The Farm Security Administration and Rural Rehabilitation in the South

Abstract

Franklin Roosevelt's Farm Security Administration (fsa), which attempted to combat rural poverty during the Great Depression, was one of the most programmatically diffuse, administratively complicated, and therefore difficult-to-pin-down programs of the New Deal era. Charles Kenneth Roberts's well-researched book will be of interest to those who desire a better understanding of the fsa's confusing history, its numerous departmental incarnations, and its plethora of divisions, organizational units, and programs—especially regarding its efforts across the southern United States during the Great Depression. The Farm Security Administration and Rural Rehabilitation in the South is organized around nine short chapters that are divided into two parts. Part 1 examines the early New Deal legislative origins of the three most important aspects of the fsa's program—rural rehabilitation, resettlement, and tenant land purchase—in the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, the short-lived Division of Subsistence Homesteads, and the Resettlement Administration (which was the programmatic predecessor of the fsa). The second part of the book, Roberts explains, looks “at how farm security operated at the local level” (p. xxiii). Here he means how it operated programmatically rather than with respect to the lived experiences of the poor farmer participants. These chapters describe the fsa's Rural Rehabilitation Program and Tenure Purchase Program, its supervised credit management system, several resettlement communities near Birmingham, Alabama, and the termination of the fsa during World War II.