Farmer's Benevolent Trust

Americans have always regarded farming as a special calling, one

imbued with the Jeffersonian values of individualism and self-

sufficiency. As Victoria Saker Woeste demonstrates, farming's

cultural image continued to shape Americans' expectations of

rural society long after industrialization radically transformed

the business of agriculture. Even as farmers enthusiastically

embraced cooperative marketing to create unprecedented industry-

wide monopolies and control prices, they claimed they were simply

preserving their traditional place in society. In fact, the new

legal form of cooperation far outpaced judicial and legislative

developments at both the state and federal levels, resulting in a

legal and political struggle to redefine the place of agriculture

in the industrial market.

Woeste shows that farmers were adept at both borrowing such

legal forms as the corporate trust for their own purposes and

obtaining legislative recognition of the new cooperative style.

In the process, however, the first rule of capitalism--every

person for him- or herself--trumped the traditional principle of

cooperation. After 1922, state and federal law wholly endorsed

cooperation's new form. Indeed, says Woeste, because of its

corporate roots, this model of cooperation fit so neatly with the

regulatory paradigms of the first half of the twentieth century

that it became an essential policy of the modern administrative

state.