Revisiting rural poverty and farm policy in the age of Roosevelt

Much of the large literature on New Deal farm policies contends that throughout the 1930s and 1940s agrarian and urban liberals battled a conservative agricultural establishment and its allies in the Department of Agriculture’s Extension Service and in Congress over whether national farm programs should benefit larger, landowning, and more commercial farm operators or should aim to sustain large numbers of smaller farms and address the plight of the rural poor. These accounts, however, slight the increasingly influential arguments put forth by liberal economists such as the Department of Agriculture’s Mordecai Ezekiel. Ezekiel argued that developing a high-growth, high-consumption American economy capable of sustained increases in standards of living for rural and urban America required a massive shift of labor and other resources out of agriculture. Achieving this liberal vision of the modern American economy required, Ezekiel insisted, abandoning the agrarian ideal of a large farm population in favor of a more urban, less rural society. Such views were crucial to the evolution of New Deal farm policy.