Back to the Land E-Book

C. J Maloney

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 488

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

How New Deal economic policies played out in the small town of Arthurdale, West Virginia Today, the U.S. government is again moving to embrace New Deal-like economic policies. While much has been written about the New Deal from a macro perspective, little has been written about how New Deal programs played out on the ground. In Back to the Land, author CJ Maloney tells the true story of Arthurdale, West Virginia, a town created as a "pet project" of the Roosevelts. Designed to be (in the words of Eleanor Roosevelt) "a human experiment station", she was to create a "New American" citizen who would embrace a collectivist form of life. This book tells the story of what happened to the people resettled in Arthurdale and how the policies implemented there shaped America as we know it. Arthurdale was the foundation upon which modern America was built. * Details economic history at the micro level, revealing the true effects of New Deal economic policies on everyday life * Addresses the pros and cons of federal government economic policies * Describes how good intentions and grand ideas can result in disastrous consequences, not only in purely materialistic terms but, most important, in respect for the rule of law Back to the Land is a valuable addition to economic and historical literature.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Table of Contents

Title page

Copyright page

Dedication

Arthurdale from 1933 to 1947

Acronyms Used in the Book

Road Song of the Bandar-Log

Map of West Virginia

Introduction

Chapter 1 The Damnedest Cesspool of Human Misery

The Great Coal Bubble

The Hell of Peace

The Agreement That Wasn’t

Scotts Run Turns Bloody

Bottom of the Barrel: Life in the Coal Camps

Misery beyond Description: Private Charity in Scotts Run

American Friends Service Committee

In the Thick of It All

Chapter 2 The Angel of Arthurdale Arrives

Getting Down with the Sickness

Interpreting a Dream

Chapter 3 The Definition of Insanity

Man Plans, God Laughs

Lather, Rise, Repeat: Previous Farm Colonies

Slipping By in the Crowd—Legislating Arthurdale

Chapter 4 We Lucky Few

Rotting from the Head

Choosing the Lucky

Chapter 5 “Spending Money . . . Like Drunken Sailors”

The Blind Leading the Blind

Money Pit

“Living in a Fish Bowl”

A Potemkin Village, American Style

The Angel of Arthurdale

Chapter 6 The Darkening of the Light

At One with the Land

The Other Half of the Equation: Wage Employment

Cooperation, Debt, and Losses

Pleasantville

Chapter 7 “A Human Experiment Station”

Machine of the Gods

Progressive School, Progressive Man

A Little Village in Itself

“This Highly Restricted Mode of Life”

The Jamestown Effect

Chapter 8 At Long Last, Arcadia

The Sleep of the Just

The End and the Beginning

Epilogue: To the Victor, the Spoils

Collective Dispossession

Flowers for Algernon

Back to the Future

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

Newspapers

Magazines/Journals

Pamphlets/Bulletins

Archives

Government Reports

Unpublished Manuscripts

Interviews Conducted with Author from Fall 2009 to Spring 2010

Interviews Conducted by Arthurdale Heritage Inc. from Late 1980s to Early 1990s

Multimedia

Books

About the Author

Index

Plates

Copyright © 2011 by C.J. Maloney. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Maloney, C. J., 1969–

Back to the land : Arthurdale, FDR’s New Deal, and the costs of economic planning / C. J. Maloney.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-470-61063-3 (cloth); ISBN 978-1-118-02353-2 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-02356-3 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-02357-0 (ebk)

1. Subsistence farming—West Virginia—Arthurdale. 2. Land settlement—West Virginia—Arthurdale. 3. Frontier and pioneer life—West Virginia—Arthurdale. 4. New Deal, 1933–1939. I. Title.

 S451.W4M35 2011

 307.1´4120975482—dc22

2010045672

For Moma and Casey

Arthurdale from 1933 to 1947

Federal Agencies that Administered Arthurdale

Division of Subsistence Homesteads, Department of the InteriorJuly 1933–May 1935Division of Subsistence Homesteads, Resettlement AdministrationMay 1935–December 1936Resettlement Administration, Department of AgricultureJanuary 1937–August 1937Farm Security Administration, Department of AgricultureSeptember 1937–September 1942National Housing Agency, Federal Public Housing AuthorityOctober 1942–April 1947

Arthurdale Community Project Managers

Bushrod GrimesNovember 1933–April 1934Ornan B. SmartApril 1934–October 1934G. M. FlynnOctober 1934–February 1937Glenn WorkMarch 1937–July 1941Milford MottDecember 1941–April 1947

Acronyms Used in the Book

AAAAgricultural Adjustment AdministrationAFSCAmerican Friends Service CommitteeCWACivil Works AdministrationDSHDivision of Subsistence HomesteadsFDRFranklin Delano RooseveltFERAFederal Emergency Relief AdministrationFSAFarm Security AdministrationMCCAMountaineer Craftsmen’s Cooperative AssociationPWAPublic Works AdministrationRAResettlement AgencyRFCReconstruction Finance CorporationWPAWorks Progress Administration

Here we sit in a branchy row, thinking of beautiful things we know,

Dreaming of deeds that we mean to do, all complete in a minute or two—

Something noble and wise and good, done by merely wishing we could!

By the rubbish in our wake, and the noble noise we make,

Be sure, be sure, we’re going to do some splendid things!

—Rudyard Kipling, “Road Song of the Bandar-Log,” The Jungle Book

Map of West Virginia.

Source: Thomas Maloney, 2010.

Introduction

Arthurdale today does not, at least on first glance, seem to be much of a place at all.

—Michael Byers, Preservation1

The story of Arthurdale begins just outside of Morgantown, West Virginia, in a five-mile long hollow* called Scotts Run. Like almost everything wretched, the tragedy that was visited upon the people who lived in Scotts Run was birthed in the turmoil of war, specifically in this case World War I, fought mostly in Europe from 1914 to 1919. Historian Niall Ferguson wondered aloud in The Pity of War why America does not seem to take much of an interest regarding that conflict’s “effect at the time on American society.”2 He is correct; we have yet to take full measure of what President Woodrow Wilson’s crusade cost us.

War of a modern scale continues to claim victims long after it ends and far from where it was fought. So it was that on a cold winter day in 1932 America a writer for the New York Times witnessed the burial of a little Scotts Run girl—she had died of exposure, a condition brought on in her case through a fatal combination of bitter winter and a lack of warm clothing.3 Without a doubt, although she was born long after the Guns of August had fallen silent, it would have been entirely accurate for her family to say “She died in the war.” If the innumerable contemporary accounts of all that took place in that hollow are to be believed, she was far from the only one.

The immense suffering experienced by the coal-mining peoples of America, a cataclysm that centered on West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Kentucky, was a direct result of that conflict. The war that at first seemed a blessing for the miners became a biblical plague upon those who could, for the most part, only wonder what in the world had happened. When the Roosevelt administration stumbled across Scotts Run during 1933 and the first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, saw firsthand the miners’ destitution, she demanded of her husband, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, that something be done for them. The town of Arthurdale, West Virginia, created and sustained expressly on FDR’s command, was that something. The town took life as part of one of the New Deal’s lesser-known but most influential components—the Division of Subsistence Homesteads.

Arthurdale was the culmination of a long-cherished dream for popu­lation resettlement held by FDR and the circle of like-minded men he had gathered about him as he ascended to power. Despite being dressed with the thin veneer of “charity,” the town was something else entirely. Through careful planning of the physical environment by the federal authorities and education of the resettled (both young and old), the town was to introduce a “new American way of life,” in the vision of its sponsors it was to build a new American man.

Openly touted by Eleanor Roosevelt (the town’s most prominent booster) as a “human experiment station,”4 never before (or in many ways since) have federal politicians ever meddled in the intimate details of the people’s everyday lives to such a degree as at Arthurdale. Never have a group of American citizens been subject to such an “experiment.” In the vast, discretionary powers allowed to the political class, the Division of Subsistence Homesteads was a battle between the ideals of the Old Republic and those of the New Deal.

The small band of dreamers who brought the town to life—FDR, the land economists Rexford Tugwell and M. L. Wilson, along with their allies—were not the kind to let a crisis go to waste, so to speak, and Arthurdale owes its very existence to Scotts Run. Without the tragedy that took place in the hollow, without all its gun battles and dynamite blasts and hungry children with distended bellies, Arthurdale would have remained just a dream for those who would eventually build it.

It was mostly from the pool of destitute coal miners in Scotts Run that it was populated, all the families resettled as part of a larger federal program that would build around 99 similar colonies across the nation.*

Arthurdale was the first, the most lavish, and the most publicized of the resettlement colonies built by the Division of Subsistence Homesteads. With the maturation of still photography and the growth in the movie industry during the early 1930s, stark images from the Run were broadcast nationally, as was the emergence of Arthurdale. The Run would become the poster child for the horrors of the Great Depression; Arthurdale the poster child for the beneficence of the New Deal and the man, FDR, who made it possible.