How much money did the FSA give to tenant farmers?
Congress, however, demanded that the FSA help tenant farmers purchase farms, and purchase loans of $191 million were made, which were eventually repaid. A much larger program was $778 million in loans (at effective rates of about 1% interest) to 950,000 tenant farmers.
What did the Farm Security Administration do during the Great Depression?
The Farm Security Administration was a part of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal. In the Great Depression, many tenant farmers and sharecroppers could not produce enough crops to sell at market value and sustain their livelihoods. Too many farmers were chasing too few buyers for their crops.
Was the Farm Security Administration a New Deal program?
Farm Security Administration – A New Deal. The Farm Security Administration (FSA) was created in the Department of Agriculture in 1937. The FSA and its predecessor, the Resettlement Administration (RA), created in 1935, were New Deal programs designed to assist poor farmers during the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. On March 9, 1933,...
What is the Farm Security Administration?
The Farm Security Administration was a Depression-era agency in the United States providing a variety of support programs to poor, rural farmers.
What was the purpose of the Farm Security Administration?
The Farm Security Administration (FSA) was a New Deal agency created in 1937 to combat rural poverty during the Great Depression in the United States.
Was the Farm Security Administration relief?
The FSA was not a relief agency, but instead it relied on a network of cooperation between states and county offices to determine which clients needed loans that could not get this credit somewhere else. Farmers could use these loans to buy land, equipment, livestock, or seeds.
What did the Farm Security Administration do quizlet?
What did the Farm Security Administration do? The Farm Security Administration gave loans to help tenants purchase land.
When did the Farm Security Administration end?
In August 1946 the Farmers Home Administration replaced the FSA. The FSA was not a relief agency.
Who benefited the most from FSA program?
Although the scope of its programs was limited, poor farm families who took part benefited greatly. One study estimates that families who participated in FSA programs saw their incomes rise by 69 percent between 1937 and 1941! Annual per capita meat consumption increased from 85 pounds to 447 pounds in the same period.
What were the three main goals of the New Deal?
The New Deal had three goals: relief, recovery, and reform. Relief meant that the president wanted to help those in crisis immediately by creating jobs, bread lines, and welfare. Recovery was aimed at fixing the economy and ending the Depression.
What was the significance of the Securities and Exchange Commission quizlet?
The Securities and Exchange Commission took away the requirement that all corporations that offer stock for public sale disclose the relevant information about the company, which would in turn make buyers of stock less confident about their purchases and purchase less.
What was the significance of the Securities and Exchange Commission quizlet Chapter 25?
It overturned the National Industrial Recovery Act, ruling that Congress had given too much power to the president and representing the growing opposition to the New Deal.
Was the Resettlement Administration relief recovery or reform?
Public Works Admin. Resettlement Admin. (see also Farm Security Admin.) (now Social Security Admin.)...NameCivil Works AdministrationAbbreviationCWADescriptionProvided public-works jobs for many of those needing reliefRelief, Recovery, or ReformRelief13 more columns
Was the Resettlement Administration successful?
Despite the criticisms, the RA did much good. It restored hope, saved farms, rehabilitated land, and created many communities that have thrived ever since [7].
How did the SSA help the Great Depression?
On August 14, 1935, the Social Security Act established a system of old-age benefits for workers, benefits for victims of industrial accidents, unemployment insurance, and aid for dependent mothers and children, persons who are blind, and persons with disabilities.
Who did the AAA New Deal help?
FarmersRoosevelt's Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) of 1933 was designed to correct the imbalance. Farmers who agreed to limit production would receive “parity” payments to balance prices between farm and nonfarm products, based on prewar income levels. Farmers benefited also from numerous other measures, such as the…
Who was the farmer who took out a government loan to start farming?
This problem reached the attention of the nation, and FDR responded by setting up the agency that became the FSA. Elroy Hoffman (right) of York was one of the farmers who took out a government loan to start farming.
What did the FSA do?
The FSA loaned money to tenant farmers (renters) at low interest rates. The FSA also built model cooperative farmsteadsfor farmers who had been forced to receive relief (now known as "welfare"). The agency built camps in California for Okies and other migrant workers.
How did the FSA help tenants?
However, the FSA's performance never matched its Jeffersonian rhetoric. The administration helped only 44,300 tenants to purchase land, with applications exceeding awards by a ratio of about twenty to one. Tenant purchase allocations accounted for only 13 percent of the aid dispensed by the Administration. The FSA also established camps for migratory laborers, and group medical services for small farmers, as well as various cooperative projects and debt adjustment programs.
What was the FSA's role in the war?
Although the FSA sought to adapt to the nation's wartime needs, its political position eroded as agriculture became crucial to lend-lease and to the war effort. The Farm Bureau, which represented the nation's larger farmers, was determined to terminate the FSA, and the bureau found allies in conservatives of both parties, including Senator Kenneth McKellar of Tennessee, Representative Clarence Cannon of Missouri, and Representative Everett M. Dirksen of Illinois. In December 1941 there was a serious move by Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia to abolish the agency; although Byrd's effort was unsuccessful, the FSA's funding was cut by 30 percent for the 1942 to 1943 fiscal year. In April 1943, the House passed an appropriations bill that effectively terminated the FSA, although the agency was not officially disbanded until 1946 and some of its credit functions were subsequently adopted by the Farmers Home Administration. The FSA was unable to survive the prospering of the agricultural community during wartime and the burgeoning power of the Farm Bureau, whose administrators were able to use the wartime emergency to dismantle much of the apparatus by which the federal government managed the agricultural economy, as well as eliminate competition and ensure an adequate labor supply for its members. The Farm Bureau and its political allies were united by an underlying ideological objection to the FSA that related not only to the social class and race of the FSA's constituents, but to the association of welfare and state intervention with alien and radical ideas.
What did the FSA do in 1940?
After Roosevelt's announcement of a program of national defense in May 1940, the FSA adjusted its role to support preparedness. It initiated a "Food for Defense" program that sought to increase production of premium foodstuffs, such as hogs, chickens, and dairy products. The agency also became responsible for farm families displaced by the acquisition of land for defense purposes, and the FSA was assigned to provide accommodation for defense workers. Under the Lanham Defense Housing Act of October 1940, the FSA embarked on a number of prefabricated housing programs, such as those at Radford and Pulaski in western Virginia. After Congress appropriated funds for the Temporary Shelter Program for defense workers in March 1941, the FSA established trailer parks in the principal industrial centers. There were strong elements of continuity in the agency's wartime preparedness work, which grew out of the FSA's well-established organizational and policy objectives of stimulation of productivity, diversification of small farms, and provision of aid to displaced persons and homeless workers.
Why was the FSA underappreciated?
In the South, especially, the FSA was underappreciated by the region's leadership groups, in part because the administration challenged the central aspects of the plantation system : landlords' control of labor, merchants' monopoly of credit, and white control of race relations. The agency also worked outside those institutions, including the Extension Service, land grant colleges, county agricultural agents, and the American Farm Bureau Federation, that maintained close relationships with the Department of Agriculture and through which federal aid to agriculture was traditionally channelled. In addition, the FSA attracted criticism from representatives of the constituencies that it intended to serve. The Southern Tenant Farmers' Union and the Socialist Party derided the administration's maintenance of the small farmer as "subsidized peasantry" and called for the establishment of agricultural cooperatives to make farming efficient by achieving economies of scale. Furthermore, the FSA often encountered the opposition of local communities, particularly when it attempted to establish camps for migratory laborers nearby.
What was the purpose of the FSA?
Baldwin. The FSA developed a more focused agenda and a more practical range of measures to help small farmers stay on the land and to improve the farmer's lot within agriculture. Rural rehabilitation grants or loans constituted the most important aspect of the agency's work. The bulk of the FSA's expenditures were used for rehabilitation loans of between $240 and $600, which were intended to finance farm improvements. Some 700,000 families, about one-ninth of the total number of farm families in the United States, received FSA loans. The FSA also inherited from the RA some 195 community resettlement projects, which were designed to provide small farmers with productive land and modern facilities, the economic benefits of group marketing and purchasing arrangements, the social benefits of cooperative community services, and the expertise of the FSA's agricultural and home management supervisors. Although these "instant communities" were criticized by FSA opponents for their flouting of the "American way," the resettlement projects never accounted for more than 10 percent of the FSA's expenditures and they were downgraded in importance after 1937.
Why was the FSA important?
It was, therefore, vital to the future of federal aid for small farmers to cultivate a public and congressional mood of sympathy for their plight. This entailed overcoming reservations about the "un-American" nature of assistance programs, reassuring individualist Americans who were apprehensive about the social and economic expansion of the federal government 's role, and convincing the economy-minded that the cost was justified.
What was the New Deal agricultural program?
Initially, the New Deal 's agricultural programs actually contributed to rural misery. The Agricultural Adjustment Administration 's (AAA) crop subsidization programs often did not reach the tenants and sharecroppers who were in most need of federal support, and these programs also encouraged landowners to displace tenants and mechanize their holdings. The Farm Security Administration (FSA), however, followed a different trajectory than the AAA, giving priority to welfare and social reform goals and targeting poor, marginal farmers.
What was the most important achievement of the FSA?
Perhaps the most lasting achievement of the FSA was its image making . To convince the general public of the need for the agency's mission, Rexford Tugwell on 10 July 1935 appointed his former student Roy Stryker "Chief of the Historical Section," with the assignment of photographing the devastated land and people that were the RA's and the FSA's task to rescue. Stryker's camera crew took 270,000 pictures, and members of the team, such as Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Arthur Rothstein, and Ben Shahn gained reputations as leading creators of documentary photography. Alongside the photographers, Pare Lorenz made films for the FSA, most notably The Plow that Broke the Plains (1935) and The River (1937), that won fame for their artistry and the vividness with which they brought home the drastic damage inflicted by flood, drought, and careless exploitation of natural resources. These images retain an ability to evoke both the hardships of rural America during the 1930s and the New Deal conviction that the common people so beautifully photographed deserved the help that only their government could give.
What was the FSA in 1937?
After the triumph of the Democrats in elections later that year, Congress passed the Farm Security Act in 1937, which transformed the RA into the Farm Security Administration, with broader powers to aid poor farmers. Eventually, the staff of the FSA reached 19,000 and was deployed in nearly 2,300 county offices to aid 800,000 client families. With funds provided by the Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Act, some 12,000 tenant families became landowners, loans totaling $100 million reduced farm debt by nearly 25 percent, and a medical care program for borrowers grew to include clinics in thirty-one states. In order to give small farmers greater stability and control over the market, the FSA also encouraged the formation of 16,000 cooperatives with 300,000 members willing to pool their resources.
Who is the author of The American Farmer and the New Deal?
Saloutos, Theodore . The American Farmer and the New Deal. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1982.
What is the Farm Security Administration?
Farm Security Administration – A New Deal. The Farm Security Administration (FSA) was created in the Department of Agriculture in 1937. The FSA and its predecessor, the Resettlement Administration (RA), created in 1935, were New Deal programs designed to assist poor farmers during the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression.
Why did the FSA fail?
In the end, the program failed because the farmers wanted ownership and when the United States entered World War II in 1941, millions of jobs were available in the cities.
What was the goal of the Information Division of the FSA?
Under him, the Information Division of the FSA adopted a goal of “introducing America to Americans,” via a focus on photography and written narratives. At first, the photo division focused on the lives of sharecroppers in the South and of migratory agricultural workers in the Midwestern and western states.
When were FSA and OWI photos transferred to the Library of Congress?
The Farm Security Administration (FSA) and Office of War Information (OWI) photographs were transferred to the Library of Congress beginning in 1944.
Who was the photographer for the FSA?
The program was managed by Roy Stryker, who initially headed the photograph division of the Resettlement Administration. When that program moved to the FSA, Stryker went with it. Under him, the Information Division of ...
Who was the first president to say unemployment could only be solved by direct recruiting by the government itself?
On March 9, 1933, the new president, Franklin D. Roosevelt called a special session of Congress, telling them that unemployment could only be solved “by direct recruiting by the Government itself.”.
How many people were helped by the resettlement program?
Though the program assisted some 75,000 people, they were only a small share of those in need and were only allowed to stay temporarily. Drought refugee arriving in California. After facing enormous criticism for poor management, the Resettlement Administration was transferred to the Department of Agriculture in September 1937 as part ...
How many photographs were in the FSA?
As the FSA photo project neared its end, Director Roy Stryker faced a dilemma. From 1935 to 1943, he had created a vast trove of nearly eighty thousand photographs (and 68,000 unprinted negatives). Stryker recognized the importance of this collection to history and feared it might be dispersed when it came under the full control of the Office of War Information (OWl). A seasoned Washington bureaucrat, Stryker had been maneuvering as early as 1939 to secure a safe harbor for the collection in the Library of Congress. Now, working with his friend Archibald MacLeish --who was both the Librarian of Congress and Assistant Director of the OWI--Stryker helped arrange a transfer of the entire FSA photo file to the Library's custody under unusual terms. The Library took title to the collection in 1944, but loaned it back to the OWl for the duration of the war. In 1946, the collection was physically moved to the Library, where it is available to all for study and reproduction. This curriculum guide draws from that collection and presents a new generation the opportunity to examine the role of photographs as historical evidence. By examining, thinking, and asking questions about photographs, students will learn to better understand how and why they were created and used.
What was the most enduring image of rural America during the Great Depression?
The most enduring image ofrural America during the Great Depression is one ofdust and human migration. This image was formed in the nation'sheartland, where the people ofthe Great Plains and Southwest suffered both natural and economic disasters during the 1930s. Decades ofintensive farming and inattention to soil conservation had left this region ecologically vulnerable. A long drought that began in the early 1930s triggered a disaster. The winds that sweep across the plains carried away its dry, depleted topsoil in enormous "dust storms." Dramatic and frightening, the dust storms turned day into night as they destroyed farms. The hardest hit area--coveringparts ofNebraska, Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico and the Texas Panhandle-was nicknamed the "Dust Bowl." FSA photographers recorded the hardships that drought, economic depression and low crop prices created throughout the Great Plains and Southwest. They documented the plight offarm families forced to abandon the land and jointhe ranks ofmigrant workers toiling for low wages on distant commercial farms. The migrant flow out ofthe region included people from cities and small towns and farm laborers who'd been replaced by motorized farm machinery.
What was the South like before the Great Depression?
Long before the Great Depression, the South was marked by deep poverty. Largely rural and agricultural, it was home to millions oftenant farmers and sharecroppers. In exchange for cash rent (or, for sharecroppers, a portion ofthe crop), they farmed the fields oflarge landowners. Even in good times, life for these workers was harsh, with little hope for the future. The Depression-and,ironically, some New Deal programs-deepenedtheir economic plight. To increase sagging crop prices, the government paid farmers to reduce production. Large landowners chose to evict thousands ofsharecropper and tenant families from unplanted land. The growing use ofgas-poweredfarm machines eliminated the need for many tenant farmers. The region'slarge African American population carried the heaviest burden. In 1930 more than eighty percent ofAmerican blacks lived in the South. Jim Crow segregation laws and the legacy ofslavery forced them to endure poverty, discrimination, and racial violence. FSA photographers captured the varied worlds ofblack and white farm workers throughout the South. They also explored the region's mill towns and cities.
Was the FSA a job?
The FSA photographic unit was not a "jobs program" like the New Deal's Federal Arts Project. Photographers were hired solely for their skills. Most were in their twenties or thirties. They traveled the nation on assignments that could last for months.