Fox on Phillips, _This Land, This Nation: Conservation, Rural America and the New Deal_

[eh.net-review at eh.net]

Published by EH.NET (March 2008)

Sarah Phillips, _This Land, This Nation: Conservation, Rural America 
and the New Deal_. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. xi + 
320 pp. $24 (paperback), ISBN: 978-0-521-61796-3.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Jon Fox, Department of Economics, University of Arizona.


Sarah Phillips' _This Land, This Nation_ is a dynamic and interesting 
look at New Deal conservationism. Finishing it, the reader is left 
with a clear understanding of the environmental and political 
consequences of New Deal agricultural policy, as well as a sense of 
the potential and limits of midcentury liberalism.

Phillips follows the New Conservationists through their formative 
years in the 1920s and into their heyday in the 30s and 40s. A group 
of New Deal politicians, the New Conservationists, who included such 
notables as Franklin D. Roosevelt, believed for the first time that 
conservation policies were an essential part of America's economic 
well being. They viewed America's economic problems as emanating from 
the rural farmer's economic problems. These were then tied to the 
proper use and fair distribution of resources, specifically water 
resources and the hydro-electricity generated from them.

_This Land, This Nation_ reads more like a very complete and 
thoroughly researched thesis than a standard history monograph. It 
begins with the premise that the agricultural policies of the New 
Deal were a novel departure from previous conservationist policy, and 
that these policies helped form the basis for government-sponsored 
commodity price supports and government-sponsored industrial 
expansion. It then incorporates sources and anecdotes to help support 
that position. Unlike a standard history monograph might do, _This 
Land, This Nation_ is not an exhaustive history of New Deal 
agricultural or conservation policy. And by not attempting to be just 
that, Phillips is much more able to focus the reader on the effects 
of specific New Deal agricultural and conservation policies.

The book is broken up into six parts. It begins with an introduction 
which discusses the previous literature on New Deal conservation 
policy and offers brief summaries of the upcoming sections. The 
following four chapters look at the rise, implementation, and 
transformation of New Conservationism. It concludes with an epilogue 
that looks at how New Deal policies and programs were both 
successfully and unsuccessfully implemented abroad.

Chapter 1 begins with the evolution of the New Conservationists' 
ideas, and the separate efforts of the men that would be united under 
Roosevelt's administration. Morris Cooke, who would later head the 
Rural Electrification Administration (REA), and his friend Senator 
Gifford Pinchot helped create an influential new agenda to make 
affordable electricity available to the small rural farmer. During 
the same period, land economists and soil scientists linked rural 
poverty to the availability and use of natural resources and argued 
land use planning was necessary to reverse the trend of farmers' 
overextension into marginal lands. These two separate lines of 
thought, one from the land economists and another from the public 
power proponents, would eventually coalesce into the New 
Conservationists' idea that rural living standards would improve with 
sustainable farming practices and equitable distribution of natural 
resources.

Chapter 2 begins as the New Deal is beginning. With an overwhelmingly 
Democratic Congress, the New Conservationists were in a position to 
implement their desired programs. It discusses the establishment of 
the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) during Roosevelt's One Hundred 
Days and how the TVA represented the first time the government not 
only built the hydro-electric system, but also embodied the New 
Conservationists' ideals by delivering the power through rural 
cooperatives at affordable rates to consumers. Unfortunately, as the 
chapter explains, the TVA never reached the poorest farmers, and the 
New Conservationists turned to reclaiming sub-marginal land to either 
devote it to parks or set it aside. An independent agency, the 
Resettlement Administration (RA) was formed in April 1935, and had 
the authority to purchase land, undertake conservation and land 
restoration projects, build resettlement communities, and make rural 
loans. However, because farmers accepted relief but not reform, the 
strategy of government ownership of land faced organized resistance 
in areas where crop growing had been successful in the recent past. 
This resistance led to the decline of land reclamation and the rise 
of soil conservation, water control, tenant assistance and rural 
electrification. The REA was formed in May 1935, and was a primary 
force behind rural electrification projects, working with 
consumer-owned cooperatives to help distribute power to rural farms. 
Between the REA and Soil Conservation Service, conservation policy 
became geared towards maintaining and supporting farmers on their own 
land.

That would soon change however, as shown in Chapter 3 which focuses 
on Lyndon Johnson's political experiences during the 1930s and 40s. 
Here Phillips uses the backdrop of the Texas Hill Country to show how 
equity was abandoned in favor of efficiency, and how the new 
hydro-electric dams allowed for a greater degree of rural 
industrialization. This chapter serves as a transition between the 
first two chapters of the book which discuss agrarian liberalism, and 
Chapter 4 which examines that ideology's decline in favor of 
industrial liberalism. It offers a prelude to the demise of agrarian 
liberalism as farmers who were unable to sustain themselves through 
agriculture on the land instead found work in munitions or other 
factories.

Chapter 4 extends this trend to the national level and illustrates 
how agrarian liberals, rebuked by the Supreme Court and losing 
popular support with farmers who wanted to increase production in a 
growing economy, gave way to a growing number of industrial liberals. 
Unlike their agrarian counterparts, industrial liberals embraced 
multipurpose river projects and outmigration to factory jobs as the 
answer to rural incomes, and envisioned a world where federal 
resource policy would help create an expanded industrial workforce 
and larger, more modernized farms. New Conservationism survived 
within the Democratic Party, and even though it had drifted from its 
initial agrarian focus, New Conservationism found new answers in the 
industrial decentralization that occurred because of the large 
hydro-electric projects and the manufacturing demands of World War II.

A concluding chapter puts the New Conservationist policies in a 
historical context and explains why some were successful and some 
were not.

Overall, this was a very good book, and for those interested in the 
immediate and long-term environmental and political consequences of 
government, and specifically New Deal, policy, it is certainly worth 
a read. Through extensive anecdotal evidence, Phillips (Assistant 
Professor of History at Columbia University) is able to bring her 
research to life and take the reader back to the political processes 
of the 1920s and 30s. In general she utilizes primary sources, and 
often uses quotes from notable New Deal politicians such as Morris 
Cooke and David Lilienthal to make her points. She colors many of her 
chapters with stories of the political maneuvering behind many of the 
New Deal programs, and does a good job of placing those programs and 
their effects in the proper historical context.


Jon Fox is a graduate student in economics at the University of 
Arizona. His research empirically examines how early twentieth 
century dam projects influenced the development and environmental 
characteristics of their surrounding areas.

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