Government Involvement In Agricultural Affairs In The 1930's

Farmers did well after the Civil War and into the 1880s with plentiful rainfall and easy credit from banks. In the 1890s, however, American farmers suffered from drought, poor harvests, restrictive tariff and fiscal policies, low commodity prices, and competition from abroad. A downward swing in the business cycle exacerbated their plight, and many farmers in the Plains filed for

The roaring 20’s for farmers was not prosperous like it was for everyone else, it was a cycle of continual debt for the American farmer with the need for high priced equipment to run the farms as well as the stemming from farming prices are just two reasons that farmers struggled before the stock market crash. When mortgage foreclosures began to happen, farmers were unable to pay and their properties were taken by the banks. In the Midwest it grew desperate, many farmers began to pool their resources to bail each other out. Two states, Minnesota and North Dakota passed laws that restricted farm foreclosures. While Roosevelt was in office he wanted to stop all the madness that was occurring with the farmers and the banks, thus the Farm Credit Act was passed in March of 1933, which refinanced mortgages that were in danger of going

Historians today debate the extent which the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 improved the lives of American farmers in the years after the law was enacted. Some historians maintain that this part of the New Deal was a successful program that helped relieve farmers from the pressure of the Great Depression. However, other historians argue that the benefits received from the Agricultural Adjustment Act exclusively benefited large farms and severely disadvantaged tenant farmers, or sharecroppers, and therefore worsening the effects of the Great Depression.

Yet it wasn’t a change that could have been made overnight. Once the Stock Market Crash in October 1929, the collapse in industrial production and the financial crisis of 1931 led to a great depth depression in agriculture and more in industrial production (Kindleberger 70). There is without a doubt that were having difficulties prior to the Stock Market Crash, with falling prices, rising stocks, inability to sustain borrowing, and the necessity to maintain debt service (91). To begin with, farm debt was serious that the total farm mortgages in the United States had risen from $3.3 billion in 1910 to $6.7 billion in 1920 and $9.4 billion in 1925 (84). National agricultural policies attempted to reduce production of certain crops and animals products, though the initial motivation was to raise prices, increase farm income and stimulate the depression economy (Hornbeck 1480).

Farmers in America were upset due to the prices of their products going down, increasing

Arguing that the majority of farmers during the Great Depression benefitted from the government policies produced through President Roosevelt’s New Deal is an inaccurate claim. While history textbooks highlight the improvement of finances for people in rural areas in the United States of America, the personal experiences of family farmers contradict those textbooks. Writers of textbooks about American history should consider looking further into the delicate topic of how the Great Depression effected common farm families. In the West, farmers endured the Dust Bowl. In the North, people in rural areas competed to make a profit. Although statistics show the most economic damage of the Great Depression beginning at the end of 1929, small farm families refer to the effects of the Depression dating back as early as 1925 since government policies mostly benefitted large farm industries as small farms were forced to foreclose.

The Dust Bowl had a negative effect on agriculture during The Great Depression that affected people in horrible ways. “The grasslands had been deeply plowed and planted. During the years when there was adequate rainfall, the land produced bountiful crops. However, as a drought that started in the early 1930s persisted, the farmers kept plowing and planting with increasingly

In the 1920’s, everything was going right for America’s economy. Unemployment was at a high and everyone was making money under Calvin Coolidge and Warren Harding. Business was doing even better under Herbert Hoover, but then eventually the stock market crashed. The thing that all of these presidents had in common was that they practiced Laissez-Faire economics. However, when the economy went downhill under Herbert Hoover’s term, he continued to not intervene in any businesses and let the economy plummet. The government wanted everyone to have money, but the government in the 1930’s was more interested in helping people get it.

By the end of the 1920s several events began to impact the success farmers had gained. First, a drought hit the Midwest - drying up the land and the crops. Second, demand for goods also fell, decreasing the value of the crops that went to the market. Finally, dust storms would wipe out the remaining fields - causing a total loss for both the sharecropper and landowner.

President Roosevelt and his New Deal tried to ease the pains of the farmers. The Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) was formed to help out the farmers in their time of need. It paid farmers not to farm parts of their land to get prices back up. The Supreme Court ruled the AAA unconstitutional in 1936. Congress responded by passing the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act of 1936, which paid farmers to plant "soil-conserving" crops such as soybeans, or they could leave their land fallow. The AAA helped to lift the burden put on many farmers during the dirty 1930's, but the almost every farmer suffered greatly due to the drought, their farming, and dust

Farmers all through the 1920s had experienced “intense competition and declining prices because of overproduction [;] U.S. agricultural interests lobbied the federal government for protection against agricultural imports” (Britannica 2015). Herbert Hoover had sided with the farmers in raising Agricultural tariffs that eventually led to his presidency and signing of the act. This Smoot Hawley Tariff as it was called would “increase the cost of imported goods so that U.S. consumers would spend their money on U.S. products” in turn would save U.S. jobs in “import competing industries” (Suranovic 2012). The act went through various revisions leading up to the presidents signing that rose tariffs for

Throughout time, politics has evolved in response to a society’s needs. American farmers in the late 1800’s had problems of their own that lead to the radical politics of rural America. New technology, the high cost of freight trains and water, and growing cash crops lead to debt and losing land for many farmers: issues that eventually culminated in radical politics.

The Agricultural Adjustment Act in Great Depression Era in 1933 was a the United States federal law, part of the New Deal, which reduced agricultural production by paying farmers subsidies not to plant on part of their land and to kill off excess livestock. Its purpose was to reduce crop surplus in order to effectively raise the value of crops. This act represented a transformation about government’s role playing in the country. Before the period, the government only taxed import or export; it didn’t touch economy. But the AAA showed that government started to have power to change its economy.

To meet the immediate crisis of starvation and the dire needs of the nation’s unemployed, FDR provided for direct cash relief for the poor, and established the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Public Works Administration. Thousands of men throughout the country began working to build bridges, roads, and sewage systems and to plant trees. His Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) guaranteed the bank savings of American families. By the end of his second term, Roosevelt had institutionalized the role of the federal government as the economic patron and stimulator of the American economy. The Roosevelt legislation machine could stop a bank panic, put thousands of Americans back to work, and give people the right to have a drink, but it could not end the Depression. In fact, the pace with which legislation was crafted during the Hundred Days made some New Deal programs ungainly, ineffective, and susceptible to court challenge. In 1935, the Supreme Court struck down the National Recovery Administration, and later the Agricultural Adjustment Act, declaring that the regulation of agriculture was the field of the individual states.

Total unemployment rose from just over three percent in 1929 to just over twenty five percent in 1933, and did not increase back up to just over seventeen percent in 1939. By 1933 wages had fallen in every industry, with construction being affected the worst, where wages had dropped by half. Wages in 1933 were twenty five percent lower than in 1929. These decreases in wages caused decreases in purchasing across the board. Durable and nondurable sales alike decreased. Nondurable goods fell by forty one percent, where durable goods suffered the most and declined by sixty two percent. In the midst of the depression farmers also had a difficult time where usually they would have been able to survive. Unfortunately, the Great Plains were hit hard with both a drought and dust storms. The dust storms destroyed everything in their paths, leaving farmers without their crops. Small farmers were hit the hardest. Even before the dust storms hit, the invention of the tractor drastically cut the need for manpower on farms. The small farms were usually already in debt, borrowing money for seed and paying it back when their crops came in. When the dust storms damaged the crops, not only could the small farmer not feed himself or his family, he could not pay back his debt. Banks would foreclose on the farms and the farmer and his family would be both homeless and unemployed. Millions of people were out of work across the United States. Many people hit the road