Planning democracy: agrarian intellectuals and the intended New Deal

366 Pages·2015·3.211 MB·English

by  Gilbert, Jess

Yale Agrarian Studies Series
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Sara M. Gregg, Managing the Mountains: Land Use Planning, the New Deal, and the
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Jenny Leigh Smith, Works in Progress: Plans and Realities on Soviet Farms, 1930– 1963
Graeme Auld, Constructing Private Governance: The Rise and Evolution of Forest, Cof-
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Jess Gilbert, Planning Democracy: Agrarian Intellectuals and the Intended New Deal
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Planning Democracy
Agrarian Intellectuals and the
Intended New Deal
Jess Gilbert
Foreword by
Richard S. Kirkendall
new haven & london
Published with assistance from the Mary Cady Tew Memorial Fund.
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Lizzy, Katie, and Dave
Finally there is the problem of coordinating [U.S. Department of Agriculture]
work with the thinking, the attitudes, the ideas, and the ideals of farmers in local
communities. . . . It is in essence the problem of democracy. How can a great
national public agency work with people in thousands of local communities,
carry ing out their desires, yet also helping them to formulate those desires by
giving them information they could not themselves collect? Or how can national
agricultural programs be carried out so as to achieve such broad objectives as
stability of farm income, conservation of resources, and security of tenure, and at
the same time be adapted to the widely varying conditions of every locality?
—usda workers milton s. eisenhower and roy l. kimmel,
Farmers in a Changing World: The Yearbook of Agriculture, 1940
Contents
Foreword by Richard S. Kirkendall ix
Preface x iii
Ac know ledg ments xvii
List of Abbreviations Used in Text xxi
chapter 1. Introduction 1
chapter 2. The Agrarian Intellectuals’ Vision: The Intended New Deal
as a Planning Democracy 13
part i social roots and early fruits: collective
biographies, alternative modernisms, and the first two
agrarian new deals
chapter 3. Growing Agrarian Reformers in the Midwest: A Collective
Biography 25
chapter 4. Modernizing Eastern Urban Liberals: A Comparison with
the Other Progressive Group in Agriculture 60
chapter 5. Struggling Toward a New Deal Land Policy: The Agrarian
Action Programs and Beyond, 1933– 1938 80
part ii the flowering of demo cratic planning: the
third and intended new deal in agriculture, 1938– 1942
chapter 6. Reinventing Education, Research, and Planning:
The Cooperative Land- Use Program 115
viii contents
chapter 7. Continuing Education: For Citizens, Scientists, and
Bureaucrats 142
chapter 8. Reforming Social Science: Participatory Action
Research 179
chapter 9. Unifying Action: Results of Cooperative Land- Use
Planning 212
chapter 10. Intended New Deal Defeated, Reassessed, and
Reclaimed 238
Appendix. List of Program Study and Discussion Pamphlets,
1935– 1945 261
List of Abbreviations Used in the Notes 265
Notes 267
Index 331
Foreword
Richard S. Kirkendall
T
his challenging and powerful book is not quite what I had ex-
pected it to be. My expectations were based on my awareness
over many years that Jess Gilbert was studying a group of men I had focused
on in my fi rst book. I assumed he would revise my story. Then he surprised
me by inviting me to write this foreword, and attached to his e-mail was an-
other that referred to my book as a classic and my effort as magisterial but
“little followed up, probably because it was so impressive and comprehen-
sive.” These were generous words, and, in my experience, revisionists had
seldom if ever been so generous.
My fi rst book was not what I originally intended it to be. I had begun to
work on the topic while I was a second-y ear graduate student working on
intellectual history with Merle Curti at the University of Wisconsin. The
year was 1954; Sen. Joseph McCarthy was the most prominent politician in
the state, and he represented American anti-i ntellectualism, so I chose to
write a dissertation on a group of New Deal intellectuals known as the Brain
Trust. I soon learned that the topic was too large, for men of that type ap-
peared in every part of Franklin Roo se velt’s administration and scholars had
not yet produced many helpful monographs on the New Deal. A decision
had to be made; I saw that the best material I had was on farm policy, and by
1958 I completed a doctoral dissertation titled “The New Deal Professors
and the Politics of Agriculture.” Then, eight years later, after doing much
more research and making a major overhaul, I published Social Scientists
and Farm Politics in the Age of Roo se velt.