Farm Security Administration

Initially created as the Resettlement Administration in 1935 as part of the New Deal, the Farm Security Administration was an effort during the Depression to combat rural poverty. The FSA stressed "rural rehabilitation" efforts to improve the lifestyle of sharecroppers, tenants, and very poor landowning farmers, and a program to purchase submarginal land owned by poor farmers and resettle them in group farms on land more suitable for efficient farming. Critics, including the Farm Bureau strongly opposed the FSA as an experiment in collectivizing agriculture — that is, in bringing farmers together to work on large government-owned farms using modern techniques under the supervision of experts. The program failed because the farmers wanted ownership; after the Conservative coalition took control of Congress it transformed the FSA into a program to help poor farmers buy land, and continues in operation in the 21st century as the Farmers Home Administration.

The FSA is famous for its small but highly influential photography program, 1935-44, that realistically portrayed the challenges of rural poverty.

Origins

The projects that were combined in 1935 to form the FSA started in 1933 as an assortment of programs tried out by the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, and later inside the Department of Agriculture under the Resettlement Administration following Roosevelt's 1935 executive order creating that agency.

Relief work

One of the activities performed by the RA and FSA was the buying out of small farms that were not economically viable, and the setting up of 34 subsistence homestead communities, in which groups of farmers would live together under the guidance of government experts and work a common area. 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. [Baldwin 1968]

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 during 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 well known for the influence of their photography program, 1935-1944. Photographers and writers were hired to report 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 FSA was also cited in Gordon Parks' autobiographical novel, " A Choice of Weapons"

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 [http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/fsahtml/fahome.html] . From these some 77,000 different finished photographic prints were originally made for the press, plus 644 color images from 1600 negatives.

Documentary Films

The Resettlement Administration also funded two documentary films by Pare Lorentz, The Plow That Broke the Plains about the creation of the Dust Bowl and The River about the importance of Mississippi River. The films were deemed "culturally significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.

Reformers ousted; Farmers Home Administration

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 Lyndon 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

* Sidney Baldwin; "Poverty and Politics: The Rise and Decline of the Farm Security Administration" University of North Carolina Press, 1968, a scholarly study by a senior FSA official [http://www.questia.com/library/book/poverty-and-politics-the-rise-and-decline-of-the-farm-security-administration-by-sidney-baldwin.jsp online edition]
* Greta De Jong; "'With the Aid of God and the F.S.A.': The Louisiana Farmers' Union and the African American Freedom Struggle in the New Deal Era" "Journal of Social History", Vol. 34, 2000
*Michael Johnston Grant; "Down and Out on the Family Farm: Rural Rehabilitation in the Great Plains, 1929-1945" U. of Nebraska Press. 2002
* Lewis Meriam; "Relief and Social Security" The Brookings Institution. 1946. [http://www.questia.com/library/book/relief-and-social-security-by-lewis-meriam.jsp online edition]
* Sternsher; Bernard. "Rexford Tugwell and the New Deal" Rutgers University Press. 1964 [http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=54519598 online edition]
* James T. Young, "Origins of New Deal Agricultural Policy: Interest Groups' Role in Policy Formation." "Policy Studies Journal". 21#2 1993. pp 190+. [http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=5000220859 online edition]

Photography

* Maurice Berger, "FSA: The Illiterate Eye," in Berger, "How Art Becomes History", HarperCollins, 1992
* Pete Daniel, et al., "Official

* James Curtis; "Mind's Eye, Mind's Truth: FSA Photography Reconsidered" Temple University Press, 1989
* Cara A. Finnegan. "Picturing Poverty: Print Culture and FSA Photographs" Smithsonian Books, 2003
* Andrea Fisher, "Let Us Now Praise Famous Women" Pandora Press, 1987
* Carl Fleischhauer and Beverly W. Brannan, eds., "Documenting America, 1935-1943" University of California Press, 1988.
* James Guimond, "American Photography and the American Dream" (1991), chap. 4: "The Signs of Hard Times"
* Jack Hurley, "Portrait of a Decade: Roy Stryker and the Development of Documentary Photography in the Thirties" Louisiana State University Press, 1972
* Michael Leicht, "Wie Katie Tingle sich weigerte, ordentlich zu posieren und Walker Evans darüber nicht grollte", Bielefeld:transcript 2006
* Dorothea Lange and Paul Schuster Taylor, "An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion" (1939); second revised edition, Yale University Press, 1969.
* Nicholas Natanson, "The Black Image in the New Deal: The Politics of FSA Photography" University of Tennessee Press, 1992

External links

* [http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/fsahtml/fahome.html The Library of Congress has placed 164,000 FSA images online]
*During World War II the FSA administered the [http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist8/land4.html use of farmland owned by interned Japanese farmers] .
* [http://newdeal.feri.org/survey/34011.htm Subsistence Homesteads] by Survey Graphic
* [http://www.shorpy.com/search/node/Farm+Security+Administration High Resolution photos taken for the FSA]
* [http://www.morningsonmaplestreet.com/oldphotos.html Nationally-known research project to track down descendants of persons photographed by the Farm Security Administration]