Acres fit and unfit: Conservation and rural rehabilitation in the New Deal era

The dissertation analyzes the relationship between public policy and landscape change, arguing that the construction of a new political and environmental order established the contours of New Deal and postwar liberalism. The era's conservation programs are reinterpreted as a set of federal strategies aimed at rehabilitating the economies of agricultural areas. National planners and politicians believed that poor resource use and unfair resource distribution caused rural poverty, and they attempted to raise rural incomes with measures tied directly to conservation objectives—land retirement, soil and forest restoration, flood control, and cheap hydropower for farms and industries. Behind the conservation programs lay the assumption that the sustainable and equitable use of the nation's resources would put the countryside on an equal footing with the cities, thereby preventing future depressions. Claiming that rural welfare entailed national welfare, conservationists established the political justification for an enlarged federal government.; The study traces the shifting methods of rural rehabilitation during the New Deal and World War II. During the 1930s, federal programs aimed to help people remain on the land. This agrarian ideology inspired substantial achievements and allowed the Democratic Party to build a permanent rural constituency. Gradually, the agrarian strategies gave way to conservation policies that encouraged farm out-migration and industrialization. Many New Dealers had concluded that the poorest rural people could not compete with their more commercial counterparts, and during the war these policymakers crafted an alternate solution. Large, multipurpose dam projects powered war factories, drew migrants from the farms, and served as catalysts of regional and industrial growth. The rural rehabilitation experience also influenced the content and assumptions of U.S. foreign assistance policy. Americans from the resource agencies helped war-torn and developing countries build multipurpose water projects and launch agricultural modernization programs. The New Deal experience played a formative role in the postwar programs because it appeared to offer a road-tested solution for rural poverty.; By combining environmental with political history, the dissertation demonstrates that new patterns of environmental regulation formed the lasting model for federal resource management and decisively shaped the evolution of the modern American state.