Planning Democracy: Agrarian Intellectuals and the Intended New Deal

Yale Agrarian Studies Series

by Jess Gilbert

Late in the 1930s, the U.S. Department of Agriculture set up a national network of local organizations that joined farmers with public administrators, adult-educators, and social scientists. The aim was to localize and unify earlier New Deal programs concerning soil conservation, farm production control, tenure security, and other reforms, and by 1941 some 200,000 farm people were involved. Even so, conservative anti–New Dealers killed the successful program the next year. This book reexamines the era’s agricultural policy and tells the neglected story of the New Deal agrarian leaders and their visionary ideas about land, democratization, and progressive social change.

Genres: History, Agriculture

368 pages, Hardcover

First published April 28, 2015

Reviews

[Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a remarkable history of New Deal agricultural policy, some of which has been well covered in other books, but much (and the very best) of which Dr Gilbert has unearthed from long forgotten history for modern audiences for the first time. You may know that Henry Wallace very nearly became America's most radical president, until Democratic party leadership physically blocked him for receiving the Vice Presidential nomination and instead ushering Harry Truman into the role. But how much do you know about what the Midwestern progressive (and a large cast of other New Dealers) was doing at his former post as the Secretary of Agriculture? For a brief time, the USDA and supporting agricultural agencies were a breeding ground for radical experiments in participatory democracy that were generations ahead of their time. Techniques like counter-mapping and participatory action research that wouldnt enter even critical geography and sociology studies for decades were pioneered in the 30s as part of a grand effort to democratize rural America. The very foundations of Jeffersonian agriculture were being challenged- if only for a moment- by new visions of farming as a cooperative act both in terms of organizational structure and in relation to the greater community. While not quite a direct democracy in its most radical form, there existed for a few short years something close: a network of committees spanning wide swaths of rural America that invited ordinary people to take part in the construction of the policy that made up their lives. Open planning committees had their hands in everything from land use planning, farm subsidies, conservation, to the creation of thousands of cooperatives providing things like healthcare, utilities, and farm equipment to rural communities. Tragically, nearly everything built by New Dealers in their attempt to change the fabric of rural America was erased by the early 40s. Just as tragic, these bold experiments have also been almost entirely forgotten in popular consciousness and even progressive histories of American agriculture. Amongst popular visions for an alternative agriculture filled with a nostalgia for a more bucolic Jeffersonianism, this book is a sorely needed reminder that there is more than one way to fight back against Big Ag, and that democracy in rural America requires a lot more than just supporting more small farmers.