When Stalin Came To Casa Grande – Part 2

Editor’s Note: When Stalin Came to Casa Grande – Part 1 was published in The Prickly Pear previously. We suggest reading both essay’s in sequence and together. As enlightening as the history of this New Deal, failed socialist experiment is for Americans, it is a revealing historic marker for the importance of free market capitalism, the reality of human nature, individual sovereignty, and how progressive, top-down policy destroys human incentive and requires government force to proceed. The parallels to the current political, academic and cultural state of America are frightening.

 

In terms of intellectual trends in the late 1920s and into the 1930s, academia in the US, like today, was marinating in collectivist thinking.  Many intellectuals, writers, and the like, flirted openly with Communist Russia and the fascism of Italy and Germany.  We highly recommend Three New Deals by Wolfgang Schivelbusch, comparing similar trends in the US, Italy, and Germany. The idea was that central planning was a better way to organize society and promote human cooperation than let that be done through the free voluntary choice of the market and private property.

It was only after Soviet Communism began killing and starving people in mass and fascist regimes started doing likewise, did at least a few, began to have second thoughts.  But many took the position taken by today’s Progressives, to wit, “real” socialism has never been tried.  They never ask themselves why it keeps failing and evolving into tyranny.

A variety of collectivist experiments were started by FDR and his brain trustors ranging from cooperative housing to farming schemes.  In agriculture, there were attempts by government bureaus to restrict production, destroy crops to support prices, and give out plots of land to homesteaders or collective farms. In the case of Casa Grande Valley Farms, a full-on attempt at collective farming was attempted on some 3,500 acres in the Arizona desert. 

To be fair, they tried to deal with the farm crisis as best they could, but their lens to view the problems was the socialist lens, and thus the picture that developed was a collective solution to a pressing problem for over one million impoverished farm families.

The best study of this whole experiment became the Ph.D. thesis of Edward Banfield and later developed into a book. The book has long been out of print, although old copies have long been prized by scholars. It recently has been republished by the American Enterprise Institute called Government Project.

Banfield started as an ardent “New Dealer”, got mugged by reality, and shifted later towards conservatism.  He later became quite notable for critiques of urban planning.  His most famous student, James Q. Wilson, became influential in his own right and contributed ideas about “broken windows” police theory.  He also greatly influence Christopher DeMuth, now a leader in “national conservatism.”

Banfield’s accounting is riveting, for a book that appears to be on what many might consider a dry subject and the story plays out in Casa Grande, at the time, a sleepy farming community about 65 miles from Phoenix. At root, it is a study of how humans cooperate…or don’t.

Certainly, the program was set up to succeed, to prove the point of the central planners.  Instead, it proves quite the opposite, and that is the lasting value of this tale.

It was well-funded and supervised.  Families were selected by a “professional” sociologist”, the first hint that they stacked the deck for success.  At its peak, 57 families worked the cooperative farm.

Each person was provided a new house as pictured above.  Uniform as they were, they had a screen porch for sleeping (before air conditioning), multiple bedrooms, running water, indoor plumbing, electricity, and the most modern home appliances.  Each participant got a share in the profits of the co-op.

The background of many of the participants or “settlers” as they were called,  is sobering as shown below.  Many had been living in tar paper shacks or tents. Many were families with children.  Most had prior farming experience and they became participants because it looked like the best available alternative for them under difficult circumstances.  Unlike the Kibbutzim, they did not all have similar religious or philosophical motivations.

They were all paid what was a more than decent wage at the time.  It started in 1937, at first flourished, but started to fail and ended about 6 years later.  Most of the members of the co-op went back into poverty.

While Banfield’s book was first published in 1951, he was a first-hand observer of events, working for the government, and many participants were still alive to recount their experiences when he wrote his book.

What is left of the farm, is now new houses and shopping malls.  If you drive through Casa Grande today, you would never know it was there.

Why the experiment failed is a long story, but the outlines can be seen from the Pilgrim experiences.

Everyone got paid, whether they worked hard, or not so hard. There thus was no incentive to be exceptional. People treat their own money, and their own time, differently than they treat other people’s money or time. People have a particular affection for their own natural children, while still being kind to others. Compensation was the same whether you were a cotton picker or an experienced mechanic. There was no incentive to take on more difficult tasks or responsibilities. Everyone got equal pay. No one could get ahead because no one could be left behind. Yet, someone has to provide order and organization so people are not all running in different directions. Who and how is that determined?

In the case of Casa Grande Valley Farms, they had an exceptionally experienced and devoted “foreman” who was appointed by bureaucrats, but he soon rubbed people the wrong way because he had to cajole people to perform.  There were infighting and petty power struggles, not unlike your typical homeowners’ association, where a little authority can go haywire.  The government started to make decisions distant from conditions on the ground, did not consult or get legitimacy from those “ruled”, and discovered that people could not cooperate in a socialist structure.

Government officials were somewhat mystified.  Given the obvious economic improvement offered, why couldn’t rational people work to continue that common interest?

The real underlying problem is: how do people manage to cooperate voluntarily and peacefully with each other?  In a market economy, it is all voluntary, there are incentives to succeed, and each person strikes a bargain precisely because they think it is best for them and their family and not for idealistic views of “community”.

One of the more inciteful explanations of cooperation is the famous, I Pencil essay, which explains how complicated it is to make a simple pencil, yet the market coordinates the interest of people all over the globe to make a pencil and each profit from doing so.  Each does his job without even knowing the other partners in production. No free housing or coercion is necessary to engage people in the process of production.

Tugwell wrote the forward of the 1951 volume and noted that the experiment collapsed, “when to all outward appearance its chances for prosperity and success were greatest.” He goes on to say, “…there were some in the government who had the itch to create a real, live Utopia and there may have been others who supposed that capitalistic agriculture would be overthrown by the mere example of a successful collective.”

He goes on to suggest it failed because people simply are not good enough to make it work.  They have not evolved above their selfish motives.  He said, “It was character which failed”.  He did not explain what aspects of character he was referring to. It is almost like he was saying people are not good enough for my theories.  If they had been, the experiment would have succeeded.

This gets to the heart of the question: what is human nature?  If you have to force people to act and behave and believe a certain way, you likely are bucking human nature.  However, it is human nature to want to do better for oneself and family. Freedom allows humans to flourish because their clashing self-interests can be harmonized without force using the market mechanism.

Socialists go on to try to create a “new man”, by beating the nature they scorn out of people and replacing it with the nature they want to believe in. That is why socialist experiments either fail or they turn totalitarian.

In the case of Casa Grande Valley Farms, it was an expensive and educational experiment but did no great harm.  The same cannot be said of what happened with collective farms in Russia, China, and Ukraine.

The shame is that so little is written about this vast effort to change America, and what a miserable failure it was.  If the actual results of these programs were better known, perhaps our politicians would quit making the same mistakes over and over again.  It was money wasted for sure because the lessons were not learned.

The essence of the experiment in Casa Grande is that Progressives and Conservatives have quite a different view of human nature.  Conservatives want to make men better from the inside out (generally through religion and civil society) while Progressives want to change man from the outside inward by using the blunt force of government.  Change the environment, and you change the man, it is believed. But the government is an organized force, the opposite of cooperation.  People flourish with freedom, and when they are left alone to live their own lives.

What happened to Tugwell?  While he had serious problems with aspects of the welfare state, he fell in with fellow Progressive Henry Wallace and supported the Progressive Party after World War II, and then continued his career in academia,  where his theories did not have to collide with reality.  He died in 1979.

*****

Image Credit: Library of Congress