Leaving the Land Behind:
Struggles for Land Reform
in U.S. Federal Policy,
1933–1965

Jess Gilbert* and Alice O’Connor**

In the 1930s the U.S. government undertook the most significant land reform and planning programs in modern American history. Two agencies of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) carried out these public policies: the Farm Security Administration (FSA), and the Bureau of Agricultural Economics (BAE). The FSA helped landless farmers become landowners, and the BAE set up a national network of grass-roots land-use planning committees that combined mass participation with scientific expertise. Almost alone among New Deal agencies, the FSA and the BAE represented the interests of agricultural workers, tenant farmers, and small family farmers.

These programs, however, were not the New Deal’s main farm policy, which was embodied in the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA). The AAA introduced production controls and subsidy payments into U.S. agriculture in 1933 and was quickly captured by large-farm interests. In class-divided agricultural regions like California and much of the South, the AAA worked against farm laborers and landless sharecroppers (Saloutos 1982; Badger 1989, pp. 147–89). This mainstay New Deal farm policy remains the basis for contemporary agricultural policy. In contrast, because of the potential threat that the FSA and BAE posed to the rural power structure both locally and nationally, conservatives abolished the two agencies soon after World War II.

Their histories, however, raise several issues of continuing significance to land policy concerns today. During the early 1940s, not only these innovative programs perished, but the possibility for a social-democratic coalition was also lost. Progressive alternatives for rural America became submerged. The underlying issues, however, resurfaced in debates over the War on Poverty during the 1960s. Today progressive policy options need to be revived and updated. In this paper, we examine some of the internal difficulties of past land reform efforts that made it hard to overcome conservative opposition. In particular we focus on three essentials of reform: the social base, visionary leadership, and administrative capacities. After a summary of the FSA and the BAE, we engage these three issues as they arose during the New Deal and later in the War on Poverty.

The FSA had its origins in the more radical Resettlement Administration, established in 1935 and led by presidential advisor and visionary economist, Rexford G. Tugwell. In 1937, Congress passed the Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Act, and Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace moved Resettlement into the new Farm Security Administration. For the next five years, the FSA was a major and influential New Deal agency that upset the status quo in rural America. It had over 19,000 employees and 800,000 client families. The FSA’s largest program, Rural Rehabilitation, offered loans, grants, and technical assistance to tenants, sharecroppers, and other poor farmers. Over 10 percent of all U.S. farmers received such loans from the FSA. Another "rehab" program created over 1,000 successful group medical and dental plans that served about a half-million people, including some of the nation’s poorest. The Tenant-Purchase program provided low interest, long-term credit for landless farmers to buy land.

More controversial were the FSA’s smaller, experimental resettlement programs. The federal government bought nearly 2,000,000 acres of farmland, mostly foreclosed plantations. The FSA resettled local landless farmers into community projects on this land, organized as either individual units or cooperative operations and occasionally with long-term leases. Another resettlement program built migrant labor camps in California (familiar to many from John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath) and established farm labor standards. Overall, the FSA was the most class-conscious of New Deal agencies, and one of the least racist. Twenty percent of its clients were African-American, including over 30 all-black community projects in the South. The FSA thus affronted the southern plantation system and much of the dominant class system elsewhere at all levels: racial, ideological, economic, and political.

Yet the FSA did not come close to dealing with the massive problems it faced. For example, the Tenant-Purchase program allowed 12,000 landless families to become landowners, but there were over 2 million tenants and sharecroppers in the country. The FSA saw its programs as immediate self-help efforts that offered alternatives to public relief and as the basis for long-term reforms; its enemies saw them as subversive and un-American. The latter view dominated in Congress, which effectively killed the FSA in 1943 (Baldwin 1968; Mertz 1978; Conkin 1959).

The year before, the same conservative Congress had ended the BAE’s federal-county land-use planning program. Less obviously reformist than the FSA, the BAE was the socioeconomic research and planning agency of the USDA in the late 1930s. Secretary Henry A. Wallace and Undersecretary M.L. Wilson set up a national system of local committees. This was a unique undertaking in American history: to combine citizens (farmers), program administrators, and land-grant scientists together to administer and plan public policy. Farmers constituted a majority of each county-level committee. By 1941, the program was in two-thirds of all U.S. counties, with 200,000 farm men and women serving on planning bodies. Forty-five states had state-level committees of farmers, scientists, and administrators, who coordinated the county reports and recommendations for land-use planning. At the federal level, the USDA was reorganized to implement this national-local planning effort. The USDA leaders called it "democratic planning" or "economic democracy in action."(1)

The federal-county planning program, however, did not achieve its democratic vision. For the farmers, it was neither very representative nor fully participatory. Yet, compared to the dominant power structure in rural America, the planning committees were remarkably open and less elitist. The planners’ experiments in action research, joining local farmers with social scientists for policy purposes, narrowed the citizen-specialist gap that is seemingly endemic to contemporary society. The effectiveness of the program was barely glimpsed in a few exemplary counties and in national defense planning work—unfulfilled potentials cut short by enemies of mass participation and reformist planning.(2) The BAE tried to democratize agricultural policy and it failed. That failure is testament not only to its own weaknesses but also to the obstacles such an effort still faces today.

From the mid-1930s until the early 1940s, then, the FSA and the BAE offered major alternatives to the dominant New Deal agricultural policy. In the remainder of this paper, we examine the three interrelated issues of social base, visionary leadership, and administrative capacity. After the following treatment of the New Deal period, we offer a similar discussion of politics, ideas, and institutions for rural reform efforts in the 1960s.

U.S. agriculture in the 1930s consisted of not one but three class structures that varied by region: family farming in the Midwest, industrial-capitalist farming in the West, and the plantation system in the South. Each major agricultural region had its own set of dominant and subordinate actors and interests. There was "mobilization from below" in each region, but regional peculiarities led to problems of organization and coherence at the national level.(3)

In the Midwest, self-employed land-owning farmers suffered from extremely low prices in the early 1930s. Banks threatened nearly half of them with foreclosure. They responded in several states by organizing the Farmers’ Holiday Association, largely a radical offshoot of the long-established National Farmers’ Union. The Holiday Association gained support as thousands of farmers picketed, blockaded roads, marched on courthouses, and held "penny auctions" to prevent foreclosures. Five midwestern governors visited President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the fall of 1933, warning of violent insurrection and demanding relief, which FDR immediately announced (Gilbert and Howe 1991; Shover 1965).

In the two other main agricultural regions of the country, nonfamily farming predominated. In California and adjoining states, a rural proletariat worked on large-scale industrial farms. Despite their ethnic diversity (for example, Mexican immigrants and poor whites), radicals and farm workers organized the "factories in the fields." In 1933 alone, there were 37 farm labor strikes in California; these culminated with an 18,000-strong cotton strike, the largest in U.S. agricultural history. The farm workers demanded higher wages and collective bargaining rights. The growers responded violently and with the aid of local officials (Daniel 1981; Majka and Majka 1982).

Equally class-conscious were both sides of the plantation economy in the South, especially in the Cotton Belt. Planter-landlords were at the top of a racist, paternalistic social system that dominated landless farmers, both black and white. Class mobilization was most clear in eastern Arkansas, where socialists and sharecroppers organized the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union (STFU) in 1934. Within three years, the union claimed 30,000 members in 6 states. The tenant farmers sought written contracts and their share of New Deal program payments. The plantation owners’ reaction was extreme; in 1935, the New York Post editorialized that "there can be no doubt of the reversion to slave law, mob violence, and Fascist methods in Arkansas."(4)

The New Deal’s AAA was able to unite dominant farmers in each region because of their common interest in higher commodity prices. Radical New Dealer Rexford Tugwell early on linked "the ruling caste of farmers, the most conservative Farm Bureau leaders, the cotton barons of the South, the emerging Associated Farmers of California, the banker-farmers of the Middle West" (Lord 1947, p. 381). On the other hand, the subordinate classes in the three regions were structurally differentiated into small farmers, farm workers, and sharecroppers. Their divergent interests made it hard to build a national organization of the "lower third" in U.S. agriculture.

By the late 1930s, the two most reformist agencies of USDA—the FSA and the BAE—constituted a "community of interest" favoring social change. The AAA’s "urban liberals" were gone, as was their leader, Rexford Tugwell. His successor, a southern liberal, led the FSA until 1940, when he was replaced by another of Tugwell’s aides. Heading the BAE from 1938 until 1946 was economist-planner Howard R. Tolley, who was strongly supported by Secretary Wallace and Undersecretary M.L. Wilson. This powerful group of USDA liberals formed a potential political coalition. Their agency constituents, first of all, numbered a few million rural citizens. More broadly they were supported by progressive farm and reform groups around the nation: the National Farmers’ Union, the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union, and urban liberals. This may be seen as an attempt to create the agrarian wing of a "social democracy" in the United States. In particular, Henry Wallace and the BAE turned increasingly toward the labor movement and issues of full employment, consumption, health, and nutrition.(5)

They were opposed, however, by a more powerful coalition of conservative USDA agencies (including the New Deal AAA), many state extension services, the National Cotton Council, California’s Associated Farmers, and most importantly the American Farm Bureau Federation. This group represented the new status quo in U.S. agriculture. Together with the anti-New Deal coalition in Congress (conservative midwestern Republicans and southern Democrats), they were able to kill the BAE county land-use planning program in 1942 and (in effect) the FSA in 1943. The social base for reform was politically weak and relatively unorganized; it failed to save the progressive New Deal in agriculture.

Just as there were two reformist agencies in USDA, so were they motivated by two different visions for rural America. Each was represented by an articulate spokesman. Despite his departure from the New Deal in 1936, Rexford Tugwell’s spirit (and staff) stayed on; the FSA continued his legacy. As undersecretary, his successor, M.L. Wilson, represented the other strand of reformism in USDA, institutionalized in the BAE’s county planning program. A summary of their ideological similarities and differences reveals much about the reformist vision of the New Deal Department of Agriculture.

First of all, both Tugwell and Wilson were institutional economists. They believed that the days of laissez-faire economies were over, that the central state necessarily had a positive, developmental role to play in social change. To them, government was the agent for collective security. Both were deep reformers, believing that long-term, substantial changes needed to be made in the economy. They represented the agrarian wing of a budding European-style social democracy in the United States. Tugwell and Wilson linked their vision of change to the "lower-third"; they did not isolate a poor underclass separate from the rest of society. Both were also in some sense modernizers who had faith in science and reason. Finally, we want to emphasize that Tugwell and Wilson lost in the struggle to achieve their visions, not only programmatically but intellectually as well. After World War II, their type of thinking virtually died in influential political circles, at least as regards domestic farm policy.

Despite these shared beliefs, Tugwell and Wilson differed significantly on a number of crucial points. Tugwell’s thought is more familiar: He was a proponent of centralized planning and governmental coordination of the economy. While allowing a political role for citizens, he believed that planning was a technical task to be done by trained experts. Grass-roots efforts to him were usually dominated by local power structures (he called them "grass-tops"). Moreover, he was willing to use the substantial powers of the federal government to reform regional cultures that did not meet his approval—for instance, the southern plantation system. He favored rapid social change and explicitly opposed forces for the status quo. Consequently he held a dim view of the agricultural power structure, including the traditional land-grant colleges and the state extension services. The main group that he worked for in agriculture was the poorest, the clients of the RA/FSA (farm workers, sharecroppers, tenant farmers) (Sternsher 1964; Padilla 1975; and Tugwell 1933, 1935).

In contrast, Wilson was more concerned about the mid-sized family farmer; indeed, he thought that most rural residents could achieve that middle-class, property-owning status. He believed much more in citizen participation than Tugwell, even to the extent that local farmers could play a major role in planning national agricultural policy. "Grass-roots democracy" was not just a slogan to him. Farmers could administer federal policies as well as help make them. Wilson also respected regional differences and local cultures more and thought that social change had to be gradual rather than imposed quickly from Washington. He was a product as well as a shaper of the land-grant and extension system (representing its left-wing) so he was much more willing than Tugwell to work within it (Kirkendall 1966, passim; Wilson 1940a, 1940b, 1941; and Kubo 1991). Still, Wilson’s views of participatory planning survived the conservative onslaught of World War II even less than did Tugwell’s seemingly more radical stance, which lived on in some of the resettlement communities.

Both the FSA and the BAE had significant administrative capacities. Each was institutionally reinforced in 1937–38, and both grew in strength until 1942. Unlike Tugwell’s Resettlement Administration, the FSA had legislative sanction; Congress passed the Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Act in 1937, and Henry Wallace merged the RA into the new FSA. Over the next five years, it became a major federal agency. Although centralized in decision-making authority, the FSA had a decentralized administrative structure. Its personnel numbered over 19,000, mostly in 2,300 county offices that served more than 800,00 client families. The FSA funded its own program of research, often carried out by social scientists in the BAE. As a leading action agency of the New Deal, it was often seen as a "poor people’s USDA." This strong mission orientation (labeled "zealous" by its detractors) soon led to problems that were more political than administrative (Baldwin 1968).

The BAE was not an action agency but rather a research and planning unit. With Wallace’s major reorganization of the USDA in 1938, he elevated the BAE to become the central planning agency for the entire department. (Even before the New Deal, however, the BAE was well-known for the quality of its research and expertise. It was probably the largest social-science research organization in the world.) With the reorganization, the BAE acquired the AAA’s Program Planning Division, which further added to its strength. The BAE was an intellectual powerhouse in terms of policy analysis and formation, probably unequaled in the federal government. In policy implementation, however, it had a limited field staff and relied on the USDA’s traditional outreach arm, the state extension services with their county agent system.

That both the FSA and the BAE were within the larger USDA had definite implications. Changes in leadership, political climate, and global affairs could have drastic consequences. Compare, for example, the outlook for the two reformist agencies in mid-1940 with late 1941. In the earlier year, both had strong support from the Secretary and the Undersecretary of Agriculture (even the President), the conservative power structure of U.S. agriculture was relatively tolerant of the agencies, and the nation was at peace. By the end of 1941, the country had entered World War II, and all priorities changed. FDR announced that "Dr. New Deal" had become "Dr. Win the War." Conservatives were aroused by the potential threats of the FSA and BAE and launched a political campaign against them. And neither Henry Wallace nor M.L. Wilson any longer led the USDA; the former had become Vice-President, and the latter, federal Director of Extension Work. The new Secretary of Agriculture did not support the reform agenda, as they had done (Kirkendall 1966, pp. 165–217).

Both the FSA and the BAE faced the same political enemies, the "establishment" of U.S. agriculture: the large-farm organizations and conservatives in Congress as well as within USDA itself. These groups were powerful both locally and nationally. In the mid-1940s, the BAE was attacked specifically for two pieces of research that threatened local power structures. One was a sociological survey of rural Coahoma County, Mississippi. An internal draft of this short study was leaked to new Congressman Jamie Whitten, who represented the county. He and other southerners were outraged that the BAE report detailed racial differences in standards of living. The other study caused even more trouble for the BAE. Anthropologist Walter Goldschmidt investigated the effects of farm size on rural community well-being in the Central Valley of California. He found that a small-farm area had a higher quality of life than did a large-farm area. The Associated Farmers and other supporters of industrial farming attacked the study and its sponsoring agency. Congress forbade the BAE from conducting "sociological surveys," as it had earlier denied funding to the county planning program, drastically weakening both the reform and the research capacities of the BAE (Kirkendall 1966, pp. 224, 235–42).

The FSA was similarly gutted in 1943. Its enemies charged it with duplication, inefficiency, waste, and radicalism. The STFU, NFU, and USDA economists Tolley and Wilson all mounted a campaign of support. Yet the FSA’s stronger adversaries won the day, cutting its budget and personnel in half. In 1946, what was left of the FSA became the moderate Farmers Home Administration (FmHA) (Baldwin 1968, pp. 352–402; Conkin 1959, pp.  214–33).

Thus, the history of land tenure reform in the New Deal era reveals the complexities of constituency-building, vision, and institutional capacity—complexities that made it difficult to sustain a reform coalition which could be a match for the powerful enemies of reform and which would continue to hinder the possibility of realizing the New Deal vision in subsequent years. But to understand the post-New Deal fate of rural land-tenure reform it is equally important to consider the broader economic, political, and ideological transformations that changed the rural landscape beginning in the 1940s. Government policies, new technology, and growing consumer demand helped to create an economy featuring a highly commercial, more mechanized agricultural sector and a larger industrial sector, heavily reliant on defense spending, as well as more "traditional" industries such as textiles and lumber. These changes, largely brought about through federal government policies, dramatically reshaped the rural labor force by eliminating agricultural jobs, streamlining factories, and spurring vast interregional migrations, particularly among blacks. They also paved the way for the consolidation of more commercial, business-oriented political power bases in the South and West, chiefly concerned with economic growth and modernization (Schulman 1991; Nash 1985; and Daniel 1986). Accommodating these concerns, postwar liberals embraced growth as the central goal of domestic policy and de-emphasized economic democracy and redistribution, thus marking a "retreat" from New Deal reform ideology (Brinkley 1995).

The longer-range implications of these economic, political, and ideological transformations for the New Deal reform vision can be seen in a second land-tenure reform "episode," this time attached to the War on Poverty in the 1960s. In contrast to the land reform policies of the New Deal era, this episode was brief, narrowly targeted, and left little visible impact on policy: the very limited land reform measures proposed as part of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 never made it off the congressional floor, where conservatives purged the act of any provisions that smacked of redistribution. Once again, there is more to the tale than conservative opposition, however, for the episode also reveals just how deeply submerged the reform tradition of the FSA/BAE "visionaries" had become, at least at the federal level, among liberals.

Land tenure reform was one feature of Title III, the "rural title," of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964. Put together by Department of Agriculture staff members, James Sundquist and John Baker, Title III was a collection of modest provisions, targeted not generally to the rural poor but more narrowly to the estimated 1 million farm families who were deemed too old, too uneducated, or otherwise "handicapped" to be candidates for migration to urban areas. These "boxed-in" families were being left behind by progress and ignored in existing government policies. "In the absence of special assistance," agency analysts wrote, "they would either remain desperately poor where they are or move to an urban area where their chances of becoming welfare cases are far better than their prospects of earning a decent living" (U.S. Senate 1964a, pp. 90–92). The idea behind legislative proposals was to provide the adults in these families with a basic level of security; meanwhile, their children would be educated for upward and outward mobility. Although they were couched within the logic of basic subsistence and remediation, the Title III provisions did contain some element of the land reform strategies of the RA and FSA: modest grants and low-interest loans would extend "middle-class" FmHA-type benefits to the poor, enabling them to improve and eventually purchase their farms; federal funds would also provide assistance for low-income farmers’ cooperatives; and, most controversially, a Family Farm Development Corporation would finance nonprofits to purchase large tracts of land for redistribution in small units to low-income farmers.

Title III met with skepticism but not much active opposition in committee hearings, where opponents depicted it as a measure that would simply prolong the inevitable death of the small farm and occasionally, as in the case of Representative Poage of the House Agricultural Committee, compared its proposals with the sort of "communistic" ideas that had been purged with the demise of the FSA (U.S. House 1964, p. 16). The more concerted—and theatrical—protestation was reserved for the Senate floor debate, when conservatives led by Strom Thurmond managed to invoke the Bible, Communist Revolution, racial fear, and the ghost of Rexford Tugwell in one sustained attack. "The poor always ye have with you," he reminded his colleagues, calling the poverty bill "pregnant with racial overtones" and threatening to the basic precepts of a free market economy. The rural title was clearly inspired by the FSA, an "experiment station of un-American ideas and economic and social theories of little or questionable value." Saving his sharpest barbs for the Family Farm Development Corporation, Thurmond also managed to get in a dig against postwar foreign aid policy, warning against the attempt to impose "socialistic devices" of the sort that "we have tried so hard to ram down the throats of our Latin American neighbors" (U.S. Senate 1964b, pp. 16704–06).

Given the lukewarm level of support for Title III from the Administration and within Congress, Thurmond’s onslaught was enough to pare it down even further. The final bill was passed without the Family Farm Development Corporation and with much diminished funding for its already minimal loan provisions. Following this brief appearance on the legislative scene, land tenure was simply a nonissue as far as the War on Poverty was concerned. Instead, federal efforts to address rural poverty would concentrate on education and training and on improving access to services through the Community Action Program.

The pre-emptive strike against land tenure reform could be seen as a sharp reminder of the power exercised by southern conservative opposition. But in reality it was the liberal camp—as revealed in certain aspects of the War on Poverty planning process—that undermined its viability in the 1960s. Once again, liberal planners encountered problems in organizing a community-based constituency for reform as well as ideological differences within the Administration and, even more than in the 1930s, lacked a politically powerful institutional base for sustaining rural reform efforts.

As suggested above, the demographic profile of rural poverty had become even more diversified since the 1930s, as low-wage industrial workers grew in number compared to the dwindling population of impoverished farm laborers. Although aware of this diversity, the Department of Agriculture analysts proposed an admittedly narrow program in the hope that it would be an opening wedge for further action. To some degree this narrow focus reflected the larger inability of the federal government bureaucracy to respond to the changing rural scene: despite profound changes since the 1940s, "rural" was still equated with farming in the 1960s, and the Department of Agriculture remained the only institutional home for attention to rural issues. Furthermore, in the minds of the poverty planners, the 1 million poor farm families targeted in Title III fit the image of the hopeless "residual" rural poor depicted in social scientific research and the popular media of the day. With few ties at the local level to work with, the federal government poverty planners were not in a position to build a constituency for a rural anti-poverty strategy that could effectively integrate land tenure issues with the concerns being articulated by community-based labor and civil-rights advocates who formed part of a natural constituency to address rural poverty. In the mid-1960s, such efforts were being organized by the National Farmers’ Union, which sponsored a report by its National Policy Committee on Pockets of Poverty linking farm problems with other forms of "structural" poverty and released weeks before the Economic Opportunity Act was sent to Congress.(6) The Farmers’ Union strongly supported Title III and testified on its behalf during congressional hearings, but its broader proposals made little impact on the Administration poverty planners.

The architects of Title III also faced several obstacles within the Administration-wide anti-poverty planning process, and these obstacles reveal the virtual absence of an elite constituency for land tenure reform in the 1960s. One obstacle was an overwhelming bias against seeing poverty as having a specifically rural component, let alone as being tied to land tenure. This bias was built into the planning process in two ways. First, the chief responsibility for conceptualizing the War on Poverty rested with the economists at the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) and the Bureau of the Budget. Unlike the institutionalists who ran the BAE in the 1930s, these economists embraced neoclassical principles and were confirmed Keynesians. Concepts such as land and place were not included in their analytic models, and they tended to see poverty primarily as a problem of low aggregate demand, high unemployment rates, and deficiencies of human capital.(7) Moreover, the recent Administration-backed effort to address "depressed area" poverty in the 1961 Area Redevelopment Act had been disappointing at best, reducing the likelihood that the CEA would back a concerted rural focus even further.

Second, to the extent that poverty was "located" in the minds of the Administration planners, it was becoming more of an urban phenomenon. The awareness of urban poverty was reinforced in the planning process by the influence of a somewhat eclectic network of social scientists, foundation officials, local government officials, and community/labor activists who had been involved in a series of urban demonstration programs since the mid-1950s. Many of these local demonstration programs had come about because of problems associated with the influx of "new migrants," largely from rural backgrounds, into inner city areas—blacks, latinos, and white "poor ethnics," who were seen to be unprepared for urban life and a strain on urban services. Putatively designed to reform local services to make them more responsive to the needs of the newcomers, the demonstrations contained the seeds of what later became the Community Action Program, emphasizing principles of comprehensiveness, coordination, and, more unevenly, local participation. While community action could, and would, be applied in rural as well as urban areas, most of its proponents came from the urban front lines, where they came to regard the rural poor through the lens of migration, as potential urban "newcomers" with cultural as well as skill "deficiencies" (O’Connor 1996).

Underlying these built-in biases against the rural perspective was a broader ideological framework that embraced economic growth and modernization as the way to affluence as well as the solution to poverty. In the 1930s, there had been some tension in liberal thought between Tugwell’s vision of centralized planning and modernization and Wilson’s vision of an economy based on the family farm and rural communities. By the 1960s, modernization was clearly the predominant framework among liberal social scientists and policymakers. As a reform vision, however, this was a narrowed, commercialized conceptualization of modernization—one which relied on market-driven growth, with minimal central planning, and was complacent about the prospect of "uneven" development. In the modernization vision, the family farm and traditional gemeinschaft communities were things of the past, the poor were victims of material and cultural deprivation rather than of broader socioeconomic inequality, and it was they, not society, who were in need of rehabilitation. Such a vision saw education, retraining, and outmigration as the keys to fighting rural poverty and regarded the rural poor, in the words of a later commission report, as "the people left behind."(8) In this vision, land redistribution was at best a means of providing subsistence for those who could not move up and out.

A third factor that presented an obstacle to the land tenure perspective was institutional in nature, and it was rooted in the earlier demise of the FSA and BAE. In the absence of those agencies, the institutional base for the administrative "voice" for the interests of poor farmers had all but disappeared. As a result, there was no strong constituency within the Department of Agriculture for incorporating the poor into a more modernized agricultural sector; departmental priorities were geared to the larger producers and overwhelmingly to commercial farm interests, and the extension services had a reputation for being racist. Not surprisingly, then, the War on Poverty planners held a deep suspicion of the Department of Agriculture and were not inclined to look to it for ideas.(9) Meanwhile, the "visionaries" of the earlier era had become increasingly engaged in the world of international development, which proved much more promising as a research/action frontier after World War II.(10)

Largely due to the persistence of James Sundquist, the Department of Agriculture analysts did manage to overcome these obstacles and persuade the Poverty Task Force to include a rural title in the anti-poverty legislation. Nevertheless, it was treated as an afterthought in packaging the legislation and was not strongly defended in the face of opposition.

Lest we conclude that the story of federal land reform is simply one of defeat, there remains the question of whether the resettlement programs were successful in achieving their ends. In the 1970s, economist and former OMB official Lester Salamon set out to answer this question, conducting an evaluation of FSA reform with the all-important element of long-term effects factored in. Focusing on programs that distributed land to black agricultural workers, Salamon found evidence of a high level of land retention over time, along with significant improvement in terms of income, assets, health, and overall well-being among program beneficiaries. Significantly, he also found that program beneficiaries were heavily engaged in local politics and community activities, most notably forming the vanguard of local support for the civil rights movement. These findings led him to conclude that the resettlement program "had significant long-run effects, transforming a group of landless black tenants into a permanent landed middle class that ultimately emerged in the 1960s as the backbone of the civil-rights movement in the rural South" (Salamon 1979). Moreover, this was "social reform on the cheap": For a limited investment, the federal government had been able to change the entire social dynamic in a rural region.

The history of federally administered land reform since the New Deal is brief and episodic, but it yields enduring lessons for reform more generally. First, these federal efforts have historically faced difficulties in mobilizing their grass-roots constituencies. To some degree these difficulties have been due to the vast diversity of rural America and the potentially conflicting interests within the social base. They have also been part of the more general institutional weakness in the federal government when it comes to developing rural policy beyond the confines of large-scale agriculture. But they have also been due to the preponderance of "top-down" planning and the lack of effective mechanisms for linking federal administrators with the localities. Although the BAE offered a model for achieving such linkages, its local constituency did not include low-income and disfranchised community members. In the 1960s, local community-action agencies were meant to engage the poor in planning, but they were primarily service-oriented and their impact on the broader direction of federal government policy was negligible. In both reform episodes, problems related to constituency-building at the local and elite levels made it that much more difficult to overcome conservative opposition to reform measures.

Second, the land reform story reveals the limitations of liberal reform ideology as it evolved during the post-World War II years. The liberal embrace of modernization, particularly in its narrow, commercialized form, relegated the poor to "residual" status, neglected the concern for economic democracy that had informed New Dealers, and, in its reliance on neoclassical economic theory, effectively defined land out of the poverty equation. Standing in contrast to this residualist vision, the New Deal land reform experiments offer a genuine alternative which, thanks to the Resettlement Administration, has grounding in historical experience. The most far-reaching of the RA programs were redistributive, challenged a prevailing system that perpetuated inequality, targeted low-income populations without stigmatizing them, and acknowledged the race as well as the class dimensions of poverty. However momentarily, they shattered the myth that poverty could be addressed without changing the status quo.

Third, the vast changes that separate these two "episodes" of land reform underscore the overriding impact of federal economic policy on the fate of low-income Americans. Much more than "welfare," training, or other types of residual programs, steps taken by the federal government to encourage growth, industrialization, agricultural commercialization, and the military/defense industry changed the face of poverty in rural America. Important as it is to develop specific reform alternatives that will improve opportunities for low-income Americans, it is also important to keep a critical eye on, and develop alternatives to, the broader macro-level and labor-market policies that form the context of poverty. By the same token, it is important to reconceptualize the links between poverty and land tenure in light of changing political, economic, and environmental realities. For low-income as for all Americans, land tenure issues go well beyond ownership and income to include persistent spatial inequality, public health, natural resource protection, and quality of life concerns. The diverse constituency for land tenure reforms includes the poor and perhaps offers an opportunity to recapture the more inclusive vision that inspired reform in the 1930s.