Abstract:
This dissertation examines the political and administrative history of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) and its predecessors, the New Deal agency most directly associated with eliminating rural poverty. In addition, it studies and describes the efforts to remedy rural poverty, with an emphasis on farm security efforts (particularly rural rehabilitation) in the South, by looking at how the FSA's actual operating programs (rural rehabilitation, tenant-purchase, and resettlement) functioned. This dissertation demonstrates that it is impossible to understand either element of the FSA's history - its political and administrative history or the successes and failures of its operating programs - without understanding the other. The important sources include archival collections, congressional records, newspapers, and published reports. This dissertation demonstrates that New Deal liberal thought (and action) about how to best address rural poverty evolved considerably throughout the 1930s. Starting with a wide variety of tactics (including resettlement, community creation, land use reform, and more), by 1937, the New Deal's approach to rural poverty had settled on the idea of rural rehabilitation, a system of supervised credit and associated ideas that came to profoundly influence the entire FSA program. This proved to be the only significant effort in the New Deal to solve the problems of rural poverty. The FSA proved to be modestly successful as an anti-poverty program; it ameliorated the suffering of the rural poor and generally improved the lives of its clients. It did not prove to be successful as a political institution, succumbing to political attacks during World War II.
