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This chapter shows how Progressives returned to the issue of farm credit distribution in the early 1900s and drew on European precedents to reframe credit allocation as a way for the central government to help people help themselves. American Progressives thus replaced their earlier, more radical farm credit politics with a more moderate vision of government-supported credit as an inexpensive way of supporting self-help. The chapter then considers the Federal Farm Loan Act (FFLA). Compared with other hallmarks of Progressive Era state building, the FFLA seems relatively unimportant. Nevertheless, it was a turning point in the use of selective credit as a tool of federal statecraft in the United States. The FFLA provided federal credit on a national level that was administered through public–private partnerships and bolstered by tax expenditures. By tracing the lead-up to this policy, one can see how Progressives forged a new array of cultural and organizational approaches to federal credit that would later proliferate across policy arenas.

In 1924, country bankers in Texas and Iowa founded tax clubs to petition for the so-called Mellon Plan for lower taxes on the rich. This chapter traces the tax club movement to the efforts of James Asbury Arnold, an organizer who took the skills he acquired from agrarian radicals in the Texas Farmers’ Union and put them to work to lobby for lower taxes on the rich. It shows that the movement caught on among country bankers who saw these tax cuts as a way to keep federally subsidized competitors out of their industry. The tax club activists hoped cutting taxes on the rich would eliminate the appeal of tax-exempt bonds—and thereby dry up their competitors’ funding stream. The tax clubs ultimately swayed key Congressional votes and brought about the largest cut in the top tax rate in American history in the Revenue Act of 1926.

This chapter examines the promise that national governments made to farmers regarding the registry of their land as private property—and how these rural people allowed their governments to do so because of the hope of obtaining farm loans on the security of their land titles. As the authors of the Swynnerton Plan theorized, the temptation given by the government is palpable enough to farmer or financier. This hope, then, of the rural people plays an important part of the popular lore surrounding the tenure reform in Kenya. The Lawrance Mission on Land Consolidation and Registration in Kenya noted in 1966 how misleading propaganda leads people away from the opportunities that registration gives them: the opportunity that every farmer can get a title deed and thereafter a loan to develop his field. Thus, this chapter looks at just how these promises have played out in reality.

With the start of the Great War, President Wilson called on Americans to be neutral in thought and deed. Barkley followed Wilson’s plea, but agricultural issues over cotton and tobacco that affected Barkley’s constituents prompted him to argue for and support bills against Great Britain, which used its powerful navy to enforce embargos on goods going to the Central Powers. Unlike the president, who seemed to be taking a vacation from reform, Barkley pursued a progressive agenda that included the “pseudoreform” of prohibition, the Barkley-Sheppard Act, the Keating-Owen Child Labor Act, the Federal Farm Loan Bank Act, the Rural Post Roads Act, the Federal Workmen’s Compensation Act, and the Adamson Act.

This chapter shows that deference to precedent and the early crystallization of the basic structure of the disaster narrative did not preclude innovation in what counted as a “disaster.” Instead, it defined the hurdles that a claimant had to overcome in order to be compensated as others had been in the past. In particular, a successful disaster story had to identify an entity or event that was wholly outside the control of the would-be victim, yet which was causally linked to an outcome intimately affecting his material condition. The chapter traces efforts to expand the role of the disaster relief precedent, beginning with its use to authorize the Freedmen's Bureau in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War through measures such as the effort to secure federal aid to education in the 1880, unemployment relief during the Depression of 1893, and federal farm loans during the first decades of the twentieth century.