Between 1932 and 1945 rural areas experienced profound economic hardship yet were subject to considerable change and modernization. Farm commodity prices, which began declining in the 1920s, fell precipitously following the onset of the Great Depression in 1929. The result was a marked increase in hardship, deprivation, and foreclosures brought on by insufficient revenues. The suffering involved was concentrated especially at the lowest rung of tenants and subsistence farmers. With the near collapse of the farm economy in rural regions, one-third of American farmers lost their farms between 1929 and 1933, and many were forced to look for work in urban areas or other states. Others were ruined by the DUST bowl, which closed down many small farms, and they migrated elsewhere. For those farmers capable of working their land, there was also the problem of generational flight from family farms. Many siblings who normally would have inherited the family plots lacked the capital to invest in new machinery to be competitive. Rural regions became one of the starkest faces of poverty in America, particularly among African-American sharecroppers, with many families, black and white, eking out an existence in small shacks with dirt floors, no electricity, and no running water.
The dire situation of agriculture and rural America prompted President Franklin D. Roosevelt to address their situation along two distinct fronts. The first was government price supports supplied by the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), created in 1933, which afforded some relief but which helped large farmers far more than small farmers, tenants, and sharecroppers. Government price supports, however, have since become a standard practice in American agribusiness. In 1937 Roosevelt created the Farm Security Administration (FSA), which provided a broad, though limited, program of rural rehabilitation aimed at the poorest landowners, tenants, and sharecroppers. But the biggest, most successful, and most dramatic change in everyday life came in the form of rural electrification. Regional electric grids were initiated at the turn of the century but rural areas remained unserved because power companies felt that extending electrical service to remote farmlands was too expensive and promised too little return. In 1930, only about 10 percent of farms had electricity. Roosevelt consequently signed an executive order of May 11, 1935, which created the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) for the purpose of forming rural electric cooperatives. These organizations received low-interest, long-term loans from the agency to both build delivery systems and buy electricity from private utilities. In this manner 419 cooperatives had emerged by the end of the 1930s, and they brought the benefits of modernization directly to some of the most remote, depressed areas in the nation. By 1941, two of every five farms had electricity and began to enjoy the luxuries of electric lights, radios, telephones, washing machines, and home appliances for the first time. The REA proved one of the New Deal’s greatest success stories, and by 1950, 90 percent of farms had electricity and only a handful of regions lacked electricity and the modern benefits and comforts it conferred.
Rural areas generally shared in the economic revitalization brought on by World War II, but the influx of young men and women into cities and towns for work in factories only exacerbated continuing migration away from the farm. Many transplants proved unwilling to return to a life of hardship and remained in urban areas or the growing SUBURBS. This, in turn, stimulated pressing labor shortages that accelerated the trend toward greater mechanization of agricultural production. The net result, overall, was the continuing absorption of small family farms by large commercial aggregates, a trend that continues to present times.
See also cities and urban life.
Further reading: David B. Danborn, Born in the Country: A History of Rural America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); Ronald R. Kline, Consumers in the Country: Technology and Social Change in Rural America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).
—John C. Fredriksen
World History
