Remembrance of former AHS President Richard Kirkendall
Under the Influence:
How Richard Kirkendall Inspired Two Scholars’ Search for More Equitable Farm Policy
Mary Summers
Dr. Richard S. Kirkendall, former President of the Agricultural History Society and a prominent scholar of the agricultural New Deal and Truman administration, died in Seattle, Washington, on August 26, 2024. He had been Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Washington since retiring in 1998 as the Scott and Dorothy Bullitt Chair in American History. Kirkendall began his association with the Agricultural History Society while completing a Ph.D. under Merle Curti at University of Wisconsin-Madison. He presented “The New Deal Professors and Politics of Agriculture” as part of the AHS sponsored session at the 1958 Mississippi Valley Historical Association meeting, introducing to the American history community the ideas underlying his classic work on the New Deal agricultural policy, Social Scientists and Farm Politics in the Age of Roosevelt.[1] Kirkendall’s foundational study traced the influence of agricultural economists and rural sociologists in Roosevelt’s Department of Agriculture on the agricultural and rural programs developed during the Depression and Dust Bowl years of the 1930s. His work has guided students of the New Deal over many years. Mary Summers examines the influence of his writings on her own work and that of colleague Jess Gilbert, whose attention to New Deal agricultural policy arose from their interest in finding more equitable approaches to federal agricultural policy.
In the first paragraph of his acknowledgements to Planning Democracy: Agrarian Intellectuals and the Intended New Deal,[2] Jess Gilbert recalled that over the many years that he and I have discussed our mutual interests in the agricultural New Deal, we sometimes joked that they were simply trying to rewrite Dick Kirkendall’s Social Scientists and Farm Politics in the Age of Roosevelt. A “half-joke,” Jess wrote, because Kirkendall’s “classic study contains so much that we all need to remember….” In these notes, I will do my best to briefly expand on that theme and the reasons why Jess and I have both found Kirkendall’s work so critical in pursuing our own lines of inquiry.
When he and I first met in the late 1980’s, Jess was an established rural sociologist, focused on the political thought and policy proposals of leading “agrarian intellectuals” in the New Deal United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). Given his interest in pragmatic philosophy and the work of John Dewey, Gilbert’s key focus was on studying the sources of the “participatory- and deliberative-democratic ideals” of men like Henry Wallace and M. L. Wilson and how these commitments shaped their policy proposals over time. In an era when talk of economic democracy, much less democratic planning seemed utopian, “statist,” or worse, old fashioned, Gilbert’s goal was to write a socially and biographically grounded intellectual and policy history exploring these New Dealers’ focus on developing democratic, cooperative educational and planning programs. His acknowledgements and citations in the book he worked on for several decades underline the many ways that Kirkendall’s work provided him with substantial foundations for doing so.
The sources of my own interests in the agricultural New Deal were more diffuse. They were in large part a result of the fact that I spent several years in the 1980’s as a speechwriter for Jesse Jackson’s 1984 presidential campaign and Harriett Woods’ 1986 Missouri Senate campaign. During that time, I became increasingly impressed by the family farm movement’s organizing efforts and impact on local, state and national politics and policy debates. Throughout much of the nation’s heartland, this movement’s organizers succeeded in linking their concerns with sky-rocketing rates of farm bankruptcies, plant closings and their impact on the quality of life in small towns and cities. They spoke to the ways that increasingly intensive agricultural production, subsidized by American taxpayers, benefitted Cargill, Monsanto and fertilizer companies, while flooding markets around the world with cheap commodities, exacerbating rural poverty and environmental destruction at home and abroad. Their fight was for a Farm Bill that would maintain commodity prices at a level where farmers could make a living through supply management programs, together with restrictions on pesticide use and ploughing up fragile soil and wetlands. As opposed to millions of taxpayer dollars for farm subsidies, they argued for expanded government support for food stamps.
The family farm movement’s local and state organizing efforts, hotlines, food banks, penny auctions, FmHA office takeovers, rallies, concerts and media attention, together with their alliances with environmentalists, unions, and anti-hunger activists made their campaigns central to both presidential and Farm Bill debates. At a time when many Democrats as well as Republicans held up the mantra that “government is the problem and markets are the solution” with regard to every other issue in American politics, Senator Tom Harkin (D, IO), Representative Dick Gephardt (D, MO), the Black Congressional Caucus and almost every would-be Democratic presidential candidate sponsored or endorsed farm bills, supporting this movement’s key legislative proposals. They did not succeed in winning their supply management objectives, but their organizing efforts played a key role in establishing the first conservation titles in the nation’s farm bills.[3]
I was intrigued by the ways that the family farm movement’s calls for restoring the basic principles behind the New Deal’s farm programs and their relatively effective organizing efforts for a more planned agriculture economy challenged so much conventional wisdom about what was possible in American politics. When I started graduate school in political science in the fall of 1987, however, I was confronted with literature that argued that the New Deal had primarily benefitted wealthy farmers and laid the foundations for elite interest groups’ domination of post war policymaking. These arguments, I learned, had developed from the work of scholars from the 1950’s onwards, seeking to explain the growing power of big business and big farmers in the nation’s political economy.[4] Building on the critiques of radical New Dealers themselves (as well as their socialist and communist critics and allies), these post war scholars focused in particular, on the Southern planters who took advantage of the New Deal farm programs to drive sharecroppers and tenants off the land.
For the most part, however, this research targeted at explaining later twentieth century developments in American agriculture paid relatively little attention to debates among the agricultural New Dealers themselves. To a large degree, post war scholars essentially ignored the nuts and bolts of New Dealers’ goals and strategies for saving farmers from bankruptcy, putting unemployed people to work, addressing soil erosion, preserving public land, and beginning to address at least some of the desperate conditions faced by “poor people on poor land” as well as migrant farmworkers throughout the nation. All too often their accounts ignored the differences between the goals and values of leading New Dealers and those of the wealthy planters, big farmers and conservative congressmen who put an end to their efforts to expand the benefits of a more planned, secure, full employment agricultural and industrial economy to all Americans.
It was as a result of my frustration with readings like these that I felt an enormous sense of relief when I finally came across Kirkendall’s in-depth account of the work of social scientists in the agricultural New Deal more than two decades after it was published. Kirkendall’s engagement with the challenges faced by the New Deal department’s leaders went a long way towards explaining the dramatically different ways that the agricultural New Deal has come to be remembered. His book used the formal and informal writings of New Dealers themselves, interviews, Congressional hearings, and both government and personal archives to explore New Dealers’ political and economic thought, the coalitions they built, and the opposition that they encountered to their programmatic and research agendas. He also respectfully accompanied his analysis of the limitations and contradictions in the policies they promoted with an acknowledgement that they often noted these contradictions themselves and sought to address them.
Alongside my great debt to Kirkendall’s first book, his edition of Uncle Henry: A Documentary Profile of the First Henry Wallace[5] also contributed greatly to my understanding of American agricultural political thought, farm politics and the development of the USDA from the Populist era through the New Deal. These reminiscences of Uncle Henry Wallace, a leader of the Iowa’s Famers’ Alliances and founder of the Wallace family paper, Wallaces’ Farmer, embody much of the complex legacy --the religious, political, scientific and financial commitments to farming both as a business and as a way of life-- that shaped the thought of his son Henry C. Wallace, who was a founder of the American Farm Bureau Federation and a Secretary of the USDA in the 1920’s, and grandson, New Deal Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace, as well as many of their political allies and colleagues in the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, who grew up reading Wallaces’ Farmer on their families’ farms throughout much of the Midwest and West.[6]
Kirkendall’s foreword to Gilbert’s 2015 book notes that his own initial source of inspiration for his dissertation was that “Joseph McCarthy was the most prominent politician in the state,” when he was a second-year graduate student at the University of Wisconsin in 1954. Since McCarthy represented “American anti-intellectualism,” he decided that he would study the intellectuals who worked with the New Deal. When it became clear that this topic was too enormous, he limited his focus to agriculture, given that “the best material (he) had was on farm policy.” The title of dissertation that he then wrote over the next four years was “The New Deal Professors and the Politics of Agriculture.”[7] Another eight years of research and revision resulted in the publication of Social Scientists and Farm Politics in the Age of Roosevelt.
In this foreword Kirkendall goes on to highlight Jess’ analysis of the late New Deal’s cooperative land use planning programs as imbued with insights into how these programs represented an extraordinary implementation of the ideas and ideals of the department’s leadership that he himself had missed. Rather than any regret, however, he relishes the way that Jess’ book “enlarges (his) knowledge and understanding” of a story that he had once lived with “for a decade a half century ago.” He is clearly moved by their shared engagement with the thought and work of men, whom they had both studied and admired for so long.
Ten years after the publication of Gilbert’s book, at a time when anti-democratic, anti-intellectual forces are now even more dominant in our nation’s political life than they were in the 1980’s, or perhaps even in the 1950’s, I can only hope that in today’s embattled colleges and universities, there are students who will find it as helpful to read Kirkendall’s work as Jess and I did more than twenty-five years ago. His scholarship still stands as an example of in-depth research on the complexities of the agricultural New Deal that never lost sight of its evidence that brave, thoughtful individuals, working for the public good and constituencies whom they care about deeply, can make a difference in American politics and policy, despite all the forces that oppose them.
[1] Richard S. Kirkendall, Social Scientists and Farm Politics in the Age of Roosevelt (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1966).
[2] Jess Gilbert, Planning Democracy: Agrarian Intellectuals and the Intended New Deal (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015).
[3] Mary Summers, “From the Heartland to Seattle: the Family Farm Movement of the 1980’s and the Legacy of Agrarian State Building,” in Catherine McNicol Stock and Robert D. Johnson, eds., The Countryside in the Age of the Modern State: Political Histories of Rural America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001)
[4] Mary Summers, “Putting Populism Back In: Rethinking Agricultural Politics and Policy,” Agricultural History,70(2):495-414.
[5]Richard S. Kirkendall, Uncle Henry: A Documentary Profile of the First Henry Wallace (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1993)
[6] Mary Summers, “Recovering the Agricultural New Deal: Its Foundations, Legacies and Losses,” in Katherine Rader, Charles Palermo and Adrienne Petty, eds, The New Deal and Its Legacies, Nonesite, Issue #47, September 20, 2024.
[7] Richard S. Kirkendall, “The New Deal Professors and the Politics of Agriculture,” unpublished dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1966.