The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi

by Wright Thompson

Supreme Court overturned the law in 1936, on the grounds that agriculture should be controlled by the states, even if the states had done nothing to try to arrest the thirteen-year free fall. The Roosevelt administration rewrote the bill to account for the high court’s reversal and it passed again. The Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938 copied all the main provisions of the previous bill and added two new ones. First, it provided for crop insurance. Second, it instituted parity payments, which added a subsidy to the per-pound price of cotton to offset the permanent drop in the crop’s value and global importance. Everyone recognized that the next revolution would happen in science labs and petroleum wells, not in fields or factories, but many felt the families who had powered the old revolution should have their economic fall softened somehow. The government worked out the math to allow farmers to regain a standard of living erased by the collapse of the commodity market. Subsidies were given to make sure that falling crop prices and rising chemical and mechanical prices wouldn’t impact the farmers’ purchasing power. They picked a golden age of cotton—but before the boom triggered by the war—as the baseline: August 1909 to July 1914.