While much of what has been written about the New Deal takes a bird's-eye view of the major trends and ideas that animated it, surprisingly little has been devoted to how those ideas played out in the lives of the people most immediately affected. Weaving firsthand accounts of those who lived through it with expert historical analysis, Back to the Land offers a uniquely intimate portrait of Arthurdale, West Virginia, one of the most ambitious of the many New Deal projects and, arguably, the most dramatic social engineering experiment ever undertaken in the United States.
Nestled among the Appalachian foothills of northern West Virginia's coal country, Arthurdale was the pet project of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt who, along with a group of idealists, was inspired by a mish-mash of foreign and homegrown collectivist ideals, all wrapped together under a "back-to-the-land" mania. The culmination of a long-cherished dream for population resettlement held by FDR and the circle of like-minded men he had gathered about him, the town was more a laboratory for testing progressive theories of government than an attempt to ameliorate the plight of those caught in the maelstrom of the Great Depression. Beset by abysmally poor planning, gargantuan cost overruns, and ideological infighting among its patrons, the Arthurdale experiment was doomed to failure from its inception.
While it was once the object of intense popular fascination, Arthurdale, designed to be the incubator of a "New Man," is now remembered only by a few historians and theorists, among whom opinions vary as to what it represented. For some it was, at best, a well-intentioned but terribly ill-conceived attempt to improve the lives of the destitute while to others, it was the embodiment of a political power grab that irrevocably changed America's social and political landscape.
No matter which side of the debate one falls on, it is fair to say that Back to the Land tells a fascinating story of the profound effect that the New Deal's economic policies had on the lives of people—both then and now.
While much of what has been written about the New Deal takes a bird's-eye view of the major trends and ideas that animated it, surprisingly little has been devoted to how those ideas played out in the lives of the people most immediately affected. Weaving firsthand accounts of those who lived through it with expert historical analysis, Back to the Land offers a uniquely intimate portrait of Arthurdale, West Virginia, one of the most ambitious of the many New Deal projects and, arguably, the most dramatic social engineering experiment ever undertaken in the United States.
Nestled among the Appalachian foothills of northern West Virginia's coal country, Arthurdale was the pet project of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt who, along with a group of idealists, was inspired by a mish-mash of foreign and homegrown collectivist ideals, all wrapped together under a "back-to-the-land" mania. The culmination of a long-cherished dream for population resettlement held by FDR and the circle of like-minded men he had gathered about him, the town was more a laboratory for testing progressive theories of government than an attempt to ameliorate the plight of those caught in the maelstrom of the Great Depression. Beset by abysmally poor planning, gargantuan cost overruns, and ideological infighting among its patrons, the Arthurdale experiment was doomed to failure from its inception.
While it was once the object of intense popular fascination, Arthurdale, designed to be the incubator of a "New Man," is now remembered only by a few historians and theorists, among whom opinions vary as to what it represented. For some it was, at best, a well-intentioned but terribly ill-conceived attempt to improve the lives of the destitute while to others, it was the embodiment of a political power grab that irrevocably changed America's social and political landscape.
No matter which side of the debate one falls on, it is fair to say that Back to the Land tells a fascinating story of the profound effect that the New Deal's economic policies had on the lives of people—both then and now.
Back to the Land: Arthurdale, FDR's New Deal, and the Costs of Economic Planning
320
Back to the Land: Arthurdale, FDR's New Deal, and the Costs of Economic Planning
320Related collections and offers
