Farm Security Administration
Encyclopedia
Resettlement Administration
The Resettlement Administration was a U.S. federal agency that, between April 1935 and December 1936, relocated struggling urban and rural families to communities planned by the federal government....
(RA) in 1935 as part of the New Deal
New Deal
The New Deal was a series of economic programs implemented in the United States between 1933 and 1936. They were passed by the U.S. Congress during the first term of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The programs were Roosevelt's responses to the Great Depression, and focused on what historians call...
in the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
, the Farm Security Administration (FSA) was an effort during the Depression to combat American rural poverty.
The FSA stressed "rural rehabilitation" efforts to improve the lifestyle of sharecroppers, tenants, 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
Collective farming
Collective farming and communal farming are types of agricultural production in which the holdings of several farmers are run as a joint enterprise...
— 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
Conservative coalition
In the United States, the conservative coalition was an unofficial Congressional coalition bringing together the conservative majority of the Republican Party and the conservative, mostly Southern, wing of the Democratic Party...
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 portrayed the challenges of rural poverty.
Origins
The projects that were combined in 1935 to form the RA started in 1933 as an assortment of programs tried out by the Federal Emergency Relief AdministrationFederal Emergency Relief Administration
Federal Emergency Relief Administration was the new name given by the Roosevelt Administration to the Emergency Relief Administration which President Herbert Hoover had created in 1932...
. The RA was headed by Rexford Tugwell
Rexford Tugwell
Rexford Guy Tugwell was an agricultural economist who became part of Franklin D. Roosevelt's first "Brain Trust," a group of Columbia academics who helped develop policy recommendations leading up to Roosevelt's 1932 election as President...
, an economic advisor to President Roosevelt. However, Tugwell's goal moving 650,000 people into 100000000 acres (404,686 km²) of exhausted, worn-out land was unpopular among the majority in Congress. This goal seemed socialistic
Socialism
Socialism is an economic system characterized by social ownership of the means of production and cooperative management of the economy; or a political philosophy advocating such a system. "Social ownership" may refer to any one of, or a combination of, the following: cooperative enterprises,...
to some and threatened to deprive influential farm owners of their tenant workforce. The RA was thus left with only enough resources to relocate a few thousand people from 9 million acres (36,421.7 km²) and build several greenbelt cities, which planners admired as models for a cooperative future that never arrived.
The main focus of the RA was to now build relief camps in California for migratory workers, especially refugees from the drought-struck Dust Bowl of the Southwest. This move was resisted by a large share of Californians, who did not want destitute migrants to settle in their midst. The RA managed to construct ninety-five camps that gave migrants unaccustomed clean quarters with running water and other amenities, but the 75,000 people who had the benefit of these camps were a small share of those in need and could only stay temporarily. After facing enormous criticism for his poor management of the RA, Tugwell resigned in 1936. On January 1, 1937, with hopes of making the RA more effective, the Resettlement Administration
Resettlement Administration
The Resettlement Administration was a U.S. federal agency that, between April 1935 and December 1936, relocated struggling urban and rural families to communities planned by the federal government....
was transferred to the Department of Agriculture through executive order 7530.
On July 22, 1937, Congress passed the Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Act. This law authorized a modest credit program to assist tenant farmers to purchase land, and it was the culmination of a long effort to secure legislation for their benefit. Following the passage of the Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Act, Congress passed the Farm Security Act into law. The Farm Security Act officially transformed the Resettlement Administration into the Farm Security Administration (FSA). The FSA expanded through funds given by the Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Act.
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 would fall back into inefficient practices not guided by RA and FSA experts.The Dust Bowl
Dust Bowl
The Dust Bowl, or the Dirty Thirties, was a period of severe dust storms causing major ecological and agricultural damage to American and Canadian prairie lands from 1930 to 1936...
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, such as Weedpatch Camp
Weedpatch Camp
Weedpatch Camp was built by the Farm Security Administration south of Bakersfield, California in 1936 to house migrant workers during the Great Depression...
as depicted in The Grapes of Wrath
The Grapes of Wrath
The Grapes of Wrath is a novel published in 1939 and written by John Steinbeck, who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1940 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962....
.
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 would have a talk with Tugwell about what he is 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!"
The FSA's primary mission was not 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 did not 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.
Modernization
The FSA resettlement communities appear in the literature as efforts to ameliorate the wretched condition of southern sharecroppers and tenants. However, those evicted to make way for the new settlers are virtually invisible in the historic record. The resettlement projects were part of larger efforts to modernize rural America. "Modernization" is a complex process where by a relatively specific set of assumptions and behaviors make other assumptions and behaviors "wrong," both morally and pragmatically. The removal of former tenants and their replacement by FSA clients in the lower Mississippi alluvial plain—the Delta—reveals core elements of New Deal modernizing policies. The key concepts that guided the FSA's tenant removals were: the definition of rural poverty as rooted in the problem of tenancy; the belief that economic success entailed particular cultural practices and social forms; and the commitment by those with political power to gain local support. These assumptions undergirded acceptance of racial segregation and the criteria used to select new settlers. Alternatives could only become visible through political or legal action—capacities sharecroppers seldom had. However, in succeeding decades, these modernizing assumptions created conditions for Delta African Americans on resettlement projects to challenge white supremacy.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 poor farmers. The Information Division of the FSA was responsible for providing educational materials and press information to the public. Under Roy StrykerRoy Stryker
Roy Emerson Stryker was an American economist, government official, and photographer. He is most famous for heading the Information Division of the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression and launching the documentary photography movement of the FSA.After serving in the infantry...
, 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
Walker Evans
Walker Evans was an American photographer best known for his work for the Farm Security Administration documenting the effects of the Great Depression. Much of Evans's work from the FSA period uses the large-format, 8x10-inch camera...
, Dorothea Lange
Dorothea Lange
Dorothea Lange was an influential American documentary photographer and photojournalist, best known for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration...
, and Gordon Parks
Gordon Parks
Gordon Roger Alexander Buchanan Parks was a groundbreaking American photographer, musician, poet, novelist, journalist, activist and film director...
were three of the most famous FSA alumni. The FSA was also cited in Gordon Parks
Gordon Parks
Gordon Roger Alexander Buchanan Parks was a groundbreaking American photographer, musician, poet, novelist, journalist, activist and film director...
' autobiographical novel, " A Choice of Weapons"
The photographers
The FSA photography group consisted of:Theodor Jung, Edwin Rosskam, Louise Rosskam
Louise Rosskam
Louise Rosskam was a photographer for the Farm Security Administration and the Standard Oil Company during the mid-20th century. Together with her husband, Edwin Rosskam , the pair documented American life during the Great Depression...
, Ben Shahn
Ben Shahn
Ben Shahn was a Lithuanian-born American artist. He is best known for his works of social realism, his left-wing political views, and his series of lectures published as The Shape of Content.-Biography:...
, John Collier, Sheldon Dick
Sheldon Dick
Sheldon Dick was an American publisher, literary agent, photographer, and filmmaker. He was a member of a wealthy and well-connected industrialist family, and was able to support himself while funding a series of literary and artistic endeavors. He published a book by poet Edgar Lee Masters,...
, and
John Steinbeck
John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr. was an American writer. He is widely known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden and the novella Of Mice and Men...
's The Grapes of Wrath
The Grapes of Wrath
The Grapes of Wrath is a novel published in 1939 and written by John Steinbeck, who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1940 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962....
(not a government project) and documentary prose (for example Walker Evans and James Agee
James Agee
James Rufus Agee was an American author, journalist, poet, screenwriter and film critic. In the 1940s, he was one of the most influential film critics in the U.S...
's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is a book with text by American writer James Agee and photographs by American photographer Walker Evans first published in 1941 in the United States...
), the FSA photography project is most responsible for creating the image of the Depression in the US. 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 portray. Stryker's agenda focused on his faith in social engineering, the poor conditions among tenant cotton 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 did not 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. 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 placed all 164,000 developed negatives online. 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 AdministrationResettlement Administration
The Resettlement Administration was a U.S. federal agency that, between April 1935 and December 1936, relocated struggling urban and rural families to communities planned by the federal government....
also funded two documentary films by Pare Lorentz
Pare Lorentz
Pare Lorentz was an American filmmaker known for his movies about the New Deal. Born Leonard MacTaggart Lorentz in Clarksburg, West Virginia, he was educated at Wesleyan College and West Virginia University. As a young film critic in New York and Hollywood, Lorentz spoke out against censorship in...
, The Plow That Broke the Plains
The Plow That Broke the Plains
The Plow That Broke the Plains is a short documentary film which shows what happened to the Great Plains region of the United States and Canada when uncontrolled agricultural farming led to the Dust Bowl...
about the creation of the Dust Bowl
Dust Bowl
The Dust Bowl, or the Dirty Thirties, was a period of severe dust storms causing major ecological and agricultural damage to American and Canadian prairie lands from 1930 to 1936...
and The River
The River (1938 film)
The River is a 1938 short documentary film which shows the importance of the Mississippi River to the United States, and how farming and timber practices had caused topsoil to be swept down the river and into the Gulf of Mexico, leading to catastrophic floods and impoverishing farmers...
about the importance of Mississippi River
Mississippi River
The Mississippi River is the largest river system in North America. Flowing entirely in the United States, this river rises in western Minnesota and meanders slowly southwards for to the Mississippi River Delta at the Gulf of Mexico. With its many tributaries, the Mississippi's watershed drains...
. The films were deemed "culturally significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry
National Film Registry
The National Film Registry is the United States National Film Preservation Board's selection of films for preservation in the Library of Congress. The Board, established by the National Film Preservation Act of 1988, was reauthorized by acts of Congress in 1992, 1996, 2005, and again in October 2008...
.
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 AdministrationFarmers Home Administration
In 1946 Farmers Home Administration replaced the Farm Security Administration which superseded the Resettlement Administration. Its mission and programs involved extending credit for agriculture and rural development. Direct and guaranteed credit went to individual farmers, low-income families,...
, 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.
Relief
- Sidney Baldwin, Poverty and Politics: The Rise and Decline of the Farm Security Administration University of North Carolina Press, 1968, a scholarly study by a senior FSA official online edition
- Greta De Jong, "'With the Aid of God and the F.S.A.': The Louisiana Farmers' Union and the African American Freedom Struggle in the New Deal Era" Journal of Social History, Vol. 34, 2000
- Michael Johnston Grant, "Down and Out on the Family Farm: Rural Rehabilitation in the Great Plains, 1929-1945" University of Nebraska PressUniversity of Nebraska PressThe University of Nebraska Press, founded in 1941, is a publisher of scholarly and popular-press books. It is the second-largest state university press in the United States and, including private institutions, ranks among the 10 largest university presses in the United States...
. 2002 - Lewis Meriam, Relief and Social Security The Brookings Institution. 1946. online edition
- Bernard Sternsher, Rexford Tugwell and the New Deal Rutgers University PressRutgers University PressRutgers University Press is a nonprofit academic publishing house, operating in Piscataway, New Jersey under the auspices of Rutgers University.-History:...
. 1964 Questia - The Online Library of Books and Journals - James T. Young, "Origins of New Deal Agricultural Policy: Interest Groups' Role in Policy Formation." Policy Studies Journal. 21#2 1993. pp 190+. Questia - The Online Library of Books and Journals
Photography
- Maurice BergerMaurice BergerMaurice Berger is an Americancultural historian, curator, and art critic.- Biography :Maurice Berger is a cultural historian, art critic, and curator. He is Research Professor and Chief Curator at the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, University of Maryland, Baltimore County. A student of...
, "FSA: The Illiterate Eye," in Berger, How Art Becomes History, HarperCollinsHarperCollinsHarperCollins is a publishing company owned by News Corporation. It is the combination of the publishers William Collins, Sons and Co Ltd, a British company, and Harper & Row, an American company, itself the result of an earlier merger of Harper & Brothers and Row, Peterson & Company. The worldwide...
, 1992 - Pete Daniel, et al., Official Images: New Deal Photography Smithsonian Institution Press, 1987
- James Curtis, Mind's Eye, Mind's Truth: FSA Photography Reconsidered Temple University PressTemple University PressTemple University Press is a university press publishing house that is part of Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.The press was founded in 1969....
, 1989 - Cara A. Finnegan, Picturing Poverty: Print Culture and FSA Photographs Smithsonian Books, 2003
- Andrea Fisher, Let Us Now Praise Famous Women Pandora Press, 1987
- Carl Fleischhauer and Beverly W. Brannan, eds., Documenting America, 1935-1943 University of California PressUniversity of California PressUniversity of California Press, also known as UC Press, is a publishing house associated with the University of California that engages in academic publishing. It was founded in 1893 to publish books and papers for the faculty of the University of California, established 25 years earlier in 1868...
, 1988. - David A. Gray, "New Uses for Old Photos: Renovating FSA Photographs in World War II Posters," American Studies, 47: 3/4 (Fall/Winter 2006).
- James Guimond, American Photography and the American Dream (1991), chap. 4: "The Signs of Hard Times"
- Jack Hurley, Portrait of a Decade: Roy Stryker and the Development of Documentary Photography in the Thirties Louisiana State University PressLouisiana State University PressThe Louisiana State University Press is a nonprofit book publisher and an academic unit of Louisiana State University. Founded in 1935, the press publishes scholarly, general interest, and regional books as part of the university’s mission to disseminate knowledge and culture...
, 1972 - Michael Leicht, Wie Katie Tingle sich weigerte, ordentlich zu posieren und Walker Evans darüber nicht grollte, Bielefeld: transcript 2006
- Dorothea Lange and Paul Schuster Taylor, An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion (1939); second revised edition, Yale University PressYale University PressYale University Press is a book publisher founded in 1908 by George Parmly Day. It became an official department of Yale University in 1961, but remains financially and operationally autonomous....
, 1969. - Nicholas Natanson, The Black Image in the New Deal: The Politics of FSA Photography University of Tennessee PressUniversity of Tennessee PressThe University of Tennessee Press is a university press associated with the University of Tennessee.UT Press was established in 1940 by the University of Tennessee Board of Trustees.The University of Tennessee Press issues about 35 books each year...
, 1992 - Roy Stryker & Nancy Wood, In This Proud Land: America 1935-1943 As Seen In The FSA Photographs, Secker & Warburg/New York Graphic Society, 1973
External links
- The Library of Congress has placed 164,000 FSA images online
- During World War II the FSA administered the Use of farmland owned by interned Japanese farmers.
- Subsistence Homesteads by Survey Graphic
- High Resolution photos taken for the FSA
- Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture - Farm Security Administration
- Farm Security Administration