Three New Deals by Wolfgang Schivelbusch

Author:Wolfgang Schivelbusch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2006-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

The Arthurdale settlement in West Virginia

This rocky start was one reason why the Subsistence Homesteads Division was dissolved in 1935, before the majority of its thirty-four projects had been completed, and its responsibilities transferred to the newly founded Resettlement Administration. The idea of a mixed agrarian-industrial economy disappeared from the spotlight as quickly as it had appeared. With three exceptions (to which we will later return), the sixty projects realized before the resettlement program was canceled at the end of the decade were aimed simply at alleviating emergency situations and involved no grand social visions. Adherents continued to argue passionately for the idea, among them an Oklahoma congressman who urged that the budget for the subsistence homestead program be increased from $25 million to $4 billion, characterizing it as the only way out of the Depression and declaiming that otherwise “we are all lost.”21 For some social planners and reformers, including M. L. Wilson, founding director of the Subsistence Homestead Division, the program remained what it had been in its initial days: a laboratory for Utopian experiments. But mainstream America, insofar as it took any notice of the post-Arthurdale settlements, and in particular the new communities’ residents, mistrusted and opposed the planners’ attempts to develop collective and cooperative forms of life. These were perceived as authoritarian and un-American, contrary to such values as individualism and competition. It may have been hyperbolic political rhetoric when a Roosevelt opponent described the settlement projects as “the first Soviet colchos on American soil.” But it was another matter entirely when the homesteaders themselves complained about state regulation and regimentation, which in the eyes of many of them amounted to government control of their private lives. As historian Diane Ghirardo concludes, “settlers rightly felt that they were surrendering entirely too much freedom simply to obtain a loan or to remain on a project, and some felt that they were being spied upon, and that their privacy was unreasonably invaded.” In this respect, the New Deal’s homesteads not only resembled but outdid their equivalents in Mussolini’s Italy.22

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