Capitalism and Agriculture: The Fate of American Democracy
For centuries, Americans have accepted uncritically the Jeffersonian invention of a critical relationship between small family farms and the integrity of our political system. Even as industrialization and shifting demographics pushed family farming to the margins of the modern agricultural economy, federal farm policy continued to assume that family-owned farms were the modal unit of production and the appropriate beneficiaries of a billion-dollar system of benefits and compensation. Historians lately have begun to interrogate the roots of capitalism by examining the history of slavery. But slavery itself was in turn embedded in agrarian social and economic structures. This essay contributes to and extends that new historiographical line of inquiry by reconsidering the place of the family farm, and farm size more broadly, in the transformation of American agriculture in the twentieth century. I use the 1945 repeal of a key plank of the New Deal’s agricultural platform—the Farm Security Administration—to show how strongly Congress believed that the key to maintaining democracy was to encourage fee simple ownership. What resulted from that politically-inflected decision was the encouragement of state structures that slowly but firmly discouraged small-scale, non-ownership farming. I conclude with observations about the sustainability of the Jeffersonian assumption about farm size and democracy.
