LAND USE PLANNING

Land use planning held the promise of unifying the disparate elements of New Deal agricultural policy. Most agrarian New Dealers thought that poor land use caused "the farm problem." Low farm prices and incomes, poverty and regional underdevelopment, soil erosion and related abuses of the land—these were the central rural problems of the Great Depression, and they all pointed to land use reform. Henry A. Wallace stated in his Report of the Secretary of Agriculture, 1938, "There are no separate problems of forestry, of wildlife conservation, of grazing, of soil conservation, and of regional crop adjustment. There is one unified land use problem, of which forestry, grazing, crop adjustment and so forth are merely aspects." Yet with few exceptions, historians have not treated New Deal agricultural policy from this vantage point. Admittedly, the baffling array of alphabet agencies makes it difficult to follow the thread of land use planning policy.

The three main "action agencies" of the New Deal U. S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) changed land use patterns substantially. To raise farm prices, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) induced acreage reductions. First the Resettlement Administration, then the Farm Security Administration (FSA), "rehabilitated" poor land as well as poor farmers, and even achieved minor land reform, turning some tenants into owners. The Soil Conservation Service (SCS) demonstrated erosion-control practices and advised farmers on preventing environmental degradation. Further, the SCS acquired a small but important land retirement program that purchased submarginal land, ended crop production, and resettled the residents onto better plots. Most other rural programs (e.g., farm-forestry, flood control, public grazing, wildlife preservation) also required land use adjustments. Wide-ranging alternative policy discussions and experiments pervaded New Deal agricultural circles; stellar examples include two presidential committee reports, The Future of the Great Plains (1936) and Farm Tenancy (1937), and the remarkable Farmers in a Changing World: The Yearbook of Agriculture, 1940. Late in the New Deal, the USDA and the land-grant colleges set up county land use planning committees to localize and coordinate all the new agencies. This participatory planning program represented the intended and long-range unity of agricultural policy.

The county land use planning committees consisted of farmers, local administrators of the new federal agencies (e.g., AAA, SCS, FSA), the extension agent, plus specialists from the state college. Together the citizens, bureaucrats, and scientists sought to unify and adapt all the government programs in the county. The committees began by discussing the philosophy of planning and studying how to subdivide their county for adequate community representation. They investigated each local area by mapping current land uses and then recommended improvements. The committees developed and implemented long-term as well as immediate land use plans, often by modifying the federal programs. By 1941 over two-thirds of all U. S. counties were engaged in this work, which involved 125,000 farm men and women as citizen-planners. The states had similar land use planning committees, and Henry Wallace reorganized the USDA to carry out the program.

Wallace and others believed that the county land use planning program, begun only in 1939, culminated New Deal agricultural policy. They saw it as adding a third major function—planning—to the public agricultural institutions, to complement education and research. It offered the local and programmatic synthesis so obviously lacking at middecade. In his final Report of the Secretary of Agriculture (1940), Wallace wrote, "Land use planning brings farmers, technicians, and administrators together in broad attacks on wrong land utilization, menacing soil erosion, inefficient farming, anti-social land-tenure relationships, and bad rural living." In an extremely innovative way, the planning program combined adult education, action research (by scientists and farmers), decentralized administration, and participatory policy-making. These features transcended land use planning; they amounted to integrated rural development. Most significantly to the New Dealers, the county planning program extended "grass-roots democracy," engaging meaningful citizen participation far beyond their earlier efforts.

Historians generally disagree with that self-assessment: The farmer-planners almost always came from the local elite, and they did not accomplish either planning or democracy. Actually, most historians argue, the real long-term goal of New Deal land policy was an efficient, rational agriculture. Government support therefore favored modern family-sized and larger operations, and usually ignored the needs of subsistence farmers, tenants, and sharecroppers. These historical judgments are hard to dispute. Still, while emphasizing the aim of modernization, historians underestimate the democratizing aspects of the planning program. Especially compared to the AAA's farmer committees, the land use program broadened the interests represented by local USDA agencies. Conservative enemies of reform—some of the department's own agencies, farm organizations (particularly the Farm Bureau), and anti-New Dealers in Congress—felt threatened enough by the county planning program to destroy it in 1942. Thus America lost the opportunity for a unified agricultural policy that serves more than narrow farm-commodity interests.

See Also: AGRICULTURAL ADJUSTMENT ADMINISTRATION (AAA); FARM POLICY; FARM SECURITY ADMINISTRATION (FSA); SOIL CONSERVATION SERVICE (SCS); WALLACE, HENRY A.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Badger, Anthony J. The New Deal: The Depression Years, 1933–40. 1989.

Daniel, Pete. "A Hundred Years of Dispossession: Southern Farmers and the Forces of Change." In Outstanding in His Field: Perspectives on American Agriculture in Honor of Wayne D. Rasmussen, edited by Frederick V. Carstensen, Morton Rothstein, and Joseph A. Swanson. 1993.

Gilbert, Jess. "Democratic Planning in Agricultural Policy: The Federal-County Land-Use Planning Program, 1938–1942." Agricultural History 70 (1996): 233–250.

Kirkendall, Richard S. Social Scientists and Farm Politics in the Age of Roosevelt. 1966.

Kubo, Fumiaki. "Henry A. Wallace and Radical Politics in the New Deal: Farm Programs and a Vision of the New American Political Economy." The Japanese Journal of American Studies 4 (1991): 37–76.

Lehman, Tim. Public Values, Private Lands: Farmland Preservation Policy, 1933–1985. 1995.

Summers, Mary. "The New Deal Farm Programs: Looking for Reconstruction in American Agriculture." Agricultural History 74 (2000): 241–257. Tolley, Howard R. The Farmer Citizen at War. 1943.

Jess Gilbert