The Farm Security Administration and Rural Rehabilitation in the South (e-book) (used book) | bookbook.eu

Description

As the roaring twenties turned into the depressed thirties, southern farmers, far removed from the
urban prosperity Americans had enjoyed during the 1920s heyday, found already difficult farming
conditions greatly intensified by the onset of the Great Depression. Agricultural incompetence
plagued the rural South through the misuse of land, depletion of natural resources, and a system
of single-crop farming that failed to adequately provide for growing families on small farms, especially
in the cotton-producing Southeast. Poverty and desperation came to define the farming
communities of the rural South, both in reality and in Americans' collective conscious.
In The Farm Security Administration and Rural Rehabilitation in the South, Charles Kenneth
Roberts traces the administrative and political history of the Farm Security Administration
(FSA) and reconciles the administration's goals with Franklin D. Roosevelt's overall vision for the
New Deal. Roberts takes a grassroots approach to dissecting the FSA's history. While other studies
have focused on FSA photography or community building, or even policy making in terms of
top-down government directives, Roberts focuses on the people and state governments who faced
an immediate need to aid southern farmers within their own borders and to boost their states'
crumbling agricultural economic bases. Roberts focuses on rural rehabilitation as a key aspect of
the FSA and defines the agency's legacy not in terms of its failures but rather in terms of an idealistic
program whose modest successes were ultimately too few to effect real change for southern
farmers.