Planning Democracy: Agrarian Intellectuals and the Intended New Deal
368
Planning Democracy: Agrarian Intellectuals and the Intended New Deal
368eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780300213393 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Yale University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/28/2015 |
| Series: | Yale Agrarian Studies Series |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 368 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Planning Democracy
Agrarian Intellectuals and the Intended New Deal
By Jess Gilbert
Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Yale UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-21339-3
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
The rightful focus of any seeming criticism of the past is our present. —PAUL K. CONKIN, THE NEW DEAL
In 1943 a longtime federal bureaucrat named Howard R. Tolley published a remarkable but little-known book, The Farmer Citizen at War. Tolley raised two pressing "dilemmas of democracy." First, he asked, how should we deal with the "giant complexities of modern economy without overcentralization of power"? Tolley worried in particular about large, distant, "intolerable bureaucracy." Granted, the federal government could and should solve national problems, but the solutions must be "flexible enough to fit local exigencies." The second problem of modern democracies spotlighted "the wide separation between the layman and the specialist." Since 1933, Tolley argued, American agriculture had gone farther than any other sector in addressing these two issues. He believed that the agrarian New Deal had discovered the key to democracy's future: local citizen participation in government programs. The answer to the problems of governing modern societies lay in deepening democracy, which, to Tolley, meant far more than periodic voting for political representatives. Rather, democracy demanded massive citizen involvement in the affairs of state: "In these first steps toward making the vast governmental structure of today as real and vital to the citizen as the New England town meeting used to be, in fighting for what [Vice President] Henry A. Wallace calls economic democracy, the right of all men to share in the making of the decisions that affect their economic welfare, the farmer himself has been deliberately drawn into the process." Both experts and citizens should make and implement public policy; both national and local action were required. The New Deal experiments in agriculture, he urged, must be "more widely known, studied, and used."
Tolley knew he had something to talk about. Very late in the New Deal, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) set up an institutional arrangement never before seen in American history: a national network of local organizations that combined representatives of a major economic sector (here, farmers), researchers, adult-educators, and administrators to plan and coordinate public policy. It constituted a vast, unparalleled attempt at nationallocal planning. To inform this cooperative planning initiative, citizens, scientists, and bureaucrats joined together in discussion-based education and action research. By 1941 three-fourths of all rural counties in the United States were taking part in the program, which involved nearly two hundred thousand farm people as local planners. Tolley and like-minded policy intellectuals referred to this effort as "democratic planning," which they knew to be the most significant endeavor of the entire New Deal in agriculture. Earlier, in 1939, Tolley referred to cooperative planning as the "big job ... in which the Department of Agriculture, which administers so many action programs, is now primarily interested." It was "far more important," his USDA colleagues asserted in 1940, "than any single agricultural program" such as production control, farm security, or soil conservation. Others at the time agreed, noting that cooperative planning may prove "in the long run to be the most important agricultural development of the past few years—more important than any specific program." Moreover, democratic planning embodied the long-term vision of the agrarian intellectuals; hence I call it the Intended New Deal. But the experiment ended just as Tolley was writing, and the remarkable policy innovations soon were all but forgotten. This book seeks to reclaim the democratizing features of the agrarian New Deal.
Today, however, in contrast to Tolley, Wallace, and their colleagues, we might well wonder: Can government bureaucrats foment participatory democracy? Can they actually propel citizen participation? Have federal workers ever really done so, on a large scale, in modern America? In this book I say yes, yes, and yes. I show that USDA leaders in the late New Deal envisioned and implemented major democratizing programs in adult education, action research, and grass-roots planning—all joining public scientists and administrators together with local citizens. Wallace, Tolley, and others believed that these cooperative activities would lead to much-needed social reform throughout the countryside. I argue that they did indeed substantially advance democracy in agricultural policy and thence in rural America.
Yet there remains a contradiction in the project of these agrarian intellectuals, or so most people nowadays would claim. How can democracy be advanced by a big, activist state? For the state is usually seen as a major impediment to democracy—indeed, as the prime case of its polar opposite, bureaucracy. The very look and sound of such terms as public administration, policy planning, applied research, and adult education often raise democratic suspicions. In particular, the state is home to planners, technicians, administrators, and other experts—in that ugly phrase, government bureaucrats. How can they possibly be drivers of democracy, of citizen empowerment? Isn't scientific expertise antithetical to public participation, and democratic planning a contradiction in terms? I question such easy dichotomies by showing how some thoughtful New Dealers refused to see them as irreconcilable. In fact, they sought explicitly and with fervor to overcome the binaries of citizen / expert, local / federal, and even democracy / bureaucracy. They worked long and hard to transcend these dualisms ideologically as well as institutionally, with massive participatory programs on the ground. This book tells their political and intellectual story.
The USDA in the 1930s was not the only New Deal agency to employ phrases like democratic planning and grass-roots democracy. In fact, in both the popular and scholarly imagination, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) pioneered the use of such grand terminology. David E. Lilienthal directed the agency during most of the New Deal, and his TVA: Democracy on the March (1944) set the rhetorical standard. Yet in his classic critique, TVA and the Grass Roots (1949), the political sociologist Philip Selznick admitted that the federal "Department of Agriculture has gone much farther in developing both the theory and the practice of citizen participation than has the TVA." Here Selznick referred to the cooperative planning of the late New Deal—the subject of this book. He also made the useful distinction between meaningful, substantive citizen participation and "mere administrative involvement," concluding that the agrarian planning effort partook more of the latter than the former. In a commentary on Selznick's book, the old New Dealer Rexford G. Tugwell and the young political scientist Edward C. Banfield declared that "'grass-roots planning' is a contradiction in terms." It is a core task of this book to counter Selznick's and Tugwell and Banfield's negative assessment of agricultural cooperative planning.
In the midthirties, when Tugwell served as the number two official in the USDA, he wrote extensively on planning, as did most public intellectuals during the Great Depression. Talk of democracy and planning filled the air, both within and beyond the New Deal. The historians Charles A. Beard and Carl L. Becker, the economists John R. Commons and Mordecai Ezekiel, the sociologists Robert S. Lynd and Pitirim A. Sorokin, the cultural critics Lewis Mumford and Walter Lipmann, among countless others, weighed in and provoked heated debate. Visiting from England, the political theorist Harold Laski and the émigré sociologist Karl Mannheim lectured in America, influencing policy thinking; Mannheim promoted his own version of democratic planning. Titles such as the following appeared in magazines and crowded bookshelves: "A New Rural Planning" by Franklin D. Roosevelt, "A Plan for Planning," "Planned Society," "Planning for America," "Political and Economic Democracy," "Democracy in Crisis," "The Modern Democratic State," "Big Democracy."
But since the early 1900s no one has had more to say about democracy, citizenship, science, and the modern state than two of the most important social theorists of the century—Max Weber and John Dewey—and they came down on opposite sides of the debate. The German sociologist Weber predicted the virtual impossibility of political projects like those of the agrarian New Dealers. He spoke of democracy as a formal, representative type of political domination. Weber believed that modern trends opposed participatory democracy and placed his money (if not his heart) on the former. Western history was moving inexorably toward the "iron cage" of increasing rationalization, especially in the commanding spheres of capitalist economy, scientific knowledge, and the bureaucratic state. Bureaucracies were instrumentally rational in their impersonal objectivity, technical efficiency, and specialized expertise—as well as antidemocratic in their interests, procedures, and outcomes. The growth of professionalized knowledge impeded meaningful citizen participation; public administration would not promote radically democratic ends. Weber wrote, "Bureaucratic administration always tends to exclude the public, to hide its knowledge and action from criticism as well as it can." Further, social science served to expand the power of government to control its citizens. Under the modern state, then, participatory democracy had little prospect of survival, let alone proliferation. Far from creating or sustaining popular democratic institutions, bureaucracies militated against them. In his political writings Weber lamented the increasing bureaucratic fate of representative democracies yet put little faith in citizen participation.
Although they were prominent rural social scientists, the New Deal agrarian intellectuals lacked the scope and stature of Weber. Not so their favorite American philosopher, the progressive John Dewey. Dewey offered a much more expansive view of democracy, which he conceived as participation in all aspects of social life that maximized individual self-realization. He vehemently disagreed with Weber on democracy's modern promise, which must be extended to all spheres of society, including culture, education, mass media, and especially the economy. Dewey believed that science as well as the state could be democratized, open to control by citizens. Publics, for instance, could guide national planning, and experts serve the common good. People should take a large role in their own governance, for only they, not elites or bureaucrats, knew their own needs and interests. Like scientists, ordinary people could also reason together. Underlying this stance was Dewey's deep faith that education helped create both intelligent citizens and progressive change and that common people could grow, learn, and make responsible decisions given proper social conditions. In contrast to Weber's "heroic pessimism," Dewey looked favorably upon the same modern trends but also hoped for the forging of a "Great Community," an organized, participatory public to run the democratic state. Here, Dewey saw a crucial role for social scientists who studied specific problems or needs identified by citizens, and communicated with publics who would discuss, debate, deliberate, and decide how to improve or adjust their situation. Knowledge, Dewey held, was not abstract or theoretical but simply information useful for social action. Although more critical of industrial capitalism, he was also more optimistic than Weber about expertise and administration, especially when grounded in democratizing education and civic participation.
While theorists like Weber and Dewey taught, studied, and debated such issues, the agrarian New Dealers actually implemented the kinds of experimental policies that the American philosopher advocated. In fact, they drew ideas and inspiration directly from Dewey. The central figure of this book, the institutional economist M. L. Wilson, told a USDA colleague in the 1930s that he was "a rip-snorting pragmatist. I'm a descendent of William James[,] and the two high priests of the only kind of philosophy that I think is worth a damn are John Dewey and my professor at Chicago, J. H. Tufts [Dewey's coauthor]." Through large-scale federal programs, the agrarian New Dealers instituted key aspects of Dewey's democratic philosophy of education, science, and planning in America's countryside. They wholeheartedly sided with him, against Weber, on the possibility of a participatory form of rationalization, a democratic type of modernization that combined bottom-up (local citizen) and top-down (state expert) initiatives and that could result in progressive social reform. This book presents their attempt, through education, research, and planning, to bring federal scientists into closer touch with rural citizens, ideologically as well as spatially. As Tolley put it, "The scientist needs the practical expertness of the citizens, and the layman needs the special knowledge of the technician." Although agricultural education and research obviously predated the 1930s, I show that the agrarian New Deal introduced radically new forms of continuing education and action research along with cooperative planning. During the late thirties, then, the USDA, along with two hundred thousand rural people all over the country, undertook this remarkable "experiment in democratic planning." The project deserves the attention both of historians, who have usually overlooked it, and of social scientists and policy makers, who can learn from it.
In the 1980s social and cultural historians came to dominate New Deal agricultural history writing. For the Cotton South, Pete Daniel and Jack Kirby emphasized the racial and class effects of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), revealing it as a racist and class-biased agency that disadvantaged black and white landless farmers. In the 1990s feminist historians added a gender perspective to the critique of the rural New Deal, which they showed to discriminate against women and reinforce patriarchy. The cultural historian Catherine Stock offered an innovative view of USDA policy makers as a "new middle class." Others proposed a counternarrative of agricultural policy, that of the Farm Security Administration (FSA), which supported the rural poor. All of these race, class, and gender works evaluated New Deal policies from the bottom up, from the viewpoint of the dominated and putupon. The historians' vision tended to be localist or regional (southern, midwestern) as well as antistate, antiscience, anti-New Deal. With the partial exception of the heroic FSA, agricultural programs were portrayed as anything but democratic.
In the nineties, historical social scientists turned to the New Deal, beginning with the move to "bring the state back in." Theda Skocpol and Kenneth Finegold emphasized the prior state building embodied in the USDA / land-grant college complex, including its socially autonomous economists who formed the AAA (such as Tolley and Wilson). Their state-centered approach took a generally positive view of the New Deal, at least in terms of administrative success and political survival; the USDA represented "an island of state strength in an ocean of weakness." In sharp contrast, the political scientist James C. Scott decried the planning state as "high modernist." He named the key New Deal agrarians Wallace, Wilson, and Tolley as statists in this mold, ones who exalted industrialized farming and scientific rationalization while denigrating historical tradition and local cultures. More broadly, high modernists tended to be authoritarian elitists who disdained religion and folk knowledge, detached "social engineers" who imposed giant public projects like the TVA on the grass roots. Scott identified the New Deal USDA as a prime site of high-modernist ideology, and the historian Deborah Fitzgerald leveled essentially the same critique.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Planning Democracy by Jess Gilbert. Copyright © 2015 Yale University. Excerpted by permission of Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Foreword by Richard S. Kirkendall, ix,Preface, xiii,
Acknowledgments, xvii,
List of Abbreviations Used in Text, xxi,
CHAPTER 1. Introduction, 1,
CHAPTER 2. The Agrarian Intellectuals' Vision: The Intended New Deal as a Planning Democracy, 13,
PART I SOCIAL ROOTS AND EARLY FRUITS: COLLECTIVE BIOGRAPHIES, ALTERNATIVE MODERNISMS, AND THE FIRST TWO AGRARIAN NEW DEALS,
CHAPTER 3. Growing Agrarian Reformers in the Midwest: A Collective Biography, 25,
CHAPTER 4. Modernizing Eastern Urban Liberals: A Comparison with the Other Progressive Group in Agriculture, 60,
CHAPTER 5. Struggling Toward a New Deal Land Policy: The Agrarian Action Programs and Beyond, 1933–1938, 80,
PART II THE FLOWERING OF DEMOCRATIC PLANNING: THE THIRD AND INTENDED NEW DEAL IN AGRICULTURE, 1938–1942,
CHAPTER 6. Reinventing Education, Research, and Planning: The Cooperative Land-Use Program, 115,
CHAPTER 7. Continuing Education: For Citizens, Scientists, and Bureaucrats, 142,
CHAPTER 8. Reforming Social Science: Participatory Action Research, 179,
CHAPTER 9. Unifying Action: Results of Cooperative Land-Use Planning, 212,
CHAPTER 10. Intended New Deal Defeated, Reassessed, and Reclaimed, 238,
Appendix. List of Program Study and Discussion Pamphlets, 1935–1945, 26I,
List of Abbreviations Used in the Notes, 265,
Notes, 267,
Index, 331,