334 Agricultural Revolutions and Change
18 For a fascinating and more complete account of the Campbell enterprise, see ‘The Campbell
Farm Corporation’, chap. 5, ibid. It’s worth adding here that the economic depression for agricul-
ture in the United States began at the end of World War I, not in 1930. The time was thus ripe
for bold experimentation, and cost of buying or leasing land was cheap.
19 Wheat and flax are, in the terminology developed later in this chapter, ‘proletarian’ crops as
opposed to ‘petit-bourgeois’ crops.
20 Fitzgerald, Yeoman No More, chap. 4, pp. 15–17.
21 See above, nn. 14 and 18.
22 Another such farm, and one with direct links to New Deal experimentation in the 1930s, was the
Fairway Farms Corporation. Founded in 1924 by M. L. Wilson and Henry C. Taylor, both of
whom were trained in institutional economics at the University of Wisconsin, the corporation
was designed to turn landless farmers into scientific, industrial farmers. The capital for the new
enterprise came, through intermediaries, from John D. Rockefeller. ‘Fair Way’ Farms would
become the model for many of the New Deal’s more ambitious agricultural programmes as Wil-
son, Taylor and many of their progressive colleagues in Wisconsin moved to influential positions
in Washington under Roosevelt. A more searching account of the connection is in Jess Gilbert and
Ellen R. Baker, ‘Wisconsin Economists and New Deal Agricultural Policy: The Legacy of Progres-
sive Professors’ (unpublished paper, 1995). The 1920s were a fertile time for agricultural experi-
mentation, partly because the economic slump for agricultural commodities after World War I
prompted policy initiatives designed to alleviate the crisis.
23 Fitzgerald, Yeoman No More, chap. 4, pp. 18–27. For an account of industrial farming in Kansas
and its link to the ecological disaster known as the dust bowl, see Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The
Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).
24 Fitzgerald, Yeoman No More, chap. 4, p. 33. The plan’s outline can be found in Mordecai Ezekial
and Sherman Johnson, ‘Corporate Farming: The Way Out?’ New Republic, 4 June 1930, pp.
66–68.
25 Michael Gold, ‘Is the Small Farmer Dying?’ New Republic, 7 October 1931, p. 211, cited in Fit-
zgerald, Yeoman No More, chap. 2, p. 35.
26 Ibid., chap. 6, p. 13. See also Deborah Fitzgerald, ‘Blinded by Technology: American Agriculture
in the Soviet Union, 1928–1932,’ Agricultural History 70, no. 3 (Summer 1996): 459–86.
27 Enthusiastic visitors included the likes of John Dewey, Lincoln Steffens, Rexford Tugwell, Robert
LaFollette, Morris Llewellyn Cooke (at the time the foremost exponent of scientific management
in the United States), Thurman Arnold, and, of course, Thomas Campbell, who called the Soviet
experiment ‘the biggest farming story the world has ever heard’. Typical of the praise for Soviet
plans for a progressive, modernized rural life was this appraisal by Belle LaFollette, the wife of
Robert LaFollette: ‘If the Soviets could have their way, all land would be cultivated by tractors, all
the villages lighted by electricity, each community would have a central house serving for the
purpose of school, library, assembly hall, and theatre. They would have every convenience and
advantage which they plan for the industrial workers in the city’ (quoted in Lewis S. Feuer,
‘American Travelers to the Soviet Union, 1917–1932: The Formation of a Component of New
Deal Ideology,’ American Quarterly 14 [Spring 1962]: 129). See also David Caute, The Fellow
Travellers: Intellectual Friends of Communism, rev. edn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).
28 Feuer, ‘American Travelers to the Soviet Union,’ pp. 119–49, cited in Fitzgerald, Yeoman No More,
chap. 6, p. 4.
29 Fitzgerald, Yeoman No More, chap. 6, p. 6.
30 Ibid., p. 37.
31 Ibid., p. 14.
32 Ibid., p. 39 (emphasis added).
33 Quoted in Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 232. An even more explicit recognition that this
was a ‘war’ appears in this statement by M. M. Khateyevich: ‘A ruthless struggle is going on