DAVIS, CHESTER

Born in rural Iowa, Chester C. Davis (November 17, 1887–September 25, 1975) graduated from Grinnell College in 1911 and became a journalist in South Dakota and Montana. While editor of the Bozeman Weekly Courier, Davis became seriously interested in farm issues and his career in journalism yielded to agricultural advocacy instead. He became editor of the Montana Farmer in 1917, involved himself in various agricultural groups, and won gubernatorial appointment as Montana's commissioner of agriculture and labor in 1921.

Sharply analytical, full of reformist ideas, and demonstrating patience and executive skill, Davis earned the confidence of farmers. In the 1920s, he joined farm advocate George N. Peek in the campaign for national farm parity, a formula designed to improve farmers'purchasing power, and worked for passage of the doomed McNary-Haugen bills, which would have authorized federal acquisition of farm commodities. Success proved elusive until the onetime Republican joined the farmer-friendly New Deal administration of Franklin Roosevelt in 1933.

When George Peek became head of the new Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), he turned to Davis to run the AAA's Production Division. They were joined by others who saw the AAA's task as primarily to raise prices for farm commodities, a view not shared by socially conscious liberals in the AAA's Legal Division and Consumers Counsel who wanted justice for farm tenants. When internecine conflict in the AAA forced Peek out by the end of 1933, he was replaced by Davis, whose personality seemed better suited to mitigate differences within the agency. However, more than a year later—in early 1935—when the Legal Division tried to reinterpret a controversial section of the AAA's cotton contract for 1934 and 1935 in favor of retention of the same tenants on plantations despite acreage reduction, an angry Davis, with the pragmatic support of Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace, fired a number of liberals in both the Legal Division and Consumers Counsel. Both Wallace and Davis knew that the agency could not alienate the conservative landlord establishment in or out of government. Davis even believed that Wallace would be forced out of the cabinet if the firings were not sustained.

Davis left the AAA in 1936 but continued to hold a series of federal positions, including membership on the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, War Food Administrator (briefly) during World War II, and advisor to the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion. Active in postwar famine relief and European reconstruction, he also served as associate director of the Ford Foundation, working with programs in India and Pakistan. Davis retired in the 1950s and died in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in 1975.

See Also: AGRICULTURAL ADJUSTMENT ADMINISTRATION (AAA); WALLACE, HENRY A.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Conrad, David E. The Forgotten Farmers: The Story of Sharecroppers in the New Deal. 1965.

Davis, Chester C. Columbia Oral History Collection, Butler Library, Columbia University, New York.

Fite, Gilbert C. George N. Peek and the Fight for Farm Parity. 1954.

Grubbs, Donald H. Cry from the Cotton: The Southern Tenant Farmers' Union and the New Deal. 1971.

Nelson, Lawrence. King Cotton's Advocate in the New Deal: Oscar G. Johnston and the New Deal. 1999.

Nelson, Lawrence. "The Art of the Possible: Another Look at the 'Purge' of the AAA Liberals in 1935," Agricultural History, 57 (1983): 416–435.

Lawrence J. Nelson