The Agricultural Adjustment Act and the Great Migration - implications of earlier agricultural subsidies.

[raharris1973]

An interesting post over at the other place suggests that the New Deal era Agricultural Adjustment Act, which included farm price supports, and provided subsidies for farmers to keep acreage *out* of production - in reaction to the collapse of farm commodity, especially cotton, prices, was a permissive condition for southern landowners and agricultural employers to *let* their largely black workforce migrate out of the south. [I'm making a wild guess the idea being that they used police powers at the county and state levels and debt obligations and outstanding warrants and patrols to prevent black people from moving north and west in really large numbers before the 1930s, and this worked even more effectively in the 1910s and earlier.] In other words, inverting classical arguments that opportunity up north for jobs, and labor shortage up north, caused by WWI stopping immigration, and postwar immigration restrictions keeping that shut down, and then word of mouth causing chain migration of southern blacks, the big thing letting the great migration happen was southern planters losing the need for the year-round workforce, offloading responsibility for providing off-season subsistence to surplus workers to the federal government, and embracing mechanization, meant they no longer opposed black migration north.

This suggests to me that perhaps if you want to see perhaps an earlier great migration north, and possibly, but not necessarily, as a consequence an earlier civil rights movement, one way to go might be to see if it would be plausible to have any of these farm support programs enacted earlier in history. Does anybody know the intellectual and policy pedigree of Roosevelt's 1933 farm policy? Was it brand new, or was it a culmination of ideas already developed and thought out, but not adopted in the Progressive and Populist eras?

For example, is farm support legislation something we could imagine happening under, for example, a victorious William Jennings Bryan in 1896. Or, more likely, had he been the victor in a more favorable year for the Democrats, like 1912?

Ulyanovsk

Until the Great Depression broke the agricultural labor system in the South where a postbellum planter class kept a poor African American underclass working for subsistence wages either year round (in much of the former Confederacy) or on a seasonal basis (Oklahoma, Texas) and incentivized the planters to mechanize production and switch to tractors and other labor-saving measures, you are going to have a difficult time convincing the planters to just let the majority of their work force walk west and leave them destitute. The post-war racial order in the South was meticulously reconstructed over decades and migration was tightly controlled and discouraged up until the point where the planters loosened the repressive regime as a result of the catastrophic collapse in cotton prices and the resulting mechanization under the New Deal's AAA program. Allow me to quote:

"The collapse of the prevailing structure eventually led the planters to mechanize. This collapse was, of course, part of the world depression of the 1930s. At the same time that the price of raw cotton fell to its lowest levels since before the Civil War, the black population of the cotton South was increasing. The birthrate in the rural Southeast was the highest in the nation in the two decades following World War I. Despite some migration out of the South during and after that war, the Southern black population rose steadily from 7.9 million in 1900 to 9.9 million in 1940. The collapse of cotton demand, combined with the growing labor pool, presented a sufficient reason for change. By abandoning the labor-repressive system that tied blacks to the land, the planters could free themselves of responsibility for the year-round subsistence of their sharecroppers. Blacks could be hired on wages when needed and left to fend for themselves the rest of the year.

But the planters did better than that. The federal government paid them for not planting cotton and took over some responsibility for the subsistence of their labor force through relief and work programs. New Deal farm policy combined acreage reduction with parity payments to farmers. The Agricultural Adjust- ment Act (AAA) of 1933, substantially re-enacted in 1938, took 53 percent of the South's cotton acreage out of production and paid subsidies to the land- owners. Tying tenants to those 7.7 million fallow acres no longer made sense, and planters released them from their bonds. These sharecroppers joined the general pool of unemployed wage workers, seeking federal relief funds and further increasing the labor surplus.

[...]

Relaxing the bonds of labor-repressive agriculture had an immediate consequence: the migration of hundreds of thousands of blacks out of the South. The tide of black migration to the North did not begin with World War II and the opportunities it offered; that move was already underway during the Depression, as the Prussian road crumbled. The net migration of whites from the Southeast between 1930 and 1940 was less than one thousand; the net migration of blacks was four hundred and twenty-five thousand -strong evidence against the argument that lack of opportunities elsewhere was the principal obstacle to black mobility. Clearly, blacks were moving to the North during the Depression, when jobs there were scarce. Thus, developments in the North were neither necessary nor sufficient causes for black migration; to understand it, one must begin with the place of blacks in the social relations of the South."

Wiener, Jonathan M. "Class Stucture and Economic Development in the American South, 1865-1955." The American Historical Review 84, no. 4 (1979): 970–92. https://doi.org/10.2307/1904611.

 

[raharris1973]

If WJB and the Populist era were too early for the production cuts/idling land concept, and if it was still too early in the core Progressive era through Wilson's time and WWI, maybe the best we could do is get something like the 1933 AAA passed 10 or 11 years early in 1922 or 1923.

Here is how I could imagine it going down:

Charles Evans Hughes narrowly wins the 1916 Presidential election. Unfortunately, just like Wilson, he is pretty much immediately faced by the crisis of German unrestricted submarine warfare, then learns of the intercepted Zimmerman Telegram, which Zimmerman stupidly confirms, and he feels compelled to declare war on Germany.

Hughes gets a clear Congressional majority to declare and prosecute the war.

The war is largely prosecuted similarly to OTL, just with some different key personnel, because Hughes, having just taken office, inherits the same military establishment Wilson got. And I think no American administration would just accept a plan of piecemeal amalgamation of individual or small American unit amalgamation into the armies of the other Allied powers. It was a predictable patriotic pride thing, not a personal Pershing thing.

Hughes finds it impossible to win reelection, despite winning the war, because the war causes a high degree of 'buyer's remorse' among the American public, no peace settlement could satisfy the visions of all American ideological and certainly not all ethnic groups, and there is resentment of wartime sacrifices, civil liberties violations, the draft, and regimentation.

The Democrats ride that resentment, voter fatigue, and desire to turn the page to win the White House in the 1920 election.

The winning Democratic coalition of 1920 is a shaky one balancing rural Protestant farmer "dry" interests and urban Catholic, ethnic, financial, middle, and working-class "wet" interests. It needs to proceed carefully.

But with the return of peace and freedom of global shipping and competition in farm produce, prices drop precipitously, as weather on the Great Plans begins to show signs of drying up. To satisfy the rural, southern and western farmer elements of their coalition, and to do so in line with traditional Democratic Free Trade doctrine, and not the Republican traditional tariff panacea, the Democrats by 1922 or 1923 support a major agricultural reform and support/subsidy bill much like the 1933 AAA, to deal with the genuine slump of the farm economy, which is a contrast to the heady expansion of the urban, industrial economy.

While some populist voices in the Democratic Party point out the problem of the program subsidizing landowners and doing nothing directly for tenant farmers and non-landowning sharecroppers, the by far dominant factions of southern Democratic pols are just fine with that, as they were in the 1930s. And the industrial sector, whichever Party it gives campaign cash to, sometimes both, is happy to help along the process of replacing human with the machine labor in agriculture.

This process encourages limitation of cotton, rice and other staple crop planting alike over the course of the 1920s and drives 100s of thousands of sharecroppers from the land. Fortunately, for most of this decade the growing industrial and urbanizing and suburbanizing economies of the northeast, midwest, and west are demand manufacturing and service labor providing jobs for displaced sharecroppers, white and black, at a steady clip. Job availablity is only enhanced by the solidification mid-decade (1924) of the tighter immigration restriction regime. [Odds would favor its adoption like in OTL based on overall political and cultural trends, the WWI experience with its 100% Americanism, and the Red Scare, although there is a chance that draconian restrictions might be delayed, softened (perhaps just limited to Asians, not Europeans?), or skipped entirely, with Democratic Administrations and Congressional majorities, relying on a more ethnically diverse voter bases for support].

Eventually WWI debt overhang, and the sheer overbuilt capacity of urban infrastructure, the national railway network, the original electric grid and telephone network and initial network of automotive roads, and financial speculation should all catch up and cause a Great Depression, likely by around the turn of the decade from the 1920s to the 1930s. This will make unemployment skyrocket and competition for jobs fierce. [Here I am going with the traditional - Great Depression is inevitable viewpoint, or at least inevitable after WWI. Your mileage may vary. I could imagine this scenario offers reasons why it might not be as deep or might be delayed. For one, the likely two or three consecutive Democratic administrations of the 1920s in place of Republican ones will have free trade rather than protectionist policies which should be better for the global economy. Although the US is not the only player with a vote on that. Would Britain's conservatives lean any less into Imperial preference in response to American freer trade? Democrats of this decade, while not expected to be New Deal liberals at all, may have less doctrinaire opposition to certain financial regulation than Republicans of the same decade, which might have some market stabilizing influence, if lucky.]