Plowed Under , livre ebook

PLOWED UNDER
PLOWED UNDER
FOOD POLICY PROTESTS AND PERFORMANCE IN NEW DEAL AMERICA
ANN FOLINO WHITE
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS Bloomington Indianapolis
This book is a publication of
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS OFFICE of Scholarly Publishing Herman B Wells Library 350 1320 East 10th Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
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2015 by Ann Folino White
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No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
White, Ann Folino.
Plowed under : food policy protests and performance in new deal America / Ann Folino White.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-01540-2 (pb : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-01537-2 (cl : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-01538-9 (eb) 1. Agri culture and state-United States -History-20th century. 2. Protest movements-United States-History -20th century. 3. New Deal, 1933-1939. I. Title.
HD1761.W427 2014
338.1 97309043-dc23
2014022234
1 2 3 4 5 20 19 18 17 16 15
For Marc and June
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Introduction
1 The New Deal Vision for Agriculture USDA Exhibits at the 1933-34 Chicago World s Fair
2 Milk Dumping across America s Dairyland The May 1933 Wisconsin Dairymen s Strike
3 Playing Housewife in Polonia The 1935 Hamtramck (Michigan) Women s Meat Boycott
4 Hunger on the Highway in the Cotton South The 1939 Missouri Sharecroppers Demonstration
5 Staging the Agricultural Adjustment Act The Federal Theatre Project s Triple-A Plowed Under (1936)
Epilogue
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
Acknowledgments
I received generous financial support from Michigan State University for the completion of this book, including a research leave sponsored by the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities, an Interdisciplinary Research Incubator Grant from the College of Arts and Letters, and a Humanities and Arts Research Program subvention from the Office of the Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies. Funding from the College of Arts and Letters-Undergraduate Research Initiative supported Magdalena Kopacz s translations for this book; Ms. Kopacz also gave freely to me important insights into her hometown of Hamtramck, Michigan, for which I am very appreciative. The College of Arts and Letters, the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities, and the Honors College supported David Clauson as my research assistant throughout the four years of his undergraduate education; David s remarkable intellect and tireless assistance made this book better.
I am also thankful to the American Theatre and Drama Society for the Publishing Subvention Award and to the American Society for Theater Research, the Alice Berline Kaplan Center for the Humanities, and the graduate school at Northwestern University for grants that supported my research. Thanks to Jarod Roll and Don Binkowski for sharing research and to Hannah Tesman and Matthew Campbell and Whitney Minter for opening their homes to me during research trips. Thanks also to Indiana University Press s reviewers for their deep engagement with my work and to the editorial and production staff for their thoroughness and responsiveness throughout this process.
Many thanks to the faculty of the Interdisciplinary PhD in Theatre and Drama Program at Northwestern University, particularly Robert Launay, Nancy MacLean, Susan Manning, and Sandra L. Richards. My graduate cohorts were the first readers of this project and remain my most trusted colleagues. Thank you, Amber Day, Christina McMahon, Jesse Njus, Scott Proudfit, and Daniel Smith. While I am also indebted to Shelly Scott and Stefka Mihaylova for reviewing many drafts, I am most grateful to them for their good counsel and friendship.
Several friends and colleagues-Caroline Kiley, Michael Largey, Melvin Pena, Sam O Connell, and Patti Rogers-offered valuable advice and critiques of this project at various stages. My colleagues Rob Roznowski and Chris Scales have served as important sounding boards and mentors. I am also incredibly grateful to Joanna Bosse for the open invitation to share ideas and for playing hooky with me. Many thanks to all.
To Tracy C. Davis, whose generous spirit, intellectual acuity, and practical advice have enriched my research, my teaching, and my life: thank you for telling me to wear a sweater in the archives.
The Folino and White families have sustained me, and so this project, in all the most important ways. They have taken great care to encourage me and to nurture and entertain my daughter June whenever this project required me to be away from her. To my mother and father, Anita and Dino Folino, thank you for teaching me the importance of perseverance and a well-timed joke. You have been my most important teachers and are the reason I became one. To my June, who requires the tooth fairy to sign for pick up, thank you for your impatience with and interest in me. My husband Marc ensured that I had everything I needed to complete this book. He is the kindest person I know and my truest friend. I am grateful that we share our lives.
Introduction
In all my experience in political life I never heard of anything so truly absurd as helping the people by killing pigs and destroying crops, by paying the farmer not to toil, paying the farmer not to work his land. There is no virtue in waste. There is virtue in relieving the poor and helping them, but there is no possible place where you can find virtue in waste.
-Clarence Darrow, September 1933


Famed attorney and leader of the American civil Liberties Union Clarence Darrow, like so many others, thought the 1933 Agricultural Adjustment Act ( AAA ) to be immoral: How could the government pay farmers to leave fields fallow while children rummaged in trash for food and thousands of Americans stood in breadlines day after day? How could President Franklin D. Roosevelt actively throw away food in the face of so much want? Darrow surely knew the currency of his rhetoric and likely believed in it as well. The cultural code of conduct regarding food and the nobility of farming were so deeply engrained in the American consciousness that the AAA seemed to flout basic American morality when hunger s call to obligation was most insistent, when access to food was truly at stake for millions of Americans. Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace anticipated that this New Deal agricultural program would face an unfavorable public reaction, 1 but he underestimated the fervor, ubiquity, and persistence of criticism leveled at the AAA . Throughout the 1930s, citizens from across the social spectrum denounced the program as immoral and unjust and did so in ways that exceeded the realm of rhetoric. They engaged in what might be called a theater of food in their protests to challenge the AAA s morality. The federal government also turned to food s potency in performance to convince the public of the AAA s benefits.
This book tells the story of the moral issues raised by the Agricultural Adjustment Act from the distinct perspectives of farmers, consumers, agricultural laborers, the federal government, and theater artists. It analyzes five case studies that map out the emergent controversies surrounding the AAA from its passage in the spring of 1933 (and its subsequent versions in 1936 and 1938) to the general adoption of its policies by 1939. Plowed Under begins by examining the U.S. Department of Agriculture s ( USDA ) promotion of the humanitarian aspects of the AAA through public exhibits at the 1933-34 World s Fair in Chicago. The next three chapters examine challenges to the official narrative, through protests by three groups of citizens, whose experiences with and complaints against the act were defined by their economic relationships to agriculture and the cultural significance of particular foods. They include the Wisconsin Cooperative Milk Pool strike staged by property-owning, white dairymen in 1933; the Women s Committee for Action against the High Cost of Living meat boycott in Hamtramck, Michigan, staged by female, working-class, Polish American consumers in 1935; and the Missouri sharecroppers demonstration staged by black and white landless/ homeless laborer families in 1939.
These competing narratives coalesce in the book s final chapter, where national struggles over food form the central conflict of the Federal Theatre Project s play Triple-A Plowed Under (1936). Sponsored, ironically enough, by the New Deal government via its Works Progress Administration, the play presents a panorama of the AAA s adverse impact, featuring scenes based on actual anti- AAA protests. By investigating both artistic events and protests, Plowed Under shows how the politics of representation influenced public policy and strategies for sociopolitical change. Along the way, cultural battles over whether the protests and the play staged the truth or were pretense elucidate the role American antitheatrical bias played in shaping public debate in the period, as well as its impact on the writing of history.
Although this book concentrates on federal leg