Was the Resettlement Administration successful

Children inspecting the photographer’s camera, Phoenix Arizona by Russell Lee, 1942

The Farm Security Administration (FSA) was created in the Department of Agriculture in 1937. The FSA and its predecessor, the Resettlement Administration (RA), created in 1935, were New Deal programs designed to assist poor farmers during the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression.

On March 9, 1933, the new president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, called a special session of Congress, telling them that unemployment could only be solved “by direct recruiting by the Government itself.” For the next three months, Roosevelt proposed, and Congress passed, a series of important bills that attempted to deal with the problem of unemployment. These programs became known as Roosevelt’s New Deal.

The Resettlement Administration (RA) was created in 1935 and to relocate struggling urban and rural families to communities planned by the federal government.

However, this objective was unpopular among the majority in Congress as it appeared to be socialistic to some and threatened to deprive influential farm owners of their tenant workforce. Its focus changed to building relief camps in California for migratory workers, especially refugees from the drought-struck Dust Bowl of middle America and the Southwest. Though this objective was highly resisted by a large share of Californians, who did not want destitute migrants to settle in their midst, 95 camps were built that gave migrants clean quarters with running water and other amenities. Though the program assisted some 75,000 people, they were only a small share of those in need and were only allowed to stay temporarily.

Drought refugee arriving in California

After facing enormous criticism for poor management, the Resettlement Administration was transferred to the Department of Agriculture in September 1937 as part of the Farm Security Administration (FSA). This department, established in 1935, had a set of responsibilities that included support for small farmers and the refurbishment of land and communities ruined by the Depression. Focused on improving the lifestyle of sharecroppers, tenants, poor landowning farmers, and a program to purchase sub-marginal land and resettle them on government-owned group farms, this program also had its critics. One of the largest – Farm Bureau, strongly opposed the FSA as an experiment in collectivizing agriculture.

In the end, the program failed because the farmers wanted ownership, and when the United States entered World War II in 1941, millions of jobs were available in the cities. By 1943, Congress greatly reduced FSA’s activities and transferred its remaining responsibilities to the Office of War Information. the following year

During the FSA’s existence was a small but highly influential photography program that portrayed the challenges of rural poverty. The program was managed by Roy Stryker, who initially headed the photograph division of the Resettlement Administration. When that program moved to the FSA, Stryker went with it. Under him, the Information Division of the FSA adopted a goal of “introducing America to Americans” via a focus on photography and written narratives.

At first, the photo division focused on the lives of sharecroppers in the South and of migratory agricultural workers in the Midwestern and western states. However, the project’s scope expanded over time, and the photographers turned to recording rural and urban conditions throughout the United States and mobilization efforts for World War II.

Arthur Rothstein, FSA photographer, 1938.

To carry out these tasks, Roy Stryker employed a small group of photographers, including Jack Delano, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Gordon Parks, Marion Post-Wolcott, Arthur Rothstein, and Ben Shahn, John Vachon, and other well-known Depression-era photographers.

The Farm Security Administration (FSA) and Office of War Information (OWI) photographs were transferred to the Library of Congress beginning in 1944.

These many photographs form an extensive pictorial record of American life between 1935 and 1944. The RA-FSA took more than 250,000 images of rural poverty. About half of these images survive.

© Kathy Weiser-Alexander/Legends of America, updated August 2021.

Also See:

Dust Bowl Days or the “Dirty Thirties”

Galleries of FSA Photographers

The Great Depression

President Roosevelt’s New Deal

For farmers in the United States the Great Depression did not start with the stock market crash of 1929. Rather, it began with ever-falling farm prices that followed the end of World War I. The booming farm economy that had characterized the war years soon gave way to years of overproduction, falling prices, and unfavorable weather. Increased mechanization put many farm laborers out of work, and many small farming operations were forced into debt in order to keep up. Thousands of debt-ridden farms were foreclosed, and sharecroppers and tenant farmers were turned from the land.

The global economic crash in 1929 only served to further the American farmers' plight. By the time Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt entered office in 1932, almost two million farm families lived in poverty, and millions of acres of farmland had been ruined due to soil erosion and poor farming practices. Several of Roosevelt's "alphabet soup" agencies created in 1933 helped the rural poor. The Civil Works Administration (CWA) gave small grants and subsidies to farmers, and the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) provided relief to land owners and set up the system of paying farmers to curtail planting crops. The National Industrial Recovery Act created the Subsistence Homesteads Division (SHD) of the Department of the Interior. The SHD created model communities, moving urban poor to small plots of land where they would live in safe, clean houses and learn to produce enough food to become self-sustaining.

In 1934 the CWA was merged into another program, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA). FERA's focus shifted from relief to rehabilitation as the answer to the problems of the rural poor. The FERA organized a Rural Rehabilitation Division that provided loans for supplies, feed, and stock. The FERA also created plans to retire submarginal land from production and resettle the occupants onto more productive land, teaching them the most modern farming techniques.

In 1935 President Roosevelt consolidated the similar works of the SHD, the FERA's Rural Rehabilitation Division, and sundry other programs into a new, independent agency called the Resettlement Administration (RA). Under the guidance of Rexford G. Tugwell, the RA absorbed the programs of its predecessors and embarked on an ambitious plan to solve the rural economic crisis.

The RA consisted of three divisions: the Land Utilization Division, the Resettlement Division, and the Rehabilitation Division. The Rehabilitation Division provided training for farm families and administered the farm credit and debt adjustment activities of the RA. The Land Utilization Division was authorized to purchase ten million acres of submarginal land to convert to pasture, forest, game preserves, or parks. Utilizing FERA and later Works Progress Administration (WPA) funds, people taken off of the land were put to work planting trees, building roads, and making other land improvements. These individuals also became clients of the Resettlement Division.

The Resettlement Division absorbed the SHD and a number of FERA projects. The division was authorized to purchase land for resettlement as well as to undertake rehabilitation of submarginal land. The larger projects totaled 151, with numerous small-scale projects scattered across the country. The Resettlement Division embarked on a building program, constructing new houses and sanitary facilities for its clients in either rural communities developed by the RA, or on scattered farms, or even in some suburban/industrial communities inherited from the SHD.

In Oklahoma the Resettlement Administration's presence was felt most by the thousands of farm families who benefited from small loans and the technical assistance offered by the Rehabilitation Division. There were a few Land Utilization Projects in Oklahoma, in which submarginal lands were retired from agriculture and converted to new uses, including some parts of Lake Murray State Park, lands around Lake Carl Blackwell in Payne County, and in the Cookson Hills region of eastern Oklahoma. In the latter area a number of farmsteads were created and a large acreage of land retired, some of which became part of Camp Gruber and Greenleaf State Park. Throughout Oklahoma the RA helped tenant farmers purchase their farms by providing long-term mortgages with low interest rates. On December 1, 1935, more than thirteen thousand Oklahoma families benefited from the RA. On that date, six approved land projects involved 109,398 acres at an estimated cost of $873,000 for the land and an estimated cost of $1.1 million for development.

In 1937 the RA was transferred to the U.S. Department of Agriculture as a part of the newly created Farm Security Administration (FSA). Most of the RA programs continued under the FSA, but the Land Utilization Division shifted to the Soil Conservation Service. Only small projects continued in Oklahoma with no additional large-scale projects being initiated.

Jim Gabbert

David E. Conrad, The Forgotten Farmers: The Story of the Sharecroppers in the New Deal (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1965).

William Corbett, "The Resettlement Administration and Rural Resettlement in Oklahoma," The North Texas Historian 1 (November 1977).

Joseph Gaer, Toward Farm Security: The Problem of Rural Poverty and the Work of the Farm Security Administration (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1941). Harlow's Weekly (Oklahoma City) 45 (7 March 1936).

Paul E. Mertz, New Deal Policy and Southern Rural Poverty (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978).

The following (as per The Chicago Manual of Style, 17th edition) is the preferred citation for articles:
Jim Gabbert, “Resettlement Administration,” The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry.php?entry=RE032.

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