This book explores those who long for “bygone utopias,” times before rapid, culturally destructive social change stripped individuals of their perceived agency. The case of the wave of foreclosure protests that swept through the rural American Midwest during the 1930s illustrates these themes. These actions embodied a utopian understanding of agrarian society that had largely disappeared by the late 19th century: hundreds to thousands of people fixed public auctions of foreclosed farms, returning owners’ property and giving them a second chance to save their farm. Comparisons to later movements, including the National Farmers’ Organization and the protests surrounding the 1980s Farm Crisis highlight the importance of culturally catastrophic social change occurring at a breakneck pace in fomenting these types of bygone utopian actions. These activists and movements should cause scholars to re-think what it means to be conservative and how we view conservatism, helping us better understand why we’re seeing a contemporary resurgence in nationalist and reactionary movements across the globe.

The authors trace the tumultuous course of the farm movement through the inflation of World War I, the subsequent depression of the early twenties, and the Great Depression of the thirties to the outbreak of World War II. From the soil prepared by the Populists sprang numerous organizations, all having the same purpose: to bring more equitable returns to the farmer. One of these was the Nonpartisan League, which ultimately merged with the Farmer-Laborites, Progressives, and Liberals. The American Farm Bureau Federation was organized in an attempt to bring rival farm groups into one major body, but there was much disagreement over objectives and means. Among the prescriptions for the ills of agriculture were the McNary-Haugen proposals, calling for "cost production plus reasonable profit," and the Hoover farm program, bitterly opposed by conservative business agencies and alienated farm groups alike. The failure of all schemes to bring relief resulted in the 1932 Farm Strike, which culminated in a melodramatic outburst of violence. Finally came the New Deal farm program, which temporarily quieted the fears of farmers.

First published in 1985. This study explores the agricultural depression in the United States of America in the 1920’s. The author examines overproduction, wartime optimism and the farm crisis, and continuity and change in agriculture during this period. This title will be of great interest to students of history, agriculture, and economics.

Their account will inform readers with a detailed account of one of the great transformations in American life."--BOOK JACKET.

Letters to Eleanor: Voices of the Great Depression examines how the flood of letters from ordinary Americans to the First Lady established a bond of hope and trust. Through this paper trail, Eleanor Roosevelt was able to help many petitioners find jobs, food, housing, and clothes. To others she offered the encouragement and support many needed in the bleak Thirties. Through it all Eleanor Roosevelt exhibited a tradionalist social outlook by her support of homemakers and opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment. But as the New Deal matured, she became an ardent reformer who fought for an anti-lynching law and job opportunity for women in the federal service. But beneath her incessant activity to help others there was an inner Eleanor who constantly sought emotional support from female colleagues or her distant correspondents, a support she did not receive form FDR or her family.

In this innovative grassroots to global study, Kathleen Mapes explores how the sugar beet industry transformed the rural Midwest by introducing large factories, contract farming, and foreign migrant labor. Identifying rural areas as centers for modern American industrialism, Mapes contributes to an ongoing reorientation of labor history from urban factory workers to rural migrant workers. She engages with a full range of individuals, including Midwestern family farmers, industrialists, Eastern European and Mexican immigrants, child laborers, rural reformers, Washington politicos, and colonial interests. Engagingly written, Sweet Tyranny demonstrates that capitalism was not solely a force from above but was influenced by the people below who defended their interests in an ever-expanding imperialist market.

Improved Earth is a history of the making of 'abstract spaces of modernity' in the setting of the Canadian prairies, particularly rural Saskatchewan, from 1869 to 1944. Rod Bantjes demonstrates how three interrelated projectsstate formation, agrarian class formation, and the transformation of the environmentwere conceived in spatial terms and employed competing visions of spatial possibility. Bantjes proposes that the prairies be thought of as a site of modernity, and makes a case for viewing prairie farmers as 'modernists' who not only embraced, but took an active role in the making of modernity. Indeed, many of the questions that excited the imaginations of prairie politicians and reformers are alive today: the ecological and social value of 'localization' in agricultural production; the potentials for 'community' maintained and linked by transportation and communications technologies; and the possibilities of democratic decentralization within large translocal networks. The first systematic treatment of the spatial dimensions of the colonization of the prairie west, Improved Earth is a unique and thorough study certain to provoke new debates about the way space and time are imagined.