Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Winter 1983
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 3, No. 1, Winter 1983, pp. 17-29.
Abstract
Chronic farm poverty in the Great Plains during the Great Depression of the 1930s provoked sharply differing responses from the governments of the United States and Canada. Among the many features of American and Canadian life that helped shape those different responses, the most significant was the status of the social sciences in agriculture. In nearly every category one might employ to assess their comparative status, from funding to publication record to political influence, social scientists in the United States enjoyed an impressive advantage over those in Canada by 1930. A historical appraisal of one element in this disparity-the research and the political influence of social scientists who worked in the field of chronic farm poverty-will help explain, at least in part, why the two countries pursued different strategies toward chronic farm poverty in the Great Plains.
ORIGINS OF THE TWO POLICIES
To a great extent, the policies of the United States in the thirties flowed. from federal bureaus staffed by politically influential social scientists who had done extensive research during the preceding decade in the Great Plains and in other agricultural regions where there was a high incidence of impoverished farmers. In Canada, on the other hand, the social scientists in agriculture were not nearly as influential, and when they did wield some political clout, their recommendations stemmed from research conducted during the depression itself and not from research during the far more prosperous period of the 1920s, as was the case with the American social scientists.
In other words, those Canadian social scientists who could influence policies studied a different group of impoverished Great Plains farmers. When the Americans probed the sources of chronic farm poverty during the boom times of the 1920s, they were dealing with a population that appeared incapable of adjustment to an economy undergoing the normal stresses that were assumed to be part of the processes of agricultural and industrial modernization. On the other hand, the Canadians, carrying out their research during the Great Depression, viewed all impoverished farmers as victims of the depression and the drought and therefore could not identify those farmers who were incapable of adjusting to a modernizing economy, if indeed they even thought of that possibility.
The impoverished group of Canadian Great Plains farmers presented their social scientists with some special problems. For example, the Canadian group contained many more recent migrants with rural European backgrounds. This first-generation immigrant group may have misled the Canadian social scientists, who concluded that they were not "Canadian" and were accustomed to a different, peasant style of life -even preferred it. Thus, the argument ran, they should be allowed to follow their preferences until they or their progeny expressed a desire to assimilate and become "Canadian." The American social scientists, by contrast, faced in America's southern plains an impoverished group, the "Okies," 98 percent of whom were white, Anglo-saxon, Protestant, and native-born. American social scientists could not therefore dub them foreigners whose background bred a preference for a lower-class lifestyle. Instead, they had to deal squarely with features of their lives that resulted in chronic impoverishment.
Comments
Copyright 1983 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln