Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
2004
Abstract
Anyone who loves the Great Plains and the life that took root there in the nineteenth century has had to face in recent years the decline and disappearance of that rural world. The Great Depression and the drought years of the 1930s were a key turning point in the evolution of farming on the Plains and helped set the stage for the long-term restructuring of farm life that has gone on there ever since. In Down and Out on the Family Farm: Rural Rehabilitation in the Great Plains, 1929-1945, Michael Grant provides a clear and concise economic history of the region. He believes that the trend toward efficient, larger scale, mechanized farming was largely inevitable, given the commercial orientation of most Plains farmers, and does not condemn those farmers who bought out floundering neighbors. The farmers who expanded-and the organizations, such as the Farm Bureau, that supported them-merely applied their business ideology to the circumstances. "If there is a culprit in the story," Grant writes, " it is the proclivity of Americans like the plains farmers to favor opportunity over their own security." His work focuses on the so-called "borderline" farmers, families making $500- $1000 per year and struggling to move up and enjoy a better standard of living. These were the farmers for whom federal rehabilitation programs such as the Resettlement Administration and the Farm Security Administration were created.
Comments
Published in Great Plains Quarterly 24:3 (Summer 2004). Copyright © 2004 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln.