Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Winter 1998
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 18, No. 1, Winter 1998, pp. 3-22.
Abstract
US Highway 62 crosses the town of Ropesville, population 480, between Lubbock and Brownfield on the South Plains of Texas. To the north and west of town, scattered among the suburban-style homes of contemporary farmers, stand several dozen small cottages of identical design. Some are still occupied, many nothing more than ruins, and a few have been added on to, stuccoed, or provided a screened porch. All are surrounded by cotton fields and most are accompanied by ramshackle outbuildings, rusted tractors, dormant windmills, and sealed irrigation wells. These farmsteads are the remains of a rural community project constructed by the federal government during the Great Depression for the resettlement of seventy-six impoverished farm families. The Ropesville Project was one of ninety-nine that were planned and built by the New Deal's controversial community building program. These communities were initiated during the early stages of the New Deal by the Division of Subsistence Homesteads of the Department of the Interior, then taken over by the Rural Rehabilitation Division of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA). In 1935, the two agencies were transferred to the Resettlement Administration (RA) which was replaced by the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in 1937.1 These programs, founded on a variety of social and economic theories and ideals, were all based on the belief that rational planning could guarantee a humane, democratic, and egalitarian way of life on the land. While the history of the Ropesville Project reveals much about the community building program, life as a resettlement client, and the long term effects of New Deal social planning, the paper that follows is primarily concerned with the project's beginnings-particularly the involvement of the Lubbock Chamber of Commerce in its initial development. This story exposes a hidden interaction between the ideals of the New Deal community program, the ambitions of elites on the local level, and the realities of farming on the South Plains.
The resettlement community building program was the most ambitious and controversial effort launched by the New Deal to rehabilitate the rural poor. The communities were to provide settlers with a lifestyle few American farmers had experienced, including homes with modern plumbing and electricity; freedom from the constant threat of eviction because of market vagaries or climate; financial security for the future; and educational and cultural facilities as an integral part of community life.
Although the New Deal community program is commonly associated with radical left-wing economist Rexford Tugwell and his Resettlement Administration, the concept for rural resettlement communities was proposed by agricultural economist M.L. Wilson of Montana State College. His plan called for "subsistence homestead" communities, in which settlers would grow food on small plots of land while they earned wages in decentralized rural industries. Residents of such subsistence communities would not add to the surpluses of commercial agriculture markets, but would have the means to feed themselves in economic downturns. The plan would also secure for them a part of the vanishing rural lifestyle that Wilson admired.2
The plan seemed communistic to local and congressional conservatives. For every supporter, there was an opponent who doubted industry could be lured to the countryside. The Division of Subsistence Homesteads of the Department of the Interior, established by executive order in August of 1933 with Wilson as chief, drew criticism because of high costs and the federal government's strict control over the development of the communities. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes insisted local control would invite graft while his opponents felt that local control offered flexibility. An alternative to tight federal control was offered by the Division of Rural Rehabilitation of the FERA in 1934.3 The FERA's rural rehabilitation plan was to be administered on the state level by corporations managed by a board of directors comprised of prominent agriculturalists, educators, and businessmen. Most of the funds were earmarked for direct loans to individual farmers, but the construction of "rural-industrial" resettlement communities in drought areas, the cut-over regions of the Great Lakes, and the coal mining regions of the Appalachians and Ozarks was a small, but significant, part of the FERA's program.4
Comments
Copyright 1998 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln