boll weevil beetle probably entered south Texas cotton fields from Mexico in the late nineteenth century. Farmers and planters—and thus the agricultural bureaucracy—became alarmed, but despite the use of arsenic-based poisons, the weevil reached into all areas of the South by the 1920s and constituted a monumental threat to cotton growers. Its march across the South had the effect of driving planters—and thus their sharecroppers—into the arms of the land-grant institutions which offered solutions. Over time, the boll weevil became a powerful symbol of the region’s plight and, unfortunately, obscured the more fundamental problems such as white supremacy, soil infertility, and the destructive credit system that inhibited experimentation with other crops (Giesen 2011).
The passage of the Smith-Lever Act in 1914 created the Cooperative Extension Service and outlined an ambitious program for aiding farmers in an era when movement from farm to city was beginning to alarm policy-makers. Farming areas across the country faced this problem, but it was also in the very decade the Cooperative Extension Service was founded that the Great Migration of African Americans began to threaten the labor needs of southern planters. The new extension service provided matching funds for hiring farm extension agents in agricultural counties across the country but recognized the power and influence of the most powerful landowners—whether planters in plantation areas or the biggest farmers in non-plantation areas. As a World War I boom in agriculture was followed by a severe agricultural recession, the initial reluctance of county quorum courts in the South to provide the matching funds for extension agents gave way to a recognition that farm agents offered some opportunities for struggling farmers and planters. The appearance of the boll weevil just as the federal agricultural bureaucracy was taking shape in a new way worked to the advantage of planters in cotton counties. Through their influence with—or control of—quorum courts, they made certain that county funds were dedicated to the promotion of a program that served their interests.
The Cooperative Extension Service understood most land in the South was farmed by African Americans, whether sharecropper or small landowner, thus it created a separate black farm agent system. Black farm agents worked with black sharecroppers as long as white landowners were assured that the program they offered did not violate planter control over their labor force. Thus, the program outlined by the extension service for black farmers was not oriented toward helping black sharecroppers climb the agricultural ladder from landless laborer to farm owner. Black farm agents, however, also worked with a small but important cadre of African American farmers who held small parcels of less desirable lands (Reid and Bennett 2012). Black agents, moreover, followed the principles laid out by Carver and Campbell and focused on attaining self-sufficiency rather than the market-oriented program outlined by white farm agents.
The white extension service agents served as the face of the state land-grant institutions and the information they provided, but they also provided access to federal programs. The Federal Farm Loan Act of 1916 was designed to provide credit to farmers across the country. The program was underfunded, however, and in 1923, the Agricultural Credit Act offered short-term loans, usually designed to fund planting. It, too, was underfunded and little in the way of a long-term remedy for the problems confronting farmers. Nevertheless, the romance between farm agents and southern farmers and planters deepened in the 1920s as farm agents introduced these and other programs in attempts to come to the aid of struggling farmers.
White farm agents faced a fundamental dilemma in the 1920s, however. Even as they proposed diversification and a turn away from cotton monoculture, they provided planters and farmers with information about how to better grow their monocrop of choice: cotton, tobacco, or rice. Farm agent annual reports from Arkansas, for example, reveal their attempts to convince farmers to rotate cotton with soybeans, a crop that restored nitrogen to the soil (Whayne 1996). This made imminent sense, but planters and farmers were reluctant to embrace a crop that had no viable existing market and, more importantly, their long-standing association with cotton factors as their principal lenders acted as a powerful barrier to diversification of any kind. Cotton factors, who had contracts or relationships with textile mills, demanded that cotton be grown in exchange for advances. Diversification would have been anathema to them. Farm agents recognized the financial exigencies facing the farmers they served, and with federal programs providing too few funds for loan, and with an eye on quorum court funding and the reality of the power of the cotton economy, farm agents capitulated and offered farmers information they needed to grow better cotton and achieve higher yields. Even though higher yields in an era of overproduction only led to lower prices, farm agents had little choice but to give planters what they wanted. Through accommodating farmers’ demands, farm agents became an indispensable part of the agricultural community. By the end of the 1920s, however, efforts to pull agriculture out of the postwar recession had all but failed. Although Congress had passed legislation designed to boost the agriculture twice in the 1920s, Republican presidents had vetoed the bills. In fact, the legislation supported by the farm bloc—the National Farmers Union, the National Grange, and the American Farm Bureau Federation—was conservative. The farm bloc could not unite over issues like a protective tariff, something southerners stridently opposed, or production control measures (Whayne 1996).
Even as the depression in agriculture worsened in the late 1920s, a new environmental challenge arose: two natural disasters struck the South within the space of 3 years. The Mississippi River flood of 1927 brought devastation to farmers, and the drought of 1930–1931 led to crop failure across the entire South. Planters, however, learned they could co-opt an outside agency to serve their purposes. Their ability to manipulate the Red Cross during the flood and the drought, prepared them to accept a considerable expansion of the federal government’s role in their operations during the New Deal. The Red Cross served as a nonprofit relief agency independent of the government, but in the 1920s it typically included a high-ranking official of the federal government. Herbert Hoover, who was Commerce Secretary under President Calvin Coolidge, was that man, and he essentially directed relief efforts. Subsequently, as president in 1930–1931, Hoover used the power of the federal government to mount an unprecedented drought relief and recovery effort. During both disasters, the Red Cross worked closely with community leaders and planters to make certain that their needs were met, particularly with regard to labor. During the Flood of 1927, Red Cross officials erected camps for those left homeless by the flood, but that included a sizeable number of tenants and sharecroppers. Fearing their labor force would not return to their plantations, planters secured an agreement with Red Cross officials to only release tenants and sharecroppers when their planters signed them out. During the drought, a controversy arose over the dispersal of Red Cross supplies when it became known that planters were distributing them to tenants and sharecroppers as part of their furnish. In other words, planters exercised control over the relief supplies and used them to keep their labor force in place. Given that the national office of the Red Cross worked with local Red Cross committees selected by the communities they served, the structure itself predestined a local bias. When it became public knowledge, the Red Cross, responding to criticism and fearing a reduction in donations, issued a directive forbidding the practice. Planters expressed anger not at the Red Cross, however, but at the sharecroppers and justified the practice by declaring that tenants and sharecroppers were lazy and shiftless and that they would not work if given the rations without being compelled to return to their plantations to receive them (Daniel 1977; Whayne 1996; Barry 1997).
By the time Franklin Roosevelt was elected president in the fall of 1932, planters and farmers had been struggling with an economic recession for more than a decade. Many had become accustomed to that relatively new agency—the Cooperative Extension Service—and prominent farmers and planters had become adept at influencing the local farm agents to respond to their needs. The agents cultivated relationships with prominent farmers, business leaders, bankers, and their organizations and were positioned to be an important intermediary for any federal government programs implemented when Roosevelt took office in 1933. The new president appointed Henry A. Wallace, a prominent Iowa farmer and newspaperman, as secretary of agriculture. Wallace played a leading role in fashioning the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), operating on the principle that controlling production of certain overproduced crops would raise the price of those commodities, including the three crops most important in the South:
