This Land, This Nation : Conservation, Rural America, and the New Deal

Sarah T. Phillips. Includes Bibliographical References And Index. Frontmatter List of Abbreviations Used in the Footnotes (page vii) Preface (page ix) Introduction (page 1) I The New Conservation (page 21) Giant Power, Rural Electrification, and Regional Thought (page 25) The Farm Crisis and the Land Utilization Movement (page 36) Herbert Hoover and Rural Conservation Policy, 1928-1932 (page 46) FDR: Governor and Candidate (page 59) 2 Poor People, Poor Land (page 75) The Tennessee Valley Authority (page 83) Beyond TVA: Land Utilization and Rural Rehabilitation (page 107) Buried in Dirt: The Resettlement Idea and The Future of the Great Plains (page 120) Rural Electrification, Soil Conservation, Water Control, and Farm Security (page 132) 3 "The Best New Dealer from Texas" (page 149) The Hill Country Setting (page 153) Historical Development of the Colorado River Congressman Johnson (page 162) LCRA Expansion: Rural Electrification, Recreation, and Wartime Growth (page 174) 4 The Industrial Transition (page 197) The Resurrected AAA and the BAE's County Planning Experiment (page 200) World War II and the Decline of Agrarian Policy (page 212) Jobs for All: Industrial Expansion and Wartime Resource Policy (page 223) Conclusion (page 238) Epilogue: Exporting the New Deal (page 242) Wartime Assistance, Postwar Institution Building, and the Cold War (page 247) The Point Four Program (page 264) The New Conservation Abroad (page 281) Index (page 285) 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. It interprets the natural resource programs of the 1930s and 1940s as a set of federal strategies aimed at rehabilitating the economies of agricultural areas. 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. Sarah T. Phillips is an assistant professor of history at Columbia University. This 2007 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. It interprets the natural resource programs of the 1930s and 1940s as a set of federal strategies aimed at rehabilitating the economies of agricultural areas. 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. 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."--Jacket. Ths 2007 book tells a new story about the New Deal period in US history, which witnessed a critical expansion of the national government's power to regulate economic activity and to provide a certain measure of social welfare. This book presents conservation policy as a critical arm of New Deal reform