Edward C. Banfield, Government Project

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! IGovernmentProjectBY EDWARD C. BANFIELDFOREWORD BY REXFORD G. TUGWELL

Tile Free Press, flleRcoe, IIliaois. i


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Edward C. Banfield Government Project (Glencoe , IL:The Free Press , 1951).

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! IGovernmentProjectBY EDWARD C. BANFIELDFOREWORD BY REXFORD G. TUGWELL

Tile Free Press, flleRcoe, IIliaois. i


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Copyright 1951 by the Free Press, a corporationPrinted in the U.Designed by Sidney Solomon

Sam HamburgWITH GRATITUDE AND AFFECTION

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Contents! I

PAGEForewordIntroduction :11

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1. Beginnings2. Organizing the Cooperative3. Selecting the Settlers4. The First Year5. Progress Report6. Factionalism7. Dissatisfaction8. Women and Children9. Pinal County Opinion10. The New Dispensation11. The Ills of Prosperity-194212. . The Ills of Prosperity-194313. Liquidation14. Experience Elsewhere15. Why They Failed

100119134147157

191206

Notes and References to SourcesSome Names Prominent in the Story

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Foreword

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IN THE SPRING OF 1935,at what might be called the apogee of the New Deal, PresidentRoosevelt signed an Executive Order establishing the Resettle-ment Administration. The condition of the low-income folk inthe rural areas of America was very much on his mind. It ha~been on his mind for some time as can be seen from his publicstatements on the subject when he was Governor of New YorkState. As Governor he had appointed an Agricultural AdvisoryCommission and on its advice had done what a Governor coulpdo to mitigate rural poverty and forward a program of consevation. During these years he had, moreover, held steadily tothe belief that sub-marginal lands ought to be retired from usand that rural communities ought to be established to whichmany of the unemployed in the cities might be moved. One ~fhis life-long interests had centered in conservation. He lov~dwell-tended farm lands, forests and parks. He thought our farmlands were misused and that our forests, parks and streams wereill-managed and not so extensive as they ought to be.As for me, who was named Administrator in the ExecutiveOrder, I had my own reasons too. My impulse, like PresidentRoosevelt's , went back to my earliest days. He had been a boyon an estate in Dutchess County of New York and had gone toa private school in New England; but he had seen plenty oferoded farms and hard-scrabble farmers. He had travelled widelyand seen the contrasts between high- and low-income folk every-where in our land and in Europe as well. Also he had followedclosely the attempts of Theodore Roosevelt to organize the con- i Iservation movement; and he had been a friend of that great ' ipione~r forester, Gifford Pinchot. I had not had those contactsand advantages. I had come , some years later, into some con-,cio",no", of tho relation botw= poor land and poo' POOPI

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III

Introduction ! I

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THIS IS AN ACCOUNT OFan attempt by one of the biggest, most efficient, and most demo-cratic of governments-that -of the United States-to remake thelives of a few of its citizens by establishing a cooperative farmat Casa Grande in the Arizona desert. These few citizens (at notime were there more than 57 families) were among the mostdesperately poor and disadvantaged in the nation. The govern-ment made an elaborate effort to help them , an effort which wassustained for seven years, which involved the investment of morethan $1 000 000, and which required the almost constant attep.-tion of several officials. Without wishing to prejudice the case(for the author wants the reader to judge for himself) it is fair I Ito say that the government s effort was administered honestly,zealously, and-by the standards of one of the most efficient ofgovernments-efficiently. Nevertheless the cooperative farm wasa failure. It collapsed at the very moment when to all outwarejlappearances its chances for prosperity and success were greates,.This book is intended to describe what, happened at CasGrande in such a way as to give some insight into why it haPIpened. There are a number of reasons why it seems worthwhileto make such a study. The story of Casa Grande should hav, at the least, a practical value to anyone who may again set 04ito - establish a cooperative farm under similar circumstances;there is a long history of attempts to establish cooperative farmsand model communities in the United States and it would befoolish to suppose that Casa Grande will prove to be the lastof these. There are other reasons , however, for telling the story.Disadvantaged people like those whom the government tried tohelp at Casa Grande are still with us. The problem they representhas been obscured by the events of recent years and it is in some

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Ra~ph ::'to Hollenberg and Robert G. Craig; at the University ofChicago Professors Herbert Blumer, Morton M. Grodzins , CharlesM. Hardin, Julius Margolis, Martin D. Meyerson, Edward A.Shils, and Rexford G., Tugwell; elsewhere the following other,friends: Dorothea Lange and Professor Paul S. Taylor of theUniversity of California at Berkeley, Margy Ellin Meyerson, JohnCollier Jr. and Herbert H. Rosenberg. Finally he wishes to thankhis wife and children for making life pleasant while the book wasin preparation.

CHAPTERONE

BeginningsTHE GOVERNMENT PRO-

ject at Casa Grande would later be described as "a modem BrooFarm a little Soviet that washed the window-panes of lifea peon camp," an experiment "without parallel in history," "rather unusual farm " and "an experiment designed to interestprivate capital in large-scale farmmg." It would turn out to be insome sense most of these things, but none of them was intendJ(jlwhen the Resettlement Administration set about optioning 3 600acres of land in Pinal County, Arizona. The Resettlement Admin-istration was in' fact acting in a hallowed American tradition.Americans had always wanted land, and the government hadalways given it to them. The Preemption Act, the Homestead Actthe Desert Land Act, and the Reclamation Act were J:inks in achain that stretched back nearly a hundred years. And now, inthe winter of 1935- , the Resettlement Administration, an inde-pendent agency established by executive order and supplied withfunds from a relief appropriation in 1935, was adding anotherlink to the traditional land policy.One might better say that it was repairing an old lin1e All of ithe old laws were intended to distribute land ownership widelyamong working farmers; all contained specific limits on theamount of land anyone settler might claim, for Americans havealways believed that to distribute the ownership of land widelyong independent farmers is to guarantee the preservation ' ffree institutions, and Americans have always hated and fear dland monopolies. In Pinal County, as in many other places, elaws favoring the small, independent farmer had failed miserab~y.

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illGovernment Projectnot wholly subject to the government's control. If they werestill reading them assiduously, the settlers could find that therevised by-laws, like the original by-laws, said in so many wordsthat "control of the association is vested in the membership.But they knew that, whatever the by-laws said, there was sureto be some other document to the contrary and, although they: may not have been entirely reconciled to the situation, they ac-cepted it without a show of resistance. As a regional officialwould explain three years later in a letter to the Administrator

e time ~ese agreements were executed the members hadbut recentlY een removed from make-shift shelters to what no: doubt appea ed to them as quite luxurious homes. It is quiteIprobable th t they

would have signed ahnost any kind of anagreement to retain their status as members.

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CHA1?TERTHREESelectingtheSettlersIN MRS. THEONE HAUGEan experienced home economist and social worker, the FarmSecurity Administration '" had a "family selection specialist" forits Arizona projects. From among the thousands of low-incomefarm people in the State she would select 60 families for member-

ship in the Cas a Grande Valley Farms.Mrs. Hauge s job was a difficult one. She could not work outa trial balance on paper in the fashion of her colleague, the farmmanagement specialist. There was no way of knowing for surewhat combinations of human material would bring about a de-sirable result; everyone was entitled to draw his own picture ofthe ideal settler and inevitably every picture would be different.Even if Mrs. Hauge had known for sure what qualities to lookfor, she had no yardstick by which to measure them in an ap-plicant. None of the common psychological tests would have beenof much use to her, and, even if they had been, she would nothave been able to use them, for the Farm Security Administrationwas bound to take its poverty-stricken people pretty muchthey came; public opinion would not have permitted the govern.ment to supplement the means test with the Binet-Sanford test.Regional Director Garst and his subordinates regarded Casa

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:)1* The Resettlement Administration was transferred into the Depart-ment of Agricultue early in 1937 and re-named the Farm SecurityAdministration.


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Govfrrmertt Projectgotten anywhere, I might as well stay here, , ,if we can passably

and devote the next 40 years to getting my kids an education.


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We have nothing else to look forward to.MBS, CHURCH: I di~n t know that you knew that.MR , CHURCH: Well, I do.H the essential bases of the factionalism were indeed the statusfeeling of the settlers , their association of the project with theidea of failure, and their impelling need to express feelings ofguilt and to achieve status and recognition by capturing powerthen Regional Director Hewes, even if he should have succeeded

in hiring a high-class educator, might have found some un-expected difficulties in the way of creating a more democraticcommunity at Casa Grande by giving the settlers greater freedomresponsibility and power.

CHAPTERSEVEN

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~issatisfactilnTHE MOST STRlKINGFAiCT

about the Cas a Grande project is that it seethes with dissatisfac- Ition," Dr, Bernard Bell, a researcher for the Bureau of Agricultu~alEconomics, concluded after a month's study of the co~unityearly in 1941. "In spite of the provision of housing facilitiessup:~r-ior to any the settlers had before and cash incomes ranging1940 around a median of $7S0 with none under $600, discontentis widespread. . Over three-fourths of the settlers interviewedexpressed dissatisfaction with life on the project,Bell interviewed SO of the settlers and found only six whowould say categorically that they were glad they had come tothe project. An equal number said categorically they were sorrythey had come. "The remaining 18 expressed ambivalent feelingsor seriously qualified their statements," Bell reported, "Most ofthem indicated they would be 'not sorry' if certain conditionswere met, ranging from virtual elimination of FSA control . toexpulsion of half the membership. Only three settlers of the SO Iinterviewed were able to express unqualified intention to remairl Ipermanently on the project. Five expressed definite intention toleave in the near future. Twenty-two made qualified statements.Of these, 12 stated they would remain permanently if they mademore money, This was their only condition, Ten others expressthis and other conditions involving better cooperation onpart of the management~ of other settlers or both.In answer to the q1:lery, 'What would you consider a betterproposition than this?' 12 of SO settlers indicated that they wouldprefer to be operating individual farms, Ten indicated that th~y

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Government Projecttheoretical agreement, yet which at least are dear, and knownand efinable, All he would have to do would be to repeat, andating the more successful formulas. More than that,'o 0 repeWuld have a trained and unified and experience orgamza

g what was expected

and practiced in doing just thatsort bf thing, In a sense, all he would have to do to start a newsubsistence-homesteads program-provided it were ~o f?llortaIn mOdels already working, and be subject to certaIn c

I 3,1 eady agreed upon administratively~would be to ~tart gl

CHAPTERFIFTEENWhy

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orders, Then an administrative machine would go mto actiona'nd in the end would produce , for better or , for worse, moremodels of the kind of product that so far has, m the eyes of theadministration, worked out best."

TheyFailedNOW THAT THE RECORD

as been spread out it is possible to look at the Casa GrandeJqJerience as a whole and to come to some conclusions about it,. Y did these people-Waldron, Mott, Olivier, Sanford, Beatty,~oker and all the rest-behave as they did? It would have taken~nly a little goodwill, self-discipline and mutual respect to have' ade the Casa Grande farm a success of a kind that would have$sured security and opportunity for the settlers, Why, then: the face of these inducements did they fail so perversely and

i ib dismally? In this concluding chapter the interpretation that ias already been placed upon the behavior of the Casa Grande)ople will be brought together and summarized; it will then be: plified and discussed in an effort to find answers to thesepestions.The central fact in the history of Casa Grande is this: The~ttlers were unable to cooperate with each other and with thepvernment because they were engaged in a ceaseless struggler power, In part the struggle for power was "rational;" that is~rtain conditions did factually exist which reasonable men wouldi\ive acted to alter by changing the distribution and use, ofbwer, Assuming, for example, that a foreman was actually in-mpetent, it was "rational" for the settlers to seek to have him~laced, Similarly where a real conflict of interests existed (as

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SOME NAMES PROMINENT IN THE STORYOFFICIALS

Jonathan Garst, Regional Director, 1936-40Laurence 1. Hewes, Ir" Regional Director1940-43Russell Robinson, Regional Fann Manage-

ment Specialist, 1936-41Meyer Cohen, Specialist on Social Organi-zation and later Assistant Regional Di-

rector in charge of projects, 1941-43Fred Ross, Specialist on Social Organization

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succeeding CohenJames ~aldron, Area Supervisor for Arizona19f-41James n.. Shelly, Area Supervisor succeedingWaldronMrs : Theone Hauge, Family Selection Special-ist and Horne Economist, 1936-41Miss Gay. Elkins, Horne Economist succeed-ing Mrs. HaugeRobert A. Faul, Project Manager, 1937-38Ralph E. Beatty, Project Manager, 1939-43Edward Wildermuth Project Clerk andBeatty s assistant

Phoenix

Project

SETTLERSUSUALLY PRO-GOVERNMENT USU ALLY ANTI -GOVERNMENT

Julius S. MottHarry OlivierJohn Sanford

Harvey ThomasMartin King

Harry CokerErnest S. PerryCecil Hopkins

Bill Forbes~. O. Hennesey

Edward C. Banfield, Government Project

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