The Farm Security Administration and Rural Rehabilitation in the South

As the roaring twenties turned into the depressed thirties, southern farmers, far removed from the

urban prosperity Americans had enjoyed during the 1920s heyday, found already difficult farming

conditions greatly intensified by the onset of the Great Depression. Agricultural incompetence

plagued the rural South through the misuse of land, depletion of natural resources, and a system

of single-crop farming that failed to adequately provide for growing families on small farms, especially

in the cotton-producing Southeast. Poverty and desperation came to define the farming

communities of the rural South, both in reality and in Americans' collective conscious.

In The Farm Security Administration and Rural Rehabilitation in the South, Charles Kenneth

Roberts traces the administrative and political history of the Farm Security Administration

(FSA) and reconciles the administration's goals with Franklin D. Roosevelt's overall vision for the

New Deal. Roberts takes a grassroots approach to dissecting the FSA's history. While other studies

have focused on FSA photography or community building, or even policy making in terms of

top-down government directives, Roberts focuses on the people and state governments who faced

an immediate need to aid southern farmers within their own borders and to boost their states'

crumbling agricultural economic bases. Roberts focuses on rural rehabilitation as a key aspect of

the FSA and defines the agency's legacy not in terms of its failures but rather in terms of an idealistic

program whose modest successes were ultimately too few to effect real change for southern

farmers. Though Roosevelt failed to adequately recognize the plight of the southern farmer and political

infighting hindered many of the administration's goals, the creation of the FSA stands as one of

the first efforts to provide sustained relief to struggling southern farmers. In light of other federal

programs of the era, the FSA may seem like a mere footnote to the New Deal outside of its small

but revered photography program. But, as Roberts shows, the FSA's legacy has endured to the

present day.