The Resettlement Administration, a New Deal agency created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in May 1935 under the auspices of the Emergency Reliee Appropriation Act, sought to assist and relocate struggling farmers and to provide new housing for urban workers. Limited funding, opposition from conservatives, large farmers, and real estate interests, and sometimes resistance from the groups it tried to help, impeded the agency’s ability to accomplish its goals.
Headed by Rexeord G. Tugwell, the Resettlement Administration (RA) focused on tenants, sharecroppers, and small farmers in its efforts in agriculture. These groups, Tugwell and others thought, had not received sufficient aid from the Agricultural Adjustment Act, yet they had suffered disproportionately from the Great Depression and other ills of American agriculture. The RA took over the Department of the Interior’s Subsistence Homestead Division and the Federal Emergency Reliee Administration’s rural rehabilitation efforts as part of its programs.
The RA sought both to provide technical advice and other assistance to struggling rural people to improve land-use practices where they lived and to relocate poor farmers and workers from unproductive and overused land to more fertile sites with new housing and community services. The RA also built camps for migrant workers and moved some farmers into new suburban areas. The agency established communal farms in New Madrid, Missouri; Casa Grande, Arizona; and Lake Dick, Arkansas. Some families were unwilling to relocate to new areas or to trust agency personnel despite impoverished conditions, and Congress proved unwilling to finance the RA adequately. The RA relocated less than 1 percent of the more than half million farm families it planned to move.
The Resettlement Administration also sought to improve housing for urban workers. The primary project involving disadvantaged urban laborers was the “green-belt” program. RA planners intended to transplant urban workers from crowded inner cities into new suburban settlements designed to include cooperative services and democratic involvement in community management. Nine such communities were proposed, but only three were built: Greenbelt, outside of Washington, D. C.; Greenhills, near Cincinnati; and Greendale, close to Milwaukee.
These greenbelt towns did not attract the anticipated numbers of needy workers from the inner cities. Site selection contributed to the shortcomings of the program, for the locations chosen were outside cities that were already taking action on housing and other urban ills. Other problems included a lack of funds needed to build enough houses to support community services, rent levels too high for low-income workers, and the rapid turnover of younger tenants, which limited participation in neighborhood management. While these difficulties limited the number of workers assisted, many middle-class families were able to take advantage of the opportunity offered by the greenbelt towns to move to a suburban setting. The ideas and concepts behind the greenbelt towns also provided information for later government housing planning projects.
The Resettlement Administration faced sharp criticism and stiff opposition throughout its short existence. Some detractors focused on Tugwell as too radical to head the agency, and labeled the agency’s efforts “socialistic.” To counteract such criticism, Tugwell created an Information Division to produce favorable publicity about the RA’s efforts. photography proved an important medium for this task, leading to a collection of documentary photographs of the difficulties of rural life. Despite his efforts at creating a positive image for the Resettlement Administration, Tugwell resigned in 1936 in order to protect the agency from further objections due to his presence. The RA’s programs also faced opposition from conservatives, larger farmers, and local real estate organizations who protested federal interference in agriculture and housing. With the enactment of the Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Act in 1937, the Resettlement Administration became part of the Farm Security Administration.
Further reading: Paul K. Conkin, To-morrow a New World: The New Deal Commu-ni-ty Program (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1959); Bernard Sternsher, Rex-ford Tugwell and the New Deal (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1964).
—Courtney D. Mattingly
Reuther, Walter (1907-1970) union leader Walter Philip Reuther was born in Wheeling, West Virginia, on September 1, 1907, the son of a brewery worker who had immigrated from Germany. His father was a committed socialist, and Walter matured in a household much given to discussion about social ills and inequities. Reuther left school at 15 and worked in a steel mill before moving to Detroit, Michigan, in 1926, where he worked as a tool and die maker at the Ford Motor Company. True to his upbringing, he was dissatisfied with the lot of workers and began agitating for collective bargaining and unions before these were politically acceptable. He lost his job in 1933 to the Great Depression, then traveled abroad and worked in the Soviet Union, 1933-35, although he was disillusioned by the lack of political freedom he encountered there. Reuther returned to Detroit in 1936, took a job at General Motors, and continued his labor activism as a committed socialist and member of the United Auto Workers (UAW). Although he supported the Socialist Norman Thomas in the election of 1932, he was impressed by the attempts of President Franklin D. Roosevelt to address social inequities through the New Deal, so he distanced himself from socialism and thereafter became identified with the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. By this time Reuther also became president of the tiny but militant Local 174, which he led during strikes in 1937 and 1940. He was beaten up by police and company security several times on the picket lines, but his militancy impressed fellow workers, and membership in Local 174 expanded commensurately. Reuther’s leadership resulted in new unions at General Motors in 1940 and Ford in 1941. During World War II he strongly opposed any wildcat strikes that might have interrupted the flow of military production.
The war had no sooner ended than Reuther initiated a 113-day strike at General Motors in 1946, which resulted in higher wages and improved benefits. That year he also formally broke with the Socialists, gained election as head of the UAW, and began purging it of all known Communist elements. He was also active in the ranks of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and expelled 11 Communist-dominated unions from the membership. Reuther also remained politically active and was a founding member of the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) in 1947. He frequently ventured abroad to help establish the anti-Communist International Confederation of Free Trade Unions in 1949. Back home, he fought for better wages and benefits, winning for the UAW employer-funded pensions, medical insurance, and supplementary unemployment benefits from the big three auto manufacturers. In 1955 he reached an agreement with American Federation of Labor leader George Meany to found the new AFL-CIO. Reuther died in an airplane crash in Michigan on May 10, 1970, one of the most significant figures of the American labor movement.
See also National Labor Relations Act.
Further reading: Nelson Lichtenstein, The Mo. st Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor (New York: Basic Books, 1995).
—John C. Fredriksen
World History
