Teaching the Article
Exercise 1

Creation of the Resettlement Administration/Farm Security Administration

When the depression hit urban people in 1929‒1930, farmers had already been struggling against a failing rural economy for nearly a decade. So when Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in March 1933—in those days there was a five-month hiatus between the election and the inauguration—addressing the agricultural crisis was one of his very top priorities. He had assigned his secretary of agriculture Henry A. Wallace to draft a bill during that gap and was able to get the bill introduced quickly in Congress and passed by May 12. The Agricultural Adjustment Act (aaa) aimed at raising the prices farmers got by reducing the supply of farm products. (This concept was called “parity”—getting supply and demand into balance.) For seven “basic crops”—corn, wheat, cotton, rice, peanuts, tobacco, and milk—the aaa offered payments to farmers in return for reducing their crop.

But those payments went to farm owners, and since the law did not require them to share their new government welfare with their tenant farmers and farm wage workers, the aaa actually made things worse for ordinary farm workers. In taking land out of production, owners fired and evicted many of their tenants and workers. Undersecretary of Agriculture Rexford Tugwell, who understood the department’s tradition of listening mainly to the big, wealthy growers with tens of thousands of acres, initiated a new program in April 1935: the Resettlement Administration (ra), later to be renamed the Farm Security Administration (fsa).

As the main historian of that new agency, Sidney Baldwin, explained, it had three basic areas of activity: educating farmers in better land use; resettling poor families on better land; and making grants and loans to help small farmers and farm workers purchase land and buy equipment and livestock.

Tugwell also created something quite unusual for the new ra: within its Information Division, he hired a former student, Roy Stryker, to create a photographic study of the Depression in rural America. Stryker then hired a group of fine photographers, including Dorothea Lange. Because Stryker’s project was small, relative to the whole ra/fsa budget and because it was so far from the center of agricultural policy, this small project developed relatively unchecked by the more conservative forces in the Department of Agriculture.

Questions

• What were the programs developed by the ra/fsa?
• What social services did it offer?
• What services did it not offer that might have been needed?