New Deal In South Carolina

10 Pages 2580 Words

the Civil Works Administration (CWA), the United Textile Workers (UTW), the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
The Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) created farm regulations. For farmers the federal government in 1933 offered the AAA, which provided subsidies in seven basic commodities to farmers who would agree to crop control (Lander 126). The AAA made payments to farmers if they cut back production. This drop in production of crops was believed would keep farm prices high (Huff 375). The AAA eventually put cotton, tobacco, and several other farm products under a quota system, whereby individual farmers were limited in the amount that each could produce. This was intended to cut production and eliminate large crop surpluses. The federal government would guarantee the farmer a minimum price for his products just as long as he did not exceed his allotment. Although grumbling arose over setting quotas, and the red tape ad inefficiency involved, many South Carolina farmers admitted that the AAA saved them from bankruptcy as cotton rose from five to ten cents a pound (Lander 73-74). On the contrary, the AAA had a negative effect on tenants and sharecroppers. The crop reduction program resulted in de facto eviction of thousands of Negro tenants and sharecroppers, no longer useful labor to their white landlords. Still, some of the landowning farmers at Promise Land realized benefits from the program. Their farms were small ones, and the amount of government money that found its way into the community was minute, but it was more than the farmers had before Roosevelt’s New Deal (Bethel 199). New Deal measures saved many landowners from bankruptcy but offered little benefit for South Carolina’s 102,000 farm tenants. In fact, between 1929 and 1939 cotton acreage in America was reduced almost in half. In addition, landowners were increasingly turning to tractors and other mecha...