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Dyess Colony, is a brief overview of the political history of Dyess and introduces the more important bosses associated with the colony. New Deal projects were largely under the operational control of bureaucrats who also maintained a lively political affiliation. The manipulation and shrewd politics practiced by Floyd Sharp allowed him to rise from a mid-level Arkansas bureaucrat to, arguably, one of the most secure of all the New Deal bosses. As other chapters will argue, the selection of the proper clients for the two New Deal projects was, in the minds of the bosses, critical to the potential success of the community. The transition from client selection by the Arkansas officials to the Resettlement Administration proved to be efficient, yet ineffective. The actual creation of the farms in the midst of wilderness swamps is remarkable, and its construction is noted and described. In this chapter most of the letters are attempts to gain full-time employment, the writers were trying to get on. The paternalism and supervision at Dyess was much more intrusive and severe than that at Tupelo; suspicion of government men and the inability to nail down a price caused consternation.

Chapter 6 opens with a scene from an Arkansas relief office, where a federal employee of the Resettlement Administration evaluated the program’s applicants based in part on personal religious priorities and the organization’s preference for mainline churchgoers. The chapter argues that a sizable cohort of southerners found the state to be the most effective outlet for their religious reform goals, while others outside the Protestant establishment—including members of the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union and the pentecostal Church of God in Christ—formed new alliances both with and in opposition to New Deal officials. Fundamentalists and a growing cadre of anti–New Dealers within the Protestant establishment found common ground as they pursued an aggressive political stance aimed at preserving the Jim Crow order and restricting federal power. These fractures and reconfigurations within the southern religious order represent the culmination of a decade of religious transformations in Memphis and the Delta.

This chapter discusses some direct-action or economic-action programs of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) “action agencies” from 1933 to 1938, before the New Deal. In 1933, the USDA's Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) initiated relief and recovery measures that raised farm prices and farmer incomes in an anticipation of an increase in the political-economic power of farmers. In 1935, the USDA's efforts focused more on the social and ecological reforms including the Resettlement Administration (RA), which promoted the subsistence of homesteads, rural rehabilitation, and land-purchase programs, and the Soil Conservation Service (SCS). The Service was tasked to preserve farm resources by concentrating on the actual treatment and handling of lands. Under the agencies, not only agricultural financing system and electrification system flourished, but also the Regional Adjustment and County Planning projects that established the relationship between technical experts and farmers in solving farm issues such as soil conservation and land-use changes.

This chapter discusses the Wagner Act, which excluded field workers and domestics—some 65 percent of African American workers—from its provisions. Still, field workers were not abandoned by the state. If New Dealers were unwilling to redress farmworkers' powerlessness, they were gearing up to do something about their poverty. The agency that would take up their cause was the Resettlement Administration and its successor, the Farm Security Administration (FSA). The FSA's mission was to serve the nation's poorest rural people, including those excluded from or further impoverished by the administration's recovery measures. The FSA took 10 million acres of marginal land out of production and resettled the families that had worked them. It created suburban “greenbelt” developments that were designed to increase rural income by combining cooperative farming and small industry.

This chapter focuses on Clarence Samuel Stein's contributions as a houser lending consistent support for a government role in order to more effectively engage the private sector while charting his transition to promoting investment housing as a preferable alternative to public housing. Stein and his colleagues enthusiastically welcomed the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt as an unprecedented opportunity to advance regionalism, new town planning, and worker housing. As a community architect, Stein favored a particular type of assisted housing—“investment housing”—a comprehensive design, development, and management approach to ensure the project's ongoing sustainability at affordable rates. This chapter first considers Stein's Hillside Homes project in New York before discussing the Resettlement Administration's Greenbelt Town program. It also examines Stein's role as consulting architect for the Baldwin Hills Village in Los Angeles.

This chapter chronicles the prominent role played by the Seeger family in contributing to the propagation of American folk music. Charles and Ruth Crawford Seeger were both great exponents of the vernacular music of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and, together and separately, made enormous contributions to the documentation of American folk music. Charles was also a prominent member of the Resettlement Administration during the Depression years, which relocated struggling farmers to better agricultural communities where they could be more productive. Mike Seeger possibly got his love of the banjo from Pete, who had a major impact on the American protest folk music scene. Seeger shared the passion his family had for traditional American folk music, but he was, perhaps, aware that he needed to play a distinct role in order to be set apart from his highly illustrious parents, brother, and sister. To begin with, Seeger rejected the formal music instruction that his mother tried to instil in him.