Week 6 - Early AEE Part 2

Objectives

At the end of the lesson, you will be able to explain the basic concepts of the progressive era in American history.

Before you start the lesson

Look at this webpage for a summary of the scope and size of the progressive movement in the United States. Note the different sub-movements in the era - civil rights, women's suffrage, and labor reform, to name a few major ones.

The Progressive Movement emerged in the United States from the 1890s to the 1920s. The movement addresses social, economic, and political issues resulting from the rapid industrialization, urbanization, and social changes of this period in American history. The movement aimed to reform government, industry, schools, and social life to improve social conditions and foster equality. People were concerned about social issues, including poverty, child labor, unsafe industrial working conditions, and poor living conditions. People with influence, we will call them Progressives, pushed for social justice. They believed that government intervention and regulation were necessary to address these problems, including corruption in government. Progressives combated corruption and improved the functioning of government at various levels.

In terms of the economy, progressives aimed to address economic inequality and the power of big industrial interests. They pushed for the passage of antitrust laws, such as the Sherman Antitrust Act, which was introduced to break up monopolies and promote fair competition. They also supported labor rights, including the right to organize labor unions and strike. Another major problem that drew the attention of progressives was the safety and quality of consumer goods. The Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act were enacted to ensure the safety of food products and regulate the meatpacking industry.

Regarding the environment, progressive leaders such as President Theodore Roosevelt embraced conservation policies to preserve natural resources and protect the environment. During the progressive movement, many national parks and forests were established, and regulations were implemented to manage natural resources responsibly.

A major area of concern during the Progressive Era was the lack of ability of women to vote. Many progressives supported the women's suffrage movement which advocated for the right of women to vote. In 1920, Congress passed the 19th Amendment, allowing women the right to vote in the United States for the first time.

Regarding education, progressives were involved in all forms of reform efforts, including the need for universal education and the improvement in the quality of schools. Progressive supported measures such as compulsory attendance laws and increasing funding for public education. The Smith Hughes Act of 1917 is a result of the work of progressives.  Progressives worked to improve public health and social welfare programs, advocating for establishing public health departments and reforms in such areas as child labor and working conditions for all workers.

What was noticeably absent during the progressive movement was an effort to grant civil rights to black Americans. From the end of Reconstruction in 1877 through the 1940s, Black citizens experienced racial discrimination in almost every facet of American life. The Progressive movement was not very progressive regarding civil rights, and neither was Roosevelt’s New Deal, which followed the Progressive movement.

The Progressive Movement, Education, and Extension

Progressive education embodies everything we already know about agricultural and extension education, at least the things that seemed to work.

Progressive education is characterized by a focus on learning by doing, involving students in entrepreneurial projects outside of the class, problem-solving, developing social skills, and learning personalized to the individual student's goals. Progressive education also emphasizes lifelong learning. All of these characteristics can be found in Georgia's agricultural education programs.

Extension follows a parallel track in Progressive education as well. Progressive education arose out of the Progressive Movement in the United States. The Progressive Era brought us the first major federal legislation to support extension through the Smith-Lever Act and the first major federal legislation for schools, the Smith-Hughes Act. The Progressive Movement was a Grassroots effort to reform political and social structures in the United States. His purpose was to eliminate the problems caused by political corruption.

The Progressive Movement also sought to improve schools, improve the environment, and deal with the negative aspects of an industrialized Nation. Monopolies began to be regulated, and women were awarded the right to vote.

The Federal Reserve System was created, and Theodore Roosevelt used the Antiquities Act and began to set aside lands as national parks. In 1904, The Jungle was published. Upton Sinclair wrote the novel to outline the problems immigrants faced upon arriving in the United States. He described the unsanitary practices in the American Meatpacking industry, which led to many reforms, including the Meat Inspection Act.

Progressivism and Agricultural and Extension Education

The progressive movement had a strong effect on farmers. Tired of low prices for agricultural commodities, and a lack of sympathy and support from the government, farmers began to organize their own means of support. The following links take you to websites that provide information about the origins of farm organizations in the era of progressivism.

The Farmers' Alliance
Please read this summary of the Farmers' Alliance. It explains in part the efforts of farmers to improve their living conditions and the profitability of farming.

The National Grange Movement
This website, created by the Ohio State University, provides an overview of the Grange.

The Decline of Farms in the 1920s

The 1920s saw a boom in agricultural production due to increased mechanization, improved farming techniques, and increased acreage under cultivation. However, the surge in output led to a surplus of agricultural goods, causing prices to plummet. Farmers faced declining incomes as a result of overproduction. While technological advances increased productivity, they also displaced many farm laborers. The shift towards mechanization reduced the demand for manual labor on farms, contributing to unemployment and underemployment in rural areas. The combination of overproduction and weak global demand for agricultural products led to a significant decrease in prices. As a result, farmers struggled to cover their production costs and make a profit. Many farmers took out loans to finance the purchase of land, equipment, and supplies during the prosperous 1920s. When agricultural prices collapsed, farmers found themselves unable to repay their debts. The burden of high levels of debt added to the economic hardships farmers face.

To make matters worse, in the early 1930s, severe drought, and poor farming practices led to the Dust Bowl in the Great Plains. Massive dust storms caused soil erosion, devastated farmlands, and made agriculture unsustainable in the affected regions. The ecological disaster displaced many families and worsened the economic challenges farmers faced.

And the government made things worse with the passage of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930. This act increased tariffs on imported goods, including agricultural products. This led to retaliation from other countries, reducing American farmers' access to international markets and leading to a decline in agricultural exports. The collapse of banks and financial institutions during the broader economic crisis of the Great Depression made it difficult for farmers to access credit. The lack of financial resources further constrained their ability to weather the economic downturn.

These factors created a perfect storm for the agricultural sector, leading to widespread economic distress, farm foreclosures, and rural hardship during the Great Depression. The challenges faced by farmers played a significant role in shaping the policy responses of the Roosevelt administration.

The Farm Revolt

The following are excerpts from Arthur Schlesinger's three-volume history of the Roosevelt Administration and the New Deal. Rather than ask you to plow through 2000 pages of history, I have included key passages below:

“THE AMERICAN FARMERS had risen nobly to the challenge of war. In the decade after 1910, they had increased the aggregate acreage harvested by nearly 15 per cent. American food saved much of Europe from hunger and revolution. But prosperity had induced expansion of output; and, when European farms resumed production after the war, the export market for American agricultural products began to decline. While businessmen in the cities marveled at having solved the secret of prosperity, the farmers, in gloom and indignation, watched gross agricultural income fall from $17.7 billion in 1919 to $10.5 billion in 1921. The farm price index fell in the same period from 215 to 124; and farm land values capsized everywhere. As prices dropped, the burden of taxation and debt grew. Interest charges per acre more than doubled between 1916 and 1923. The countryside’s terms of trade with the city turned sharply for the worse. Discontent produced protest The crisis gave new life to the Grange and the Farmers’ Union and unexpected scope to the new and aggressive American Farm Bureau Federation.” (Schlesinger, 2003, p. 133

“The soil was rich and purple-black in Iowa; the red barns stood large and foursquare behind the comfortable white farmhouses with their ample lawns and swaying cottonwoods; the country teemed with abundance. But the buildings needed paint, the overalls of the farmer were patched and ragged, corn stood uncut in the field, parched by the sun. Along the roads near Sioux City in August 1932, sunburned farmers in ten-cent straw hats, carrying clubs, sticks, or pitchforks in their hands, were laying spiked logs and threshing-machine cables with loving care across the road. Their mood was jocular as they searched tracks for farm products and by one means or another persuaded those bound for market to think again and turn back. They waited in the sun and lay in the tall grass and made wisecracks and cursed a bit about the “international bankers” and slept in tents along the road—and the Ladies’ Aid brought them basket suppers. Independent of the Holiday movement but parallel with it arose a strike of the dairy farmers. Receiving two cents a quart for milk sold by distributors for eight cents in Sioux City, Woodbury County farmers declared an embargo on the entry of milk into the city (except for hospitals). All ten highways into town were under farmers’ patrol; and the movement spread fast to Council Bluffs, to other Iowa communities, and into neighboring states. But with milk it was more than a matter of turning trucks back. The strikers ripped open the cans and poured them onto the road, the fresh milk forming a white river, drying and curdling on the cement, trickling into the drainage ditch. Around Council Bluffs the sheriff armed citizens with baseball bats and ordered them to clear the roads; then he arrested sixty of the pickets, until the threat of a mass march on the jail forced their release.” (Schlesinger, 2003, p. 337)

“At Storm Lake, Iowa, farmers flourished a rope and threatened to hang a lawyer who was about to conduct a foreclosure. In Van Buren County, Iowa, Mrs. Otto Nau forced Sheriff Bostock off her farm at the point of a rifle. At Le Mars, five hundred men gathered in a sullen mob to watch the farm of John A. Johnson go on auction; when the agent for the New York Life Insurance Company offered a sum less than the face value of the mortgage, people slapped and mauled him; a few shouted “Lynch him!” Outside of Pleasanton, Kansas, someone found the murdered body of a man who had just foreclosed on a five-hundred-acre farm. At Sidney, Nebraska, farm leaders threatened to march two hundred thousand debtors to the State Capitol at Lincoln and “tear it down” unless they got relief. At Malinta, Ohio, a noose hung ominously from Albert Roehl’s barn to warn off outside bidders. In one bankruptcy proceeding after another, friends of the debtor, using unspoken intimidation to cut off other bids, bought back the property for a few cents and restored it to its owner.” (Schlesinger, 2003, p. 571)

“The rumblings reached Washington. Ed O’Neal told Congress that unless something were done there would be revolution in the countryside in less than twelve months. “Gentlemen of the Committee,” John A. Simpson of the Farmers’ Union said before the Senate Agricultural Committee, “the biggest and finest crop of little revolutions I ever saw is ripe all over this country right now.” And in New York, Mother Bloor, the veteran Communist agitator, back from the Middle West, said with professional admiration, “I never saw anything like the militancy of those farmers.” But it was not Bolshevism that was moving the men of the middle border. They were rather defending rights of property, especially the right of men to keep the homes they had carved out of the prairie by years of labor and self-denial—a right to be affirmed, by force if necessary, against all the banks and insurance companies in the world. Theirs, as they saw it, was the way not of revolution but of patriotism. The foreclosure riots at Primghar, Iowa, thus came to an end when a deputy sheriff sank to his knees before a crowd of angry farmers and obediently kissed the American flag.” (Schlesinger, 2003, p. 572)

“FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT, surveying in post-election calm the conditions of the country, could not but have been awed by the responsibility he was about to inherit. At least thirteen million of his countrymen were walking cold streets in search of work. Everywhere the system of local relief was breaking down. The spurt in economic activity in the summer of 1932, as a result of the fillip administered by Hoover’s involuntary excursion into deficit spending, had long since succumbed to the downward grind of deflation. As prices fell, the burden of debt incurred at higher price levels was becoming every day more intolerable. It was bankrupting the railroads, it was bankrupting local government, it was exerting an unendurable strain on the whole structure of banking and credit, it was goading the farmers into violence. A long winter stretched ahead, with nothing certain save discouragement and despair.” (Schlesinger, 2003, p. 547)

“THE FIRST BUSINESS of the Hundred Days had been the banks. But another problem lay urgently on Roosevelt’s mind that March: this was the problem of the farmers. No group in the population, except perhaps the [Black] workers, was more badly hit by depression. The realized net income of farm operators in 1932 was less than one-third what it had been in 1929—a dizzying collapse in three years. Farm prices had fallen more than 50 per cent; and the parity ratio—the ratio of prices received by farmers to the prices they paid—had plummeted from 89 in 1929 down to 55 in 1932 (in terms of 1910–14 as 100). The seething violence in the farm belt over the winter—the grim mobs gathered to stop foreclosures, the pickets along the highways to prevent produce from being moved to town—made it clear that patience was running out. In January 1933, Edward A. O’Neal, the head of the Farm Bureau Federation, warned a Senate committee: “Unless something is done for the American farmer we will have revolution in the countryside within less than twelve months."” (Schlesinger, p. 41)

Roosevelt's New Deal and the Agricultural Adjustment Act

More from Schlesinger...
“The farmers had been through too much—their crops crushed by hailstorm and withered by drought and consumed by plagues of grasshoppers, their hard labor brought to naught by falling farm prices, their homes and livelihood menaced by the banks and insurance companies, their recourse to legislation now threatened by nullification in the courts and apathy in the Congress.” (Schlesinger, p. 60)

The Act Passes...

“The Senate passed the bill by a vote of 64 to 20, and on May 12 it went to Roosevelt for signature. It now contained three parts. Title I was the Agricultural Adjustment Act; Title II was the Emergency Farm Mortgage Act; Title III, concerned with monetary issues, included the Thomas Amendment. As Roosevelt signed, the Farmers’ Holiday Association, under pressure also from Olson of Minnesota and other midwestern political friends, agreed to postpone its strike to give the new program a chance.” (Schlesinger, p. 61)

“The mortgage question was causing more immediate unrest than anything else; and the administration had already moved with vigor to relieve the situation. At the end of March, Roosevelt reorganized the hodgepodge of federal agricultural credit instrumentalities into a single new agency, the Farm Credit Administration, and made his Dutchess County neighbor Henry Morgenthau, Jr., its head. Under the fast-moving direction of Morgenthau and his deputy, William I. Myers of Cornell, the new agency took quick action to stave off the sheriff. Its powers confirmed by the Emergency Farm Mortgage Act and supplemented in June by the Farm Credit Act, FCA refinanced farm mortgages, inaugurated a series of “rescue” loans for second mortgages, developed techniques for persuading creditors to make reasonable settlements, set up local farm debt adjustment committees, and eventually established a system of regional banks to make mortgage, production, and marketing loans and to provide credits t” (Schlesinger, p. 61)

“62 cooperatives. It loaned more than $100 million in its first seven months, four times as much as the total of mortgage loans to farmers from the entire land-bank system the year before. At the same time it beat down the interest rate in all areas of farm credit.” (Schlesinger, p. 62)

Provisions of the Act

The Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) of 1933 was a landmark piece of legislation implemented as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal program to address the economic challenges faced by American farmers during the Great Depression. The primary goals of the AAA were to raise agricultural prices, provide financial relief to farmers, and combat the problem of overproduction, which had led to a collapse in commodity prices.

Key provisions of the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 included:

Crop Reduction and Subsidies - Farmers were paid subsidies by the federal government in exchange for reducing their production of certain crops and livestock. The idea was that by reducing supply, prices would increase, providing farmers with higher incomes.

Commodity Marketing Quotas: The AAA set limits on the amount that could be sold, to prevent overproduction and maintain stable prices. Farmers who exceeded their quotas faced penalties.

Commodity Processing Taxes: To fund the subsidies paid to farmers, the AAA imposed processing taxes on the processors of agricultural commodities such as cotton, wheat, corn, and tobacco. The revenue generated was used to finance the subsidy payments to farmers who participated in the program.

Tenant and Sharecropper Provisions: Recognizing the challenges faced by tenant farmers and sharecroppers, the AAA included provisions to ensure that they received a fair share of the benefits. However, in some cases, the benefits were more readily accessible to larger landowners.

Overall, the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 represented a significant shift in the federal government's approach to agriculture, moving towards more interventionist policies to address the economic hardships faced by farmers during the Great Depression.

60-Minute Assignment this Week

This is the first time I have taught this particular lesson, and I'm not sure I covered everything as well as I could have. Your 60-minute assignment this week is to send me an e-mail message with your questions about the course material. What was not clear? What do you need more information about?

References

Schlesinger, A. M. (2003a). The coming of the new deal_ 1933-1935 (Mariner Books 1st, Vol. 2). Houghton Mifflin.

Schlesinger, A. M. (2003b). The crisis of the old order, 1919-1933 (Mariner Books 1st, Vol. 1). Houghton Mifflin.