Planning Democracy: Agrarian Intellectuals and the Intended New Deal by Jess Gilbert

Abstract

Reviewed by: Planning Democracy: Agrarian Intellectuals and the Intended New Deal by Jess Gilbert Catherine McNicol Stock Jess Gilbert, Planning Democracy: Agrarian Intellectuals and the Intended New Deal. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016. 368 pp. $30.00. Just when all the world seems interested in the rise of the conservatism in rural America, Jess Gilbert's important new book has reminded us of a different tradition: the quest for radical democracy that was embedded in the programs of the agricultural section of the New Deal. For that reason, Planning Democracy belongs aside recent books that have revived the history of left-wing populism in the Midwest, like Michael Lansing's Insurgent Democracy (University of Chicago Press, 2015) rather than those that seek to explain the rise of the Tea Party. Somewhat unusually, Gilbert explores what a group of New Deal administrators "intended" for rural America—even if they did not succeed for long. After five years of bureaucratic confusion and farmer resistance in the years between 1932 and 1937, left-leaning, midwestern-oriented administrators launched a "third New Deal." They [End Page 90] sought to bring full farmer participation to the job of land use planning, enhancing participatory democracy while making federal programs far more "legible" to local populations. By providing case studies from several different regions, Gilbert shows how much progress these leaders made before Congressional Republicans and the beginning of a second World War derailed their efforts and struck them from memory. Gilbert asserts that the goals of the "third New Deal" were national. Even so he locates his story in the cultural, social, and agricultural history of the Midwest. The six administrators and scholars whose careers he highlights—Henry A. Wallace, M. L. Wilson, Howard R. Tolley, L. C. Gray, Carl C. Taylor, and Bushrod W Allin—all grew up on family farms in the region, in Iowa, Indiana, Missouri, and Kentucky. According to Gilbert, "this social background plainly helped determine their careers as students of rural society … [and] affected their later works and politics: a one-class view of society, civic republicanism, and the reforming Protestant spirit." (27–28). When these men, whom Gilbert deems "agrarian intellectuals," thought about farmers, they thought about middle class, land-owning family farmers—the kinds of people they had grown up with. This was a good thing, so long as they were working with middle class, landowning family farmers. But, as Gilbert candidly admits, they did not connect as naturally with the problems of the southern sharecroppers, California farm laborers, or African Americans. At least in the early years of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, then, they had less interest in working to improve the lives of the most impoverished members of rural society. Gilbert contrasts these midwesterners with their more radical colleagues, men "with their hair ablaze" whose names we associate with programs of the second New Deal, including the Farm Security Administration and the Resettlement Administration. Rexford Tugwell, Jerome Frank, Alger Hiss, Lee Pressman, Frederic Howe, and Gardner Jackson were not country boys at all, but eastern born, Ivy-educated urban-living intellectuals. They belonged, he argues, to the school of "high modernism" as defined in James Scott's Seeing Like a State (Yale University Press, 1998). As such they saw more potential for social change in centralized planning than in grass roots organizing. "They were centralizers and collectivizers who urged rapid transformation to achieve social justice.… They were in a hurry … to 'make America over'" (74). However "irreligious, preferring belief in themselves rather than deferring to any higher authority," two of these "high modernizers" were also Jews, an important distinction in a time of [End Page 91] significant anti-Semitism. Although Gilbert does not discuss this in detail, it is not a far stretch to think some of the animosity between the two groups grew out of ethnic and religious, not just ideological, difference. Gilbert presents convincing data that farmers in many regions of the country participated enthusiastically in the newly organized land planning committees of the Third New Deal. He provides evidence from Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, Ohio, northern Michigan and Minnesota, Oklahoma, Washington, and Texas. But it was the people of North Dakota who...