ABSTRACT
during the great depression, with a wave of bankruptcies threatening to collapse America’s rural economy, the federal government worked both to prop up agricultural prices and to feed the legions of hungry people camped out in cities or roaming the countryside. This was partly because government officials in the Roosevelt administration genuinely believed they had a duty to help America’s growing numbers of downtrodden and destitute, to craft innovative institutional responses to an unprecedented economic crisis. Partly, however, it was because they feared the costs of inaction to the social order.
