Another journalist noted that “Tugwellism” was less about the man than about the times, that is, a contest about class politics and who could claim to represent poor whites. On the surface, this forty-three-year-old Ivy Leaguer, with a cool, “carefully-studied informality of appearance,” projected an air of haughtiness and seemed to regard humanity as something for “experimentation.” To Tugwell’s critics, then, nothing about him suggested a bona fide understanding of rural America.34 Tugwell, however, refused to engage in a theatrical debate over what it meant to be a “man of the people.”
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From the sounds of it, Tugwell was hardly 'pretending to be an earnest plowman' in the vein of Jefferson and others. To his mind, he's doing the most efficent thing he can do to raise the country out of the Depression, and if that means raising poor white farmers to more education, greater wealth, voting rights, and other things they didn't have before, then those are either collateral damage or happy side effects, depending on one's viewpoint. Either way, it's hardly a bad thing for the people who are benefitting the programs.
