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The New Dealer This book combines political with environmental history to present conservation policy as a critical arm of New Deal reform, one that embodied the promises and limits of midcentury American liberalism. The New Dealers believed that the country as a whole would remain mired in depression as long as its farmers remained poorer than its urban residents, and these politicians and policymakers set out to rebuild rural life and raise rural incomes with measures tied directly to conservation objectives - land retirement, soil restoration, flood control, and affordable electricity for homes and industries.
In building new constituencies for the environmental initiatives, resource administrators and their liberal allies established the political justification for an enlarged federal government and created the institutions that shaped the contemporary rural landscape. Phillips is an assistant professor of history at Columbia University.
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"Sarah Phillips has provided easily the best environmental history of the New Deal that we have. Her wide-ranging and authoritative account of all aspects of. Sarah T. Phillips. This Land, This Nation: Conservation, Rural America, and the New Deal. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, xi + pp.
Mar 28, Samuel rated it really liked it. Uprooted and impoverished people, scarred land, abandoned farms, and swollen rivers. Black sharecroppers deprived of nutrient topsoil. Floods in the river valleys of the south.
Farm relief, migrant camp management, and Tennessee Valley Authority builds dams. This book combines political with environmental history to present conservation policy as an arm of New Deal economic reform embodying the promises and limits of New Deal liberalism.
This ushered in the modern liberal state—Americans received direct aid welfare benefits, farm subsidies and retirement pensions for the first time. How to secure farming? Land retirement, soil and forest restoration, flood control, and cheap hydropower for farms and new industries were viewed as solutions 2. Lasting effects on American institutions and public policy are under examined with relation to New Deal legacy New rural conservatism rested on two paradoxes: Governor and Candidate Chapter 2: The Industrial Transition [shifts: Ian Stevenson rated it really liked it May 02, Garn rated it liked it Nov 05, Melissa Jean rated it it was ok Nov 16, Cait rated it it was ok Jul 05, Adam Danoff rated it it was ok Feb 07, Sean Case rated it liked it Oct 16, Jake rated it liked it Mar 09, Kristi rated it liked it Mar 06, Anne rated it did not like it May 30, Jessica rated it it was ok Sep 01, Glen rated it it was amazing Dec 04, Michael Taylor rated it liked it Oct 05, Apr 04, Brandi rated it it was amazing Shelves: The Tennessee Valley Authority provided cheap power for farmers and industrial customers, spurring consumption of consumer goods and creating jobs for what administrator David Lilienthal believed would be an industrial South.
Resettlement advocates wanted the federal government to purchase 75 million acres of land in the South, West, and Great Lakes cutover districts that they believed were unable to support settlement.
Furthermore, opponents of rural rehabilitation for poor farmers charged that socialism and race mixing would be the inevitable result. Federal farm policies emphasized voluntary participation and financial incentives, which rewarded middling and prosperous farmers who were the most aggressive natural resource users.
Garn rated it liked it Nov 05, Cambridge University Press, It interprets the natural resource programs of the s and s as a set of federal strategies aimed at rehabilitating the economies of agricultural areas. Phillips follows the New Conservationists through their formative years in the s and into their heyday in the 30s and 40s. New rural conservatism rested on two paradoxes:
In , Johnson obtained federal investment in the development of the Lower Colorado River Authority to construct dams for flood control and hydroelectric power for farmers. These projects would encourage stability and prosperity in the Texas Hill Country, a region known of poor land and poor people.
Johnson eventually altered his views about rural development, conceding that industry was a key component of rural uplift. By the s, US policy makers favored a mix of industrial and agricultural development. Like Johnson, even the most ardent advocates of New Deal conservation policies adapted to changing conditions and modified their agrarian fundamentalism. Phillips contributes to our understanding of the role of conservation in a capitalist society.
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