"The Cotton Divide: Haute Finance and the Farm Bloc, 1920-1929"

Efforts to re-establish a system for international trade proved fraught in the Interwar 1920s. An aborted attempt to resume the gold standard in 1920-1921 coincided with global postwar recessions, and the final resumption of the standard in 1925 proved equally precarious. Protective tariffs, such as the United States Fordney-McCumber Tariff in 1923, spread across the globe and compounded challenges. Though much scholarship has been written on the rise of the cooperative movement and orderly marketing campaigns, a gap remains regarding the links between international credit and cotton in the 1920s. Through the League of Nations agricultural and currency studies, trade journals, U.S. administrative reports, and U.S. Congressional archives, our proposed paper looks at the link between the international futures market and U.S. cotton production and exports prior to the New Deal.
Motivating this research is our belief, derived from previous research on U.S. agricultural credit reforms and the gold standard, that a division existed within the U.S. Congressional Farm Bloc over the McNary-Haugen bills. While Western Republican farmers who mostly relied on the domestic market supported the proposed “equalization fee,” we contend that cotton producers preferred solutions to improve exports and supported McNary-Haugen as a “theory of second-best” option. By focusing on the cotton futures market, cotton exporters, and politicians from the cotton South, we seek to explore how international factors beyond production explained the political economy of U.S. agriculture policy during the 1920s.