Penguin History of the United States of America (101 page)

Despair erupted in violence that might have become revolutionary: these were men of the stock of ’76. In the summer and autumn of 1932 there were demonstrations throughout the farm belt. In the spring of 1933 there were renewed outbursts, especially in Iowa, then as now the heart of American farm country, where an organization called the Farm Holiday Association took the lead. Attempts were made to stop the movement of produce to market, and thus, by creating a shortage, to force up prices. They did not succeed. More effective were interruptions of mortgage foreclosures. In the most spectacular of these incidents a crowd of Iowa farmers, masked with blue handkerchiefs, interrupted foreclosure proceedings in a courthouse, threatened to lynch the judge, dragged him outside, put one end of a rope round his neck and the other over a limb of a tree, and then, after half-throttling him, making him say his prayers, throwing dirt at him, and yet, in spite of all, failing to intimidate him, gave up the enterprise, merely stripping off his trousers and smearing him with axle grease. It could have been worse, and in other countries unquestionably would have been; but the episode seemed a shocking warning in America.

So no wonder the Roosevelt administration lost no time in tackling the farm problem. The Secretary of Agriculture, Henry A. Wallace of Iowa, was an old hand: his father had been Secretary in Harding’s Cabinet, whose efforts to help the farms had been regularly frustrated by the opposition of
Herbert Hoover. The younger Wallace had abandoned the Republicans in disgust in 1928. Now he could put his lifetime’s devotion to scientific agriculture and the farmers’ cause to good account. The Agricultural Adjustment Administration was his instrument. It was to be even more riven by feuds between radicals and conservatives than the NRA, but it enjoyed far more consistent political support; and the shape it gave to American agriculture has lasted to the present day.

That shape was in large measure predetermined. In the first place, all agreed that the central problem was the frightful disparity between industrial and agricultural prices. According to the enabling Act the Triple A was set up precisely to deal with this problem. The farmers’ favourite remedy was dumping: that is, the purchase of the agricultural surplus at a good price by the government and its disposal overseas for whatever it would fetch. Wallace and his more radical associates, such as the Assistant Secretary, Rexford Tugwell (one of the Brain Trusters), were against this practice, since it was highly injurious to America’s trading relations with other countries; they held off as long as they could; but by the end of the thirties the perpetual surplus of American agriculture was forcing them, in spite of their convictions, to dump, if only because storage was getting to be frighteningly expensive. During most of the New Deal, nevertheless, this last resort was forestalled by more novel devices. Of these the most spectacular was the curtailment of production that was undertaken in the first months of the Roosevelt administration. Industry, it was reasoned, cut back when demand fell off: agriculture must do the same. American traditions were still too strong for the New Dealers to allow themselves to resort to compulsion (though at the time the farmers would probably have welcomed it); instead they bought the farmers’ acquiescence. The proceeds of a special tax on processing (canning meat, milling grain and so on) were used to compensate generously farmers who agreed to plough up their cotton crops, or restrict their acreage of wheat planting or slaughter their baby pigs. Ten million acres of cotton that might have made shirts and dresses were dug under; six million piglets were murdered prematurely, and although some of the meat was used by the government to supplement the diet of the urban unemployed, nine-tenths of it was inedible. There was an immense outcry from the public. Wallace was disgusted. ‘To hear them talk,’ he said, ‘you would have thought that pigs were raised for pets.’

Nevertheless the public had a point, as Wallace well knew. The destruction of food and fibre, in a world where so many (even in normal times) went hungry and naked, was an obscenity; and Wallace was aware that it was the fault of the ‘profit system’, as he and the President termed it, that the abundance of America could not be distributed to the needy of, say, China, or even of the USA. Only wholesale socialization of the American economy – in a word, revolution, peaceable or otherwise – might begin to remedy the evil; and there was all too much reason to doubt that even revolution could do the trick (it had failed spectacularly in the USSR). So the starving
Chinese would have to fend for themselves, while Americans solved the problem of abundance by destroying the abundance, as one observer put it. They were startlingly successful. The emergency measures of 1933 did something; then in 1934 and 1935 came dust-storms. The Great Plains had entered the dry phase of the climatic cycle once more; there was a prolonged drought; exhausted and neglected by the greedy methods of traditional farming, the soil of western Kansas, Oklahoma, the Texan panhandle and eastern Colorado blew away on the gales. Eventually it darkened the skies over Washington, DC, stained the winter snows of New England red and fell upon ships 300 miles out on the Atlantic. Tens of thousands of farming families were ruined and took their hopeless way west, pathetic caricatures of the pioneers, to charity camps in California. The price of farm products began to rise, falteringly at first, from their low point in 1932, and had nearly doubled by 1937; and those farmers who weathered the storms began to prosper again, assisted by a flood of new programmes out of Washington – conservation programmes, electrification programmes, resettlement programmes. A divided Supreme Court, in one of the worst decisions in its history, struck down the original Agricultural Act in January 1936 (
US
v.
Butler et al.)
, but the essential parts were quickly re-enacted (it was election year) under the guise of a soil conservation law, and in 1938 the farm programme was put on a permanent footing by a new AAA. Washington, having literally set its hand to the plough, would not look back.

This became the secret of the farmers’ strength. During the decades of neglect they had been, though still so large a part of the population, not voiceless, but ineffective in national politics. Now they could always be sure of a hearing, and a respectful one too, for neither the White House nor a Democratic Congress, in which Senators and Representatives from the cotton South held dominating positions, was going to alienate so large a block of citizens (roughly 25 per cent of the population) by withdrawing favours to which they had got used. Especially not since the activities of the AAA taught the farmers, far better than the Populists had ever managed, how to unite and organize. Under the AAA it was the farmers, meeting and voting, who decided how many acres should be taken out of production every year and supervised each other to make sure that the reduction actually occurred. All the other programmes were administered in the same manner. By the end of the thirties the farmers were no longer the desperate clients of Washington: they gave terms to the bureaucracy. Once more vast surpluses built up (in federally paid-for granaries); only now they threatened not the farmer, but the national government, with financial disaster. Henry Wallace was landed with the responsibility; he was nearly at his wits’ end as to how to discharge it when he was elevated to the Vice-Presidency, and then war, which brought an insatiable need for all supplies, came to the rescue, and the American surplus began to reach the starving world at last.

The fact that the New Deal was less in command of events than it seemed
was well illustrated by another aspect of the farm programmes. The farmers who took the lead in the administration of the AAA were not the worst-hit victims of the Depression: not the sharecroppers of the South, the tenants of the Middle West, the hired hands everywhere, the illiterate, the black, the ignorant, the smallholders trying to live off pocket-handkerchief holdings, owners of exhausted land, or young men and women forced to stay on the land because there was no work in the cities.
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Apart from every other obstacle in their way they were often too ill-fed to have enough energy to stand up for themselves in meetings at the end of a hard day’s work. So the big commercial farmers and, in the South, the landlords carried all before them, greatly helped by the fact that AAA subsidies were paid, as it were, to acres, not individuals: the bigger the farm, therefore, the more money the farmer received from the government. With abundant collusion from within Congress and the Department of Agriculture they strengthened their position more ruthlessly and determinedly than big business did under NRA, and with far more permanent success. The reforming followers of Tugwell within the administration, the organizations of poorer farmers outside it, made no great headway against them; and the ebb of the Depression diminished such sense of social solidarity as had been induced in 1932. In short, the renewed prosperity benefited the strong farmer; the weak suffered much as before; and after 1941 (when the factory boom of the Second World War opened up the job market again) the movement from the land to the cities resumed. It was probably an economically necessary process; but the human and political gains to America would have been enormous if the movement could have been regulated with intelligence and compassion, instead of being left, in the old way, to the brutally impersonal operations of ‘the profit system’, which were only marginally braked by the commitment of the New Deal and succeeding administrations to maintain the existing farm population
in situ
. Agriculture Secretaries came and went and made the same pledges to uphold the small family farm (anything was better than the effort and conflict involved in thinking out a new policy); but the number of such farms went on shrinking, and nobody did much for the displaced.

That things might have been happier was demonstrated by the third major enterprise of the New Deal, the great relief operation.

It is almost impossible to give a coherent account of the evolution of the Roosevelt programme for poor relief. Critics of FDR’s administrative methods (they were and are numerous) can point in scorn to the fact that the programme changed its form almost yearly – in early days, more than yearly. The Federal Emergency Relief Administration was largely replaced by the Civil Works Administration, which then gave way to FERA again;
then came the period of consolidation under the Works Progress Administration, which was cut back in 1937 and re-expanded in 1938; and all the time the incessant rivalries of the New Deal, in this case predominantly between Harold Ickes and Harry Hopkins,
¹⁴
meant that there were always at least two major relief organizations: for whatever else might come and go, the P W A went on until the outbreak of the Second World War, though Roosevelt at one stage thought he had abolished it.

This is not a tidy picture; but the Depression was not a tidy phenomenon, and it could not be effectively fought by the tidy methods of an Ickes. Nothing in Roosevelt’s career mattered more to him, ultimately, than the task of rescuing the millions of innocent victims of the great storm and of transforming American attitudes to them. Indeed, though it was long before he fully recognized it, one of his chief historical tasks was the foundation of the American welfare state. For this great undertaking he had, in Harry Hopkins, a man in whom ‘the purity of St Francis of Assisi combined with the sharp shrewdness of a race-track tout’,
¹⁵
the perfect instrument. Hopkins was as loose in his methods as Ickes was tight. Working on a tiny salary, from a dim little office, with an exiguous if devoted staff, by methods that might have been designed to appal the Bureau of the Budget (if so they certainly succeeded), he yet spent his way through more money than any other single New Dealer, transformed the lives of more Americans, revolutionized attitudes to unemployment, and incidentally did more than any man next to the President himself to make over the Democratic party. He destroyed his health in the process, otherwise the President might have picked him as his own successor. He was widely regarded as Roosevelt’s evil genius, but this former social worker from Iowa, with his selfless passion for the public service and his fondness for Keats and horse-racing, rendered, in peace as in war, ‘a service to his country which will never even vaguely be appreciated’
¹⁶
because it was, literally, incalculable.

No one has ever reckoned with certainty the number of unemployed on Inauguration Day, 1933: estimates vary from twelve to sixteen million – say, a quarter of the labour force. All classes were haunted by the spectres of hunger, waste, despair and something, perhaps, even worse: said the mayor of Toledo, Ohio, in 1932: ‘I have seen thousands of these defeated, discouraged, hopeless men and women, cringing and fawning as they come to ask for public aid. It is a spectacle of national degeneration.’ It was time to do something. After the passage of the Federal Emergency Relief Act, Roosevelt summoned Harry Hopkins, who had worked for him in a similar
job in New York, to be its administrator. Hopkins set out to spend the Act’s $500,000,000 in a hurry.

The importance of his activities in the end lay less in what he did than in what he began. Hopkins himself had no illusions. In 1936 he commented, ‘we have never given adequate relief,’ and in January 1937
¹⁷
Roosevelt expressed his essential agreement, announcing, in his second inaugural, that he saw ‘one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished’. There was not even a regular federal relief programme: FERA payments went to the states and the cities, to supplement their resources, not direct to the needy. But the great point was to have reversed the legacy of Herbert Hoover. When in the summer of 1935 Roosevelt again demonstrated his political mastery (which had seemed to be waning after the Supreme Court’s action in destroying the NRA) by launching a second Hundred Days of ‘must’ legislation, the Social Security Act (which had been making a slow progress through Congress since January) was the heart of it. Riddled with anomalies and exceptions, this act was nevertheless the foundation stone of the future. It began to extend to Americans the sort of protection against the distresses of old age and poverty that the Germans and British had long enjoyed. It was financed entirely, and from the economic point of view unwisely, by contributions: by taxes levied on the employers and by deductions from the wages of the employed. This was to have some harmful results in the near future, but Roosevelt was clear about the political importance of the arrangement. ‘We put those payroll contributions there,’ he said, ‘so as to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pensions and their unemployment benefits. With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security programme.’
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There was to be no retreat to Hooverism; and later administrations would take care of some of the weaknesses of the original act. (So they did: the system was extended, under Truman and Eisenhower, to another twenty million workers; Lyndon Johnson augmented it with a system of medical insurance.)