Photo of a sharecropper by Walker Evans for the U.S. Resettlement Administration

Overview

Created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as part of his New Deal, the Farm Security Administration was a depression-era agency formed in 1935 inside the Department of Agriculture as a combination of three agencies, the Subsistence Homestead Division of the Interior Department, farm projects of the the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, and the Resettlement Administration. Originally set up by executive order, it was formalized by Congress in July 1937, by "The Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Act." Rexford Tugwell had originally designed the RA, but he was out of power by 1935. The FSA head was Will W. Alexander. He strongly supported civil rights; in the Deep South about a third of the FSA clients were African American, along with some program staff.

Relief work

The RA and FSA bought out small farms that were not economically viable, and set up 34 subsistence homestead communities, in which groups of farmers would live together under the guidance of government experts and work a common acreage. 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. In 1936 the Republican National Committee accused the RA of sponsoring farm communities which were "communistic in conception," and went on to charge that, "President Roosevelt's Resettlement Administration is establishing. . .communal farms which follow the Russian pattern." RA and FSA spokesmen claimed they were inspired by Jefferson and denied they were following a Soviet model. More serious opposition came from the commercial farmers organized into the powerful Farm Bureau. It denounced "inexcusable waste, extravagance, and incompetence, and the misuse of farm relief funds for the pursuit of socialistic objectives inimical to the American way of agriculture." RA and FSA had strained relations as well with the state agricultural colleges and their extension services. FSA did receive support from James C. Patton of the more radical "National Farmers Union" (NFU), as well as Florida Senator Claude Pepper. [Baldwin pp 115, 390-92]

The Dust Bowl 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, as depicted in The Grapes of Wrath.

The RA and the FSA gave educational aid to 455,000 farm families in 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!" [Sternsher 272]

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. [Meriam p 290-312]

Photography program

The RA and FSA are best known less as failed experiments in collectivizing agriculture as major sponsors of documentary photography that exerted a strong influence on American art. Photographers and writers were hired to go out and document the plight of the poor farmer. The Information Division of the FSA was responsible for providing educational materials and press information to the public. Under Roy Stryker, 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, Dorothea Lange, and Gordon Parks were three of the most famous FSA alumni.

The photographers

The FSA photography group consisted of:

Together with John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (not a government project) and documentary prose (e.g. Walker Evans and James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men), the FSA photography project is most responsible for creating the image of the Depression in the USA. 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 give out. Stryker's agenda focused on his faith in social engineering, the poor conditions among cotton tenant 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, e.g., "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. [Finnegan 43-44] 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 now placed all 164,000 developed negatives online[1]. From these some 77,000 different finished photographic prints were originally made, plus 644 color images from 1600 negatives.

Death of FSA

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 Administration, 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 Lybdon 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. [Baldwin 403]

References

Relief

Photography


Categories