ABSTRACT

In the agricultural depression of the 1870s, farm organizations such as the Patrons of Husbandry and the Farmers' Alliance turned from educational programs to political action in their search for basic changes in the economic structure affecting agriculture. Populists sought structural solutions to rural and urban societal problems, but Progressives sought government assistance for individual solutions to farm problems. During the Great Depression, radical farm organizations, among them the Farm Holiday movement, called for direct action by farmers to withhold produce and to stage a general strike. The farm security administration, launched in 1937, was the poor families' Department of Agriculture and the most extensive effort by the federal government to deal with the problems of the rural poor, subsistence farmers, and rural blacks in the South. Female farmers for the first time started their own general farm organizations in the 1970s to achieve independence from male-dominated farm organizations and financial security in agriculture.