When Stalin Came to Casa Grande (Part 1)

One of the pillars of Stalinism was the attack on individually owned farms and private property, and the forced introduction of collective farming. Stalin himself never came to Casa Grande in Arizona, but his ideas certainly did.

These ideas came to Arizona largely through university professors and Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and created the largest agricultural collective in the US as an experiment to test socialist theories about both farming and human nature.

Collectives have a long history in the US and elsewhere, and they all failed.  In the Soviet model, this failure was admitted, and thus the collectivization required force, terror, and starvation to “convince” people to operate properly in the collective environment.  But even with massive brutal force and the full weight of the state, in the end, they could not make the idea work.  Most food production came from a small amount of privately owned plots that represented about 3% of the land under cultivation.

Israeli Kibbutzim were propelled by similar socialist ideals, adding a dash of religion and ethnic cohesion, but they left out the coercion. Even so, most failed, people were allowed to leave and few members stayed for long periods, and state subsidies were still required to make the model work.  They “worked” within a broader capitalist economy.

The earliest settlement in America, the Pilgrims tried collective farming and it almost led to their extinction. Shifting away from this model, William Bradford the governor, saved the colony.

But let’s look back at Arizona in the 1930s.  A brief context is needed to understand.

In 1900, about 40% of the population lived on farms and about 60% of the entire population lived in rural areas, largely supporting the farm population.

Several mega trends caused a crisis in agriculture.  The introduction of gas and diesel-powered machines accelerated the downtrend of an existing trend of mule-drawn mechanization, and better methods of crop rotation and fertilizer, leading to a sharp increase in farm output.  This tended to create more supply than demand, which in turn caused falling prices, which made failure on small marginal farms frequent.  There was a jarring economic and social process of closing down farms, and the migration into industrial cities.

This created a lot of pain but also a lot of opportunity.  Many people who otherwise would have farmed, learned to pursue other endeavors and the broader opportunity that implies.

This kind of mega-trend shift in how a population works and lives, is always a difficult process, even in an authoritarian state like modern China.

World War I took most of European production offline, and US farmers stepped up with record production, record expansion, and record indebtedness. When the end of the war came and European farmers started to produce once more, crop prices fell sharply, and a painful contraction started in the 1920s leading to over 5,000 rural bank failures.  By the time of the stock market crash in 1929, the beginning of The Depression in the early 1930s, domestic agriculture was in crisis.

Franklin Roosevelt was elected President and he launched his “New Deal”, which greatly changed the country forever.  Agricultural policy was an integral part of this national transformation.

Adding to the difficulties, there were shifts in climate causing the Dust Bowl and forcing more people off the land.  You might have seen the movie or read the book, “The Grapes of Wrath.”

FDR hired a group of Columbia University Professors, headed by Raymond Moley, which was dubbed “the brain trust.”  The first man recruited according to Moley, was Rexford Guy Tugwell, a specialist in agricultural economics.

The good professor had long been a critic of private property.  As a skeptic of free enterprise, Tugwell stated, ” I personally have long been convinced that the outright ownership of farms ought to be greatly restricted. ”  He added, “…under intelligent state control it should be possible to introduce a planned flexibility into the congestion and rigidity of our outdated economic system.”

As Under Secretary for Agriculture, he was in charge of many experiments under the auspices of the Resettlement Administration.  He had a massive 13,000 bureaucrats at his disposal plus $250 million to spend to try to find places for farmers displaced from the land. As a result, quite a few “collectives” were organized by the Federal government.  Unlike private attempts at communal living, this put the socialist experiment into another dimension.  Never had so many schemes been launched with the resources of the state behind them, at least in the US.  But unlike his Soviet counterparts, he didn’t have the license for killing or imprisoning those who might object.

He had to convince officials and participants that collective ideas could be successfully implemented in a country that had long cherished private property and personal freedom.  The rhetoric was all about “rational planning”, where decisions would be made by experts, not the crude mechanism of private choice.

Like many New Deal programs, the government itself was increasing the displacement of farmers and thus had to dream up new schemes to deal with the effects of their own policies.

The experiment in Casa Grande with a large-scale collective farm, was just one of many costly ventures.

Tugwell, whose handsome visage eventually made a Time Magazine cover, was like so many New Dealers, a man of the genteel political left. Enthralled with the idea of central planning and the socialist model for organizing society, many American academics, having been educated in Bismarck’s Germany, embraced both fascism and communism.   Like many others of his academic generation, he had traveled to Soviet Russia, thought he had seen the future, and it confirmed his already highly Progressive left-wing ideas.

The problem was how to implement these ideas in a free country like the US.  The trauma of the Great Depression provided such visionaries the opportunity to try out their ideas and convince the country to move quickly in a socialist direction.

Part 1 of a 2 part series

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Image credit: the author’s collection, Library of Congress