688 Chapter 26 The New Deal: 1933–1941
significant. Within a year John L. Lewis’s United Mine
Workers expanded from 150,000 members to half a
million. About 100,000 automobile workers joined
unions, as did a comparable number of steelworkers.
Labor leaders used the NIRA to persuade work-
ers that Roosevelt wanted them to join unions—
which was something of an overstatement. In 1935,
because the craft-oriented AFL had displayed little
enthusiasm for enrolling unskilled workers on an
industry-wide basis, John L. Lewis, together with
officials of the garment trade unions, formed the
Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO) and set
out to rally workers in each of these mass-production
industries into one union without regard for craft
lines. Since a union containing all the workers in a
factory was easier to organize and direct than separate
craft unions, this was a far more effective way of
unionizing factory labor. The AFL expelled these
unions, however, and in 1938 the CIO became the
Congress of Industrial Organizations. Soon it rivaled
the AFL in size and importance.
PWA in Action Posterat
http://www.myhistorylab.com
The Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA)
Roosevelt was more concerned about the plight of the
farmers than that of any other group because he
believed that the nation was becoming overcommitted
to industry. The Agricultural Adjustment Act of May
1933 combined compulsory restrictions on production
with government payments to growers of wheat, cotton,
tobacco, pork, and a few other staple crops. The money
for these payments was raised by levying processing taxes
on middlemen such as flour millers. The object was to
lift agricultural prices to “parity” with industrial prices,
the ratio in most cases being based on the levels of
1909–1914, when farmers had been reasonably prosper-
ous. In return for withdrawing part of their land from
cultivation, farmers received “rental” payments from the
Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA).
Since the 1933 crops were growing when the law
was passed, Secretary of Agriculture Henry A.
Wallace, son of Harding’s secretary of agriculture and
himself an experienced farmer and plant geneticist,
decided to pay farmers to destroy the crops in the
field. Cotton planters plowed up 10 million acres,
receiving $100 million in return. Six million baby pigs
and 200,000 pregnant sows were slaughtered. Such
ruthlessness appalled observers, particularly when they
thought of the millions of hungry Americans who
could have eaten all that pork. Thereafter, limitation
of acreage proved sufficient to raise some agricultural
View theImageprices. Tobacco growers benefited, and so did those
who raised corn and hogs. The price of wheat also
rose, though more because of bad harvests than
because of the AAA program. But dairy farmers and
cattlemen were hurt by the law, as were the railroads
(which had less freight to haul) and, of course, con-
sumers. Many farmers insisted that the NRA was rais-
ing the cost of manufactured goods more than the
AAA was raising the prices they received for their
crops. “While the farmer is losing his pants to his cred-
itors,” one Iowan complained, “NRA is rolling up his
shirt. [Soon] we’ll have a nudist colony.”
A far more serious weakness of the program was
its effect on tenant farmers and sharecroppers, many
of whom lost their livelihoods when owners took land
out of production to obtain AAA payments. In addi-
tion many landowners substituted machinery for
labor. In the Cotton Belt farmers purchased more
than 100,000 tractors during the 1930s. Each could
do the work of several tenant or sharecropping fami-
lies. Yet acreage restrictions and mortgage relief
helped thousands of others. The law was a remarkable
attempt to bring order to the chaotic agricultural
economy. One New Deal official called it “the great-
est single experiment in economic planning under
capitalist conditions ever attempted by a democracy in
times of peace.” This was an overstatement. The AAA
was a drastic change of American policy, but foreign
producers of coffee, sugar, tea, rubber, and other sta-
ples had adopted the same techniques of restricting
output and subsidizing growers well before the
United States did.
An Attack on New Deal Farm Policiesat
http://www.myhistorylab.comThe Dust Bowl
A protracted drought compounded the plight of the
farmers, especially in dry sections of the Midwest.
During the first third of the twentieth century, mid-
western farmers perfected dryland techniques. This
entailed “dragging” the fields after rainfall to improve
absorption, raking them repeatedly to eliminate
water-devouring weeds, and plowing the soil deeply
and frequently to allow rain to sink in quickly. The
use of tractors, combines, plows, and trucks during
the 1920s made possible this intensive working of the
fields. Farmers planted the driest areas in winter
wheat, which required little moisture; in Nebraska
and Iowa, most farmers planted corn.
Then came the dust storms. During the winter of
1933–1934, bitter cold killed off the winter wheat
and heavy storms pulverized the soil. By March 1934
driving winds whipped across the Great Plains. In
April storms from the Dakotas belched great cloudsReadtheDocument