| Summary |
This study is an examination of the administration of the Agricultural Adjustment Act in North Carolina and its resultant impact on the people of the state. Depression in agriculture began in the summer of 1920. The total gross income, including sale of crops, livestock, livestock products, and forest products declined almost steadily from 1920 into the decade of the thirties. The number of Tarheels affected by this decline in farm income was substantially greater than the national average. North Carolina had the second largest farm population of all the states and the bulk of this number rested at the bottom of the economic scale as agriculture was far less mechanized than in most of the other states. From 1920 to 1933, there was a constant demand for relief, the federal farm relief. Of all farm proposals for farm relief, the most significant was the domestic allotment plan. Specifically, the plan provided for giving farmers a higher price on that portion of their crop sold in the domestic market in return for signing limiting acreage. Tarheel grossmen, editors, farm leaders, tenants, and other interested parties contributed to the proposals before Congress and to the general air of discontent. Included were the efforts of U. Benton Blalock, Clarence Poe, Governor Ehringhaus, and the vast majority of North Carolinians to achieve passage of a domestic allotment plan. It also included the almost unanimous front of opposition presented by the manufacturers of agricultural products. In spite of this opposition voiced by manufacturers, friends of agriculture were able to secure passage of a domestic allotment plan, and on May 12, 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Agricultural Adjustment Act. Once passage of domestic allotment was accomplished, state officials and state agencies cooperated fully with the Agricultural Adjustment Administration. The reduction programs covered cotton, corn and hogs, tobacco, wheat, peanuts, and for a brief period, potatoes. These programs reaped a measure of success--success, that is, for the landed farmer. The economic standing of the landowners steadily improved from 1933 to 1936. This improvement was largely the result of the work of the A.A.A. as implemented by the Extension Service. Although some success was certainly registered by the A.A.A. in North Carolina, failure was an accompanying phenomenon with regard to the landless farmer, in North Carolina, and in the South, tenants suffered miserable lives and blacks suffered most of all. The "New Deal" which the A.A.A. brought to North Carolina's tenant farmer was a culmination of this misery. The program was, in many instances, responsible for driving tenants from the land. As far as concerned the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, the tenant in North Carolina was a "forgotten man." |
