Reviving the Yeoman Farm: Arthur Raper and New Deal Policy on Small Farmers

The New Deal was not consistent in its policies toward Southern sharecroppers and tenant farmers.  The Agricultural Adjustment Act (1933), by paying planters not to grow cotton, helped to push sharecroppers and tenants off plantations.  Planters used their payments to purchase machines, which meant that even when they began to grow more cotton again, they would not need to rehire their workers.  A few years later, the Farm Security Administration worked to help tenants become landholders by offering them low-interest loans and other benefits.  In my paper, I would like to explore the ideas behind the FSA—to consider why, at a time when farming was being transformed by machines and infusions of capital, a federal program would work to set up small, independent, self-sufficient farms.  I will go about this through an examination of the ideas of Arthur Raper, a rural sociologist who studied the problems of the twentieth-century American South and served as an advisor to the FSA.  Raper, influenced by his childhood on a North Carolina tobacco farm and his studies at the University of North Carolina under Howard Odum, believed that the federal government should help sharecroppers and tenants to become yeoman farmers.  Raper’s belief that the South would be better off full of small farms, and that tenant farmers would be better off on their own farms than in industry or elsewhere, helped to shape the FSA.  The story of Raper and the FSA raises some interesting questions about federal agricultural policy, which has vacillated between promoting large, industrial farms and aiding small farmers.