The Eisenhower Administration
Dwight D. Eisenhower became President in 1953 and appointed Ezra Taft Benson as his Secretary of Agriculture. Benson favored a free market in agricultural commodities. Benson’s principal objective was to lower and ultimately abolish government support payments to farmers.
He did not seem to be the kind of secretary who would favor a federal rural development program. However, he selected True D. Morse as his Undersecretary, and Morse was able to convince Benson of the need for a modest program aimed at low-income farmers. Morse most likely strengthened his case by telling Benson that such a program could be used to indirectly criticize federal commodity payments by showing how they had not benefited low-income farmers. Benson picked up this idea and soon was fond of saying that "if we had spent half as much money and effort during the past 25 years to develop agriculture's human resources as we have spent trying to support the prices of farm products and control production, both farmers and non-farmers would be better off."10
In January 1954, President Eisenhower issued a special message on agriculture stating in part that "the chief beneficiaries of our price-support policies have been the two million larger highly mechanized farming units which produce about 85 percent of our agricultural output . . .
Special attention should be given to the problems peculiar to small farmers."11 This was the signal to undertake a study of low-income farmers, which Morse assigned to Don Paarlberg, an assistant secretary and economist, formerly with Purdue University, where an interest in rural development had begun several years earlier.
Paarlberg and a team of researchers formed a Task Force and spent the next year studying the problem. It soon became clear that the idea of rural development would not be accorded immediate approval within USDA itself. For instance, Calvin Beale, who later became USDA's leading interpreter of rural demographic trends, recalls a meeting in 1954 at which an official of the Extension Service informed the task force that his agency would not be able to participate in such a program. Beale recalls that he went on to say that: “The county officials who paid part of the agents' salaries would not tolerate any work by the agents in programs that might lead to development of local nonfarm employment (competitive with farm labor) or training programs for nonfarm employment or provision of information about nonfarm jobs. And that was the end of Extension's participation in that task force. Clearly, however, the message got through over time, and soon Extension Service was involved with more enthusiasm."12
Although the Extension Service did, indeed, eventually participate in the rural development program, this official touched on problems that would affect his organization for many years to come. USDA was not organized to deal with low-income farmers or the rural nonfarm population, and its agencies would need to be convinced of the need to direct more attention to these groups.
In April 1955, Paarlberg's Task Force published a 44-page booklet entitled the Development of Agriculture's Human Resources: A Report on Problems of Low-Income Farmers. The report began by pointing out that in 1950 there were 5.4 million farm operator families in the United States of which 1.5 million, mostly small farmers, had annual cash incomes under $1,000. The problem was significant and the approach to it, the report continued, must be primarily educational and developmental. Some aids and credit could be used to enhance the opportunities for off-farm employment, but it was considered that whatever was to be done "must be done within the American philosophy that each individual make his own decisions and set his own goals."13
The Task Force found that in nearly 1,000 counties, most of them in the South, Southwest, Upper Great Lakes, Ozarks, Appalachia, and the Northwest, one half of the farmers were dependent "on the income from small, poorly paying farms." In the South and Southwest, rural poverty was frequently associated with the presence of oppressed minority populations. (That language, however, was not used in 1955.) In other cases, the Task Force discovered that low-income farms were often found in areas which once had hosted rural industries such as lumbering and mining. When these extractive industries declined, many people were left without supplemental income or were forced onto marginal subsistence farms in order to survive. During the Depression the Farm Security Administration, which in 1946 became the FmHA, had assisted some small farmers to move from marginal land into new farming communities, but this kind of direct New Deal assistance to small farmers was no longer politically acceptable.
The report recognized that little practical aid could be given to older people "outside the range of welfare and social security services," but that younger farmers could benefit from vocational training, better credit, better management, and better information on crops and livestock. The report recommended 14 steps to improve employment and training opportunities:
1. Federal and State agencies should expand their extension services and launch an experimental rural outreach program in a limited number of counties to gain experience.
2. Private and cooperative lending agencies should be encouraged to extend more intermediate-term loans to worthy borrowers trying to develop farms.
3. The Farmers Home Administration should also loan more money "to supplement private and cooperative sources."
4. A State-Federal research program should examine employment, training, and farming adjustments.
5. In cooperation with USDA, the Land-Grant colleges should hold State and regional meetings to discuss adapting ideas to local needs.
6. State employment services should improve their services to low-income farmers.
7. The Federal Government should identify areas of rural underemployment and include them "as part of the labor market services to make occupational adjustments easier."
8. USDA should work with the defense industry to develop employment opportunities in rural areas.
9. The Federal Government should improve educational and vocational training opportunities by revising formulas for grants in aid.
10. USDA and the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare should set up pilot vocational training programs.
11. USDA and State agricultural colleges should participate in the White House's 1955 Conference on Education.
12. Rural people should be informed about how to qualify for Social Security. Inclusion of farmers under Social Security beginning in 1955 was an important step.
13. Government should promote better health and nutrition.
14. Private trade area programs and community development efforts have been effective. Farm, business, and community leaders should unite in efforts to develop their communities. Another important suggestion was that pilot counties be selected "in a sufficient number.
. . in each low-income area to cover the range of different conditions." In these pilot counties consideration should be given to "setting up county and community committees with a broad base of participation; assembling materials for analysis or planning through cooperative efforts by all agencies concerned; using farm and home management specialist teams to work with individual farmers; exploring methods of working with farm people of limited opportunities; and developing community programs and goals."14
In general, the report presented a concise and well-written analysis of the problem of rural poverty, and it still holds up today as one of USDA's best research efforts in the field. What it did not contain was a call for any kind of large governmental program. Obviously, such a recommendation would have been inconsistent with the market-oriented philosophy of Benson and Morse, although many USDA economists, holdovers from the New Deal era, would have supported it. Given this situation, the rural development program had to depend much more on exhortation and example than on federal money.
Morse’s Program Begins
The limited scope of the program was apparent almost immediately. In 1955, Joseph J. Doherty, at that time a junior (GS-9) public affairs specialist, was selected to run the daily business of the program. Morse attempted to get Congress to fund Doherty's position but the agriculture committees refused to do so, which was one indication of how the congressional leadership viewed the program.
During the next five years Doherty wrote or edited almost everything about rural development that came out of the Washington office of USDA, including the annual reports.
During those years he said he worked harder than at any other time in his life. Because his position was not officially funded, he kept his desk in the Public Affairs Office and recalls that some of his colleagues looked somewhat askance at him because of his ability to have direct access to the Undersecretary, despite his junior civil service status. In 1957 Harry J. Reed, retired Dean of Agricultural Economics at Purdue University, was hired to be the Coordinator of Rural Development. Doherty, however, continued to do all of the day-to-day work and saw Reed, who spent most of his time giving speeches outside of Washington, DC, only a few times. Garland Marshall took over from Reed in 1959. He had more direct involvement in the program but Doherty continued to do most of work until the end of the Eisenhower Administration.15
Morse inaugurated the program by holding several regional conferences at which the participants were encouraged to make suggestions. In June he appeared before the House Agriculture Subcommittee on Appropriations. To those skeptical members who did not see much new in his ideas, Morse replied:
"The program before you is a modest one. It is modest for reasons of prudence, because we will be learning as we go and we wish to build soundly on experience. . .
"I have heard it said that there is little which is new in the Rural Development Program. Of its separate parts this is undoubtedly true to a certain extent. But the coordination of these separate parts is new, the emphasis on a balanced vocational training program is new, the adoption of the farm unit approach is new, and the high degree of local responsibility is new.
Especially, the emphasis we propose to place in this program is new. In any case, we are less concerned with whether the program is new than whether it is good; we are less concerned with documenting its parentage than with charting its future."16
Morse said the program was limited by available personnel and "the restricted inventory of knowledge as to how we might best proceed." Therefore, he favored a cautious approach, one that avoided "over-selling" the program so that people did not get unrealistic expectations that USDA would solve problems that "go back a hundred years or more." On the other hand, he told them once the program had begun "we must not falter" and must show evidence of "forward motion."
In 1955 Congress passed an amendment (PL-360) to the Smith-Lever Act, which had created the Extension Service in 1914, authorizing the use of special funds for projects in lowincome counties. According to the amendment, the Service was to give “assistance and counseling to local groups in appraising resources for capability of improvements in agriculture or introduction of industry designed to supplement farm income [and] cooperation with other agencies and groups in furnishing all possible information as to existing employment opportunities.”17 Congress appropriated most of the funds requested, thus permitting the Service to hire 120 new extension workers. This was to be the only piece of specific rural development legislation passed during the Eisenhower administration.
As previously mentioned, Congress was generally indifferent to the program. For instance, in 1957 the Extension Service received an appropriation for $640,000. By 1960 that amount had risen to only $2,000,000. One of the reasons for the low levels of funding was the opposition of Jamie Whitten (D-MS), chairman of the House Agricultural Appropriations Subcommittee. In 1956 Congressman Whitten asserted that "the Rural Development Program, which was offered several years ago to help low-income farmers of the country, is another program adopted by the Secretary as a substitute for adequate farm income."18 According to Doherty, Whitten was eventually persuaded to accept some modest funding requests after the intercession of two of his colleagues on the subcommittee. Whitten, however, was not alone.
Many congressional Democrats suspected that "rural development" was a smokescreen to cut price supports and Benson's statements linking the two programs did nothing to dampen those suspicions. In any case, Morse was not worried about funding, preferring instead to go slowly with a pilot program.19
