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The Rebirth of Rural LifePart IIRUSSELL LORD
Barely a month before Franklin D. Roosevelt's first inaugural, Raymond Moley made it known from advance guard offices of the New Deal in Washington that the President-elect had asked Henry A. Wallace, R. G. Tugwell, and M. L. Wilson of Montana to draw working plans, as a committee, to reorganize the Department of Agriculture as an instrument of active national planning. A continuing whirl of changes which since have unsettled many a fixed bureaucratic concept and career was thus foretold. With Moley and Tugwell, Wilson joined in a little polite lobbying to see if the last "lame duck" Congress, in interim session, could be persuaded to pass the working version of Wilson's "voluntary allotment plan" and so make it legal to reduce plantings by March, 1933. The lame ducks had a field day with these professorial newcomers, who got nowhere. Then as now, in a time of haste, fellow workers with Wilson were to find his quiet, patient, stubborn insistence upon "local, democratic participation" in national planning, impractical and annoying. Into this Hope-Norbeck bill he had written a referendum provision. Even if the bill passed, its provisions were to be submitted to a nationwide referendum and if 60 percent of the farmers did not vote "yes," no go. This did not fit with the New Dealers' emergency plea of frantic haste to the lame duck Congress. They threw out the referendum provision in committee. Wilson quietly packed his bag and left Washington. "I wasn't much interested in it without that," he said.
It occurred to none of us at the time to question Wilson as to the human displacements of modern agriculture. If we had, he would, I am sure, on the basis of his preview of the large scale crack-up in Montana, have admitted that probability also, and accepted it. Already he was on record in a radio talk from Chicago as follows:
Since our land retirement problem contemplates releasing families from poor agricultural lands it is logical to ask: Will these join the already overcrowded ranks of the unemployed?Again, before the Society of American Engineers in the summer of 1932, Wilson:
Our civilization is gripped in an age of science and machines. Agriculture cannot escape the engineered economic problems attendant to rapid change. These problems are not only economic and social, but philosophic and humanistic as well.... IIIt is extraordinary, the emotional appeal that the second strain in Wilson's agricultural thinking exerted upon widely diverse and often powerful persons around the time of the 1933 bank holiday. "We seek the security of the earth," Clare Leighton has written, "when all around us trembles." Joseph Knapp, largest owner of the Crowell publications, was not trembling. Other people attend to that for "Uncle Joe." But he was certainly amenable to Wilson's vision of a part time modern peasantry semi-removed from the tumult and strain of commerce. And there can be no harm now, at this late date, in telling how on two occasions, Uncle Joe Knapp, warmest-hearted of tycoons and among the most irascible, almost joined the New Deal. The Old Man, as they call him at the Crowell shop, has a big place in coastal Carolina. His love of the land is expressed in large-handed local benefactions and in a passion for ducks. "Ducks unlimited" is his slogan. Arthur Hyde, Mr. Hoover's Secretary of Agriculture, was also somewhat duck-minded. Hyde published a piece in a Crowell magazine on the tragic irony of the barns and busted banks and the Old Man read the piece. He called in lawyers and went into a burst of national planning for open price covenants in industry. The attraction here was in some part that which had attracted Henry I. Harriman to Wilson's farm allotment plan; it foretold for industry a large out from under the antitrust laws, such as was later attempted under NRA. But Knapp's ideas were different from those of the Chamber of Commerce, under Harriman; Knapp wanted to induce industrial cooperation largely by baiting the offer with cheap governmental credit. (He would have been surprised to know how many dread liberals such as Rex Tugwell and Jerome Frank nourished similar plans). Right in the middle of all this The Country Home came out with a piece about Wilson. Now the phones at Crowell really began to chime. The Old Man wanted to see this fellow, Lord, who had written the article. His friend, Arthur Hyde, told him the Wilson idea was no good. He wanted to see this Wilson, too. Wilson was in New York for a day. The interview was arranged. A couple of harassed Crowell executives took us in a cab to the Old Man's big Park Avenue apartment. "Try, for heaven's sake," one of them urged us, "to get him back on ducks!" We were shown into the Old Man's presence. His profile is like the face on an Indian penny, his skin a rugged red, his bearing erect and peppery. A grand old Tory, if ever there was one, and he liked Wilson right away. We started talking about farm allotments, indicating—in deference to the Old Man's gamey notions—that there might well be feed in the "surplus" strips and fields for migrating wild-life. A long distance call came from Washington and Wilson left the room. One of the minions leaned forward and remarked in a placatory tone, "You're going to like Professor Wilson, Mr. Knapp." The Old Man switched a steely, imperious eye and answered: "Of course like him. I know a man when I see one." We sat there waiting. Wilson returned and settled into a chair comfortably. With slow words and gestures he showed that the Hoover-Hyde plan of retiring only unproductive or marginal acres would not sufficiently reduce production and maintain prices. Then he developed the business or industrial implications of an openly planned production. The Old Man listened, asking sharp questions. Then Wilson unfolded his legs and rose. He walked over to where the Old Man sat by a wide, curtained window in a high-backed chair. "Now, Mr. Knapp," he said, "you and I have agreed just about perfectly so far. But now I'm going to say something I don't believe you'll agree with. I'm going to tell you what I really want." He took hold of a thick brocaded window-drape and drew, it back. There was Park Avenue, St. Bartholemew's Church, the apartment palaces, the elevated and the Westside slums beyond. "I want to destroy all this," said Wilson. He went on talking quietly, standing there by the window. "This is no way for people to live. I want to get them out on the ground with clean sunshine and air around them, and a garden for them to dig in, if they like. I want to get all these children off of streets, out on the land again. Spread out the cities, space the factories out, give people a chance to live so they'll know what life is all about—that's what I want." "Mr. Wilson," the Old Man told him as we were leaving, "I've never voted for a Democrat in my life. But if that's your New Deal, I'll vote for it; and I'm with you 100 percent." A few weeks later, still in that happy time when the Deal was really New and all the cards were being played face up with spirit and abandon, the Old Man and three aides came to Washington to talk with Wilson and Secretary Wallace about Industrial (as compared with Agricultural) Adjustment. The Knapp plan was being circulated in typescript. Many New Dealers in agriculture liked it better than the plan furthered by Harriman and the Chamber of Commerce (later NRA). Under a loose cooperative arrangement then rather common, I was working on loan from my company—Crowell—as an assistant to the Secretary, and I took the delegation in to introduce them to Wallace. With his customary air of amiable diffidence Wallace came from behind his desk to shake hands. He said a few words of praise for certain features of the Knapp plan. Then we all sat down. "Young man," said the Old Man, abruptly. "You're tired. But you're young. I envy you. You have the greatest power and the greatest opportunity in your hands at this moment of any American who ever"— He broke off abruptly, and, "My God!" he cried. "What's that?" A white rabbit had come out from under a radiator, gently ambling and nibbling at the carpet. "It's a rabbit," said the Secretary. The Old Man passed a hand across his eyes. The rabbit misbehaved. An alert colored man, Edward, then the Secretary's messenger, came scurrying to scoop up the rabbit with one hand and the droppings with the other. They went away. The Secretary explained that the rabbit was his boy's, Henrys'; and it was sick; so he had brought it down to have a friend in the Department, a vet, look it over. Everybody laughed and there was some attempt to get the talk back on the subject of the Knapp plan; but no go. The Old Man rose abruptly. "Can't you see this man's tired?" Then to Wallace: "God bless you!" They passed into the anteroom. "Now," said the Old Man, "where do I find Wilson?" We took him up to Wilson's office as chief of Triple-A's new wheat section, and they talked for the better part of an hour. From this and subsequent conversations grew the report of the Thomas A. Beck-J. N. Darling-Aldo Leopold committee on Wild Life Restoration, and from this came "Ding" Darling's breezy spell of service as chief of the Biological Survey. But that visit was, so far as I know, Uncle Joe Knapp's last appearance in Washington or anywhere else as a hundred percent New Dealer. IIIThe first New Deal post that had been proffered Wilson was Commissioner of Indian Affairs. This he had declined; he did not want to live in Washington. Even now he was "living in a rented house"—to him, a sure: sign of impermanency—and he planned to return to Montana "as soon as we get this wheat thing running." From March to May of 1933, as the new Congress debated the details of the first Triple-A Farm Act, the United States was faced with a wheat carryover and a cotton carryover three times normal. During this waiting period an unofficial Adjustment council attached to the office of the Secretary of Agriculture held sessions day and night. One of Wilson's main assignments was to convert George Peek, slated to be Triple-A's first administrator, to the idea of acreage restriction. Restriction there was, but Peek's conversion never came off. A stouthearted industrial-agrarian of the old order, he would seem at times to waver, but the pioneer in him hated restriction; and the foreign dumping of surpluses, the core of McNary-Haugenism, was a personal rock of ages against which even Wilson could not prevail. The Farm Act was passed on May 12. It was too late to birth control the cotton crop, so the South had a plowdown, pretty much on its own. For a while it seemed that Wilson, as wheat chief, would have to administer a plowdown on wheat, the traditional Staff of Life. Then, ironically, drought seared the Plains again. "Our press section breathed a sigh of relief," Wallace wrote later. "It would not be necessary to write about the logic of plowing under wheat while millions lacked bread." Wilson went to work and turned in, by the time of the 1933 fall planting, the first job of orderly crop birth control under Triple-A. He had to reach more than a million different wheat growers and explain the plan. He let the little patches of wheat go, for the most part, and concentrated on the Plains. Some Montana and Kansas counties signed up every acre in the county, 100 percent, and reduced their fall sowings 15 percent. Adjustment payment checks went out by the millions of dollars' worth, and were distributed by the local committees of farmers which had supervised the reduction. Some big wheat counties turned in claims for reduction which exceeded the government's past counts on their total wheat acreage. Often this was because the growers did not know their acreage; again, government figures were found to be at fault. For the first time now the government was getting the materials for a farm-by-farm census of production and accurate land measures field-by-field, farm-by-farm, a stupendous job in itself. The technique of measuring farms accurately by airplane photograph was not then fully developed. At one time, when a question of field procedure came up and he had no answer for it, Wilson left his desk without leaving a forwarding address, flew out to Montana, and went around visiting farmer-committeemen until he found one who had the answer. A key pamphlet for the campaign had to wait. The haste was such that I was sent to meet him on the way in, in Ohio, and clear the proofs from there. He was entirely unperturbed. "No use in printing anything until we know what it means," he said. Assigned to compose the wheat campaign pamphlet that would explain to all the technique of "a balanced abundance" through acreage reduction, I was often in Wilson's office in those days, and I generally found him thinking and talking about something that seemed to have nothing whatever to do with wheat. But he was, I could see, at times performing a delicate task of highly practical intent. Time and again I found him closeted with some of the business friends who, with large interests in land and wheat, had helped put over the domestic allotment plan. Now that there was a speculative flurry in wheat, and a general feeling of eased tension, these insurance men and bankers were inclined to unload their distressed holdings. This might have meant another wave of farm foreclosures and untold distress. Wilson took it upon himself to talk them out of it, and generally he did. Also, through the turmoil of the wheat sign-up he continued to see as many people who had plans for "subsistence homesteads" as people who had claims or ideas about wheat. Partly through the influence of his friend, Henry I. Harriman, a rider, very roughly drawn, went through with the act establishing the National Industrial Recovery Administration—in short, NRA. It provided "for aiding the redistribution of the over-balance of population in industrial centers" and made $25,000,000 "available to the President . . . for making loans and otherwise aiding in the purchase of subsistence homesteads." The Act passed in late June, 1933. In July the President delegated administration of the $25,000,000 to Secretary Ickes. In September Wilson went over to the Department of the Interior as director of the Federal Subsistence Homesteads Corporation, a non-profit corporation set up under the laws of Delaware. He worked for about ten months, until July 1934, on this job. Some idea of the diversity of interest the subsistence homestead idea aroused may be gained from even a partial list of those present at a supper meeting which Henry I. Harriman called for purposes of initial discussion at the Shoreham Hotel. Bernarr Macfadden was there, and Tugwell and Ickes and John D. Black, and George Soule of The New Republic. Of farm leaders, L. J. Taber, the Granger, and Ed Oneal of the Farm Bureau. Of labor people, Meyer Jacobstein and William Green. Of humanitarians, Dr. John A. Ryan, Catholic, and Bernard G. Waring, Quaker. And besides, there were professors and bankers and businessmen, some of whom had definite projects in mind. Discussion ran unhampered and seemed to get nowhere. There were indications of a tendency among some hardboiled industrialists to favor semi-rural colonies as convenient places to anchor help until, in their opinion, such help was needed; and then to pay off not so much in money as in sunshine and fresh air. There appeared a countering tendency on the part of labor and labor leaders to suspect a catch in the subsistence homestead design. There appeared an unreadiness of business leaders to relocate plants under federal guidance; and there appeared, finally, an immemorial tendency of rural colonization schemes to attract cultists, faddists, male skirt-dancers, and a certain number of crackpots, along with the more effective humanitarians. IVExcitement surrounding the cotton plow-up, hot differences between urban liberals within the Department, and reverberations which began to play around that dread name, Tugwell (after he had sponsored a somewhat stringent Food and Drug bill, particularly), served in part to obscure rather remarkable advances toward overall land planning, even in the New Deal's first year. Amazing contradictions between the Tugwell you knew and the Tugwell you read about in the papers, or heard discussed in shuddering conversation at dinner patties, while he rode high in the headlines, still must seem to his associates in the Department of Agriculture one of the most bewildering examples of a distorted public opinion in our time. He is a man of tense but quiet ways, ardent in the work, but balanced. His thinking is brilliant and elastic. His sympathies are generous and wide. Wryly, he anticipates imperfections in human beings, including himself; and he never expects human affairs to be arranged ideally; but he is always in there working for what he believes to be just and decent. To those who work with him he is a friend wholly without pose, obscure purposes, or "side." Summoned in 1934 to a sort of rump trial before a Senate committee, he said of himself quietly that he is a conservative: "I would really like to conserve all those things which I grew up to respect and love, and not to see them destroyed." The fact is, as "Cotton Ed" Smith suggested, that Tugwell is no 100 percent son of the soil, with sympathies exclusively agrarian. His family background and boyhood were rural, but not strictly agricultural. It was a medium background with a small-town tinge. As truly as Wilson stems from open country, Tugwell comes from the "periphery" just beyond the suburbs, with constant access to and conditioning by a metropolitan environment. This accounts for much of the stir Tugwell aroused and the good that he did in broadening programs of the Department of Agriculture. It accounts also for some of the enlargements developed, under the Resettlement program, from Wilson's start with subsistence homesteads late in 1933. Wilson's subsistence homestead division of the Department of Interior set up modest offices in a dingy old building on Pennsylvania Avenue and tried to keep it fairly quiet that it had $25,000,000 to spend. Even so, the division had applications calling for a dispersal of three billion dollars at the end of two months. First loans went to places like Austin, Minn. and Dayton, Ohio, where industries were willing to promise subsistence homestead colonists part time and reasonably paid employ. As a relative scarcity of such locations developed, Wilson put more emphasis on the need of a peaceful transition from strictly competitive concepts toward cooperative and community developments, such as he discerned in Denmark at the time. "Subsistence homestead colonies can be a sort of new synthesis of present-day ideals and aspirations for community life," he told members of the American Farm Economics Association as 1933 turned into 1934. Thus, somewhat formally, he staked off the ground which he felt this "new pattern of rural life" should occupy. Less formally, he gave me some conversational material for an intended magazine article, which I have never found place or occasion to publish until now. "Now, this isn't something for everybody," he told me. "Let's get that straight. It isn't for well-to-do people, and it isn't for poor working people who are willing to go on the way they are, just to be a part of the great jazz age procession. It isn't a relief proposition, to be applied at random. It's a middle-class movement for selected people, not the top, not the dregs. "There are a lot of people who really belong to this jazz-industrial age. They like it. They're white-lighters, never satisfied, but excited, and they just don't want to get away from the white lights, out close to themselves, more or less alone. On the other hand, there are a great many of our people, of all degrees of wealth and education, in all walks of life, who feel that they are outcasts of the jazz-industrial age, and who are looking for something more secure and satisfying. "I am very, very skeptical about the prospect, under a competitive regime as tense as it is at present, of getting enough decentralization out of industry on its own accord. I mean by that, enough decentralization to make all our projects self-supporting. Where that can't be, we'll just have to regard the projects as experiments in a new pattern of civilization, under the competitive system, plus subsidy," Wilson said. Clarence Pickett, one of Wilson's first assistants, brought to the job some years of experience as secretary of the Friends' Service Committee in Philadelphia. He had been working on subsistence projects in Pennsylvania and West Virginia trying to cover unemployed miners from the weather more decently and to preserve them from starving to death. On some of the new federal projects labor hour systems offering immediate sustenance, which Pickett favored, were tried. That is to say, the unemployed "settlers," at relief wages, "went out and built their own homes and roads in the industrial wilderness," as Wilson put it at the time. At the end of four months the Division had approved more than thirty projects, and the Corporation had authorized loans of around $10,000,000 to local corporations set up under the laws of the state of Delaware. There were even among Wilson's first and most devoted associates those who strongly doubted if they could go on loaning federal funds over a long term of years and maintain as high a degree of local management, with as little federal supervision and management, as Wilson resolutely proposed. His insistence on this point was in natural development of all his experience in government and in planning. "I tell you where I got the idea of a preponderance of business men on local boards. I got it from watching the work of the hospital board at Bozeman, Mont., my home. I've used that idea in making up various boards and committees since; and it's always worked. "When you get local businessmen, a majority or close to that, on a local board, your enterprise is likely to succeed. They know the people there, realistically. That board can make a lot of mistakes; but when you've got men on it who have been doing business there for thirty years or more, and getting by, well, they're likely to guess right most of the time, and whatever they get behind is likely to succeed there. "Of course, not all that hospital board were hardboiled business people. There were also 100 percent social-altruistic people on it. Fine men and women, warm-hearted, with larger ideas than most of the business element. But if you let them run a hospital, well, it would be awful hard on the patients." The Comptroller General was the first to raise the question as to the propriety of extreme decentralization. Secretary Ickes entered upon a correspondence which led to an appeal for an opinion by the Attorney General. Then the Comptroller General overruled the Attorney General and in May of 1934 Ickes issued an order abolishing the local corporations around which Wilson had built his entire plan of decentralized local management. It is significant that Carl Taylor, who as Wilson's first field organizer, was Washington representative on the boards of thirteen local corporations, resigned from the Division in May. Some sixty-five other projects were ready to come under local organization at the time. The abrupt order to federalize led to an almost complete alienation of important industrial backing and to several little local "revolts" among the new-formed colonies. Having protested against the ruling, Wilson offered no further opposition. He returned to the Department of Agriculture as Assistant Secretary with a glad heart. His projects were later enfolded into the much larger program of Tugwell's Resettlement Administration, and now are continued by the Farm Security Administration. "Do you know," Wilson says mildly now, after he has made a visit to some of his favorite subsistence homestead projects (such as Longview, in the state of Washington, which he founded, or Penncraft, Pa., privately supported by the Quakers). "Do you know, I'm often surprised how many of the things we set out to do seem to be coming through amid all the rumpus."
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