From WLockeretz@infonet.tufts.eduSat May 11 09:00:47 1996 Date: Fri, 10 May 96 20:20:38 EDT From: WLockeretz@infonet.tufts.edu To: SANET-MG@amani.ces.ncsu.edu Subject: Recent Farm Aid posting The April edition of Farm Aid News & Views, recently posted here, contains a mistake that I have seen made before, and that therefore warrants an explanation (even though at first it my seem insignificant). The posting states that the Farmers Home Administration (FmHA) was established in 1935 to aid Depression-stricken families. Actually, FmHA was established in 1946, but more important than the precise date is that the FmHA most decidedly was not a Depression-era agency in spirit either. The reason for the mistake is that FmHA was the successor -- sort of -- to a true Depression-era agency, the Farm Security Administration (FSA, but no connection with the current agency with those initials). FSA was established in 1937, when the Resettlement Administration, an independent agency founded in 1935, became part of USDA. FSA was red-baited to death during World War II by reactionary elements in Congress, the American Farm Bureau Federation, and others. After the war, the newly established FmHA took over just the credit function of FSA. "Red-baited, you say? A USDA agency -- red-baited?" Yup. Besides providing credit to low-income and marginal farmers, FSA instituted many innovative programs, intended mainly to help sharecroppers, tenants, farm laborers, and submarginal farmers. Most controversial were their cooperative farms -- not a popular notion in the 1930s, smelling dangerously of Bolshevism. Also not popular, at least not in the Jim Crow South, was their defense of tenants and sharecroppers, including blacks, against abuses by landowners. FSA also founded several "Greenbelt" communities, including Greenbelt, Maryland, most famous today (at least among SANETers) as the home of the Henry A. Wallace Institute for Alternative Agriculture, publisher (as you know, or should know) of the American Journal of Alternative Agriculture. FSA also established excellent camps for Dust Bowl refugees, one of which was sympathetically (and realistically) depicted in The Grapes of Wrath. Unfortunately, most of its activities were short-lived. It did, however, bequeath us a national treasure of inestimable value: the greatest documentary photography project of all time, in the form of some 80,000 pictures showing every aspect of American life during the Depression, especially migrant workers, sharecroppers, Dust Bowl refugees, and others at the bottom of the "agricultural ladder." Even if the name "Farm Security Administration" is unfamiliar to you, you no doubt have seen some of these pictures, if only the justly famous "Migrant Mother," by Dorothea Lange. Other important photographers in the group included Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee, and several more. The collection is alive and well, I am happy to say, and accessible to the public in the reading room of the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress. In summary, the difference between FSA and FmHA is a lot more than 9 years and a couple of letters. If FmHA were the true successor to FSA, its shortcomings as the farmer's "lender of last resort," as described in the Farm Aid posting, might never have arisen. William Lockeretz Tufts University