A Research On The Farm Labor Force Shift In Southern United States During Its Modernization Era,1938-1970

The great depression in the 1930 s damaged the south agriculture area greatly. The New Deal created the beginning of modernization of American south. The New Deal brings great beneficial for large-scale farm, also stimulate development of agriculture mechanization. Thus the farm in the south changed greatly from tenants to capitalism large-scale farm, along with mass tenant farmers lost their job, which surpluses in the south commonly.The change of agriculture labor force migrate to other places, and find jobs in other industry,is a very important component of the south modernization, also a very important guarantee for the accelerate of of the south modernization. So, the shift of the farm labor force in the south have much relationship with industrialization and urbanization in this place.The shift of farm labor force in the south have some very distinct characteristics. From the aspects of farm labor force shift processing,doing works in non-farm rural area is a very important transition stage in the process of farm labor force shift, including part-time job and full time job. The attractiveness peak value that city against farm labor force occurred in the beginning of the process,and then transferred farm labor force prefer working in no-farm rural area, accompany with urbanization.We also known that cities in the south absorbed mostly of the transferred farm labor force. Most transferred population number appeared in the 1950 s,but women delayed in 1960 s. From another aspects, we could known that most transferred farm labor force find their job in a low technical level.I have arranged this paper in four chapters, so as to make a clear clue of my topic. In chapter 1 I firstly introduced many fundamental aspects of the south, discusses the steps of modernization process. And then I continued analysis the five main causation of farm labor force shift in Dixie, they are agricultural mechanization, agricultural production type change, relationships between arable lands and population growth,the great depression and the New Deal, the industrialization. As the corepart of this thesis, used population census data from USA Census Bureau,and adopt proper method, I figured out those common regulars of farm labor force quantity change,occupation transfer and social status variation.In chapter 3, I continued to discuss the implications that farm labor force shift have greatly shaped the politics, economics and society of U.S.,hence I also analysis government policies reply to farm labor force transfer.In chapter 4 I proposed some suggestions for places which may faced the same farm labor shift problems.