Everything about Farm Security Administration totally explained
Initially created as the
Resettlement Administration in 1935 as part of the
New Deal, the
Farm Security Administration was an effort during the Depression to combat rural poverty. The FSA stressed "rural rehabilitation" efforts to improve the lifestyle of sharecroppers, tenants, and very poor landowning farmers, and a program to purchase submarginal land owned by poor farmers and resettle them in group farms on land more suitable for efficient farming. Critics, including the
Farm Bureau strongly opposed the FSA as an experiment in collectivizing agriculture — that is, in bringing farmers together to work on large government-owned farms using modern techniques under the supervision of experts. The program failed because the farmers wanted ownership; after the
Conservative coalition took control of Congress it transformed the FSA into a program to help poor farmers buy land, and continues in operation in the 21st century as the
Farmers Home Administration.
The FSA is famous for its small but highly influential photography program, 1935-44, that realistically portrayed the challenges of rural poverty.
Origins
The projects that were combined in 1935 to form the FSA started in 1933 as an assortment of programs tried out by the
Federal Emergency Relief Administration, and later inside the Department of Agriculture under the
Resettlement Administration following Roosevelt's 1935 executive order creating that agency.
Relief work
One of the activities performed by the RA and FSA was the buying out of small farms that were not economically viable, and the setting up of 34 subsistence homestead communities, in which groups of farmers would live together under the guidance of government experts and work a common area. They were not allowed to purchase their farms for fear that they'd fall back into inefficient practices not guided by RA and FSA experts. [Baldwin1968]
The
Dust Bowl in the Great Plains displaced thousands of tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and laborers, many of whom (known as "Okies" or "Arkies") moved on to California. The FSA operated camps for them, as depicted in
The Grapes of Wrath.
The RA and the FSA gave educational aid to 455,000 farm families during the period 1936-1943. In June, 1936, Roosevelt wrote: "You are right about the farmers who suffer through their own fault... I wish you'd have a talk with Tugwell about what he's doing to educate this type of farmer to become self-sustaining. During the past year his organization has made 104,000 farm families practically self-sustaining by supervision and education along practical lines. That is a pretty good record!" [Sternsher272]
The FSA's primary mission wasn't to aid farm production or prices. Roosevelt's agricultural policy had, in fact, been to try to decrease agricultural production to increase prices. However, when production was discouraged, the tenant farmers and small holders suffered most by not being able to ship enough to market to pay rents. Many renters wanted money to buy farms, but the Agriculture Department realized there already were too many farmers, and didn't have a program for farm purchases. Instead they used education to help the poor stretch their money further. Congress however demanded that the FSA help tenant farmers purchase farms, and purchase loans of $191 million were made, which were eventually repaid. A much larger program was $778 million in loans (at effective rates of about 1% interest) to 950,000 tenant farmers. The goal was to make the farmer more efficient so the loans were used for new machinery, trucks, or animals, or to repay old debts. At all times the borrower was closely advised by a government agent. Family needs were on the agenda, as the FSA set up a health insurance program and taught farm wives how to cook and raise children. Upward of a third of the amount was never repaid, as the tenants moved to much better opportunities in the cities. [Meriamp 290-312]
Photography program
The RA and FSA are well known for the influence of their photography program, 1935-1944. Photographers and writers were hired to report and document the plight of the poor farmer. The Information Division of the FSA was responsible for providing educational materials and press information to the public. Under
Roy Stryker, the Information Division of the FSA adopted a goal of "introducing America to Americans." Many of the most famous Depression-era photographers were fostered by the FSA project.
Walker Evans,
Dorothea Lange, and
Gordon Parks were three of the most famous FSA alumni. The FSA was also cited in
Gordon Parks' autobiographical novel, " A Choice of Weapons"
The photographers
The FSA photography group consisted of:
Together with
John Steinbeck's
The Grapes of Wrath (not a government project) and documentary prose (for example Walker Evans and
James Agee's
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men), the FSA photography project is most responsible for creating the image of the Depression in the USA. Many of the images appeared in popular magazines. The photographers were under instruction from Washington as to what overall impression the New Deal wanted to give out. Stryker's agenda focused on his faith in social engineering, the poor conditions among cotton tenant farmers, and the very poor conditions among migrant farm workers; above all he was committed to social reform through New Deal intervention in people's lives. Stryker demanded photographs that "related people to the land and vice versa" because these photographs reinforced the RA's position that poverty could be controlled by "changing land practices." Though Stryker didn't dictate to his photographers how they should compose the shots, he did send them lists of desirable themes, for example, "church," "court day," "barns." Stryker sought photographs of migratory workers that would tell a story about how they lived day-to-day. He asked Dorothea Lange to emphasize cooking, sleeping, praying and socializing. [Finnegan43-44] RA-FSA made 250,000 images of rural poverty. Fewer than half of those images survive and are housed in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress. The Library has now placed all 164,000 developed negatives online
(External Link
). From these some 77,000 different finished photographic prints were originally made for the press, plus 644 color images from 1600 negatives.
Documentary Films
The
Resettlement Administration also funded two documentary films by
Pare Lorentz,
The Plow That Broke the Plains about the creation of the
Dust Bowl and
The River about the importance of
Mississippi River. The films were deemed "culturally significant" by the
United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the
National Film Registry.
Reformers ousted; Farmers Home Administration
After the war started and there were millions of unfilled factory jobs in the cities, there was no need for FSA. In late 1942 Roosevelt moved the housing programs to the National Housing Agency, and in 1943, Congress greatly reduced FSA's activities. The photographic unit was subsumed by the Office of War Information for one year then disbanded. Finally in 1946 all the social reformers had left and FSA was replaced by a new agency, the
Farmers Home Administration, which had the goal of helping finance farm purchases by tenants--and especially by war veterans--with no personal oversight by experts. It became part of
Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty in the 1960s, with a greatly expanded budget to facilitate loans to low-income rural families and cooperatives, injecting $4.2 billion into rural America. [Baldwin403]
Further Information
Get more info on 'Farm Security Administration'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://farm_security_administration.totallyexplained.com">Farm Security Administration Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
