“Depressions are farm led and farm fed



[pic] 1860

1860

Total population: 31,443,321; farm population: 15,141,000 (est.); farmers 58% of labor force; Number of farms: 2,044,000; average acres: 199

1862

Homestead Act grants 160 acres to settlers who have worked the land 5 years

1865-70

Sharecropping system in the South replaces the old slave plantation system 1865-90 Influx of Scandinavian immigrants

1866-77

Cattle boom accelerates settlement of Great Plains; range wars develop between farmers and ranchers

1867:

Grange founded by Oliver Hudson Kelly and Mary Lease?

1870

Total population: 38,558,371; farm population: 18,373,000 (est.); farmers 53% of labor force; Number of farms: 2,660,000; average acres: 153

1871

Granger Laws

1873

Panic

1877

Munn vs. Illinois

1878

Bland Allison Act on Silver coinage

[pic] 1880

1880

Total population: 50,155,783; farm population: 22,981,000 (est.); farmers 49% of labor force; Number of farms: 4,009,000; average acres: 134; Most humid land already settled; heavy agricultural settlement on the Great Plains begins

1880-1914

Most immigrants are from southern and eastern Europe

1883

Panic

1887-97

Drought reduces settlement on the Great Plains

1887

Interstate Commerce Act

1890s

Increases in land under cultivation and number of immigrants becoming farmers boost agricultural output

1890

Total population: 62,941,714; farm population: 29,414,000 (est.); farmers 43% of labor force; Number of farms: 4,565,000; average acres: 136; Census shows that the frontier settlement is over

1891

President authorized to set aside public lands as forest reserves

1893

Panic

1892

Populist Party founded

1896

William Jennings Bryan vs. William McKinley

[pic] 1900

1900

Total population: 75,994,266; farm population: 29,414,000 (est.); farmers 38% of labor force; Number of farms: 5,740,000; average acres: 147

1900-20

Continued agricultural settlement on the Great Plains

1902

Reclamation Act

1905-07

Policy of reserving timberlands inaugurated on a large scale

1905

Forest Service created

[pic] 1910

1910

Total population: 91,972,266; farm population: 32,077,000 (est.); farmers 31% of labor force; Number of farms: 6,366,000; average acres: 138

1909-20

Dryland farming boom on the Great Plains

1911-17

Immigration of agricultural workers from Mexico

1916

Stock Raising Homestead Act



The content on this website (2014) is based upon work supported by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), under Agreement No. 2004-38840-01819. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed on this website, are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the view of the USDA.

Citation: Spielmaker, D. M. (2018, March 21). Growing a Nation Historical Timeline. Retrieved from 

“Depressions are farm led and farm fed.”

South Dakota Senator

Economic Troubles on the Horizon (1920s)

1920

Total population: 105,710,620; farm population: 31,614,269; farmers 27% of labor force; Number of farms: 6,454,000; average acres: 148

Library of Congress: Farm equipment is auctioned off in Hastings Nebraska. Farmers typically operate in debt, borrowing against future crops. In the 1920s, the collapse of farm prices meant that farmers could not make enough money to make their payments. Banks were quick to foreclose on mortgaged farms, selling off equipment and other assets.

As the 1920s advanced, serious problems threatened economic prosperity. Though some Americans became wealthy, many more could not earn a decent living, important industries struggled, and farmers grew more crops and raised more livestock than they could sell at a profit. Both consumers and farmers were steadily going deeper into debt. As the decade drew to a close, these slippages in the economy signaled the end of an era.

Perhaps agriculture suffered the most. Throughout the 1800s, many farmers lived a subsistence life. They produced just enough to feed their families and take care of necessities. During World War I, prices rose and international demand for crops such as wheat and corn soared. In order to produce more food during the war, President Woodrow Wilson set up the Food Administration under Herbert Hoover (eventual President of the United States.) Under Hoover’s guidance, American food shipments to the Triple Entente (America’s allies of France, Great Britain and Italy) had tripled. The Food Administration set a high government price on wheat and other staples. Farmers responded by putting an additional 40 million acres into production. In the process, they increased their income by almost 30 percent. Of course at the same time in order to plant more and produce more, famers had taken out loans for land and equipment.

After World War I, demand fell and crop prices declined by 40 percent or more. How do you pay off the mortgaged land and equipment? Farmers boosted production in the hopes of selling more crops, but this only depressed prices further. Between 1919 and 1921 (President Wilson -1913-21 and then Warren G. Harding-1921-1923) annual farm income declined from $10 billion to just over $4 billion. Farmers who had gone into debt had difficulty in paying off their loans. Many lost their farms when banks foreclosed and seized the property as payment for the debt. As famers began to default on their loans, many rural banks began to fail. Auctions were held to recoup some of the banks losses.

Congress tried to help out farmers with a piece of legislation called the McNary-Haugen bill. This called for federal price supports for key products such as wheat, corn, cotton and tobacco. The government would buy surplus crops at guaranteed prices and sell them on the world market.

President Calvin Coolidge (President 1923-1929) vetoed the bill twice. He commented, “Farmers have never made money. I don’t believe we can do much about it.” Farmers of course began to buy fewer goods causing other problems.

Caption: President Calvin Coolidge (President 1923-1929) By Copyright by Notman Photo Co., Boston, Mass. - , Public Domain,

“We in America are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before.”

Herbert Hoover

(President 1929-1933)

1930

Total population: 122,775,046; farm population: 30,455,350; farmers 21% of labor force; Number of farms: 6,295,000; average acres: 157; irrigated acres: 14,633,252

The stock market crash of 1929 signaled the beginning go the Great Depression—the period from 1929 to 1940 in which the economy plummeted and unemployment skyrocketed. The crash alone did not cause the Great Depression, but it hastened the collapse of the economy and made the depression more severe.

After the crash many people panicked, and withdrew their money from banks. But some couldn’t get their money because the banks had invested it in the stock market. In 1929, 600 banks closed. By 1933, 11,000 of the nation’s 25,000 banks failed. Because the government did not protect or insure bank accounts, millions of people lost their savings accounts.

Caption: Herbert Hoover: Public Domain,

The Great Depression hit other businesses, too. Between 1929 and 1932, the gross national product—the nation’s output of goods and services –was cut nearly in half, from $104 billion to $59 billion. Approximately 90,000 businesses went bankrupt. Among these failed enterprises were once-prosperous automobile and railroad companies.

As the economy plunged into a tailspin, millions of workers lost their jobs. Unemployment leaped form 3 percent (1.6 million workers) in 1929 to 25 percent (13 million workers.) in 1933. One out of every four workers was out of a job. Those who kept their jobs faced pay cuts and reduced hours.

Dust storm approaches Springfield. Colorado in 1937 (AP/ Wide World)

Life in rural areas was hard, but it did have one advantage over city life: most farmers could grow their food for their families. With falling prices and rising debt, though, thousands of famers lost their land. Between 1929 and 1932, about 400,000 farms were lost through foreclosure—the process by which a mortgage holder takes back property if an occupant has not made payments. Many farmers turned to tenant farming and barely scraped out a living. Things were not going to get any better for the farmer.

In the early 1930s, a ravenous drought hit the Great Plains, destroying crops and leaving the earth dry and cracked. The drought lasted for more than seven years. The dust storms in Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Oklahoma and Texas were a great hardship. Unfortunately, one of the causes of this drought may have been man-made.

Arthur Rothstein, a former student of his at Columbia University, and Dorothea Lange (1895–1965), who was eventually the best known of the RA/FSA photographers. Two of Rothstein's most famous pictures are "Dust Storm, Cimarron County [Oklahoma], 1936," depicting a father and his sons striding to shelter during a dust storm

During the several previous decades, farmers from Texas to North Dakota had used tractors to break up the grassland and plant millions of acres of new farmland. Plowing had removed the thick protective layer of prairie grass. Farmers had then exhausted the land through overproduction of crops, and the grasslands became unsuitable for farming. When the drought and winds began in the early 1930s, little grass and few trees were left to hold the soil down. Wind scattered the topsoil, exposing sand and grit underneath. The dust traveled hundreds of miles. One windstorm in 1934 picked up millions of tons of dust from the plains and carried it to East Coast Cities.

The region that was the hardest hit, including Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico and Colorado, came to be known as the Dust Bowl. Plagued by dust storms and evictions, thousands of farmers and sharecroppers left their land behind. They packed up their families and few belongings and headed west following Route 66 to California. Some of the migrants—known as Okies (a term that originally referred to Oklahomans but came to be used negatively for all migrants)—found work as farmhands. But others continued to wander in search of work. By the end of the 1930s, hundreds of thousands of farm families had migrated to California and other Pacific Coast states.

“Mellon pulled the whistle

Hoover rang the bell

Wall Street gave the signal

And the country went to hell.”

Widely used phrase of Depression

Helping the farmers

President Hoover, like Coolidge before him, firmly believed that government should not take an active role in relief or in economic reform. Angered by Hoover's failure to help in raising farm prices, desperate farmers protested: They burned crops, dumped milk on highways rather than sell it at a loss, and organized strikes, refusing to take their produce to market for weeks. They hoped these "farmers' holidays" would reduce the nation's supply of farm produce and raise prices. Occasionally violence erupted as farmers blocked highways in Nebraska and Iowa to prevent food from reaching markets.

As time went on and the depression deepened, President Hoover gradually softened his position on government intervention in the economy and took a more activist approach to the nation’s economic troubles.

First, Hoover backed cooperatives. He felt that the federal government could encourage cooperation between Americans including companies. He backed the creation of the Federal Farm Board, an organization of farming cooperatives. The Farm Board was intended to raise crop prices by helping members buy crops and keep them off the market temporarily until prices rose.

By late 1931, however, many people could see that these measures had failed to turn the economy around. With a presidential election looming, Hoover appealed to Congress to pass a series of measures to reform banking, provide mortgage relief, and funnel more federal money into business investment. In 1932, Hoover signed into law the Federal Home Loan Bank Act, which lowered mortgage rates for homeowners and allowed farmers to refinance their farm loans and avoid foreclosure. For Hoover these measures were too little, too late.

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

With the entire U.S. economy worsening, Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) ran as the Democratic presidential candidate in the November 1932 election. Promising a "new deal" for Americans, Roosevelt easily defeated the unpopular Hoover. New Deal legislation was designed to bring relief and then recovery on many economic fronts, but President Roosevelt (served 1933–45) gave special priority to federal government assistance for farmers.

Roosevelt named agricultural expert Henry Wallace (1888–1965) of Iowa as secretary of agriculture; Roosevelt chose Rexford Tugwell (1891–1979), a close adviser, as assistant secretary of agriculture. Everyone recognized that for agricultural assistance to gain acceptance, the programs would have to be operated locally rather than by federal officials in Washington, D.C. On March 16, 1933, only twelve days after Roosevelt's inauguration, Wallace gathered farm leaders from around the country in Washington to draft a revolutionary farm bill. This group described its goal as "agricultural adjustment" of farmers' income: how to decrease farm production but still allow farmers enough income to survive and regroup.

On May 12, 1933, Roosevelt signed the Agricultural Adjustment Act into law. The act established the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA). The AAA was Roosevelt's first New Deal economic recovery program directed toward farmers. At their March meeting the farm leaders had made reduction of farm production their main focus, and the AAA reflected this focus: The AAA would pay farmers to limit their crop production. Reducing crops was the only way to get crop prices to rise. The crops in greatest surplus were wheat, cotton, corn, and hogs. Farmers who agreed to limit crop production according to the AAA's plan would receive government payments. The production control program was completely voluntary, but with the poor economic condition of farms, many farmers felt they had no choice but to participate. AAA checks became the chief source of income for some farmers. The income helped them avoid losing their farms to the bank; it also allowed them to buy goods, which helped other industries. To raise the funds needed to pay farmers for reducing production, a tax was placed on processing companies—flour mills, textile mills, and meat packing-houses. The AAA gave county agents from state agricultural extension services and local farmer committees authority to oversee the program at the local level.

Not unexpectedly, some problems in reducing crop surplus immediately arose. The Agricultural Adjustment Act did not pass until May 1933, so many crops had already been planted. The AAA offered to pay farmers to plow under more than ten million acres of cotton. To those farmers the AAA paid out $112 million dollars in the summer of 1933. Hogs were also in great surplus that summer. Six million hogs were slaughtered and discarded in September 1933. By FDR

Many criticized the AAA's policy of destruction, because Americans were going hungry. In response to the outcry, Secretary of Agriculture Wallace arranged for the Federal Surplus Relief Corporation, formed in October 1933, to purchase over a hundred million pounds of baby pork (the meat of hogs) and distribute it to people enrolled in relief programs.

Another key focus for farm relief was farm debt reduction. President Roosevelt created the Farm Credit Administration (FCA) to make loans more available to farmers. Congress provided funding for the agency by passing the Emergency Farm Mortgage Act in May 1933 and the Farm Credit Act in June. The Farm Credit Act also created a system of banking institutions for farmers. The FCA replaced the Federal Farm Board, an agency established by former president Hoover, which had made 7,800 loans to farmers totaling $28 million. In the FCA's first twelve-month period, it approved 541,000 loans for $1.4 billion. The FCA program gave hundreds of thousands of families the means to keep their farms.

On January 31, 1934, Congress passed the Farm Mortgage Refinancing Act, which provided money to refinance farm home loans. (Refinance means to set up new, easier repayment terms.) In June 1934 Congress passed the Frazier-Lemke Farm Bankruptcy Act, which limited the ability of banks to take away the farms of those experiencing severe financial hardships.

Picture of FDR: By FDR Presidential Library & Museum - CT 09-109(1), CC BY 2.0,

Picture 2:

“Across the dooryard the tractor cut, and the hard, foot-beaten ground

Was seeded field, and the tractor cut through again; the uncut space

Was ten feet wide. And back he came. The iron guard bit into the house-corner,

Crumbled the wall, and wrenched the little house from its foundation so

That it fell sideways, crushed like a bug….The tractor cut a straight

line on, and the air and the ground vibrated with its thunder.

The tenant man stared after it, rifle in his hand. His wife beside him,

And the quiet children behind. And all of them stared after the tractor.”

Grapes of Wrath

John Steinbeck

In the mid-1930s, two out of every five farms in the United States were mortgaged, and thousands of small farms lost their farms.

In January 1936 the U.S. Supreme Court struck a blow to New Deal agricultural programs by ruling the Agricultural Adjustment Act unconstitutional in United States v. Butler. The Court ruled against food processing companies being taxed to support the Agricultural Adjustment Administration's programs. The relief farmers felt was a brief respite.

This forced FDR and Congress to initiate what would be called a Second New Deal. In 1936 Congress passed the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act. Under the new act farmers were paid for soil conservation and for planting crops that deplete the soil the least. This act proved somewhat ineffective because not enough farmers voluntarily followed its guidelines.

Therefore, in 1938 Congress passed a new Agricultural Adjustment Act. This act brought back many of the features of the first AAA. One of the more popular features of the AAA was the Allotment Act became permanent and helped regulate farm production. However, it did not include a processing tax to pay for farm subsidies, a provision from the first AAA that the Supreme Court had declared unconstitutional.

The Second New Deal also attempted to help sharecroppers, migrant workers, and other poor farms. The Resettlement Administration, created by executive order in 1935, provided monetary loans to small farmers to buy land. In 1937, the agency was replaced by the Farm Security Administration (FSA), which loaned more than $1 billion to help tenant farmers become landholders and established camps for migrant farm workers, who had traditionally live in squalid housing. The FSA hired photographers Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Walker Evans, Arthur Rothstein, and Carl Mydans to take many pictures of rural towns and farms and their inhabitants. The agency used their photographs to create a pictorial record of the difficult situation in rural America.

Picture 1 from: 'The Dust Bowl' review: Relevant but dry TELEVISION By David Wiegand Updated 5:19 pm, Thursday, November 15, 2012



Picture 2 from: Life Through a Lens – Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother, Nipomo, CA

By St Louis Museum of Art | May 11, 2016

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