AAA

Henry Wallace

• evolved from the New Deal for agriculture that started in 1933 with the Agricultural Adjustment Administration under Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace
• AAA emphasis on parity payments, crop reduction
• farmers paid to low under 10 million acres cotton, kill 5 million hogs
• payments made to landlords, not tenants
• 1 million contracts signed 1934, used check-writing machines
• due to acreage reduction, landlords evicted tenants
• STFU in Arkansas sought AAA help
• USDA conservatives opposed help: G. Peek, Cully Cobb, Chester Davis
• AAA liberals favored help: Jerome Frank, Gardner Jackson, Francis Shea, Rexford Tugwell, Adlai Stevenson, Alger Hiss
• but liberals inexperienced: Lee Pressman worked on macaroni code, "Just tell me this, is this code fair to the macaroni growers?"
• 1935 lawsuit by STFU against Hiram Norcross in Tyronza AR caused crisis in AAA - liberals critical of conservatives for allowing landlords to evict tenants
• Feb. 5 purge of liberals Frank, Pressman, Jackson, Shea by Wallace
• Jackson angry, arranged for March of Time to film STFU for the 1936 issue on "Trouble in the Cotton Country" and Jackson in film attacked the purge - also in Aug. 7 issue "King Cotton's Slaves"
• Norman Thomas radio broadcast March 1 on "Forgotten Men of the New Deal" and gave sppech March 15 at Birdsong AR for the STFU but assaulted on the platform
• Thomas made dramatic public appeal to FDR but no change in AAA policy, "reign of terror" began in the South against union
• September cotton picker strike by STFU successful
• Jan. 6, 1936, Supreme Court ruled against AAA

RA

• Resettlement Admin. created April 30, 1935 under Rexford Tugwell - 1
• rural rehabilitation, loans, education, technical aid
• "Dust Bowl" from March of Time, June 11, 1937
• 200 demonstration projects, subsistence homestead communities
• most dramatic - help for 400,000 families due to drought: 1 year loan moratorium, $18 m. crop loans, jobs & cash grants in emerg. areas
• Tugwell went on 2000-mile tour, met FDR at Bismarck ND in August
• retired 9 million acres poor land
• 96 resettlement projects, most in South, 100 units each of 40-100 acres, families leased land from government, paid rent in crops
• Arthurdale - 1 and Longview Homesteads - 1 near DC

Greenbelt Towns

• 3 towns built of 25 planned: Greenbelt MD near DC, Greenhills OH near Cincinnati, Greendale WI near Milwaukee
• each for 10,000 pop., with roads, schools, shopping centers, hospitals
• garden city idea: large blocks with internal parks, in-facing homes, pedestrian underpasses, keep trees and terrain, surrounded by belt of parks and farms and woods
• prefab wood frame, utilities, furniture; families carefully screened
• 1st government health care plan, at 1$ per month
• problems: paternalistic and bureaucratic
• rules against owning dogs, must take wash from clotheslines by 4 pm
• no local government, no local taxes, high administrative costs, 20 cents from every dollar to pay $19 million salaries of 13,000 employees - coordinator Wallace Richards
• Tugwell forced to resign 1937 - "Rex the Red"
• Bankhead-Jones Act July 22, 1937 - RA absorbed into new FSA

Documentary Photos

Ohio window by Shahn 1938, from Architecture of Segregation

• Photography project created in RA under Roy Stryker
• expansion of government publicity efforts using new media
• Arthur Rothstein - used 35 mm camera in Shenandoah National Park,
• Carl Mydans - used Leica camera in West Virginia coal mines
• Russell Lee - replaced Mydans - "Children Eating Christmas Dinner 1936" in Iowa, but father present
• Walker Evans used large camera, artistic, lived in Greenwich Village with Ben Shahn and James Agee, composed images, irony in signs, "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" images of Hale Co. AL tenant farmer Bud Fields, son-in-law Floyd Burroughs, neighbor Tengle
• Dorothea Lange - US 80 in NM, "Harvest Gypsies" with Paul Taylor, "Migrant Mother" images March 1936, FSA camps, Shafter CA
• Ben Shahn - resettled farmers in Boone Co. AR
• Jack Delano - positive images after 1939 in GA
• Marion Post Wolcott - Shenandoah harvest, Vermont winter
• John Vachon - Great Northern grain elevators in Wisconsin
• John Collier - NC tobacco barn
• Gordon Parks - prosperous African American workers

Sources:

• Conrad, David E. The Forgotten Farmers: The Story of Sharecroppers in the New Deal. University of Illinois Press, 1965.
• Lord, Russell. The Wallaces of Iowa. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1947.
• Pells, Richard H. Radical Visions and American Dreams. New York: Harper, 1973.
• Ben Shahn exhibit from Harvard
• Migrant Mother photos and Oakland archive
• Russell Lee Collection from Southwest Texas State University