The American farmer was particularly hard mop up: years of bumper crops - with no overseas markets toward which to divert the excess - dispirited agrarian prices drastically. Indeed, even before the "official" beginning of the keen Depression in 1929, the agricultural sector was suffering mightily. When the municipal market began withering in the face of massive industrial layoffs that rippled from the four years' wake of the October '29 Crash, the drastically over-valued dollar resulted in farmers being forced to sell their produce for less than it court to gr
Bird, Caroline. The Invisible Scar: The Great Depression, and what it did to American life, from then until now. New York: David McKay Company, Inc., 1966.
The bucolic Adjustment Act, and the Agricultural Adjustment formation created from it, were the impulse indemnity of an administration hard put to address the crisis of the Great Depression. Like all of the programs and policies developed by Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, the AAA was fraught with internal contradictions that prevented a same record of accomplishment from ever being within its sieve. Administration procedures varied from region to region; changes in programs came about as a combination of political and administrative expediency in most cases, rarely as a result of fine-tuning in coordination with long-term policy goals.
Oddly, despite the almost revolutionary reach of government into the private sector that implementation of the AAA entailed, the agricultural programs that grew out of that period and endure to this day enjoy a generally bipartisan support - in the states where agriculture is a major concern. Although the record of success for this New Deal policy is spotty at vanquish, perhaps this political endurance is its best testimony; an indication, at least, that Roosevelt's decision to involve the government in agricultural policy was fundamentally in concert with the wishes of the American people.
Which is not to say that the final legislative product was uncorrupted by compromise - although just how much Roosevelt himself engineered those compromises is unclear. The so-called "doubting Thomas Amendment" to the Agricultural Adjustment Act, demanded by Senator Elmer Thomas of Oklahoma, authorized presidential powers of discretion over, among other things, the value of silver and gold similitude the dollar. That is, the Thomas Amendment gave President Roosevelt the right to devalue the dollar, adding an inflationary distortion to the Act's proposed boost to the economic recovery.
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