matter frankly among themselves. . . . On a number of occasions the persons invited to lecture before the schools have replied to the effect that ‘there has been some mistake, for I am

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opposed to the present administration and to most of the farm program.’ Such persons are at once told that that is all the more reason why they should be invited to appear on the school-of-philosophy program.” He called the anti– New Deal stance of potential lecturers “an additional virtue”!39 Taeusch and Wilson wanted alternatives to current policies to be thoroughly hashed out in open forums and discussions. That’s precisely what the schools of philosophy were created to bring about. The first experimental school was held in Washington in October 1935 for about seventy-five Extension workers. Each day offered three lectures in the morning and group discussions in the afternoon, with the lecturers participating but no longer acting as the expert. Along with Wilson, Taeusch, and his small staff, two of the lecturers that week were the leading economists Mordecai Ezekiel of USDA and John D. Black of Harvard. The fiveday conference focused on the economic and social dimensions of the Great Depression and the farm problem. Day-long themes included “Progress and the Ideal State” and “Philosophy and Social Goals.” Presentations emphasized current developments in ecology and the social sciences. Specific discussion topics included the role of land in civilization, the natural environment, the cultural complex, and spiritual values found in rural life. The discussion leaders prompted the attendees to critically analyze American culture, particularly whether it should be altered to treat pressing problems. School leaders hoped to stimulate the Extension workers to undertake a reconsideration of the New Deal as well as of American society as a whole.40 Such advancement of critical thinking gave rise to early reaction from USDA field workers, some of whom expressed dismay, others enthusiasm. One regional Extension director told Wilson, “The [conceptual] food was rather heavy.” Three lectures a day plus discussion groups were too much philosophy, economics, and sociology for county agents. And five days of it were beyond the “limit of philosophic endurance.” Further, while he “personally greatly enjoyed those speakers who ‘disagreed,’ ” most of the Extension audience was disturbed by the lecturers’ critiques of New Deal farm policy, the AAA in particular. Under present circumstances, “our county agents appear to want to be ‘told the truth’ rather than the metaphysical approach to the fountain.” He quoted one of them: “If we are to sell the A.A.A. thing to our farmers, we have got to have faith in it ourselves. These discussions raised doubts. We extension workers in the field wish you people in Washington . . . would get together and agree on something and come out speaking one voice and not a multitude of ‘tongues.’ ” While the director

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said he disliked propaganda, some of the lectures “looked like rank ‘heresy.’ ” Such attacks, he felt, could be left to the political opposition. He concluded that future lecturers should “not have too radical and deep-seated opinions in regard to the plans that extension agents have been so earnestly encouraged to put forward.” Another participant agreed: it was “a rather disconcerting experience to find the A.A.A. plan much questioned and doubted rather than having the full support of the U. S. Department of Agriculture and visiting speakers.” 41 Other reactions differed. The attorney Philip Glick, an assistant to Wilson, appreciated the inclusion of critics of the AAA. The New Deal policy could be improved, he thought, “if at every stage adverse criticism is invited and considered.” Extension workers would develop “a clearer understanding of the [AAA] programs,” knowledge that should offset “the loss in singlemindedness” or “a unified view toward the A.A.A.” Presenting diverse viewpoints would also protect against charges that the schools were promoting propaganda for the Democratic Party. In fact, Wallace and Wilson explicitly intended “to raise questions, to spread doubts,” as one close observer noted. Taeusch established the principle that the schools would always include critics of the New Deal. Regardless of their responses, all suggested continuation of the schools.42 Taeusch revised the program and took it on the road in late 1935. The first school was at Ohio State University, followed by eight others at landgrant colleges. Establishing a pattern that persisted over the years, the schools’ content was decided by the individual lecturers, not by the USDA. In addition, the presentations were intended as discussion starters, not the final word. Each set of three lectures in the morning was followed by an afternoon of small-group discussions. Typical was the school at Washington State College (table 3).43 By far the most common overall theme of the schools was, What is a desirable national agricultural program? Taeusch or another philosopher usually opened each school by proposing the contributions philosophy and the social sciences could make to a study of the present situation, particularly as they illuminated agriculture. In one early school Taeusch suggested that philosophy did not try to answer questions so much as to raise them. It fostered an attitude of exploration and discovery of “relationships, meanings and values.” He pointed out the inadequacy of science in providing objectives since science was instrumental, not evaluative. After an overview of Western civilization from the Greeks to the Enlightenment and scientific

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table 3 usda school of philosophy agenda, pullman, washington, january 12–17, 1936 Day and Theme

Lecture One

Lecture Two

Lecture Three

Day One Background and Development of the Present Situation

What Can Philosophy Contribute to a Better Understanding of the Present? Individualism, Democracy, and Social Control

General Social and Economic Background in the U.S.

Immediate Backgrounds of Present Agricultural Policies and Programs The Problem of Continuing a Program of Agricultural Adjustment A Desirable Foreign Trade Policy for American Agriculture Production, Price, and Income Problems of Agriculture

Day Two The Place of Government in Modern Society Day Three Regionalism, Nationalism, and Internationalism Day Four “Scarcity Economy” and “Economy of Abundance” Day Five Values, Social and Human

Unity and Diversity in Society

“Progress” and the Philosophy of History

Human Values

The Relation of Government to Social and Economic Affairs Political and Social Problems Involved in Nationalism and Internationalism A Critique of Our Present Economy

Living Standards in American Life

Improving American Farm Life

Source: Agricultural Extension Service, State of Washington, 3 Jan. 1936, “Twenty-fourth Annual Conference and School for Extension Workers,” box 7, entry 33, RG 83, NACP.

rationalism, he focused on the “bewilderment arising from the growing complexity of modern life.” Taeusch counseled humility, which he characterized as “a most hopeful sign,” and urged philosophical pragmatism as a way to treat current problems. American agriculture was beginning to understand “broader policies and long-time programs, controlled by democratic methods and directed by intelligent leadership.” There could hardly have been a more Deweyan introduction to the schools of philosophy for Extension workers.44 In another school Taeusch focused on democracy, particularly the role of minority opinion. The “essence of our democracy,” he posited, was tolerance of minority groups. He illustrated with a story about Secretary

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Wallace. He had mentioned that they were planning a school of philosophy in Arizona, and Wallace asked who was invited to lecture. Taeusch told the secretary that a prominent commissioner from Texas was on the program, one “who had been viciously attacking the Department program for cotton. ‘Fine, fine,’ said the Secretary,” according to Taeusch. This was his example of the proper democratic frame of mind, going out of the way to include critics of the New Deal. Milton Eisenhower, another longtime USDA worker, testified to the same mental characteristic of Wallace: He liked his ideas to be challenged.45 Another school lecturer, Father Edmund A. Walsh, embodied this oppositional stance that USDA encouraged. Walsh, the vice president of Georgetown University, kicked off the school on the topic of democracy. To the five hundred clerical workers assembled, he railed against a strong governmental push for equality. More equality meant less liberty, the Catholic priest claimed, and he named the New Deal’s effort in this (mis)direction: “I have always felt a little uneasy . . . about the terms of our national legislation, social security. We cannot guarantee any man in this life social security.” The guarantee was bound to disappoint “the unthinking” and would lead to a dangerous disillusionment, perhaps to “the final madness of revolt.” He viewed democracy as being close to tyranny, “the tyranny of a multitude.” In both his conception of democratic equality and his opposition to Social Security, Father Walsh vehemently criticized the New Deal, yet Taeusch invited him to have his say in the school of philosophy. It is also true that the priest was probably balanced by the appearance of Eleanor Roosevelt as a lecturer at this school.46 One lecture called “A Critique of Our Present Economy,” common in the schools, asked whether the past reliance on “prices and competition” still served the country well. Orthodox economic theory, based on free markets and laissez-faire, was no longer operative in the political economy, a lecturer held. New social “institutions of control” were needed, another lecturer argued, to move from scarcity to abundance, to achieve the full potentialities of the economy. Were more government regulations like antitrust, price setting, and production control effective as well as desirable? or were the remedies worse than the disease? As usual, more questions were raised than answered. A treatment of the philosophy of history surveyed the rise of democracy, asking what we can learn from history. What were the prevailing forces shaping contemporary society, both positive and negative? The notion of progress was also interrogated. For example, “Was Hegel right, that the spiritual factors have in the main controlled historic trends, or was Marx right,

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that it is the physical and economic factors which control and which drag the spiritual and cultural in their wake? . . . Can we improve Society? . . . Will the future be determined by forces beyond our control or is the human mind capable of controlling developments, largely by planning and foresight?”47 This school doubtless seemed like “heavy food” indeed to the assembled Extension personnel. The final lectures of every school brought it all home to agricultural policy. Ezekiel often emphasized the fundamental change in the international political economy brought on by World War I that continued into the 1920s: overproduction of food, import restrictions, and the rise of nationalism, including Fascism. Unlike other industries, American agriculture did not “reduce production collectively in the face of declining prices,” but instead increased output. Ezekiel concluded that the New Deal policy had not yet achieved its goals of production efficiency, soil conservation, or price-andincome equity for farmers. Another lecturer argued that from “a larger social point of view,” simply higher farm prices fell short, that consumer interests must be protected. Moreover, regional specialization, soil conservation, and price–income adjustments should be coordinated. Most important, farmers must “participate intelligently in the national referenda and administrative activities which constitute our agricultural democracy.” A third closing lecturer argued that agriculture in the United States must either reduce production to meet only domestic demand, at “decent standards of living,” or readjust to low prices that would jeopardize much commerce and industry as well as farm ownership. The speaker concluded that New Deal agricultural adjustments may be helping some farmers, but they disadvantaged “low income classes [and] consumers.” 48 Obviously these topics and discussions ranged widely. By design they pursued questions that drove to the root of FDR’s agricultural policy. Were consumer interests getting a fair shake? Was the New Deal creating a “scarcity economy” instead of an “economy of abundance”? What alternatives could be envisioned? Critics of the New Deal must ultimately face such issues, which Wallace and Wilson encouraged. The major aim of the schools of philosophy was to get Extension people thinking and talking about some deeper aspects of what they did in their day jobs.49 As was the case in the farmer discussion groups, not everyone approved of the schools. Some state Extension directors, like J. W. Bateman of Louisiana, strenuously objected. He believed that poor farmers needed practical instruction in cooking, health, and blacksmithing. Their Extension agents

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certainly did not need days-long courses in philosophy and social studies, which to Bateman appeared to be worse than a distraction, a waste of time and resources. He opined that the black land-grant schools in particular should concentrate on vocational training and practical advice rather than philosophizing or building up their libraries. Taeusch answered such critics by saying that the discussion groups and schools gave farmers and Extension workers a bit of breathing space for reflection. “More profound thinking among farm people is being encouraged, regardless of what they may finally decide; greater confidence in their own judgments, so that they will express themselves fearlessly; and a feeling that they are a part of government and society and should take a hand in controlling them.” The disagreement here arose from clashing philosophies of education—and of democracy. Atypical to be sure, the major intellectual figure W. E. B. Du Bois lectured at the USDA schools of philosophy for African American teachers.50 Other land-grant officials expressed appreciation. Roland Renne, the agricultural economics head at Montana State, reported to Wilson on a recent school of philosophy in Bozeman. He judged it “a distinct success . . . extremely stimulating.” Many participants, particularly Extension agents “of the old type,” found it too theoretical and “far afield” from their workaday world. The main problem was that Extension workers lacked the academic background to take in all the economics, sociology, and political science thrown at them. Renne did say that the material had been covered too fast, but overall “the school was excellent.” Land-grant colleges needed such events at least annually in order to instill more social-scientific attitudes in their technical personnel.51 During the late New Deal, the schools, like the farmer discussion groups, grew in number and scope. After the USDA’s reorganization in October 1938 to advance cooperative planning, the Program Study and Discussion unit began immediately to assist. In early November Taeusch, hoping to grow the department’s philosophical education, wrote to Tolley asserting “the sociological interest in farm people above the economic interest in commercial farming,” that is, “a political principle of conserving a larger farm population than a strictly economic justification would warrant.” Taeusch argued that “farmers’ thinking” on this score was organic, dynamic, integrative and well ahead of the department’s and the land-grant colleges’. From this position, he argued that the USDA’s educational and planning programs could become more aligned with “the thinking of farmers themselves.” Taeusch proposed incor-

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porating the new farmer-planners into the schools of philosophy, which should be “definitely linked up with the objectives of county program planning.”52 Tolley agreed, for the Program Study and Discussion unit soon expanded considerably and worked closely with the new cooperative planning. In early 1939 it joined the BAE “as an aid to county agricultural planning development.” The schools of philosophy in particular, Tolley noted, helped “prepare leaders for county agricultural-planning activity, and for local farmer discussion groups.” Taeusch’s unit broadened its activities to include schools of philosophy for agricultural workers and farmer committee members, aimed at local citizen-planners. In Iowa during March 1940, for example, it conducted twenty multicounty two-day training sessions with cooperative planning committees. Moreover, it led fifteen training workshops on planning for BAE field representatives and continued this kind of intra-BAE collaboration into 1942. The division also held schools for the Washington staffs of the FSA and the Extension Service, each with about two hundred workers attending. The planning leader Bushrod Allin emphasized the centrality of the educational process of “studying and discussing” to his larger program. Taylor lectured on democracy at one school, and Gray gave a lecture titled “The Land and the People” at another.53 By 1942, however, the sap was no longer rising. The more progressive parts of the agrarian New Deal came under attack from a conservative Congress, antireformist farm organizations, and even some USDA agencies. As the head of the continuing education program, Taeusch first became taciturn, then defiant, at least on paper. He persisted in speaking of radical “economic democracy” and “cultural democracy.” In support of the new war effort, the Program Study and Discussion Division reoriented its topics to feature international affairs, agricultural–industrial relations, and the war’s impacts on farm problems. Taeusch still insisted that the USDA must offer a broader view of agricultural problems and policies, as evidenced by some of the new topics he advanced: background of the world crisis, the social implications of technology, and local communities in relation to national settings. In addition, Taeusch kept arguing for more citizen participation and independent thinking as crucial to “real democracy.” Given that, he admitted that his division’s work “lies in the realm of growing public policy, and much of it is frankly ‘controversial.’ ”54 Taeusch’s complaint here, written to his boss, Tolley, fell on deaf ears. The entire BAE was coming under increasingly vitriolic attack from

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conservatives. The remarkable Program Study and Discussion Division survived until 1945, when its final publication, “World Peace Organization and What It Means to Farm People: An Aid to Discussion of the United Nations Idea,” appeared.55 Needless to say, no farmer study groups or schools of philosophy convened to discuss that matter. But back in 1938, when the rose still held the bloom, Wallace and Wilson conducted another series of extraordinary continuing education efforts, this time within the USDA itself. Educating Experts and Publics in History, Social Science, and Democracy Wallace and Wilson knew that farmers and Extension workers were not the only ones who could use education in democracy. Scientists and administrators within the USDA needed reeducation on the broader social and economic, even historical and philosophical, dimensions of their work. Wilson explicitly called for “education for all of us,” himself included. In one of his most widely distributed pieces, he wrote that “experts frequently need educating just as much as do farmers.” During the Third New Deal, Wilson enacted several amazing projects aimed at educating experts and publics alike in “the ways of democracy.” In 1938 he organized a series of lectures and discussions on democracy by some of the leading public intellectuals in the nation, with USDA workers as the sole intended audience. The following year he hosted six conferences on the potential contributions of several academic disciplines to agricultural policy and the USDA’s work: philosophy, social psychology, political science, cultural anthropology, rural sociology, and agricultural history. It was at this time that Wilson wrote the progressive sociologist Robert S. Lynd at Columbia University, who had just published his influential Knowledge for What? The Place of Social Science in American Culture (1939). The undersecretary told Lynd that “Mr. Tolley has about made Knowledge for What? required reading for everybody in the Bureau of Agricultural Economics.” Finally, in 1940 Wilson and his friend Tolley compiled a special social-science edition of the department’s yearbook of agriculture for the general public. Still respectable today, that heady volume, Farmers in a Changing World, culminated their continuing education effort; more, it epitomized the intellectual–agrarian New Deal in action.56

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The Democracy Lectures, 1938 During spring 1938 an extremely impressive set of lectures and intellectual exchanges took place within USDA. Organized by Undersecretary Wilson and Miller of the Program Study and Discussion unit, the topic was democracy. Originally Wilson scheduled himself to kick off the weekly series with the question, “What Do We Mean by Democracy?” But it turned out that the first lecturer was Charles A. Beard, the dean of American historians, who subsequently wrote the preface to the published version of the series, called Democracy Has Roots. Sixteen national experts with diverse perspectives gave the lectures. As Wilson admitted in the introduction, they all probably agreed on only one principle: “The different views on these vital questions held by responsible citizens should have the widest possible hearing.” Thus Wilson amassed in the USDA auditorium some leading intellectuals of the day to address from five hundred to one thousand employees. The next morning Wilson treated the guest speakers and some bureaucrats, including Secretary Wallace, to continuing in-depth discussion of the topic. One bright young participant recalled them as “an unusually stimulating series of lectures,” followed in Wilson’s office by the “rare opportunity to hear the informal views of [intellectual] leaders . . . , challenged by top staff in the Department, and the interplay was very thought-provoking.”57 Beard, well known as a critic of President Roosevelt, had already published in the BAE’s in-house journal, Land Policy Review, and wrote approvingly of the administrative yet antibureaucratic experiments of the USDA, going so far as to call them democratic. In his lecture to one thousand departmental employees in early 1938, Beard explained why patterns of power in the United States were “undisguisedly economic,” compared to those in Europe. In a deft analysis of the family farm, in which “entrepreneur and laborer combined,” he argued historically that farmer-citizens believed that “government was democratized in proportion as it was localized.” But now such Jeffersonian agrarianism was dead and gone. Could political arrangements that were established before 1800 fit modern needs and circumstances? What “new conventions and institutions are necessary to the continuance of democracy in the contemporary world”? The elder statesman of American history raised but did not answer these large issues before the assembled USDA staff.58 Following Beard was the anthropologist and antiracism advocate Ruth Benedict of Columbia University, the author of Patterns of Culture

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(1935). Taylor had primed Benedict by raising issues of scientists’ and planners’ naivete about their purportedly rational “blue prints,” culture, and social change. He added that Wallace and Wilson were “most deeply concerned about what is happening to democracy under the program of planning.” Next came the new antitrust head in the Department of Justice, the former law professor at Yale Thurman Arnold, who wrote The Folklore of Capitalism (1937) and who addressed some traditional, or “non-rational,” elements in American civilization. The ecologist Paul B. Sears, the author of Deserts on the March (1935), concentrated on the scientific approach, and the University of Chicago philosopher T. V. Smith, whose The Democratic Way of Life appeared in 1926, discussed the prerequisites of democracy. George H. Gallup, soon to publish The Pulse of Democracy, spoke on the new science and democratic promise of public opinion polling. All emphasized the “lack of balance” between cultural folkways and scientific technology and the consequent disruptions to society. Old concepts of private property, for instance, no longer squared with the contemporary corporate economy, and mass insecurity was a new experience for millions of citizens. Benedict explicated the current anti-individualist trend toward collectivism or “acting together in groups.” Echoing Beard, they raised the question of adapting existing cultural patterns to ever-changing conditions. New institutions must be built, they asserted: “The procedure of redefinition is the democratic process.”59 In his talk, “Discipline and Democracy,” Secretary Wallace lectured the department on democracy as a way of life. He listed seven particular ways: majority rule “after the people have had opportunity to inform themselves as to the real facts”; the freedoms of speech, press, religion, and so on; stability and order, meaning nonviolence; “ascending general welfare,” realized through increases in productivity with more even distribution of income; “belief that there are extraordinary possibilities in both man and nature which have not yet been realized,” as in art, science, and religion; “joyous faith in a progressive future”; and “tolerance and humor” at human differences. Struggles over the past century and a half, Wallace said, had been about “efforts to create the proper institutions” and social structure for this democratic way of life.60 Wilson gave the final lecture, which became part of the book’s last chapter, “Contemporary Democracy and Contemporary Agriculture.” Deeply critical and probing, the chapter questioned not only New Deal farm policy but also the reality of democracy in America: “American democracy has too often exhibited the weakness of faith without works. . . . The practice of

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democracy has been too largely absent.” Farmers had been overly concerned with economic activity and not enough with political participation. Wilson asked whether the farm programs were truly democratic. “The alternative to government by the people is government for the people,” a prospect he hardly relished. Other countries had recently gone the way of dictatorship, where “self-government ceases and democracy fails.” The lecturers raised serious questions about the viability of American and world democracy, which they saw as definitely on trial in the world of the late 1930s.61 To Wilson, the federal aspects of current agricultural policy should be balanced by increased participation by local farmers in administration and policy making. Yet, he confessed, the early agrarian New Deal had been “highly centralized.” The county committees of the AAA and the RA were only “a first step immediately taken. . . . A further step, more recently taken, [is] to combine the county activities under these two action programs with general discussion of agricultural welfare.” The USDA decided to unify these activities, that is, AAA, FSA, and continuing education, in the new program of community and county land-use planning. It combined representative farm people with the professional public employees who implemented federal policy locally. The community committees also organized “a far-reaching program of adult education throughout each county” via discussion groups. After mapping, discussing, and deliberating, the planning committees would direct practical action programs, thus restoring “local initiative and leadership.” Government workers were in frequent contact with farmers, and as “practicing democrats,” they informed each other in the county committees. Such, at least, was Wilson’s vision of the policy scene—the meaning of “democracy has roots.”62 Yet Wilson and the others knew that this ideal set a high standard. To oppose “benevolent paternalism” and the dangers of bureaucracy, they held that the “tests of democratic procedure should therefore be all the more rigorously applied” by asking such questions as “What was an equitable division of loans as between Negro and white farmers?” Have the AAA, SCS, and FSA actually “increased the practice of democracy? . . . At meetings, hearings and other assemblies of farmers are the opinions expressed on the farm programs free from official dominance?” Moreover, perhaps as a critique of Wilson himself, his coauthors warned, “Too much idealism can be an administrative fault. Education of the public to want something better than it is likely to demand from its current combination of ignorance, prejudice, horse sense and desire for fair play is a valid function of the civil servant, but

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he should not force his idealism on the public without the public’s having a choice.” Administrators should recognize “the essential difference” between scientific plans and those “developed in the give-and-take of local political discussion.” Technicians sometimes thought of public policy as precise in design and universal in application, whereas citizens saw it as contingent, a compromise. Thus arose the “potential difference between planning and democracy.” 63 Wilson concluded with a vision of democracy he had learned from the institutional economist John R. Commons twenty years earlier, whom he cited here. “The current requirements of the democratic process,” Wilson wrote, called for a synthesis of individualism, groupism, such as cooperatives, and statism. Each of these can be carried too far, producing anarchy, syndicalism, or state socialism. “Now, democracy is each of these three forces pressing against the other two” in an “elastic balance.” Farmers’ crucial participation and experience in public and private associations, in discussion groups and county committees, planning and administration, will eventually yield “local agricultural democracies.” Wilson knew that his vision had yet to be achieved. Indeed, it would be obtained only by the next generation of farm men and women, educated in the social sciences and philosophy at the state colleges of agriculture. This was his fervent hope. Wilson’s conclusion exemplified his homespun style and deep-felt sentiment: “It behooves all who believe in this promise to put their shoulders to the wheel and with tolerance and good nature push it along to make the new agricultural democracy a reality.” He ventured that USDA, farm groups, and rural communities were constructing such a democratic future as he spoke. That is why Wilson dedicated the book “to those whose faith in democracy calls forth new methods to make it work.”64 Six USDA Conferences on History and the Social Sciences, 1939 Wilson’s next project was just as remarkable as the lectures on democracy: a major federal bureaucracy invited leading intellectuals from six academic fields to assist in its work. In spring 1939 he organized conferences in the USDA on “non-economic social sciences” that included follow-up discussion with seventy-five to a hundred top administrators. Wilson sought to acquaint departmental workers with these disciplines, which included philosophy, cultural anthropology, social psychology, political science, rural

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sociology, and agricultural history, as well as to discover what they could offer USDA. As undersecretary, Wilson wanted intellectual contributions to “the union of democratic procedures and scientific methods in the development of agricultural planning and policy-making, and in the educational and research activities of the Department in general and of the reconstituted Bureau of Agricultural Economics in particular.” That’s how he expressed it, but Wilson also foresaw a more instrumental use of the social sciences. How could they help overcome obstacles to farmers’ acceptance of government policy? What scientific insights could they provide to assist administrators in implementing the programs?65 The social-science conferences had an impact on Wilson’s precarious health situation. He obviously worked too much and suffered physically. In early 1939 he experienced debilitating sciatica, which “numbed one hand and arm and sent shooting pains up to the shoulder,” Russell Lord reported. He could not sleep but refused to take sleeping pills. Wilson once said to his wife, “If this keeps up—I’m going to ask you to do something—I’m going to ask you to get out the Bible and read me all of the Book of Job!” Yet, as Lord added, Wilson’s “only daytime relief and distraction was to hold conferences and try to keep his work going.”66 Perhaps the most striking conference was the three-day workshop with cultural anthropologists. Participants included top figures in the field: Robert Redfield of the University of Chicago, who studied a Mexican village and published his findings in a book entitled Tepoztlan; Conrad M. Arensburg of MIT, the author of The Irish Countryman; Charles S. Johnson of Fisk University, the author of The Negro in American Civilization; W. Lloyd Warner of the University of Chicago, who wrote A Black Civilization; Kimball Young of the University of Wisconsin, the author of Social Psychology; Edwin R. Embree, the president of the Rosenwald Fund and a coauthor of The Collapse of Cotton Tenancy; and Robert E. Park, emeritus professor at the University of Chicago and then at Fisk University, the author of The City. In talking with USDA leaders, the anthropologists stressed that cultures do not change piecemeal but rather as structural wholes. They emphasized adjustments to the natural environment as well as changing technology, institutions, and values. Redfield, for example, said that anthropology counters “any expectations that a culture could be quickly, entirely, and painlessly made over. It should upset any notion that alleged bad features of a culture could be changed without some alteration of those features believed to be good.” They agreed that a “policy aimed to accomplish a single good purpose may fail if

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it runs . . . against some well established tradition or attitude.” Cultural anthropologists, then, were “most qualified to predicate the total effects of a given policy.”67 USDA administrators in the discussion concluded that “a series of studies of communities as culturally integrated wholes might be useful.” For example, uncovering the role of “interrelated cultural factors” in different ethnic communities would assist in evaluating the success and failure of a program. In particular, they suggested that anthropologists could show their expertise as technical advisers to the cooperative planning program. Further, cultural anthropology should be added to the expanding schools of philosophy as well as to the curriculum of the agricultural colleges. In his self-styled “little speech” to the group, Wilson drew some lessons from anthropology: (1) that man is malleable, not forever determined to be “just as he is today”; (2) that cultures are holistic, not artificially divided into economics, politics, religion, and so forth; and (3) that an integrated culture is one that “offers the chance for satisfactory living and the flowering of individual capacities and happiness.” Here Wilson reflected not just cultural anthropology but his Deweyan, developmental-democratic philosophy as well.68 After the discussion in USDA, Park sent Wilson an extraordinary salute to the department’s initiatives. The elderly Park recalled hearing Wilson on the radio in 1933: “I had never before heard any one talking to [farmers] as if they were adults; talking to them as if they lived in the world rather than in Kansas, or Texas.” But not until the recent USDA conference on anthropology did he have “any real comprehension of the fundamental way in which the New Deal and the Department of Agriculture were attempting to deal with the revolutionary changes” going on in the country and the world. Park continued, “I have long been interested in revolutions as a social and political phenomenon but I had never expected seeing a department of government actually trying to deal with one by administrative methods.” He went on to discuss mass media, public opinion polling, farmer participation, and institutional change, concluding that what was needed, “finally, is not a public opinion but an institution.” Park saw the USDA as being involved in such a long-term undertaking of “collective action.” In closing, he thanked Wilson for inviting him “to participate in your extraordinarily interesting and instructive seminar.”69 This high praise from a leading American academic is an indication of the intellectual reach of the USDA’s social-science conferences. The social psychologists focused on science and on experts, who, they held, saw problems differently from farmers. Specialists often “don’t tune in

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on the thinking patterns and point of view of the people they are dealing with. . . . Probably the experts have as much to learn as the person affected by the plans.” The social psychologists criticized scientists for dismissing folk customs and habits as irrational. Rather, traditional thought patterns were worth respect and consideration. Many farmers felt imposed upon by the urbanized, rationalized world and by USDA in particular. Handling agricultural surpluses offered an example. Economists, rationally enough, suggested that since there were too many farm commodities to fetch a decent price, production should be controlled. Yet, for quite understandable cultural and psychological reasons, many farmers opposed such controls, imposed by the AAA, especially when this required idling land that had always been planted: “Idle acres were a kind of sin to [farmers], and so the whole program seemed to go counter to moral and religious feelings.” The social psychologists concluded that USDA administrators should at least understand such beliefs and values. All social change, they taught, generated friction, opposition, and “moral protest.”70 In addition to “respect for customary habits,” education could help smooth the conflict. But it had to be a new kind of education, not the traditional landgrant or Extension focus on technology. Increased attention to social and economic problems and adjustments should be given priority. Most agricultural educators and leaders were unprepared for, and often even hostile to, advancing needful changes. Not so, many farmers: “The farmers who are up against the gun of reality are less likely to cling to a folklore that no longer applies than are those who merely advise farmers and are not personally confronted with the new situation.” The educators themselves needed reeducation.71 Instilling this new social and economic outlook was one of the major motivations for the USDA’s continuing education programs of farmer discussion groups and schools of philosophy and accounted for their expansion during the Third New Deal. The rural sociology conference focused more on the discipline’s direct contribution to USDA action programs, probably because the BAE contained a unit devoted to this specialty. But the results disappointed, failing to reach the intellectual level of those on anthropology and psychology. Taylor’s BAE Division of Farm Population and Rural Welfare housed about forty sociologists plus a few geographers, psychologists, and anthropologists. In Wilson’s conference, they concentrated on how their field could advance the new cooperative planning that was just then, in spring 1939, getting under way. Rural sociologists could provide “the social facts for planning,” including

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information on populations, social status and stratification resulting from class divisions and poverty, institutional services, and community / neighborhood areas. Like the anthropologists, they warned of ignoring local loyalties, affronting powerful groups, and arousing “suspicion and antagonism [that could] defeat the very ends of the democratic process.” Planning for social change, they held, succeeded only when those with “a vested interest . . . can see benefit in change.” The sociologists claimed expertise in techniques of social organization such as group processes, leading discussions, forming representative committees, and developing local leadership. They also made a pitch to the USDA administrators for more support for “fundamental research on the social or human aspects of rural life.” One of the seventeen proposed research topics questioned the “effectiveness of the groups set up in the [USDA’s] action programs and to what extent they produce a democratic system of social control.” Presumably neither the social scientists, administrators, nor anyone else knew the answer to that question. This meant that, despite their sometimes exaggerated rhetoric, Wallace, Wilson, and others were not so sure that New Deal farm programs were actually operating in the intended democratic fashion. And they wanted to find out.72 At the end of this season of USDA academic conferences, in late May 1939, Wilson held one on agricultural history. Chaired by John D. Hicks, of the University of Wisconsin and the author of The Populist Revolt, the conferees included Solon J. Buck of the National Archives, the author of The Agrarian Crusade; Caroline F. Ware, the author of The Early New England Cotton Manufacture and at the time editing The Cultural Approach to History; Donald R. Young of the University of Pennsylvania, the author of American Minority Peoples; Avery Craven of the University of Chicago, the author of The Irrepressible Conflict, 1830–1861; Edwin G. Nourse of the Brookings Institution and the lead author of the major critical evaluation Three Years of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration; the elderly Henry C. Taylor, the founder of the BAE; and the young Paul W. Gates of Cornell University, soon to become the premier historian of American land policy. The conferees dealt with the value of history in addressing the social and economic problems facing agriculture, the contribution of historical research to the USDA and the state experiment stations, significant historical source materials, and the dissemination of agricultural history. They also endorsed a proposed national museum of agriculture. The USDA’s senior historian said that “the conference report is a veritable handbook for research workers for at least a decade,” adding, as he wrote in 1941, as long as “the Nation is permitted to remain at

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peace.”73 Historians as well as philosophers and social scientists all had their say in informing agricultural policy in the Third New Deal. Farmers in a Changing World: The Yearbook of Agriculture, 1940 The yearbook of agriculture for 1940, Farmers in a Changing World, is one of the most remarkable books ever published by the U.S. Government Printing Office. For decades the USDA had widely disseminated an annual review to the public. Congress members often gave them to their constituents. Starting in the New Deal, the yearbooks became topical, for example, Soils and Men, 1938, and Climate and Man, 1941. But the yearbook of 1940 took the cake. It weighed in at over twelve hundred pages, with USDA workers writing most of its fifty-five chapters. Other authors included a distinguished Harvard philosopher, two Chicago anthropologists, and the president of the Julius Rosenwald Fund—mostly attendees at the recent USDA conferences. A social-science showcase, the volume stood as a tribute to Wallace, who was then leaving the department to run as FDR’s vice president. In his foreword, Wallace called for building “an economic democracy that will match our political democracy.” Wilson, newly installed as federal Extension director, and Tolley, working with an editor, organized the tome. They received advice and assistance from their fellow agrarian intellectuals Gray, Taylor, and Allin.74 In superb fashion the book culminated the intellectual and educational achievement of the agrarian New Deal. Its core theme, reflected in the title, signaled the necessity of adjusting to the coming transformation of American agriculture. The changes were not just rural but international as well as national, urban, and industrial. Such interconnections led to the current trend among many national governments toward comprehensive planning. In addition to treating earlier New Deal programs, Farmers in a Changing World featured the major development in agricultural policy since 1938, participatory cooperative planning. Another theme was the human side of the farm problem, specifically rural poverty, recently “discovered” by state and federal social scientists. The New Deal, the editor wrote, tended less to stigmatize the poor than to see them as “individuals and families with the same needs, longings, and possibilities as the rest of us.”75 Fairly new in most agricultural circles, the social sciences, including history, received places of honor in the yearbook. The volume had its shortcomings, such as some repetition, occasional scientism,

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a streak of agricultural fundamentalism, and overrepresentation of economists, but overall it was a remarkable compilation of substantive pieces intended for the general public. It still provides short, authoritative summaries of the agrarian New Deal programs. Yet the yearbook of 1940 did not reflect official policy. Indeed, some of its chapters criticized the USDA and the New Deal. Such differences of opinion, the editor held, reflected the democratic stance of not only allowing but encouraging open discussion and different perspectives. The reader should therefore “discount or disagree with whatever he wishes in the book and bring his own thinking to bear on the points at issue.” This theme of deliberative democracy was timely, the “result of the impact of world events on American thinking.” While certainly hyperbolic, it is still sobering to read this sentence from 1940: “In fact, there are few other countries left in the world where such a book as this could now be published.” All the authors were acutely aware of the import of the new world war. Americans were now “reexamining their origins and looking into the meaning of democracy more intensively than at any time since the Republic was founded.”76 The yearbook played an educational role in rediscovering agrarian-democratic roots and branches. Among the most relevant chapters was one by Paul H. Johnstone, an agricultural historian in Taylor’s BAE division who wrote a still-used account of agrarianism. He pointed up the agrarian idealism of American intellectual reformers as opposed to the practicality of farm people, who daily faced “the monotony of chores, the dust of harrowing, the threat of drought and pests and disease.” Johnstone implicitly criticized New Deal agricultural policies for favoring the wealthy and increasing class stratification. The old ideal of progress had given way to the greater need for security, and he called for the development of new social institutions to achieve it. Another key chapter, titled “The Cultural Setting of American Agricultural Problems” and written by the historian Ralph Turner, was an extremely wideranging piece, by turns Marxist and Jeffersonian but always critical of the status quo. Turner argued that the growing interdependence and instability of modern life necessitated an increase, or a restoration, in his view, of participatory economic democracy among ordinary citizens. Finally, in a onehundred-page overview, the senior USDA historian similarly traced the close tie between land and democracy in the American past and the “perversion” of that link more recently. All three chapters deployed the historical imagination in contextualizing New Deal agricultural policies, specifically raising the question of democracy.77

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One of the many fine social-science contributions to the yearbook was Rensis Likert’s “Democracy in Agriculture: Why and How?” A prominent social psychologist and survey researcher, Likert joined the reconstituted BAE in 1939 to head a new Division of Program Surveys. In his chapter he profiled the “democratic personality,” which, he argued, exhibited emotional maturity and self-reliant citizenship. Nevertheless, such individuals still required training in democratic methods as well as “machinery” to implement democratic processes. Many modern governments were tending toward more complexity and less democracy; legislatures passed bills that were only generally worded, leaving administrators to make key decisions, as was the case with the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933. Likert proposed a new scientific technique to “direct [agricultural policy] in a thoroughly democratic manner”: the sample survey. Survey sampling made citizens’ opinions available to government administrators quickly, cheaply, and accurately. For example, how do midwestern farmers prefer that the AAA administer corn prices? What assistance do Dust Bowl landowners need to carry out conservation practices? Despite some warnings as to their conduct and misuse, Likert expressed grand hopes for public polling techniques, particularly as they could “help make administration more democratic.” Likert himself went on to become professionally well known (he invented a widely used scale to measure attitudes), but his promised democratic use of survey research did not turn out exactly as planned.78 This eventual fact reflects on Likert, but it also shows the political and intellectual distance the country has traveled since the social-science optimism of late New Deal America. Other instances of prewar democratic confidence in the yearbook were offered by the agrarian intellectuals Tolley, Gray, Taylor, and Allin as well as by philosopher William Hocking and the anthropologists Redfield and Warner. Aspects of rural poverty were detailed in eight long chapters. Related topics included expertise and citizens, individual versus collective action, planning and capitalism, private property and democracy, nutrition and income distribution, education and labor, underconsumption and surplus commodities. (The last two themes engendered the food stamp and school lunch programs.) Wilson’s piece in Farmers in a Changing World exemplified his “practical and peculiarly American” philosophy of reform. First, he enumerated many sides to the complex agricultural problem: low incomes, land tenure, population adjustments, rural poverty, soil conservation. Then he proposed a new, holistic way of approaching them, the cultural approach, arguing that “economic problems are moral problems.” In fact, Wilson continued,

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doubtless reflecting his takeaway from the recent USDA conferences, the problems were also cultural and psychological, even philosophical and spiritual. And educational, that is, “not consist[ing] in experts telling farmers what the truth is, for experts frequently need educating just as much as do farmers. Education appropriate to contemporary needs would consist rather in an effort to stimulate the critical senses, to develop broader points of view, and to develop creative imagination.” Wilson made perfectly clear that he favored the family-sized farm over the large industrial type, and he promoted modern subsistence, “live-at-home” farming too. Yet ultimately he disavowed “class and race devils” in presenting his reform stance, based as it was on three streams of current American thought: philosophical pragmatism, institutional economics, and cultural anthropology. This synthetic perspective “would recognize the interdependence of social phenomena all the way from the monthly creamery check and the Monday-morning washing to the highest aesthetic or philosophic or spiritual concern.” Wilson’s declaration did indeed go “beyond economics,” as his title promised. It even went beyond education, although he saw “educational procedures as a first essential to success.”79 The first pillar of the Intended New Deal in agriculture, then, was continuing education, as elaborated in this chapter. In the Program Study and Discussion project as well as the other educational programs for experts and publics, Wallace, Wilson, and the other agrarian New Dealers sought to inculcate critical thinking. They believed that deliberative democracy required educated, critical citizens who questioned their government and that government itself had a crucial role in advancing such a democracy. The farmer discussion groups and the schools of philosophy offered diverse points of view on pressing issues of the day, as did the public intellectuals’ lectures on democracy, the social-science conferences, and the Yearbook of Agriculture, 1940. The USDA leaders created and implemented these projects in the faith that, as Wilson put it, average people can make their way if they are “given light.” In these educational venues at least, the agrarian intellectuals modeled democracy. The other two pillars of the Intended New Deal, action research and local planning, both involved grass-roots citizen participation.

chapter 8

Reforming Social Science Participatory Action Research Democratic planning for agriculture and rural life, which involves the active participation of farm men and women, is essentially a social process. —carl c. taylor, 1941

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ocial scientists played a much larger role in the New Deal than ever before in the federal government, and the agrarian intellectuals more than carried their weight. We have seen that many USDA leaders were public-spirited institutional economists. As the 1930s proceeded, the Third New Deal became remarkably influenced by social-scientific research, often conducted in partnership with local citizens. Secretary Wallace, Undersecretary Wilson, BAE chief Tolley, and many working under them saw this as the investigative phase of democratic planning. Here were scores of social scientists using their specialized skills to advance farmers’ input to government programs, what today could be called community-based research or participatory action research. Not an unalloyed success, it still pioneered concepts and techniques to be used later in community organizing and community development, and it produced many more immediate positive outcomes. The effort is significant as the first nationwide attempt to effect a merger of local and expert knowledge in public policy. It has hardly been equaled since. State and federal social scientists were involved in all three phases of cooperative land-use planning. In the first, preparatory stage, the BAE Program Study and Discussion Division carried out continuing education for farmers, scientists, administrators, and Extension agents, as shown in the previous chapter. Also at this initial stage, citizens and sociologists in the BAE Division of Farm Population and Rural Welfare conducted local selfstudies called community delineation, a process detailed below. Next, BAE

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economists and Extension specialists worked with the county planning committees to construct the land-use maps and reports that emerged from the second phase of the program, treated later in the chapter. In both phases, local citizens with experts performed work previously done by social scientists alone. The third and final stage of cooperative planning involved BAE and land-grant personnel helping local committees achieve the action phase (see chapter 9). At each of the three stages of the planning process, citizens, scientists, educators, and administrators worked together in unprecedented ways. Rural sociologists and land economists assisted hundreds of county and thousands of community-level planning committees. Tolley referred to this widespread citizen participation as “the farmer [doing] a social science chore.” The agrarian intellectuals were not socialists, yet in their reformist way they answered Marx’s century-old radical call to unify theory and practice: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is, to change it.”1 More obviously, they were responding to practical debates in their own time on the relationship between democracy and the state, reflected in the divergent theories of Weber and Dewey. For their part, the governmentbased social scientists were reformers out to use scientific knowledge to improve rural America as they understood it. Organizing the Rural Community: Participation, Representation, Mobilization BAE and land-grant sociologists labeled the technique that they and local citizens used to subdivide a county–community delineation. For the purposes of land-use planning, they asked, Which smaller geographical areas should be represented on the county planning committee? The goal was for residents in such socio-spatial units to participate in the planning process. To the activist public sociologists, community organization was a verb, that is, an activity to perform, not an object to study. One described their type of participatory research as “a sociology of social action.” Beginning with the Third New Deal in 1939, the BAE Division of Farm Population and Rural Welfare, USDA’s rural sociology core, increasingly devoted time and energy to community delineation. By mid-1941 citizens and sociologists had delineated eighteen hundred communities and eleven thousand neighborhoods across thirty-two states. These numbers reflected tremendous intellectual and administrative effort. The head of the division, Carl Taylor, and the other so-

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ciologists saw it as organizational work, that is, social science that contributed to the self-organization of local areas for purposes of planning and action. In fact, community delineation was an early effort of what came to be called community development, which aimed at collective mobilization and problem solving.2 What was the sociological theory behind the BAE’s community delineation? How did the sociologists actually carry it out? With what intentions and what results?. Theory Sociological and Democratic The goal of community delineation was to uncover the already “functioning social units” or “ ‘natural’ social groupings” that would ensure “democratic representation and full participation” on the local planning committees. Thus community delineation employed both sociological theory to illuminate existing social patterns and participatory-democratic theory. The federal sociologists took the social part of sociology very seriously, reflecting the BAE’s group or collective approach to local problems and public policy. They urged cooperative, not individual, action as part of broad-based solutions, following what was called, after decades of rural sociological and ideological practice, “the community idea.”3 For twenty-five years sociologists had investigated small communities in excruciating detail. Now, in cooperative planning, they were able and eager to apply their accumulated knowledge to public purpose, administrative as well as participatory. In 1915 Charles Josiah Galpin published the first classic locality study of American rural sociology.4 Based on detailed empirical research in a Wisconsin county, he coined the phrase “rurban community” to identify a village or service-trading center and its surrounding farmsteads. Taylor claimed that “Galpin literally invented a new method of community analysis,” one that became replicated countless times over the next three decades. In 1919 Galpin moved with his boss in Madison, Henry Taylor, to Washington, D.C., to found USDA’s rural sociology unit, which three years later became the Division of Farm Population and Rural Life in the original BAE. In this position he supported similar research by other pioneering rural sociologists via cooperative agreements with state agricultural experiment stations. In the 1920s they looked within the community to see smaller rural neighborhoods, variously called, by John Kolb in Wisconsin, primary groups; by Dwight Sanderson in New York, social areas; by E. L. Morgan in Missouri, rural population groups; and by E. A. Taylor and F. R. Yoder in Washington, simply rural

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social organization. They generally found that physical proximity, or neighborhoods, led to neighborliness among farm families. But after investigating rural organization in biracial North Carolina, Carl Taylor and Carle C. Zimmerman strenuously denied that spatial areas were also social units. Class and racial stratification prevented homogeneity or communal “we-feelings” in any particular place. Yet these latter findings seemed anomalous, perhaps peculiarly southern, and the Progressive field of rural sociology developed apace. The positive, integrative features of rural communities continued to be emphasized.5 In addition to two decades of such empirical research, New Deal sociologists possessed another inspiring source for their community delineation work. By the late 1930s the Gemeinschaft- Gesellschaft theory of the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies had gained currency in the United States, especially among rural sociologists. They applied his analytical, typological constructs in an effort to become more scientific and theoretical. Gemeinschaft, translated as “community,” referred to intimate social relations based on blood, friendship, or neighborliness. The European peasant village exemplified this type of communal solidarity and cultural integration, which was organic, traditional, and exclusive. Gemeinschaft corresponded loosely to the theoretical formulations of American sociologists, such as Charles H. Cooley’s “primary group,” Pitirim A. Sorokin’s “familistic” relations, and Louis Wirth’s “folk society” as well as the anthropologist Robert Redfield’s “folk culture.” On the other hand, Tönnies’s Gesellschaft, translated as “society” or “association,” meant social relations governed by competitive individualism, utilitarian rationality, and large, differentiated institutions. Its exemplars were commercial business, the impersonal market, and capitalist civil society. Carl Taylor contrasted the two concepts in terms of folk culture and rationalized culture.6 Some American sociologists made the conceptual leap, however questionable, from social relations to spatial types. In 1929 Sorokin, at Harvard, and Zimmerman superseded the first generation of rural textbooks with their Principles of Rural–Urban Sociology. In using Tönnies to differentiate types of social relations spatially, they identified the countryside with Gemeinschaft and the city with Gesellschaft, a linkage that Tönnies himself sometimes suggested. The next year, in cooperation with Galpin of the BAE, they edited a three-volume tome titled A Systematic Source Book in Rural Sociology. Citing Tönnies’s concepts, they again contrasted urban life with the rural community. In 1938 Zimmerman culminated this spatialization of

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Tönnies in The Changing Community, virtually defining Gemeinschaft as “localistic” and Gesellschaft as “cosmopolitan.” Gemeinschaft, with its clanlike we-feelings, thus came to be identified with small communities, and Gesellschaft with cities, based on rational calculation and special interests. Charles P. Loomis, who earned his doctorate with Sorokin and Zimmerman at Harvard after acquiring a master’s with Carl Taylor at North Carolina State, brought this interpretation of Tönnies into the BAE, where he worked tirelessly to delineate rural communities. In his spare time, apparently, Loomis translated Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft into English; it appeared in 1940, just at the zenith of his and others’ community delineation work in the Third New Deal.7 Following Tönnies, Galpin, and other theorists, rural sociologists in the 1930s distinguished between rural neighborhoods and communities. Both exhibited geographical proximity and a degree of social solidarity, but they differed by size, complexity, and quality of relationships. Neighborhoods were the smallest group, or “functioning social unit,” beyond the nuclear family and farmstead. The BAE sociologists saw the rural neighborhood as relatively intimate and sympathetic, reinforcing unity and offsetting “selfish special interests and pressure groups.” Neighborhoods offered familistic, face-to-face interactions, or Gemeinschaft. The typical rural neighborhood was a closeknit socio-spatial group that had a name and often a store, school, or church. Its members frequently “neighbored” and easily met together, sharing “neighborhood loyalty” and a “sense of belonging to the area.” And crucially, according to the sociologists, they held interests in common.8 The empirical task was to determine precisely where joint social interests overlapped spatially. Upon uncovering established working relationships in a locale, the sociologists claimed that people there would probably express themselves freely in group meetings. Such neighborhoods thus provided “the most representative cross-section of information on conditions and local problems in the county.” Further, sociological research showed that a few families in each neighborhood frequently interacted face-to-face with most of the others. Being “very close to the ‘grass roots,’ ” they could quite capably represent “the ideas and opinions of the neighborhood at public meetings,” according to local residents. These so-called leading families could therefore best serve as neighborhood representatives on the planning committees. Here, sociologists mixed empirical work with democratic intentions. Finally, they asserted that leadership and all formal organizations like churches, cooperatives, and

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planning committees were founded on informal social interactions and networks: in other words, Gemeinschaft underwrote Gesellschaft. These public sociologists foreshadowed later techniques of network analysis as well as today’s concept of social capital.9 Whereas Weber might have raised his eyebrows over this activist approach to research, Dewey would have nodded in approval. The rural community, by contrast, was a larger socio-spatial entity, comprising several neighborhoods as well as more self-interested groups. Based on secondary, nonfamilistic relationships, it offered larger schools and churches, more economic, medical, and recreational services, and more formal organizations. Constituting trade centers for surrounding areas, selfsufficient communities met most basic needs, as Galpin had earlier indicated with his term rurban. Compared to neighborhoods, they appeared less intimate, more Gesellschaft-like. BAE sociologists observed that in communities, people did not know everyone so much as they knew of everyone. Communities “bridge[d] the gap between the ‘grass roots’ and the ‘Great Society.’ ” For this reason, the sociologists concluded, communities served as the ideal unit beyond the neighborhood to be represented on the county planning committees.10 The theory underlying community delineation was democratic as well as sociological. The BAE sociologists saw their work as a way to advance “active participation of farm men and women” in cooperative planning. Such participation was required if citizens were to fulfill the low-modernist aim of the Third New Deal, that is, to localize and coordinate government programs. In an internal memorandum BAE sociologists wrote, “To make possible real representation and active participation on the part of farm people necessitates having people work in effective social groups which we term communities: that is, areas within which people have the strongest sense of belonging together.” Given the need for representation, since all farm people could not participate directly on the planning committees, the BAE pursued a cell-form of organization. Every farm family was located in a rural neighborhood, every neighborhood represented on a community committee, and every local community on the county committee. The sociologists claimed it was “the most democratic scheme of getting representative committees.”11 This type of organization promised a heretofore unrealizable public potential for grass-roots mobilization and social change in rural America. It was a very large task, one that was notably inspired by science and driven by gov-

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ernment. Again, in line with Dewey, the BAE sociologists simultaneously promoted administrative organization and citizen participation. To realize effective cooperative planning, the BAE sought representativeness as well as participation. The committees themselves demanded delineation work since they recognized that “if representative and effective county committees are to be organized there must be some knowledge of the sub-groups within the county which need to be recognized if the planning is to represent the thinking of the people, and if the planned action is to follow the deliberations of the committees. The most effective subdivision of the county which has been found is that into communities and neighborhoods, for these represent the ‘natural’ social groupings within the county. They provide a basis for representation.” The sociologists held that local committee members both represented their constituencies at the meetings and took back tentative decisions for discussion and possible approval. Local planning depended not only on the community status of representatives but also on their informal social bonds and contacts. Central here was the “organization of the two-way transmission of suggestions and recommendations for action between the county committees and the local farmers.” This was the reason for community delineation in the first place, that is, to make the planning committees representative as well as effective.12 In their own internal division report, the BAE sociologists took an explicitly normative stand favoring local mobilization: “There must be developed a strong, forceful, aggressive community. The greatest need in every community undertaking planning is for the men, women, and children of the community to form and operate for themselves a functioning organization through which to help themselves.” The sociologists gave highest priority to local self-organization: “Rural community organization should be thought of as the means of bringing together the people of the community so that they can think through their common problems, work out ways and means of solving them, and through cooperative effort, develop schemes for carrying through their plans.” This was a very early statement of what came to be known as “community organizing” and “the community development process.”13 What could be more low modernist? The farm-reared, empirical sociologists realized that many rural communities did not actually exhibit common interests or a sense of belonging. “The lack of community organization and mutual feeling of responsibility on the part of all families living within the community is today one of the

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limiting factors in the development of a planned agriculture,” BAE researchers reported. But instead of simply accepting that naked fact in positivist fashion, the sociologists sought to transform the reality. In addition to “real representation and active participation,” they thus fostered community mobilization for democratic planning and action. In particular, they undertook to create community interest, expand citizen participation, and build local leadership.14 Again, this all reflected the power of the community idea among the reform-minded sociologists. A related idea, deliberative democracy, also took center stage in the Third New Deal. The agrarian planners assumed that group discussion could lead to improved understanding, compromise, and agreement, from which all would benefit. This theory of democratic talk derived from their midwestern familyfarm origins as well as from their philosophical mentors, Dewey and Commons, and they applied it most directly in the late 1930s. Granted that most communities comprised varying interests based on such differences as class and land tenure, the planning committee aimed first to organize the possibly conflicting locality-based interests, then bring them together to work on common problems and develop collective solutions. Each local group, ideally, was represented at the table. They would agree and act insofar as they could; the remaining issues were left for the next meeting, another day. This deliberatedemocratic theory held that such discussion and broadening understanding would engender cooperation and better community decisions. A contemporary political scientist concluded that the planning program sought “the common interest of the county [which] must be built by discussion and compromise out of the conflicts of particular interest.”15 Taylor, in charge of the BAE’s delineation work, wrote that it constituted “in itself only a step in the total process of analyzing the community, and in utilizing the knowledge gained in promoting a program of democratic planning.” Some spatial basis for organization and representation of the local committees had to be used. By combining theoretical assumption and empirical finding, the sociologists and the citizens developed this low-modernist model of rural organization. The local committees already sensed what BAE sociologists determined empirically, namely, that rural neighborhoods and communities constituted “ ‘natural’ social groupings” within a county, and all agreed on the use of these local groups for planning. Grass-roots forms of social organization promised the most effective planning. Such “existing informal groupings” provided a two-way channel between farm families and the public action agencies. Effective community delineation also advanced

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“democratic functioning” through organization and representation. The community groupings, that is, offered keys to participation. Further, the cell-type form of organization involved not only two-way exchanges but also local “buyin” of the resulting plan. Therefore, BAE sociologists believed, the plans had a high likelihood of being put into action because “it is their plan and best fits their needs and thinking.”16 Community delineation and the larger planning program aimed for active organization, participation, representation, and mobilization. Something like it seemed prerequisite for almost any kind of collective decision making, an article of BAE’s deliberative-democratic faith. But, more mundanely, how did the rural sociologists conduct community delineations on the ground? What did they actually do out in all those counties? Locating the Rural Community In early 1939, as part of the Third New Deal, BAE sociologists began promoting the new cooperative planning program. In their initial work with the county committees, they discussed the role of subcounty “social groupings” like communities and neighborhoods in planning, particularly “the idea of the two-way channel to be created by the planning process between farm families on the one hand and the public agencies on the other.” The BAE sociologists pointed out “the need for concerted action,” or community mobilization, which usually led to “a consideration of how representative the committee actually was.” Thus began the formal process of community delineation, their first research task. Based essentially on folk knowledge gleaned from interviewing local people, these area delineations were, as Howard Beers noted, “merely those social groupings which to a long-time, widely acquainted resident of [the] county might be obvious.” Such residents, “by reason of their general familiarity with the social habits of citizens in all parts of the county,” could probably name the various neighborhoods and communities identified by the sociologists. Community delineation, in other words, simply formalized local knowledge, or common sense, as Taylor readily admitted. Such an understanding exemplified the low-modernist stance of the federal sociologists.17 The empirical aim of community delineation research was to “find out what neighborhoods of the county cluster around the chief centers, and to consider each cluster as a natural community.” Two young rural sociologists, Irwin T. Sanders and the BAE staffer Douglas Ensminger, both of whom had

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been graduate students of Dwight Sanderson at Cornell, codified the process into seven steps, which highlighted local citizen involvement and thereby presaged the community development process and, later, participatory action research: 1. Select local people to help in the survey. Sanders and Ensminger specified those who had “inquiring minds and a democratic manner.” 2. Collect materials for the survey, including state highway maps and a questionnaire. 3. Prepare for field work. a. Ask key informants (such as county agents, school bus drivers, merchants, older boys and girls) to name and draw the boundaries of all the rural neighborhoods they know about. b. Collect names of “leading people” in each neighborhood to interview. c. Form research pairs or “teams” and assign them a section of the county, preferably one they are unacquainted with. d. Train research teams with survey and questionnaire. 4. Conduct field work for mapping neighborhoods. a. Interview three or four neighborhood leaders about the boundaries of their area, asking: “What community is this? Can you show me on the map here just how far this community goes in each direction?” b. In cases of doubt about neighborhood affiliation, inquire: “If an interesting meeting were being held the same night at both centers, which one would the people most likely attend?” c. Consult with other teams working in the neighboring area and decide which boundaries are most accurate. 5. Analyze social life of village centers: leadership, organizations, stratification, cooperation, and conflict. 6. Make final map and tabulations. 7. Begin planning in the “natural community.” a. Hold local open forums. b. Use discovery of the local neighborhoods and communities to determine equitable representation on the planning committees for all parts of the county.18 This “neighborhood-cluster” method of community delineation represented a refinement of the “trade and service area” technique Galpin had

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introduced twenty-five years earlier. The older procedure had two variants: (1) surveying rural people about where they shopped, attended church, and obtained services like milling, ginning, banking, and health care; and (2) asking businesspeople about the extent of their service areas. In their intensive study of an Alabama county, Sanders and Ensminger found through empirical research that this trade–service-area method failed to identify the “real natural community” based on strong neighborhood loyalties and attachments. For this reason their alternative method focused on whole neighborhoods instead of on individuals or families. Sanders and Ensminger, like the other BAE sociologists, believed that the new neighborhood-cluster technique emphasized primary rather than secondary associations, that is, Gemeinschaft instead of Gesellschaft. The neighborhood method also was “better adapted to serve as [a] basis of representation in planning programs.” Furthermore, it was less laborious than the service-area method.19 In several publications BAE and land-grant sociologists illustrated the actual process of delineating neighborhoods and communities. In Kentucky, Beers, Robin Williams, John Page, and Ensminger exemplified it by applying the new neighborhood-cluster method in Garrard County. First, they met with the county planning committee, which had requested assistance. Committee members and other local knowledgeable people tentatively identified the main communities or population centers of the county, along with their surrounding areas. These were treated as “trial areas” to be subsequently confirmed or revised by field research. The delineators used a base map of the county supplied by the highway department, which showed villages, roads, schools, churches, stores, public buildings, rivers, streams, bridges, farmsteads, and other landmarks. They asked various locals to identify the different neighborhood areas. Pointing to a part of the map, the sociologist would query, “If folks from this area were in the county seat and were asked where they lived, what would they probably say?” Further questions led to more specific identification of the various rural neighborhoods. Through repeating this process of interviewing key informants throughout the county, the delineators initially discovered all of its local places.20 Next, members of the planning committee provided the delineators with the names of people from each tentatively identified neighborhood who could help outline the actual boundaries of the area. These were almost always farm people who had lived in the area for a long time and who were “aware of the existing patterns of social behavior.” The sociologists believed that a farmer, “as a lay citizen,” would be less biased in considering “the

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total patterns of relationships” in his or her community than store owners or school, church, and local government officials. Members of the planning committee also gave the delineators additional background on the county, including the various meeting places, recent local issues, and cultural divergences or similarities among the social groups.21 After gathering all these preliminary data, the fieldwork of delineation then consisted of “a systematic visitation of the selected neighborhood residents” who would indicate their area boundaries on a base map. The sociologists asked residents about their identification with the locale: “Who belongs to this neighborhood [or community]? Who identifies with this area?” The sociologists further inquired about the geographical extent of each area: “How far down this road does your community go? Where does the next neighborhood begin?” The boundaries of each area were then marked on the road map, which again was presented to the local informant: “So is this the best place to draw the boundaries of your community?” This interview-and-map technique was repeated with at least one person from each neighborhood, who functioned as the expert. All the estimates of each informant were doublechecked and confirmed by others. The neighborhoods were delineated first, then related neighborhoods were clustered to form the larger natural community areas. Thus the initial community trial areas that had been identified at the beginning of the research were verified and adjusted. Over the course of such fieldwork, the citizens and the sociologists delineated thirty-eight neighborhoods and nine communities in Garrard County.22 On the basis of their study, Beers and the others concluded that since the “trial areas proved to be substantially correct,” county planning organizers could, by following the above techniques, accurately map communities without special assistance. However, at the more local, neighborhood level, some field study would probably be required. That is, local people could delineate the larger communities alone but might need technical assistance in identifying all the rural neighborhoods. The sociologists added that “actual scientific analysis and classification of neighborhoods and communities involve thoro [sic] investigation.” However, they realized that the real experts in this process of delineation were the local citizens who shared knowledge of their areas.23 Two additional points about this method of community delineation: First, if the local informant did not know a particular family in a rural neighborhood, the sociologist often went to that house for an interview. Through this procedure even the more marginalized families became included in the re-

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search. While doubtless many of the poorest were excluded from the community delineations, the sociologists made a systematic effort to reach them. Second, by asking who belongs? and who identifies? with a particular locale, the sociologist and the planning committees offered empirical confirmation of a shared feeling of solidarity. Rather than assuming that such we-feelings or Gemeinschaft existed in rural communities, the sociologists tested that proposition and followed where the evidence led. In some cases, there surely was not much solidarity, but this procedure insured that the maximum amount that did exist became the basis for the delineations.24 The social-scientific work of delineation resulted in more accurate bounding of the territorial extent of the rural communities and in further locating the county’s “smaller social groupings,” or neighborhoods. Community delineation aimed to maximize participation by organizing effective and representative local planning committees. Low-modernist technical assistance by federal sociologists thus contributed to greater citizen involvement. It also increased both scientific and administrative knowledge of rural neighborhoods and communities. Progress and Problems in Community Delineation Over the short life of cooperative planning, Taylor’s Division of Farm Population and Rural Welfare devoted most of its resources to advancing the program. During the Third New Deal the unit peaked in terms of funding and personnel, numbering fifty-seven professional researchers, mostly rural sociologists. From July 1939 to June 1940, the first full year of the program, the most significant activity in the 935 “preparatory counties” was the systematic delineation of neighborhood and community boundaries. The resultant county maps showing all “natural neighborhoods and communities” were used to organize and mobilize the county and community planning committees. By mid-1940 government sociologists working with local planning committees had delineated 480 communities and 3,600 rural neighborhoods in 40 counties. The sociologists reported, “As a result of the practical need of the county planning programs to find effective units of organization within the county, a demand for service in the delineation of neighborhoods and communities has developed in all parts of the country.” They were right. A year later, Taylor’s unit had delineated 1,800 communities and 11,000 neighborhoods across 32 states. They called this “organizational work” the selfmobilization of local areas for planning and action.25

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To begin this participatory process, rural sociologists often delineated a sample community, then the county planning committee completed the rest of the community delineations on its own. This kind of demonstration effect, well known in Extension circles, highlighted the new type of participatory research. The county committees’ representation was increasingly based on such work: they were “gradually adopting the natural [community] groupings for [their] basis of operation.” For example, in Hand County, South Dakota, the Extension agent had first used the forty townships as organizational units for the planning program. This number of local committees seemed too high, so the county committee sought “fewer and more effective local units for planning.” With the BAE sociologist’s assistance, it conducted community delineations, identifying twelve geographical areas of common interests where farm people neighbored. These twelve areas then became the new, more efficient socio-spatial bases for land-use planning, replacing the previous forty. Moreover, the county agent commented that the “most important point about this community mapping job is that it has been done by the farm men and women.” This kind of participatory research, which created more locally meaningful units for planning, occurred throughout America’s countryside.26 Further, the BAE sociologist in Hand County served “essentially in a technical and advisory capacity,” Taylor noted. This manner of assistance was far more effective than if he had done the job for the local committee: “Not only is it a job of the committee, but the information is applied more definitely than if it were simply handed to the committee as a finished job. Frequently in the process, new angles of a problem are developed and it is possible to lift the entire problem out of the realm of speculation on the basis of the facts which the discussants have themselves collected and analyzed.” Taylor’s division stressed that community and neighborhood delineation was only the first step in local planning. “With the natural groupings of people marked out, a sound basis for democratic representation—and full participation—is established. That this is widely understood is indicated by the number and distribution of counties in which delineation has been undertaken.” Taylor averred that his division’s participatory method of technical guidance, as opposed to expert-only research, was “preferred, for it is desirable that farm people should understand the processes of their planning—and participation in the work is the best assurance of understanding,” he added in low-modernist tones. Taylor emphasized this “fusion of farmer and technician thinking” that he saw in many county planning committees.27 Participatory action research was happening on the ground.

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Yet the well-delineated rural neighborhoods and communities did not always exhibit social solidarity or even common interests. Sometimes they did, especially in relatively homogeneous regions such as the Midwest. But in more class- and race-divided regions like the South, distrust and suspicion between groups were the norm. For instance, the sociologist John Holt delineated the nine communities and thirty neighborhoods in Lee County, Alabama. While intraracial group solidarity persisted in some places, in others there was “weak community consciousness.” Social class, based on wealth or land tenure, divided the population, and better-off, higher-status residents, not poor people, usually attended the planning meetings. Cross-class cooperation was very low, and interracial solidarity virtually nonexistent, a conclusion that held throughout the plantation South, where white supremacy would not be overcome by a few reforming sociologists.28 Like agriculture in the South, that in the West diverged from the familyfarm model. Federal sociologists stationed in California focused above all on nonfamily farm labor. Partly tongue in cheek but with serious intent, Taylor wrote to an apparently wayward young member of his BAE division, “You will remember that I used to joke about the people in our West Coast office getting Berkeley-itis and used to define the symptoms as follows: First, once having gotten into the West Coast office at Berkeley one was never willing to leave the region; second, he even became unwilling to leave California, or even to get very far away from Berkeley; and, third, no matter what focus for work he had when he went there, he shifted that focus to the problem of farm labor. It looks as if you have all the symptoms of Berkeley-itis and I am writing to ask you either to correct my diagnosis or assist me in making a better one.”29 More generally, from the beginning of the planning program, BAE sociologists admitted the absence of Gemeinschaft in many rural areas. In 1940, for example, Ensminger wrote that sometimes “neighborhood ties either have never existed or are no longer present.” But even in this case, he added, “it has been possible to outline areas where people can conveniently meet together and within which they have more in common than if they were grouped in any other way.” Despite the administrative needs and theoretical assumptions of the county planning program, then, research revealed tremendous variation in social solidarity among rural neighborhoods and communities. Still, the BAE sociologists had their delineation job to do, so the practical default became, as Ensminger suggested, to maximize convenience and commonality in the local areas.30

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In a more theoretical vein, Rudolf Heberle made a similar point about the “socio-psychological quality of these spatial groupings,” or rural Gemeinschaft. A German émigré sociologist and Tönnies’s son-in-law, Heberle taught at the land-grant Louisiana State University and revealed the best understanding of the issue. After reviewing the history of American rural– community studies, including all the BAE delineation work, he observed, “Neighborhood means more than spatial relation. Mere living together does not constitute gemeinschaft.” He went on to observe, however, that geographical proximity varied in its effects on social solidarity, so that it may in fact lead toward a more Gemeinschaft-like group. Tönnies’s dualistic concepts were not mutually exclusive, empirically speaking. Actually, Gesellschaft always depended in some measure on its analytical opposite. Tönnies’s theory “justified the search for gemeinschaft elements even in relatively pure gesellschaft groupings by empirical inquiry.” The “wide variations” between rural communities in this respect provided the justification. Heberle hypothesized, for example, that residential stability or cultural homogeneity among farm families tended to “strengthen gemeinschaft between neighbors.” Further, “close proximity of farmsteads will help to intensify spontaneous primary contacts and relations and thereby tend to integrate neighborhoods into true gemeinschaft groups.” He added that deep ethnicracial or class differences probably made Gemeinschaft impossible. Thus he argued that the existence of socio-spatial relations needed to be studied empirically rather than assumed.31 The BAE sociologists were more than glad to comply. As Loomis wrote to Taylor, they all exhibited severe symptoms of “researchitis.” Still and all, whatever the theoretical questions, in order to be effective and representative, local groups needed a meeting place “where they are accustomed to congregate.” The empirical researchers held that people living in a properly delineated neighborhood or community felt more attached to it than to any other area. The BAE division believed that its delineation work insured that local “planning units are made up of people who have more in common with each other and who would work better together than would be the case if they were grouped in any other way.” This was an empirical assertion based on their detailed fieldwork with local citizens. Delineating neighborhoods and communities was the best that the applied sociologists could do to advance cooperative planning. Heberle concluded that community delineation proved an effective way for government programs “to proceed on democratic principles.”32

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In addition to delineating rural neighborhoods and communities across the country, government sociologists also evaluated the citizen participation and representation claims of the county planning program. The most intensive evaluation of these issues was done in Kentucky. In 1939 rural sociologists from the BAE and the land-grant university in Lexington studied the nine community planning committees in Garrard County (forty-six men and twenty-one women), a tobacco, corn, and livestock part of the Kentucky Bluegrass. They found that overall participation was quite high. Attendance at the five planning meetings in each community during 1939 averaged 64 percent of all members. Before the first meeting, over three-fourths of the committee members already knew their community coplanners, usually quite well, thus reinforcing the use of “community theory” as the basis for delineation. A large majority of the local citizen-planners believed that farm tenants and laborers, not just owners, should be represented on the planning committees. Only about one-fifth, though, had discussed land-use planning with their neighbors; this fact violated an underlying assumption of the planning organization, that community committee members would talk up and link local farmers to the countywide program. Further, many of the participants had no clear understanding of the aims of cooperative planning, yet most wanted it to continue, even expand. The most active members of the local committees tended to be male, farm owners, moderately involved in other organizations, and previously active in Extension work. Moreover, there was overlap between membership on local AAA committees and the planning committees.33 The sociologists also compared planning committee members with a representative sample of farmers in the communities. Committee members were slightly better educated, owned more land, operated somewhat larger farms, and participated more in other organizations. A majority of both groups of local farmers believed that county land use had improved during the past five years, that soil conservation was profitable, that the government had educated farmers concerning conservation problems, that schooling made young farmers better, and that the AAA favorably affected rural life. On each of these issues, a somewhat higher proportion of planning committee members held such opinions, compared to nonmembers. Neither group, though, differentiated between AAA, Extension work, and land-use planning; all three were perceived as part of one governmental program. The sociologists concluded that those most receptive to planning as well as to other federal and Extension programs were medium-sized family farms and

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that local USDA officials should reach out more effectively to underrepresented groups. In 1939–40 Williams and Beers, the cooperating sociologists from the University of Kentucky, replicated their study in two more counties, and their findings generally agreed with those for Garrard County. One difference was that in the three counties overall, more (over one-third) of the local committee members had discussed their planning work with neighbors.34 On the basis of these Kentucky findings, in mid-1940 Taylor’s BAE division initiated discussions with the Division of State and Local Planning to evaluate “the democratic process of planning.” By early 1941 they were ready to study the process in seven selected planning counties around the country. The focus was on participation and representativeness of the local committees as well as knowledge and interest in the planning program among rural citizens. Like the community delineation work, this research project involved local people in its conduct. Each community-level committee chair was to fill out an extensive questionnaire, and the planning groups would tabulate the results, drawing their own conclusions. However, only two of the projects were ever completed, those in in Eddy County, New Mexico, and in Greene County, Georgia.35 In 1941 Sigurd Johansen of New Mexico State College and Milton Rossoff of the BAE conducted a study of land-use planning communities in Eddy County, New Mexico, which boasted the tourist attraction Carlsbad Caverns and a population one-third Spanish American and two-thirds Anglo that was engaged in ranching and irrigated farming. Excluding two small urban centers, Johansen and Rossoff interviewed every household in five of the county’s ten villages. These were very poor places and had a host of problems concerning education, recreation, leadership, health care, and the deleterious effects of concentrated landholding. The sociologists asserted that unless the poverty conditions were addressed, social improvement could not occur. They were not surprised to find little citizen participation in cooperative planning. Few rural residents knew much about it, and many of the community planners did not understand the program. The sociologists noted that poverty in general and ethnic–class differences in particular limited “community consciousness.” They recommended that all social classes and both major cultural groups be represented in land-use planning and that the need for wider participation “should ignore cultural or class distinctions.” However, they were not confident that “rural community organization” would soon come to in Eddy County.36

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Most of the community delineation work occurred in another class- and race-divided region, the rural South. Greene County, Georgia, was equally poor and racially divided, being in the old Cotton Belt. In his delineation of Greene, the BAE sociologist Lee Coleman studied the makeup and residence of planning committee members. He found that many more local citizens served on the community and county planning committees than on those of the AAA, SCS, or FSA. Yet most of the people on all of these committees were above average in terms of landownership and social status. Poor people and their communities were barely represented at all. In addition, only two of the sixteen agricultural committees in Greene were black, set up to work with the black Extension agent. So even though the planning committees went much deeper into the citizenry than the local AAA and other agencies, they still comprised largely the white landowning classes. Further, the Extension agent and local USDA administrators selected citizens to serve on the community planning committees; they were not elected. However, the immediate effects of the planning program in Georgia were quite different from those in Eddy County. Another BAE sociologist, Arthur Raper, spent two years investigating cooperative planning in Greene. While acutely aware of the underrepresentation of poor-white and black farmers on the committees, Raper could hardly believe planning’s positive outcomes for practically all residents. He detailed these results in his book Tenants of the Almighty (1943) (see chapter 9).37 Another contemporary analysis was more broadly focused but equally revealing. The political scientist John D. Lewis studied the planning program in fifty counties across twenty-two states. The sociologists’ research, he found, documented inadequate representation in many areas, especially in the plantation South. But they refused to accept that fact as given. Instead, the sociologists sought to “create new units for democratic discussion and policy planning” and “elevate social units which may be unconscious or only half-conscious of their own unity, into active semi-political units with a broad general advisory competence.” Lewis argued that the BAE sociologists’ research increased the participation of excluded community groups in cooperative planning. They tried to create “a new community consciousness as a part of the planning process,” a social-scientific effort to revitalize local organizations. Yet regarding the selection of committee members, Lewis reported that they were generally appointed by the Extension agent, often in consultation with local USDA officials or other leading citizens. Fewer than half the states used electoral methods in choosing committee members,

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although some more democratic cases stood out. In Ward County, North Dakota, the community committees were elected in open, well-publicized meetings attended by over a thousand farmers! Similar procedures were followed in Montana, Texas, and West Virginia. Overall, the planning program, he concluded in 1941, was tending toward the election, rather than the appointment, of committee members and thus toward more “democratic participation in planning.”38 Mapping Land Use, Participatory and Bureaucratic After sociologists and citizens delineated rural neighborhoods and communities for cooperative planning, land-grant and BAE economists worked with the local committees in the next, intensive stage of the process: classifying and mapping the land-use areas and writing a county report with recommended changes. This, too, was an early instance of joining citizen participation and scientific expertise on a large scale. By mid-1941 over one thousand counties, or a third of all those in the United States, had constructed detailed land-use maps and reports. Such a massive undertaking ran into problems from both the citizens and the scientists, but it remains a notable endeavor in participatory action research. Citizens and Experts Make a Map In January 1939 the recently reorganized USDA issued the imaginatively entitled “County Land-Use Planning Work Outline Number 1 Covering an Area Mapping and Classification Project Recommended for County Agricultural Land-Use Planning Committees.” Addressed to Extension, research, and administrative personnel, it directed the new county committees to undertake land-use mapping as their first project. This recommendation flowed from the AAA Program Planning Division’s experience in the County Planning Project since 1935. Designed to bring farm people into the research process, the dual purpose now was interagency coordination and local citizen participation—both its rationalizing (Weberian) and democratizing (Deweyan) functions. The two found common ground in the immediate aim of participatory mapmaking.39 USDA leaders believed that farm people knew a great deal about suitable and unsuitable land uses in their area. These usages deeply affected

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public issues like school location, road construction, and settlement patterns. The federal action agencies desired such knowledge in order to improve their local activities, and citizen participation offered what the government could use: “needed information on the location and characteristics of areas unsuited for farming.” Federal agencies as well as states and counties could employ this local knowledge as a guide to public services. The planning committees, then, contributed to a more effective administration of government programs. They also gave the agencies some citizens’ views of long-term goals for each local area.40 Moreover, land-use mapping, according to the work outline, would prove useful to farm people as well as to federal programs. It advanced citizen involvement in the form of a directed community self-study. Thus BAE devolved the fairly technical task of area mapping and land-use classification to farmers, who were purposefully brought into the research process. Farmers would benefit from the improved effectiveness of programs and from their own increased knowledge of farm practices and land uses in the area. Work outline number 1 concluded with a warning against committee domination by government experts: “What is desired in county agricultural planning is carefully formulated opinions of the people themselves, based upon such factual information as will aid them in understanding their land-use problems and the various measures which may be used in their solutions.” 41 Although such planning had its bureaucratic moments, not to mention jargon, at base it amounted to a remarkable, state-led case of participatory research. This second, or intensive, stage of land-use planning had four phases, carried out largely by the community-level committees. The first involved mapping a community’s various land-use areas, that is, relatively homogeneous parts (larger than several farms) that shared similar physical and economic characteristics. For their local area, the community committees noted such physical features as soils, land cover, and topography; current land-use patterns and types of farming, including crops, size, and conservation practices; and land-use problems. The committees divided their locale into a number of subareas, indicated on a large base map. An open community meeting then discussed the same material, followed by one or two additional committee meetings to revise the map in light of the discussion and to discuss goals for the land-use areas. This initial phase of the work provided a “fund of factual information” for subsequent decision making.42

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The second phase of intensive planning entailed the classification of the designated areas in terms of desirable land use. The community committee classified each local land-use area into one of the following categories: A: B: C: D: E:

Now in farms but generally not suited for arable agriculture Not now in farms and should not be used for arable agriculture Now in farms but questionably suited for arable agriculture Not now in farms but suited for arable agriculture Now in farms and should remain so although perhaps with some changes.

Each of these classifications was color coded on the large base map, in blue, green, red, orange, and yellow, respectively. Every local land-use area in the county was so classified. A second open community meeting considered the desired adjustments and objectives.43 The third phase of intensive planning produced conclusions and recommendations, deciding what changes were desirable in each local area, especially shifts in land use and adjustments in farming practices. In addition, the community committees suggested which public programs could assist in the needed changes. For each classification, the committee addressed a series of issues. Questions concerning Class A land, for instance, included the following: What percentage of the local land-use area is now in farms? What alternative land use, such as timber, grazing, wildlife, recreation, watershed protection, and so on, should be made of the area? What is the rationale for this recommendation? How could the area be developed for rural residence, for example, through work opportunities in forestry or new industries? How can public programs assist in the recommended adjustments? How rapidly should the adjustments occur? 44 The fourth and final phase of intensive planning involved dissemination. On the basis of the earlier work, each community committee produced a land-use map and a brief report. The county committee, with the state Extension project leader and the BAE representative, both stationed at the agricultural college, coordinated and summarized the community maps and reports. They combined the community maps into a single countywide landuse map. Then the county committee, consisting of representatives from each community committee plus others, hammered out corrections and final recommendations. The Extension leader prepared the final county report, taking “particular care in making it conform to the conclusions of the committees.” 45

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Following work outline number 1, each planning committee made available ten or twelve color-coded copies of the map and report for use throughout the county, including one copy to the State Land-Use Planning Committee. The reports emphasized two aims: obtaining needed information from local farmers, which was useful for public programs, and increasing local knowledge and participation in land-use activities. The land-use mapping and classification work, the BAE held, “represents a very important first step in county agricultural planning.” And it again warned against committee domination by the technicians. While work outline number 1 was not followed in all states—Delaware and New York, for instance, preferred maps already developed by experts—it provided the foundation for cooperative planning. Such detailed analysis of every local land-use area in the country yielded an amazing inventory of the rural United States, unlike anything that had ever existed before.46 These activities, however, represented a potentially serious societal intrusion into, or at least public discussion of, private property rights. The local planning committees told farmers and landowners what their land was suitable for, what kind of crops to grow, and preferred uses of the land. In short, they told them what they could and could not, or rather should and should not, do on their private land. This was something new in American political history.47 Second, the land-use mapping and classification exercise was bureaucratic, following administrative rules and procedures, guidelines and personnel from the USDA and land-grant colleges. It was also participatory, carried out by thousands of local citizen committees. Unlike most of us today, the agrarian intellectuals saw no necessary contradiction between democracy and bureaucracy. In fact, they believed in and went a long way toward implementing participatory administration as part of their broader vision of democratic planning. The radical democrat Dewey shared this vision, while Weber, the theorist of bureaucracy, would see it as practically impossible. Progress and Problems in Land Mapping By mid-1939 the preparatory or organizational stage of the new cooperative planning program was under way in approximately one-fourth of all counties. Intensive planning, following work outline number 1, had begun in 447 counties, while 44 counties entered the third, action phase. The BAE planning leaders Howard Tolley and Bushrod Allin expressed optimism

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but knew that the effort needed to become more “truly democratic.” In January 1940 the intensive planning counties numbered 761. Indiana claimed the most, followed, in order, by Missouri, Washington, Kansas, Georgia, Ohio, Texas, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Alabama, Maine, Vermont, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. Fifty-nine counties completed their maps and reports, which were reviewed by their State Land-Use Planning Committee and submitted to Washington, D.C.48 In mid-1940 land-use mapping and classification was actively under way in 976 counties and completed in 367 of them. The major planning trend in 1939–40 was “added emphasis given to economic and social factors,” as evidenced by recommendations concerning land tenure, taxation, schools, recreation, and health. A second theme was paying more attention to woodland management. Local planning committees sought technical assistance on how forest land could contribute more to farmers’ well-being. This was especially important in the rural South, with its poor farm population and extensive forest cover, over 60 percent of the land. Third, federal action agencies and high school teachers of vocational agriculture and home economics showed growing interest in the planning program, again particularly in the South. The committee maps and reports were used in the public schools as self-study texts on the cultural and economic geography of the counties, a promising dissemination of the work. Yet problems remained, the BAE knew. The local committees, for instance, were still not very representative of all citizens in the counties.49 By June 1941, 789 counties had completed the land-use mapping and classification suggested in work outline number 1, with 440 others engaged in the process. The states that completed the most land-use planning maps and reports were Texas, with 178 counties, Indiana, with 86, Michigan, with 63, North Dakota, with 33, and Washington, with 32. Those with the most counties under way in mid-1941 were Georgia, with 36, Missouri, with 26, Kentucky, with 25, Kansas, with 22, and Ohio, with 21. Overall, 1,229 counties, well over a third of all counties in the country, were actively involved in the land-use mapping and classification process. In 1941, because of the looming world war, some counties gave less attention to land-use mapping and moved directly to a problem-solving, action approach. The department still strongly encouraged the mapping and classification work.50 Like the community delineations earlier, this second phase of county planning involved participatory research, combining expertise with local citizens’ knowledge. BAE land economists had previously produced similar maps and

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reports of higher technical caliber but with less utility to the localities. In cooperative planning, the BAE state representatives taught some basic research skills to those most likely to use the results, including local federal actionagency administrators and farmers themselves. These people constituted the county planning committee in the first place. In addition, the local committees held another advantage over the scientist-only work: the farmers “participating in the work bring to it a detailed and intimate knowledge of local conditions which makes extensive field survey unnecessary,” claimed the BAE. Such citizen contribution saved much research on the experts’ part and led to better use of the maps “at only a fraction of the costs of the former technical surveys.” Hence, more work was completed in less time. By 1941 about twelve hundred county committees had either finished or started land-use maps and reports, compared to the handful that had been done by specialists working alone. According to Allin, the resulting maps were of a surprisingly high quality. “Good, usable maps and reports are produced,” he said. The “pooling of knowledge” was working as planned.51 Citizens joined with scientists all over the country in the participatory action research. Another benefit of the cooperative planning process was educational and social-psychological. Both farmers and local administrators gained a much better understanding of conditions in the county as well as, in Allin’s words, “practical things that can be done to improve [them].” In the process, vague problems became, in bureaucratese, “adverse conditions with definite dimensions and proportions that can be dealt with by means which are available.” This transformation led to “an increased confidence of local people” in their ability to solve community problems. County planning, Allin concluded, was “an educational process,” and the state Extension services agreed.52 Although stated in bureaucratic language, the actual content of this work with local citizens was educative as well as participatory. Despite the visionary ideals and rapid growth of the planning organization throughout the country, tensions arose immediately over the relationship between experts and citizens. How did the agrarian New Dealers handle these problems as they appeared nationally and in the field? Secretary Wallace saw both strengths and weaknesses in the new cooperative planning. In his report to President Roosevelt in 1939, he applauded the fact that “planning is done by the people who are most interested in the programs.” And there was strength, he claimed, in “the organizational tie-up of the planning program with the action agencies.” But being more concerned to highlight weaknesses

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in the new program, Wallace wrote, “Foremost is the problem of obtaining truly democratic representation” on the planning committees, where smaller and poorer farmers were underrepresented. Next was the difficulty of “obtaining and developing men with technical knowledge and vision, and with the ability to advise with and work with farmers in democratic procedures. It is a problem for this Department and for the agricultural colleges.” Here Wallace referred to the tendency of agricultural specialists to dominate local citizens in the planning process. It was up to the USDA and the land-grants, Wallace said, to correct this antidemocratic trend among their experts.53 He was criticizing himself as well as his colleagues out in the states and calling for corrective action from the top on down. The new BAE state representatives, stationed in the land-grant colleges, had major responsibility for implementing cooperative planning. At the kickoff conference for the program in March 1939, they disagreed among themselves as to the proper balance of technical expertise and farmer participation. One group of the state-based BAE economists questioned the “feasibility of having farmers participate in the development of basic data,” arguing that nonexperts could most effectively contribute only to the interpretation of data. They stressed the provision of technical assistance, factual information, and the “formulation of well considered statements and recommendations” in planning, apparently reluctant to give much real authority to local farmers.54 However, their inflated view of the experts’ role appeared as a distinctly minority position. Most of the state representatives suggested that “farmers should have at all times a voting majority on the committee and . . . agency groups should not attempt to dominate the committee’s actions.” They further asserted, “These [local committee] meetings must serve in part as a means of supplying farmers with that information necessary to enable them to draw their best conclusions and they must not become meetings to rubber-stamp the proposals of technicians. In these meetings farmers should be encouraged to discuss any and all problems or types of programs which they think desirable.” Other BAE economists repeatedly urged that the county planning committees double-check their recommendations with farmers in open community meetings before proceeding with their plans.55 At the conference in March 1939 the forty-seven so-called field men made a substantial presentation of their “considered informal majority opinion” to Tolley and Allin. All the viewpoints expressed in this meeting by the state representatives purposefully reflected the collective stance of the group. The rising professional star Leonard Salter, then twenty-eight years old, served

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as the moderator, and representatives summarized the group’s “suggestions and considerations.” The explicit point of the meeting was for the field staff to give their superiors the benefit of their experiences so far out in the states and to hear the responses, if any. The issues raised and the reactions from headquarters give considerable insight into the difficulties felt early on in cooperative planning. At several points in the proceedings, there was obvious tension between the “drum beaters,” or field men, and the “brass-hats,” their Washington bosses.56 In this frank, formal discussion with their administrators, the BAE state representatives expressed serious reservations about some of the planning procedures, ones they saw as being too rigid and too bureaucratic. Farmers, they reported after only a brief time out in the states, sometimes preferred that federal agency people not be voting members of the county planning committees. The consensus from the field was that on this matter the farmers’ “judgment should be respected,” although the planning directives said otherwise. They also believed that poor, tenant, and minority farmers, even farmworkers, should be represented on the committees. Further on the point of representativeness, the BAE could well consider what types of farmers were making the land-use recommendations. Here and elsewhere, the BAE state representatives seemed to be more inclined to respect the views of citizens than their leaders in Washington were. The push for local leadership, it appears, did not emanate only from the center.57 On the other hand, the same BAE field representatives asked Tolley and Allin whether farmers themselves always had to do “the original mapping job,” as described in work outline number 1. What if experts had already developed good enough land-use maps for the county? And must farmers make all the major recommendations for local land-use adjustments? What if farmers’ preferences conflicted with national policy? “Very often we who sit around the table have seen this democratic process in operation to the detriment of sound land-use planning,” the field personnel maintained. As technically trained specialists, were they to accept shoddy work and present it to their professional colleagues in the state colleges and the BAE? Thus arose the perennial tension between scientific research and citizen involvement.58 A related issue appeared early on, pitting Weberian bureaucracy against Deweyan participation. The BAE field staff had ongoing problems with work outline number 1. For one thing, they reported that farmers often did not see the need for the land-use mapping and classification exercises. The specific bureaucratic procedures made it hard to convince farmers to work with the

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program. “It is our philosophy that as we work with [farmers,] gradually they will see what we are driving at and work along with us, but that immediately these particular procedures make it difficult in many instances.” The BAE state representatives reiterated their commitment to “this democratic process,” to farmer participation in planning. Yet “some farmers are not yet interested in what their responsibility ought to be, and so we have to take them along gradually. In certain instances, if we take [them] too fast they lose interest.” Again, if technicians moved too fast in order to meet the deadlines imposed from Washington, “farmers become . . . rubber stamps; and we don’t want that to happen.” Going slower would facilitate more participation by farmers and responsibility for the program, the field personnel believed.59 These two problems, lack of immediate interest by farmers in land-use mapping and Washington’s rapid bureaucratic timeline, were echoed publicly by state Extension directors just as cooperative planning began. In March 1939 one director inveighed against the apparent go-fast attitude of the BAE: “We cannot go faster than the education and experience of the people with whom we are working will permit.” Two months later, another Extension director warned that his state’s farm leaders “did not quite see what [planning] was all about,” with “a lot of figures, charts, and maps.” This only drove farm people away because the process had not “started where the people are.” The work outline’s questions about local land uses were not farmers’ issues, and they stopped coming to meetings: “Forget the idea that we must make some maps and charts and give answers to specific questions in a hurry.” Such opposition in the early stages of cooperative planning, especially from those responsible for implementing it in the states, must have disheartened the new program’s leaders. Similar criticism from other land-grant colleges continued, and it did not bode well.60 In late spring 1940, at another meeting of the BAE state representatives with their leaders in Washington, the same issues surfaced. To many in the field, both the USDA’s “cooperating agencies” and the BAE field personnel themselves, work outline number 1 seemed too inflexible and bureaucratic. Not everyone even agreed with the general strategy of the work outline, which followed the area approach instead of a problem approach. Many concerns, the field staff said, transcended local land-use areas. Yet Allin and others defended the geographic approach by stressing the interrelated, overlapping nature of agricultural problems. The land-use area provided the “least common denominator” for considering the issues. The relatively uniform areas “establish boundaries within which the interrelationship of problems is fairly con-

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sistent and uniform throughout.” This facilitated “unified and harmonious” plans to treat the different issues identified by local citizens. All the concerns in a given area could thereby be addressed systematically, the leaders in Washington asserted.61 Unfortunately, as late as May 1940 there was still widespread confusion in the field “as to the function and purpose of intensive planning.” The point of such planning, headquarters responded, was simply mutual agreement on facts and adjustment goals, “to develop the factual and policy basis for unified action” since no “rigid formula can be followed” in planning. Allin compromised by encouraging states to tailor the work to fit their situation. The state joint committees were responsible only for “an orderly process in each county—not an identical procedure.” Planning leaders, both state and county, should meet with community groups to help catch local people up on the latest “experiences and thinking” of the committees. They should not, in other words, get out too far ahead of the local people but try to keep them “abreast of their committees.” Broad education and open public meetings about landuse planning must be an intrinsic part of the process.62 Allin and other federal leaders here were mediating their bureaucratic and democratic goals—then as now a difficult balancing act. According to Allin, work outline number 1 had been misinterpreted as a mapping project: “It was not intended as a project, nor primarily a map-making activity.” To clarify, he elaborated a process, including maps and reports, that was not an end in itself but a means to achieve the broader goals of agricultural policy: soil conservation, farm income stability, better rural living. Ideally the work outline led to a cooperative process, based on full participation by both local farmers and agency representatives. Allin stated portentously, “If local people and administrative agencies are not well represented on planning committees and do not themselves participate actively . . . , then the results are almost certain to be disappointing . . . and ineffective.” Furthermore, local farmers and the agencies must develop “the philosophy of cooperative land-use planning—and this can only be accomplished through active participation in the planning process.” Otherwise, experts and citizens would have little understanding or interest in making the plans work, that is, “in translating the plans into action.”63 Here, over halfway through the short life of this “experiment in democratic planning,” its national leader was waging a rearguard action. His remarks suggested that serious problems of interest, participation, and cooperation existed with the planning program. Despite his protestations, it

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was a mapping project, or started that way; his first directive to the committees was to undertake “an area mapping and classification project,” as that full title of work outline number 1 put it. Allin sometimes seemed to think he could solve difficulties by intellectual fiat. In this conference in 1940, for example, he announced that henceforth the name of the program would be “cooperative land-use planning,” dropping program and adding cooperative, as if either of these verbal switches would erase the problems on the ground. Moreover, Allin’s unit admitted to state and county planning leaders that “procedures and policies as to the full use and treatment of Intensive reports in the Department have not been completed.” The BAE unit in charge of cooperative planning did not yet know how to handle the hundreds of reports generated by its local organizations.64 In spite of the problems evident in 1940, the planning program continued to grow and improve. As Wallace had done in his annual report, Tolley and Allin admitted shortcomings and sought to correct them. Still, the planning program was not operating exactly as intended. It worked wonders in some counties (see chapter 9) but fell short in others. Was a successful program too much to expect of experts as well as citizens, neither of whom had any experience or training in the endeavor? Regardless, the effort alone deserves admiration. Fusing Research and Planning In addition to community delineation and land-use mapping, both rural sociologists and agricultural economists in the Third New Deal conducted additional action research with the county planning committees. In 1940 Taylor wrote to Allin about the promise of a new kind of relationship between scientists and citizens. As a case in point, he attached a report from Teton County, Montana, concerning the suggested minimum size for small, low-income farms in the area: “I think you may be interested in this, because it represents a type of work that is neither an abstract research nor strictly limited service function; it is, rather, a combination of service, technical guidance, and research. The technicians engaged on this survey worked very closely with the local committee at all times, and the job is a good example of the bringing together of farmer and technician thinking and activity on a local problem which has far reaching application.”65 Another instance of such fusion came from Colorado. After his initial community delineation work, the BAE sociologist assigned to the Washington

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County Planning Committee aided in gathering data on population trends as they affected local schools, public health, and recreational facilities. This joint research led to such improvements in the schools as showers and hot lunches and to plans for a community building. Along with the BAE Division of Program Study and Discussion, he also organized discussion groups and conducted local leadership training schools. This BAE “participantobserver” generally acted as a community change-agent working with local people to advance their goals. The Ross County, Ohio, planning committee addressed its needs through a similar process but focused on youth involvement. BAE sociologists carried out this kind of work all around the country. Taylor concluded that “analyses of local social groupings [served] as a means of implementing the planning process.”66 Thus participatory action research. As the leading rural sociologist in the New Deal and the president of the new Rural Sociological Society during 1939–40, Taylor was not above instructing his bureaucratic superiors on the wider and proper uses of the discipline, especially as it advanced cooperative planning. He and the other BAE sociologists emphasized the cultural, psychological, and sociological aspects of land-use planning. All too often, Taylor complained, BAE leaders acted as if planning were mainly physical or economic. On the contrary, he said astutely, “land use adjustments mean organizational and institutional adjustment.” Such community organization included attention to schools, churches, libraries, cooperatives, and special interest groups, that is, local social institutions. The sociologists studied precisely all such institutional and organizational features of rural society: “Consequently, the delineation is in itself only a step in the total process of analyzing the community, and in utilizing the knowledge gained in promoting a program of democratic planning.” 67 Like the sociologists, BAE economists spent endless hours working with the county planning committees, even after completing the land-use maps and reports. Following on the departmental reorganization of 1938, one in-house economist noted the topics covered: “Major effort of the [BAE] Division of Land Economics, both in Washington and in the field, was turned to research, service, and survey planning to assist the local planning groups with problems of finance and local government, settlement, landlord– tenant relations and leasing arrangements, zoning or other directional measures, water supply, and related problems.” Hundreds of examples of such participatory land economics research, “in close cooperation with local groups,” occurred all over the country. For instance, in an experiment station publication called Agricultural Planning: Its Economic and Social

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Aspects, economists at Montana State College detailed farmers’ continuing self-education, action research, and “democratic planning.”68 Taylor’s professional impatience with merely “servicing” the planning committees was echoed by the agricultural economists. In late 1940 the young department chair Roland R. Renne at Montana State felt compelled to clarify the role of federally supported social-science research in the cooperating agricultural colleges. A Wisconsin graduate, Renne represented the agricultural research station on the land-grant / BAE state committee for land-use planning. He asked if the BAE’s “new policy” that all research should assist cooperative planning was in fact their charge. Renne posed the alternatives in extreme terms, offering an opportunity to compromise. But Tolley surprised him. Yes, he replied firmly, all BAE-sponsored work must henceforth advance the planning program, a radical departure indeed. This doubtless took Renne aback, but it showed the BAE’s broad commitment to cooperative planning in the Third New Deal, and not just in Montana.69 Tolley himself was busy pushing the BAE’s theory and practice of participatory action research. In 1940 he reported to Secretary Wallace that the agency had reoriented its work to meet the “immediate pressing requirement for quick research jobs” with the local planning committees. The next year Tolley entitled his annual report A Democracy Uses Its Experts in a Time of Crisis. In sections called “Blending Research and Planning into Programs for Action” and “Focusing BAE Activities on Farmers’ Local Problems,” Tolley realized the novelty of his bureau’s undertaking. He and his nearly thousandstrong professional social scientists sought “a practical synthesis of fundamental research and planning,” a “merging of the experience of layman and expert—in recent years a problem of increasing importance to the success of democracy.” After reviewing the sociologists’ work with the planning committees on thousands of community delineations, he concluded, There is thus set up a channel for the two-way flow of ideas and experience between farmers and researchers. Already this natural mode of consultation between research workers and members of the local planning committees has resulted in the joint planning of new research programs and, in many instances, the local planning committees later have helped to carry out the recommendations built on the results of the research. . . . [Several] State agricultural experiment stations and the various agencies of the Department . . . have already adjusted their activities to effect a closer tie- up between research and actual community needs. . . .

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This sort of planning by farm men and women, local administrators of farm programs, and qualified farm technicians, all working together, is assuring agriculture’s maximum contribution to the defense of democracy at home and abroad. Tolley was justifiably proud of the BAE’s participatory action research. He may be forgiven for venturing that such a “fusion” of research and planning marked “the coming of age of the reorganized Bureau.”70 In fact, that “age” became drastically foreshortened. Within a few months, the anti–New Deal Congress fiercely attacked Tolley’s agency and killed cooperative planning. Instead of a new beginning, as Tolley had hoped, 1941 reached the high-water mark of the BAE and its planning. In his annual report to the president, Wallace had recently spotlighted the need for agricultural experts to come “to grips promptly with new problems. This requires a combined statistical, observational, and interpretational (research) service closely linked with the planning mechanism . . . for timely decisions and action.”71 The reconstituted BAE functioned as precisely just such a service for the grass-roots planning program. In the Third New Deal, Tolley’s large agency became the premier action research unit in the nation. While not without its problems, the BAE approached and sometimes achieved its democratizing goals.

chapter 9

Unifying Action Results of Cooperative Land-Use Planning The whole undertaking was to be cooperative between farmers and agency representatives. No agency or individual was to wield a big stick. Thus the scheme was as idealistic and practical as democracy itself. —ellery foster, “the development of land-use planning committees,” 1942

T

he action phase of cooperative planning marked the culmination of this most significant of all New Deal agrarian programs. Despite ongoing problems with interactions between experts and citizens and federal–state relations, the planning program made real progress in its attempt to democratize rural America. As noted earlier, in twenty-two hundred counties, or over two-thirds of all agricultural counties, nearly two hundred thousand farm people worked with local federal administrators and other experts to coordinate and integrate agricultural programs. The goal remained progressive social change through continuing education, participatory research, and, finally, unifying federal action on the ground. Here I take up the story of the third phase of cooperative planning, wherein all New Deal and other agencies acted together to carry out committee recommendations. Most of the work and hence the results were local. The core unit of the program was the county committee, whose members, like most people, were locally oriented. I highlight action growing out of planning in three major problem areas of the country, the plantation South, the northern Plains, and the Great Lakes cut-over region, before moving to the national level. What did cooperative planning mean to local citizens in Greene County, Georgia? And, by extension, what could it mean for thousands, even millions, of others had it been similarly enacted on a larger scale? For the poor people in Greene County the program amounted to an almost unbelievable gain in

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living standards, and it gave them hope for a better future. Greene revealed an alternative path for postwar rural America. Not the road taken, certainly, but one that was possible, in fact quite operational as late as 1942. Other impressive achievements of cooperative planning also took place at the local level. Moreover, what was the major, but long-forgotten, national policy contribution of the program? In 1941, federal Extension director M. L. Wilson and BAE chief Howard Tolley submitted a report from the county and state planning committees on the essential reforms needed if post–World War II rural revitalization was to occur in the United States. The surprisingly progressive slant of the policy recommendations offered strong evidence for the existence of an agrarian wing of the social democracy that appeared to be then emerging in America. An Exemplary Case: Greene County, Georgia Greene County’s was the most thoroughly studied of all the local cooperative planning programs, thanks to the work of the sociologist Arthur F. Raper. A white liberal born and raised in the rural South, Raper had a lifelong passion for racial justice. In September 1940, on assignment from Carl Taylor’s Farm Population and Rural Welfare Division of the BAE, Raper settled with his family in Greene County for two years of participant-observation research. His mission was to investigate and evaluate the local effects of the third, action phase of cooperative planning called the unified program. Raper’s big report, published in book form as Tenants of the Almighty, chronicled how the New Deal systematically denied equal treatment to blacks, and he frequently pointed up the “racial differential” that African Americans suffered. Yet in every chapter he noted the improved conditions of blacks as well as of poor whites as a result of the unified program.1 Raper’s witness is important because he learned firsthand what cooperative planning meant to people at the bottom of the plantation South. His findings give unequaled insight into the actual achievements of the planning program at the grass roots. USDA leaders saw Greene County as “a demonstration area in which county, state, and federal agencies would work together in a new way,” that is, as a unified program. The county exemplified what cooperative planning could attain, what the program might accomplish when badly needed resources were forthcoming. And forthcoming they were. The head of FSA, Will Alexander, who was Raper’s mentor and former boss at the Commission on Interracial Cooperation in Atlanta, picked Greene County to be a showcase

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because of both its dirt-poor conditions and Raper’s earlier baseline research. Yet it was far from exceptional in the South, representing instead the depths to which millions had sunk in the Great Depression. Alexander and others wanted “to make a concerted effort to rebuild Greene County, as a demonstration of what could be done for really low-income farm people with the help of the Government.” Greene constituted “a sort of test-tube demonstration of what can be done with the very bottom income groups in the way of permanent rehabilitation.”2 Starting in 1933 the New Deal alphabet agencies had come to Greene County, as to the rest of the nation. Five years later there was still little cooperation or coordination among them, even those within the USDA. Then, with the launch of cooperative planning, Greene’s unified program brought together a vast array of public powers: county government, local school board, U.S. Forest Service, New Deal agencies such as CCC and National Youth Administration, plus the new agricultural action programs AAA, SCS, and FSA as well as local businesses and the Red Cross. According to the chair of the county board of commissioners, Greene was viewed as “a likely place to demonstrate what could be done by the unified approach of local, state and federal agencies.” He also stressed the drastic need for federal assistance of poverty-stricken places like his county.3 Greene appeared to be somewhat atypical in the rural South for having a white elite willing to work closely with the federal government on economic reforms, even though such reforms did not approach racial equality. Established in early 1939, the Greene County Land-Use Planning Committee consisted of twenty-one farmers, the usual bevy of local representatives of the federal agricultural agencies, and several county and state officials. Very few, if any, poor people were represented on either the community or county planning committees. The county Extension agent largely determined the makeup of these committees, which represented the “better-to-do farmers” and large landowners (fig. 10). Following the BAE’s work outline number 1, community committees of farmers drew up local land-use maps, soon consolidated into a county map that showed present land uses and suggested changes. The county committee found that only about 40,000 of the 200,000 farm acres did not require intensive erosion control. Soil erosion thus arose as the first problem to tackle. Other recommendations included improvement in landlord–tenant relations along the lines of better housing, long-term written leases, winter employment for sharecroppers, and compensation to tenants for soil improvement; encouragement of “the family-type farm,”

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10. Greene County, Georgia. Meeting of the County Land-Use Planning Committee, 1941. FSA photo by Jack Delano, Library of Congress Number LC-USF34- 046358-D.

consisting of about 140 acres, roughly divided among crops, pasture, and woods; “year-round supervision along with financial assistance,” that is, rehabilitation or supervised credit for the large majority of landless farmers; and loans to enable a few tenants to become landowners, though more for whites than for blacks. Cooperative planning broadened the use of best agricultural practices already followed by the better farmers, in effect, simply extending those practices to other, poorer farmers, a not insignificant accomplishment.4 What else happened in Greene County? With the coming of the unified program in 1939, the county planning committee determined to expand the agrarian New Deal locally, with consequent improvements in “soil building farm practices, balanced diets, health care, better schools, and community participation,” Raper observed. The committee was able to enlarge the county FSA office: personnel rose from one supervisor in 1938 to twelve, including two black professionals, a home economist, and a farm management expert, plus two engineers, two nurses, and four clerical assistants. This in turn led to a huge jump in the amount of fruits and vegetables canned by clients.

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Compared to scarcely a dozen quarts “put up” per family before people got on the program, an average of 225 quarts per family were put up in 1939 and an astonishing 499 quarts in 1942. Raper attributed the nutritional gain to the loans for pressure cookers and the demonstrations by home economists, provided by the FSA at the county planning committee’s behest. These socalled government farmers also increased their consumption of eggs, meat, bread, and milk, although Raper noted that most FSA-provided cows were poor milkers. He asserted that many of the “dependent Negro families realized for the first time that some people thought they might eat the same foods as the landowning white folks.”5 Greater access to health care emerged as one of the most remarkable successes. The Greene County planning committee expanded the nation’s first group medical plan—and this for poor people. In 1938 the local FSA established a health care cooperative for 130 client families. The next year, under the county’s unified planning program, 515 additional families joined the medical co-op. Each paid twelve dollars plus one dollar for every person in the family, up to twenty dollars. (Many made less than two hundred dollars annually.) This fee covered all of a family’s health care costs for a year, including drugs and hospitalization. Every physician in the county except one serviced the co-op, and the families could choose whom to see. The doctors made house calls; some of the co-op members called them too often, according to Raper.6 With unspoken reference to a transformation in progress, Raper further observed, “The members of the [cooperative] Association like the feeling that is theirs when they send for a doctor, like knowing they have some claim on his services. The doctor is from that prosperous world of colleges, ‘educated’ talk, grapefruit for breakfast and Sunday clothes all week long. In some of the poorer homes he and the FSA supervisor are the only persons from that world who ever come inside the house and sit down and talk.” Black members paid the same amount and supposedly got the same services as whites, except at childbirth. Physicians delivered white babies whereas midwives delivered black infants, unless complications were foreseen. During a six-month period in 1942 about 80 percent of both races used the medical service. Over 25 percent of the white families and 12 percent of the black families incurred bills exceeding their annual dues to the medical cooperative. Raper concluded, “With a better diet and a doctor when needed, many FSA families report the best health ever.” Encouraged by this success, the local FSA also set up a dental co-op and a veterinary co-op (three dollars per family for each).7 These

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count among the differences that unified planning made in the everyday lives of Greene County citizens. As part of cooperative planning, education improved dramatically for both races. Twenty-six new school buildings were erected, and teacher qualifications shot up. Even though a rural county, Greene had never had vocationalagricultural and home economics teachers until 1939. By 1942 thirteen such teachers were working in the county, seven white and six black. Students formed new clubs such as New Farmers of America (black) and Future Farmers of America (white), and took shop classes for the first time. These and other innovations, including a county library system, bookmobile, motion picture projector, and hot lunch program, resulted from efforts by the county planning committee to secure the cooperation of FSA, the Work Projects Administration (WPA), the National Youth Administration, Surplus Commodities, the local board of education, the Red Cross, and parent–teacher associations. Extension also increased its adult-education work. Agents distributed more soil-building legumes, arranged more livestock loans, developed a forest fire program with the SCS, led homemaker groups, and expanded gardens and livestock raising in 4-H clubs. The black farm agent performed many of the same tasks with African Americans, but Extension provided no black home economist for the county.8 The unified program also improved housing and recreation in Greene. Following the planning committee’s promotion of family-size operations, the FSA built eighty-two new farm units and made twelve tenant-purchase loans (eight to whites, four to blacks). Most FSA families, though, did not get new homes, instead rehabilitating existing houses with paint, screens, roof repair, new water pumps, fly-proofed privies, and other upgrades. Before entering the FSA program, 40 percent of tenant families in Greene County moved every year; after joining, the percentage shrank impressively. In addition, many people in the county liked get-togethers that included recreation and singing. At first, they organized community sings, then demanded a countywide one. Through the planning committee and the WPA, local clubs joined to hold a singing pageant in the new Greensboro auditorium, attended by an overflow crowd of three thousand people. As part of the unified planning program, the WPA subsequently appointed a full-time recreational leader for the county. Raper noted that a similar organizational effort was needed for the benefit of black residents.9 The cooperative planning committee deemed soil erosion a major problem. It therefore promoted crop rotation, expanding terraces, strip-farming,

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soil-building crops, and the retiring of worn-out cotton land to pasture and forest. This latter endeavor became part of the multicounty North Central Georgia Land-Utilization Project Number 22, one of L. C. Gray’s submarginal land-purchase projects. By 1942 the federal government had purchased 30,000 acres in Greene County for the project at a cost of $165,000, almost all paid to local landowners. County authorities seemed pleased with the land project, as back taxes were paid and the future promised sustained-yield harvesting of timber. The planning committee also spearheaded the creation of a Soil Conservation District, which led to the hiring of nineteen new SCS employees in the county. The local SCS, Extension, and vo-ag teachers planned a wildlife camp in the land-utilization project for use by 4-H clubbers and Future Farmers of America. A black CCC camp moved into the county to work on soil erosion. All these agencies cooperated under the auspices of the county planning committee.10 Forest fires were another serious problem in Greene County. The unified planning program built an eighty-foot-high steel observation tower, and made plans for erecting more. It established a volunteer forest fire control program, with contributions from the federal land-use project, the FSA, the new Conservation District, the CCC, lumber companies, the county government, and local school boards plus volunteer firefighters. Representatives of most of these groups constituted the county planning committee in the first place. Spurred by this good start, Greene mounted a strong educational effort to prevent forest fires. Before 1939, when the unified program started, over half of the county’s woodlands had been burned over each year, a figure that soon decreased dramatically. In addition, the CCC boys, with the SCS, planted four hundred acres of pine seedlings, fenced a hundred forty-acre pastures, terraced seventy-five hundred acres, and planted seventeen thousand acres of kudzu. Such work on private lands required that the owners follow the recommendations of their Soil Conservation District. Raper commented that since Congress abolished the CCC in mid-1942, this kind of conservation work would thereafter have to be done by farmers themselves or, more likely, given the lack of resources, not at all.11 In the midthirties Raper had been quite critical of the early New Deal in Greene County, especially the AAA, for displacing and disadvantaging poorer citizens. But after his intensive research in the early forties, he saw the later New Deal in a vastly different light. He reported “more activity everywhere,” countywide feelings of accomplishment, and “hope, too, on the face of many a farmer—white or black. . . . A world of things have been done in the past

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four years [since unified planning began]. A larger world of things still remain to be done.” To Raper, after a decade of Roosevelt’s reform administration and having himself spent the two most recent years conducting participant-evaluation research in Greene, this late effort at local planning, cooperation, and coordination signaled a real departure from the earlier New Deal and was something worth publicizing, celebrating, and expanding. As he summed up, “The phrase ‘before the government came’ is as definite a way of speaking about time as ‘back in slavery times’ or ‘before the boll weevil.’ People feel they are in a new era. And,” he added knowingly, “some do not like it.”12 Admittedly, the unified planning program in Greene County was exemplary, not typical. According to the FSA, the experiment showed that “coordinated planning and cooperative work by all interested governmental agencies can mean more rehabilitation and better rehabilitation than any single agency could hope to accomplish alone. Greene County is a picture on a small scale of what a unified social and economic program can do for destitute farm people.” Greene’s unified program showed what was possible with cooperative planning, what the county program could accomplish by combining top-down federal bureaucracy with organized citizen participation. The unified program represented a coordinated use of public and private agencies to improve poor people’s lives. It functioned as the local democratizing arm of governmental power and action.13

More Action Planning The South Greene County was not the only place in the South to benefit from cooperative planning. The first unified program in Mississippi, in Covington County, a piney-woods area, illustrated the entire process leading up to action, including responses from federal agencies and BAE headquarters. During 1939 eighty-five farm men and women participated in community and county planning meetings and decided that soil conservation was the major problem. They chose terracing as the focus for the year’s unified action. The county planning committee made several recommendations: that the local AAA modify its payments to encourage terracing among cooperating farmers and that “a penalty be assessed against each farm which fails to properly maintain the terracing system”; that the local FSA establish a cooperative to

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buy terracing machines and encourage terracing among its clients; that Extension agents and vocational agriculture teachers conduct “terracing schools” and set up terracing clubs through 4-H; and that the SCS, through the newly formed Soil Conservation District, purchase additional terracing equipment and make it available at the local CCC camp.14 All the community planning committees in Covington County agreed that the terracing effort should be followed immediately by “a sound agronomic program . . . through the planting of crops for protective cover,” summer legumes, for example. The county planning committee thus suggested that the AAA revise its 1940 program to incorporate such soil-building cover crops. Further, Extension and the TVA should carry out their “test demonstration farm program” in Covington, including some FSA clients. A vo-ag teacher volunteered to assist in this endeavor, which would be augmented by a winter cover-crop campaign consisting of eight community meetings and employing the latest technology, “sound motion pictures.” In addition, the county FSA and SCS offices agreed to promote cover crops.15 Moreover, the unified program of the Covington County Planning Committee proposed more on-farm production to reduce cash needs and improve nutrition for rural families. It therefore recommended that the AAA modify its program in order to support payments for “home gardens and truck patches,” which should also be encouraged among FSA clients. Extension set up a demonstration garden program in each community through 4-H, and voag and home-ec teachers promoted farm gardens in their high school and adulteducation classes. Other planks of the unified planning program for 1940 included reforestation, pasture improvement, tenure reform, and a county public health program.16 The action agencies responded to Covington County’s unified program bureaucratically, without complete assent, but ultimately they proved useful. The state AAA office agreed in particular that “farms failing to maintain terraces” could be sanctioned but balked at changing its 1940 program wherever extra payments or rule changes were required. The BAE planning division under Bushrod Allin responded more favorably, praising the good work done in Covington but asking for more specificity on “the lines of action to be undertaken.” It also criticized the planning committee’s lack of attention to land tenure, which the BAE thought was “a major problem in the county,” and posited that if this basic issue was not addressed, little “fruitful work” could be done on local soil conservation or live-at-home programs. The higher-level IBCC took up Covington County’s unified planning

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program at its meeting on July 20, 1940. The AAA, FSA, and SCS agreed to cooperate in providing more terracing assistance and acknowledged that Covington had “originally suggested” this programmatic improvement. The county’s unified program clearly provoked the action agencies in Washington to start talking more among themselves, no small achievement. On the basis of the Covington report, both federal Extension and the FSA realized that they needed more personnel in the county. The IBCC members also cross-referenced other county cases with issues similar to those raised in Covington’s unified program and offered several technical specifications to improve the Mississippi county planning. The local upshot was that Covington established a county health unit, restricted FSA loans to areas deemed “suited for farming,” secured a county forester, set up twenty-seven TVA demonstration farms, fit the AAA program to local conditions, and gave major emphasis to terracing by the farmers and action agencies cooperating in the county.17 Tolley was especially fond of citing Caswell County, North Carolina, another poor, biracial, “one-crop” southern county as “an example of the effectiveness of land-use planning as a means by which farmers participate in planning the improvement of what may appear to be the most difficult of agricultural situations.” Caswell County had been tobacco country since Reconstruction, but in the thirties failing markets and soil depletion conspired to undermine production. The land-use planning committees, both black and white, developed an agenda of improvement for the county: erosion control, cover crops, land drainage, home gardens, more livestock and dairy cattle, greater use of lime and phosphate, and better housing and farming equipment. Soil conservation emerged as one of the immediate problems, which the county committee addressed with a terracing program. It coordinated the local efforts and operations of the Extension service, the vo-ag teachers, the SCS together with National Youth Administration crews and a CCC camp, and the FSA, which approved twelve community-service loans for terracing equipment and fifty individual farm terrace loans. A professional workers’ council involving all of these public agencies started meeting monthly to discuss plans of work. Immediate results of this cooperative effort included a new milk route as well as purchases of plows, tractors, combines, lime spreaders, stalk cutters, purebred bulls, and a jack—all by groups of farmers working together.18 Women played a particularly active role in Caswell County’s planning for action. Each of the nine community committees consisted of four men

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and three women. The women committee members inspired more than two thousand new year-round gardens, a 50 percent increase. Extension’s home demonstration agent cited many more fruits and vegetables grown and poultry flocks raised in the county. In addition, the FSA expanded live-at-home programs and organized a health care cooperative for its clients. While these modifications in farming practices and lifestyle may seem simple, even minor, they made a positive difference in the lives of many Caswell residents. The home economist wrote that it all amounted to “a sort of revival of hope that had been shrinking.” USDA’s Tolley agreed. The most important local result of cooperative planning, he claimed, was “its stimulating effect on the psychology and morale of the people.” He spoke of “the development of this latent energy among the people of the South,” along with adult-education opportunities offered by the planning program. These openings, he thought, had “tremendous promise in lifting Caswell County and the South up to a more adequate living standard for the majority of the people.” They thereby made “better use of the county’s resources.” Accounting for Tolley’s midwestern assumptions as well as some likely paternalism, it still appears that cooperative planning functioned positively to transform the debilitated rural South. He entitled one of his talks in North Carolina “Planning a Way Out for Southern Agriculture.”19 Could anyone disagree that planning held promise? There are other stories of planning success in the South. The committee in Culpeper County, Virginia, called for the improved medical care of poor people. It met with the local association of doctors, who agreed to experiment with a program open to all low-income families. Culpeper’s unified planning also led to the establishment of a Soil Conservation District and a Rural Electrification Administration (REA) cooperative as well as the expansion of FSA loans for fruit farming; some small farmers began selling strawberries and raspberries in nearby Washington, D.C. In Lee County, Alabama, the planning committee decided to attack soil erosion and won support from the AAA and the FSA to urge farmers to build terraces and waterdisposal systems. Vo-ag and home-ec teachers also agreed to stress the importance of terracing. Over 70 percent of Lee County’s farmers were landless, and the FSA began to administer the farm-tenant purchase program according to the committee’s recommendations, including promotion of long-term, written leases. In Texas and Alabama, state highway departments, at the request of unified planning counties, agreed to develop farmto-market roads. Further, several other planning committees secured public

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health units by working with their local governments and state health departments.20 Such seemingly small gains counted as meaningful victories for common people throughout the rural South. Northern Plains and the West One state, North Dakota, stood out for its extremely high level of farmer participation throughout the entire planning process, as a few numbers from 1940 illustrate. Over 3,600 farm people were elected to serve on the local planning committees in 848 communities. Almost 6,000 land-use planning meetings were held, including 2,400 of the open community type, attended by between one-fourth and three-fourths of all the farm people. Of the nearly 72,000 farm families statewide, 37 percent took part to some degree in land-use planning; more than 44,000 citizens attended planning meetings. Sheridan County boasted the best record, with “85 percent of its farm people actively participating” in land-use planning. According to the state Extension project leader, this level was not obtained “in an effort to ‘yes the work of the committees.’ ” Rather, the county agent aimed to “keep the people planning conscious.” The pervasive nature of well-organized, even politicized Farmers Union locals in much of North Dakota accounted, in part, for the impressive citizen participation.21 Doubtless it was no accident that this state with the highest rate of citizen participation in the planning program offered the most progressive, even radical, proposals for policy changes. The planning committee in Pierce County, North Dakota, for example, recommended that larger or “oversized [farm] units should be discouraged. ‘Corporation farming’ is detrimental to our community institutions. It appears that the AAA program should be built around the medium size farm.” This committee also called on Congress to study farm machinery prices with an eye to bringing them down, more in line with the prices farmers received. Bowman County’s planning committee proposed that the AAA limit payments to larger farmers in order to give more support to family farmers. It complained that “because of AAA payments, many businessmen or people with income other than farming are buying up . . . land as an investment and dispossessing the regular farm operators.” Towner County proposed “graduated land taxation” as a way to advance owner-operatorship and also wanted Congress to adopt the North Dakota Farmers Union plan to raise wheat prices. Based on such initiatives of the planning committees, the North Dakota legislature passed a profamily

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farming law in 1941. The BAE in Washington noted all these policy recommendations, but most of them probably seemed too radical or class conscious for the federal agency to act on.22 Ward County, in northwestern North Dakota, exemplified two key features of cooperative planning: citizen participation and changes on the ground. Its community and county land-use committees enjoyed extremely high involvement by farmers. A drought-stricken, wheat-growing area, Ward had engaged in the earlier AAA County Planning Project (see chapter 5). In April 1939 the state planning committee selected Ward as the first unified program county in North Dakota. The old AAA planning committee first divided the county into twelve communities, which held open meetings to explain the program; about 870 people, one-fourth of all farm families in the county, showed up. Attendees elected their community committees (a total of eighty-five members), the chairs of which became the farm representatives on the new Ward County planning committee. The local USDA action agencies provided every community committee with several maps, including aerial, soil, slope, erosion, tax, and ownership maps, as well as the crop acreages of each township. The twelve community committees each met four to six times in June and July, an intense period of study, discussion, and debate that used the above data combined with the local knowledge of the eighty-five farm people. Following the BAE’s work outline number 1, these sixty-seven community meetings culminated with land-use maps and classifications for their area, including recommendations for improvement. Forty percent of all farm families in Ward County participated in land-use planning in some capacity. However, by 1941 local interest in planning had slacked off, and the Extension agents were moving to establish smaller, “natural community” groupings.23 Despite this extensive work by the community planning committees, the Ward County committee did not convene until after the harvest season in 1939. At a two-day meeting in September, members, including the usual local representatives of USDA action agencies, BAE, and Extension, studied and discussed the twelve community maps and recommendations, then appointed four subcommittees to give the issues more attention as well as correlation at the county level. At the next meeting, the county committee tentatively accepted the maps and reports with minor revisions and then held another round of open community meetings. After “practically unanimous approval,” the county committee finalized the report recommending several action plans and forwarded it on to the state planning committee in Fargo. This land-use mapping and classification phase of cooperative planning led

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to greater recognition of a number of serious agricultural problems in the semiarid county on the Northern Plains: debt, drought, overcapitalization, wheat monocropping, a high tenancy rate of two-thirds, and tax issues such as low base, delinquency, and inequitable burden.24 Working from the detailed analysis by the local committees and discussion in the open community meetings, the county committee decided to focus on increased diversification through expanding livestock herds, building up feed reserves, and live-at-home farming. It publicized these recommendations via radio, newspapers, and public meetings with Extension, farm organizations, and the local New Deal agencies. Most farmers agreed with this unified program initiative, and many started growing more feed crops. The county planning committee supported such individual adjustments by encouraging USDA loans for fencing, range improvement, livestock purchases, and water conservation. In particular, it worked with the local AAA office to modify rules that resulted in increased opportunities for feed and forage crops as well as summer-fallow practices. Further, at the planning committee’s suggestion, the AAA added ten thousand acres to its county restoration program, turning wheat land back to grass; it took out about one thousand acres that had been misclassified. In addition, the county committee proposed a change in national regulations to allow credit for seeding perennial grasses on restoration land, and in 1940 the AAA in Washington accepted this improvement. The planning committee also helped the local FSA promote long-term leases and expand its land-purchase and debt-adjustment programs as well as to follow the unified program recommendation on adapting its two hundred plus rural rehabilitation loans to semiarid conditions.25 The Ward County planning committee addressed other issues as well. It convinced local taxing authorities to adjust taxes to the productive capacity of the land, using the new land-use data it had gathered. The committee proposed that the county government impound rents on tax-delinquent land, resulting in collections from about four hundred more parcels. Throughout the thirties, financing public services such as schools persisted as a problem, and the committee urged both state and federal agencies to contribute payments to local governments, in lieu of taxes, for properties they owned. For instance, the FSA operated a subsistence homestead project in the county, which eventually received more federal aid for the local public school that served the new community. Still, county officials criticized public (state and federal) landowners for being slow to comply with such payments due. What’s more, the FSA started two farmer cooperatives (creamery and grain elevator) that the

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planning committee had urged. The FSA also cooperated with the Public Health Service, Farmers Union, and the American Medical Association to push a live-at-home program locally. Last, the committee worked with county government in setting aside several tax-forfeited lands for public recreation areas.26 Teton County, in north-central Montana, quickly became another showcase for the cooperative planning program. Most of its one thousand farmers grew wheat and raised sheep or cattle. Much of the land had been misused, so conservation emerged as a pressing concern. Farmers and officials organized three-member community planning committees, and the chairs of these served on the county committee along with the usual group of government representatives. Specialists from Extension, Montana State College, and federal agencies assisted the farmer-planners, providing, for instance, county maps and charts showing population, precipitation, soil types, farm size, tax delinquency, and type of farming. The committees requested additional research such as a field survey that graded every forty-acre tract according to carrying capacity, checked against farm records; and a map of ownership and operating units in each township, prepared by WPA workers using AAA and tax records. These research findings were double-checked by the community committees, composed as they were of farmers with local, experiential, and historical knowledge of the area. In this way, the community committees charted local land-use areas, indicating problems and recommending solutions, data which the county committee synthesized into a tentative report. After further study and discussion at community-wide meetings and subsequent revisions, in July 1939 the county committee produced its intensive planning report, including a land-classification map that graded the carrying capacity for both grazing and plowing.27 On the basis of these study, discussion, and research findings, Teton’s local planning committees decided that land producing fewer than seven bushels of wheat per acre was not suitable for plowing, and they mapped the location of such “low-grade cultivated areas.” The county committee found twenty thousand acres that fit that category and recommended they be used for grazing only, and that other poor land not be plowed but remain in grass. All levels of government, including BAE technicians and Montana State scientists, worked with the farmer-planners in bringing about this land-use adjustment. Among the actions taken in 1940 were the following: the AAA encouraged retirement and grass seeding of low-quality land; twenty-five hundred acres were retired that year. If poor land continued to be tilled, the

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AAA disallowed it from the commodity programs, “controlling” two thousand acres in this manner. The FSA agreed not to make loans for cropping poor land, and the FCA considered land productivity before making loans. The state land department took similar steps on properties under its jurisdiction. Teton County officials assessed low-grade lands being cultivated at a higher tax rate and gave a lower, grazing assessment to such land put into grass. The Extension agent oversaw these land-use changes, including informing nonresident landowners about the new classification and planning work in the county. “Thus,” the USDA concluded, “the farmers, technicians, and administrators in Teton County worked together toward the solution of one pressing problem.” Such a cooperative process was the very goal of the planning program.28 Elsewhere in the Plains and the West, planning committees at the state and county levels proposed 140 initiatives in the new federal water facilities program. This late New Deal effort built small facilities and repaired existing ones to conserve water resources on western farms, typically involving wells, springs, impounding dams, or other diversion projects for runoff and storm water. For example, the planning committee in Kootenai County, Idaho, discovered that although more diversified farms with livestock would enhance conservation, water supply was limited. By working through the local SCS and FSA offices, it succeeded in establishing a number of water facilities demonstration projects. Counties in Colorado and South Dakota achieved similar results, while others cooperated with technicians in flood-control studies. The local committees shared their recommendations with experts, for instance, in the water facilities plan for the Republican River watershed in Kansas, Colorado, and Nebraska. One state planning committee worked with the BAE and the agricultural college to produce a comprehensive planning report, “Water-Land Resources and Problems in South Dakota.”29 The planning committees often promoted group action by farmers, which seemed especially active in the West: cooperative tree planting in Nebraska, cooperative sawmills in Utah, cooperative marketing in Texas, buying clubs for purchase of livestock in Arkansas, renting bulldozers for land clearing in Washington, and financing a cold-storage locker plant to improve community health in New Mexico. In Mesa County, Colorado, the unified planning committee worked out a successful marketing plan to sell more than a million bushels of peaches. From this effort grew a state law allowing closer collaboration between state and federal officials on farm marketing problems. The village of Cornville in Yavapai County, Arizona, wanted electricity but

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was too small even to form a cooperative with the REA. Through the planning committee, citizens negotiated with a private power company by offering their own labor and some equipment in exchange for reduced charges; they formed a local co-op to handle the project. A neighboring community soon gained electricity in the same way.30 A final instance of cooperative planning in the West came from Washington County, Idaho, a dry-wheat farming territory whose agricultural future looked doubtful owing to widespread soil erosion, land abandonment, and tax delinquency. At the community level, the Dixie area land-use planning committee requested that agricultural economists from the University of Idaho conduct a farm management study. It revealed that a few farmers were doing quite well because they had switched from cash wheat to hay, pasture, alfalfa seed, and livestock and that others could profitably make the same change. Using that report, the planning committee wrote a comprehensive unified plan involving Extension, including the 4-H club, university agronomists, and poultry specialists, and the Washington County AAA (encouraging legumes and grasses), SCS (erosion control and a CCC camp), and FSA (loans for seeds, livestock, and water facilities). The county improved the main road into the Dixie community to boot. This local planning committee, then, brought together farmers with county, state, and federal agencies to create, in the BAE’s words, “a brighter future.”31 Another small but meaningful change for common rural people. The Great Lakes Cut- Overs Two multicounty areas in the northern Great Lake states exemplified the troubled process but eventual policy impacts of cooperative land-use planning on a larger scale. Eight counties in the cut-over region of northern Minnesota boasted active planning committees by 1940, and they all reached the same conclusion: Much of the land was unsuited for farming and should be devoted to timber, wildlife, recreation, and similar conservation uses. However, many farmers initially met this idea with skepticism. For over ten years a debate had raged between outside experts, that is, economists from BAE and the University of Minnesota, and local officials over what to do with the cut-over land. Land economists had determined that it was neither adapted to nor needed for farming, a position bitterly opposed by local interests, who favored traditional development of the region by new farmers. The locally preferred policy continued through most of the 1930s, eventuating in over six

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million acres of land forfeited to local governments for nonpayment of taxes, not to mention public debt, relief, and other government expenses.32 Starting in 1938, the planning committees mapped, analyzed, and classified all the land in the eight counties. They agreed that much of the cutover was unsuited for agriculture and sought to limit settlement to the more fertile acres, preventing isolated farmsteads in the areas with poor land. The maps they produced were similar to the earlier ones by land economists, but this time local people themselves had done the necessary investigation and so had more faith in the resulting analysis and land classification. The result was a fundamental reconciliation of divergent views on local land use: the planning process here led to new understandings and new policies. The county governing boards “adopted a progressive policy of withholding from sale tax-forfeited lands in areas which have been agreed to be unsuited or unneeded for farming at the present time.” Nearly five million acres were so classified by mid-1940 and would remain in public ownership for conservation uses. In addition, three of the eight county boards adopted zoning ordinances prohibiting private settlement on such land. The county zoning laws themselves were a consequence of the planning work.33 Still, many northern Minnesota farmers wanted more public credit available for land-clearing equipment and general land improvements. They asserted that such land clearing in the cut-over region was consistent with national agricultural adjustment and conservation policy. The planning committees could not reach consensus on this issue and referred it to the USDA’s new IBCC. This federal body saw the local wisdom of clearing land that was well suited for farming and provided opportunities for those farmers displaced from submarginal farms. The resulting policy offered land-improvement loans to tenants and farm laborers as well as to current owners. The county committees’ land-use maps proved essential in carrying out this land-clearing and credit program. Other benefits included guidance to settlers and forest resource development along with savings in road and school costs. In Tolley’s eyes, these were “among the long-time benefits which will accrue from the new understandings, new policy, and new programs which were established as a result of cooperative land-use planning in this area.”34 Northern Michigan, where forty-seven counties had been cut over, constituted a similar but larger case. As a result of low fertility, depressed prices, farm abandonment, and tax delinquency, state and federal governments owned nearly a third of the land, a total of over seven million acres. Here, cooperative land-use planning contributed local knowledge and citizen deliberation,

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with definite long-term policy consequences. A study of the region done in 1945 described the membership of the community and county cooperative planning committees in this way: “Farm men and women, who had watched specific acres perform since they could remember, who had the judgment of their fathers and grandfathers on the results of use trials on given areas behind them, were brought together. With them sat county, state, and federal authorities, all concerned with land use.” Over seventeen hundred rural citizens sat on the committees that, following work outline number 1, conducted the land-use mapping and classification research with scientists and local administrators. Their overwhelming recommendation amounted to an endorsement of the widespread public landownership that already existed in both the northern Lower Peninsula and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. For the most part, the committees concluded, the soil was too poor to farm profitably; the land should go to public parks, forests, wildlife refuges, recreation areas, and other extensive uses. As in northern Minnesota, these policy actions culminated over a twenty-year-long process of deciding what to do with the Michigan cut-overs, the land, as people said at the time, “nobody wanted.”35 Other Localized Federal Action Cooperative planning committees devoted much attention to conservation of natural resources, particularly soil erosion and fertility depletion. As mentioned above, numerous counties around the nation organized Soil Conservation Districts. In other counties, the federal SCS used the land-use planning maps and reports to guide its work locally. The Okfuskee County, Oklahoma, planning committee coordinated the activities of public agencies to prevent soil erosion, proposing, for example, to use funds from a tractor tax for terracing. Five committees in Iowa convinced their respective county governments to buy limestone in bulk for discounted resale to farmers. Adair County, Iowa, Henry Wallace’s boyhood home, needed more strip cropping and contour tillage for its rolling topography, according to the planning committee, which worked with local federal agencies to that end.36 Farm forestry became another leading activity of the planning committees, which helped set up thirty-nine intensive demonstration projects to assist woodland owners. In Ross County, Ohio, the committee sponsored a forestry training school. At the participants’ request, state and federal agencies developed a handbook on woodland management practices. In northern New England, several counties had problems with woodland pastures. The

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local planning groups got the AAA to adjust its program to accommodate managed woodland alternatives without penalizing the farmers. In several other states, the U.S. Forest Service used the county land-use classification maps in planning national forest acquisition. The Mississippi State Forest Commission changed the location of a proposed state forest because of a county planning committee’s designation of land unsuited for farming.37 The area maps and reports were put to use in numerous other ways, including as guides to land settlement by prospective farmers and real estate development. Banks and investment agencies used the maps and reports in determining policies fitted to diverse land-use areas, for example, to deny credit in areas designated unsuitable for farming. Local taxing authorities found them valuable for revising and adjusting land assessments. In Washington County, Rhode Island, the county map and report indicated that a certain area was unfit for agriculture, and this became the location for an airport. In O’Brien County, Iowa, the location of eight new public schools followed the suggestions of the planning committee, a process also followed in several Indiana counties where similar population analyses had been conducted. Thus, facts gathered and presented by the citizen-planners served as the basis for local policy initiatives and public action. Soil conservation districts, local zoning commissions, county agents, highway officials, utility companies, bankers, scientists, educators, and farm buyers all used the land-use maps and reports to carry out their activities.38 These results of cooperative planning constituted purely local changes, but they improved the quality of life for the residents of the affected areas. Mainly, though, the planning documents were used by federal agencies. They provided a basis for their “coordination of action.” Specifically, in Spokane County, Washington, both the FSA and the FCA used the planning committee’s land-classification maps in determining new loans. The Public Roads Administration used the land-use maps in Chittenden County, Vermont, to decide the location of future secondary roads. The Forest Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the SCS, and the REA also used the county land-use maps and reports in their local work. Agency personnel in general acquired firsthand insight into local farmers’ thinking and thereby could develop unified agricultural programs.39 Of the USDA action agencies, the FSA worked most closely with the planning committees. A real and early achievement came in 1939, as one hundred county FSA committees agreed to make new loans only to “farming-suitable” areas, based on the land-use mapping and classification

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done by the local planning committees. Over four hundred other FSA offices used them variously in the tenant purchase program, rural rehabilitation loans, and resettlement projects. For instance, the FSA in Newberry County, South Carolina, followed the recommendation of the planning committee in setting up farms of “at least two-mule size.” Nonetheless, the BAE State and Local Division suggested that the FSA “dig deeper” and do more to assist the poorest farmers rather than “skimming the cream,” that is, helping those already most likely to succeed. In particular, some planning committees felt that the FSA should do more to help those farmers who could not qualify for its standard rehabilitation loan. In Culpeper County, Virginia, for example, the FSA agreed to make a few experimental “pre-standard” loans to small farmers with extremely limited resources.40 The FSA was also a major partner of the planning program in developing a cooperative farm women’s market in Atlantic County, New Jersey. Local women and Extension home economists had been discussing such a market for two years, and the county planning committee brought it to fruition by coordinating local, state, and federal resources. The co-op sold fruits, vegetables, bread, and pastries as well as eggs, poultry, and dairy products. Sale of such fresh goods raised farm incomes in this relatively poor area. The market became the “focal point” toward which local citizens and agency representatives directed their “thinking and efforts,” Tolley wrote.41 Finally, planning acted as an “educational force.” Extension in particular used the committee reports to help guide its work in the counties. Demonstration projects were established in many areas at the urging of the citizen-planners. In Kansas, vo-ag teachers introduced the planning reports into their classrooms, and some were used more generally in public schools for instructional purposes. In Young County, Texas, because of the planning report, the vo-ag teachers taught better conservation practices in both high school and adult classes. And in Belmont County, Ohio, the teacher built an adult agricultural class around the committee’s land-use map, descriptions, and recommendations. Further, the BAE believed deeply in the value of the maps and reports for their makers. The local committee members who constructed the maps, both farm people and agency personnel, received a “valuable educational experience.” Consider this testimonial from a farmer on the Hand County, South Dakota, unified planning committee: “We have been getting a great deal of information together about the county. I do not know that we are just sure what we are going to do with all the information. It is all so new. The people, however, are for it and they go right after it. They don’t

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all agree, which makes it harder to know what to do, but they are surely becoming better informed about the county in many ways.” The land-use mapping and classification exercises stimulated public discussion of rural problems, especially since they reflected the thinking of local people. Educational meetings and discussion groups grew as a result. They also provided useful baseline data on current agricultural needs and conditions in a given area. As Tolley summed up, “The committees learned as they worked.” 42 These selected county results show that much action came from the planning effort and that most of this activity was local. As in Greene County, Georgia, scores of locales reached the unified, action phase of planning and brought about changes that substantially improved the daily lives of rural citizens. One USDA report concluded in 1940 that “whatever the recommendations of the planning committees may be, and whatever the action growing out of these recommendations, these committees are establishing a new channel for the expression of farmer opinion— one that will allow farmers to be heard much more clearly than ever before. In essence, land-use planning is a national attempt to make democracy work throughout the whole field of agriculture, to make the voice of the people more effective in their government. That, by itself, is perhaps the most important single fact about county land use planning.” 43 National Social-Democratic Planning by Local Farmer-Citizens An unremembered but highly significant federal achievement of the planning program occurred during the national “defense emergency,” so-called before the United States entered World War II. The war in Europe pressed unprecedented demands on American agriculture, and the cooperative planning program answered the call. Not only did market demand for farm products shoot up after a decade of economic depression, but sudden growth of rural industrial employment caused serious dislocations. Agricultural adjustments now needed to be made upward, for the first time since the New Deal started with the AAA back in 1933. The “reorientation and broadening” of the program gave new import and meaning to the state-level planning committees and a major emphasis on the problems of location and job opportunities in war-related industries in rural America.44 To meet the national and international crisis, “the democratic planning process” was extended and deepened; participatory planning by farmers,

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experts, and administrators increased in “the defense of democracy.” The planning committees’ work during the first two years of the program, especially land-use mapping and classification, was useful in meeting the defense emergency. Thanks to the local–national organization that had been set up, the secretary of agriculture, for example, knew where cropland was available for expanded production, where increased cultivation should not occur, as had happened during World War I, and where unemployed or underemployed rural people lived. In particular, in those areas where defense industries and large military bases were established, county planning committees had been able to furnish information on local labor availability for construction and industry, on vacant houses and farms for displaced families, and on the best sites for additional housing so as to be of permanent value to the communities after the emergency. The committees also helped make “locally-grown perishable farm products available for consumption at nearby army training centers with a minimum of handling and transportation charges.” 45 But their major national service was just now ready to be realized. In July 1941 Tolley and Wilson submitted a thirty-page IBCC report to the departmental Agricultural Program Board, awkwardly entitled “Agriculture’s Plans to Aid in Defense and Meet the Impacts of War.” A summary of the forty-seven state agricultural planning committees’ recent work, it was the single most vital contribution of the program to national policy. In January 1941 Secretary of Agriculture Claude Wickard had requested the state committees to address (1) how agriculture could best contribute to national defense and national unity, (2) how the results of the defense program could be used to adjust farming, forestry, and rural living so that agriculture emerged “in a stronger economic and social position,” and (3) how unwise land uses could be prevented. The committees, led by the volunteer citizen-planners, submitted their reports to the BAE in less than five months. During June seven regional conferences hammered out the recommendations, then the BAE under Tolley and the Extension office under Wilson prepared the national summary report.46 This comprehensive report culminated the planning program in two senses: substantively, it marked the high-water point of policy recommendations by the decentralized committees, and chronologically it came just before the program ended. The report exemplified what the planning committees could do—and in short order. It showed that they were functioning as originally intended by the USDA’s agrarian intellectuals: the committees provided national policy makers with grass-roots direction. And in a rare instance for

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the United States, inside agriculture or not, the report specified the socialdemocratic sentiments of farmer-citizens as well as those of the planning experts. Indeed, it evidenced the agrarian wing of a social democracy then emerging in the United States. “Agriculture’s Plans to Aid in Defense and Meet the Impacts of War” summarized the considered policy opinions of the 775 farm men and women plus 1,739 administrative and technical workers who served on the state planning committees. Their work, in turn, was based on the county planning committees, the majority of whose members were farmers, and the farmer-only community committees. In their cover memorandum to Secretary Wickard, Tolley and Wilson expressed some pride in the achievement: “The ingenuity and effort that went into the State reports produced a reservoir of suggestion which has served as the basis for . . . the formulation of policy statements and specific programs of action by the Department of Agriculture.” Further, the national report represented a “significant first step in developing a unified agricultural program,” a phrase they used advisedly. Tolley and Wilson claimed that “it is questionable whether any group of government agencies ever cooperated in any common effort more wholeheartedly and with less consciousness of jurisdictional lines than was the case in this activity.” Allin, the BAE leader of the planning program, also bragged that the report “demonstrated the effectiveness and value of democratic planning in agriculture.” To low-modernist intellectuals like Allin, Tolley, and Wilson, such a nonbureaucratic stance deserved high praise indeed. They urged the secretary to give the committees’ recommendations his “most careful consideration.” 47 What did the report propose? Among the broadest policy suggestions were those for health, nutrition, and housing. Tolley and Wilson noted that the state planning committees “showed a striking unanimity on concern for the national health as part of the first line of defense.” A “unified national educational program on health and nutrition is an immediate need,” for example, information on vitamins given through the public schools. All schoolchildren should receive hot lunches, and all poor families, not just those on relief, should be eligible for food stamps. Other health recommendations included the need for more doctors in rural areas (some things never change!), the “organization of local medical care associations for all rural people,” like those established in Greene County, and a “coordinated national rural housing program” to sustain defense work as well as better health. In a section titled “Planning for the Post-War Period,” the authors proposed a

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“non-relief ” public works program focused on rural hospitals, community centers, and recreational facilities.48 Further, the agrarian planners advocated educational reforms and an integrated national farmworker policy including “security and desirable working conditions for farm labor.” Some state committees suggested the extension of Social Security and minimum wage benefits to farmworkers, who had been excluded from these programs. Migratory farm labor camps should be expanded to improve housing, sanitation, education, and recreation. Several state committees suggested establishing “state or county farm labor conciliation boards” to address disputes between workers and employers. The planning document endorsed more federal support for the vocational training of rural youth, directed primarily toward nonfarm employment. It sought federal funds to raise rural schools’ standards and to create a national system of trade schools. Adult education for farmer-citizens would inculcate a better understanding of “the democratic process and its differences from other political systems.” Tolley and Wilson saw education as an “integral part of the strengthening of democracy generally in the [defense] emergency.” A section termed “Pan-American Relations” called for improved trade and cultural exchanges, including increased study and discussion of Latin American history and the region’s current socioeconomic problems, presumably by the BAE Program Study and Discussion unit.49 On agricultural policy, most of the state committees endorsed the ongoing policies of acreage control, commodity loans, and marketing quotas. However, they suggested “increasing penalties for non-cooperation” and encouraging more diversified farming systems instead of export or surplus crops. They also promoted more public acquisition of submarginal land. Conservation and sustainability received considerable attention in regard to soil, water, forest, and range (grass, livestock, game) resources. Moreover, Tolley and Wilson suggested that increased production should derive from greater efficiencies with existing resources, like cooperative ownership and operation of farm equipment, rather than from opening new land or new farms. Specifically, the nation must avoid the harmful financial speculation and overexpansion of agriculture that arose in the wake of World War I. Farm input prices should be controlled, and a national transportation plan for wartime agriculture established.50 Perhaps of greatest consequence was the unflinching endorsement of family farming. The state committees stressed their “general insistence that the Department should encourage the maintenance of family-sized farms in

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every way possible.” They argued pointedly that “family-sized farms, rather than multi-family or subsistence farms, ought to be encouraged” and that “the benefit from federal [farm] programs to large operators should be limited.” Moreover, undersized farms would continue to receive supervised credit and part-time employment; eventually, though, they should move toward either a more economic size or urban jobs. Tolley and Wilson concluded with a section called “Suggested Next Steps for the Department,” offered specifically by the agencies they led, the BAE and Extension. The USDA should “work out a clear-cut statement of its objectives or policies on the family-sized farm,” use public credit to reform current farm structure, improve the diets of low-income families, reorient agricultural commodity programs away from export and surplus crops and toward diversified farming, and extend land-use planning.51 This visionary report revealed the existence of a progressive agrarian foundation across the land. The state-level work that Tolley and Wilson summarized was itself derived from thousands of community and county planning committees. This wide grass-roots base of social-democratic sentiment could have been tapped politically, used to broaden and deepen the progressive New Deal, perhaps giving rise to a fourth New Deal! Instead, very few of the policy suggestions were taken up. In fact, Secretary Wickard shelved the report, which was never utilized and hardly ever referenced again. Over the next years and decades, the USDA went in the opposite direction from that recommended by Tolley, Wilson, and the whole national–local network of cooperative planning committees. Postwar agricultural policy tilted more toward larger-thanfamily farms, a freezing of the current inefficient and inequitable farm structure, land-use determination by market forces rather than by citizen / expert planning, continued malnutrition in “the other America” of the affluent society, and farm commodity programs that rewarded overproduction and specialization in export and surplus crops rather than conservation and diversification. All of this transpired during and after World War II in direct opposition to the BAE and the federal Extension office as well as the thousands of local members of the cooperative planning organization.

chapter 10

Intended New Deal Defeated, Reassessed, and Reclaimed Those who voice the loudest objections to the planning now being done [in the New Deal] are the disappointed politicians, the orthodox economists, and the business men who think their interests are likely to be adversely affected by any plans made by farmers, workers, and unconventional economists. —bushrod w. allin, “is planning compatible with democracy?,” 1937

T

he New Deal agrarian intellectuals intended to democratize agricultural policy as well as rural America, and this book presents their story and reclaims their vision. For almost three years, from early 1939 through late 1941, cooperative planning substantially deepened farmer participation, broadened its geographical reach, and delivered numerous benefits to rural citizens. But fatal problems also grew, culminating in 1942 with the termination of the program. Its demise has been told by a few scholars, whose findings I follow below. What has been generally missed, though, is the larger meaning of cooperative planning. The Demise The demise of cooperative planning was a story of power politics in rural America and hence in Congress and the land-grant colleges as well as within the USDA itself. Bureaucratic turf wars, ideological differences, and administrative missteps all played their role, but ultimately the enemies of democratization defeated the planning program. Sad to say, these included the BAE’s supposed partners-in-planning, the state Extension services and its fellow New Deal agencies. The major aggressor, though, was the nation’s strongest and most conservative farm organization, the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF). One contemporary analyst wrote that the AFBF was

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“plaguing and perverting the development of all public agricultural activity” in the late New Deal era, notably cooperative planning. Richard Kirkendall, the earliest and best student of the entire New Deal agrarian project, summarized the liquidation of cooperative planning as follows: “Perhaps internal weaknesses would have eventually destroyed the program, but the historian must note that external forces did in fact destroy it.”1 Despite its progress and successes, the planning program never enjoyed smooth sailing. The planning leader Bushrod Allin characterized its duration as “brief and stormy.” As a joint effort of the USDA and the land-grant colleges—operationally, the BAE and the state Extension services, with their county agents—tremendous variation existed in the degree of actual cooperation between them. Often the partners distrusted each other; one observer witnessed innumerable “deadlocks and bickerings.” Traditionally, Extension favored individualized education and farm-management approaches, whereas the BAE assumed that national, political-economic problems demanded farmers’ collective action, even the invention of new governmental institutions. Moreover, the Extensions claimed authority over state and local implementation of cooperative planning, and the BAE, with only its state representatives in the field, had little recourse. In many cases, Extension saw in the program federal “dictation” and resisted establishing the intended state–county planning network. Additionally, Extension agents sometimes interpreted planning as only another part of their own program, thus undercutting participation by the federal action agencies.2 The New Deal action programs presented their own set of problems to cooperative planning. The powerful grass-roots bureaucracies, especially the AAA and the SCS, gained political support from the farmers they served and often refused to cooperate with BAE planning. For one thing, they had ongoing feuds with many of the state Extensions that ran the planning program in the field. Second, the AAA and the SCS felt threatened by coordinated planning, both locally and nationally, and they defended their substantial turf against the BAE’s perceived incursions. To the BAE, they were “not sufficiently planning committee conscious.” Further, the BAE sought to include citizens that the other agencies ignored and sometimes harmed, such as poor farmers and tenants. The planners had a broader vision for American agriculture that promoted more conservation and diversification, compared to AAA’s stance for specialization and export crops. Secretary Wallace vigorously supported the planning effort at first but eventually shifted his focus to national politics, winning the vice presidency in 1940. His successor, Claude

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Wickard, was weaker, wary of planning, and distrustful of intellectuals. With no strong push from the new secretary, the action agencies had little call to cooperate with BAE planning.3 The other shoe dropped in late 1940, as the AFBF declared war on cooperative planning. The Farm Bureau had grown during the New Deal, becoming the strongest farm organization in the country. It had vigorously supported the early AAA, which materially benefited its members, typically larger farmers. But the organization feared that the new planning network, from the grass roots on up, could displace it in policy making. By the late New Deal, the AFBF thought that Wallace and the USDA were moving too close to the progressive National Farmers Union, the rural poor, via the FSA, and urban liberals, specifically, consumer groups and labor unions. Like Extension, AAA, and SCS, the dominant farm organization disapproved of agricultural planning by anyone other than itself.4 At the end of 1940, then, the Farm Bureau proposed an audacious plan to reorganize the USDA: creation of a five-member national board to oversee, among other agencies, AAA, SCS, and cooperative planning, with local administration vested in Extension’s county agents. The AFBF itself had emerged from the first county agents during World War I and in most states kept close ties to Extension. It became increasingly alarmed by the proliferation of decentralized New Deal farmer groups such as AAA, FSA, Soil Conservation Districts, rural electrification cooperatives, and now cooperative planning committees. Through its reorganization proposal, the AFBF sought to consolidate its power over farm politics by seizing authority from the wayward USDA and giving it to Extension. The AFBF also proposed cutting half a million dollars from the BAE budget, aimed to stop cooperative planning. And the farm organization had many supporters, indeed, proud AFBF members, in Congress.5 At first, Secretary Wickard and many state college officials defended the BAE, as Tolley, Allin, and Wilson mounted their own defense. Wilson’s personal standing and new position as USDA Extension director doubtless helped the land-grants respond favorably. But more trouble arose within the department when Tolley criticized the AAA, and the major action agency increasingly balked at “being planned.” In mid-1941 Congress cut the BAE planning budget by half a million dollars. Then the BAE received another major blow: in setting up local defense boards to coordinate USDA activities, Wickard bypassed the planning network and vested the new authority in AAA offices. His biases toward the AAA and against the BAE were well known, but nev-

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ertheless the choice was disappointing in the extreme since the cooperative planning organization appeared tailor-made for the defense-coordinating job. To make the timing worse, Wickard announced his decision just as Wilson and Tolley presented him with one of the planning program’s premier achievements, their report “Agriculture’s Plans to Aid in Defense and Meet the Demands of War” (see chapter 9). All that planning and all that coordination came to naught in the eyes of the secretary of agriculture who replaced Wallace.6 Things got worse. In late 1941 Wickard reorganized the department, and the BAE suffered a loss of influence, as Tolley was disallowed from reporting directly to the secretary. Tolley had taught Wickard in high school, and the student felt uncomfortable around his former teacher. The BAE fell into disarray in early 1942. Allin’s Division of State and Local Planning was downgraded, with a much reduced staff, to an Agricultural Planning Field Service and placed within the BAE chief’s office. Since the Farm Bureau could not take over the planning program, it now proposed eliminating cooperative planning altogether, deeming it “unwise and unnecessary.” The AFBF wrote that the BAE “has been building up a nation-wide field organization with the apparent objective of developing a super-planning agency.” For its part, the AAA circulated a fabricated rumor that Tolley intended to use the planning organization to replace the AFBF. By this time, neither Wickard nor the state colleges rose to the defense of cooperative planning. Only Wallaces’ Farmer, the National Farmers Union, and North Dakota’s Extension director testified on behalf of the BAE. Congress followed the AFBF’s charge and in spring 1942 cut the BAE budget by $800,000 more, mandating that none of the appropriated funds “shall be used for State and county land use planning.” The legislation took effect that summer.7 The Third, Intended New Deal in agriculture was now dead, killed by core parts of the growing anti–New Deal coalition that would soon destroy other progressive agencies, including the FSA. The AFBF vehemently opposed the agrarian intellectuals’ vision for American agriculture and exerted its political muscle to win the day. Wallace’s replacement by a weak, unsupportive secretary could also be blamed as could lack of support by the state colleges and Extension. They received assistance from USDA’s own powerful new action agencies, AAA and SCS. A bitter Allin remarked, “Apparently the only mistake the BAE has made is that of insisting that cooperative landuse planning should not be dominated by either the American Farm Bureau Federation or those few State Extension Directors who blindly do its bidding.” Although Allin overstated his case, the AFBF did find BAE planning “too

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democratic,” as one historian concluded.8 Thus only the least significant part of Wilson’s visionary “theory of agricultural democracy” survived. With cooperative planning, the farmer discussion groups, and participatory research all abolished, what remained was only local elites’ administration of the fragmented federal programs. Yet there is more to say by way of evaluating America’s first nationwide public policy initiative in democratic planning. An Assessment What exactly were the agrarian intellectuals trying to do with cooperative land-use planning? and how much did it succeed? Three intertwining themes emerge in this regard: planning’s democratizing thrust, the successes and problems it encountered in implementation, and its pioneering contributions to what later became known as community development and participatory action research. The agrarian intellectuals intended to achieve two goals with the late 1930s initiative of cooperative planning: increased direction of the New Deal action programs by farmers and better coordination between USDA and the state agricultural colleges in regard to those programs.9 First, the participatory intent aimed at policy integration and localization by farmers and experts working together. By unifying and adapting federal land-use programs at the county level, the planning committees played a central role in the local governance of New Deal agricultural policy. Further, based on the cooperative research and continuing education of experts as well as citizens, they could re-form the programs. This process and outcome exemplified the combined bottom-up, top-down ideal of the Third New Deal in agriculture. The agrarian intellectuals, in short, sought to democratize the government functions of administration, education, research, planning, and policy making. But cooperative planning had a second goal: to smooth relations between the activist New Deal USDA and the relatively conservative state land-grant colleges. Could this be accomplished in a way satisfactory to both parties? All the agrarian intellectuals believed that the cooperative planning program would derail rising conflict over alleged federal intrusion into the colleges’ territory, that is, USDA’s sudden and direct contact with millions of farmers via its action agencies. However, while the department aimed to restore institutional peace with the land-grants, it sacrificed too much in the attempt. The founding document of cooperative planning, the Mount Weather Agreement of 1938, not only promoted farmer participation but also

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gave the Extension services control over the program at the state and county levels. The BAE, however elevated in becoming the USDA-wide planning agency, actually had little power to direct implementation of the supposedly national–local planning program.10 These “internal weaknesses,” to cite Kirkendall, constituted serious design flaws in cooperative planning. In the first and best, albeit unpublished, full-length analysis of the program, the political scientist Ellen Sorge Parks noted that the two conflicting goals of the Mount Weather Agreement “necessitated its being diplomatically, but confusingly, ambiguous, if not contradictory,” and she attributed that confusion and ambiguity to Extension’s recalcitrance toward federal planning. If USDA and the land-grants had been true partners, with each committed to its success, trusting each other, and willing to compromise, then the planning deal might have worked. Instead, a power struggle ensued or, rather, continued, pitting the BAE, with an institutionalist-reform vision but relatively few resources, against the state Extensions, with personnel, organization, and direct ties to leading farmers in every county of rural America.11 Mount Weather, more a truce than an agreement, did not end hostilities; its contradictory objectives presaged the lack of cooperation to come. A relatively minor but nonetheless revealing point concerned the scope and designation of the program. The physical extent of the planning to be done was left vague. Was it limited to agricultural land use, as its most common name suggested? or did it extend to all of agriculture, or even to rural America at large? Worse, what was the actual title of the program? It was most commonly labeled county land-use planning, but Secretary Wallace’s departmental reorganization memo of October 1938 called it agricultural planning. Other official documents spoke of the “agricultural land-use program” or simply “county planning.” In 1940 the BAE started using “agricultural planning,” and in mid-1941 announced that the official designation henceforth would be “cooperative agricultural planning.” Some states referred to it as rural policy work, and indeed the term “rural policy planning” probably best captured the scope and intent. To add to the confusion, Allin’s new BAE unit, created to oversee the program, was the Division of State and Local Planning. And Allin called his initial, widely referenced publication on the program “County Planning Project: A Cooperative Approach to Agricultural Planning.” One BAE state representative wrote, “The inadequate and misleading title given the Department’s planning activity constituted a significant handicap.” At a minimum, it suggested a certain lack of clarity at headquarters.12

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As cooperative planning was implemented, other ambiguities arose. One concerned the precise policy status of the planning committees. Everyone knew that the planning program was not part of an action agency; the BAE delivered no direct assistance to farmers, in contrast to AAA, SCS, and FSA. But was it merely advisory? Some thought so and criticized USDA planners for failing to emphasize this point. Others held that the “advisory only” claim overlooked a substantial influence on policy making. The planning committees merged local and national interests as the county administrators of federal agencies, together with farm people, tried to coordinate their programs. Government workers had to attend to committee recommendations; if they could not implement them, they had to explain why. Cooperative planning thus occupied a middle ground between local bodies that only advised public agencies and virtually autonomous, quasi-public entities like rural electrification co-ops and farm credit associations. Such a hybrid model was untried and perhaps unclear, even to its leaders. But innovation requires time while politics has little patience. Just as they were beginning to clarify matters in 1941–42, the program ended.13 In addition, the county plans simply did not add up to a coherent national plan. The BAE found it practically impossible to develop a process whereby hundreds of local citizen groups could help plan national policies. On this issue, the elevated rhetoric of the USDA leaders rang hollow even before 1942. Moreover, the county land-use reports generated by the planning organization were barely used by the BAE. (The defense-planning report that Tolley and Wilson issued in July 1941, summarized in chapter 9, stood as the one large exception.) Why did county planning fail to culminate in national plans? First, few people at the local level, citizens or administrators, knew exactly how to contribute to national planning, and, besides, coordination appeared to be a federal, even bureaucratic, issue, not a local felt need. Here the agrarian intellectuals gave insufficient guidance. Further, national policy integration required some central authority, but the decentralized Extensions maintained control of the program. Finally, the dominant action agencies, especially beyond the county level, often balked at being coordinated, so cooperative planning took a more local turn. Again, policy innovations require an incubation period, and true national planning, more integrated and centralized, was only beginning to develop in 1942.14 In a similar vein, another operational problem in cooperative planning was that its federal leaders, Tolley and Allin, pushed the organization for quick results, to the detriment of the deliberative process. In theory, the agrarian

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intellectuals understood that democratic planning necessitated timeconsuming deliberation. But they faced a dilemma, as politics called for immediate payoffs. The BAE had relatively few funds to carry out its planning program, and Congress controlled the purse. Interagency feuds and the need to justify the project to an increasingly hostile Congress led Allin and Tolley to demand something to show for their planning effort. Although they didn’t admit to it, one historian made the point with understatement: “This pressure was usually absent from official rhetoric.” The field staff, however, frequently complained about such pressure.15 In their fight for survival, Tolley and Allin sometimes forgot that deliberative democracy took time to yield results. How democratic, after all, was cooperative planning? Did the committees adequately represent all farmers? What was the nature of citizen participation in the program? The latter question raises the important issue of farmer / expert interaction on the planning committees. To use the political sociologist Philip Selznick’s useful dichotomy, did grass-roots engagement reflect mere administrative involvement or substantive decision making? Finally, and crucially, how did the agrarian intellectuals respond to the less-thandemocratic conditions that confronted them in planning? The agrarian planners knew that each social group or class should be represented by its own. But in fact planning committee members were not representative of farmers as a whole, especially in terms of race and socioeconomic class. This flaw mirrored the broader polity, as it does today: members of the U.S. Senate, the so-called millionaires’ club, and other political bodies are hardly representative of their constituents. Similarly, citizen-planners tended to be wealthier, larger farmer-landowners, while small farmers or tenants rarely counted. The more class-divided regions such as the South had the most unrepresentative committees; very few sharecroppers and even fewer African Americans served. The typical committee member came from that group who most used Extension: “able, successful, leading” farmers. Moreover, many planners already sat on other local New Deal bodies. One saving grace, however, was that, compared to the dominant agencies such as AAA and SCS, the planning committees appeared noticeably more open and less elitist. Since the committees claimed considerably more members at both community and county levels, they reached much father down into the grass roots.16 In response to the hard fact that the committees were unrepresentative, the USDA planners admitted the failure and sought to remedy it. Here, they

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faced head-on the profound problem of social inequality. Based on past agricultural programs, including his planning project, Allin doubted “whether the interests of the low-income groups will be adequately represented. This problem is a challenge to all public servants.” In his view, the country was “still trying to make its democracy a living force.” Tolley argued for a “working democracy in the planning process”; the interests of all groups, “landowners, tenants, sharecroppers, and laborers,” should be represented. In particular, Tolley praised the FSA, which had disproved a dominant-class belief that the poor were “just ‘no account.’ ” The cooperative planning organization must bring low-income people “into common councils for determining plans and policies of agriculture.” With such leadership, the BAE urged specific techniques to democratize planning, including increased voter participation, more open meetings for all, community delineations to equalize representation, and popular gains like recreation centers and hot school lunches. County committees were increasingly adopting these procedures in 1941–42.17 There is another way to evaluate the participatory aspects of the planning effort. Considering the high rhetoric of combining citizen participation and scientific expertise, how did farmers and technicians interact on the committees? Tolley and the others often highlighted the “practical working relationship between expert and citizen.” Indeed, this question framed the BAE annual report for 1941, entitled A Democracy Uses Its Experts in a Time of Crisis: “How can the layman make use of the conclusions of the expert, and the expert incorporate in his conclusions the specific problems and experience of the farmer?” One of the first analysts of the planning program emphasized the benefits of mutual exposure between citizen and professional. It “attempts through a novel type of machinery to bring farmers into more frequent and direct contact with agricultural specialists and administrators, and at the same time to bring the specialists into more frequent and direct contact with farmer experience and local practices, opinion, and traditions.” This process, the political scientist concluded, broadened the vision of farmers by placing local problems in the context of national issues and policies. He added that by reducing the tension between specific, that is, local farmer interests and more general interests, this type of “economic democracy” supplemented the more familiar political democracy in America.18 In one important respect, the planning program did narrow the gap between technician and farmer. The land-use mapping and investigative procedures of committees amounted to a simplified version of the local-area analysis that BAE economists under L. C. Gray had been doing for years.

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Here, farmers conducted part of the research work of the professionals, and together they reached programmatic recommendations for land-use changes. One immediate product was that the county maps and reports could be used by both citizens and local action-agency administrators. Another, less tangible but more far-reaching outcome was educational: the increased knowledge of thousands of farmers about land use and related agricultural problems and policies. As a result of such cooperative research by scientists and citizens, each learned a valuable lesson. Farmers adopted broader points of view, becoming less local and individualist and more national and scientific, while economists realized that people’s preferences “had roots deeper than theory,” as Tolley put it. A former BAE state representative agreed, deeming such enlightening education for all participants as the program’s “greatest accomplishment.”19 Yet cooperative planning could not resolve the deep-seated problems of scientist / citizen interaction in modern society. Experts tended to lead and often dominate the planning process. Extension agents and the BAE state representatives organized the committees, set the agendas, conducted much of the research, made the maps, wrote the reports, and negotiated with action agencies concerning committee recommendations. Farmers, for their part, identified local problems, evaluated the recommendations, consulted with grass-roots people, and sometimes disagreed with the experts. A firsthand observer noted that one Mississippi committee “was thrown into an uproar, with farmers and officials sharply dividing, when farmer committeemen refused to accept certain recommendations in the state planning report.” While the roles played by farmer committee members went beyond mere legitimation, citizen-planners frequently failed to differentiate between the various federal programs operating in their county, such as AAA, SCS, FSA, and planning, and felt, as one historian judged, “often bewildered by the flood of advice directed at them.20 In response to such problems of domination by experts, USDA planners undertook to develop more farmer leadership and more participatory research. By design, farmers always constituted a majority of the county committees, which worked through subcommittees with even higher citizen representation. Local leaders received training in running meetings, and all committee members gained extensive education about planning and related policy matters, as they “learned by doing,” according to the North Carolina BAE representative. On the research front, the BAE urged scientists to stay in close contact with the farmers on the committees throughout the entire process.

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The agency saw the probability of professional domination and officially tried to counter it with farmer / technician partnerships. In sum, the BAE made “earnest, systematic” attempts to maximize meaningful citizen participation but did not always succeed.21 Still and all, organizationally the cooperative planning program was quite impressive. It established a grass-roots network of planning committees that reached from rural neighborhoods and communities to the state level and on to Washington. BAE sociologists conducted the democratizing “community delineations” in many counties, although many more needed it. They taught the technique to local citizens, who then delineated communities in their county. The existing planning organization included 2 or 3 percent of the farm population, involving 200,000 rural people and reaching 280,000 others, which could have quickly increased to 10 percent, according to one BAE state representative and later evaluator of the program. In 1941 planners held 8,000 open community meetings. The growth of citizen involvement to include almost half a million rural people in a mere three years constituted a promising start. Although there should have been more group discussions and related ways to familiarize experts as well as citizens with the underlying philosophy of democratic planning, one of the main accomplishments was “the educational values received by those who participated,” claimed one state leader. A former BAE state representative, he estimated that 1,000 rural leaders in only one small state, Massachusetts, received valuable educational benefits, as did other leaders throughout rural America.22 The very novelty of the planning project deserves underscoring. In her dissertation in 1947, Parks called it “the new uncharted field of nationalized democratic grassroots planning.” Hardly anyone in the 1930s knew how to implement a national–local program of participatory planning; the agrarian intellectuals truly broke new ground in their cooperative-planning work. How to organize local citizens and public administrators in three thousand counties with tens of thousands of communities into a viable, multilevel network bent on coordinating and integrating federal policy? As we have seen, BAE and land-grant sociologists started in the rural neighborhoods and organized community committees into a county planning committee. Agricultural economists and Extension agents worked with the community and county groups to map land-use patterns in their areas and sent the resulting land-use reports on to the state level, which in turn evaluated and transmitted them to the USDA in Washington. The agrarian intellectuals established this network of planning organizations that engaged local citizens with scientists to help

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form and reform public policy. In Parks’s words, nothing like this “localized national agricultural planning” had ever been attempted before.23 While they did not fully accomplish their goals, they put huge efforts into the unprecedented project, with some notable success. In fact, some highly placed participant-critics of the initiative saw it as too innovative, too ambitious, or “too audacious.” That’s the word from the director of the Wisconsin agricultural experiment station, who commented, “The proposal for a two-way planning process all the way from Washington to the county and community, however noble in conception, was too revolutionary to succeed all at once. It needed years to work itself out.” Those years the program never had. John D. Black agreed, writing that one “difficulty with the whole undertaking was its very comprehensiveness. It really undertook to do too much all at once. The people in the counties were very far from ready for full-scale comprehensive county-wide planning.” Looking back after twenty years, Black and George W. Westcott noted, “Our people were scarcely ready for such an ambitious undertaking at that time. Nor were the departments and agencies of government that were involved.” However, they added, notably, that if cooperative planning had survived, “our agricultural people and institutions would be doing a much better job than they are doing now [1959] with their newly-conceived” programs like “rural development.” Thus it is important to realize that the cooperative planning program essentially amounted to rural development by another name (and before its time), as Wilson claimed in 1966.24 What’s more, at the local level, cooperative planning developed new ways of organizing groups and communities for social change (see chapter 8). The agrarian planners elicited the felt needs of local citizens, “starting where the people are,” sought the participation of previously excluded groups, and achieved visible gains for common citizens that sustained their interest. Today, all of these lessons are considered elementary in the processes of community organizing and community development, but those fields hardly existed in the 1930s. Indeed, the New Deal agrarians pioneered theories and methods to bring together and coalesce local people into effective, deliberative bodies. Further, by promoting give-and-take interactions between citizen-planners and BAE social scientists in studying local issues, both the community delineations and the mapmaking, their approach foreshadowed what would later be known as participatory action research or communitybased research. By narrowing the expert / farmer gap, BAE sociologists tried explicitly to prevent professional domination and introduced new

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group methods in the process. These audacious innovations—rural development, community development, and participatory research—went from the New Deal USDA to the Third World in the 1950s, often taken there by the agrarian intellectuals who invented them (see below). Such nationwide deliberative efforts not only were unprecedented but also took time to develop and mature, as did cooperative planning itself. Unfortunate in the extreme, this was time that the program never enjoyed, for the enemies of deeper democratization cut short its life. I have mentioned several instances of “if only there had been more time . . .” The community delineations and the mapmaking, clarification of the policy status of the planning committees (whether advisory-only or more?), melding local recommendations with national plans, better representation on the committees—the cooperative planning program had begun making these and other improvements in 1941–42, just as Congress ended the entire undertaking. True, there were noteworthy problems of conflicting objectives, consequent political and bureaucratic issues with the state Extensions and the federal action agencies, failures in policy integration and formulation, shortcomings in the democratization effort as well as in the attempt to reduce the citizen / expert divide. All these and more plagued the planning program. Maybe, as some have said, such deficiencies themselves would have doomed the planning initiative. The political scientist Charles Hardin claimed as much: “If the LandUse Planning Program (1938–42) had not been destroyed by unfriendly interests it would surely have exploded from the fatal flaw of its own pretensions.”25 Perhaps. But I have argued for an alternative view: Cooperative planning was maturing and making impressive progress on critical fronts, even as it faced increasingly fierce resistance that eventually killed it. Selznick would agree. In his classic TVA and the Grass Roots (1949) he claimed that the “Department of Agriculture has gone much farther in developing both the theory and the practice of citizen participation than has the TVA.” He even defended cooperative planning in the late New Deal as “a program developing toward complete fulfillment of the [democratic] ideal.” Selznick argued that the planning program was actually moving toward its grass-roots ideals. His criticism, rather, was that cooperative planning amounted to mere administrative involvement rather than meaningful citizen participation. In commentary on TVA and the Grass Roots, Rexford Tugwell and Edward Banfield similarly criticized the cooperative planning program. They argued that USDA’s democratic-planning rhetoric functioned only as a “protective ideology,” as Selznick said, to conceal the fact that the

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department could not plan, that by 1936–37 it had already yielded that power to farm organizations at the grass-tops (their term), notably the AFBF. Further, they held that the grass-roots approach was hardly democratic and that “grass-roots planning” was “a contradiction in terms” since planning must represent “the whole social organism,” not mainly the local.26 Tugwell and Banfield landed some good criticisms. Real democracy proved hard to obtain in the planning program, as in the larger American polity. The agrarian intellectuals shared with most Americans a “weakness for local autonomy” and distrust of federal intrusion, as Tugwell put it. He knew earlier and better than they that local interests could be antidemocratic, especially in the plantation South. If rural communities were to gain more democracy, Tugwell wrote perceptively, “they will have to import it from Washington.” On these and other issues, he had political lessons to teach the agrarian intellectuals. Yet they could return the favor. Tugwell personified the technocratic, top-down planner (see chapter 4). In 1950 he still evidently knew what was best for the nation as a whole, and local people should get out of the way. The agrarian intellectuals’ third way, combining top-down and bottom-up, escaped him, as he dismissed cooperation and synthesis of farmers and experts.27 Two opposing views of planning clashed fundamentally; we can label them, as I noted earlier, high modernist and low modernist. By their lights (and mine), the agrarians made a good start at planning by reorganizing the USDA and empowering the BAE for that purpose, by organizing rural America from “neighborhood to nation,” and by enacting adult education, action research, and participatory planning in nearly twenty-two hundred counties. All this cannot be discounted simply as “protective ideology” to conceal USDA’s evasion of public responsibility, as Tugwell claimed. Far from hiding the inability to plan, the cooperative program exhibited a fervent intention and heroic effort precisely to plan in a democratic direction. And it could count numerous successes, from Georgia to Montana and many places in between. My assessment of the program—indeed, most of this book— constitutes an argument against Selznick, Tugwell, and Banfield. In the concluding section of TVA and the Grass Roots, Selznick offered “Implications for Democratic Planning.” He suggested that one ask “whether the ambiguities, the inherent dilemmas, of the attempt to fulfill doctrinal [for example, democratic] demands are squarely faced” or whether they are “denied out of hand.”28 By this criterion, the agrarian intellectuals look good. When they saw shortcomings in planning, they undertook to rectify them. They increased the

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representation of poor farmers on the committees, held more open meetings for all to voice opinion, won local victories based on expressed preferences, and developed farmer leadership. These ongoing improvements in cooperative planning, I submit, show that the agrarian planners tried to match on-the-ground practice with their participatory-democratic theory. They recognized the serious difficulties facing their democratizing effort and revised it toward more substantive participation of local citizens through continuing education, participatory research, and action planning. This kind of accountability among federal bureaucrats was unusual in its day, and it continues to be in ours. Indeed, the successful achievement of such democratic planning still eludes us today. Fortunately, we can learn from the failures as well as the successes of the Intended New Deal in agriculture. Low Modernists, Organic Intellectuals, and Democratic Planning I want to make some more general observations about the themes of this book, both historical and theoretical. With certain exceptions as noted, agricultural historians, even those specializing in the New Deal era, have neglected the cooperative planning program. Understandably, they have concentrated on those policies from the thirties that survived World War II, mainly the AAA but also soil conservation, farm credit, rural electrification, and so on. Yet as late as 1942 New Deal policy was much more complex, multifaceted, and politically progressive than these programs suggest, especially given the domination of elite farmers after the war. Many scholars, I posit, have read postwar developments back into the thirties and generalized from the AAA to the USDA as a whole, thus minimizing the debates, diversity, and intentions that constituted New Deal agriculture just before and during World War II. Consequently, important parts of the USDA that did not survive the war have been downplayed. This scholarly neglect of crucial democratizing features has led to an overly homogeneous as well as adverse view of the entire agrarian New Deal. My telling of the story goes beyond the AAA, racism, scientism, and dominant-class bias, consequential as they were. Circa 1941 there was nothing inevitable about the eventual dominance of the AAA. During the early war years it was not really clear what the future held for American agriculture or what role USDA would play in any coming transformation. Historians have too readily adopted a view of policy continuity in the commonly accepted narrative of postwar rural transformation, a view that

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ignores the pervasive Third New Deal programs on the ground from 1939 to 1942. Like most such things, the outcomes were determined by contemporaneous politics, not back in 1933 (or 1936–37, as Tugwell would have it). Perhaps the negative view of New Deal agricultural policy predominates today because most of its decentralist critics are either old New Left scholars or their intellectual progeny. As such, they exalt those popular ideals of the radical 1960s, citizen participation and participatory democracy. Yet few seem to realize that many USDA policy makers spoke a similar language, also committed to democratic citizenship, if often muted by administrative exigencies. In sharp contrast to the sixties radicals, however, the New Dealers sustained their commitments not as alienated intellectuals at odds with their government, but as optimists inside the state. This social-structural location certainly mattered but perhaps not as much, philosophically speaking, as one might think. Whether working within or outside the state, both generations of participatory democrats, agrarian New Dealers and New Leftists, drew deep inspiration from the same political and intellectual well: John Dewey. The historian James Kloppenberg reminds us that among Dewey’s enduring legacy to the American Left was “stubborn faith in the reforming spirit of a new citizenship” and in “the need for radical democratic reform.”29 Among later progenitors of that faith, I would add the agrarian intellectuals featured in this book. Progressive Americans claim a long tradition that seeks to implement democratic ideals through government. The New Left lost sight of this tradition by assuming that any effort to work through state bureaucracies is inevitably dominated by self-serving elites. Another reason, then, that the New Left overlooked their forebears’ radically democratic stance may be the New Dealers’ attention to bureaucratic matters—where, in their view, much state power actually resided. After discussing FDR’s administrative reorganization bill of 1937, the policy historian Otis L. Graham Jr. comments, “Dull administrative detail? Perhaps to the uninitiated.” He links public administration to “a revolutionary shift in power,” and others concur. A student of John R. Commons called his mentor’s policy innovations “a revolutionary means of administering laws concerned with intricate social and economic problems.” The Progressive labor historian Leon Fink makes a similar point about Commons’s institutional reforms, referring to them as “striking social initiatives veiled by their very administrative machinery” and “an alternative path to social-democratic initiatives via administrative action.” I would extend these descriptions to Commons’s protégés, the New Deal agrarians. The Chicago

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sociologist Robert E. Park wrote to Wilson after attending the USDA conference on anthropology in 1939, saying, “I have long been interested in revolutions as a social and political phenomenon but I had never expected seeing a department of government actually trying to deal with one by administrative methods.” All of the remarkably participatory features of the New Deal in agriculture came about as a result of executive decisions and administrative actions, not of legislative mandate (see chapter 5).30 Thus the intent and the achievement of the agrarian intellectuals. Over the past decade or so historians have rediscovered democracy in America’s past. In one of the best of the books, The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History, the editors Meg Jacobs and Julian E. Zelizer open with their twin themes: “The first concerns the relationship of citizens to the government. . . . The second addresses the continually evolving mechanisms of democratic participation.” My book concentrates on these two issues, offering a new view of the citizen–state connection and highly innovative means of popular participation, including education, administration, research, and planning. Recent work by the third editor of that Democratic Experiment volume, William Novak, is especially relevant. He argues that American intellectuals, particularly pragmatist philosophers and institutional economists, developed a useful but little-recognized theory and practice of the modern state. Novak stresses “an American model of state development,” one highlighting dispersed governance, power in the periphery, a pluralistic and instrumental approach that pays special attention to Dewey and Commons, popular oversight, and a blurring of public–private lines. The New Deal agrarian intellectuals’ theory and practice of democratic planning offer a fine instance of these broader trends in American cultural development. They also help resolve the dilemma posed by another contemporary historian, who concludes that the New Deal was too centralizing, “without adequate means of common deliberation and public judgment, without the means to sustain the vitality of its civic culture.” Henry Wallace and his colleagues would beg to differ and could point to their advanced means of continuing education, participatory research, and cooperative planning, all of which were intent on bringing citizens into the circles of governmental power.31 The revival of democratic policy history allows one to see more clearly the extraordinary continuity between early Progressives and late New Dealers. One line here is the connection stretching from the intellectual star Richard Ely in the 1880s all the way to the youngest of the USDA agrarians, the

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land economist Bushrod Allin. In an article titled “Is Planning Compatible with Democracy?” (1937), Allin declared in good Progressive form that “democracy cannot be preserved without planning.” After quoting Ely’s call for a new national land policy, Allin praised the “years of planning and agitation by Professor John R. Commons” in developing unemployment insurance for Wisconsin—notions that in 1937 were “taking hold . . . of the federal government.” He concluded by noting that “those who voice the loudest objections to the planning now being done are the disappointed politicians, the orthodox economists, and the business men who think their interests are likely to be adversely affected by any plans made by farmers, workers, and unconventional economists.” Another line of influence goes from Dewey to the agrarian intellectuals, especially Wilson, that “rip-snorting pragmatist,” as I have elaborated throughout this book. The broader point is that the left-wing Progressive–New Deal link on issues of science, citizenship, democracy, and the state held firm in the USDA as late as the early 1940s. But World War II seemed to change everything. In many respects the agrarian New Dealers had more in common, ideologically speaking, with Ely, Commons, and Dewey than they did with young policy intellectuals just ten years in the future, those of the 1950s, not to mention alienated radicals like C. Wright Mills, another major influence on the New Left. The Third agrarian New Deal may thus be seen as the last gasp of a democratic Progressivism, the content of which I discuss below.32 Modern society presents a number of seemingly insoluble problems for democracy, including the scientist / citizen split, the federal / local divide, and, more generally, bureaucracy versus democracy. These issues are still highly salient today; in fact, their salience has only increased over the past seventyfive years. The New Deal agrarian intellectuals obviously could not solve them but did valiantly struggle on these fronts institutionally as well as on the ground. I believe they offer some valuable insights. In the terms of this book, the concepts of low modernism and its institutional embodiment, cooperative democratic planning, summarize the agrarian New Deal contribution. Both concepts combine a top-down with a bottom-up approach to public policy, a third way, so to say, beyond either-or.33 The USDA intellectuals engaged local farmers, scientists, and administrators working together in programs of broadening education, action research, and integrative policy planning. Granted, their devolution of federal power to the county level involved local elites, but in family-farming regions like the Midwest those elites went further down toward the grass roots than ever before in policy history. Their effort partook

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of well-known aspects of large-scale bureaucracy such as expertise, efficiency, and centralized decision making. But it also embraced lesser-known features like massive citizen involvement, including some marginalized groups, local community organization, and a family-farm orientation. In this way, democratic planning stands as a low-modernist project, combining rationalization with participation, federal with local, science with citizenry, bureaucracy with democracy. This is what the political scientist John D. Lewis meant in 1941 when he concluded that the Third agrarian New Deal—simultaneously “centralizing and decentralizing”— enacted participatory “integration.” He called it “the new democracy.”34 A related argument of the book focuses on the social origins and constituents of the agrarian democratic vision: Wallace, Wilson, and the others championed this approach because they were organic intellectuals of the midwestern family-farming class. Their cultural background predisposed them to take a moderate stance toward science, the central state, and modernity in general: not rejecting them, surely, but also not accepting them wholeheartedly or without reservation. Rather, like their relatives back on the farm, the agrarian intellectuals worried about distant, intrusive bureaucracy yet combined it with apparent opposites: citizens, rural culture, religious sensibilities, local community. They managed to combine a range of values and commitments that current dualistic theories presume to be inevitably opposed to each other. My use of organic intellectual, democratic planning, and low modernism essentially refers to the same impulse, that is, the effort by the USDA agrarians to discover a third way, a nuanced path between what modernity presents to people today as stark choices. The Weber–Dewey debate illustrates what else the Intended New Deal in agriculture has to contribute. The two social theorists strongly disagreed on the relative weights and powers of bureaucracy and democracy. Weber bet, however much he wished otherwise, that technical elites would garner and jealously guard their expert knowledge to the exclusion of citizens. He could not seriously entertain the notion that participatory-democratic practice stood much chance of success in modern society, even in the United States. Professional administration, specialized knowledge, large-scale organization, and formal reason would overcome a local, egalitarian political culture; science and bureaucracy killed popular participation. Dewey, on the other hand, foresaw the democratization of instrumental rationality: free, creative individuals in local communities could use a democratic science cooperatively to plan a better society—what Dewey called the “Great Community.” Practical experience and experimentation in problem solving could teach communities

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and societies how to become more democratic. In profound contrast to Weber, Dewey saw nothing inherent in modernity or rationality that prevented a participatory-democratic culture. The American answered the German’s tragic pessimism with an almost unlimited confidence in radical democracy. For his part, Weber saw Dewey’s stance as unwarranted and likely to lead to more bureaucracy. Thus were the theoretical battle lines drawn.35 Enter the Third New Deal in agriculture. Had its agrarian intellectuals been strictly academic, they would have set about to test the two theories of modern society, Weberian vs. Deweyan. But, committed as they were to acting in the political world (and, indeed, to “improving the human condition,” in James Scott’s words) and institutionally well placed to do so, they actually undertook to accomplish Dewey’s vision via state policy. Like Dewey, the agrarian intellectuals sought to extend Weber’s instrumental rationality, which they saw as “scientific intelligence,” beyond the privileged possession of technocratic elites to include the common citizenry. This is why the USDA initiated the adult-education programs for both farmers and experts and why it got the two to work together on action research and policy planning. The New Deal agrarians democratized public policy, using the Weberian means of administration, science, and planning to achieve Deweyan ends, that is, to create a cooperative community of knowledge producers as well as knowledge consumers. In good Jeffersonian and Lincolnesque fashion, republican citizens should be responsible and engaged in their own governance. Weber’s Germany lacked such a democratic tradition.36 It is instructive to look a little further into this debate over modernity, its central cultural tendency, and what the Intended New Deal might contribute to understanding it. According to Dewey and the agrarian intellectuals, deeper democracy depended on an active, virtuous citizenry, which education would help create. Education could also reorient citizens toward the more cooperative, less individualistic values needed in modern society. As we have seen, the agrarian New Dealers invented large-scale state institutions in order to advance their participatory-democratic project. But it could be argued that few Americans, including farmers, took on the social responsibilities required of them by the agrarian intellectuals and by Dewey. While we cannot discount possible long-term impacts, the fundamental cultural reorientation did not take hold in rural America during the 1930s, and the Intended New Deal fell victim to old-fashioned power politics, as Weber might have predicted.37 Clearly, the agrarian New Dealers’ philosophy of democratic planning and governance failed to guarantee success in their battles against entrenched and powerful elites. Even given this outcome,

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however, the most remarkable thing about the Intended New Deal was just how far its radically democratic ideas actually got. Cooperative planning was not only conceived but also institutionalized for a few years, and with some notable success. The USDA intellectuals invented a tradition of democratizing agrarian reform, but it was short-lived, at least domestically. Conservative politicians and administrators suppressed institutional economics and reformist rural sociology in the land-grant colleges as well as in USDA, banishing ideas and programs such as those presented in this book. A rabid anti–New Dealism, eventuating in the postwar Red Scare, purged these economic planners and agricultural professors from the ranks.38 The intellectual head of the planning program thereby got lopped off, and the nation forfeited an informed, wide-ranging debate on the future of American agriculture. After World War II, national policy set the United States on a rapid course of unrestrained capitalist development with little regard to its costs or its victims, ecological as well as human. Owing in part to the defeat of like-minded agrarian intellectuals, and not just the six treated here, the technological and demographic “revolution” in American agriculture of the fifties and sixties was fundamentally chaotic, unplanned, and dominated by the priorities of the economically powerful. The profound social and economic changes wrought in rural America received little positive policy attention, and the government gave no assistance to the millions displaced, mostly poor people. The New Dealers had intended to slow and ease such societal transformations, but their plans went unheeded; indeed, they had been shelved early in 1942. Instead, the next cohort of policy makers muddled through without the serious discussions broached by the cooperative planning network on a wide range of issues, including health, nutrition, education, housing, poverty, welfare, cooperatives, farm labor, public works, economic policy, and democratic planning itself. Not only were the particular programs and institutions set up by the agrarian intellectuals crushed, but, more important, their very way of low-modernist thinking effectively disappeared from public discussion, unavailable as an option in postwar policy debates. The country’s self-imposed deficit of major reformist leaders in Extension, applied research, and policy circles meant that subsequent discourse became drastically narrowed, especially in comparison to the New Deal era. Voices for real alternatives, including those from the rural grass roots, were silenced in the forties and remained unarticulated for decades. Indeed, even the very existence of such viewpoints soon became forgotten or denied. It was an inestimable loss, not just for agriculture but

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for the nation as a whole. Thus, the once-dominant social-science tradition of democratizing agrarian reform had a brief domestic life. The two world wars signaled its rise and fall. Still, all was not lost. Many young agricultural economists and rural sociologists followed the New Dealers’ lead and pursued international careers after World War II with either the U.S. government or the major foundations concerned with land reform and rural development. In 1946 Howard Tolley finally got fed up with congressional repression of the BAE and resigned as chief. He had helped organize the world Food and Agriculture Conference in 1943 and went on to serve as the chief economist in the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) until 1951. He then worked at the Ford Foundation helping to set up the planning board of Pakistan and a prominent policy think tank in Washington named Resources for the Future. He took some of the brightest minds in the USDA with him to the FAO, notably the economist Mordecai Ezekiel, who remained with the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) into the sixties.39 Henry Wallace always stood as an internationalist. As vice president during most of America’s participation in World War II, he took it as his mission to internationalize the New Deal, exhibiting a special fondness for Mexico. In his ill-fated presidential bid of 1948, adversaries accused him of being soft on Communism and worse, but he held to his “one-worldism” and to what he saw as the only sane stance toward the Soviet Union. L. C. Gray retired from the USDA in 1941, “broken in health as a result of overwork,” claimed his old mentor Henry C. Taylor, so he could not partake of the internationalization. In the midforties Carl Taylor spent a year in Argentina and published Rural Life in Argentina, the first in a series of important books by American rural sociologists on Latin American countries. During his trip to the United States in 1959, Fidel Castro cited the call for land reform in Cuba by the New Deal rural sociologist Lowry Nelson, who earned a doctorate at Wisconsin in 1929 and wrote Rural Cuba (1950). Wilson continued as federal director of Extension and pushed the globalization of the 4-H youth program, including advancing the United Nations, which got him into political hot water. Taylor, Wilson, their New Deal protégé and lead community delineator Douglas Ensminger, and many other USDA colleagues increasingly looked abroad, promoting, for instance, the role of Extension in postwar national rehabilitation. They stayed on in USDA until 1952–53, when the first Republican administration in twenty years took over. The new secretary of agriculture, Ezra Taft Benson, demoted and fragmented the BAE until it was a shadow of its former self.40

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the flowering of demo cratic planning

Wilson and Taylor had late careers in international rural development, particularly with the Ford Foundation in India, then led by Ensminger. Allin remained in USDA but also took assignments with Ensminger in India. Taylor served as a community development agent in the Middle East for the U.S. International Cooperation Administration (precursor to AID), followed in that post by the sociologist Arthur Raper. Raper, who after World War II worked on land reform in Japan and Taiwan, spread the lessons he learned in Greene County, Georgia, abroad. Taylor, Raper, Ensminger, and Wilson became major figures in the new field of community development, as did many other New Deal rural sociologists (including Howard Beers, Irwin Sanders, John Page, and Arthur Wileden). Over the decade of the fifties, community development spread from India, Iran, Pakistan, and the Philippines to Jordan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Korea, Indonesia, Vietnam, and forty other countries around the globe. The Ford Foundation gleaned much from the agrarian intellectuals and succeeded in transferring that knowledge. The foundation’s reach was not only international. Largely through Ford and other well-placed community developers, the local, participatory approach of the agrarian New Deal found its way into the domestic War on Poverty in the midsixties. At the center of that Great Society effort stood the Community Action Program, promising “maximum feasible participation” of the poor.41 Thus one can trace the policy legacy of New Deal cooperative planning. It planted experimental seeds in the thirties that sprouted into participatory action research as well as community development abroad, albeit in the entirely new context of the Cold War. Both practices of local social change bore fruit globally before coming home to help shape major social reforms in poor rural and urban neighborhoods throughout the United States. The internationalization of the agrarian New Deal and its return to America is just one instance, however spectacular, of the rise and fall and rise again of such programmatic movements. The story continues. The agrarian intellectuals attempted to forge the rural wing of a social democracy in the United States, but despite their best efforts it did not materialize. The tragedy of the Intended New Deal is that too few Americans were prepared to embrace the agrarians’ participatory practice of democratic planning. But that wasn’t the end. As Wilson reminded us seventy-five years ago, at the dawn of the Third New Deal: “We may well resolve to accept the challenges to democracy that our day has brought.”42 Now the question is whether we are ready yet to accept the challenges that our own day brings. If so, we can reclaim the vision of a planning democracy.

Appendix List of Program Study and Discussion Pamphlets, 1935–1945

What follows is a complete list of pamphlets produced by the AAA Program Study and Discussion Section (and later BAE Division). Most of the early pamphlets measured about five by eight inches and were ten to fifteen pages in length. Some of the later pamphlets were about sixty pages in length, but the final ones were just a few pages long and measured nine by twelve inches.

I. Methodological Pamphlets D-1. Discussion: A Brief Guide to Methods (1935) D-2. How to Organize and Conduct County Forums (1935) D-3. What Is the Discussion Leader’s Job? (1937) D-4. Group Discussion and Its Techniques (1942) D-5. Organization of Groups for Discussion and Action (1942) DN-1. Suggestions for Discussion Group Members DN-2. Suggestions for Group Discussion Leaders DN-3. Suggestions for County Extension Workers on Forum and Discussion Groups DN-4. Suggestions for Panel Discussions

II. Subject Matter Pamphlets A. Subject Matter Pamphlets, 1935–1936 In the early period of discussion the subject matter pamphlets were divided into several series, each with a different prefix: “DA” for members’ use before meetings (about four pages long), “DB” for leaders and for members who wanted follow-up reading (fifteen to thirty pages long), and “DC” for leaders. The pamphlets were titled as follows:

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appendix DA-1. What Is the Chief Cause of the Farm Depression? DA-2. Do Farmers Want the Federal Government to Deal with Farm Problems? DA-3. Should American Agriculture Seek Recovery of World Markets or Live at Home? DA-4. What Kind of Foreign Trade Policies Do American Farmers Want? In Peace Time? In War Time? DA-5. What Kind of an Industrial Policy Is Best for Agriculture? DA- 6. The Farmer and the Consumer of Farm Products—What if Any, Are Their Responsibilities to One Another? DA-7. Do Farmers Want High Tariffs on Farm Products? On Industrial Products? DA-8. Should Farm Benefit Payments Be Abolished? DA- 9. Farm Prices—How Are They Made? DA-10. What Kind of Land Prices Would Be Best for Agriculture? For the Nation as a Whole? DA-11. Will Crop Adjustment Be Necessary or Desirable in Years to Come? DA-12. What Possibilities and Limitations Do Farmers in This Country Face in Seeking a Better Balance in Farm Production? DA-13. What Objectives Are Desirable for Farming Production as a Business? As a Way of Life? DA-14. What Should Farmers Seek to Accomplish Through Organization? DB-1 to DB-14. Same topics as above but more complete discussion of each subject. DC-1 to DC-7. Folders of materials covering two topics each, following order of above questions.

B. Subject Matter Pamphlets, 1936–1937 Starting with the 1936–37 discussion season the unit switched to the “DS” series of longer pamphlets (up to sixty pages), titled as follows: DS-1. What Should Be the Farmers’ Share in the National Income? DS-2. How Do Farm People Live in Comparison with City People? DS-3. Should Farm Ownership Be a Goal of Agriculture Policy? DS-4. Exports and Imports—How Do They Affect the Farmer? DS-5. Is Increased Efficiency in Farming Always a Good Thing? DS-6. What Should Farmers Aim to Accomplish Through Organization? DS-7. What kind of Agriculture Policy Is Necessary to Save our Soil? DS-8. What Part Should Farmers in Your County Take in Making National Agriculture Policy?

C. Subject Matter Pamphlets, 1937–1938 DS- 9. Taxes: Who Pays, What For? DS-10. Rural Communities: What Do They Need Most? DS-11. Soil Conservation: Who Gains By It?

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DS-12. Co-ops: How Far Can They Go? DS-13. Farm Finance: What Is a Sound System? DS-14. Crop Insurance: Is It Practical? DS-15. Reciprocal Trade Agreements: Hurting or Helping the Country? DS-16. Farm Security: How Can Tenants Find It?

D. Subject Matter Pamphlets, 1938–1945 DS-17. The National Farm Program. What About Cotton? (1938) DS-18. The National Farm Program. What About Wheat? (1938) DS-19. Getting at the Facts About Agriculture: Program Building (1940) DS-20. Surplus Farm Products—Where Shall We Find a Market? (1941) DS-21. Getting Established on the Land (1941) DS-22. Let’s Talk About Milk Production for a World at War (1943) DS-23. Let’s Talk About Farm Labor for the Wartime Job (1943) DS-24. Let’s Talk About When Joe Comes Home and Comes Back to the Farm DS-25. Let’s Talk About Buying and Selling Farm Products Abroad (1944) DS-26. Let’s Talk About Timber Supplies (1945) DS-27. Let’s Talk About Farm Leases and How They Can Be Improved (1945) DS-28. World Peace Organization and What It Means to Farm People, An Aid to Discussion of the United Nations Idea (1945) Source: David Lachman, “Democratic Ideology and Agricultural Policy: ‘Program Study and Discussion’ in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1934–1946,” MS thesis, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1994, 57–59.

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Abbreviations Used in the Notes

AES AH BWA Papers

CCT Papers ESR GPO HCT Papers JFE JLE LPR MLW Papers

NACP NAL

RG RS

Agricultural Experiment Station Agricultural History Bushrod W. Allin Papers, Special Collections Department, W. Robert and Ellen Sorge Parks Library, Iowa State University, Ames Carl C. Taylor Papers, Rare and Manuscript Collections, Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University, Ithaca Extension Ser vice Review U.S. Government Printing Office Henry C. Taylor Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison Journal of Farm Economics Journal of Land and Public Utility Economics Land Policy Review M. L. Wilson Papers, Merrill G. Burlingame Special Collections and University Archives, Roland R. Renne Library, Montana State University, Bozeman National Archives, College Park, Maryland U.S. Department of Agriculture History Collection, Special Collections Section, National Agricultural Library, Beltsville, Maryland Record Group Rural Sociology

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Notes

Chapter 1. Introduction Epigraph. Conkin, The New Deal, 3d ed. (Arlington Heights, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, Inc., 1992), xiii. Used with permission of John Wiley and Sons. 1. Tolley, The Farmer Citizen at War (New York: Macmillan, 1943), 29–30 (emphasis added). 2. These claims from 1940 may seem startling because they have not been followed up by historians, who have focused instead on the individual programs. See Tolley, “The Department of Agriculture and the Land Grant Colleges Today,” 8 Feb. 1939, 15, in “Howard R. Tolley” folder, NAL; Milton S. Eisenhower and Roy I. Kimmel, “Old and New in Agricultural Organization,” Farmers in a Changing World: The Yearbook of Agriculture, 1940 (Washington: GPO, 1940), 1135; Ellery A. Foster and Harold A. Vogel, “Cooperative Land Use Planning: A New Development in Democracy,” ibid., 1138. The county–federal program I focus on went by numerous names, including (with variations) county planning, land-use planning, agricultural planning, and cooperative planning; I generally employ the latter term. I lift the “intended” phrase from Otis L. Graham Jr., “Franklin Roosevelt and the Intended New Deal,” in Essays in Honor of James MacGregor Burns, ed. Michael R. Beschloss and Thomas E. Cronin (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1989), 75– 95. Graham meant that FDR never achieved the reform vision he held “in his mind” (78), particularly as he proposed it in 1937–38. The difference in my usage is that the Intended New Deal in agriculture actually came to pass—for about three years. It was also more participatory and deliberative than most of the New Deal, including that envisioned by FDR. Graham equated the Intended with the Third New Deal (86), which I elaborate in chapter 5. 3. Philip Selznick, TVA and the Grass Roots: A Study in the Sociology of Formal Organization (1949; reprint, New York: Harper, 1966), 221–25; Tugwell and Banfield,

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“Grass Roots Democracy: Myth or Reality?,” Public Administration Review 10, no. 1 (Winter 1950): 54. 4. John Friedman, Planning in the Public Domain: From Knowledge to Action (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 106–12, passim; Otis L. Graham Jr., “The Planning Ideal and American Reality: The 1930s,” in The Hofstadter Aegis: A Memorial, ed. Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick (New York: Knopf, 1974), 257– 89; Graham, Toward a Planned Society: From Roosevelt to Nixon (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976); Patrick D. Reagan, Designing a New America: The Origins of New Deal Planning, 1890– 1943 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999). 5. In an outstanding comparative study, the intellectual historian James T. Kloppenberg writes, “Indeed, it is arguable that Dewey and Weber are the two most significant social theorists America and Europe have produced in the twentieth century.” See his Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 8, 334–415 (quote at 350–51); and Kloppenberg, “Democracy and Disenchantment: From Weber and Dewey to Habermas and Rorty,” in Modernist Impulses in the Human Sciences, ed. Dorothy Ross (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 69– 90. Dewey and Weber did not directly engage each other’s writings, but the substance of their ideas was in constant dialogue. See William J. Novak’s suggestive Deweyan, anti-Weberian interpretation of U.S. policy history in “The Myth of the ‘Weak’ American State,” American Historical Review 113, no. 3 (June 2008): 752–72. 6. Weber, Political Writings, ed. Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 127–29, 222–23, 275–79; Weber, Economy and Society, ed. Guenther Roth and Klaus Witten (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 1: 266–71, 289– 97; 2: 948–52, 983–1005, 1393–1416, 1451–69 (quote at 992). See also Richard J. Bernstein, “The Rage Against Reason,” in The New Constellation: The Ethical–Political Horizons of Modernity/Postmodernity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 31–56; Rogers Brubaker, The Limits of Rationality: An Essay on the Social and Moral Thought of Max Weber (London: Routledge, 1991), 20–34; Ira J. Cohen, “The Underemphasis on Democracy in Marx and Weber,” in A Weber–Marx Dialogue, ed. Robert J. Antonio and Ronald M. Glassman (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1985), 274– 99; Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory, 334–415; Kloppenberg, “Democracy.” 7. Dewey’s major work in political philosophy is The Public and Its Problems (1927), which I draw from here; see the end of that book in John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925– 1953, vol. 2, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981), 325–72. For his more popular, radical-democratic stances, see Individualism Old and New (1930), Liberalism and Social Action (1935), and Freedom and Culture (1939). An excellent political–intellectual biography is Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); see also James T. Kloppenberg, “Pragmatism: An Old Name for Some New Ways of Thinking?,” Journal of American History 83 (June 1996): 100–138; Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory, 334–415; Kloppenberg, “Democracy.” Dewey consistently criticized the New Deal; in addition to Liberalism and Freedom cited above, see John Dewey: The Political Writings, ed. Debra Morris and Ian Shapiro (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), 133–72.

notes to pages 6 –7

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8. “The Reminiscences of Milburn Lincoln Wilson,” Columbia Oral History Collection, Columbia University, 1954, 1018; Tolley, Farmer Citizen, 30. The first and best full-length analysis of this program was by the political scientist Ellen Sorge Parks, “Experiment in the Democratic Planning of Public Agricultural Activity,” PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, 1947. Parks’s name and that of her husband, W. Robert Parks, grace the main library at Iowa State University, where W. Robert Parks served as president from 1965 to 1986. For formulations of the bottom-up and top-down approach applied to American history, see Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth- Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 53–55; and Roberto Mangabeira Unger and Cornel West, The Future of American Progressivism: An Invitation for Political and Economic Reform (Boston: Beacon, 1998), 20–21, 45–51 (the latter pages on the “partnership between the federal government and the family farmer”). 9. Pete Daniel, Breaking the Land: The Transformation of Cotton, Tobacco, and Rice Cultures since 1880 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985); Daniel, “A Hundred Years of Dispossession: Southern Farmers and the Forces of Change,” in Outstanding in His Field: Perspectives on American Agriculture in Honor of Wayne D. Rasmussen, ed. Frederick V. Carstensen et al. (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1993), 90–104; Daniel, “The Legal Basis of Agrarian Capitalism: The South since 1933,” in Race and Class in the American South since 1890, ed. Melvyn Stokes and Rick Halpern (Oxford, UK: Berg, 1994), 79–102; Jack Temple Kirby, Rural Worlds Lost: The American South, 1920–1960 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987); Kirby, “Rural Culture in the American Middle West: From Jefferson to Jane Smiley,” AH 70, no. 4 (Fall 1996): 580– 97; Deborah Fink, Open Country, Iowa: Rural Women, Tradition, and Change (Albany: SUNY Press, 1986); Fink, Agrarian Women: Wives and Mothers in Rural Nebraska, 1880–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); Katherine Jellison, Entitled to Power: Farm Women and Technology, 1913–1963 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993); Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, Rooted in Dust: Surviving Drought and Depression in Southwestern Kansas (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994); Mary Neth, Preserving the Family Farm: Women, Community, and the Foundations of Agribusiness, 1900–1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); Catherine McNicol Stock, Main Street in Crisis: The Great Depression and the Old Middle Class on the Northern Plains (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); Cindy Hahamovitch, The Fruits of Their Labor: Atlantic Coast Farmworkers and the Making of Migrant Poverty, 1870–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). For a summary of much of this literature, see David B. Danbom, Born in the Country: A History of Rural America, 2d ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 206–32. For another take, see R. Douglas Hurt, American Agriculture: A Brief History, 2d ed. (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2002); Hurt, “Reflections on American Agricultural History,” Agricultural History Review 52, part 1 (2004): 1–19; and for an excellent meta-analysis, see the booklet by Scott Peters, Changing the Story about Higher Education’s Public Purposes and Work: Land- Grants, Liberty, and the Little Country Theater (Ann Arbor: Imagining America, 2007). 10. Kenneth Finegold and Theda Skocpol, State and Party in America’s New Deal (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 57– 61; James C. Scott, Seeing Like a

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State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 199–201, 267; Scott, “High Modernist Social Engineering: The Case of the Tennessee Valley Authority,” in Experiencing the State, ed. Lloyd L. Rudolph and John Kurt Jacobsen (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006), 40–46; Deborah Fitzgerald, “Blinded by Technology: American Agriculture in the Soviet Union, 1928–1932,” AH 703 (1996): 459–86; Fitzgerald, Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 57– 73, 157– 83; Fitzgerald, “Accounting for Change: Farmers and the Modernizing State,” in The Countryside in the Age of the Modern State: Essays on the Political History of Rural America, ed. Catherine McNicol Stock and Robert D. Johnston (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 189–212. 11. Anthony J. Badger, The New Deal: The Depression Years, 1933–1940 (New York: Noonday, 1989), 147–89 (“grass-roots democracy” at 172); Badger, Prosperity Road: The New Deal, Tobacco, and North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 219–35; David E. Hamilton, From New Day to New Deal: American Farm Policy from Hoover to Roosevelt, 1928–1933 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 1–25, 183–250; Hamilton, “Building the Associative State: The Department of Agriculture and American State-Building,” AH 64, no. 2 (Spring 1990): 207–18; Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 181– 97. For other evaluations, see Mary W. M. Hargreaves, Dry Farming in the Northern Great Plains: Years of Readjustment, 1920–1990 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993), 150– 61; Fumiaki Kubo, “Henry A. Wallace and Radical Politics in the New Deal: Farm Programs and a Vision of the New American Political Economy,” Japanese Journal of American Studies 4 (1991): 37–76; Tim Lehmann, Public Values, Private Land: Farmland Preservation Policy, 1933–1985 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 4–50. Although starting in the latter nineteenth century, Louis Ferleger and William Lazonick make an impressive argument related to Badger and Hamilton in “The Managerial Revolution and the Developmental State: The Case of U.S. Agriculture,” Business and Economic History 22, no. 2 (Winter 1993): 67– 98. The sociologist Gregory Hooks attended to the late agricultural New Deal in “A New Deal for Farmers and Social Scientists: The Politics of Rural Sociology in the Depression Era,” RS 48, no. 3 (1983): 386–408; and “From an Autonomous to a Captured State Agency: The Decline of the New Deal in Agriculture,” American Sociological Review 55 (Feb. 1990): 29–43. 12. Finegold and Skocpol, State and Party, 57– 65, 240–42. Earlier Carolyn Howe and I criticized Finegold and Skocpol in “Beyond ‘State vs. Society’: Theories of the State and New Deal Agricultural Policy,” American Sociological Review 56 (April 1991): 204–20; and (less extensively) in Gilbert, “Agrarian Intellectuals in a Democratizing State: A Collective Biography of USDA Leaders in the Intended New Deal,” in The Countryside in the Age of the Modern State: Essays on the Political History of Rural America, ed. Catherine McNicol Stock and Robert D. Johnston (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 214, 237. For a good overview of this and related debates, see Jeff Manza, “Political Sociolog ical Models of the U.S. New Deal,” Annual Review of Sociology 26 (2000): 297–322.

notes to pages 8– 9

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13. The concept of organic intellectual derives from Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist in the interwar period. He defines intellectuals as those who educate, organize, or lead different social classes. See Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 1–25, 325–34. Margaret Christie and I first applied this concept to a prominent rural sociologist in “ ‘Sociology on the Spot’: Carl Taylor and the Division of Farm Population and Rural Life,” paper presented at the Twentieth Century Farm Politics Conference, College Park, Md., June 1995; Christie, “Carl C. Taylor: ‘Organic Intellectual’ in the New Deal Department of Agriculture,” MS thesis, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1996; Gilbert, “Agrarian Intellectuals.” For the New Dealers’ single “farming class” view, see, e.g., Wallace, “The States, the Regions and the Nation,” Proceedings of the 49th Annual Convention of the Association of Land-Grant Colleges and Universities, 1935, ed. Charles A. McCue (Wilmington, Del.: Cann Brothers, 1936), 43; Wallace, Whose Constitution: An Inquiry into the General Welfare (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1936), 259–72; Tolley, “Some Essentials of a Good Agricultural Policy,” Farmers in a Changing World: The Yearbook of Agriculture, 1940 (Washington: GPO, 1940), 1159– 83; Taylor, The Farmers’ Movement, 1620–1920 (New York: American Book Co., 1953), 490–500; Allin, “The U.S. Department of Agriculture as an Instrument of Public Policy: In Retrospect and in Prospect,” JFE 42, no. 5 (Dec. 1960): 1094–1103. For Stock’s views, see Main Street, 98–129, 145–47, 206–17; and Rural Radicals: Righteous Rage in the American Grain (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 79– 85, 149–51. 14. Scott, Seeing, 3–4, 88–102, 199–201; Scott, “High Modernist,” 40–42, 46–47; Fitzgerald, “Accounting”; Fitzgerald, “Blinded”; Fitzgerald, Every Farm, 57–73, 157– 83. I have questioned Scott’s and Fitzgerald’s “high modernist” claim in “Low Modernism and the Agrarian New Deal: A Different Kind of State,” in Fighting for the Farm: Rural America Transformed, ed. Jane Adams (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 129–31, 145; and “Agrarian Intellectuals,” 214–15, 238. 15. Sarah T. Phillips, This Land, This Nation: Conservation, Rural America, and the New Deal (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Neil M. Maher, Nature’s New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the American Environmental Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Sara M. Gregg, Managing the Mountains: Land Use Planning, the New Deal, and the Creation of a Federal Landscape in Appalachia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); Mary Summers, “The New Deal Farm Programs: Looking for Reconstruction in American Agriculture,” AH 74, no. 2 (Spring 2000): 241–57, reprinted in Fighting for the Farm, ed. Adams, 147–59; Summers, “From the Heartland to Seattle: The Family Farm Movement of the 1980s and the Legacy of Agrarian State Building,” in The Countryside in the Age of the Modern State, ed. Stock and Johnston, 304–26; Scott J. Peters and Paul A. Morgan, “The Country Life Commission: Reconsidering a Milestone in American Agricultural History.” AH 78, no. 3 (2004): 289–316; Scott J. Peters, “ ‘Every Farmer Should Be Awakened’: Liberty Hyde Bailey’s Vision of Agricultural Extension Work,” AH 80, no. 2 (2006): 190–219; Peters, Changing the Story; Elizabeth Sanders, Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Leigh Raymond, “Localism in Environmental Policy: New Insights from an Old Case,”

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Policy Sciences 35 (2002): 179–201. For the democratic turn in political history, see Byron E. Shafer and Anthony J. Badger, eds., Contesting Democracy: Substance and Structure in American History, 1775–2000 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001); Sidney M. Milkis and Jerome M. Mileur, eds., The New Deal and the Triumph of Liberalism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002); and Meg Jacobs, William J. Novak, and Julian E. Zelizer, eds., The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). Of particular relevance to my work in the latter volume, see Meg Jacobs and Julian E. Zelizer, “The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History,” 1–21; and James T. Kloppenberg, “From Hartz to Tocqueville: Shifting the Focus from Liberalism to Democracy in America,” 350–80. A recent exchange exemplifies this scholarly trend reconsidering democracy: Novak, “Myth”; John Fabian Witt, “Law and War in American History,” American Historical Review 115, no. 3 (June 2010): 768–78; Gary Gerstle, “A State Both Strong and Weak,” ibid., 779– 85; Julia Adams, “The Puzzle of the American State . . . and Its Historians,” ibid., 786– 91; and Novak, “Long Live the Myth of the Weak State? A Response to Adams, Gerstle, and Witt,” ibid., 792– 800. Two dissertations did focus on the USDA’s cooperative planning program: Graham D. Taylor, “The New Deal and the Grass Roots,” PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1972; Christopher Clark-Hazlett, “The Road to Dependency: Policy, Planning, and the Rationalization of American Agriculture, 1920–1945,” PhD diss., University of Rochester, 1986. 16. Leon Fink, Progressive Intellectuals and the Dilemmas of Democratic Commitment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 11–12, 280. I must disagree with Fink, though, when he asserts that “no grand plan for a dialogue between intellectuals and a mass audience has ever been put into practice” (50–51). Part 2 of this book constitutes evidence to the contrary.

Chapter 2. The Agrarian Intellectuals’ Vision Epigraph. Dewey, “The Economic Basis of the New Society,” in The Later Works of John Dewey, Volume 13: 1938–1939, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), 321. Copyright © 1988, 2008 by the Board of Trustees, Southern Illinois University; used with permission. 1. The term agrarian refers most specifically to land reform policies that prevent concentration of large holdings and redistribute landed property to smallholders. Thomas Jefferson is America’s most famous (and paradoxical) agrarian. He exalted an independent, landowning yeomanry because he believed that it safeguarded the democratic republic; economic independence begat political independence. For fifty years the intellectual historian Paul K. Conkin has conducted a virtual one-person campaign insisting on proper use of the term, and I follow him here in a specific, land-based definition; see his Tomorrow a New World: The New Deal Community Program (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1959), 11–12, 51–52, 96– 97, 294– 95; The New Deal, 2d ed. (New York: Crowell, 1975), 52–55; Prophets of Prosperity: America’s First Political Economists (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 222–58; The Southern Agrarians (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988), 89– 90, 113–14, 174–75; A Revolution Down on the Farm:

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The Transformation of American Agriculture since 1929 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2008), 180–83. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. calls my subjects “farm intellectuals” in The Coming of the New Deal (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959), 46; and Richard S. Kirkendall, “service intellectuals” and “agrarian liberals” in Social Scientists and Farm Politics in the Age of Roosevelt (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1966). Sarah T. Phillips in This Land, This Nation: Conservation, Rural America, and the New Deal (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007) uses my “agrarian intellectual” label along with “agrarian liberals” and “agrarian pragmatists.” Late in my writing, I was delighted to discover Carl Taylor’s use of the phrase “agrarian intellectuals” to identify the likes of Thomas Jefferson and John Taylor (Taylor, The Farmers’ Movement, 1620–1920 [New York: American Book Co., 1953], 12, 495– 96). For overviews of American agrarianism, see Kimberly K. Smith, Wendell Berry and the Agrarian Tradition: A Common Grace (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003), and Edwin C. Hagenstein, Sara M. Gregg, and Brian Donahue, eds., American Georgics: Writings on Farming, Culture, and the Land (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), which includes some of the essential documents. The journalist quoted is Russell Lord, “M. L.: A Contemporary Memoir,” The Land 1, no. 3 (Summer 1941): 243. 2. Ira Katznelson has recently referred to “the ambiguities that were inherent in the idea of democratic planning” but without reference to the late New Deal agrarian version; see his Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013), 373–74. 3. Wilson, “Informal Comments,” in Agricultural Statesman: Proceedings of the M. L. Wilson Symposium, ed. Roy E. Huffman (Bozeman, Mont.: Big Sky Books, 1966), iii–viii. 4. Wilson, “A Theory of Agricultural Democracy,” USDA Extension Service Circular 355 (March 1941), 3–20. At this meeting the APSA passed a resolution urging all political scientists to spread democracy’s moral ideals and institutions (Edward A. Purcell Jr., The Crisis of Democratic Theory [Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1973], 190). It was in the air. 5. Ibid., 11–15 (emphasis added). 6. Ibid., 9–16. For other late New Deal statements of the essential participatory planning–research–education nexus undergirding administration, see [Wallace] Report of the Secretary of Agriculture, 1940 (Washington: GPO, 1940), 82– 83; Tolley, Report of the Chief of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, 1940 (Washington: GPO, 1940); Allin, “Historical Background of the United States Department of Agriculture,” 4 Oct. 1940, 14, “Bushrod W. Allin” folder, NAL; Dale Clark, “The Farmer as Co-Administrator,” Public Opinion Quarterly 3 (July 1939): 482– 90; John Albert Vieg, “Working Relationships in Governmental Agricultural Programs,” Public Administration Review 1, no. 2 (Winter 1941): 146. 7. Wallace, “Foreword,” in USDA, Farmers in a Changing World: The Yearbook of Agriculture, 1940 (Washington: GPO, 1940), v; Wallace, “Producer Goals and Consumer Goals,” Rural America 15, no. 6 (Sept. 1937): 5; Wallace, Democracy Reborn: Selected from Public Papers, ed. Russell Lord (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1944), 128, 197– 98; Tolley, “Cooperative Land Use Planning: A Product of Changing Conditions

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in American Agriculture,” 18 Oct. 1940, 4–5, in “Howard R. Tolley” folder, NAL; Tolley, The Farmer Citizen at War (Macmillan, 1943), 207, 68; Allin, “Agricultural Land Planning from the Federal Point of View,” in National Conference on Planning (Chicago: American Society of Planning Officials, 1941), 122; Allin, “County Planning Project: A Cooperative Approach to Agricultural Planning,” JFE 22, no. 1 (Feb. 1940): 298; Allin, Soil Conservation: Its Place in National Agricultural Policy (Washington, D.C.: USDA, 1936), 19; Taylor, “The Implementation of Democracy,” 28 Dec. 1941, box 1, CCT Papers; Wilson, “Society and the Farmer Have Mutual Interests in the Land,” Soil Conservation 3, no. 5 (Nov. 1937): 118. 8. Allin, “The National Implications of Land Use Problems,” 16, speech, 16 Aug. 1939, in “Bushrod W. Allin” folder, NAL; Bushrod W. Allin, “Is Planning Compatible with Democracy?,” American Journal of Sociology 42, no. 4 (Jan. 1937): 515–16; Allin, “Historical Background of the United States Department of Agriculture,” 10–13, 4 Oct. 1940, in “Bushrod W. Allin” folder, NAL; Bushrod W. Allin, “County Planning,” 298; Tolley, “Some Essentials of a Good Agricultural Policy,” in USDA, Farmers in a Changing World: The Yearbook of Agriculture, 1940 (Washington: GPO, 1940), 1164; Tolley, Farmer Citizen, 159. 9. Wilson, “The Place of the Department of Agriculture in the Evolution of Agricultural Policy,” 11 Dec. 1936, 7, in “M. L. Wilson” folder, NAL; M. L. Wilson, “Farmer Participation,” Soil Conservation 4, no. 2 (Aug. 1938): 31; Allin, “Agricultural Planning,” 9–14, 12 Jan. 1940, in “Bushrod W. Allin” folder, NAL; Bushrod W. Allin, “Is Planning Compatible?” 10. Wallace, “Thomas Jefferson: Farmer, Educator, and Democrat,” Proceedings, 51st Annual Convention, Association of Land-Grant Colleges and Universities, ed. William L. Slate (Washington, D.C., 1937), 338–46; Wallace, “Making the Ideal Practical,” 28 Jan. 1937, “Speeches,” box 1, MLW Papers; Wallace, “Producer Goals,” 4; Wallace, Democracy Reborn, 141–47, 197; Wilson, “Education for Democracy,” Rural America 14 (Sept. 1936): 3– 6; Wilson, “On Using Democracy,” LPR 2 (Jan.–Feb. 1939): 1–4; Wilson, “Place”; Wilson, “Theory,” 15–20; Tolley, “A Discussion of Various Methods of Making Our Farm Policy Effective,” ESR 9, no. 8 (March 1938): 35–36; Tolley, “Objectives in National Agricultural Policy,” JFE 20, no. 1 (Feb. 1938): 33–35; Tolley, Farmer Citizen, 8, 71, 108, 143–46, 157–59; Allin, “National Implications,” 10–11; Allin, “Agricultural Planning,” 13; Allin, “County Planning,” 298; Allin, “Historical Background”; Allin, “Is Planning Compatible?,” 515–16; Taylor, “Comprehensive Yet Logical and Democratic Approaches to Group Planning and Social Planning,” Dec. 1938, box 1, CCT Papers. 11. Wallace, “Democracy in Planning,” 17 Nov. 1937, box 5, entry 224, RG 83, NACP; Wilson, “The New Department of Agriculture,” 5, 13 Jan. 1939, “M. L. Wilson” folder, NAL; M. L. Wilson, “Place,” 4, 9; Wilson, “Theory,” 15; Tolley, “The Department of Agriculture and the Land Grant Colleges Today,” 21, 9 Feb. 1939, in “Howard R. Tolley” folder, NAL; Howard R. Tolley, “Objectives”; Tolley, “Cooperative,” 6; Taylor, “Sociology on the Spot,” RS 2 (Dec. 1937): 379–80; Taylor, “Social Theory and Social Action,” RS 5 (1940): 24–30; Taylor, “Social Science and Social Action in Agriculture, Social Forces 20 (Dec. 1941): 155–59; Taylor, “Sociology and Common Sense,” American Sociological Review 12 (Feb. 1947): 1– 9; Taylor, “The ABC’s of the Democratic

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Process,” n.d. [ca. 1940], box 1, CCT Papers; “Comprehensive”; Taylor, “Implementation.” The most elaborate analysis on the role of experts came from Howard Tolley, whose Farmer Citizen at War (1943) contained a chapter entitled “The Managerial vs. the People’s Revolution,” with reference to James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution (1941). Kirkendall points out that the British political theorist Harold Laski’s article “The Limitations of the Expert” (Harper’s Magazine, Dec. 1930) was popular in the BAE during 1939–40 (Social Scientists, 184). 12. Taylor, “Comprehensive”; Allin, “Land Use Planning,” 2 March 1939, BWA Papers; Allin, “National Implications,” 11–15; Allin, “Agricultural Planning,” 13; Allin, “County Planning,” 298– 99; Allin, “Historical Background,” 14; Wilson, “Place,” 7; Tolley, Report of the Chief of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, 1940 (Washington: GPO, 1940), 82– 83; Tolley, “Cooperative,” 3– 6. 13. Wilson, “Cultural Patterns in Agricultural History,” AH 12, no. 1 (Jan. 1938): 3–10; Wilson, “Validity of Fundamental Assumptions Underlying Agricultural Adjustment,” JFE 18, no. 1 (Feb. 1936): 13; Wilson, “Abraham Lincoln and the Historical Background of the Department of Agriculture,” in Proceedings, 51st Annual Convention, Associations of Land-Grant Colleges and Universities, ed. William L. Slate (Washington, D.C., 1937), 331–36; Wallace, “Jefferson,” 338–46; Wallace, Whose Constitution: An Inquiry into the General Welfare (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1936), 17– 95; Gray, Land Planning, Public Policy Pamphlet No. 19 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1936); Allin, “Historical Background.” See chapter 7 on Wilson’s three-day USDA conference on agricultural history. 14. Report of the Secretary of Agriculture, 1938 (Washington: GPO, 1938), 59; Report of the Secretary of Agriculture, 1939 (Washington: GPO, 1939), 3, 53–57; Wallace, “The Future of the American Farm,” New Republic, 8 Nov. 1939, 49–52; Tolley, Report of the Chief of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, 1941 (Washington: GPO, 1941), 3–4, 19–20; Tolley, “Objectives”; Tolley, “Some Essentials,” 1178; Ellery Foster, “The Development of Rural Land-Use Planning Committees: A Historical Sketch,” Planners’ Journal 8, no. 2 (April–June 1942): 3. Donald Worster refers to the cooperative and related programs as “grass-roots planning” and “experiments in social democracy”; see his Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 183– 97. 15. Allin to C. E. Brehm, 18 June 1938, box 2, entry 208, RG 83, NACP. 16. Mary Summers makes this final point in “The New Deal Farm Programs: Looking for Reconstruction in American Agriculture,” AH 74, no. 2 (Spring 2000): 241–57.

Chapter 3. Growing Agrarian Reformers in the Midwest Epigraph. Wilson, “The Communication and Utilization of the Results of Agricultural Research by American Farmers: A Case History, 1900–1950,” in Charles Y. Glock et al., Case Studies in Bringing Behavioral Science into Use (Palo Alto: Stanford University Institute for Communications Research, 1961), 79. Used with permission of Stanford University Department of Communications. 1. In Intellectuals and Politics (Boston: George Allen, 1980), 60–73, the sociologist Robert J. Byrm shows that these three time periods in one’s life have profound

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consequences for future political orientation. In M. L. Wilson’s own “spiritual autobiography,” he proposed a similar theory of biographical development, what he called “the matrix of our personality”; see “M. L. Wilson,” in American Spiritual Autobiographies, ed. Louis Finkelstein (New York: Harper, 1948), 1–2. 2. Kenneth Finegold and Theda Skocpol, State and Party in America’s New Deal (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 155, passim, focus on the influence of political institutions on individuals yet downplay the “personal factor” itself. George Steinmetz, among others, criticizes them by arguing for more attention to culture and ideology, which arise and become embodied in people’s lives within certain historical networks and social connections. He particularly highlights the subjective intent of policy intellectuals. In such sociological terms, I am addressing the question of how specific ideas enter and eventually pervade political institutions. See Steinmetz, “Introduction: Culture and the State,” in State/Culture: State-Formation after the Cultural Turn, ed. G. Steinmetz (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 1–49. 3. Taylor, A Farm Economist in Washington, 1919–1925 (Madison: Department of Agricultural Economics, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1992). The major missing element in Taylor’s makeup, compared to that of the New Deal agrarians, was a participatory-democratic sensibility, admittedly a large exception. 4. Among key biographical sources, see, on Wallace, Russell Lord, The Wallaces of Iowa (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1947); John C. Culver and John Hyde, American Dreamer: The Life and Times of Henry A. Wallace (New York: Norton, 2000); Mark L. Kleinman, A World of Hope, A World of Fear: Henry A. Wallace, Reinhold Niebuhr, and American Liberalism (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000). On Wilson: Wilson, “Science and Folklore in Rural Life,” in O. E. Baker, Ralph Borsodi, and M. L. Wilson, Agriculture in Modern Life (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1939), 215–81; “M. L. Wilson,” 1–24; “The Reminiscences of Milburn Lincoln Wilson,” Columbia Oral History Collection, Columbia University; Harry Carson McDean, “M. L. Wilson and Agricultural Reform in Twentieth Century America,” PhD diss., University of California–Los Angeles, 1969. On Tolley: M. R. Benedict and M. L. Wilson, “Howard Ross Tolley, 1889– 1958,” JFE 41 (Feb. 1959): 1–2; “The Reminiscences of Howard R. Tolley,” Columbia Oral History Collection, Columbia University. On Gray: Henry C. Taylor, “L. C. Gray, Agricultural Historian and Land Economist,” AH 26 (Oct. 1952): 165; E.H.W. and H.C.T., “Lewis Cecil Gray, 1881–1952,” JFE 35 (Feb. 1953): 157. On Taylor: “Carl C. Taylor,” in Biographical Sketches of 101 Major Pioneers in Cooperative Development, ed. Joseph Knapp (Washington, D.C.: American Institute of Cooperation, 1967), 489– 95; Olaf Larson and Julie N. Zimmerman with Edward O. Moe, Sociology in Government: The Galpin– Taylor Years in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1919–1953 (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2003); Margaret M. Christie, “Carl C. Taylor, ‘Organic Intellectual’ in the New Deal Department of Agriculture,” MS thesis, Department of Rural Sociology, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1996. On Allin: “The Agricultural-Business Conflict,” 1958, box 4, folder 3, BWA Papers. 5. Harriet Friedmann, “World Market, State, and Family Farm: Social Bases of Household Production in the Era of Wage Labor,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 20, no. 2 (1978): 545–86; Friedmann, “Simple Commodity Production and Wage

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Labour in the American Plains,” Journal of Peasant Studies 6, no. 4 (Oct. 1978): 71–100; Friedmann, “Household Production and the National Economy: Concepts for the Analysis of Agrarian Formations,” Journal of Peasant Studies 7, no. 2 (Jan. 1980): 158– 84; Susan A. Mann and James M. Dickinson, “Obstacles to the Development of a Capitalist Agriculture,” Journal of Peasant Studies 5 (July 1978): 466– 81; Patrick H. Mooney, “Toward a Class Analysis of Midwestern Agriculture,” RS 48, no. 4 (1983): 563– 84; Mooney, My Own Boss? Class, Rationality, and the Family Farm (Boulder: Westview Press, 1988); Max J. Pfeffer, “Social Origins of Three Systems of Farm Production in the United States,” RS 48, no. 4 (1983): 540– 62; Nola Reinhardt and Peggy Barlett, “The Persistence of Family Farms in United States Agriculture,” Sociologia Ruralis 29, no. 3/4 (1989): 203–25. For a good historical review of nineteenth-century America as well as theoretical summary, see Allan Kulikoff, The Agrarian Origins of American Capitalism (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992). For some of the agrarian intellectuals’ own family-farm views, see Gray, “National Land Policies in Retrospect and Prospect,” JFE 13, no. 2 (April 1931): 239; Lord, Wallaces, 399; Taylor, “The Corn Belt,” in Taylor et al., Rural Life in the United States (New York: Knopf, 1949), 360– 82; Wilson, “Science and Folklore,” 222–23, 272–73. 6. See note 5. Gender and age inequalities existed, to be sure; women and children worked the land owned by the husband and father. As recent research has shown, female and child labor was essential to the family farm’s economic production and social reproduction. Jon Gjerde elaborates both these points: the centrality of household labor as well as age and gender discrimination on midwestern family farms, which he calls “household-run farms”; see The Minds of the West: Ethnocultural Evolution in the Rural Middle West, 1830–1917 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 135–58. Another useful theoretical specification is “family-labor farm,” in A. V. Chayanov, The Theory of Peasant Economy, ed. Daniel Thorner et al. (Homewood, Ill.: Irwin, 1966). Historians who have addressed the question of the midwestern family farm include Theodore Saloutos and John D. Hicks, Agricultural Discontent in the Middle West, 1900–1939 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1951), 12–13; Jack Temple Kirby, Rural Worlds Lost: The American South, 1920–1960 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 1–22, 49; Jeremy Atack and Fred Bateman, “Was There Ever an ‘Agrarian Democracy’ in America? The American Middle West in 1860,” in Outstanding in His Field: Perspectives on American Agriculture in Honor of Wayne D. Rasmussen, ed. Frederick V. Carstensen, Morton Rothstein, and Joseph A. Swanson (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1993), 69– 89; Louis Ferleger and William Lazonick, “The Managerial Revolution and the Developmental State: The Case of U. S. Agriculture,” Business and Economic History 22, no. 2 (Winter 1993): 67– 98; Jane Adams, The Transformation of Rural Life: Southern Illinois, 1890–1990 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Jon K. Lauck, “The Prairie Historians and the Foundations of Midwestern History,” Annals of Iowa 71 (Spring 2012): 157– 63. For gender- rather than class-based views of family farming, see Deborah Fink, Open Country, Iowa: Rural Women, Tradition, and Change (Albany: SUNY Press, 1986); Fink, Agrarian Women: Wives and Mothers in Rural Nebraska, 1880–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); Katherine Jellison, Entitled to Power: Farm Women and Technology,

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1913–1963 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993); Mary Neth, Preserving the Family Farm: Women, Community, and the Foundations of Agribusiness in the Midwest, 1900–1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); Jack Temple Kirby, “Rural Culture in the American Middle West: Jefferson to Jane Smiley,” AH 70 (Fall 1996): 581– 97. 7. Wilson, “The Communication and Utilization of the Results of Agricultural Research by American Farmers: A Case History, 1900–1950,” in Charles Y. Glock et al., Case Studies in Bringing Behavioral Science into Use (Palo Alto: Stanford University Institute for Communications Research, 1961), 79; “M. L. Wilson,” 1; Taylor, “Corn Belt,” 381– 82; Christie, “Taylor,” 8. Taylor chronicled in great historical detail the deep-seated animus of American farmers toward the workings of the “commercialcapitalist economy” (The Farmers’ Movement, 1620–1920 [New York: American Book Co., 1953], 9, 495). 8. Douglas A. Bakken, “Interview with Carl C. Taylor,” 20 May 1968, 3–4, in CCT Papers. The young farm boys also learned of class differences thanks to their parents’ participation in radical farmer movements. Tolley thrilled to see his “hero,” William Jennings Bryan, during the presidential election of 1896, and Taylor grew up hearing of his father’s Populist activities. Allin also imbibed pro-Populist dispositions when his family moved to central Texas. See Taylor, Farmers’ Movement, 324–25, 492; Christie, “Taylor,” 10–11; Bakken, “Interview,” 68; Tolley, “Reminiscences,” 26–27; Allin, “Agricultural-Industrial Conflict,” 3; “Biographical Sketch of Bushrod Warren Allin,” 18 Aug. 1937, box 2, folder 33, BWA Papers. 9. A. Whitney Griswold, Farming and Democracy (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1948); “M. L. Wilson,” 20; Wilson, “Science and Folklore,” 222, 272; Taylor, Farmers’ Movement; Bakken, “Interview,” 28; Lord, Wallaces, 296, 340; Lauck, “Prairie Historians,” 157– 63. For more on their views of Jefferson and Lincoln, see my “A Usable Past: New Dealers Henry A. Wallace and M. L. Wilson Reclaim the American Agrarian Tradition,” in Rationality and the Liberal Spirit: A Festschrift Honoring Ira Lee Morgan, ed. Centenary College Department of English (Shreveport, La.: A Centenary Publication, 1997), 134–42. 10. Lord, Wallaces, 432; McDean, “Wilson”; Bakken, “Interview,” 7; Christie, “Taylor”; Kirby, “Rural Culture.” Mary O. Furner presents a nineteenth-century republicanism that led, in part, to the “democratic statism” of the twentieth, including that of three major influences on the New Deal, Dewey, Ely, and Commons: “The Republican Tradition and the New Liberalism: Social Investigation, State Building, and Social Learning in the Gilded Age,” in The State and Social Investigation in Britain and the United States, ed. Michael J. Lacy and Furner (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center, 1993), 171–241; see also Joyce Appleby, “Commercial Farming and the ‘Agrarian Myth’ in the Early Republic,” Journal of American History 68 (March 1982): 833–49, which opens with M. L. Wilson quoting Henry Wallace. There is a Lincoln Room in the MLW Papers at Montana State University. 11. “M. L. Wilson,” 20–24. See chapter 7 below. 12. Tolley, “Reminiscences,” 22–25; Christie, “Taylor,” 10–14; Bakken, “Interview,” 7.

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13. Richard S. Kirkendall, Uncle Henry: A Documentary Profile of the First Henry Wallace (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1993), 219, passim; H. A. Wallace, “Equality of Bargaining Power and the General Welfare,” Benjamin Hibbard Memorial Lecture, Department of Agricultural Economics, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 28 March 1961, 5. 14. Sherman E. Johnson, From the St. Croix to the Potomac: Reflections of a Bureaucrat (Bozeman, Mont.: Big Sky Books, 1974), 151; “M. L. Wilson,” 7; McDean, “Wilson,” 18; Bakken, “Interview,” 8; Lord, Wallaces, 338, 399. 15. Pete Daniel, “The Legal Basis of Agrarian Capitalism: The South since 1933,” in Race and Class in the American South since 1890, ed. Melvin Stokes and Rick Halpern (Providence, R.I.: Berg, 1994), 86– 96; Anthony J. Badger, The New Deal (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989), 184; Kirby, “Rural Culture.” I argue later that as the 1930s progressed, they came around to a better understanding of the plight of sharecroppers and farmworkers. 16. Wilson, “Communication,” 80; Wilson, “A Theory of Agricultural Democracy,” Extension Service Circular 355 (March 1941), 15. 17. Wallace, “Equality,” 1; Kleinman, World of Hope, 23–24. 18. I have borrowed the “middle way” interpretation from James T. Kloppenburg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). This outstanding comparativeintellectual history treats eighteen figures, including Richard Ely, John Dewey, and Max Weber. Ely proposed a middle way in The Labor Movement in America (New York: Crowell, 1886), and Henry Wallace employed the phrase in America Must Choose: The Advantages and Disadvantages of Nationalism, of World Trade, and of a Planned Middle Way (New York: Foreign Policy Association, 1934). L. C. Gray wrote that “ ‘planning’ constitutes an attempt of the American people to find an intermediate ground between laissezfaire capitalism and socialism” (Land Planning, Public Policy Pamphlet No. 19 [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1936], 2). 19. Richard S. Kirkendall, “Howard Tolley and Agricultural Planning in the 1930s,” AH 39 (Jan. 1966): 25; Tolley, “Reminiscences,” 67–102; Jess Gilbert and Ellen Baker, “Wisconsin Economists and New Deal Agricultural Policy: The Legacy of Progressive Professors,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 80, no. 4 (Summer 1997): 302. The following paragraphs on Wisconsin draw from this latter article. For a treatment of institutional economics in Madison, see Malcolm Rutherford, The Institutionalist Movement in American Economics, 1918–1947: Science and Social Control (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 186–222; Rutherford mentions agricultural economics occasionally but does not concentrate on it. 20. Ely, Ground Under Our Feet: An Autobiography (New York: Macmillan, 1938), 140; Benjamin G. Rader, The Academic Mind and Reform: The Influence of Richard T. Ely in American Life (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1966), 48– 90; J. David Hoeveler Jr., “The University and the Social Gospel: The Intellectual Origins of the Wisconsin Idea,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 59 (1976); Robert J. Lampman, ed., Economists at Wisconsin, 1892–1992 (Madison: Board of Regents, University of Wisconsin System, 1993), 6– 9; Kloppenburg, Uncertain Victory, 207– 9. Ely’s Introduction sold thirty

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thousand copies in a decade and, revised and coauthored as Outlines of Economics, remained the leading text in the field until World War II. 21. Merle Curti and Vernon Carstensen, The University of Wisconsin: A History, 1848–1925 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1949), 1: 630–40; David P. Thelan, The New Citizenship: Origins of Progressivism in Wisconsin, 1885–1900 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1972), 101, 122, 309; Theoron F. Schlabach, “An Aristocrat on Trial: The Case of Richard T. Ely,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 47 (Winter 1963– 64): 146–59; Ely, Ground, 185–89; Kloppenburg, Uncertain Victory, 266–72; Rader, Academic Mind, 50–56, 115. For a critical view of Ely, see Robert J. Gough, “Richard T. Ely and the Development of the Wisconsin Cutover,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 75 (Autumn 1991): 3–38; and Gough, Farming the Cutover: A Social History of Northern Wisconsin, 1900–1940 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997). 22. Clarence E. Wunderlin Jr., Visions of a New Industrial Order: Social Science and Labor Theory in America’s Progressive Era (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 129; John Dennis Chasse, “John R. Commons and the Democratic State,” Journal of Economic Issues 20 (Sept. 1986). 23. Commons, Myself: The Autobiography of John R. Commons (1934; reprint, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964), 97; Selig Perlman, “John Rogers Commons, 1862–1945,” American Economic Review 35 (Sept. 1945): 782– 86; LaFayette G. Harter Jr., John R. Commons: His Assault on Laissez-Faire (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1962), 72–73; Paul Buhle, “Madison: An Introduction,” in Buhle, ed., History and the New Left: Madison, Wisconsin, 1950–1970 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 10–13. The two best contemporary books on Progressive Wisconsin were written by students of Ely: Charles R. McCarthy, The Wisconsin Idea (1912), and Frederic C. Howe, Wisconsin: An Experiment in Democracy (1912). 24. Commons, Myself, 72–73; Wunderlin, Visions, 102–3; Commons, “Communism and Collective Democracy,” American Economic Review 25 (June 1935): 215; Harter, John R. Commons, 75–76. One of Commons’s students later said that he conducted “what we now call ‘action research’ ” (Elizabeth Brandeis Raushenbush and Paul Raushenbush in Our “U. C.” Story, 1930–1967 [Madison: np, 1979], 9). In chapter 8 I use this term to describe the participatory research of the Third New Deal. 25. In 1926, Taylor, supported by Ely, wrote an informative but unpublished memoir. Thanks to the editorial work of Kenneth H. Parsons it became available: Taylor, A Farm Economist in Washington, 1919–1925 (Madison: Department of Agricultural Economics, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1992), 14–17, 256–63; see also Taylor, “A Stage Onward, at the University of Wisconsin, 1896–1899” and “European Influences in My Education, 1899–1901,” both in box 37, folder 2, HCT Papers; Parsons, “B. H. Hibbard, H. C. Taylor, and the Taylor-Hibbard Club,” Taylor-Hibbard Club Newsletter 1965 (University of Wisconsin), 2–16; R. J. Penn, “Henry Charles Taylor, 1873–1969,” American Journal of Agricultural Economics 51 (Dec. 1969): 999–1002. 26. Hibbard returned to Iowa State (where he tutored the young Henry Wallace) until Taylor called him back to Wisconsin in 1913. See Taylor, Farm Economist, 17–19, 143–46; Taylor, excerpts from an unpublished history of agricultural economics, in folder 10, box 35, HCT Papers; Marvin A. Schaars, “The Story of the Department of Agri-

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cultural Economics, 1909–1972” (Madison, 1972), mimeo; Wilson, “Agricultural Conservation: An Aspect of Land Utilization,” JFE 19, no. 1 (Feb. 1937): 4–7. 27. Taylor, “L.C. Gray, Agricultural Historian and Land Economist,” AH 26 (Oct. 1952): 165; E.H.W. and H.C.T., “Lewis Cecil Gray, 1881–1952,” JFE 35 (Feb. 1953): 157; Phillippe J. Crabbe, “The Contribution of L. C. Gray to the Economic Theory of Exhaustible Natural Resources and Its Roots in the History of Economic Thought,” Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 10 (1983): 195– 220; University of Wisconsin–Madison Registrar; Richard S. Kirkendall, “L. C. Gray and the Supply of Agricultural Land,” AH 37, no. 4 (Oct. 1963): 206; Taylor, Farm Economist, 143; Todd A. Wildermuth, “ ‘Had Our Fathers Cared to Provide a Solution’: L. C. Gray’s Crusade Against Laissez-Faire,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the Agricultural History Society, 17 June 2006, Cambridge, Massachusetts. I have benefited from Wildermuth’s work on Gray and thank him for sharing it. 28. McDean, “Wilson,” 1– 94; Wilson, “Reminiscences,” 299–307; Lord, Wallaces, 297. Wilson reported similar recollections of Commons in Baker, Borsodi, and Wilson, Agriculture in Modern Life, 279– 81. 29. “M. L. Wilson,” 16–17; Wilson, “Reminiscences,” 302–3, 323; McDean, “Wilson,” 161– 64; folder “Biographical Notes 1969–71,” box 1, Home Office Collection, MLW Papers. 30. Allin to Wilson, 27 Feb. 1933, in file E-69, MLW Papers; Allin, “AgriculturalBusiness,” 6–38; “Biographical Sketch,” 18 Aug. 1937, folder 33, box 2, BWA Papers. Allin’s graduate cohort at Wisconsin included many outstanding policy economists, including Edwin E. Witte, Elizabeth Brandeis, Paul Raushenbush, Arthur Altmeyer, Foster Elliott, Calvin Hoover, Roland Renne, Theodore Schultze, and Wilbur Cohen (Lampman, Economists at Wisconsin, 45–49; Rutherford, Institutionalist Movement, 202). 31. Gray, “Evolution of the Land Use Program of the United States Department of Agriculture,” 29 March 1939 (box 1, entry 213, RG 83, NACP); Wilson, “Reminiscences,” 305–7, 579; Allin to B. M. Selekman, 8 January 1952; Allin to Witte, 3 Nov. 1953, box 3, BWA Papers; Allin, “Relevant Farm Economics,” JFE 43 (Dec. 1961): 1007–18. 32. Commons, Myself, 74–77; Thomas H. Eliot, Recollections of the New Deal: When the People Mattered (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992), 74. 33. Christie, “Taylor,” 14–18; Bakken, “Interview,” 6–17; Taylor, “The Social Survey and the Science of Sociology,” American Journal of Sociology 25, no. 6 (May 1920): 731–56. 34. Bakken, “Interview,” 12; Wallace, Statesmanship and Religion (New York: Round Table Press, 1934); Mark L. Kleinman, “Searching for the ‘Inner Light’: The Development of Henry A. Wallace’s Experimental Spiritualism,” Annals of Iowa 53 (Summer 1994): 195–218; “M. L. Wilson,” 12–17; Wilson, “Reminiscences,” 302–23, 1018, 2091; Wilson, “Beyond Economics,” in USDA, Farmers in a Changing World: The Yearbook of Agriculture, 1940 (Washington: GPO, 1940), 936–37. After receiving his M.S. degree from Wisconsin, Wilson returned to Montana as department chair. Between 1920 and 1923 he studied part-time at Chicago and Cornell but never earned a doctorate. See Wilson, “Biographical Notes 1969–71”; McDean, “Wilson,” 161– 64.

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35. Finegold and Skocpol so describe the BAE in State and Party, 58. Richard S. Kirkendall, “Howard Tolley and Agricultural Planning in the 1930s,” AH 39 (Jan. 1966): 25–33; Kirkendall, Social Scientists, 15–17; Benedict and Wilson, “Howard Ross Tolley, 1889–1958”; Tolley, “Reminiscences,” 99, 146. At Berkeley, Tolley supervised the dissertation of the Canadian farm boy John Kenneth Galbraith. 36. Taylor to M. L. Wilson, 12 March 1941, folder 1, box 27, HCT Papers; Taylor, Farm Economist, 22–33; Harry C. McDean, “Professionalism, Policy, and Farm Economists in the Early Bureau of Agricultural Economics,” AH 57 (Jan. 1983): 64– 82; Donald L. Winters, “The Persistence of Progressivism: Henry Cantwell Wallace and the Movement for Agricultural Economics,” AH 41 (April 1967): 109–20. For more critical background, see McDean, “Professionalism in the Rural Social Sciences, 1896–1919,” AH 58 (July 1984): 373– 92. 37. Henry C. Wallace, Our Debt and Duty to the Farmer (New York: Century, 1925); Taylor, “Economics in the Agricultural Course,” 1923, folder 1, box 4, HCT Papers; Taylor, Farm Economist, 65; Winter, “Persistence of Progressivism,” 118. 38. Tolley, “The History and Objectives of Outlook Work,” JFE 13, no. 4 (Oct. 1931): 523–34; Tolley, “The Outlook a Basis for Adjustments in the Better Farming Areas,” Proceedings of the National Conference on Land Utilization (Washington: GPO, 1932), 165– 67; Joel Kunze, “The Bureau of Agricultural Economics’ Outlook Program in the 1920s as Pedagogical Device,” AH 64, no. 2 (Spring 1990): 252– 61; Donald L. Winters, Henry Cantwell Wallace as Secretary of Agriculture, 1921–1924 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970), 109–44; Taylor, Farm Economist, 84, 147, 202; H. C. Taylor and Anne Dewees Taylor, The Story of Agricultural Economics in the United States, 1840– 1952: Men, Ser vices, Ideas (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1952), 447–57; McDean, “Professionalism.” David E. Hamilton is particularly good at showing the continuities of the BAE in the 1920s and 1930s; see his From New Day to New Deal: American Farm Policy from Hoover to Roosevelt, 1928–1933 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), and Hamilton, “Building the Associative State: The Department of Agriculture and American State-Building,” AH 64, no. 2 (Spring 1990): 207–18. 39. Taylor, Farm Economist; McDean, “Professionalism”; Winters, “Persistence of Progressivism”; Taylor to Allin, 14 Aug. 1956, folder 5, box 5, HCT Papers; Taylor and Taylor, Story, 317. Allin published the claim in “Galbraith’s Stinger,” JFE 38 (Nov. 1956): 1055. Despite all this professionalism, Taylor himself could not escape politics. His main supporter, Secretary Henry C. Wallace, died in office in 1924. President Calvin Coolidge had reason to believe that Taylor was campaigning for a national farm policy that he opposed, so in 1925 the new secretary of agriculture fired Taylor. The BAE, however, flourished along the same lines he had established, and Taylor went to work for his old mentor, at Ely’s Institute for Research on Land Economics. 40. Gray combined institutional and neoclassical analysis to develop an economic theory of natural resource extraction; see his pathbreaking articles “The Economic Possibilities of Conservation,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 27 (May 1913): 497–519; and “Rent Under the Assumption of Exhaustibility” (1914), ibid., 28 (May 1914): 466– 89; Crabbe, “Contribution”; Taylor, Farm Economist; McDean, “Professionalism,” 65– 67; Kirkendall, Social Scientists, 21, 39.

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41. Ely, “A National Policy for Land Utilization,” Report of the National Agricultural Conference (Washington: GPO, 1922), 111–21; Albert Z. Guttenberg, “The Land Utilization Movement of the 1920s,” AH 50, no. 3 (July 1976); Guttenberg, “The Land Use Movement of the 1920’s: A Bibliographic Essay,” Exchange Bibliography #462 (Np: Council of Planning Librarians, 1973), 15–16; Tim Lehman, Public Values, Private Lands: Farmland Preservation Policy, 1933–1985 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 9–11; Kirkendall, “Gray,” 213; Winters, Wallace, 148; Taylor, Farm Economist, 157– 63; Taylor and Taylor, Story, 576– 90; Hamilton, From New Day, 170–78; Hamilton, “Building.” Wilson referred to the “movement leading to the establishment of a land use policy” (“Economic Planning and Agricultural Adjustments,” 6, 12 July 1931, file E27, MLW Papers), and Gray, to “the planning movement” (Land Planning, 5). 42. Gray et al., “The Utilization of Our Land for Crops, Pasture and Forests,” USDA, Yearbook of Agriculture, 1923 (Washington: GPO, 1924), 415–506. See also Gray, “The Field of Land Utilization,” JLE 1, no. 2 (April 1925): 152–59; Gray, “The Status of American Research Works in Agricultural Land Economics,” JFE 10, no. 2 (April 1928): 137– 50; Gray and O. E. Baker, Land Utilization and the Farm Problem, USDA Misc. Pub. No. 97 (Washington: GPO, 1930); Gray, “National Land Policies in Retrospect and Prospect,” JFE 13, no. 2 (April 1931): 231–45; Gray, Land Planning, 6– 9; Guttenberg, “Land Utilization,” 479–84; Lehman, Public Values, 11–14; Kirkendall, “Gray.” Taylor and Taylor refer to Gray’s work as “trend-bending” (Story, 854). In the twenties, several states undertook land-use classification and planning, including Wisconsin, the first to adopt rural zoning, and New York, where Governor Franklin Roosevelt advanced it as a pet project. 43. USDA, Proceedings of the National Conference on Land Utilization (Washington: GPO, 1932) (Ely quote at 126); Gray, “National Conference Recommends Program of Study and Action,” Yearbook of Agriculture, 1932 (Washington: GPO, 1932), 460– 62; Gray, Land Planning, 9–10; Gray, “Evolution of the Land Use”; Guttenberg, “Land Utilization,” 481; Kirkendall, “Gray,” 210–12; Lehman, Public Values, 15–16. 44. Wilson, “The Source Material of Economic Research and Points of View in Its Organization,” JFE, 8, no. 1 (Jan. 1926): 9; Wilson, “The Fairway Farms Project,” JLE 2, no. 2 (April 1926): 156–71; Wilson, “Experimental Method in Economic Research,” JFE 11, no. 4 (Oct. 1929): 578–83; Wilson, “Research Studies in the Economics of Large Scale Farming in Montana,” Agricultural Engineering 10, no. 1 (Jan. 1929): 8–11; Russell Lord, Men of Earth (New York, 1931), 287; Lord, Wallaces, 305; Gray, “Evolution of the Land Use,” 6; Taylor, Farm Economist, 151, 187; Guttenberg, “Land Utilization,” 484–86; Guttenberg, “Land Use,” 7, 21–26. See the excellent study by Deborah Fitzgerald, Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 57–74, which attributes the Fairway Farms failure largely to the overly optimistic faith in technoscientific rationality of Wilson and the others. Fitzgerald also offers a detailed analysis and similar evaluation of Wilson’s Soviet effort; see Every Farm, 157–83, and “Blinded by Technology: American Agriculture in the Soviet Union, 1928–1932,” AH 70, no. 3 (Summer 1996): 459– 86; cf. Thomas R. Wessel, “Wheat for the Soviet Masses: M. L. Wilson and the Montana Connection,” Montana 31, no. 2 (April 1981): 43–53. For a firsthand account of Wilson in the USSR, see

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Lement Harris, My Tale of Two Worlds (New York: International Publishers, 1986), 62–72. (Harris was an American Communist.) 45. Mordecai Ezekiel, “Henry A. Wallace, Agricultural Economist,” JFE 48 (Nov. 1966): 789– 802; Richard S. Kirkendall, “The Mind of a Farm Leader,” Annals of Iowa 47 (Fall 1983): 138–53; Wallace, “Equality,” 2; Lord, Wallaces, 464; Kleinman, World of Hope, 37–39. 46. Taylor, “Factors Entering into a Membership Campaign in Cooperative Marketing,” American Cooperation, Proceedings of the 6th Summer Session of the American Institute of Cooperation at Ohio State University (Columbus: American Institute of Cooperation, 1930), 202; Taylor, “The Story and the Lesson of the Tri-State Tobacco Cooperative Association,” American Cooperation, Proceedings of the 9th Summer Session of the American Institute of Cooperation at North Carolina State College (Raleigh: American Institute of Cooperation, 1933), 515–18; Taylor, “Why Not Learn from Other States?,” undated paper, box 10, CCT Papers; Christie, “Taylor,” 19–30; Bakken, “Interview,” 23–24. 47. Taylor, “Organizing Farmers for Economic and Political Action,” Publications of the American Sociological Society 17 (1922): 194– 99; Taylor, “Farmers’ Movements as Psychosocial Phenomena,” Publications of the American Sociological Society 23 (1929): 152– 62; Taylor, Farmers’ Movement, 9; Christie, “Taylor,” 19–30. 48. Taylor, Farmers’ Movement, 327, 492– 95; Christie, “Taylor,” 32–35; Olaf F. Larson, Robin M. Williams Jr., and Ronald C. Wimberley, “The Dismissal of a Sociologist: The AAUP Report on Carl C. Taylor,” RS 64 (1999): 533–53. In his 1953 book Taylor dropped the “farmer class consciousness” argument, which he then called fruitless (492). Sociologists Patrick H. Mooney and Theo J. Majka develop Taylor’s continuity thesis in their Farmers’ and Farm Workers’ Movements: Social Protest in American Agriculture (New York: Twayne, 1995). 49. Wilson to Allin, 27 Aug. 1931; Allin to Wilson, 24 Nov. 1931; Allin to Wilson, 27 Feb. 1933 (all in E69, MLW Papers); Allin, “Agricultural-Business,” 26–29. 50. Allin, “The Development of the Social Sciences and Their Relation to the Use of Scientific Information in Human Progress,” 3 July 1958, folder 51, box 1, BWA Papers; Allin, “Galbraith’s Stinger,” 1055; Allin, “Agricultural-Business,” 23–38. 51. Wilson, Land Utilization, Economics Series Lecture No. 25 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1932), 1–10. 52. Ibid., 6– 8; Wilson, “A Land Use Program for the Federal Government,” JFE 15, no. 2 (April 1933): 220; Guttenburg, “Land Use Movement,” 27–29. 53. As I noted in the introduction, the concept of organic intellectual derives from Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist in the interwar period. See Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 1–25, 325–34. In different terms, several of the agrarians said essentially the same thing about his and the others’ careers; see Wallace, “Farm Economists and Agricultural Planning,” JFE 18, no. 1 (Feb. 1939): 1; Wilson, “Making the Plans Click,” ESR (Jan. 1940): 10; Wilson, “Theory of Agricultural Democracy,” 15, and other Wilson quotations above; Allin, “Soil Scientists Have a Planning Job,” Soil Science Society of America: Proceedings 1941 (Morgantown, W.Va.: Soil Science Society of America,

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1941), 3– 7 (this piece is premised on the idea that agricultural scientists have farm backgrounds); see also Ellery Foster, “The Development of Land Use Planning Committees: A Historical Sketch,” Planners’ Journal 8, no. 2 (April–June 1942): 6. Philip Glick effectively put forth a similar interpretation of agricultural policy history in “The Coming Transformation of the Soil Conservation District,” Journal of Soil and Water Conservation 22, no. 2 (March–April 1967): 46–49; as did Charles P. Loomis and Zona Kemp Loomis, “Rural Sociology,” in The Uses of Sociology, ed. Paul F. Lazersfeld, William H. Sewell, and Harold L. Wilensky (New York: Basic Books, 1967), 660.

Chapter 4. Modernizing Eastern Urban Liberals Epigraph. Tugwell, “A Planner’s View of Agriculture’s Future,” JFE 31, no. 1 (Feb. 1949): 29. Used with permission of the American Agricultural Economics Association. 1. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 89– 90, 3–4. 2. Ibid., 88–101; Scott, “High Modernist Social Engineering: The Case of the Tennessee Valley Authority,” in Experiencing the State, ed. Lloyd I. Rudolph and John Kurt Jacobsen (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006), 7–18. 3. Scott, Seeing, 93– 96; Scott, “High Modernist,” 7– 8. 4. Scott, Seeing, 199–201, 211, 229–32, 267–71, 398; Scott, “High Modernist,” 40–42, 46–47, 51; Fitzgerald, “Blinded by Technology: American Agriculture in the Soviet Union, 1928–1932,” AH 70, no. 3 (1996): 459–86; Fitzgerald, Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 57–73, 157–83. In a later piece, Fitzgerald adopts Scott’s high-modernist interpretation: “Accounting for Change: Farmers and the Modernizing State,” in The Countryside in the Age of the Modern State: Essays on the Political History of Rural America, ed. Catherine McNicol Stock and Robert Johnston (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 189–212. 5. Frederic C. Howe, The Confessions of a Reformer (New York: Scribner’s, 1925), 1–18, 317; Alger Hiss, Recollections of a Life (New York: Seaver, 1988), 4– 6; John Chabot Smith, Alger Hiss: The True Story (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976), 32– 60; Murray Kempton, Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955), 13–35. 6. Tugwell, The Light of Other Days (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1962), 83; Tugwell, To the Lesser Heights of Morningside: A Memoir (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), 20–33, 219, 397; Tugwell, “Foreword,” in Edward C. Banfield, Government Project (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1951), 10; Russell Lord, The Wallaces of Iowa (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1947), 348; Michael V. Namorato, Rexford G. Tugwell: A Biography (New York: Praeger, 1988), 11–20; Spencer D. Wood, “Autonomous Expert or Power Elite Member? Rexford G. Tugwell and Creation of the U.S. Resettlement Administration in 1935,” MS thesis, Department of Rural Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1991. 7. Robert Jerome Glennon, The Iconoclast as Reformer: Jerome Frank’s Impact on American Law (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 15–16; Walter E. Volkomer, The

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Passionate Liberal: The Political and Legal Ideas of Jerome Frank (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970), 1–2; “The Reminiscences of Lee Pressman,” Columbia Oral History Collection, Columbia University, 1957–58, 1–4, 33–35; “The Reminiscences of Gardner Jackson,” Columbia Oral History Collection, Columbia University, 1959, 179. 8. Jackson, “Reminiscences,” 1–44; Kempton, Part, 41–44. 9. Howe, Confessions; Howe, The Land and the Soldier (New York: Scribner’s, 1919). 10. Jackson, “Reminiscences,” 8–228; Kempton, Part, 45–52; Donald H. Grubbs, “Gardner Jackson, That ‘Socialist’ Tenant Farmers’ Union, and the New Deal,” AH 42 (April 1968): 125–37. 11. Tugwell, To the Lesser Heights, 44, 157; Namorato, Tugwell, 21–35; Bernard Sternsher, Rexford Tugwell and the New Deal (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press), 5– 25; Otis L. Graham Jr., “Afterword,” in Tugwell, To the Lesser Heights; Wood, “Autonomous Expert.” 12. Glennon, Iconoclast, 16; Volkomer, Passionate Liberal, 1–2; Jordan A. Schwarz, The New Dealers: Power Politics in the Age of Roosevelt (New York: Vintage, 1994), 177– 78; Joseph P. Lash, Dreamers and Dealers: A New Look at the New Deal (New York: Doubleday, 1988), 111; Peter H. Irons, The New Deal Lawyers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 121–22. 13. Jerold S. Auerbach, Unequal Justice: Lawyers and Social Change in Modern America (London: Oxford University Press, 1976), 181; Irons, New Deal Lawyers, 12–14; Smith, Hiss, 50–57; Pressman, “Reminiscences,” 4– 7, 35–37; Jackson, “Reminiscences,” 294– 97. 14. Sanford V. Levinson, “The Democratic Faith of Felix Frankfurter,” Stanford Law Review 25 (Feb. 1973): 430–48; G. Edward White, “Felix Frankfurter, the Old Boy Network, and the New Deal: The Placement of Elite Lawyers in Public Service in the 1930s,” Arkansas Law Review 39 (1986): 631– 67; Hiss, Recollections, 13–14, 59; Irons, New Deal Lawyers, 6– 9; Auerbach, Unequal Justice, 182– 90; Schwarz, New Dealers, 123–37. 15. Pressman, “Reminiscences,” 8; Hiss, Recollections, 52– 61; Smith, Hiss, 16–18, 32– 74; Kempton, Part, 20– 24; Irons, New Deal Lawyers, 124– 25; Lash, Dreamers, 217–18. 16. Unofficial Observer, The New Dealers (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1934), 67; Lash, Dreamers, 218; Kempton, Part, 52–55, 81; Glennon, Iconoclast, 97. 17. George N. Peek and Samuel Crowther, Why Quit Our Own? (New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1936), 20, 114; Lord, Wallaces, 352–58; Hiss, Recollections, 66. 18. Sternsher, Tugwell, 329–32; Graham, “Afterword,” 251; Tugwell, Light, 200; Lord, Wallaces, 346–52, 381– 82; Lash, Dreamers, 113. 19. Schlesinger, The Coming of the New Deal (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959), 50– 51; Lash, Dreamers, 112–13, 218, 434–36; Unofficial Observer, New Dealers, 322; Irons, New Deal Lawyers, 126–27; Lord, Wallaces, 358; Hiss, Recollections, 66. Before the U.S. congressional House Un-American Activities Committee in 1950, Lee Pressman named himself, John Abt, Nathan Witt, and Charles Kramer (in the Consumers’ Division) as having belonged to an AAA Communist cell in 1934. Whitaker Chambers had already

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listed Alger Hiss and other AAA officials as also being in the group and charged that Hiss (later, while in the State Department) had spied for the USSR. Hiss denied the charges, was convicted of perjury, and spent forty-four months in federal prison. See Hiss, Recollections, 149–60; John Abt with Michael Myerson, Advocate and Activist: Memoirs of an American Communist Lawyer (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 32, 150–76; Kempton, Part, 13– 83. 20. Lord, Wallaces, 329, 338–46, 399, 431–40. 21. Tugwell, The Battle for Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1935), 6–20; Otis L. Graham Jr., “The Planning Ideal and American Reality: The 1930s,” in The Hofstadter Aegis: A Memorial, ed. Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick (New York: Knopf, 1974), 288; Sternsher, Tugwell; Scott, “High Modernist,” 30–33. For a theoretical, contextualized sketch of Tugwell by a former planning student of his at the University of Chicago, see John Friedman, Planning in the Public Domain: From Knowledge to Action (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 106–12. 22. Tugwell, Battle, 17–20, 212; Sternsher, Tugwell, 373–77, 391. 23. Tugwell, The Industrial Discipline and the Governmental Arts (New York: Columbia University Press, 1933), 187–220; Tugwell, Battle, 200; Tugwell, To the Lesser Heights, 157; Sternsher, Tugwell, 96– 97; cf. Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 455–58. 24. Tugwell, Battle, 52, 20, 204; Tugwell, “We Have Bought Ourselves Time to Think,” New Republic, 26 July 1939, 325; Sternsher, Tugwell, 103–4, 151; Tugwell, “The Fourth Power,” Planning and Civic Comment (April–June 1939); Tugwell, “The Future of National Planning,” New Republic, 9 Dec. 1936. 25. Tugwell, Industrial Discipline, 187–220; Tugwell, Battle, 52, 196–200; Tugwell, “Fourth Power”; Tugwell, “Future,” 162; Tugwell, To the Lesser Heights, 157; Sternsher, Tugwell, 96–104, 391. Time failed to cure Tugwell of his planning predilections; see, e.g., Tugwell, “A Planner’s View of Agriculture’s Future,” JFE 31, no 1 (Feb. 1949): 29–47; Tugwell and E. C. Banfield, “Governmental Planning at Mid-Century,” Journal of Politics 13, no. 2 (May 1951): 133– 63; Salvador M. Padilla, ed., Tugwell’s Thoughts on Planning (San Juan, Puerto Rico: University of Puerto Rico Press, 1974); and Tugwell, “Planning and Democracy,” Center Magazine 11, no. 5 (Sept.– Oct. 1978): 60. 26. For an extended comparison of Wilson and Tugwell, see William Edward Bennett, “The Concept of Community: A Study of the Communitarian Programs of the New Deal,” PhD diss., University of Southern Mississippi, 1983. 27. Tugwell, Battle, 201. See chapter 5 for their democratizing projects. In “High Modernist Social Engineering,” Scott treats high modernists like Tugwell but hesitates to call them true democrats because of their staunch statism (see 7, 18–33); cf. Scott, Seeing, 94. 28. Some historians have adopted the concept of low modernism to good effect: Amanda Kay McVety, “Pursuing Progress: Point Four in Ethiopia,” Diplomatic History 32, no. 3 (June 2008): 371–403; Jane Adams and D. Gorton, “This Land Ain’t My Land: The Eviction of Sharecroppers by the Farm Security Administration,” AH 83, no. 3 (Summer 2009): 323–51; Jessica Wang, “Local Knowledge, State Power, and the Science of Industrial Labor Relations: William Leiserson, David Saposs, and American Labor

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Economics in the Interwar Years,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 46, no. 4 (Fall 2010): 371– 93; Clifford M. Kuhn, “ ‘It Was a Long Way from Perfect, But It Was Working’: The Canning and Home Production Initiatives in Greene County, Georgia, 1940–1942,” AH 86, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 68– 90; Daniel Immerwahr, Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015).

Chapter 5. Struggling Toward a New Deal Land Policy Epigraph. Wallace, “The States, the Regions and the Nation,” Proceedings of the 49th Annual Convention of the Association of Land-Grant Colleges and Universities, 1935, ed. Charles A. McCue (Wilmington, Del.: Cann Bros., 1936), 39–40. Used with permission of the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities. 1. M. L. Wilson, “Agricultural Conservation: An Aspect of Land Utilization,” JFE 19, no. 1 (Feb. 1937): 11; “Address by M. L. Wilson,” Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Convention of the Association of Land-Grant Colleges and Universities, ed. William L. Slate (New Haven: Quinnipiack Press, 1938), 84; Wilson, “The New Department of Agriculture,” 13 Jan. 1939, “M. L. Wilson” folder, NAL; Bushrod W. Allin, “Is Planning Compatible with Democracy?” American Journal of Sociology 42, no. 4 (Jan. 1937): 517; Allin, “County Planning Project: A Cooperative Approach to Agricultural Planning,” JFE 22, no. 1 (Feb. 1940): 300; Allin, “Agricultural Planning,” 12 Jan. 1940, in “Bushrod W. Allin” folder, NAL; Allin, “Historical Background of the United States Department of Agriculture,” 4 Oct. 1940, ibid.; F. F. Elliott, “Economic Implications of the Agricultural Conservation Program,” JFE 19, no. 1 (Feb. 1937): 16– 22; USDA, Planning for a Permanent Agriculture, Misc. Pub. 351 (Washington: GPO, 1939), 1–12; USDA, Land Use Planning Under Way (Washington: GPO, 1940), 2; Milton S. Eisenhower and Roy I. Kimmel, “Old and New in Agricultural Organization,” Farmers in a Changing World: The Yearbook of Agriculture, 1940 (Washington: GPO, 1940), 1126–36; Donald C. Blaisdell, Government and Agriculture: The Growth of Federal Farm Aid (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1940), 67; John Albert Vieg, “Working Relationships in Governmental Agricultural Programs,” Public Administration Review 1, no. 2 (Winter 1941): 142; Charles P. Loomis and Douglas Ensminger, “Governmental Administration and Informal Local Groups,” Applied Anthropology 1, no. 2 (Jan.– March 1942): 42; John M. Gaus and Leon O. Wolcott with Verne B. Lewis, Public Administration and the United States Department of Agriculture (Chicago: Public Administration Service, 1940), 132, 149–51; Gaus, “Agricultural Policy and Administration in the American Federal System,” in Federalism Mature and Emergent, ed. Arthur W. Macmahon (New York: Russell and Russell, 1962), 288–302; Russell Lord, The Wallaces of Iowa (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1947), 393; R. Burnell Held and Marion Clawson, Soil Conservation in Perspective (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965), 44; Charles M. Hardin, The Politics of Agriculture: Soil Conservation and the Struggle for Power in Rural America (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1952), 27–34; Judith L. Graubert and Alice V. Graubert, “Milton Eisenhower” [interview], Decade of Destiny (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1978), 41; Theodore Saloutos, The American Farmer and the New Deal

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(Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1982), 265; Commons, “Institutional Economics,” American Economic Review 21 (Dec. 1931): 648. 2. Howard R. Tolley, The Farmer Citizen at War (New York: Macmillan, 1943), 29, 68; Carleton R. Ball, “Citizens Help Plan and Operate Action Programs,” LPR 3, no. 2 (March–April 1940): 26; Graham D. Taylor, “The New Deal and the Grass Roots,” PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1972, 115– 20; Tim Lehman, Public Values, Private Lands: Farmland Preservation Policy, 1933–1985 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 31; Gaus and Wolcott, Public Administration, 150–52. 3. [Douglas Helms], The Preparation of the Standard State Soil Conservation Districts Law: An Interview with Philip M. Glick, USDA Soil Conservation Service, Economics and Social Sciences Division, NHQ (1990), 27; Roscoe C. Martin, Grass Roots (University: University of Alabama Press, 1957), 15–17; USDA, Planning, 7–10; Blaisdell, Government, 178– 82; Eisenhower and Kimmel, “Old and New,” 1131–34; Loomis and Ensminger, “Governmental Administration,” 43–46; Anthony J. Badger, The New Deal: The Depression Years, 1933–1940 (New York: Noonday, 1989), 150–58. 4. Ellery A. Foster and Harold A. Vogel, “Cooperative Land Use Planning: A New Development in Democracy,” Farmers in a Changing World: The Yearbook of Agriculture, 1940 (Washington: GPO, 1940), 1138–56; Wallace, “Democracy in Planning,” Proceedings of the 51st Annual Convention of the Association of Land-Grant Colleges and Universities, ed. William L. Slate (New Haven: Quinnipiack Press, 1937), 55; Tolley, “Planning Public Programs for Agriculture,” ESR 10, no. 3 (March 1939): 36; Wilson, “New Department,” 3; Allin, “Historical Background”; Eisenhower and Kimmel, “Old and New,” 1135; USDA, Planning, 1– 6; Vieg, “Working Relationships,” 142– 46; Taylor, “New Deal,” 115–20. 5. Barry D. Karl and Otis L. Graham Jr., first identified a Third New Deal. They stressed Roosevelt’s attempt to reorganize the executive branch to achieve more planning and coordination of the national state as well as economy. Combining the interests of the first two in local administration and social justice, respectively, the Third New Deal went beyond them in its concern for administrative coordination and overall planning. The aim was as much governmental as economic—not new programs but “the direction and coordination of those in place,” as Graham says. Third New Deal measures included FDR’s executive reorganization bill of 1937, which called for, among other administrative things, a strong national planning board. It also meant judicial reform (FDR’s “court-packing” attempt), electoral reform (his effort in 1938 to purge some conservative Democrats from Congress), and more regional planning authorities (“seven little TVAs”). All these initiatives failed. In other words, the Third New Deal was “abortive,” according to Karl, or, as Graham puts it, “intended,” i.e., envisioned but not attained. Except, I argue, in agriculture. In striking contrast to the other initiatives and ignored by Karl and Graham, those in agriculture actually got off the ground and into the field, as part 2 of this book shows. They were less centralized and bureaucratic, more participatory and deliberative, than those FDR proposed. Graham does have a good clause on USDA’s cooperative planning (“the radical change in the government’s engagement with local land-use practices being pushed forward in the Department of Agriculture’s formulation of a national land-use planning system”; see “Comment,” in Graham, ed.,

290

notes to pages 83–84

Soviet-American Dialogue on the New Deal [Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989], 289). On the Third New Deal, see Graham, “Franklin Roosevelt and the Intended New Deal,” in Essays in Honor of James MacGregor Burns, ed. Michael R. Beschloss and Thomas E. Cronin (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1989), 85–86; Graham, “The New Deal,” in Franklin D. Roosevelt: His Life and Times, ed. Graham and Meghan Robinson Wander (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1985), 285– 91; Karl, The Uneasy State: The United States from 1915 to 1945 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 160– 67; Barry D. Karl, “Constitution and General Planning: The Third New Deal Revisited,” Supreme Court Review (1988): 163–201. For other views, see John W. Jeffries, “A ‘Third New Deal’? Liberal Policy and the American State, 1937–1945,” Journal of Policy History 8 (1996): 387–409; Sidney M. Milkis, “Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Economic Constitutional Order, and the New Politics of Presidential Leadership,” in The New Deal and the Triumph of Liberalism, ed. Milkis and Jerome M. Mileur (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 40–49; Neil M. Maher, Nature’s New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the American Environmental Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 181–210. Also relevant here is Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York: Knopf, 1995), which maintains that reformers retreated in 1937–38. Such was not the case in agriculture, as I show throughout this book. 6. Report of the Secretary of Agriculture, 1938 (Washington: GPO, 1938), 59; Report of the Secretary of Agriculture, 1939 (Washington: GPO, 1939), 3, 53–57. 7. Gaus and Wolcott, Public Administration, 115, 159 (emphasis added); Wilson, “A Land Use Program for the Federal Government,” JFE 15, no. 2 (April 1933): 217–35; Wilson, “Agricultural Conservation,” 8–11; Wilson, “New Department”; Rexford G. Tugwell, “The Place of Government in a National Land Program,” JFE 16, no. 1 (Jan. 1934): 55–69; Lewis C. Gray, Land Planning, Public Policy Pamphlet No. 19 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1936), 11, 37; Allin, “Is Planning Compatible?”; Allin, “Historical Development”; USDA, Planning, 1–18; USDA, Land Use, 3; Elliott, “Economic Implications,” 22–23; Eisenhower and Kimmel, “Old and New,” 1128–33; Foster and Vogel, “Cooperative”; Blaisdell, Government, 178; Richard S. Kirkendall, “L. C. Gray and the Supply of Agricultural Land,” AH 37, no. 4 (Oct. 1963): 206; Lehman, Public Values, 13. For good accounts along this line, see Sarah T. Phillips, This Land, This Nation: Conservation, Rural America, and the New Deal (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), and Sara M. Gregg, Managing the Mountains: Land Use Planning, the New Deal, and the Creation of a Federal Landscape in Appalachia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). 8. Edwin G. Nourse, Joseph S. Davis, and John D. Black, Three Years of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (Washington: Brookings Institution, 1937); Richard S. Kirkendall, Social Scientists and Farm Politics in the Age of Roosevelt (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1966), 60–70; William D. Rowley, M. L. Wilson and the Campaign for the Domestic Allotment (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970); David E. Hamilton, From New Day to New Deal: American Farm Policy from Hoover to Roosevelt, 1928–1933 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 170– 94; Laurie Winn Carlson, William J. Spillman and the Birth of Agricultural Economics (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005), 148–53; Badger, New Deal, 146– 89.

notes to pages 84–89

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9. See note 8. 10. Tolley, “The Department of Agriculture and the Land Grant Colleges Today,” 23, 6 Feb. 1939, in “Howard R. Tolley” folder, NAL; Blaisdell, Government, 166–70; USDA, Planning, 20–21; Gaus and Wolcott, Public Administration, 15–59; Badger, New Deal, 157–59. 11. Pete Daniel, “The Legal Basis of Agrarian Capitalism: The South since 1933,” in Race and Class in the American South Since 1890, ed. Melvyn Stokes and Rick Halpern (Oxford, UK: Berg, 1994), 87; Daniel, Breaking the Land: The Transformation of Cotton, Tobacco, and Rice Cultures since 1880 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 91–109; Jack Temple Kirby, Rural Worlds Lost: The American South, 1920–1960 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 1–79. Anthony Badger notes that the AAA committees were no less democratic than southern society at large and perhaps less so: many black farmers in the South voted in AAA elections and referenda, whereas they did not vote in the larger polity; see Prosperity Road: The New Deal, Tobacco, and North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 233. 12. David Eugene Conrad, The Forgotten Farmers: The Story of Sharecroppers in the New Deal (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1965), 136–53; Donald Grubbs, Cry from the Cotton: The Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union and the New Deal (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971), 30– 61; Richard Lowitt, “Henry A. Wallace and the 1935 Purge in the Department of Agriculture,” AH 53 (July 1979): 607–21; Lawrence J. Nelson, “The Art of the Possible: Another Look at the ‘Purge’ of the AAA Liberals in 1935,” AH 57 (October 1983): 416–35; Nelson, King Cotton’s Advocate: Oscar G. Johnston and the New Deal (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999), 77– 91; Jess Gilbert and Carolyn Howe, “Beyond ‘State vs. Society’: Theories of the State and New Deal Agricultural Policy,” American Sociological Review 56 (April 1991): 204–20. 13. See note 12. 14. The Dairy of Rexford G. Tugwell, ed. Michael Vincent Namorato (New York: Greenwood, 1992), 198–218; Lord, Wallaces, 346, 404– 9. 15. Elliott, “Economic Implications,” 14–27; John Donald Black and George William Westcott, Rural Planning of One County: Worcester County, Massachusetts (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959), 133–34; Badger, New Deal, 160– 68; Saloutos, American Farmer, 236–42; Phillips, This Land, 202–3. 16. Michael W. Schuyler, “The Politics of Change: The Battle for the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938,” Prologue 15, no. 3 (Fall 1983): 165–78; Badger, New Deal, 160– 68; Saloutos, American Farmer, 242–52; Phillips, This Land, 203–4; USDA, Planning, 20–30. 17. Bill Winders, The Politics of Food Supply: U.S. Agricultural Policy in the World Economy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); Wilson, “New Department,” 2. 18. Sidney Baldwin, Poverty and Politics: The Rise and Decline of the Farm Security Administration (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 96– 97; Paul K. Conkin, Tomorrow a New World: The New Deal Community Program (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1959), 157. 19. Paul K. Conkin, The New Deal, 2d ed. (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1975), 57; Grant McConnell, The Decline of Agrarian Democracy (1953; reprint, New York:

292

notes to pages 89– 92

Atheneum, 1969), 89; Richard A. Couto, Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Round: The Pursuit of Racial Justice in the Rural South (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), 306; Saloutos, American Farmer, 161; Donald Holley, Uncle Sam’s Farmers: The New Deal Communities in the Lower Mississippi Valley (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975); Paul E. Mertz, New Deal Policy and Southern Rural Poverty (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978). Like much of USDA reformism, the FSA was influenced by the thought of John Dewey; see USDA, Toward Farm Security: The Problem of Poverty and the Work of the Farm Security Administration (Washington: GPO, 1941), 91– 92, which quotes a long passage on freedom and equality from Dewey’s Economic Basis of the New Society and comments as follows: “This certainly applies to the entire Farm Security program.” 20. Charles P. Loomis, “Subsistence Homesteads in the United States,” Studies of Rural Social Organization in the United States, Latin America, and Germany (East Lansing, Mich.: State College Book Store, 1945), 125–29; Lord, Wallaces, 426–28; Baldwin, Poverty, 68–75; Conkin, Tomorrow, 93–130; Phillips, This Land, 114–17. 21. Gregg, Managing Mountains, 175– 97; Phillips, This Land, 115–20; Conkin, Tomorrow, 131–53; Baldwin, Poverty, 62– 67. The RA also built three suburban “greenbelt” communities; Tugwell planned ten. 22. Tugwell, “Changing Acres,” Current History 44 (Sept. 1936): 57; Tugwell, “Cooperation and Resettlement,” Current History 45 (Feb. 1937): 71–76; Tugwell, “The Resettlement Idea,” AH 33 (Oct. 1959): 161; Wilma Dykeman and James Stokely, Seeds of Southern Change: The Life of Will Alexander (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 212; Holley, Uncle Sam, 67, 105–8; Baldwin, Poverty, 65–105. On Tugwell’s thought more broadly, see Bernard Sternsher, Rexford Tugwell and the New Deal (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1964); Spencer D. Wood, “Autonomous Expert or ‘Power Elite’ Member? Rexford G. Tugwell and the Creation of the U.S. Resettlement Administration in 1935,” MS thesis, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1991. 23. Lord, Wallaces, 346, 460–62; Conkin, Tomorrow, 180; Saloutos, American Farmer, 238–44. Tugwell regarded Wallace as a serious intellectual; see Richard S. Kirkendall, “Commentary on the Thought of Henry A. Wallace,” AH 41, no. 2 (April 1967): 140; Badger, New Deal, 164. 24. Donald Holley, “The Negro in the New Deal Resettlement Program,” AH 45, no. 3 (July 1971): 184; Dykeman and Stokely, Seeds, 216. 25. Baldwin, Poverty, 187– 92; Conkin, Tomorrow, 183– 85. 26. Michael R. Grey, New Deal Medicine: The Rural Health Programs of the Farm Security Administration (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); Baldwin, Poverty, 193–261; Conkin, Tomorrow; USDA, Planning, 31–35. One of the FSA’s more lasting achievements was documentary and aesthetic. Through its film and photographic units, major artists immortalized the faces and scenes of poverty during the Great Depression; see, e.g., Dorothea Lange and Paul S. Taylor, An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion (1939), James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families (1941), and Richard Wright and Edwin Rosskam, 12 Million Black Voices (1941). The classic RA/FSA documentary films by Pare Lorentz were The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) and The River (1938). For a recent

notes to pages 92– 96

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treatment, see Linda Gordon, Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits (New York: Norton, 2009). 27. Michael Johnston Grant, Down and Out on the Family Farm: Rural Rehabilitation on the Great Plains, 1929–1945 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 110–25; Blaisdell, Government, 158, 182; Tolley, Farmer Citizen, 75–78; Baldwin, Poverty, 209–10. 28. Baldwin, Poverty, 335–404 (quote at 283); Conkin, Tomorrow, 214–33, 326–31; McConnell, Decline, 88–114; Holley, Uncle Sam, 242. On the legacy, see Couto, Ain’t Gonna, and Spencer D. Wood, “The Roots of Black Power: Land, Civil Society, and the State in the Mississippi Delta, 1935–1968,” PhD diss., University of Wisconsin– Madison, 2006. 29. A. P. Chew, The United States Department of Agriculture: Its Structure and Functions, USDA Misc. Pub. No. 88 (Washington: GPO, revised 1940), 217–19; Douglas Helms, “Natural Resources Conservation Service: Brief History,” in A Historical Guide to the U.S. Government, ed. George Thomas Kurian (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 434–39; Lehman, Public Values, 27; Robert J. Morgan, Governing Soil Conservation: Thirty Years of The New Decentralization (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965), 99–100; Hardin, Politics, 66; Held and Clawson, Soil Conservation, 42–43; Gaus and Wolcott, Public Administration, 128–37; Wilson, “Agricultural Conservation,” 8; Phillips, This Land, 136–43. 30. Maher, Nature’s New Deal; Chew, USDA, 216–18; Morgan, Governing Soil, 23–24, 42; Held and Clawson, Soil, 46; Helms, “NRCS”; USDA, Planning, 35–38. 31. Held and Clawson, Soil, 44–45. 32. Glick, “The Soil and the Law,” in USDA, Soils & Men: Yearbook of Agriculture, 1938 (Washington: GPO, 1938), 296–318; [Helms], Interview, 15– 26; Wilson, “Agricultural Conservation,” 11; USDA, Planning, 38–40; Blaisdell, Government, 173; Chew, USDA, 219; Morgan, Governing Soil, 37–39; Held and Clawson, Soil, 46– 47; Lehman, Public Values, 28–30. 33. Report of the Secretary of Agriculture, 1939, 3, 53–57; Chew, USDA, 219; Wilson, “Agricultural Conservation,” 9; USDA, Planning, 16–18; Grey, “Evolution of the Land Use Program of the United States Department of Agriculture,” 22 March 1939, 5– 6, box 1, entry 213, RG 83, NACP; Gaus and Wolcott, Public Administration, 131–54; Helms, Interview, 33–45; Morgan, Governing Soil, 39–51 (Wallace and Wilson quoted at 46); Held and Clawson, Soil, 46; Lehman, Public Values, 31. 34. Helms, Interview, 35–36, 56; the model law itself is appended to this document. See also Held and Clawson, Soil, 47; Morgan, Governing Soil, 42–46, 328–29, where Dewey’s influence is noted (46). 35. W. Robert Parks, Soil Conservation Districts in Action (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1952), 7–13; Glick, “The Coming Transformation of the Soil Conservation District,” Journal of Soil and Water Conservation 22, no. 2 (March–April 1967): 48; Helms, Interview, 19–24, 45–46, 51–59; Wilson, “Agricultural Conservation,” 11; Morgan, Governing Soil, 42–46; Held and Clawson, Soil, 47. 36. Helms, Interview, 48–53; Glick, “Coming Transformation,” 47; Parks, Soil Conservation, 227–32; Morgan, Governing Soil, 77–89, 106, 323–35; Held and Clawson, Soil, 47–49; Lehman, Public Values, 33–34; Hardin, Politics, 56; USDA, Planning, 38–40.

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notes to pages 96 – 99

37. Hugh H. Bennett and W. C. Lowdermilk, “General Aspects of the Soil-Erosion Problem,” USDA, Soils & Men: Yearbook of Agriculture, 1938 (Washington: GPO, 1938), 607– 8; Wilson, “Agricultural Conservation,” 11; Lehman, Public Values, 32–35; Parks, Soil Conservation, 190– 91; Morgan, Governing Soil, 82– 83; Glick, “Coming Transformation,” 48; Gaus and Wolcott, Public Administration, 150–54. 38. Blaisdell, Government, 164–77; Saloutos, American Farmer, 207–21, 269; Badger, New Deal, 168–78; Phillips, This Land, 134–42; Wm. I. Myers, “The Program of the Farm Credit Administration,” JFE 16, no. 1 (Jan. 1934): 30–40; J. K. Galbraith, “The Federal Land Banks and Agricultural Stability,” JFE 19, no. 1 (Feb. 1937): 48–58; Chew, USDA, 126–32, 213–16. 39. Lilienthal, TVA: Democracy on the March (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1944); Richard Lowitt, The New Deal and the West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), 65–72; Graham D. Taylor, The New Deal and American Indian Tribalism: The Administration of the Indian Reorganization Act, 1934–45 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980); Gray, Land Planning, 11; Blaisdell, Government, 175–77; Gaus and Wolcott, Public Administration, 152; Badger, New Deal, 171–81; Phillips, This Land, 83–107. For a theoretically rich study of local citizen participation, see Leigh Raymond on the public grazing districts, “Localism in Environmental Policy: New Insights from an Old Case,” Policy Sciences 35 (2002): 179–201. 40. The Future of the Great Plains, Report of the Great Plains Committee (Washington: GPO, 1936), 6– 8, 49– 67; Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 192– 96; Gilbert F. White, “The Future of the Great Plains Re-visited,” Great Plains Journal 6 (Spring 1986): 84– 93. Lowitt, New Deal, 44–46; Phillips, This Land, 130–31. The Plow That Broke the Plains, the RA’s influential documentary film, effectively presented a visual version of The Future report. For a provocative analysis of Dust Bowl historiography, including the report, see William Cronon, “A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative,” Journal of American History 78, no. 4 (March 1992): 1347–76. 41. President’s Committee on Farm Tenancy, Farm Tenancy (Washington: GPO, 1937); Kirkendall, Social Scientists, 126–29; Baldwin, Poverty, 167–77. 42. Taylor, “New Deal,” 115–20. 43. Saloutos, for instance, writes that New Deal agricultural policy “came to an end in 1939” (American Farmer, 256). 44. Roosevelt, “Presidential Statement on the Transition from an Emergency to a More Permanent Plan for American Agriculture,” 25 Oct. 1935, The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt (New York: Random House, 1938), 4: 432–33, reprinted as “President Roosevelt for Permanent AAA,” Rural America 13, no. 9 (Dec. 1935): 10– 11. On the significance of the AAA Program Planning Division under Tolley, see Edward G. Banfield, “Organization for Policy Planning in the U.S. Department of Agriculture,” JFE 34, no. 1 (Feb. 1952): 14–19; George William Westcott, “The Evolution of Rural Planning: An Important Area for Strengthening the Democratic Processes and Optimizing the General Welfare,” PhD diss., Harvard University, 1955, 166; Black and Westcott, Rural Planning, 119–20; Gladys L. Baker, Wayne D. Rasmussen, Vivian Wiser, and Jane M. Porter, Century of Ser vice: The First 100 Years of the United States

notes to pages 100 –103

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Department of Agriculture (Washington: USDA, 1963), 157–58; Gladys L. Baker and Wayne D. Rasmussen, “Economic Research in the Department of Agriculture: A Historical Perspective,” Agricultural Economic Research 27, no. 3–4 (July– Oct. 1975): 59. A leading USDA policy analyst noted this mid-decade shift (Mordecai Ezekiel, “Schisms in Agricultural Policy,” JFE 24, no. 2 [May 1942]: 465– 67). 45. Wallace, “The States, the Regions and the Nation,” Proceedings of the 49th Annual Convention of the Association of Land-Grant Colleges and Universities, 1935, ed. Charles A. McCue (Wilmington, Del: Cann Bros., 1936), 39–40. 46. Wallace, “States,” 39–40; Tolley, “Regional Adjustments and Democratic Planning,” Proceedings of the 49th Annual Convention of the Association of Land-Grant Colleges and Universities, 1935, ed. Charles A. McCue (Wilmington, Del: Cann Bros., 1936), 110; Tolley, “Cooperative Land Use Planning,” 18 Oct. 1940, 4– 6, in “Howard R. Tolley” folder, NAL; Allin, “Is Planning Compatible?,” 512; Wilson, “Progress of Agricultural Planning,” National Conference on Planning (Chicago: National Society of Planning Officials, 1941), 107; Gray, Land Planning, 11; Allin, “Historical Background”; Kirkendall, Social Scientists, 136. Earlier, Kirkendall linked the regional, county, and educational programs of 1935; see his “Howard Tolley and Agricultural Planning in the 1930s,” AH 39, no. 1 (Jan. 1965): 29. 47. Tolley, “Regional Adjustments”; Allin, “Is Planning Compatible?,” 512; Black and Westcott, Rural Planning, 120–21; Kirkendall, Social Scientists, 137. 48. Wallace, “States,” 39; Tolley, “Regional Adjustments,” 111; Allin, “County Agricultural Adjustment Planning,” Planning for City, State, Region and Nation, Proceedings of the Joint Conference on Planning (Chicago: American Society of Planning Officials, 1936), 66–71; AAA Program Planning Division, Regional Problems in Agricultural Adjustment (Washington: GPO, 1935); Westcott, “Evolution,” 166–70; Kirkendall, Social Scientists, 138. 49. Wallace, “States,” 39–41; Tolley, “Regional Adjustments,” 110, 117; Wallace, “Democracy in Planning,” 55; Wallace, “The Department as I Have Known It,” in Lecture Series in Honor of the United States Department of Agriculture: Centennial Year, ed. Wayne D. Rasmussen (Washington: USDA), 1961), 26–27. 50. F. F. Elliott, “Significant Trends in Planning for American Agriculture,” 5 May 1941, 34–36, box 2, entry 53, RG 83, NACP; Baker et al., Century, 158, 166– 69, 252–53; Kirkendall, Social Scientists, 144–45. 51. Wallace, “Democracy in Planning,” 55; AAA Program Planning Division, “The County Planning Project: A Statistical Summary of Results Obtained in 1935–36,” box 1, entry 25 RG 83, NACP; K. J. Nicholson, “Forerunners of Unified Programs,” LPR 2, no. 3 (May–June 1939); Allin, “Historical Background”; Allin, “Is Planning Compatible?,” 513; Allin, “County Planning,” 293; USDA, Planning, 8; Black and Westcott, Rural Planning, 120–24; Baker et al., Century, 252–53; Kirkendall, Social Scientists, 139–40, 155–57. 52. Tolley, “County Agricultural Planning Gets Its Second Wind,” ESR 7, no. 9 (Sept. 1936): 129–30; “County Agricultural Planning and County Participation” [1936], box 1, entry 25, RG 83, NACP; USDA, “Agricultural Adjustment Planning in Selected Counties for 1937,” ibid.; USDA, “Next Steps in County Agricultural

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Adjustment Planning,” 21 Sept. 1936, ibid.; Allin, “County Agricultural”; Westcott, “Evolution,” 178. 53. AAA, “County Planning Project.” 54. Extension Service, USDA, “Resume of Experience in County Agricultural Planning,” 1938, box 2, entry 208, RG 83, NACP; USDA, “Suggested Objectives and General Policy for County Agricultural Planning Project,” 10 May 1937, box 1, entry 25, RG 83, NACP; Tolley, “County Agricultural”; “County Agricultural Planning”; USDA, “Agricultural Adjustment”; USDA, “Next Steps”; Allin, “County Agricultural”; Westcott, “Evolution,” 174– 87. In mid-1936 the program’s name changed to the County Agricultural Adjustment Planning Project, although it was referred to by different labels, including the County Agricultural Planning Project. 55. Tolley, “County Agricultural”; Nicholson, “Forerunners,” 32; USDA, “Agricultural Adjustment”; USDA, “Suggested”; USDA, Planning, 21–22; Wilson, “Progress,” 106–7; BAE, Foundations of Land Use Planning: A Study Guide (Washington: USDA, 1940), 75. 56. Letter, Allin to Wilson, 20 Feb. 1937, Series I, NAL; Allin, “County Agricultural”; Allin, “Is Planning Compatible?,” 512–13; Tolley, “County Agricultural”; USDA, “Next Steps.” 57. Allin, “Sound Agricultural Planning,” Proceedings of the 51st Annual Convention of the Association of Land-Grant Colleges and Universities, ed. William L. Slate (New Haven: Quinnipiack Press, 1937), 130; Allin, “County Agricultural,” 67– 69; Wilson, “Progress,” 107; Extension Service, “Resume”; Allin, “Is Planning Compatible?,” 515–20; Westcott, “Evolution,” 175– 80. 58. H. G. Bolster, “Report of County Agricultural Adjustment Planning Project for Montana,” 27 May 1936, box 27, MLW Papers. Iowa also included county planning as part of this adult education initiative (P. C. Taff to Roy F. Hendrickson, letter and report on “Rural Discussion Groups in Iowa, 1935–1936,” 27 Nov. 1935, 8, box 2, entry 34, RG 16, NACP). Both Westcott (“Evolution,” 170– 74) and Taylor (“New Deal,” 237–41) treat adult education together with the county planning project, and Allin (“Historical Background,” 14) stresses Wilson’s emphasis on education in planning. 59. Taeusch, “Schools of Philosophy for Farmers,” USDA, Farmers in a Changing World: The Yearbook of Agriculture, 1940 (Washington: GPO, 1940), 1111–24; Taeusch, “Freedom of Assembly,” Ethics 63 (1952): 33–43; David Lachman, “Democratic Ideology and Agricultural Policy: ‘Program Study and Discussion’ in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1934–1946,” MS thesis, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1991. 60. Wilson, “The Reminiscences of Milburn Lincoln Wilson,” Columbia Oral History Collection, 2091; NA, “National Project, Schools on National Agriculture Policy and Philosophical Aspects of Contemporary Civilization,” n.d. (box 6, entry 32, RG 83, NACP). 61. Taeusch, “Freedom”; Taeusch, “Schools”; Lachman, “Democratic Ideology.” 62. Tolley, “The Program Planning Division of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration,” JFE 16, no. 4 (Oct. 1934): 583– 90; Gray, Land Planning, 30–32, 13; Margaret R. Purcell, “A Quarter Century of Land Economics in the Department of

notes to pages 107– 9

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Agriculture, 1919–1944,” 1945, 12–14, in “U.S. Department of Agriculture,” NAL; Leonard A. Salter Jr., A Critical Review of Research in Land Economics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1948), 28–29; Westcott, “Evolution,” 152– 65; H. H. Wooten, The Land Utilization Program, 1934 to 1964, USDA Agricultural Economic Report No. 85 (Washington: GPO, 1965), 4– 6, 82. On Gray’s work, see Phillips, This Land, 107–13; and Gregg, Managing Mountains, 175– 97. 63. Early in the New Deal (July 1933), the Public Works Administration appointed a National Planning Board, which superseded the two land-use committees that had grown from the National Land Utilization Conference held at the University of Chicago in 1931 (see chapter 3). In June 1934 President Roosevelt replaced the PWA planning unit with the NRB. A year later FDR changed its name to the National Resources Committee. In mid-1939 it was absorbed into the new National Resources Planning Board, which became the planning arm of the President’s Executive Office. It lasted until the conservative Congress of 1943 killed it and many other progressive programs of the New Deal. See Marion Clawson, New Deal Planning: The National Resources Planning Board (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), and Patrick D. Reagan, Designing a New America: The Origins of New Deal Planning, 1890–1943 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999); Gaus and Wolcott, Public Administration, 143. 64. National Resources Board, A Report on National Planning and Public Works in Relation to Natural Resources and Including Land Use and Water Resources with Findings and Recommendations, Part II: Report of the Land Planning Committee (Washington: GPO, 1934), 89–251; Tolley, “Program Planning”; Gaus and Wolcott, Public Administration, 143; Hooker, “Land Utilization”; Purcell, “Quarter Century”; Salter, Critical Review, 28–29; Westcott, “Evolution,” 152– 65; Wooten, Land, 4– 6, 82; Lehman, Public Values, 18–23. For a useful summary of this historic report by its main author, see Gray, Land Planning, 10–31. 65. The RA’s Land Use Planning Section represented a huge expansion in scope and personnel of the BAE’s old Land Economics Division, still directed by Gray. As before, the two units effectively operated as one, even though until January 1937 the RA was an independent agency not in the USDA. The new RA land-use section was directed by Ernest Wiecking, who, like many others under Gray in both the RA and the BAE, was a Wisconsin-trained institutional economist. See Tolley, Report of the Chief of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, 1939 (Washington: GPO, 1939), 10–12; USDA, Planning, 40–44; Gaus and Wolcott, Public Administration, 143; Purcell, “Quarter Century,” 18–20; Salter, Critical Review, 28–31. 66. V. Webster Johnson, “Twenty-Five Years of Progress: Division of Land Economics,” JLE 21, no. 1 (Feb. 1945): 58– 60; Baker et al., Century, 500–502; Purcell, “Quarter Century,” 28–30; Salter, Critical Review, 31–32; Wooten, Land, 12–13. 67. Gaus, “Agricultural Policy,” 293– 94; Eisenhower and Kimmel, “Old and New,” 1131; Allin, “County Planning,” 293; Wilson, “Planning in the New Structure,” in “Excerpts and Pertinent References on the Scope and Functions of the Reconstituted BAE,” 51, box 9, entry 25, RG 83, NACP; Tolley, “Cooperative,” 6; Elliott, “Economic,” 27; USDA, Planning, 5– 6; Loomis and Ensminger, “Governmental Administration,” 43; Gaus and Wolcott, Public Administration, 156; Blaisdell, Government, 178; Lord,

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notes to pages 110 –12

Agrarian Revival, 193– 95; Black and Westcott, Rural Planning, 127–29; Held and Clawson, Soil, 44. 68. Ellery Foster, “The Development of Rural Land-Use Planning Committees: A Historical Sketch,” Planners’ Journal 8, no. 2 (April–June 1942): 6; Eisenhower and Kimmel, “Old and New,” 1131; Allin, “County Planning,” 292– 93; Allin, “Historical Background”; Lord, Agrarian Revival, 194– 95; USDA, Planning, 5– 9; Tolley, “Cooperative,” 6; Gaus and Wolcott, Public Administration, 152; Gaus, “Agricultural Policy,” 294; McConnell, Decline, 116. 69. Tolley made this administrative move because he was not getting Extension support in turning the AAA toward more soil conservation (e.g., grassland and livestock farming) and less toward surplus crops (i.e., cotton, tobacco, corn, wheat); this indeed was one of the main goals of national land-use planning. See Allin, “County Planning,” 294; Eisenhower and Kimmel, “Old and New,” 1131; USDA, Planning, 8– 9; Blaisdell, Government, 178; Loomis and Ensminger, “Governmental Administration,” 43; Gaus and Wolcott, Public Administration, 373; Lord, Agrarian Revival, 193– 95; Black and Westcott, Rural Planning, 127–34; Kirkendall, Social Scientists, 152–53; Held and Clawson, Soil, 44. 70. Wallace, “The Importance of Planning in the Development of Agricultural Programs” box 12, entry 217, RG 83, NACP; Dale Clark, “The Farmer as Co-Administrator,” Public Opinion Quarterly 3, no. 3 (July 1939): 487– 88; Jean Choate, Disputed Ground: Farm Groups That Opposed the New Deal Agricultural Program (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2002); Loomis and Ensminger, “Governmental Administration,” 43–46; USDA, Planning, 7–10, 21–22; Blaisdell, Government, 178; Gaus and Wolcott, Public Administration, 150–53; Gaus, “Agricultural Policy,” 293; Eisenhower and Kimmel, “Old and New,” 1131–34; Bushrod W. Allin, “The Land Use Program,” 2 March 1939, box 1, BWA Papers; Allin, “Agricultural Planning, County,” 19 Dec. 1939, box 1, BWA Papers; Nicholson, “Forerunners,” 34; BAE, Foundations, 75; Wilson, “Progress,” 106–7. See my discussion of the County Planning Project above. 71. Fumiaki Kubo, “Henry A. Wallace and Radical Politics in the New Deal,” Japanese Journal of American Studies 4 (1991): 37–76; Carl C. Taylor, Helen W. Wheeler, and E. L. Kirkpatrick, Disadvantaged Classes in American Agriculture, USDA, FSA and BAE cooperating, Social Research Report No. 8 (Washington, 1938); Gray, “Disadvantaged Rural Classes,” JFE 20, no. 1 (Feb. 1938): 71– 85; Wilson, “Problem of Poverty in Agriculture,” JFE 22, no. 1 (Feb. 1940): 10–29; Allin, “Historical Background”: Tolley, “Cooperative”; Loomis and Ensminger, “Governmental Administration,” 43–46; Lord, “M. L. Wilson, Nutritionist (Part III, Concluding a Contemporary Memoir),” The Land 2, no. 4 (Spring 1943): 312 (emphasis added); Lord, Wallaces, 460– 62; Lord, Agrarian Revival, 181– 83; Blaisdell, Government, 178; McConnell, Decline, 118; Conkin, Tomorrow, 180; Saloutos, American Farmer, 238–44. 72. Wallace, New Frontiers (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1934), 174–75, 200; USDA, Planning, 4–10; Wilson, “Farmer Participation,” Soil Conservation 4, no. 2 (Aug. 1938): 30–31; Taylor, “The Contribution of Sociology to Agriculture,” in USDA, Farmers in a Changing World: The Yearbook of Agriculture, 1940 (Washington: GPO, 1940), 1044, 1049; Allin, “Land Use,” 6; Allin, “Is Planning Compatible?,” 517; Allin, “His-

notes to pages 112–17

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torical Background”; Tolley, “Cooperative,” 4– 6; Wilson, “Progress,” 107; Gaus and Wolcott, Public Administration, 473; Clark, “Farmer,” 487–88; USDA, Land Use, 3; Eisenhower and Kimmel, “Old and New,” 1131–34; Foster and Vogel, “Cooperative,” 1150; Foster, “Development of Rural Land-Use Planning,” 5– 6; Loomis and Ensminger, “Governmental Administration,” 43–46; Elliott, “Economic Implications,” 23–27; Lord, Agrarian Revival, 181– 83; Blaisdell, Government, 178; Kubo, “Henry A.” 73. Allin, “County Planning,” 296; Gaus and Wolcott, Public Administration, 153– 58; Eisenhower and Kimmel, “Old and New,” 1132–34; Westcott, “Evolution,” 188– 99; Black and Westcott, Rural Planning, 127–33; Gaus, “Agricultural Policy,” 295; Baker et al., Century of Ser vice, 254–57; Kirkendall, Social Scientists, 151–54.

Chapter 6. Reinventing Education, Research, and Planning Epigraph. Chew, The United States Department of Agriculture: Its Structure and Functions, Miscellaneous Publication No. 88 (Washington: GPO, 1940), 20. 1. Allin, “What Kind of Agriculture Do We Want?” 23 Dec. 1958, folder 5, box 4, BWA Papers; Allin, “County Planning Project,” JFE 22, no. 1 (Feb. 1940): 295; Ellen Sorge Parks, “Experiment in the Democratic Planning of Public Agricultural Activity,” PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, 1947. 2. For useful overviews, see Wilson, “The New Department of Agriculture,” 13 Jan. 1939, in “M. L. Wilson” folder, NAL; USDA, Planning for a Permanent Agriculture, Misc. Pub. 351 (Washington: GPO, 1939), 1–10; USDA, Land Use Planning Under Way (Washington: GPO, 1940), 1–4; John M. Gaus and Leon O. Wolcott with Verne B. Lewis, Public Administration and the United States Department of Agriculture (Chicago: Public Administration Service, 1940), 154–59; Tolley, The Farmer Citizen at War (New York: Macmillan, 1943), 90, passim; John Donald Black and George William Westcott, Rural Planning of One County: Worcester County, Massachusetts (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959) 128–38; Richard S. Kirkendall, Social Scientists and Farm Politics in the Age of Roosevelt (Columbia: University of Missouri, 1966), 156– 66; Allin, “County Planning”; Parks, “Experiment.” 3. For the Mount Weather agenda and attendees, see “Persons invited to the Joint Conference on Federal-State Relations and Program Planning,” folder “The Mt. Weather Meeting” (D1, IX, C2b), NAL; see also Milton S. Eisenhower and Roy L. Kimmel, “Old and New in Agricultural Organization,” Farmers in a Changing World: The Yearbook of Agriculture, 1940 (Washington: GPO, 1940), 1132–34; Tolley, “Cooperative Land Use Planning,” 2, 18 Oct. 1940, “Howard R. Tolley” folder, NAL; Russell Lord, The Agrarian Revival: A Study of Agricultural Extension (New York: American Association for Adult Education, 1939), 193– 96; Lord, The Wallaces of Iowa (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1947), 435; Wallace, “Memorandum Describing Departmental Organization,” 6 Oct. 1938, reprinted in Gaus and Wolcott, Public Administration, 468– 69; John M. Gaus, “Agricultural Policy and Administration in the American Federal System,” in Federalism Mature and Emergent, ed. Arthur W. Macmahon (New York: Russell and Russell, 1962), 295; George William Westcott, “The Evolution of Rural Planning: An Important Area for Strengthening the Democratic Processes and Optimizing the General Welfare,” PhD

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notes to pages 117–20

diss., Harvard University, 1955, 200–210; Gladys L. Baker, Wayne D. Rasmussen, Vivian Wiser, and Jane M. Porter, Century of Service: The First 100 Years of the United States Department of Agriculture (Washington: USDA, 1963), 254–60; Allin, “County Planning,” 294– 96; USDA, Planning, 3–5; USDA, Land Use, 3–4; Gaus and Wolcott, Public Administration, 157–59; Black and Westcott, Rural Planning, 133–37; Kirkendall, Social Scientists, 157– 61. It is a measure of the importance of the Mount Weather document that it was reprinted in both Lord, Agrarian Revival, and Gaus and Wolcott, Public Administration, as well as its continuing significance over twenty years later, as Black and Westcott reprinted it in Rural Planning. 4. “Joint Statement by the Association of Land Grant Colleges and Universities and the Department of Agriculture on Building Agricultural Land Use Programs,” 8 July 1938, reprinted in Gaus and Wolcott, Public Administration, 463– 64. Hereafter I cite this document as “Mt. Weather.” 5. “Mt. Weather,” 464– 65. 6. Ibid.; Wallace, “Memorandum,” 468. 7. Wilson, “The Extension Service Marches On,” Extension Service Circular 348 (Dec. 1940), 1, 10; Wilson, “Progress of Agricultural Planning,” in National Conference on Planning (Chicago: American Society of Planning Officials, 1941), 107– 9; Wilson, “Two Years of Land Use Planning,” Proceedings of the 54th Annual Convention of the Association of Land Grant Colleges and Universities, 1940, ed. William L. Slate (New Haven: Quinnipiack Press, 1940), 162– 64; Wilson, “New Department”; Tolley, “Planning Public Programs for Agriculture,” ESR 10, no. 3 (March 1939): 36; Allin, “Historical Background of the United States Department of Agriculture,” 4 Oct. 1940, 14, in “Bushrod W. Allin” folder, NAL; Eisenhower and Kimmel, “Old and New,” 1135: Gaus and Wolcott, Public Administration, 158; Black and Westcott, Rural Planning, 135. The two agrarian intellectuals least involved in Mount Weather were also the two most skeptical of it and its follow-on agreements with the state Extensions; see, e.g., L. C. Gray to Tolley, 19 Jan. 1939, and Carl Taylor to Tolley, 20 Jan. 1939, both in box 1 (Records Relating to LUP, 1938–48), entry 1, RG 83, NACP. 8. Wallace, “Memorandum,” 468– 69. Wallace’s original order was entitled “Memorandum for Chiefs of Bureaus and Offices” (box 1, entry 1, RG 83, NACP) but is otherwise identical to the 1940 reprint cited herein. See also Wilson, “New Department.” 9. Wallace, “Memorandum,” 469. 10. Wallace, “Administrative Orders Affecting the Bureau of Agricultural Economics,” 6 Oct. 1938, reprinted in Gaus and Wolcott, Public Administration, 475–76; Wallace, “Establishment of the Agricultural Program Board,” 6 Oct. 1938, reprinted in Gaus and Wolcott, Public Administration, 483– 84; Wallace, “Memorandum,” 470–71; Black and Westcott, Rural Planning, 139; Eisenhower and Kimmel, “Old and New,” 1136; USDA, Planning, 4–7; Allin, “County Planning,” 296. 11. Wallace, “Memorandum No. 783,” 6 Oct. 1938, reprinted in Gaus and Wolcott, Public Administration, 477–78; Arthur W. Macmahon and John D. Millett, Federal Administrators: A Biographical Approach to the Problem of Departmental Management (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), 72–74; Gladys L. Baker and Wayne D.

notes to pages 121–24

301

Rasmussen, “Economic Research in the Department of Agriculture: A Historical Perspective,” Agricultural Economics Review 27, nos. 3–4 (July– Oct. 1975): 59; Eisenhower and Kimmel, “Old and New,” 1136; USDA, Planning, 7; Kirkendall, Social Scientists, 150. The AAA Program Planning Division was effectively, if not formally, transferred to the BAE; see Wallace, “Administrative Orders,” 476; Gaus and Wolcott, Public Administration, 266; Baker et al., Century of Ser vice, 494–500. 12. Saloutos and Hicks, Agricultural Discontent in the Middle West, 1900–1939 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1951), 522; Gaus and Wolcott, Public Administration, 158–59; USDA, Planning, 4; Parks, “Experiment”; Lord, “M. L. Wilson, Nutritionist (Part III, Concluding a Contemporary Memoir),” The Land 2, no. 4 (Spring 1943): 313. 13. USDA, BAE, BAE Handbook (Washington: USDA, 1939), 3; Tolley, Report of the Chief of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, 1939 (Washington: GPO, 1939), 1–2; Tolley, “Contribution of Agricultural Economics to the General Welfare,” JFE 21, no. 1 (Feb. 1939): 9, 15–18; Wilson, “Address by M. L. Wilson,” Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Convention of the Association of Land Grant Colleges and Universities, 1938, ed. William L. Slate (New Haven: Quinnipiack Press, 1938), 86; Wilson, “New Department”; Carl C. Taylor, “Social Science and Social Action in Agriculture,” Social Forces 20, no. 2 (Dec. 1941): 154; USDA, Planning, 6–7; Gaus and Wolcott, Public Administration, 311; Macmahon and Millett, Federal Administrators, 70–74, 365; Baker and Rasmussen, “Economic Research,” 59. Wallace and Wilson repeatedly attest to the newness of the BAE in “Excerpts and Pertinent References on the Scope and Functions of the Reconstituted Bureau of Agricultural Economics,” 5, 51–53, box 9, entry 25, RG 83, NACP. A then-young division head recalled that the BAE felt so reinvigorated after 1938 because of its newfound reformism, in contrast to its stodginess earlier in the New Deal; see Johnson, From the St. Croix, 140–41. 14. Tolley, Report, 1939, 1–2. 15. USDA, BAE Handbook, 30–32; pages 36–38 of this document, “issued for the use of the staff,” list the state and regional BAE representatives by name and location. See also Allin, “County Planning,” 296; Tolley, Report, 1939, 3–4, 10–11; L. C. G. [Gray], “Memorandum on Local Planning,” 9 Dec. 1938, box 8, entry 157, RG 83, NACP; A. G. Black, “Memorandum for Dr. Bushrod W. Allin,” 8 Feb. 1938, box 8, entry 25, RG 83, NACP. 16. Tolley, Report, 1939, 9–12; Tolley, Report, 1940, 51; H. H. Wooten, The Land Utilization Program, 1934 to 1964, USDA Agricultural Economic Report No. 85 (Washington: GPO, 1965), 35–36; L. C. Gray, “Evolution of the Land Use Program of the United States Department of Agriculture,” 22 March 1939, box 1, entry 213, RG 83, NACP; “Meeting of the Field Men, March 28, 1939,” 50, 60, typed transcription, box 2, entry 25, RG 83, NACP. The difficulties were exacerbated by the frequent administrative moves. In 1934 Gray’s field staff started with the National Resources Board and the AAA Program Planning Division, moved to the RA in 1935, then to the BAE in 1937 (see chapter 5). A year later, as part of Wallace’s reorganization of USDA, they were again transferred, this time within the BAE but to the brand-new Division of State and Local Planning under Allin. With all this near-annual reassignment and redirection, the field men had reason for concern, even anxiety, about their new roles. In fact, no one could have been

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notes to pages 125–32

well prepared for the job since the field of rural planning was just emerging, largely in their work. 17. Tolley, Report, 1939, 7; USDA, BAE Handbook, 27–28; Allin, “County Planning,” 299. Allin, “Historical Background,” 14, emphasizes Wilson’s stress on education in the planning process. 18. Likert, “Democracy in Agriculture: Why and How?” in USDA, Farmers in a Changing World: The Yearbook of Agriculture, 1940 (Washington: GPO, 1940), 994–1002; USDA, BAE Handbook, 25–29; Baker et al., Century of Ser vice, 499. 19. Tolley, Report, 1939, 2–3; USDA, BAE Handbook, 3–4; Baker et al., Century of Ser vice, 261– 62. 20. Eisenhower and Kimmel, “Old and New,” 1136. 21. Allin to Paul Appleby, 14 March 1939, box 1, entry 213, RG 83, NACP. 22. “Agenda for BAE Conference,” box 1, entry 213, RG 83, NACP. 23. Wallace, “The Importance of Planning in the Development of Agricultural Programs” box 12, entry 217, RG 83, NACP. See Russell Lord, “Introduction: ‘Young Henry,’ ” 8–15, 95– 96, in Wallace, Democracy Reborn (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1944), and Lord, Wallaces, 334, on Wallace’s notable speaking style. 24. Wallace, “Importance.” 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid. 27. Gray, “Evolution of the Land Use.” This speech, which encapsulated so much of America’s modern land and conservation policy, justifiably became widely distributed as a small offprint. 28. Ibid. 29. Tolley, Report, 1939, 3; USDA, Planning, 4–5. 30. BAE and the Extension Service, USDA, Membership of Land Use Planning Committees, County Planning Series No. 2 (Washington: GPO, 1940), 2, 7; BAE and the Extension Service, USDA, The Land Use Planning Organization, County Planning Series No. 3 (Washington: GPO, 1940), 2; BAE and the Extension Service, USDA, Communities and Neighborhoods in Land Use Planning, County Planning No. 6 (Washington: GPO, 1940), 2–3; BAE Division of State and Local Planning, “Summary of Discussion Meetings on Cooperative Land-Use Planning, Held at Washington, D.C., April 8 to May 6, 1940,” 10–11, box 1, entry 223, RG 83, NACP (attached to a meeting report of 8 Jan. 1941); “Mt. Weather,” 463. 31. BAE, Membership; BAE, Land Use; BAE, Communities; BAE, “Summary,” 16–18, 39. 32. BAE, Land Use, 6; BAE, Membership; BAE, Communities; BAE, “Summary,” 13–14; USDA, Planning, 5; USDA, Land Use, 7; Allin, “County Planning,” 297. 33. BAE, “Summary,” 14–15; USDA, BAE Handbook; BAE, Land Use; Macmahon and Millett, Federal Administrators, 75; Gaus and Wolcott, Public Administration, 158; Black and Westcott, Rural Planning, 139–40. A young BAE economist at the time, Harold F. Breimyer recalled a less efficacious planning process; see his insightful memoir, Over-fulfilled Expectations: A Life and an Era in Rural America (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1991), 135–38.

notes to pages 132–40

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34. BAE and the Extension Service, USDA, “A Forum on County Planning,” Washington, D.C., Nov. 1939, chap. 1, box 1, entry 1, A1 [addition], RG 83, NACP; BAE and Extension Service, USDA, “Report on the Progress of Land-Use Planning During 1939,” 30 Jan. 1940, 12, box 1, entry 26, RG 83, NACP; BAE, “Summary,” 7– 8, 26; USDA, Land Use, 10–11; USDA, BAE Handbook, 31. 35. BAE, “Summary,” 28–29, 9; BAE, “Forum,” chap. 1; Allin, “County Planning,” 299. 36. BAE, “Forum,” chap. 1. 37. Ellery A. Foster and Harold A. Vogel, “Cooperative Land Use Planning: A New Development in Democracy,” Farmers in a Changing World: The Yearbook of Agriculture, 1940 (Washington: GPO, 1940), 1140; BAE, “Summary,” 30–35, 45; USDA, Land Use, 11. The planning leaders in North Dakota claimed, incredibly, that from one-fourth to three-fourths of the farm people within a given community attended these open meetings; H. W. Herbison and John Muehlbeier, “Organization and Operation of Rural LandUse Planning, with Examples from North Dakota,” Planners’ Journal 8, no. 2 (April–June 1942): 13. 38. Ellery Foster, “The Development of Rural Land-Use Planning Committees: A Historical Sketch,” Planners’ Journal 8, no. 2 (April–June 1942): 7; BAE, “Summary,” 33–41; Herbison and Muehlbeier, “Organization,” 5; Foster and Vogel, “Cooperative,” 1142–44. 39. N. S. Hadley, “78 Farmers Make a Map,” LPR 3, no. 1 (1940): 15–21. 40. R. M. Evans et al., “Memorandum for the Secretary, Re: Procedure for Developing a Unified County (or Area) Program,” 2 Feb. 1939, 1–3, 22, box 4, entry 208, RG 83, NACP; BAE, “Forum,” chap. 8; Foster and Vogel, “Cooperative,” 1143–44; Allin, “County Planning,” 297–301. 41. BAE, “Summary,” 49–51; USDA, BAE Handbook, 5– 6; Foster and Vogel, “Cooperative,” 1143–44. 42. USDA, Land Use, 12–25. 43. F. F. Elliott, “We, the People . . . ,” LPR 2, no. 3 (May–June 1939): 6; USDA, BAE Handbook, 5. 44. Tolley, Report, 1939, 2–5; USDA, “Report, 1939,” 1–2. See the combative statement by the Pennsylvania Extension director in Proceedings of the 53rd Annual Convention of the Association of Land-Grant Colleges and Universities, 1939, ed. William L. Slate (New Haven: Quinnipiack Press, 1939), 143–44, as well as the negative response to the planning program by the president of Iowa State College, Charles Edwin Friley, “FederalState Relationships in Agriculture,” ibid., 98–103; and Tolley’s response, ibid., 103–5. 45. USDA, “Report, 1939,” 1– 9. These data for 1 Jan. 1940 are also in USDA, Land Use, 5–10, and “A Year of Land Use Planning,” ESR (April 1940): 53. 46. Allin to Eric England, with 1-p. data attachment, 4 March 1941, box 1, entry 223, RG 83, NACP; BAE Division of State and Local Planning, “Operating Report covering the Cooperative Land-Use Planning Program for the year ended June 30, 1940,” 3– 8, box 1, entry 215, RG 83, NACP; Tolley, Report of the Chief, 1940, 10. 47. BAE, “Operating Report of the Division of State and Local Planning covering the Cooperative Agricultural Planning Program for the year ending June 30, 1941,”

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notes to pages 140 –43

11–15, box 1, entry 215, RG 83, NACP; USDA, “Agricultural Planning in a World at War: A Progress Report covering the Cooperative Agricultural Planning Program for the year ending June 30, 1941,” Jan. 1942, 21–28, box 1, entry 25, RG 83, NACP; Tolley, Report, 1940; Parks, “Experiment,” 6, 112; Westcott, “Evolution,” 235–37; Black and Westcott, Rural Planning, 145. The final annual reports, covering through mid-1941, give 1,891 as the number of planning counties; Parks and Westcott use higher, end-ofyear figures, as does Tolley, Farmer Citizen, 138. 48. BAE, “Operating Report, 1941,” 16–18; USDA, “Agricultural Planning,” 26– 32; Parks, “Experiment,” 6, 112; Westcott, “Evolution,” 235–37; Black and Westcott, Rural Planning, 145; Tolley, Farmer Citizen, 138. 49. Taylor to Carle C. Zimmerman, 20 Feb. 1939, CCT Papers.

Chapter 7. Continuing Education Epigraph. Wilson, “Discussion Time Is Here.” ESR 6, no. 10 (Oct. 1935): i. 1. Wilson credited the Progressive rural educator Kenyon L. Butterfield with urging the use of continuing education instead of adult education because it captured the intended lifelong process of growth and development; Wilson, “What Are the Objectives of Continuing Education?,” Rural America 17, no. 6 (Sept. 1939): 8. 2. For an overview of the program, see Carl Taeusch, “Schools of Philosophy for Farmers,” USDA, Farmers in a Changing World: The Yearbook of Agriculture, 1940 (Washington: GPO, 1940), 1111–24; for the numbers in this paragraph, see A. Drummond Jones, “Farmer Discussion Is Adult Education,” Adult Education Bulletin 5 (June 1941): 122; Wilson, “Rural America Discusses Democracy,” Public Opinion Quarterly 5, no. 2 (June 1941): 291; Taeusch, “Freedom of Assembly,” Ethics 63, no. 1 (Oct. 1952): 41. Few historians have treated this educational program; see Richard S. Kirkendall, Social Scientists and Farm Politics in the Age of Roosevelt (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1966), 140–43, 187– 90; Harry C. McDean, “M. L. Wilson and Agricultural Reform in Twentieth Century America,” PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1969, 414–25. The fullest analysis is David Lachman, “Democratic Ideology and Agricultural Policy: ‘Program Study and Discussion’ in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1934–1946,” MS thesis, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1991; see also Jess Gilbert, “Low Modernism and the Agrarian New Deal,” in Fighting for the Farm, ed. Jane Adams (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 134–38. For the most recent and in-depth treatment, see Andrew Jewett, “The Social Sciences, Philosophy, and the Cultural Turn in the 1930s USDA,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 49 (Fall 2013): 396–427. For the general intellectual context, see Jewett, Science, Democracy, and the American University: From the Civil War to the Cold War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). For parallel efforts (but nothing on the USDA), see David Goodman, “Democracy and Public Discussion in the Progressive and New Deal Eras: From Civic Competence to the Expression of Opinion,” Studies in American Political Development 18 (Fall 2004): 81–111. 3. Wallace, “Thomas Jefferson: Farmer, Educator, and Democrat,” Proceedings, 51st Annual Convention, Association of Land-Grant Colleges and Universities, ed.

notes to pages 143–47

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William L. Slate (New Haven: Quinnipiack Press, 1937), 338–46; Wilson, “The Place of the Department of Agriculture in the Evolution of Agricultural Policy,” 11 Dec. 1936, “M. L. Wilson” folder, NAL; Wilson, “Education for Democracy,” Rural America 14 (Sept. 1936): 3– 6; Wilson, “On Using Democracy,” LPR 2 (Jan.–Feb. 1939): 1–4; Tolley, The Farmer Citizen at War (New York: Macmillan, 1943), 8, 108. Cf. Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). 4. Wilson, “On Using Democracy,” 4. “The Ways of Democracy” is a chapter title from the book version of the USDA lectures on democracy in 1938 (see below): Wilson, Democracy Has Roots (New York: Carrick and Evans, 1939). 5. Wilson, “Great Decisions upon Which the Future of Rural Life Will Depend,” Country Life Programs: Proceedings, 18th American Country Life Conference, 1935 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1936), 95, 104; Wilson, “Rural America Discusses”; Wilson, “What Are the Objectives?,” 10. 6. Russell Lord, The Wallaces of Iowa (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1947), 323, 382; “Address of Alvin Johnson,” 18 May 1946, file D19, box 3, MLW Papers. 7. Wilson, “Rural Discussion and National Democracy,” Rural America 15, no. 5 (May 1937): 6–7; Wilson, “On Using Democracy,” 4; Wilson, “What Are the Objectives?,” 8–10; Wilson, “Education for Democracy”; Wilson, “Great Decisions,” 97. 8. Wilson, “Place of the Department,” 6–7; Wilson in O. E. Baker, Ralph Borsodi, and M. L. Wilson, Agriculture in Modern Life (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1939), 266. 9. Wilson, Agriculture, 280; Wilson, “Beyond Economics,” USDA, Farmers in a Changing World: The Yearbook of Agriculture, 1940 (Washington: GPO, 1940), 929; Wilson, “Two Years of Land-Use Planning,” Proceedings, 54th Annual Convention, Association of Land-Grant Colleges and Universities, ed. William L. Slate (New Haven: Quinnipiack Press, 1940), 162; Wilson, “Education for Democracy,” 4–5; Wilson, “What Are the Objectives?”; Wilson, “Great Decisions,” 98– 99; Wilson, “Rural Discussion,” 6–7. For a similar critique of traditional education, see Taeusch, “Schools,” 1122. 10. Wilson, “Discussion Time Is Here,” ESR 6, no. 10 (Oct. 1935): i; Wilson, “How Much Obligation?,” ESR 12, no. 2 (Feb. 1941): i; Wilson, “Great Decisions,” 113; Wilson, “Education for Democracy,” 4– 6; Wilson, “On Using Democracy.” 11. Tolley, Report of the Chief of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, 1939 (Washington: GPO, 1939), 7; McDean, “Wilson,” 422–25. Phillip Glick, who worked closely with Wilson, recalled the educational unit as Wilson’s attempt to bring the Wisconsin “milieu” of John Commons into the USDA and thence to rural America. 12. Roy F. Hendrickson, “Statement on Discussion Group Materials,” Agricultural Library Notes 10, no. 3 (March 1935): 108– 9, box 3, entry 34, RG 16, NACP; “National Project Discussion Groups and County Forums on National Agricultural Policy” [mid-1935], box 6, entry 33, RG 16, NACP; P. C. Taff to Roy F. Hendrickson, and attached report, “Rural Discussion Groups in Iowa, 1935–1936,” 27 Nov. 1935, 7, box 2, entry 34, RG 16, NACP; Extension Service and AAA, USDA, Do Farmers Want the Federal Government to Help Them Deal with Farm Problems?, DS-A, No. 2 (Washington: GPO, 1935), 3; Russell Lord, The Agrarian Revival: A Study of Agricultural Extension (New York: American Association for Adult Education, 1939), 165–68; Gladys

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notes to pages 148–50

Baker, The County Agent (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939), 83– 85; A. F. Wileden, “The Sociologist’s Role in Public Policy Discussions,” RS 24, no. 2 (June 1959): 133–35; John M. Brewster, A Philosopher Among Economists: Selected Works of John M. Brewster, J. Patrick Madden and David E. Brewster, eds. (Philadelphia: J. T. Murphy, 1970), 3; Harry C. McDean, “Wilson and the Origins of Federal Farm Policy in the Great Plains, 1909–1914,” Montana 34, no. 4 (Autumn 1984): 57–59; McDean, “Wilson,” 414–21. 13. “Report of the Forum and Discussion Group Project, USDA, 1934–35,” June 1935, 2, box 3, entry 34, RG 16, NACP: Benson Y. Landis, “Report of the Executive Secretary for A.C.L.A., 1934–35,” Country Life Programs: Proceedings, 18th American Country Life Conference, 1935 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1936), 129–30; “The Discussion Group Program and ‘Education for Democracy,’ ” Farm Population and Rural Life Activities 10, no. 4 (Oct. 1936): 3–5; Hendrickson, “Statement,” 107; P. C. Taff to Roy F. Hendrickson, 2; McDean, “Wilson,” 418–20; George William Westcott, “The Evolution of Rural Planning: An Important Area for Strengthening the Democratic Processes and Optimizing the General Welfare,” PhD diss., Harvard University, 1955, 171– 72. Westcott was the discussion project leader for Massachusetts. 14. “Discussion Group Topic No. 8: ‘Is the Farm Laborer Getting a Square Deal?,’ ” “Discussion Groups” folder, Lincoln Room, MLW Papers. Both Amberson and Thomas had been instrumental the year before in aiding the formation of the interracial Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union (STFU) in eastern Arkansas. A prominent critic of New Deal agricultural policy, the STFU protested the AAA’s discriminatory payments to plantation owners to the detriment of sharecroppers; see Donald H. Grubbs, Cry from the Cotton: The Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union and the New Deal (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971). The AAA’s education program continued to cite Thomas’s book as well as that of his fellow Socialist Howard Kester titled Revolt Among the Sharecroppers (1936) and listed the STFU specifically as a bona fide farm organization. Most traditional farm leaders considered the two Socialists beyond the pale, but AAA publications included them as critics of its own programs. For an informal firstyear report on the continuing education effort, see Roy F. Hendrickson, “A Crop of New Ideas on the Farms,” Journal of Adult Education 8 (April 1936): 177– 80. 15. “Report,” 24–25; Wileden to Roy Hendrickson, 1 July 1935, letter and attached report, June 1935, box 2, entry 34, RG 16, NACP; Wileden, “Do We Still Believe in Democracy?,” ESR 6, no. 6 (June 1935): 67. Wileden had earlier started a similar discussion program in rural Wisconsin and led this one in his home state. 16. Miller, “Design for Policy-Making,” LPR 3, no. 3 (May–June 1940): 31; Miller, Yours for Tomorrow: A Personal Testament of Freedom (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1943), 110, 141–45; Francis Pickens Miller, Man from the Valley: Memoirs of a 20thCentury Virginian (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971), 82– 86, 158; “Discussion Group Program,” 4; Brewster, Philosopher, 3–4. 17. “Forty Minnesota Counties Discuss the Situation,” ESR 7, no. 1 (Jan. 1936): 2; “Discussion in the Modern Mode,” ESR 7, no. 3 (March 1936): 42; “Discussion Project,” box 5, entry 34, RG 16, NACP; Benson Y. Landis, “Memorandum regarding Discussion Program in Virginia,” 15 May 1936, box 5, entry 34, RG 16, NACP; Taff to

notes to pages 150 –54

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Hendrickson; Baker, County Agent, 85. Numerous state reports dated March 1936 are in box 577, entry 19, RG 83, NACP. 18. Hendrickson, “Statement”; Westcott, “Evolution,” 172–73; Taeusch, “Schools,” 1119. 19. Donald C. Blaisdell, “Contributions by the Department to the Discussion Group Project, 1936–37,” 5 Aug. 1936, box 6, entry 39, RG 16, NACP; USDA, “Helps for Discussion,” August 1937, box 6, entry 34, RG 16, NACP; Taeusch, “Discussing Public Policies,” Adult Education Bulletin 4 (Jan. 1940): 46. 20. Extension Service and AAA, USDA, What Part Should Farmers in Your County Take in Making National Agricultural Policy?, DS-8 (Washington: GPO, 1936). 21. Ibid., 6–7; Extension Service and AAA, USDA, Should Farm Ownership Be a Goal of Agricultural Policy?, DS-3 (Washington: GPO, 1936), 7, 13; Extension Service and AAA, USDA, What Kind of Agricultural Policy Is Necessary to Save Our Soil?, DS-7 (Washington: GPO, 1936), 1, 10, 12; Extension Service and AAA, USDA, Is Increased Efficiency in Farming Always a Good Thing?, DS-5 (Washington: GPO, 1936), 1. In the texts, some of these quotations are in capital letters, which I normalize here. 22. See note 21. 23. “Group Discussion Program,” Farm Population and Rural Life Activities 11, no. 1 (Jan. 1937): 18–19; Program Study and Discussion Section, “Report of the Chicago Conference on Discussion Groups in Agriculture,” 10–12 May 1937, 11, box 577, entry 19, RG 83, NACP; Wilson, “A Theory of Agricultural Democracy,” USDA Extension Service Circular 355 (March 1941), 9; Taeusch, “Schools,” 1118; “Discussion Group Program.” 24. USDA, “Outline of Procedure of Regional Schools,” n.d., box 577, entry 19, RG 83, NACP; USDA, “The Educational Value of Types of Discussion,” n.d., box 535, entry 19, RG 83, NACP; Program Section, “Report of Chicago Conference,” 2–12; “Group Discussion Program.” 25. Taeusch to Eric Englund, 12 June 1940, box 577, entry 19, RG 83, NACP; Division, “Activities: Discussion-Leadership Training Conferences,” 6, 2 Jan. 1941, box 535, entry 19, RG 83, NACP; Dale Clark, “The Farmer as Co-Administrator,” Public Opinion Quarterly 3 (July 1939): 490; A. Drummond Jones, “Rural America Revitalizes Democracy,” Journal of Adult Education 12, no. 2 (April 1940): 167; Wilson, “Rural America Discusses,” 291; Taeusch, “Schools,” 1113–18; Taeusch, “Freedom.” 26. Extension Service and AAA, USDA, Discussion: A Brief Guide to Methods, D-1 (Washington: GPO, 1935). 27. Ibid. This methodological emphasis remained throughout the unit’s life; in 1942, it issued a sixty-page bulletin, Group Discussion and Its Techniques: A Bibliographical Review, D-4 (Washington: GPO, 1942). 28. Extension Service and AAA, USDA, What Is the Discussion Leader’s Job?, D-3 (Washington: GPO, 1937). 29. Morris B. Storer to W. S. Middaugh, 27 Jan. 1941, box 176, entry 19, RG 83, NACP; Allin and Taeusch, 4 March 1941, box 535, entry 19, RG 83, NACP; USDA, “Wartime Work Program of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics,” Washington, 1 Jan. 1942, 50; BAE and Extension Service, USDA, Organization of Groups for Discussion and

308

notes to pages 155–59

Action, D-5 (Washington: GPO, 1942), in box 2, entry 223, RG 83, NACP; Taeusch to Eric Englund; Division, “Activities.” 30. USDA [Wilson], Democracy in the Present Crisis, Extension Service Circular 351, March 1941; Wilson, “Rural America Discusses,” 289; see also Ralph Barton Perry, “The Obligations of Citizens in a Democracy,” 25 Feb. 1941, a radio talk for USDA, copy in E-25, MLW Papers. 31. Baker, County Agent, 85. 32. C. B. Loomis, “The Adventures of a Discussion Barn Stormer,” box 6, entry 34, RG 16, NACP. 33. Ibid. 34. Lord, Agrarian Revival, 168. 35. Wilson, “The Reminiscences of Milburn Lincoln Wilson,” Columbia Oral History Collection, Columbia University, 1958, 2065, 2090– 91; Wallace, “The States, the Regions, and the Nation,” Proceedings, 49th Annual Convention, Association of Land-Grant Colleges and Universities, ed. Charles A. McCue (Wilmington, Del.: Cann Bros., 1935), 38–43; Wallace, quoted (1934) in Lord, Agrarian Revival, 168. It was widely remarked that land-grant personnel lacked training in civics and the liberal arts; see Wallace, “A New World, a New Spirit, a New Generation,” 1938 speech, in Wallace, Democracy Reborn: Selected from Public Papers, ed. Russell Lord (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1944), 146; Taeusch, “Discussing Public Policies,” 44–45; Taeusch, “Schools,” 1114; Baker, County Agent, 85; McDean, “Wilson,” 485. 36. “National Project: Schools on National Agricultural Policy and Philosophical Aspects of Contemporary Civilization (rough draft),” n.d. [1935], box 6, entry 33, RG 16, NACP (emphasis added); see Taeusch, “Schools,” 1118. 37. Memo for F. F. Elliott, 24 Feb. 1936, box 6, entry 34, RG 16, NACP; Taeusch, “Adequate Perspectives,” Journal of Adult Education 9 (Oct. 1937): 410; Taeusch, “Schools,” 1115; Jewett, “Social Sciences,” 410; Lord, Agrarian Revival, 168; McDean, “Wilson,” 422. One of the philosophers at the USDA was T. V. Smith, a professor at the University of Chicago and the author of The Democratic Way of Life (1926), which Dewey called “the most adequate discussion of this ideal with which I am acquainted” (The Public and Its Problems, in Later Works, ed. Jo Ann Boydston [Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1988], 2: 327). Smith taught at some of the USDA schools. 38. “A Proposed School for Extension Workers,” n.d., box 6, entry 33, RG 16, NACP; Taeusch, “Schools,” 1114–19; Westcott, “Evolution,” 173. Taeusch and others knew that one four-day school could not educate people; they hoped for follow-up by “institutions better equipped to pursue a continuous educational program.” 39. Taeusch, “Schools,” 1115–23; Taeusch, “Adequate Perspectives,” 412; Taeusch, “Discussing Public,” 45. 40. Taeusch to Wilson, 26 Nov. 1935; Taeusch to Wilson, 29 Oct. 1935 (attached to Tolley to Roy F. Hendrickson, 27 Dec. 1935), box 7, entry 33, RG 16, NACP; Taeusch, “Agriculture Comes of Age,” ESR 6, no. 12 (Dec. 1935): 170; “Schools for Agricultural Workers,” attached to Morris B. Storer to James O. Howard, 12 Oct. 1939, box 577, entry 19, RG 16, NACP; USDA, BAE Handbook (Washington, December 1939), 27, Memo for Elliott; McDean, “Wilson,” 423–25.

notes to pages 160 –66

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41. W. A. Lloyd to Wilson, 23 Oct. 1935, box 7, entry 33, RG 16, NACP; Taeusch to Wilson, 29 Oct. 1935. 42. Glick to Assistant Secretary, 25 Oct. 1935, box 7, entry 33, RG 16, NACP; Lord, Agrarian Revival, 166– 68. 43. “Schools.” Another school outline is in Taeusch, “Schools,” 1115. 44. Division of Program Planning, “Schools for Extension Workers,” n.d., box 7, entry 33, RG 16, NACP. 45. Taeusch, “How Can Philosophy Help the Employee in this Understanding?,” Lectures and Discussions from School of Philosophy for Washington Employees, Forest Service, USDA, 1–3 Oct. 1941, 6, copy in NAL; Milton S. Eisenhower, The President Is Calling (New York: Doubleday, 1974), 80. 46. Father Walsh, “Democracy, its Broad Meaning and its Function in the Social Structure,” Lectures and Discussions, 37–39; Eleanor Roosevelt, “Has Democracy a Universal, Workable Philosophy of Human Relationships in a Complex World?,” 66–70, ibid. The First Lady also published an article in the BAE’s in-house journal: “Let Us Have Faith in Democracy,” LPR 4, no. 1 (Jan. 1942): 20–22. 47. AAA, Division of Program Planning, “Schools for Extension Workers,” n.d., box 7, entry 33, RG 16, NACP. 48. Ibid. 49. Taeusch, “Schools,” 1115–23. 50. Bateman quoted in Lord, Agrarian Revival, 183– 85; Taeusch, “Schools,” 1120; Andrew Jewett, “Social Sciences,” 410. 51. Renne to Wilson, 24 Jan. 1939, box 14, MLW Papers. 52. Tauesch to Tolley, 8 Nov. 1938, box 9, entry 25, RG 83, NACP. 53. Tolley, Report of the Chief of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, 1939 (Washington: GPO, 1939), 7; Tolley, Report of the Chief of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, 1940 (Washington: GPO, 1940), 63; USDA, BAE Handbook, 27; Taeusch, “Schools,” 1112; Morris B. Storer to W. S. Middaugh, 27 Jan. 1941, box 176, entry 19, RG 83, NACP; USDA, “Wartime Work Program of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics,” Washington, 1 Jan. 1942, 50; BAE, “Organization of Groups”; Taeusch to Eric Englund, 12 June 1940, p. 4, box 577, entry 19, RG 83, NACP; Taeusch to England, 13 June 1940, ibid.; Division of Program Study, “Activities-Discussion-Leadership Training Conferences,” 6, 2 Jan. 1941, box 535, entry 19, RG 83, NACP; Allin and Taeusch, 4 March 1941, ibid.; Taylor, “The Place of Democracy in the Department of Agriculture and the Place of the Department in a Democracy at War,” 16 June 1942, box 3, CCT Papers; Gray, “The Land and the People,” 20–22 June 1940, “L. C. Gray” folder, NAL. 54. Taeusch, “Annual Report, Division of Program Study and Discussion to Dr. H. R. Tolley . . . June 30, 1942 [draft]”; “War Activities of the Division of Program Study and Division,” n.d.; Taeusch, “What Are We Fighting For? What Does Democracy Mean to Me?”; Morris B. Storer to Taeusch, 6 Aug. 1942—all in box 535, entry 19, RG 83, NACP. 55. USDA, “Wartime Work Program of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics,” 1 Jan. 1942, 50–51; Morris B. Storer to Taeusch, “The Division’s Job,” box 535, entry 19, RG 83, NACP; Kirkendall, Social Scientists, 237.

310

notes to pages 166 –70

56. BAE, USDA (mimeo), Culture and Agriculture: Cultural Anthropology in Relation to Current Agricultural Problems, 14; Wilson, “Beyond Economics,” 929; Kirkendall, Social Scientists, 185. Another of Wilson’s experiments during 1939–40 was a series of seven “traveling conferences” of regional land-use issues and programs. Participants in these four-day study-tours were professional agricultural workers, led by those responsible for land-use planning in the region. The overall theme was “planning for a more stable agriculture,” and the topics included history, geology, ecology, anthropology, and psychology as well as the more common land-grant sciences. Emphasizing “collective study of the area and its people” and traveling by automobile, the students met with county planning committees, Extension, and state research workers. Wilson touted land-use planning as a “pioneer field” and saw the traveling conferences as a “new experiment” in education. See Wilson, “Making the Plans Click,” ESR (Jan. 1940): 10; Donald C. Blaisdell, “Traveling Conferences Show Regional Land Use Problems,” ESR (March 1940): 39: McDean, “Wilson,” 485– 88. 57. Donald C. Blaisdell, “Special Series of Lectures on Democracy,” box 8, entry 25, RG 83, NACP; Wilson, Democracy Has Roots, 19; Sherman E. Johnson, From the St. Croix to the Potomac: Reflections of a Bureaucrat (Bozeman, Mont.: Big Sky Books, 1974), 143–44. Democracy Has Roots is an oddly presented book. The title page names Wilson as the sole author, but Beard’s preface says that Wilson and Helen Hill Miller “condensed and edited the proceedings” (13), and Wilson admits as much (15–19). The book is an edited summary of sixteen lectures and subsequent discussions melded into seven chapters. Wilson lists the topic of each lecturer and which chapters he or she contributed to, but otherwise readers don’t know who said what. In my treatment below, I refer to specific authors only when their identity is reasonably clear. The USDA journalist Russell Lord, who would have known, also cites Miller as Wilson’s coauthor (Agrarian Revival, 226). 58. Beard, “Government and the Humane Spirit,” LPR 2, no. 5 (Sept.– Oct. 1939): 1– 6; Beard, “Preface,” Democracy Has Roots, 11–14; Wilson, ibid., 29–33; cf. H. A. Wallace, “Beard: The Planner,” New Republic, 1 Jan. 1935; George Soule, “Beard and the Concept of Planning,” in Charles A. Beard: An Appraisal, ed. Howard K. Beale (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1948), 69–71. 59. Wilson, Democracy Has Roots, 26, 40–41, 58– 63; Taylor to Benedict, 19 Feb. 1938, CCT Papers. 60. Democracy Has Roots, 93– 94; cf. Wallace’s similar list, also from 1938, in Democracy Reborn, 141–42. 61. Wilson, Democracy Has Roots, 168– 99. 62. Ibid., 178– 83 (emphasis added). 63. Ibid., 182– 90. 64. Ibid., 195– 99. See also AAA Program Planning Division, “Questions Arising Out of the Staff Conferences on Democracy,” Feb. 4–March 4, 1938, box 5, entry 224, RG 83, NACP. In 1939 Wilson hosted ten other lectures at the USDA in a series titled “Science: Its History, Philosophy, and Relation to Democracy.” Again, the lecturers were leading academic figures, including Morris Cohen of the University of Chicago, with whom Henry Wallace aired a spirited disagreement on the philosophy of science; see “Ten Lectures and Discussions on Science,” NAL.

notes to pages 171–77

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65. “Farm Problems and the Social Sciences,” Farm Population and Rural Life Activities 13, no. 4 (Oct. 15, 1939): 3; BAE, Culture and Agriculture, ii. 66. Lord, “M. L. Wilson, Nutritionist (Part III, Concluding a Contemporary Memoir,” The Land 2, no. 4 (Spring 1943): 314. Jewett, “Social Sciences,” has more on the philosophy and political science conferences. From the former field, see William Ernest Hocking, “A Philosophy of Life for the American Farmer (and Others),” USDA, Farmers in a Changing World: The Yearbook of Agriculture, 1940 (Washington: GPO, 1940), 1056–71. Hocking, a prominent Harvard philosopher, frequented the USDA during these years. He and Cohen (see note 64) were welcomed there even though they were antipragmatists and professional critics of Dewey. 67. “Farm Problems and the Social Sciences,” 3, 6; BAE, Culture and Agriculture, ii, 13. Redfield and Warner reiterated some of these points in “Cultural Anthropology and Modern Agriculture,” USDA, Farmers in a Changing World: The Yearbook of Agriculture, 1940 (Washington: GPO, 1940), 983– 93. 68. BAE, Culture and Agriculture, iii–iv, 10–14. Taylor’s BAE division subsequently carried out six ethnographic studies under a common title, Culture of a Contemporary Rural Community, for example, Edward O. Moe and Carl C. Taylor, Culture of a Contemporary Rural Community: Irwin, Iowa, Rural Life Studies 5 (Washington: USDA, BAE, 1942). Rural sociologists reexamined the places a half century later; see A. E. Luloff and Richard S. Krannich, Persistence and Change in Rural Communities: A 50-Year Follow Up to Six Classic Studies (New York: CABI Publishers, 2002). 69. BAE, Culture and Agriculture, v–vii. 70. “Farm Problems and the Social Sciences,” 11–12. 71. Ibid., 13–14. 72. Ibid., 15–20. 73. Eight other historians participated; see Everett E. Edwards, “Agricultural History and the Department of Agriculture,” AH 16, no. 3 (July 1942): 133; “The U.S. Department of Agriculture Agricultural History Conference,” AH 13, no. 4 (Oct. 1939): 221–22. Another soon-to-be-famous historian also contributed to the progressive USDA with an article on populism and participatory-democratic planning: C. Vann Woodward, “American Agrarianism: A Fighting Tradition,” LPR 2, no. 1 (August 1941): 3–7. 74. Farmers in a Changing World: The Yearbook of Agriculture, 1940 (Washington: GPO, 1940), v, xi. 75. Gove Hambidge, “Farmers in a Changing World: A Summary,” 4; FSA director Will W. Alexander put forth the same generous view of the poor in “Overcrowded Farms,” 870– 86—both ibid. 76. Ibid., 2–5. For the same view of promoting dissent, especially during wartime, see Alfred D. Stedman, “Public Information and the Preservation of Democracy,” 1075– 80, ibid. 77. Johnstone, “Old Ideals Versus New Ideas in Farm Life,” 165; Turner, “The Cultural Setting of American Agricultural Problems,” 1008–29; Everett E. Edwards, “American Agriculture: The First 300 Years,” 222—all ibid. 78. Likert, “Democracy in Agriculture: Why and How?,” 997–1001, ibid. The Columbia University sociologist Robert Lynd had recommended Likert to Wilson. Likert

312

notes to pages 178–81

stayed in the BAE until 1946, when he went to the University of Michigan to found the Survey Research Center and later the Institute for Social Research (Jean M. Converse, Survey Research in the United States: Roots and Emergence, 1890–1960 [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987], 157– 60, 341). Henry Wallace and James L. McCamy refer to USDA’s public opinion research in “Straw Polls and Public Administration,” Public Opinion Quarterly 4, no. 2 (June 1940): 223. 79. Wilson, “Beyond Economics,” 922–37. See also Wilson, “Cultural Approach in Extension Work,” Extension Service Circular 332 (May 1940), on the use of anthropology in the cooperative planning program.

Chapter 8. Reforming Social Science Epigraph. Taylor, Annual Report, Division of Farm Population and Rural Welfare, Farm Population and Rural Life Activities 15, no. 4 (Oct. 1941): 18. 1. Howard Tolley, The Farmer- Citizen at War (New York: Macmillan, 1943), 258; Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach” (No. 11), in Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, ed. Loyd D. Easton and Kurt H. Guddat (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1967), 402. 2. Douglas Ensminger, Diagnosing Rural- Community Organization, Cornell University Extension Bulletin 444 (Sept. 1940), 3; Linden S. Dodson, Douglas Ensminger, and Robert N. Woodworth, Rural Community Organization in Washington and Frederick Counties, Maryland, University of Maryland AES Bulletin 437 (1940), 106– 8; Linden S. Dodson and Jane Woolley, Community Organization in Charles County, Maryland, University of Maryland AES Bulletin A21 (1943), 271–73; Dwight Sanderson and Robert A. Polson, Rural Community Organization (New York: John Wiley, 1939), 76; Ray E. Wakeley, “Rural Planning: Its Social and Community Organization Aspects,” RS 6, no. 1 (March 1941): 63; Division of Farm Population and Rural Welfare, “Annual Report,” Farm Population and Rural Life Activities 15, no. 4 (Oct. 1941): 18. For the numbers, see Division, Annual Report, 7– 8; Charles P. Loomis, Douglas Ensminger, and Jane Woolley, “Neighborhoods and Communities in County Planning,” RS 6, no. 4 (Dec. 1941): 339; Charles P. Loomis and Douglas Ensminger, “Government Administration and Informal Local Groups,” Applied Anthropology 1, no. 2 (Jan.–March 1942): 48. Irwin T. Sanders, The Community (New York: Ronald Press, 1958), 389– 91, traces the switch in the 1950s from “community organization” to “community development.” 3. Carl C. Taylor, Rural Sociology: In Its Economic, Historical, and Psychological Aspects rev. ed. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1933), 553– 64; M. L. Wilson, “The Place of Subsistence Homesteads in Our National Economy,” JFE 16 (Jan. 1934): 81; Dwight Sanderson, Locating the Rural Community, Cornell University Extension Bulletin 413 (June 1939), 1; Charles P. Loomis, “Plans and the Man,” LPR 2, no. 5 (Sept.– Oct. 1939): 30–31; Division of Farm Population and Rural Welfare, “This Year in The Division of Farm Population and Rural Welfare,” Farm Population and Rural Life Activities 14/15 (Oct. 1940/Jan. 1941): 4; BAE [Division of Farm Population and Rural Welfare], “Service and Research in Community Organization” (Sept. 1940), 1, box 2, entry A1, RG 83, NACP; Division, Annual Report, 8, 18; BAE and Extension Service,

notes to pages 181–82

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USDA, Membership of Land Use Planning Committees, County Planning Series No. 2 (Washington: GPO, 1940); BAE and Extension Service, USDA, Communities and Neighborhoods in Land Use Planning, County Planning Series No. 6 (Washington: GPO, 1940), 3; Rudolf Heberle, “Rural Community Studies,” RS 7, no. 2 (June 1942): 212; Dodson et al., Rural Community, 161; Dodson and Woolley, Community Organization, 272–73; Loomis et al., “Neighborhoods,” 339; Loomis and Ensminger, “Government Administration,” 58; Sanderson and Polson, Rural Community, 47; Paul K. Conkin, Tomorrow a New World: The New Deal Community Program (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1959), 102, 327–29. 4. Galpin, The Social Anatomy of an Agricultural Community, University of Wisconsin AES Research Bulletin 34 (1915). The first rural-sociological locality studies in the country were actually done by W. E. B. Du Bois for the federal Department of Labor. His work has not traditionally been considered part of rural sociology, doubtless owing to racist constructions of the field. Three later rural community studies by white men are recognized as pre-Galpin classics, all done as dissertations at Columbia University under the sociologist Franklin H. Giddings. On Du Bois and the later studies, see Frederick H. Buttel, Olaf F. Larson, and Gilbert W. Gillespie Jr., The Sociology of Agriculture (New York: Greenwood, 1990), 2– 9. 5. Carle C. Zimmerman, The Changing Community (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1938), 4 (Zimmerman dedicated this book to his former professor Carl Taylor). For good overviews of this research, see Newell LeRoy Sims, Elements of Rural Sociology, 3d ed. (New York: Crowell, 1940), 75– 99; T. Lynn Smith, The Sociology of Rural Life (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1940), 317–26; Carl C. Taylor, “Techniques of Community Study and Analysis as Applied to Modern Civilized Societies,” in The Science of Man in the World Crisis, ed. Ralph Linton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1945), 416–41 (quote at 427); Taylor, Rural Sociology, 574– 89; Olaf F. Larson and Julie N. Zimmerman, Sociology in Government: The Galpin–Taylor Years in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1919–1953 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), 88– 93. Dwight Sanderson at Cornell University specialized in this kind of work, and several of his students brought it into Carl Taylor’s BAE division during the New Deal; see Douglas Ensminger and Robert A. Polson, “The Concept of the Community,” RS 11, no. 1 (March 1946): 43–51. Rudolf Heberle, “Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft in Rural Communities,” RS 7, no. 1 (March 1942): 78; and Heberle, “Rural Community Studies,” 215, point out that most pre–New Deal community studies assumed that all social relationships were positive, or “solidaric”—a very midwestern, family-farm assumption. For historians’ critical view of all this, see Mary Neth, Preserving the Family Farm: Women, Community, and the Foundations of Agribusiness in the Midwest, 1900–1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), and Allen Ruff and Tracy Will, Forward! The History of Dane, the Capital County (Cambridge, Wis.: Woodhenge Press, 2000). 6. Tönnies, Fundamental Concepts of Sociology (Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft), translated and supplemented by Charles P. Loomis (New York: American Book Company, 1940). The 1957 and 1963 editions of this translation (retitled) include a useful comparison of Tönnies with several other theorists; see “Introduction” by Loomis and

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notes to pages 183–84

John C. McKinney, Community and Society (Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft) (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1957), 1–29. Other important contemporary discussions are Talcott Parsons, The Structure of Social Action (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1937), 686– 94; Louis Wirth, “Urbanism as a Way of Life,” American Journal of Sociology 44, no. 1 (1938): 1–24; Rudolf Heberle, “The Application of Fundamental Concepts in Rural Community Studies,” RS 6, no. 3 (Nov. 1941): 203–15; Robert Redfield, The Folk Culture of Yucatan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941); Redfield, “Rural Sociology and the Folk Society,” RS 8, no. 1 (March 1943): 68–71; and Taylor’s review in Agricultural Economics Literature 14, no. 9 (Nov. 1940): 957–59. The latest English translation of Tönnies’s book is called Community and Civil Society, ed. Jose Harris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Two excellent analyses of Tönnies’s use in American sociology are Thomas Bender, Community and Social Change in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), and Werner J. Cahnman, “Toennies in America,” History and Theory 16, no. 2 (March 1977): 147– 67. 7. This early use of Tönnies was a theoretical advance over the empiricism of earlier rural community studies, but it had the unfortunate consequence of identifying particular empirical places with the typological concepts. All of these sociologists acknowledged the difference, methodologically, between ideal types and actual locales, yet by tying rural to Gemeinschaft, they overwhelmed any theoretical demurrals. See Sorokin and Zimmerman, Principles of Rural-Urban Sociology (New York: Henry Holt, 1929), 514–17; Sorokin, Zimmerman, and Galpin, eds., A Systematic Source Book in Rural Sociology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1930), 1: 215, 367– 68, 2: 48; Zimmerman, Changing Community, 6–7, 80–87, 107–16, 630–32; Smith, Sociology, 316; Heberle, “Application,” 212. For the long-term impacts on the field of rural sociology, see Howard Newby, “Rural Sociology: A Trend Report,” Current Sociology 28 (Spring 1980): 1–141; Jess Gilbert, “Rural Theory: The Grounding of Rural Sociology,” RS 47, no. 4 (Winter 1982): 609–33; and Kenneth P. Wilkinson, The Community in Rural America (New York: Greenwood, 1991). For a fascinating talk with Charles Loomis in old age, in which he offered much insight into Carl Taylor, M. L. Wilson, the New Deal USDA, applied social science, and Harvard University during this time, see “SfAA Oral History Project: Conversation with One of SfAA’s Founders: An Interview of Charles P. Loomis” by J. Thomas May and Peter K. New, ed. John van Willigen, SfAA News: A Publication of the Society for Applied Anthropology 24, no. 1 (Feb. 1, 2013): 25–30. 8. Douglas Ensminger, “The Community in County Planning,” LPR 3 (March– April 1940): 46–48; John B. Holt, Rural Neighborhoods and Communities of Lee County, Alabama (Washington: BAE, 1941), 3– 6, box 1, entry 218, RG 83, NACP; Howard W. Beers, Robin M. Williams, John S. Page, and Douglas Ensminger, Community LandUse Planning Committees: Organization, Leadership, and Attitudes, Garrard County, Kentucky, 1939, University of Kentucky AES, Bulletin 417 (Lexington, 1941), 153; BAE, Communities and Neighborhoods, 2– 6; Loomis et al., “Neighborhoods,” 339–40; Sims, Rural Sociology, 77– 91; Smith, Sociology, 317–22; Zimmerman, Changing Community, 4. 9. Ensminger, “Community,” 46–48; BAE, Communities and Neighborhoods, 2– 6; Loomis et al., “Neighborhoods,” 340–41; Loomis and Ensminger, “Government Admin-

notes to pages 184–86

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istration,” 47; Dodson and Woolley, Community Organization, 310–11; Beers et al., Community Land-Use, 195; Holt, Rural Neighborhoods, 1– 9; Smith, Sociology, 322. For vigorous criticism of such governmental use of rural sociology, see Bryce Ryan, “The Neighborhood as a Unit of Action in Rural Programs,” RS 9, no. 1 (March 1944): 27–37; and Heberle’s defense, ibid., 36. 10. Heberle, “Application,” 209; Dodson et al., Rural Community, 108– 9, 159; Sims, Rural Sociology, 95– 99; Smith, Sociology, 322–26; Holt, Rural Neighborhoods, 6; Ensminger, “Community,” 45; Loomis et al., “Neighborhoods,” 339. The term Great Society was introduced by the British Fabian socialist Graham Wallas in his Great Society (1914), and Dewey featured it in The Public and Its Problems (1927) as his term for modern Gesellschaft. In this sense, the Great Society was common currency among rural sociologists during the New Deal era. Dewey called his concept of a modernized Gemeinschaft “the Great Community,” i.e., updated feelings of solidarity to overcome the greed and alienation of contemporary social life—a view the sociologists worked to stimulate. 11. BAE, Communities and Neighborhoods, 7; BAE, “Service and Research,” 1; almost identical words by Loomis appear in “Notes on Conference of Washington and Regional Staff Leaders of the Division of Farm Population and Rural Welfare, Mt. Weather, VA, September 7– 9 [1940],” 7, box 2, entry 1, RG 83, NACP. 12. BAE, Membership, 2; Division, Annual Report, 8; BAE, Communities and Neighborhoods, 5; Loomis et al., “Neighborhoods,” 339. Most subcounty or community administrative units of the USDA were not based on natural neighborhoods or communities; neither were other administrative units of county government, the sociologists found, and such noncongruence worked to their detriment; see Charles E. Allred, Howard J. Bonser, and Lee S. Stith, Comparison of Representation in Administrative Agencies with Natural Neighborhoods and Communities, Roane County, Tenn., University of Tennessee, Agricultural Economics and Rural Sociology Department, Rural Research Series Monograph No. 138 (1942); Lee Colman, “Community Organization and Agricultural Planning, Greene County, Georgia” (Atlanta: BAE, 1942), box 9, entry 219, RG 83, NACP; Loomis and Ensminger, “Government Administration,” 48–58; Beers et al., Community Land-Use, 151. For criticisms of this approach, see Harold A. Kaufman, “The Limitations of the Neighborhood as a Unit for Organization,” RS 9, no. 1 (March 1944): 57–59; Walter M. Kollmorgen and Robert W. Harrison, “The Search for the Rural Community,” AH 20, no. 1 (Jan. 1946): 1– 8; Ryan, “Neighborhood.” 13. BAE, “Service and Research,” 1–2; Loomis, “Notes,” 8. See William W. Biddle and Loureide J. Biddle, The Community Development Process: The Rediscovery of Local Initiative (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965), but this literature rarely cites the New Deal rural sociologists. The BAE practice also shares points with both John Commons’s notion of institution building and Saul Alinsky’s later community organizing. 14. BAE, “Service and Research,” 1–2. 15. BAE, Extension Service, and Soil Conservation Service, The Land Use Planning Organization, County Planning Series No. 3 (Washington: GPO, 1940), 3; BAE, Pooling Ideas in Land Use Planning, County Planning Series No. 5 (Washington: GPO,

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notes to pages 187– 90

1940); BAE, Membership of Land Use Planning Committees, 2– 6; Carl Taylor, “The ABC’s of the Democratic Process,” n.d. [ca. 1940], box 1, CCT Papers; Wilson, “Farmer Participation,” Soil Conservation 4 (Aug. 1938): 30–31; Loomis and Ensminger, “Government Administration,” 48; John D. Lewis, “Democratic Planning in Agriculture, I,” American Political Science Review 35 (April 1941): 248. This was the more sophisticated view of the planning program but not the one always presented. The BAE’s position could appear as naive or idealistic, at least by the end of the New Deal. In several pieces of the early and midforties, some rural sociologists within the BAE itself, including the most active community delineators, highlighted the point. Loomis and Ensminger (“Government Administration,” 44) wrote that “some idealists have hoped” that neighborhood well-being would trump selfish pressure groups (e.g., class, farm organization, religious affiliation), that “community interests would be advanced by ‘public-spirited’ individuals.” These idealists aimed to use “the same community solidarity” that gave rise to older midwestern farming customs like cornhusking and threshing bees. Surely Loomis and Ensminger here reflected their own sentiments as much as those of their departmental superiors like Taylor and Wilson. See Ryan, “Neighborhood,” and two BAE workers, Kollmorgen and Harrison, “Search,” for a critique of community delineation theory as romantic. Taylor himself became quite critical of the rural community studies that had been conducted under his eye a few years earlier; his rural sociologists had misconstrued their “social object” of study. His solution was for sociologists to team up more with “participant-observers,” that is, knowledgeable local residents, who could educate the scientists about their community; see his presidential address to the American Sociological Society, “Sociology and Common Sense,” American Sociological Review 12, no. 1 (Feb. 1947): 1–12; and Taylor, “Techniques,” 431–38. In Theories of Democracy (New York: Routledge, 2002), Frank Cunningham discusses the philosophical issues entailed by different kinds of democracy, for example, participatory, deliberative, pragmatic, radical-pluralist. 16. Division, “This Year,” 5; BAE, “Service and Research”; Division, Annual Report, 8– 9; Loomis and Ensminger, “Government Administration.” 17. Locating the Rural Community by Dwight Sanderson is the title of Cornell Extension Bulletin 413 (1939, first published in 1920); Taylor, “Sociology and Common Sense”; Division, Annual Report, 9; BAE, “Service and Research,” 2; Beers et al., Community Land-Use, 154– 67; Loomis and Ensminger, “Government Administration,” 47; Loomis et al., “Neighborhoods,” 340; Larson and Zimmerman, Sociology in Government, 100. 18. Sanders and Ensminger, Alabama Rural Communities: A Study of Chilton County, Alabama College Bulletin 33, No. 1A (Montevallo, Ala., 1940), 60– 63. For summaries of the method, see Ensminger, “Community,” 45–48; BAE, Communities and Neighborhoods, 4–7. 19. Sanders and Ensminger, Alabama, 79– 80; cf. Beers et al., Community LandUse, 154; Taylor, “Techniques”; Larson and Zimmerman, Sociology in Government, 100. 20. Beers et al., Community Land-Use, 152–56. Other good examples are Dodson et al., Rural Community; Sanders and Ensminger, Alabama; Holt, Rural Neighborhoods. 21. Ibid., 156–57.

notes to pages 190 – 96

317

22. Ibid., 157– 60. 23. Ibid., 165. 24. On this point, see Loomis and Ensminger, “Government Administration,” 47; Heberle, “Rural Community,” 212; Loomis et al., “Neighborhoods,” 340. 25. Division of Farm Population and Rural Welfare, “Work of the Division of Farm Population and Rural Welfare During the Year Ending June 30, 1940,” Farm Population and Rural Life Activities 14, no. 3 (July 1940): 1–13; Division, “This Year”; Division, Annual Report, 7– 8; Larson and Zimmerman, Sociology in Government, 225–26. Loomis et al., “Neighborhoods,” 339, claimed thirty-two states, while the division a few months earlier had said twenty-nine. 26. BAE, Communities and Neighborhoods, 4; Loomis and Ensminger, “Government Administration,” 51; Division, “Work,” 7. 27. Division, “Work,” 7 (emphasis added); Loomis to Taylor, 15 May 1940, box 705, entry 19, RG 83, NACP; Division, “This Year,” 4–5 (emphasis added), 10; Division, Annual Report, 2; Loomis, “Notes on Conference,” 8; Heberle, “Rural Community,” 212. 28. Holt, Rural Neighborhoods, 1–11; Lewis, “Democratic Planning, I,” 249; Lewis, “Democratic Planning in Agriculture, II,” American Political Science Review 35 (June 1941): 456–58; John D. Lewis and Ewart Lewis, “The Farmer Helps to Plan,” New Republic, 20 Oct. 1941, 504–5. 29. Taylor to John S. Page, 9 Dec. 1943, in box 36, CCT Papers. 30. Ensminger, “Community,” 44–46 (emphasis added). This same line is also in BAE, Communities and Neighborhoods, 7, and in Loomis, “Notes on Conference,” 8; cf. BAE, “Service and Research”; Larson and Zimmerman, Sociology in Government, 90, 175. 31. Heberle, “The Sociology of Ferdinand Tönnies,” American Sociological Review 2, no. 1 (Feb. 1937): 15–22; Heberle, “Application,” 203–14; Heberle, “Rural Community,” 215; Heberle, “Gemeinschaft,” 78; cf. Loomis, “Translator’s Appendix,” in Tönnies, Fundamental Concepts, 281; Loomis et al., “Neighborhoods,” 339. 32. B.W.A. [Allin], “Summary of Discussion Meetings on Cooperative Land-Use Planning Held at Washington, D.C., April 8 to May 6, 1940,” 27, box 1, entry 223, RG 83, NACP; Loomis to Taylor memo; Holt, Rural Neighborhoods, 1; BAE, “Service and Research,” 1; Heberle, “Rural Community,” 212. 33. In contrast to Extension programs, cooperative planning did not segregate members by gender. The authors remarked that this procedure “thus constitutes an experiment which should furnish some clues concerning the way in which women participate in general planning groups” (Beers et al., Community Land-Use, 78–79, passim). 34. Ibid., 221; Williams and Beers, Farmers on Local Planning Committees in Three Kentucky Counties, 1939–1940 (Lexington: Kentucky AES Bulletin 443, 1943), 15. 35. Taylor to Wilson, Taylor to Tolley, both 19 Feb. 1941, box 543, entry 19, RG 83, NACP. On the planned evaluation, see Beers et al., Community Land-Use, preface; Taylor, “Social Science and Social Action in Agriculture,” Social Forces 20, no. 2 (Dec. 1941): 156. The division stopped this line of evaluation before the other five could be done because of USDA’s reorientation following entry of the United States into World War II as

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notes to pages 196 –204

well as the planning program’s eminent demise (Larson and Zimmerman, Sociology in Government, 228). 36. Johansen and Rossoff, Community Planning in Eddy County, New Mexico (State College, N.M.: AES Bulletin 297, 1942), 17–20. 37. Lee Coleman, “Community Organization and Agricultural Planning, Greene County, Georgia” (USDA, BAE Atlanta office, Jan. 1942), box 9, entry 219, RG 83, NACP; Harold A. Vogel to K. J. Nicholson, “1940 Progress Report on Unified Program– Green County, Georgia,” 12 April 1940, box 4, entry 218, RG 83, NACP; Raper, Tenants of the Almighty (New York: Macmillan, 1943), 203–11, 280–82; Loomis and Ensminger, “Government Administration,” 48–58. 38. USDA, BAE, “Operating Report of the Division of State and Local Planning Covering the Cooperative Agricultural Planning Program for the Year Ending June 30, 1941,” 27, box 1, entry 215, RG 83, NACP; Lewis, “Democratic Planning, I,” 242–49; Lewis and Lewis, “The Farmer,” 504–5. 39. USDA, “County Land Use Planning Work Outline Number 1 Covering an Area Mapping and Classification Project Recommended for County Agricultural Land Use Planning Committees,” box 1, entry 25, RG 83, NACP; Bushrod W. Allin, “County Planning Project: A Cooperative Approach to Agricultural Planning,” JFE 22, no. 1 (Feb. 1940). (See chapter 5 for discussion of the County Planning Project.) 40. USDA, “Work Outline,” 3– 6. 41. Ibid., 33. 42. Ibid., 3, 18; Allin, “Summary of Discussion,” 33–35. 43. USDA, “Work Outline”; Allin, “Summary of Discussion,” 33–35. 44. USDA, “Work Outline,” 22. 45. Ibid., 29. 46. Ibid., 33. 47. Legitimation was one major reason that the USDA sought local buy-in to its programs; see John M. Gaus and Leon O. Wolcott with Verne B. Lewis, Public Administration and the United States Department of Agriculture (Chicago: Public Administration Service, 1940), 131–36, 149–51. (I elaborate on this point in chapter 5.) 48. Tolley, Report of the Chief of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, 1939 (Washington: GPO, 1939), 4–5; Division of State and Local Planning, BAE, USDA, “Report on the Progress of Land-Use Planning During 1939,” 12–16, box 3, entry 208, RG 83, NACP. The listed states each had at least twenty (or for small states, a majority of) intensive-planning counties. 49. Division of State and Local Planning, “Operating Report Covering the Cooperative Land-Use Planning Program for the Year Ended June 30, 1940,” 11, box 1, entry 215, RG 83, NACP. 50. BAE, “Operating Report of the Division of State and Local Planning Covering the Cooperative Agricultural Planning Program for the Year Ending June 30, 1941,” 22– 25, box 1, entry 215, RG 83, NACP. 51. Division, “Operating Report, 1940,” 10–11, 20–21. 52. Ibid., 5–11. 53. Report of the Secretary of Agriculture, 1939 (Washington: GPO, 1939), 76–77.

notes to pages 204–10

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54. BAE, USDA, “Summary of Committee Reports Prepared at Conference of Field Men and Washington Staff BAE, March 25–29, 1939,” 4–5, 9, box 1, entry 213, RG 83, NACP. 55. Ibid., 13–14, 30–32. 56. “Meeting of the Field Men, March 28, 1939,” 11–14, 21–22, typed transcription, box 2, entry 25, RG 83, NACP. 57. Ibid., 26–28. 58. Ibid., 8, 12–14. 59. Ibid., 8– 9. 60. C. E. Brehm, “After Planning-Action,” ESR 10, no. 3 (March 1939): i; Roger B. Corbett, “Planning Starts Where the People Are,” ESR 10, no. 5 (May 1939): 68; Noble Clark, “Relationship of Federal Activities to State and Local Programs of Land Use,” 23 June 1939, box 1, entry 209, RG 83, NACP; H. C. Ramsower to Allin, 29 Sept. 1939, box 5, entry 208, RG 83, NACP. 61. Allin, “Summary of Discussion,” 30. 62. Ibid., 35–36. 63. Ibid., 31–33. 64. Ibid., 41. The young Harold F. Breimyer, who went on to become a major postwar agricultural policy economist, handled many of these county reports for the BAE in Washington; see his Over-fulfilled Expectations: A Life and an Era in Rural America (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1991), 135–38. 65. Taylor to Allin, 10 Oct. 1940, box 9, entry 218, RG 83, NACP. 66. Division, Annual Report [1941], 10–12, 18; A. R. Mangus and Robert L. McNamara, The Rural Youth of Ross County, Ohio: Their Level of Living and Social Achievement, Ohio AES Bulletin 635 (Wooster, Ohio, 1942). 67. BAE, “Service and Research,” 2–3; Division, Annual Report [1941], 8– 9, 38. At the same time, Taylor almost complained about the overwhelming number of requests for research assistance from county planning committees, but he added, “On the other hand, it does subject the hypothesis on which a project rests, as well as all the data and the findings, to the rigid test of making sense to the people who are in the middle of it—and it has opened opportunities to do certain phases of research projects which now have value to the local people because they have gone through the preliminary steps with us.” Other division personnel also presented the many ways, beyond community delineations, that sociological research could assist the planning committees, e.g., Taylor, “Sociology on the Spot,” RS 2, no. 4 (Dec. 1937): 373– 81; Charles Loomis, “Plans and the Man,” LPR 2, no. 5 (Sept.– Oct. 1939): 30–31; Robin Williams, “Planning for People, Not for Plans,” LPR 4, no. 1 (Jan. 1941): 30–34. 68. Margaret R. Purcell, “A Quarter Century of Land Economics in the Department of Agriculture, 1919–44,” Oct. 1945, 30–33, in “U.S. Department of Agriculture,” NAL; Carl F. Kraenzel and O. A. Parsons, Agricultural Planning: Its Economic and Social Aspects, Montana AES Bulletin 391 (Bozeman, Mont.: 1941), 4–7. 69. Renne to V. Webster Johnson, 23 Nov. 1940; Tolley to Renne, 16 Dec. 1940— both in L-32, box 14, MLW Papers. For Tolley’s point more generally, see Parks, “Experiment,” 224–30. Renne soon saw the light: after World War II he wrote convincingly

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of “the need for coordination” and integration of research, education, and planning, specifically citing the defunct BAE land-use planning program as a model; this was the conclusion to his textbook, Land Economics: Principles, Problems, and Policies in Utilizing Land Resources (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1947), 712–21. He went on to become president of Montana State University, and the library there that houses the MLW Papers bears his name. 70. Tolley, Report of the Chief of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, 1940 (Washington: GPO, 1940), 30–37, 2; Tolley, Report of the Chief of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, 1941 (Washington: GPO, 1941), 1–4, 39–41 (emphasis added). 71. Report of the Secretary of Agriculture, 1939, 77.

Chapter 9. Unifying Action Epigraph. Foster, “The Development of Land Use Planning Committees: A Historical Sketch,” Planners’ Journal 8, no. 2 (April–June 1942): 6. Reprinted by permission of Taylor and Francis LLC, http://www.tandfonline.com. 1. Raper’s use of this technical term is understandable but has prevented widespread recognition that the program detailed in Tenants of the Almighty (New York: Macmillan, 1943) is that of cooperative planning. Most readers come away thinking that the second half of the book, that is, the late New Deal part, is about the activities of the FSA rather than about the broader planning program. Still, his book remains the best account of the local impact and promise of cooperative planning. Two short booklets also offer useful evaluations: USDA, FSA, Greene County, Georgia: The Story of One Southern County (Washington: GPO, 1941), and T. Hamp McGibony, Governmental Cooperation in Greene County, Georgia (Washington: Council on Intergovernmental Relations, 1945); for a summary, see A. P. Chew, The United States Department of Agriculture: Its Structure and Functions (Washington: GPO, 1940), 21–24. For current scholarship on Greene, see Mary Summers, “The New Deal Farm Programs: Looking for Reconstruction in American Agriculture,” AH 74, no. 2 (Spring 2000): 241–57; Louis Mazzari, Southern Modernist: Arthur Raper from New Deal to Cold War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006); Jess Gilbert, “Rural Sociology and Democratic Planning in the Third New Deal,” AH 82, no. 4 (Fall 2008): 431–33; Clifford M. Kuhn, “ ‘It Was a Long Way from Perfect, but It Was Working’: The Canning and Home Production Initiatives in Greene County, Georgia, 1940–1942,” AH 86, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 68– 90. For the next most-studied county in cooperative planning, see John Donald Black and George William Westcott, Rural Planning of One County: Worcester County, Massachusetts (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959). 2. FSA, Greene County, 7, 20; Raper, Tenants, 203, 360. Tenants represented Raper’s third major research project in Greene over a fifteen-year period. First was his dissertation in sociology at the University of North Carolina (1930), followed by Preface to Peasantry (1936), which contained a quite critical assessment of the early rural New Deal. 3. McGibony, Governmental, 10–15, 22, 29; Raper, Tenants, 210. 4. Harold A. Vogel to K. J. Nicholson, “1940 Progress Report on Unified Program– Greene County, Georgia,” 12 April 1940, box 4, entry 218, RG 83, NACP;

notes to pages 216 –24

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Raper, Tenants, 203–4, 229–30, 295; McGibony, Governmental, 16; FSA, Greene, 9–11; Kuhn, “It Was a Long,” 72. 5. Raper, Tenants, 234–41, 302. 6. Ibid., 248–52. For the program nationally, see Michael R. Grey, New Deal Medicine: The Rural Health Programs of the Farm Security Administration (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). 7. Raper, Tenants, 250–53. 8. Ibid., 211–15, 304– 9, 385– 86. 9. Ibid., 243–47, 340; FSA, Greene, 19. 10. Raper, Tenants, 205, 219–21; FSA, Greene, 9, 12. 11. Raper, Tenants, 221–28; McGibony, Governmental, 17. 12. Raper, Tenants, 208– 9, 322. 13. FSA, Greene, 20 (emphasis added); Raper, Tenants, 203. 14. Minutes of Meeting of the Covington County Agricultural Policy and Planning Committee, 28 Sept. 1939; “An Outline for Discussion of Unified Program before Covington County Agricultural Policy and Planning Committee,” 30–31 Oct. 1939—both in box 8, entry 218, RG 83, NACP. 15. “Outline.” 16. “Outline.” 17. T. M. Patterson to S. A. Roberts Jr., 5 Dec. 1939, box 8, entry 218, RG 83, NACP; Harold A. Vogel to K. J. Nicholson, 12 July 1940, ibid.; Interbureau Coordinating Committee Meeting, 20 July 1940, ibid.; “Progress Report on Unified County Programs,” Mississippi Agricultural Planning Digest, Jan.–Feb. 1941, 5, attached to W. H. Elliott to D. A. Fitzgerald, 5 March 1941, box 3, entry 223, RG 83, NACP. 18. Tolley, “Planning a Way Out for Southern Agriculture,” 2 May 1940, 11–12, box 10, entry 25, RG 83, NACP; Tolley, Report of the Chief of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, 1940 (Washington: GPO, 1940), 13. 19. Maude L. Searcy, “Steering a Course by Land Use Plans,” ESR (March 1941): 42–43; Tolley, “Planning a Way”; Tolley, Report, 13–14. 20. Harry O’Brien, “The Home Folks Take Inventory,” Country Gentleman 111, no. 2 (Feb. 1941): 61; USDA, Land Use Planning Under Way (Washington: GPO, 1940), 26, 31, 40; Tolley, Farmer Citizen, 155–56. 21. H. W. Herbison, John Muehlbeier, and Stanley Wilner, “North Dakota Land Use Planning: Annual Progress Report,” 30 June 1941, box 7, entry 215, RG 83, NACP; H. W. Herbison, “North Dakota Land Use Planning Progress,” Jan. 1941, ibid.; H. W. Herbison and John Muehlbeier, “Organization and Operation of Rural Land-Use Planning, with Examples from North Dakota,” Planners’ Journal 8, no. 2 (April–June 1942): 13; E. J. Haslerud, “In the Face of Financial Crisis,” ESR (Jan. 1940): 5. Cf. Mary W. M. Hargreaves, Dry Farming in the Northern Great Plains: Years of Readjustment, 1925– 1990 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993), 157. 22. [BAE Division of State and Local Planning], “Interesting Facts in Land-Use Planning Intensive Reports,” 1940–41, 8–13, box 2, entry 223, RG 83, NACP; Mary W. M. Hargreaves, “Land-Use Planning in Response to Drought: The Experience of the Thirties,” AH 50, no. 4 (Oct. 1976): 580. Hargreaves notes the widespread support for

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family farming from the county and state land-use planning committees in both Dakotas (Dry Farming, 154–55). 23. Geo. T. Murray and Claire O. Southam, “Preliminary Report of Land Use Planning in Ward County, 1939,” 7–14; Clair O. Southam and Ethel B. Jones, “Annual Narrative Report of Agricultural Extension Work and Home Demonstration Work in Ward County, North Dakota,” 31 Oct. 1941, 42—both documents in Institute for Regional Studies, North Dakota State University (NDSU) Libraries, Fargo; Ellery A. Foster and Harold A. Vogel, “Cooperative Land Use Planning: A New Development in Democracy,” USDA, Farmers in a Changing World: The Yearbook of Agriculture, 1940 (Washington: GPO, 1940), 1146–47; Herbison, “North Dakota Land.” 24. Murray and Southam, “Preliminary Report,” 14–16. 25. Claire O. Southam, “Annual Narrative Report of Agricultural Extension Work for Ward County, North Dakota,” 31 Oct. 1940, 37, passim, in Institute for Regional Studies, NDSU Libraries, Fargo; H. W. Herbison, “Summary of Progress in County Land Use Planning in North Dakota,” 18 Sept. 1940, 16–18, box 10, entry 218, RG 83, NACP; Murray and Southam, “Preliminary Report, 1939,” 47, passim; Foster and Vogel, “Cooperative,” 1146–48; Tolley, Report, 15–16. 26. Herbison, “Summary,” 11–12; Herbison et al., “North Dakota Land,” 14; Foster and Vogel, “Cooperative,” 1146–48; Tolley, Report, 15–16. 27. USDA, Land Use, 13–20; Tolley, Farmer Citizen, 151–54. 28. Tolley, Report, 20; USDA, Land Use, 17, 25. The Teton County planning committee made other specific proposals concerning water utilization, soil erosion, public land management, control of weeds, rodents, and insects, and the minimum desirable size of farms for various types of crops. The Harvard agricultural economist John Black, a longtime USDA adviser, later similarly assessed Teton planning; see Black and Westcott, Rural Planning, 146–47. A detailed case study of another Montana county found that local planning committees enacted comparable measures and that farmers also broadly approved of the New Deal land programs affecting their operations; see Melissa Gilbert Wiedenfeld, “The Development of a New Deal Land Policy: Fergus County, Montana (1900–1945),” PhD diss., Louisiana State University, 1997; cf. Hargreaves, Dry Farming, 157– 60. 29. BAE, USDA, “Operating Report of the Division of State and Local Planning Covering the Cooperative Agricultural Planning Program for the Year Ending June 30, 1941,” 21–22, box 1, entry 215, RG 83, NACP; USDA, “Agricultural Planning in a World at War,” 35, Jan. 1942, box 1, entry 25, RG 83, NACP; USDA, Planning for a Permanent Agriculture, Misc. Pub. 351 (Washington: GPO, 1939), 44–47; USDA, Land Use, 37–39. 30. USDA, “Agricultural Planning,” 14–15; USDA, Land Use, 45. 31. Tolley, Report, 14–15. 32. Ibid., 11–12. 33. Ibid. On the development of rural zoning, pioneered in Wisconsin, see George S. Wehrwein, “Enactment and Administration of Rural County Zoning Ordinances,” JFE 18, no. 3 (Aug. 1936): 508–22. 34. Tolley, Report, 11–12.

notes to pages 230 –37

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35. Harold Titus, The Land Nobody Wanted: The Story of Michigan’s Public Domain, AES Special Bulletin 332 (East Lansing: Michigan State College, 1945), 19–26. Pages 37–43 of this booklet name the seventeen hundred farm men and women who served on the local land-use planning committees of northern Michigan. 36. USDA, Land Use, 33, 38; Tolley, Report, 16–10; Tolley, Farmer Citizen, 142. 37. USDA, Land Use, 37–44; Tolley, Report, 22–23. 38. BAE, “Operating Report, 1941,” 24–25; USDA, Land Use, 28, 41. 39. USDA, Land Use, 40, passim; Black and Westcott, Rural Planning, 146. 40. Division of State and Local Planning, “Report on the Progress of Land-Use Planning During 1939,” 80– 81, 30 Jan. 1940, box 1, entry 26, RG 83, NACP; Division of State and Local Planning, “Operating Report Covering the Cooperative Land-Use Planning Program for the Year Ended June 30, 1940,” 11–14, box 1, entry 215, RG 83, NACP; USDA, Land Use, 43–44, 81– 82. 41. Tolley, Report, 24–26. 42. BAE, “Operating Report, 1941”; USDA, “Agricultural Planning”; USDA, Land Use, 46; Tolley, Farmer Citizen, 143–47, 157–59; Black and Westcott, Rural Planning, 145; Hargreaves, Dry Farming, 158 (quotation). 43. USDA, Land Use, 48. Tolley’s Farmer Citizen offers many more extended examples of county planning achievements, too numerous to detail here (e.g., 134– 61). 44. BAE, “Operating Report, 1941,” 2–10; USDA, “Agricultural Planning,” 11–21. At this time the term land use planning gave way to agricultural planning as the name of the program. 45. BAE, “Operating Report, 1941,” 2–10; USDA, “Agricultural Planning,” 1–10. Tolley, Farmer Citizen, 164–75, summarizes other defense work of the planning committees. 46. USDA, “Agricultural Planning,” 3. Pennsylvania never participated in cooperative planning. 47. [Tolley and Wilson,] “Agriculture’s Plans to Aid in Defense and Meet the Impacts of War: A Summary of Reports of State Agricultural Planning Committees,” 23 July 1941, box 2, entry 26, RG 83, NACP; USDA, “Agricultural Planning,” 3– 6; BAE, “Operating Report, 1941,” 4–7. Tolley, Farmer Citizen, 161– 64, summarizes this report, what he described as “a broad program of agricultural changes.” For an instance of how the state committees developed their recommendations, see Mississippi Agricultural Planning Digest, 2– 6, March–April 1941, box 3, entry 223, RG 83, NACP; cf. the Dakotas in Hargreaves, Dry Farming, 155–56. 48. Tolley and Wilson, “Agriculture’s Plans,” 4– 8. 49. Ibid., 8–17. The BAE planning division advanced major progressive policy proposals for farm labor; see USDA, “Agricultural Planning,” 7– 8; BAE, “Operating Report, 1941,” 8, summarized in Tolley, Farmer Citizen, 164– 66. 50. Tolley and Wilson, “Agriculture’s Plans,” 4– 8, 18–25. 51. Ibid., 15–19, 24–30.

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notes to pages 238–41 Chapter 10. Intended New Deal Defeated, Reassessed, and Reclaimed

Epigraph. Allin, “Is Planning Compatible with Democracy?,” American Journal of Sociology 42 (Jan. 1937): 520. Used with permission of the University of Chicago. 1. Ellen Sorge Parks, “Experiment in the Democratic Planning of Public Agricultural Activity,” PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, 1947, 341; Richard S. Kirkendall, Social Scientists and Farm Politics in the Age of Roosevelt (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1966), 195–217 (quote at 215); Charles M. Hardin, “The Bureau of Agricultural Economics under Fire,” JFE 28, no. 3 (Aug. 1946): 638–48; Hardin, The Politics of Agriculture: Soil Conservation and the Struggle for Power in Rural America (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1952), 134–36, 164– 69; Hardin, Freedom in Agricultural Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), 160– 63; Grant McConnell, The Decline of Agrarian Democracy (1953; reprint, New York: Atheneum, 1969), 116–19. 2. Allin, “What Kind of Agriculture Do We Want?” 23 Dec. 1958, folder 5, box 4, BWA Papers; Howard R. Tolley, The Farmer Citizen at War (New York: Macmillan, 1943), 90– 91; George William Westcott, “The Evolution of Rural Planning: An Important Area for Strengthening the Democratic Processes and Optimizing the General Welfare,” PhD diss., Harvard University, 1955, 420–24; Graham D. Taylor, “The New Deal and the Grass Roots,” PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1972, 246–300; Parks, “Experiment,” 260–309. 3. John D. Black, Federal-State-Local Relations in Agriculture (Washington: National Planning Association, 1950), 16; Parks, “Experiment,” 310–14; Taylor, “New Deal,” 301–2; Westcott, “Evolution,” 426–32. 4. Christina McFayden Campbell, The Farm Bureau and the New Deal: A Study of the Making of National Farm Policy, 1933–1940 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1962); John M. Gaus, “Agricultural Policy and Administration in the American Federal System,” in Federalism Mature and Emergent, ed. Arthur W. Macmahon (New York: Russell and Russell, 1962), 296– 97; Hardin, “Bureau,” 638–42; McConnell, Decline, 118. 5. Kirkendall, Social Scientists, 197– 98; Hardin, “Bureau,” 639–43; Hardin, Politics, 165– 68; Parks, “Experiment,” 329–31; Westcott, “Evolution,” 434–35; McConnell, Decline, 118–19. M. L. Wilson, then USDA’s Extension director, discouraged the AFBF’s plan; see his valiant address to its national meeting, “The Extension Service Marches On,” Extension Circular 348 (Dec. 1940). 6. Kirkendall, Social Scientists, 202– 6; Hardin, “Bureau,” 644–45; Hardin, Politics, 134–35; Parks, “Experiment,” 325. 7. Kirkendall, Social Scientists, 207–13; Hardin, “Bureau,” 645–48; Hardin, Politics, 134–35; Parks, “Experiment,” 58, 329–31. Although federal participation ended in 1942, some state Extensions maintained the local committees, often under new names; see Steven C. Smith, “The Process of County Planning: A Case Study of Henry County, Indiana,” JLE 26, no. 2 (May 1950): 162–70; V. Webster Johnson and Raleigh Barlowe, Land Problems and Policies (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1954), 274, 367; Howard W. Ottoson et al., Land and People in the Northern Plains Transition Area (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), 86; Anthony J. Badger, Prosperity Road: The New Deal,

notes to pages 242–45

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Tobacco, and North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 267; John Donald Black and George William Westcott, Rural Planning of One County: Worcester County, Massachusetts (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959), 7– 9, 148. 8. Hardin, “Bureau,” 643; Parks, “Experiment,” 332; Anthony J. Badger, The New Deal: The Depression Years, 1933–1940 (New York: Noonday, 1989), 175. 9. On the varied objectives as well as broader evaluations of the program, see Allin, “County Planning Project: A Cooperative Approach to Agricultural Planning,” JFE 22, no. 1 (Feb. 1940); J. G. Crawford and Gunnar Lange, “County Planning for Land-Use Adjustment,” JFE 22, no. 2 (May 1940): 473– 83; Bryce Ryan, “Democratic Telesis and County Agricultural Planning,” JFE 22, no. 4 (Nov. 1940): 693; Neal C. Gross, “A Post Mortem on County Planning,” JFE 25, no. 3 (Aug. 1943): 646–52; Westcott, “Evolution,” 286– 99; Black and Westcott, Rural Planning, 398–405; Taylor, “New Deal,” 287–314. 10. Parks, “Experiment,” 256– 60; Kirkendall, Social Scientists. Charles M. Hardin summarized the intent: “Farmer committees in the counties and eventually state committees, all seconded by experts in BAE and the colleges as well as by action agency administrators, were to make plans that would consider the farmers’ felt needs, fulfill the ideal goals of local communities, ameliorate undesirable effects of other farm programs, integrate conflicting agencies, and infuse the entire process with administrative and operational flexibility. The very logical perfection of this ideal planning function would . . . have almost surely proved to be a fatal flaw” (“Policy Planning,” in Modern Land Policy, ed. Harold G. Halcrow [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1960], 260). 11. Parks, “Experiment,” 256– 69, 298, 334–36, 298 (quote at 258). After the demise of cooperative planning, Tolley emphasized the need for “true partners” if such state–federal cooperation were ever to succeed (Farmer Citizen, 90). 12. Allin, “County Planning”; Westcott, “Evolution,” 278– 86 (quote at 286). 13. Allin, “County Planning,” 298; Westcott, “Evolution,” 287– 93, 315–17, 441– 47; Black, Federal-State-Local Relations, 15; Black and Westcott, Rural Planning, 395– 405; Taylor, “New Deal,” 83, 123–25. 14. Harold F. Breimyer, Over-fulfilled Expectations: A Life and an Era in Rural America (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1991), 135–38; Parks, “Experiment,” 97– 98, 166– 90, 333–36; Westcott, “Evolution,” 413–15; Crawford and Lange, “County Planning,” 480– 81; Taylor, “New Deal,” 292– 95, 310–12. The last major document of cooperative planning, which was never finalized but offers a fascinating glimpse into its increasingly comprehensive vision and plans for implementation, is a one-hundred-plus-page document called “Foundations of Agricultural Planning,” 5 June 1941, box 441, entry 36, RG 83, NACP. 15. John D. Lewis, “Democratic Planning in Agriculture, I,” American Political Science Review 35 (April 1941): 247; John D. Black, “The Bureau of Agricultural Economics: The Years in Between,” JFE 29, no. 4 (Nov. 1947): 1034; Taylor, “New Deal,” 288– 98, 331–36 (quote at 331). 16. Mary W. M. Hargreaves, Dry Farming in the Northern Great Plains: Years of Readjustment, 1925–1990 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993), 150; Lewis,

326

notes to pages 246 –53

“Democratic Planning, I”; Gross, “Post Mortem,” 652–56; Parks, “Experiment,” 14–45; Westcott, “Evolution,” 334–39; Taylor, “New Deal,” 268– 71. 17. Allin, “Historical Background of the United States Department of Agriculture,” 13, 4 Oct. 1940, in “Bushrod W. Allin” folder, NAL; Tolley, “Cooperative Land Use Planning,” 18–20, 18 Oct. 1940, in “Howard R. Tolley” folder, NAL; Tolley, Farmer Citizen, 176–208; Wilson, “A Theory of Agricultural Democracy,” USDA Extension Service Circular 355 (March 1941), 14–19; Gross, “Post Mortem,” 652–53; Parks, “Experiment,” 33– 97, 117– 22, 337–40; Westcott, “Evolution,” 333–40; Taylor, “New Deal,” 271–72, 308–10. 18. Tolley, Report of the Chief of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, 1941 (Washington: GPO, 1941); Lewis, “Democratic Planning, I,” 234; Lewis, “Democratic Planning in Agriculture, II,” American Political Science Review 35, no. 3 (June 1941): 468; Parks, “Experiment,” 114–16, 208–31; Hargreaves, Dry Farming, 153–58. 19. Tolley, Farmer Citizen, 271, 258– 60; Parks, “Experiment,” 219–31; Westcott, “Evolution,” 450. 20. Parks, “Experiment,” 125–48, 208–31; Westcott, “Evolution,” 356–58; Taylor, “New Deal,” 288. 21. Parks, “Experiment,” 134–36, 206–31, 333–40; Westcott, “Evolution,” 358– 89. 22. Tolley, Farmer Citizen, 138; Westcott, “Evolution,” 299–315, 417, 445–51. 23. Parks, “Experiment,” 216, 256 (emphasis added). 24. Noble Clark quoted in Black, “Federal-State-Local Relations in Agriculture,” draft report, 7 Jan. 1949, 18, box 42, John D. Black Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison (also in the published summary version, Federal-State-Local Relations in Agriculture, 16, without attribution); Black, “BAE Years,” 1039; Black and Westcott, Rural Planning, 397, 148; Wilson, “Informal Comments,” in Agricultural Statesman: Proceedings of the M. L. Wilson Symposium, ed. Roy E. Huffman (Bozeman, Mont.: Big Sky Books, 1966), iii–viii. 25. Hardin, “Policy Planning,” 261. 26. The 1936–37 time frame coincided with Tugwell’s departure from USDA. Philip Selznick, TVA and the Grass Roots: A Study in the Sociology of Formal Organization (1949; reprint, New York: Harper, 1966), 221–25; Tugwell and Banfield, “Grass Roots Democracy: Myth or Reality?” Public Administration Review 10, no. 1 (Winter 1950): 52–54; see also Banfield, “Organization for Policy Planning in the U.S. Department of Agriculture,” JFE 34, no. 1 (Feb. 1952): 14–34; Tugwell, “A Planner’s View of Agriculture’s Future,” JFE 31, no. 1 (Feb. 1949): 29–47. 27. Tugwell and Banfield, “Grass Roots,” 48–54. 28. Selznick, TVA, 265. 29. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 364. By and large, the New Left got its Dewey secondhand, notably through Arnold S. Kaufman, a philosophy professor of Tom Hayden and other young radicals at the University of Michigan. In his insightful book The Radical Liberal–The New Politics: Theory and Practice (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968), 50, Kaufman mentions their exhibition of “generational mistrust”; see also James Miller, “Democracy Is in the Streets”:

notes to pages 254–58

327

From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 169– 73. 30. Graham, “Franklin Roosevelt and the Intended New Deal,” in Essays in Honor of James MacGregor Burns, ed. Michael R. Beschloss and Thomas E. Cronin (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1989), 86; Leon Fink, Progressive Intellectuals and the Dilemmas of Democratic Commitment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 90– 93, 313; letter, Park to Wilson, reprinted in BAE, USDA (mimeo), Culture and Agriculture: Cultural Anthropology in Relation to Current Agricultural Problems, v–vii; Taylor, “New Deal,” 115–20. Jessica Wang makes a similar point about “abstruse technicalities” and the “seemingly arcane” policy work of two of Commons’s other students in “Local Knowledge, State Power, and the Scope of Industrial Labor Relations: William Leiserson, David Saposs, and American Labor Economics in the Interwar Years,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 46, no. 4 (Fall 2010): 380– 86. I thank Mary Summers for helping me formulate many of these points. 31. Meg Jacobs and Julian E. Zelizer, “The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History,” in The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History, ed. Meg Jacobs, William J. Novak, and Julian E. Zelizer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 1; Novak, “The Myth of the ‘Weak’ American State,” American Historical Review 113, no. 3 (June 2008): 762–72; Sidney M. Milkis, “Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Economic Constitutional Order, and New Politics of Presidential Politics,” in The New Deal and the Triumph of Liberalism, ed. Sidney M. Milkis and Jerome M. Mileur (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 62. 32. Allin, “Is Planning Compatible?,” 513–20. For a thorough, if dated, treatment of the ties between the two reformist episodes, see Otis L. Graham Jr., An Encore for Reform: The Old Progressives and the New Deal (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967). See also, Morton Keller, “The New Deal and Progressivism: A Fresh Look,” in The New Deal and the Triumph of Liberalism, ed. Sidney M. Milkis and Jerome M. Mileur (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 313–22. Neither draw agrarian links between the two eras. 33. As the eminent peasant scholar Teodor Shanin told me decades ago, too many social theorists can count only to two: this or that. By this measure, the agrarian intellectuals could count to three. 34. Lewis, “Democratic Planning, II,” 469 (emphasis added). 35. Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 306–18; James T. Kloppenberg, “Democracy and Disenchantment: From Weber and Dewey to Habermas and Rorty,” in Modernist Impulses in the Human Sciences, ed. Dorothy Ross (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 78– 88; Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory, 339– 94. 36. Westbrook, Dewey, 188, 310–14; Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory, 384–409; Kloppenberg, “Democracy,” 71–78. 37. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory, 350–415; Westbrook, Dewey, 312–15. 38. Walter Goldschmidt, As You Sow: Three Studies in the Social Consequences of Agribusiness (1947; reprint Montclair, N.J.: Allanheld, Osmun, 1978); Mary Summers, “The New Deal Farm Programs: Looking for Reconstruction in American Agriculture,”

328

notes to pages 259–60

AH 74, no. 2 (2000): 241–57; Olaf F. Larson and Julie N. Zimmerman, Sociology in Government: The Galpin–Taylor Years in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1919–1953 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), 49–52, 161– 63, 179– 84; Julie N. Zimmerman, “Voices from the Past, Lessons for the Future: Learning from the History of Sociology in Government,” Equal Opportunities International 27, no. 2 (2008): 132–47; Kirkendall, Social Scientists, 220–54. 39. M. R. Benedict and M. L. Wilson, “Howard Ross Tolley, 1889–1958,” JFE 41, no. 1 (Feb. 1959): 1–2; Mordecai Ezekiel, “Henry A. Wallace, Agricultural Economist,” JFE 48 (Nov. 1966): 789– 802. 40. Mark L. Kleinman, A World of Hope, a World of Fear: Henry A. Wallace, Reinhold Niebuhr, and American Liberalism (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000), 121–23, passim; Taylor, “L. C. Gray, Agricultural Historian and Land Economist,” AH 26, no. 4 (Oct. 1952): 165; Tolley, “Dismemberment of the BAE,” JFE 36, no. 1 (Feb. 1954): 14–16; H. C. Taylor, “The Reorganization of the Economic Work of the USDA,” ibid., 12–14; Lowry Nelson, Rural Sociology: Its Origin and Growth in the United States (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969), 148, 210; Amrys O. Williams, “Cultivating Modern America: 4-H Clubs and Rural Development in the Twentieth Century,” PhD diss., University of Wisconsin–Madison, 2012; Gabriel N. Rosenberg, Breeding the Future: 4-H and the Roots of the Modern Rural World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming); Andrew Jewett, “The Social Sciences, Philosophy, and the Cultural Turn in the 1930s USDA,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 49 (Fall 2013): 420; Kirkendall, Social Scientists, 220–54. 41. On the whole story of community development, see Daniel Immerwahr, Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015). The connections between agrarian New Dealers and international rural development are fascinating and under-researched, a situation some historians are rectifying; in addition to Immerwahr, see Sarah T. Phillips’s epilogue in This Land, This Nation: Conservation, Rural America, and the New Deal (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 242–83; Clifford M. Kuhn, “Globalizing the American South at Mid-Century: The Case of Arthur Raper,” paper presented at the Agricultural History Society annual meeting, 2011; Louis Mazzari, Southern Modernist: Arthur Raper from the New Deal to the Cold War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 287–309; Williams, “Cultivating Modern.” For a rural-sociological view, see Donald E. Voth and Marcie Brewster, “An Overview of International Community Development,” in Community Development in Perspective, ed. James A. Christenson and Jerry W. Robinson Jr. (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1989), 280–306. From the principals, see, e.g., Wilson, “Foreword,” in H. B. Allen, Rural Reconstruction in Action: Experience in the Near and Middle East (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1953); Wilson, “Community Development Programme in India: Report of a Survey” (Delhi: Community Projects Administration, 1956); Raper, “Rural Sociologists and Foreign Assignments,” RS 18 (1953): 264– 66; Raper, Rural Development in Action: The Comprehensive Experiment at Comilla, East Pakistan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970); [Ensminger], A Guide to Community Development (Delhi: Ministry of Community Development, Government of India, 1957), iii, passim; Irwin T. Sanders, The Community (New York: Ron-

note to page 260

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ald Press, 1958), 389–410; Sanders, “Community Development Programs in Sociological Perspective,” in Our Changing Rural Society, ed. James H. Copp (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1964), 307–40; Arthur F. Wileden, Community Development: The Dynamics of Planned Change (Totowa, PA: Bedminster Press, 1970); Taylor, “Early Rural Sociological Research in Latin America,” RS 25 (1960): 1– 8; Taylor, “The Development of Rural Sociology Abroad,” RS 30 (1965): 462–73; Taylor, Ensminger, Helen W. Johnson, and Jean Joyce, India’s Roots of Democracy: A Sociological Analysis of Rural India’s Experience in Planned Development since Independence (Bombay: Orient Longmans, 1965). 42. Wilson, “On Using Democracy,” LPR 2 (Jan.–Feb. 1939): 4.

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Index

Note: Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations and charts. African Americans: as invisible in citizen committees, 86; and racial differential, 213, 245; and RA/FSA benefits, 91– 92; as tenant farmers, 91– 92 Agency for International Development (USAID), 259 agrarian intellectuals: assessment of programs, 242–52, 254, 255; contrast with urban liberals, 72–77, 240; cultural roots of, 7, 8, 13, 20, 25–32, 34–35, 57, 58–59, 85, 97, 256; early careers of, 47–57, 73–75; education of, 35–47, 57; local to federal network of, 248–49; opponents of, 241–42, 251, 258; and social science, 179; vision of, 2, 13–22, 25, 74, 81, 234, 242, 245, 255, 257–58 Agricultural Adjustment Act (1933), 57, 83– 84, 177 Agricultural Adjustment Act (1938), 87– 88 Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), 80, 82, 83– 88; citizen participation in, 98– 99, 240; conservative influence in, 86; and cooperative planning, 214, 220, 221, 226– 27, 228, 231; County Planning Project, 102– 6, 224; critical evaluation of, 174; criticisms of, 100, 159– 60, 240; and eastern urban liberals, 60, 69, 70– 72, 85– 86; and family farms, 223, 225; increasing consumption via, 81; and land-use planning, 16, 107– 8, 130, 137, 239–42; Legal Division, 70– 72, 85– 86; pamphlets issued by, 261– 63; postwar

programs in, 252; Program Planning Division, 99–100, 103–5, 107, 109, 116, 120, 121, 124, 146, 198; racial and class issues in, 6, 7, 85; Regional Adjustment, 100–102; reorganization of, 87– 88, 120, 240; rumor circulated by, 241; scarcity policy of, 111–12; Supreme Court ruling on, 87, 95, 104; survival of, 99; and USDA, 122– 23; voluntary domestic allotment plan of, 15, 84 Agricultural History Society, 19, 49 Agricultural Prices (Wallace), 53 Agriculture Department, U.S. (USDA): agencies of, 80– 81, 82, 98– 99, 109–10, 117, 120, 137, 195, 244 (see also specific agencies); Agricultural Program Board, 120, 131–32, 234; anti-Semitism in, 72; and citizen participation, 3, 111, 112; goals of, 115, 242; and land-grant colleges, 242; and local knowledge, 81– 82; and modernism, 62; move to long-range planning, 104, 106; national-local planning network of, 2, 112, 138–39, 140–41; Office of Land-Use Coordination, 112; “Purge of the Liberals” in, 86– 87, 88; reorganization of, 108, 116, 119–26, 122– 23, 127, 131, 154, 241, 243, 251; and World War II, 233–37; yearbooks of, 50–51, 166, 175–78 “Agriculture’s Plans to Aid in Defense and Meet the Impacts of War” (IBCC) [1941], 234–37, 241 Alexander, Will W., 91, 98, 127, 213

332

Index

Allin, Bushrod W., 10, 13, 44, 111; and AAA, 100, 104, 105; and adult education, 165; and BAE, 55–56, 108, 220, 240, 241, 243, 244; and County Planning Project, 102; early career of, 27, 55–56; education of, 26, 35, 43, 45, 46, 47; farm-family background of, 27; “Is Planning Compatible with Democracy?,” 255; and land-use planning, 16, 112, 115, 124, 127, 137, 201, 203, 204– 8, 220, 239; on learning by doing, 17, 18; and Mount Weather Agreement, 116; postwar roles of, 260; and social stratification, 246; on synthesis, 19; and World War II, 235; and yearbook, 175, 177 Amberson, William R., 148 American Economic Association, 37, 39 American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF), 54, 98, 238–39, 240–42, 251 American Farm Economic Association, 45, 48, 49, 50, 52 anthropology, cultural, 171–72, 178, 254 Arnold, Thurman, 69, 70, 168 Association of Land-Grant Colleges and Universities, 18, 100, 101; and Mount Weather Agreement, 116 Badger, Anthony, 7 Banfield, Edward C., 3, 251 Bankhead–Jones Farm Tenant Act (1937), 91, 108 Battle for Democracy, The (Tugwell), 78 Beard, Charles A., 4, 11, 54, 120, 142, 167, 168 Beers, Howard, 187, 189, 190, 196, 260 Benedict, Ruth, 11, 15, 142, 167– 68 Bennett, Hugh H.: and SCS, 93– 94, 127; Soil Erosion: A National Menace, 93 Benson, Ezra Taft, 259 Black, John D., 84, 85, 112, 120, 142, 159, 249 Brandeis, Louis D., 66, 67, 70, 73 Brewster, John M., 149, 152 Bureau of Agricultural Economics (BAE), 10, 26; Agricultural Planning Field Service, 241; applied research in, 19, 58, 211; assessment of, 248–49; and community delineation, 179, 180– 87, 248; early days of, 55, 74; Farm Population and Rural Life Division, 125, 149, 152, 173, 179, 180, 181, 191, 213; history of, 48–53; and in-service training, 47; Inter-Bureau Coordinating Committee, 125–26; Joint BAE-Land-Grant College Committee, 131, 134; Land Economics Division, 107, 108, 209; and land-use planning, 51–52, 108,

119–20, 126–29, 130–33, 179– 80, 211, 239–42, 246–47, 249; and Mount Weather Agreement, 117; opponents of, 211, 240–41, 243, 259; Outlook Reports, 49; Program Development and Coordination, 125; Program Surveys Division, 125, 177; and Regional Adjustment, 101; reorganization of, 121–26, 122– 23, 171, 211, 241; roles of, 55, 121, 247; State and Local Planning Division, 108, 124, 127, 196, 232, 241, 243 California: capitalist farmers in, 59; wage workers in, 59 capitalism: and family farms, 28–29; free-market, 77; laissez-faire, 35, 75; planned, 75–76; questions rising from, 35, 47; and reform, 37; unrestrained, 258 Castro, Fidel, 259 Caswell County, North Carolina, 221–22 Chew, A. P., 115 civic republicanism, 26, 30 Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), 93, 214, 218, 220, 221, 228 civil rights movement (1960s), 93 Cobb, Cully, 86 Cold War, 260 Coleman, Lee, 197 Collapse of Cotton Tenancy (Alexander et al.), 91 Collier, John, 97 Committee on Farm Tenancy, 98 Commons, John R., 4, 38–39, 48; and action research, 39; Documentary History of American Industrial Society, 39; History of Labor in the United States, 39; influence of, 10, 17, 19, 35, 36, 39, 40, 41–42, 43–45, 47, 50, 54, 55–56, 73, 81, 170, 186, 253, 254, 255; Institutional Economics, 39; Legal Foundations of Capitalism, 39 Communist Party, 72, 74 Community Action Program, 260 community building, 83, 92 community committees, 130–31, 235, 237 community delineation, 179, 180– 87, 248; and common interests, 192– 93, 194; community theory as basis for, 195; fieldwork, 190– 91, 194; formal process of, 187– 91; Gemeinschaft- Gesellschaft theory, 182– 84; goals of, 181, 185, 187– 88; neighborhood cluster method of, 188– 89; organizational work of, 191; participatory-democratic theory in, 181; progress and problems in, 191– 98; seven steps of, 188; sociological theory in, 181

Index community development, 181, 185– 86, 188, 242, 249, 260 community organization, 180– 81, 185– 86, 249 Congress, U.S.: AFBF members in, 240; Agricultural Bloc in, 54; New Deal attacked in, 165, 211, 218; and political climate, 245; slashing funds, 92, 240, 241 Conkin, Paul K., 1, 88 Conservation and the Natural Resources of the United States (Van Hise), 40 conservation of natural resources, 40, 51, 56, 93– 96, 100–102; and land utilization, 107; long-range planning, 104; planning committees in, 230 cooperative land-use planning: xiv, 6, 16–18, 115–41, 175; action phase of, 212–13; and adult education, 154, 179; assessment of, 242–52; demise of, 240–42; key parts of, 100, 108, 147, 242; launch of, 126–30; local to federal, 15–16, 21, 130–33, 140–41, 155, 169, 185– 91, 205– 8, 223–24, 230–33, 235, 243–44, 248–49, 251; and low modernism, 255; mapping, 133–35, 137, 138–39, 140, 180; Mount Weather Agreement, 117–18, 242–43; nationalized democratic grassroots planning, 248–49; opponents of, 211, 239, 240–41; organization, 122– 23; phases of, 179, 212; private farmland, 51; proposal for, 50–52, 56–57, 80, 83, 112; public forest land, 51; and quality of life, 231; regional, 51; results of, 212–37, 248; and rural communities, 17–18, 187– 91; scope of, 20; unified planning, 135–36, 213, 214–15, 217, 219, 220–21, 225, 232–33 county planning committees: BAE economists working with, 184– 85, 209–10; as core units, 212, 213, 237, 242; and defense industries, 234; farmers represented on, 184, 205, 242, 247; lack of coherent national plan, 244; and participatory research, 202–3, 208–11; problems in, 203– 8 County Planning Project, 102– 6, 124, 224 Covington County, Mississippi, 219–21 Cuba, land reform in, 259 Culpeper County, Virginia, 222, 232 culture, rationalized, 182 Daniel, Pete, 6, 86 Davis, Chester, 86 debt adjustment, 83, 92 democracy, 42; and adult education, 143, 146, 164, 166–70, 178, 236; agricultural, 14–16,

333

18, 242; bureaucracy of, 1, 3, 4, 62, 79, 82, 99, 122– 23, 201, 238–40, 243, 253, 255, 256–57; capitalism, 258; citizen participation in, xiv, 1–5, 7, 15–17, 18, 21, 30, 74, 78, 79, 82, 98– 99, 128, 143, 146, 184, 186, 192, 248, 253, 254, 255, 256, 257; civic republicans, 30; collective, 39, 74; as deliberativeparticipatory state, 16–17, 186, 245, 252, 257; dilemmas of, 1; economic, 88, 246; enemies of, 238; grass-roots, 3, 7, 14, 17, 74, 77, 82, 85, 99, 183, 184, 186, 213, 237, 245, 251; political domination in, 4, 246, 253, 257–58; pursuit of common good in, 30; role of minority opinion in, 161– 62; separation between layman and specialist in, 1, 4, 255; social, 74, 233–37, 260; state as foundation of, 43; state as impediment to, 3; totalitarianism vs., 128, 154–55, 176 Democracy Uses Its Experts in a Time of Crisis, A (BAE), 210–11, 246 democratic planning: xiii, 2, 6–7, 13–14, 17, 21, 252– 60. See also cooperative land-use planning; land-use planning development, meanings of the term, 14 Dewey, John, 4–5, 9, 13, 17, 172; and American pragmatism, xiii, 46–47, 76; contradictory lessons learned from, 73; education philosophy of, 5, 19, 106, 142, 145–46, 153, 161, 186; Freedom and Culture, 15; and “Great Community,” 256–57; and participatory democracy, 18, 143, 146, 185, 253, 254, 255, 257; The Public and Its Problems, 54, 152; and social reform, 22, 106, 136; Weber-Dewey debate, 4, 5, 184, 198, 201, 205, 256–57 Disadvantaged Classes in American Agriculture (C. Taylor), 111 Du Bois, W. E. B., 164 Dust Bowl, 50, 93, 97, 107, 177 eastern urban liberals, 60–79, 90, 240; and AAA Legal Division, 70–72, 85– 86; agrarian intellectuals vs., 72–77, 240; as “city slickers,” 72; collective biography of, 63–72; early careers of, 73–75; influences on, 67; and modernism, 61– 63, 77–79 economics: farm, 43, 47, 49–50; and farm prices, 57, 58, 83, 84– 85, 100, 111, 223, 236; institutionalism, 37, 38, 47, 178; land, 38, 49, 50, 83; of natural resources, 50; neo-classical revolution in, 37; world vs. national, 56–57

334

Index

Eddy County, New Mexico, 196– 97 education, 35–47; in basic research skills, 203, 247; continuing [adult] education, 6, 15, 16, 18, 82, 100, 105– 6, 125, 142–78, 179, 236, 242, 251; and cooperative planning, 217, 232–33; for democracy, 18, 178, 252, 257; elite, 74; and Extension services, 102, 110, 142, 147–57, 217; group discussions, 31, 43, 132, 143, 146, 147–56, 164, 167, 169, 173, 178, 183, 186, 233, 242, 248; in-service training, 47; land-grant colleges, 6, 8, 26, 34, 47, 58, 71, 77, 78, 81, 84, 110, 115, 131, 156, 164, 204, 210, 239, 242–43, 258; leadership training, 125; learning by doing, 17, 18, 247; Mount Weather Agreement (1938), 116–19; networks in, 36, 67, 73; problem-solving basis, 35, 256–57; Program Study and Discussion, 105– 6, 124–25, 146–47, 149–57, 164– 66, 167, 178, 179, 209, 261; schools of philosophy, 106, 125, 143, 145, 147, 154, 156– 66, 161, 172, 173, 178; social change as result of, 106; and synthesis, 19 Einstein, Albert, 145 Eisenhower, Milton, 32, 82, 162; and Agricultural Program Board, 120, 126; and BAE, 132; on gap between local and federal aims, 109, 111; and Land Policy Committee, 112 electrification, rural, 83, 96– 97, 228 Ely, Richard T., 37–38, 47, 50; on activist social science, 37, 38, 48, 55; and BAE, 51–52; influence of, 19, 26, 36, 39–41, 44, 52, 66, 73, 83, 254–55; Introduction to Political Economy, 37; Journal of Land and Public Utility Economics, 38, 50 Embree, Edwin R., 91, 171 Ensminger, Douglas, 187– 88, 193, 259, 260 Europe: impending war in, 128; peasant villages in, 182; and social democracy, 74; World War II in, 233 Evans, R. M., 127 experts: and citizens, 1, 4, 18–19, 21, 47, 49, 77, 105, 108, 179, 203, 210, 212, 247, 255, 256; and farmers, 18–19, 49, 115, 124, 129, 178, 204, 205, 211, 242, 245–46, 249; and World War II planning, 234 Extension services, 49, 78; and adult education, 102, 110, 142, 147–57, 217; and AFBF, 240, 241; community services of, 217, 221, 222, 227; and county planning, 18, 102, 105– 6, 131, 180, 203, 228, 232, 243;

creation of, 118; decentralized, 7, 77; and discussion groups, 147–56; and farmers, 34, 58, 85, 110; and land-use planning, 132–33, 180, 227, 239, 241, 247; and Mount Weather Agreement, 116–18, 243; postwar roles of, 18, 110, 259; and production controls, 84– 85; and schools of philosophy, 106, 125, 143, 157; and SCS, 94; and TVA, 97; and USDA reorganization, 120, 122– 23 Ezekiel, Mordecai, 4, 84, 159, 163, 259 factory farms, 97– 98 Fairway Farms Corporation, 52 family farms: agrarian intellectuals’ roots in, 8, 13, 20, 26–32, 34–35, 57, 58–59, 85, 256; and democracy, 30, 167, 178; “domestic allotment plan,” 56–57; endorsement of, 236–37; financial support to, 223, 225; gender relations in, 7, 34; landowners, 28, 30, 53, 57, 58–59, 72, 74, 78, 85– 86, 201; and large-scale mechanization, 52; and local committees, 130–31, 184, 195; and low modernism, 60, 184, 255–56; production in, 28; and racial bias, 34; “released” from poor land, 56; scientific, 52; and selfsufficiency, 30; and social class, 28–30, 32, 34–35, 54, 59, 111; and values, 32, 34 “Farm and Home Hour” (NBC radio), 150 Farm Bureau (AFBF), 54, 98, 238–39, 240–42, 251 farm cooperatives, 40, 43 farm credit, 83, 99, 231–32 Farm Credit Administration (FCA), 96– 97, 98, 227 Farmer Citizen at War (Tolley), 1, 9 farmers: action programs of, 81; and adult education programs, 142, 150–51, 156, 173, 236; and community delineation, 189– 90, 195; and crop-lien system, 53; experiential knowledge of, 81– 82, 103–4, 112, 115, 118, 176, 198– 99, 226, 247; and experts, 18–19, 49, 115, 124, 129, 178, 204, 205, 211, 242, 245–46, 249; and Extension services, 34, 58, 85, 110; federal benefit payments to, 84, 86; government interference resented by, 110–11, 173, 256; individualism of, 56, 169; involvement in administering New Deal programs, 81– 82, 130–31, 169, 212; and land-grant colleges, 74, 81; landless, 86, 108, 215; and land-use classification and mapping, 199–201, 205– 6, 247; and land-use planning, 121, 195, 233, 242; local committees of, 15, 16, 17, 84– 85, 111, 117,

Index 129, 130–31, 134, 135, 137, 184, 195, 203–5, 233, 235, 240, 242, 245, 247; organization of, 54, 81, 104, 239; and participatory research, 203, 247; part-time, 56; poor, 111, 175, 232, 252; postwar programs for, 252; resettlement and rehabilitation, 83, 92; social justice for, 47, 54. See also tenant farmers Farmers Home Administration, 92 Farmers in a Changing World (USDA), 166, 175–78 Farmers’ Movement, The (C. Taylor), 20, 54 Farmers Union, 223, 226 farm foreclosures, 96 farming: cooperative, 92, 225, 227, 236; corporation, 223; industrial, 8, 52, 59, 97– 98 farm mortgage bill, 96 farm prices, 57, 58, 83, 84– 85, 100, 111, 223, 236 farm problem, causes of, 83, 84, 119 Farm Security Administration (FSA), 7, 82, 88– 93; accomplishments of, 91– 92, 98, 246; community services in, 220, 221, 222, 225, 227, 228; and cooperative planning, 214, 217, 219, 231–32, 240; defeat of, 99, 241; fighting poverty via, 6, 80, 81, 240; local participation in, 92, 130; and RA, 88– 91, 98, 108; subsistence homestead projects, 225 Farm Tenancy, 98 farmworkers, 57, 74 Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), 89, 107 Finegold, Kenneth, 6, 8 Fink, Leon, 12, 253 Fitzgerald, Deborah, 7, 8, 63 flood control, 83, 93, 97, 227 folk culture, 182 folk knowledge, 187 Food and Agriculture Conference (1943), 259 food stamps, 177, 235 Ford Foundation, 259, 260 forestry, 51, 83, 93, 230–31 Forest Service, U.S., 231 Foster, Ellery, 212 4-H, 218, 220, 228 Frank, Jerome, 60, 73; in AAA, 69, 70, 71, 86; background and early years of, 64, 65, 69; dismissal from AAA, 86– 87 Frankfurter, Felix, 66; influence of, 67, 69–70, 71, 72, 73, 74 Frankfurter, Marion, 69 Freedom and Culture (Dewey), 15

335

Friedman, Harriet, 28 Future Farmers of America, 217, 218 Future of the Great Plains, The (Great Plains Committee), 97– 98 Galbraith, John Kenneth, 11, 55, 142 Galpin, Charles J., 40, 48, 181, 182, 184, 188 Garrard County, Kentucky, 189– 90, 195– 96 Gaus, John, 109, 120, 132 Gemeinschaft- Gesellschaft theory, 182– 84, 189, 191, 193– 94, 257 gender inequality, 7, 34 German-Historical School, 37, 44 Giannini Foundation of Agricultural Economics, UC-Berkeley, 48, 101 Glick, Philip M., 94, 95, 160 government: and business, 76; centralized planning, 6–7, 75–77, 78, 79; citizens’ active role in, 5, 74, 254, 256; citizens controlled by, 4, 17; fourth branch of, 75; interagency feuds in, 245; roles of, 26, 37, 77, 80; separation of powers, 75; strong central state, 62 Graham, Otis L. Jr., 253 Gray, Lewis C., 10, 13, 41, 47; and adult education, 165; and BAE, 48, 50, 51, 108, 124; “Disadvantaged Rural Classes,” 111; early career of, 27, 50; education of, 40–41, 43, 50; farm-family background of, 26, 27; farm-purchase initiative, 100, 107, 218; and farm tenancy, 53, 98; and Great Plains, 97; History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860, 20; and land policy, 50–51, 89, 107, 108, 124, 128– 29, 246; and RA, 88; and Regional Adjustment, 101; retirement of, 259; and yearbook, 175, 177 Great Depression, 3, 16, 26, 71, 76, 80, 82, 83, 144, 159 Great Lakes, cut-overs in, 90, 124, 212, 228–30 Great Plains: action phase in, 212, 227; land purchase in, 124 Great Society, 260 Greene County, Georgia, 196, 212–19; county land-use planning committee in, 214–17, 215; as demonstration area, 197, 213–14, 218–19, 235, 260; dirt-poor conditions in, 214; education in, 217; forest fires in, 218; goals in, 215; home canning in, 215–16; land purchase projects in, 218; soil erosion in, 214, 217–18; unified program in, 214–15, 217, 219, 233

336

Index

Hamilton, David, 7 Hand County, South Dakota, 192, 232–33 Harvard University, 70, 72, 142 health care, 92, 235 Heberle, Rudolf, 194 Hibbard, Benjamin H., 19, 35, 36, 40, 43, 46 Hicks, John D., 120, 142, 174 Hiss, Alger, 60; in AAA, 69, 70, 71, 72; background and early years of, 63, 64, 64, 69, 70; resignation from AAA, 86, 87; and Socialist Party, 70 Hiss, Priscilla, 70 history: adult education in, 166, 170–75; agricultural, 49, 174–75; as complement to modernism, 79; significance of, 19–20 History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860 (Gray), 20 Hocking, William Ernest, 142, 177 Holmes, Oliver Wendell Jr., 67, 69, 70 Homestead Act (1862), 28, 56 Hoover, Herbert, 45, 147 Howe, Frederic C., 60; and AAA, 70–71, 86, 87; background and early years of, 63– 64, 64; The City: The Hope of Democracy, 66; and class conflict, 86, 87; education of, 66; and land reform, 66; Wisconsin: An Experiment in Democracy, 66 Ickes, Harold, 89, 93 Indian Reorganization Act (1934), 97, 99 Indian reservations, 107 Industrial Discipline and the Governmental Arts (Tugwell), 76 industrial farming, 8, 52, 59, 97– 98 Institutional Economics (Commons), 39 institutionalism, 37, 38, 39–40, 41, 47, 48, 58, 178 Intended (Third) New Deal, 10; cooperative land-use planning in, 80, 82, 115–41, 242, (see also land-use planning); debates leading to, 99; demise of, 238–42; democratic planning in, xiii, 2, 6– 7, 13–14, 21; education in (see education); land utilization in, 103, 106– 9; launching of, 115–16, 118; Mount Weather Agreement, 112, 116–19, 130, 242–43; root sources of, 25, 109–12; social and economic purposes of, 83, 257; and social science, 179– 80; success of, 258; tragedy of, 260 Inter-Bureau Coordinating Committee (IBCC), 122– 23, 125–26, 131, 220, 229 Interior Department, U.S., Subsistence Homesteads Division, 89

International Cooperation Administration, 260 Introduction to Political Economy (Ely), 37 Jackson, Gardner “Pat,” 60; and AAA, 70–71; background and early years of, 63, 64, 65– 66, 68, 70; dismissal from AAA, 86, 87 James, William, 5, 40, 154; Varieties of Religious Experience, 46 Jefferson, Thomas, 18, 20, 30, 34, 57, 106, 142, 143, 146, 167, 257 Johnson, Alvin, 144 Johnson, Charles S., 91, 98, 154, 171 Johnston, Oscar, 86 Johnstone, Paul H., 176 Journal of Farm Economics, 49, 55 Journal of Land and Public Utility Economics (Ely), 38, 50 Kelso, M. M., 108 Kimmel, Roy, 82, 120, 126 Kirby, Jack, 6 Kirkendall, Richard S., 120, 239, 243; Social Scientists and Farm Politics in the Age of Roosevelt, ix–xii, xiv, 9 Kloppenberg, James, 253 labor movement, 37, 38, 54, 74, 240; interracial unionism, 86 La Follette, Robert M., 38–39, 43, 56, 66 land classification, 51, 56, 108; and mapping, 133–35, 137, 138–39, 140, 198–208, 224, 226, 229–33, 246–47 land economics, 38, 49, 50, 83 land-grant colleges. See education land occupiers, 94, 96 landownership, 13, 28, 30 land policy, 20, 44, 50–51, 82, 83, 106– 9 Land Policy Review, 120, 167 land purchase, federal program of, 89, 93, 100, 106– 8, 218 land tenure, 50, 52, 186, 193, 220 land use, use of term, 83 land-use adjustment, 226–27 land-use planning, 16, 38, 106– 9; assessment of, 242; and Committee on Farm Tenancy, 98; and community delineation, 180– 87; and County Planning Project, 102, 103–4; and farmers, 121, 195, 233, 242; and farm-purchase initiative, 100, 106–7; and participatory research, 202–3, 208–11; questions arising in, 206– 8; Report of the Land Planning Committee, 107; state

Index committees, 201; use of term, 83; Work Outline No. 1, 198–202, 205, 207– 8, 224, 230. See also cooperative land-use planning land-use reform, 13, 20, 52, 56–57, 83, 89, 90 Laski, Harold J., 4, 14, 69 Latin America, rural sociologists in, 259 Lewis, John D., 197, 256 Likert, Rensis, 125, 177 Lilienthal, David E., 3, 62, 70, 97 Lincoln, Abraham, 18, 20, 30, 32, 34, 57, 72, 142, 257 local planning committees, 17, 130–31, 140, 192, 195, 210, 230, 232–33, 245 London School of Economics, 38, 40 Loomis, Charles P., 183, 194 Lord, Russell, 111, 121, 171 Lynd, Helen, 14 Lynd, Robert S., 4, 11, 14, 142, 166 Mannheim, Karl, 4 Mapping. See land classification Marxism, 58 Michigan, cut-over region of, 229–30 Midwest: Corn Belt, 29; family farms in, 7, 8, 32, 34, 58, 59; gender issues in, 7; one-class society of, 28–29, 30, 57–59, 85, 193; religion in, 58 migrant labor, 92, 98, 236 Miller, Francis Pickens, 149 Miller, Helen Hill, 149, 152, 154, 167 Mills, C. Wright, 255 Minnesota, cut-over region of, 228–29 modernism, high, 8, 61– 63, 75– 77, 251; attributes of, 6–7; authoritarian, 7, 62, 78; democratizing, 77–79; history as complement to, 79; uses of the term, 60, 61, 74 modernism, low, 235, 251; and active citizen participation, 184, 187, 192; and community development, 185– 86; and democratic planning, 252– 60; disappearance from public discussion, 258; uses of the term, 8– 9, 16, 60, 61, 63, 79, 256 modernity, cultural tendencies of, 257–59 Montana: action research in, 210; County Planning in, 105– 6, 147; Extension Service, 41, 52; schools of philosophy in, 164; Teton County, 136, 226–27 Montana State College, 210, 226 Mount Weather Agreement (1938), 112, 116–19, 130, 242–43 National Advisory and Legislative Committee on Land Use, 51

337

National Conference on Land Utilization (1931), 51–52, 55 National Farmers Union, 240, 241 nationalized democratic grassroots planning, 248–49 National Land Use Planning Committee, 51 national planning, 6–7, 75–77, 78, 79, 82 National Planning Board, 52 National Resources Board (NRB), 107, 108, 112 National Youth Administration, 214, 217, 221 natural resources: conservation of, 51, 56, 93– 96, 100–102; economics of, 50 Natural Resources Conservation Service, 96 neighborhoods: as clusters, 188– 91; and communities, 184, 185– 86, 187; delineating, 189– 90, 191– 92, 194– 95; and Gemeinschaft, 182– 84, 189, 191, 193– 94; interests in common, 183, 193, 194 Nelson, Lowry, Rural Cuba, 259 New Deal: agrarian, xiii, xiv, 1, 4– 6, 7, 8, 15, 25, 47, 50–51, 81, 242; citizen participation in, 98; class issues in, 6, 7, 34, 112; and cooperative land-use planning, xiv, 16, 18, 20, 239; critics of, 163, 165, 168, 176, 211, 218, 241, 253, 258; development in, 14; gender issues in, 6, 7, 34; and institutionalism, 40; intended (see Intended New Deal); internationalization of, 259– 60; move to long-range planning, 104, 106; and Progressive movement, 254–55; race issues in, 6, 7, 34; Second, 80, 108; social change brought about by, 80, 83, 260; social science in (see social science); Third (see Intended New Deal) New Farmers of America, 217 New Frontiers (Wallace), 20, 32 New Left, 253, 255 North Dakota, farmer participation in, 223–25 Novak, William, 254 Okfuskee County, Oklahoma, 230 organic intellectual, 8, 10, 35, 57–59, 256 Park, Robert E., 11, 36, 46, 171, 172, 254 Parke County, Indiana, 134–35 Parks, Ellen Sorge, 243, 248–49 Peck, George, 71 Perry, Ralph Barton, 142, 154 Populism, 34, 37 Porter, Paul, 32, 70 pragmatism, 46–47, 58, 73, 76, 158, 178

338

Index

Pressman, Lee, 60; in AAA, 69, 70; background and early years of, 64, 65, 69, 70; dismissal from AAA, 86, 87 private land, public interest in, 95– 96 private land use, state regulation of, 94 private property, 38, 56, 81, 93, 201 Progressive movement, 34, 57, 253; BAE as continuation of, 48–49; “concentration and control” policy of, 75; and conservation, 51; and New Deal, 73, 254–55; progressive reformism, 158; and social change, 31, 40, 74; and social sciences, 26, 39, 59, 182; and Wisconsin Idea, 37, 50, 69 Public and Its Problems, The (Dewey), 54, 152 public grazing, 51 public policy: collaboration in, 19; disparate views of, 170; participation in, 18; and poverty, 90; reform of, 56; and research, 50, 179

land-use planning, 83, 203; and long-range planning, 99–100, 105, 163, 267n2; and RA, 88, 89, 90; and rural planning, 4; and SCS, 95 Roosevelt administration: and farm bill, 87– 88; First Hundred Days, 80; and New Deal, 80, 219; reorganization bill (1937), 253 Rosenwald Fund, 91, 171 Ross, Edward A., 38, 40, 44 rural community, 17–18, 187– 91, 194 Rural Cuba (Nelson), 259 rural development, 14, 249, 259– 60 Rural Electrification Administration (REA), 96– 97, 98, 99, 222, 228, 231, 240 Rural Life in Argentina (C. Taylor), 259 rural poverty, 74, 83, 88– 93, 98, 177, 240 rural sociology, 40, 49, 53, 58, 173–74, 180– 82 “rurban community,” 181, 184 Russell, George (Æ), 147

racial issues, 6, 34, 194; in the South, 7, 85, 86, 182, 193, 197, 213, 216. See also African Americans Raper, Arthur F., 91, 197, 213–19, 260 rationalization, 4, 5, 7, 79, 256 Redfield, Robert, 11, 142, 171, 177, 182 Red Scare, 258 Regional Adjustment Project, 100–102, 103, 104 rehabilitation, rural, 89, 91, 98 religion: evangelical Protestantism, 26, 28, 30–31, 32, 58; and urban liberals, 73 Renne, Roland R., 164, 210 research: action research, 6, 16, 39, 178, 179–211, 242, 249, 251; applied, 19, 58, 82; community delineation, 133; demonstration effect in, 192; empirical, 73, 183; integrated, 16; and local committees, 131; mapping, 133–35; participatory, 82, 192, 202–3, 209–11, 242, 247, 249, 252; and planning, 208–11; public policy based on, 50, 179; and the state, 49; surveys, 189, 203, 226; trade-service method, 188– 89; training in basic skills, 203, 247 Resettlement Administration (RA), 80, 88– 91; and FERA, 89, 107; and FSA, 89– 91, 98, 108; land-use planning, 103, 107– 8; and NRB, 108 resettlement and rehabilitation, 83, 92 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 120, 162 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 26, 76, 87, 144; critics of, 167; and elections, 53, 57, 69; as Governor of New York, 56, 69; and

Sacco and Vanzetti case, 66, 69, 70 Salter, Leonard, 204 Sanders, Irwin T., 187– 88, 260 Sanderson, Dwight, 181, 188 Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr., 72 school lunches, 177, 235 scientific management, 61, 75 scientists: and adult education programs, 142; and citizens, 17–18, 21, 108, 129, 208, 247, 255, 256 Scott, James C., 6, 7, 63, 257; and high modernism, 61– 62, 76, 77, 78; Seeing Like a State, 61, 75, 78 Selznick, Philip, 3, 245, 251 sharecroppers, 59, 74, 85– 86, 91, 148, 214, 245 Skocpol, Theda, 6, 8 Smith, T. V., 168 social change, 74, 77, 78, 80, 83, 106, 174, 184; disequilibrium theory of, 45 social class, 28–30, 47, 59, 176; class conflict, 75, 76, 85– 87; discrimination based on, 6, 7, 85; equal representation of, 245; as invisible to agrarian intellectuals, 47, 59, 85, 87; middle class, understanding of term, 72; and poverty, 111, 196; in the South, 7, 85, 182, 193, 197, 245; stratification of, 176, 182, 186, 194, 245–46; and urban liberals, 72–73 social democracy, 74, 235, 237, 260 social engineering, 7, 63 socialism, 42; revolutionary, 35 Socialists, 70, 86 social management, 75

Index social psychology, 172–73 social reform, 5, 18, 34, 37, 47, 62, 79, 80; and FSA, 88– 93; and Tugwell, 111, 251 social science, 175; adult education in, 166, 170–75; participatory action research, 179–211 social scientists: activist, 35, 37, 38, 39, 48, 55, 59; professionalism of, 49–50; state-centered approach of, 6–7, 20–21, 49 Social Scientists and Farm Politics in the Age of Roosevelt (Kirkendall), ix–xii, xiv, 9 soil conservation, 83, 87, 93, 103, 151, 195, 207, 220, 221, 230 Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act (1936), 87, 102 soil conservation districts, 94– 96, 218, 220, 230, 240 Soil Conservation Service (SCS), 80, 82, 93– 96, 98; community services of, 218, 220, 221, 228; and land utilization, 108, 230, 231, 239–42; and local committees, 130, 214; preserving resources via, 81; survival of, 99 soil erosion, 83, 93, 98 Soil Erosion: A National Menace (Bennett), 93 Sorokin, Pitirim A., 4, 182– 83 South: action planning in, 219–23; cooperative planning in, 213–14, 215; cotton and tobacco farms in, 84, 86, 91, 197, 218, 221; family farms in, 214–15; forest lands in, 202; FSA in, 89; plantation, 7, 28, 59, 78, 85, 86– 87, 197, 212, 213, 251; poverty in, 90– 91, 111, 214, 216; race issues in, 7, 85, 86, 182, 193, 197, 213, 216; sharecroppers, 59, 74, 85– 86, 91, 148, 214, 245; social class divisions in, 7, 85, 182, 193, 197, 245; white supremacy in, 193 South Dakota, cooperative planning in, 227 Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU), 86, 87, 98 Soviet Union: collectivization in, 61, 63; totalitarianism in, 128; Wilson’s visit to, 52, 63 states: agricultural land-use programs, 117–18, 124, 136–37, 140–41; county planning committees, 202, 205, 208, 248; joint committees, 207; land classification and mapping, 137, 138–39, 140, 202; land-grant colleges (see education); local to federal network, 248–49; soil conservation districts, 94– 96; state-level planning committees, 233, 234, 237, 248 Statesmanship and Religion (Wallace), 73 Steinbeck, John, The Grapes of Wrath, 92

339

Stock, Catherine, 6, 8 Subsistence Homesteads Division, 89 Supreme Court, U.S., and AAA, 87, 95, 104 synthesis, meaning of the term, 19 Taeusch, Carl F., 105, 146–47, 149, 152, 154, 157–59, 160– 62, 164– 65 Taylor, Alva, 31 Taylor, Carl C., 10, 13, 16–17, 46, 141, 179; and adult education, 147, 149–50, 152, 165, 168; and BAE, 53, 108, 125, 213; and community delineation, 180– 81, 182, 186, 187, 191, 192, 196; Disadvantaged Classes in American Agriculture, 111; early career of, 27, 31, 46, 52–54; education of, 45–46, 47; The Farmers’ Movement, 20, 54; farmfamily background of, 26, 27, 31; fusing research and planning, 208–10; and land purchase program, 107; postwar roles of, 260; and RA, 88, 89; and religion, 31, 73; Rural Life in Argentina, 259; and yearbook, 175, 177 Taylor, Frederick W., 61– 62, 75 Taylor, Graham, 98 Taylor, Henry C., 39–40, 259; background of, 26, 40; and BAE, 19, 47–48, 49–50, 52, 53, 55, 174; influence of, 36, 39, 40, 43, 44, 45, 58; and rural sociology, 181 Taylor Grazing Act (1934), 97, 99 technology: advances in, 75; and modernism, 79 tenant farmers, 225; African Americans, 91– 92; Bankhead-Jones Act (1937), 91, 108; ignored in USDA, 57, 59, 85– 86; and land reform, 52, 53, 222; and RA/FSA, 90, 91, 92; and state legislation, 94; and STFU, 86, 87, 98 Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), 3, 7, 62, 97, 98, 99, 220, 221 terracing, 219–20, 221, 222, 230 Teton County, Montana, 136, 226–27 Thomas, Norman, 148 Tolley, Howard R., 1–2, 15, 42; and AAA, 6, 85, 87, 88, 99, 100, 102, 104, 105, 107, 110, 124, 240; and adult education, 143, 147, 165, 166; and BAE, 10, 13, 19, 47–49, 50, 51, 120, 121, 124, 126–27, 130, 210, 240, 241, 244, 259; and county planning committees, 213, 232, 233; and democratic planning, 2, 17; early career of, 27, 47–48; family-farm background of, 8, 26, 27, 31; and FAO, 259; Farmer Citizen at War, 1, 9; as high modernist, 61, 63; on involving

340

Index

Tolley, Howard R. (continued) farmers in New Deal, 6, 19, 81; and land-use planning, 112, 116, 130, 137, 201, 204, 221, 222, 229, 246, 247; and Mount Weather Agreement, 116; and Regional Adjustment, 101; and religion, 31; and research, 179, 210–11; and social reform, 111; and World War II, 234–37, 241; and yearbooks, 175, 177, 246 Tönnies, Ferdinand, 182– 83, 194 Tufts, James H., 5, 43, 47 Tugwell, Rexford G., 3, 10, 33, 69; and AAA, 60, 71, 85, 107; background and early years of, 63, 64, 65; The Battle for Democracy, 78; as eastern urban liberal, 60, 61, 70, 71–72, 73, 90; and farm tenancy, 98; as high modernist, 60, 61, 74, 75–77, 78–79, 251; The Industrial Discipline and the Governmental Arts, 76; and land planning, 107, 251; and land reform, 90, 111; and production controls, 84; and RA/FSA, 88, 90; and SCS, 93; and social reform, 111, 251; and TVA, 97 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 19, 20, 26, 35, 36, 38, 40 TVA: Democracy on the March (Lilienthal), 3 TVA and the Grass Roots (Selznick), 3, 251 United Nations (UN), Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), 259 University of Wisconsin, Madison, 37–46, 50, 55–56, 58, 66 urban liberals. See eastern urban liberals USDA. See Agriculture Department, U.S. Van Hise, Charles, 38–39; Conservation of the Natural Resources of the United States, 40 Veblen, Thorstein, 10, 19, 35, 36, 54; disequilibrium theory of social change, 45; influence of, 45–46; and slide-rule authoritarianism, 62, 75 Wallace, Henry A., 30, 33, 55, 80, 162; and AAA, 84, 85, 86– 88, 99–100, 105– 6, 107, 111–12; and adult education, 142–43, 146, 147, 149, 153, 156–58, 160, 163, 166, 168, 178; Agricultural Prices, 53; and BAE, 49, 50, 53, 127–28; and cooperative planning, 203–4, 254; early career of, 27, 53, 73; education of, 35, 52–53; family-farm background of, 26, 27, 32, 256; and farm bill, 87– 88; and farm tenancy, 98; as high modernist, 61, 62, 63; and international-

ization, 259; and land policy, 83, 105, 107, 112, 127–28; and Mount Weather Agreement, 116, 118; New Frontiers, 20, 32; and NRB, 107; and production controls, 84; and RA, 90– 91; and Regional Adjustment Project, 101, 104; and religion, 46, 73; and research, 174, 179, 210, 254; on role of experts, 18; and SCS, 93, 96; as Secretary of Agriculture, xiii–xiv, 10, 13, 32, 39, 43, 88, 115, 116, 211; and social reform, 2, 111; Statesmanship and Religion, 73; tour of the South, 90– 91; and USDA reorganization, 119– 21, 127, 131, 154, 243; as Vice President, 1, 10, 175, 239, 259; Whose Constitution, 20 Wallace, Henry C. (father), 32; and BAE, 53; as Secretary of Agriculture, 48, 128 Wallace, Henry “Uncle Henry” (grandfather), 31–32, 34 Wallaces’ Farmer, 53, 241 Ward County, North Dakota, 198, 224–25 Warner, W. Lloyd, 142, 171, 177 War on Poverty, 260 Washington State College, 160, 161 water resources, conservation of, 93, 225 Webb, Sidney and Beatrice, 38 Weber, Max, 4, 5, 184, 198, 201, 205, 256–57 Wells, O. V., 125 West: action phase in, 227–28; cooperative planning in, 228; nonfamily farm labor in, 193 Westcott, George W., 249 Whose Constitution (Wallace), 20 Wickard, Claude, 234, 235, 237, 239–41 wildlife conservation, 51, 83, 93 Wiledon, Arthur, 148, 260 Williams, Robin, 189, 196 Wilson, M. L., 5, 10, 13, 42, 109, 112, 255; and AAA, 6, 84– 85, 88, 105, 106, 107; and adult education, 100, 142–50, 153, 154, 156–59, 160, 163, 166, 172, 178; and BAE, 48, 50, 51, 52, 240; and community development, 260; and county planning committees, 213; on democracy, 14–18, 19, 20, 167–70; early career of, 27, 52, 73; education of, 41–43, 47; and Extension, 14, 155, 175, 240, 259; family-farm background of, 8, 25, 26, 27, 29, 30, 34–35, 59, 256; and farm tenancy, 98; and FSA, 88; as high modernist, 61, 62– 63; and international rural development, 260; and land policy, 105, 107, 112, 116, 141; “Land Utilization”

Index (radio), 56–57; as low modernist, 79, 256; and Mount Weather Agreement, 116–19; and production controls, 84; and Regional Adjustment, 101; and religion, 31, 46, 73; and research, 174, 179; and rural development, 249; and SCS, 94, 96; in Soviet Union, 52, 63; and Subsistence Homesteads Division, 89; “A Theory of Agricultural Democracy,” 14–16; and UN, 259; and World War II, 234–37, 241; and yearbook, 177–78 Wilson, Woodrow, 39, 43, 66 Wirth, Louis, 182 Wisconsin: An Experiment in Democracy (Howe), 66 Wisconsin: local-federal network criticized in, 249; rural zoning in, 108; workers’ benefits in, 25, 39 Wisconsin Idea, 37, 50, 55, 69 Witt, Nathan, 70 Witte, Edwin, 44–45

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Wolcott, Leon, 120, 132 women: and farm markets, 232; rights of, 54; roles of, 135, 221–22 woodland management, 202, 230–31 Woodson, Carter G., 148 Work Outline No. 1, 198–202, 205, 207– 8, 224, 230 World War I, 163, 234, 236, 240 World War II, 59, 165; defense coordination, 241; impact of, 255; national defense emergency preceding, 233–37; postwar programs, 235–36, 237, 252–53, 258 Worster, Donald, 7 Yavapai County, Arizona, 227–28 Yearbook of Agriculture (1923), 50–51; (1940), 166, 175–78 Young County, Texas, 127, 232 Zimmerman, Carle C., 182– 83 zoning, rural, 108, 229