Liberty and Coercion by Gary Gerstle

Author:Gary Gerstle [Gerstle, Gary]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2017-09-26T16:00:00+00:00

THE SUCCESS AND FAILURE OF THE NEW DEAL’S FARM PROGRAM

The centerpiece of the New Deal’s farm program was the Agricultural Adjustment Act, passed in 1933 during Roosevelt’s first hundred days in office. This act was an omnibus bill that gave the USDA the power to attack agricultural problems on multiple fronts: through inflationary monetary policies, marketing agreements, trade treaties, and extensions of farm credit. But most important was its novel approach to eliminating crop surpluses. Instead of authorizing the federal government to dispose of these surpluses in international markets and compensate farmers who had had to sell below cost (the McNary-Haugen plan), this legislation instructed the central state to pay individual farmers to reduce the acreage they put under the plow. Agricultural production would decline as a result, bringing supply into closer correspondence with demand and thus exerting upward pressure on prices. This farm law established the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) to implement the new programs. AAA supporters claimed that farmers would end up earning more money for each bushel harvested. The income earned from those sales, in combination with federal payments for acreage left untilled, would hopefully bring farmers more enduring economic security than most had ever known. 42

The scope of this crop reduction program was vast; so, too, were the number of government employees and associations of farmers needed to make it work. The AAA required the secretary of agriculture to identify each year the percentage of acres to be removed from cultivation for each of the major crops and determine how much the federal government would pay for each bushel not produced. Setting those figures was actually the easier part of this governing challenge, and the Bureau of Agricultural Economics embraced it. The hard part was writing individual contracts for each of the millions of farm owners whom the AAA hoped to involve in this venture. Those contracts were to stipulate the acreage that farmers were to leave untilled, the number of unplanted bushels for which they were to receive compensation, and the total subsidy that the federal government was to pay them. The contracts were also to extract pledges from farmers not to exceed their allotments, and authorize the central state to take action against those who did. 43

If some farmers were initially reluctant to allow the federal state to intrude so deeply into their economic lives, most embraced this program once they understood that the central government was in effect offering to pay them to work less. Quickly, the central state found itself confronted with the need to write hundreds of thousands and then millions of individual contracts. By 1934, AAA officials had issued more than a million contracts among cotton farmers in the South alone, and most contracts had to be rewritten or renewed on an annual basis. Here was an instance of the central state reaching down to millions of citizens and involving each of them individually in a grand plan to stabilize American agriculture. 44

The federal government’s only chance of executing this

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