Soviet Collectivization, Capitalist Dreams 313The most striking proposal designed to reconcile the American small-property
regime with huge economies of scale and scientific, centralized management was
that of Mordecai Ezekial and Sherman Johnson in 1930. They outlined a ‘national
farming corporation’ that would incorporate all farms. It would be vertically inte-
grated and centralized and ‘could move raw farming materials through the indi-
vidual farms of the country, could establish production goals and quotas,
distribute machinery, labor and capital, and move farm products from one region
to another for processing and use. Bearing a striking resemblance to the industrial
world, this organizational plan was a sort of gigantic conveyor belt’.^24 Ezekial was
no doubt influenced by his recent tour of Russian collective farms as well as by
the plight of the depression-stricken economy. Johnson and Ezekial were hardly
alone in calling for centralized industrial farming on a massive scale, not just as a
response to economic crisis but as a matter of confidence in an ineluctable high-
modernist future. The following expression of that confidence is fairly represent-
ative: ‘Collectivization is posed by history and economics. Politically, the small
farmer or peasant is a drag on progress. Technically, he is as antiquated as the
small machinists who once put automobiles together by hand in little wooden
sheds. The Russians have been the first to see this clearly, and to adapt themselves
to historical necessity.’^25
Behind these admiring references to Russia was less a specifically political ide-
ology than a shared high-modernist faith. That faith was reinforced by something
on the order of an improvised, high-modernist exchange programme. A great
many Russian agronomists and engineers came to the US, which they regarded as
the Mecca of industrial farming. Their tour of US agriculture nearly always
included a visit to Campbell’s Montana Farming Corporation and to M. L. Wil-
son, who in 1928 headed the Department of Agricultural Economics at Montana
State University and later became a high-level official in the Department of Agri-
culture under Henry Wallace. The Russians were so taken with Campbell’s farm
that they said they would provide him with 1 million acres if he would come to the
Soviet Union and demonstrate his farming methods.^26
Traffic in the other direction was just as brisk. The Soviet Union had hired
thousands of US technicians and engineers to help in the design of various ele-
ments of Soviet industrial production, including the production of tractors and
other farm machinery. By 1927, the Soviet Union had also purchased 27,000
American tractors. Many of the American visitors, such as Ezekial, admired Soviet
state farms, which by 1930 offered the promise of collectivized agriculture on a
massive scale. The Americans were impressed not just by the sheer size of the state
farms but also by the fact that technical specialists – agronomists, economists,
engineers, statisticians – were, it seemed, developing Russian production along
rational, egalitarian lines. The failure of the Western market economy in 1930
reinforced the attractiveness of the Soviet experiment. Visitors travelling in either
direction returned to their own country thinking that they had seen the future.^27
As Deborah Fitzgerald and Lewis Feuer argue, the attraction that collectiviza-
tion held for American agricultural modernizers had little to do with a belief in