The Kennedy Administration Picks Up the Pace
肯尼迪时期的快速发展
Dennis Roth
丹宁生·罗素
As a senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy had shown little interest in agriculture. In the democratic primary of 1960, however, he scored a key victory over rival Hubert Humphrey in the predominantly rural state of West Virginia. In the same year, Michael Harrington's The Other America focused national awareness on rural poverty in West Virginia and other Appalachian states. As a result of this book and the attention it received in the media, the need for rural development was seen by many more people than the handful of legislators and bureaucrats who had been its custodians up to that point. CBS's 1960 documentary on the plight of migrant workers ("Harvest of Shame") also helped prepare the groundwork.
作为来自麻省的参议员，约翰·肯尼迪显得对农业毫不感兴趣。然而，1960年民主党的选举中，肯尼迪却在农业大州西弗吉尼亚与对手韩伯特·韩福瑞的对决中，取得了关键性的胜利。同年，麦可·韩瑞生的著作《另一个美国》引发了全国对西弗吉尼亚和其他阿巴拉契亚地区（美国东部）各州乡村贫困的关注。这本书的出版以及其所引发的媒体关注，使得更多的人认识到发展乡村的迫切需要，而不再仅局限于乡村当时的监管人——立法者和官员。全国广播公司1960年拍摄的反映移民工人惨境的纪录片“可耻的收获”也对乡村后来的发展有所帮助。
Agricultural issues played an important role in the election between Kennedy and Vice President Richard Nixon, both of whom campaigned extensively in rural areas. The Democrats increased their criticism of USDA Secretary Ezra Taft, blaming his policies for huge farm surpluses and sharp declines in commodity prices. Consequently, Nixon attempted to separate himself from Benson during the campaign.
肯尼迪和副总统理查德·尼克松都在广大乡村争取选票，所以农业议题在两人的选举中至关重要。民主党加强对美国农业大臣伊子若·他夫的抨击，因为农产品的过剩供应和价格下滑而指责他的政策。览于此，尼克松在竞选中也试图与本森主义划清界限。
Despite Benson's unpopularity among many people, Kennedy's narrow victory came with little support from farm states. Kennedy had little knowledge of agriculture. Therefore, he wanted a secretary of agriculture who would leave him free to direct his attention elsewhere. He also wanted one from a farm state who supported the Democratic views expressed in the party platform and during the campaign. Kennedy considered several farm leaders but in the end chose Orville Freeman, who had nominated Kennedy at the Democratic National Convention and who had just lost his bid for a fourth term as governor of Minnesota. Freeman had worked on his grandfather's farm while growing up but was a lawyer by education and profession and did not have any direct connections to agriculture. In fact, his lack of close ties to agriculture was a point in his favor because Kennedy thought he might offer a fresh perspective. Like Kennedy and several other members of the Cabinet, Freeman was a relatively youthful veteran of World War II, and at 42 was the youngest Secretary of Agriculture up to that time.35 Freeman soon displayed a keen interest in rural development. Of course, like all Secretaries of Agriculture, he had to spend most of his time on price support and other farm issues, but he often said he preferred to work on rural development.
尽管本森在很多人中不受欢迎，然而略占优势的肯尼迪也没能得到各农业州的支持。肯尼迪对于农业几乎一无所知。所以，他希望能够有一位农业部长可以让他分身出来，把精力投放在其他领域。他也需要一个出身农业州，并且支持民主党在选举和党章中的所表述的立场。肯尼迪考虑了几个农业领袖的人选，但最终选择了欧伟利·弗里曼。他曾在民主党全国大会中提名过肯尼迪，弗里曼刚刚放弃角逐明尼苏达州长的第四个任期。虽然绅里曼在成长过程中曾在其祖父的农场工作过，但他接受的教育和从事的工作仍然是律师，他与农村并无直接联系。事实上，他与农村缺乏紧密联系，反而成为他的一个优势，因为肯尼迪认为，这样他可能会带来一种全新的视角。与肯尼迪以及其他一些内阁成员一样，弗里曼也是二战士兵中相对较为年轻的，并且在此后其42岁的时成为当时最年轻的农业部长。弗里曼很快显示出对农村发展的极大热情。当然，与所有的农业部长一样，他必须得花大部分时间在支持农产品价格以及其他农业事务上面，但他常说，自己更愿意致力于推动农村的发展。
One of the first things done under Freeman was to change the name of the Rural Development Program to the Rural Areas Development Program. Part of the reason for the name change was the tendency of a new administration to take credit for a program as though it had just created it. Most of the files from the old program were discarded in 1961,36 and for many years thereafter, former Undersecretary Morse expressed disappointment that his work had been ignored by his Democratic successors. On the other hand, the new Administration could claim with some justification that the addition of the word "Areas" was more than just a nominal change. It signaled that it wished to move beyond the cheerleading approach of its predecessor and to become more directly involved through grants, loans, and technical assistance to rural areas.
弗里曼最开始的几项举措之一，就是将“农村发展计划”更名为“农村区域发展计划”。更名部分程度上是因为，当时的新内阁倾向于支持新提出的计划。1961年，大部分上任政府的计划都被搁浅。以至于多年以后，前农业部副部长莫斯说，他的民主党继任者对他曾付出的努力视而不见，这让他感非常失望。而另一方面，新内阁则可以宣称在计划名称中加入“区域”二字是应该的，因为这将不只是字面上的变化。它将预示着新内阁要超越只说不做的前任内客，直接推动农村财拨款、贷款以及技术协助。
Area Redevelopment Administration (ARA)
区域基础设施现代化建设
During the Eisenhower administration Senator Paul Douglas (D-IL) had sponsored rural area redevelopment bills that had been vetoed, and this became a campaign issue during the 1960 election. The passage of the Area Redevelopment Act (ARA) of 1961, which covered both urban and rural areas, was one of the earliest legislative victories for the new Kennedy administration.37
艾森豪威尔执政时期，参议员保罗·道格拉斯曾发起过农村基础设施现代化建设的提案，但遭到否决。这在1960年的选举中成为一项竞选议题。1967年，城乡区域基础设施现代化建设法案的通过，是肯尼迪执政时期最早的立法胜利之一。
The ARA authorized grants for localities to develop infrastructure, including water, street, and sewer improvements, as well as business loans. Urban areas were required to show that they had experienced at least six percent unemployment for several years to qualify for help, while rural areas became eligible for assistance if they had a high incidence of low income families and sustained unemployment.
区域基础设施现代化建设法案授权向部分地区进行财政拨款和商业贷款，以帮助它们进行包括饮水系统、公路交通、排水系统改善等在内的基础设施建设。法案帮助的对象是那些多年来失业率在6%以上的城市，以及低收入家庭比例很高且失业率居高不下的农村。
Douglas' draft bill had provided for an independent development agency for depressed areas, but the Kennedy White House insisted it be placed in the Department of Commerce. USDA had strong misgivings about this decision, but was only able to get authority to exercise a share of the administrative duties within rural areas.38
道格拉斯的草案提出建立独立机构以管理农村的发展，但肯尼迪政府则坚持让商务部来管理。美国农业部对此感到十分忧虑，但却也只能在农村发展的管理中分得一杯羹。
The Secretary of Commerce was given discretion to designate counties. In addition to unemployment and low family income levels, the Secretary could also consider existing USDA rural projects, the extent of outmigration, and existing public assistance. Although the criteria were somewhat flexible, it was generally accepted that the eligible counties had to be relatively "depressed", which irked leaders of some counties who did not want to see their areas tagged with this label even if it meant the infusion of Federal monies.
商务部长被授权决定进行援助的乡镇。除了失业率和低收入家庭数量，他还可以参考正在进行中的农业部相关计划、人口迁出的程度以及已有的政府援助。虽然判定的标准多少是有弹性的，但一般而言，那些符合条件的乡镇必须是相对“贫困的”。这让一些乡镇领导感到为难，因为即使可以得到联邦政府的资助，他们也不想让自己的乡镇戴上“贫困乡镇”的帽子。
At first, USDA refused to cooperate in designating eligible counties and thus ARA was forced to make decisions from faulty or incomplete data. Based on information it had, ARA chose 300 rural counties in addition to the 230 counties that had been in the Rural Development Program at the end of 1960. Many of these counties, it turned out later, were not "depressed" under the terms of the Act.39
起初，农业部拒绝在甄选援助乡镇方面进行合作，法案的援助对象被迫根据不完善的相关数据来决定。1960年底，根据其所得到的数据，法案挑选了230个城镇和300个乡村作为乡镇发展计划的援助对象。后来证实，其中有许多乡镇并不符合法案所规定的“贫困”标准。
Within a few months, however, USDA began to cooperate with ARA. It organized the county rural development committees that submitted proposals through the national Rural Development Committee in USDA's Washington, DC office to the Department of Commerce. Generally the ARA funded proposals that USDA supported.40
ARA lasted for only four years (1961-1965) and during that period came under increasing criticism. Business groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce protested government interference in private business decisions. Labor unions objected that business was being encouraged to locate in areas where unions were weak or nonexistent. Southern supporters turned against the ARA as the civil rights campaign gathered momentum. And, as previously mentioned, local groups sometimes disliked being designated "depressed" and asked that their regions be removed from the list.41
By 1964, the 530 rural counties originally designated for ARA assistance had increased to nearly 1,000, but financial assistance was not increased proportionately. Nevertheless, ARA claimed to have financed 316 projects (as of 1964) that directly created more than 40,000 jobs.42
In 1962, only $170 million of the $390 million authorized was actually appropriated, and even in spending this amount ARA was limited by administrative delays and tepid support from the Commerce Department. By 1963, opposition and criticism had become stronger and the House of Representatives refused to appropriate any money for the next fiscal year.43
In addition to ARA, the Food and Agriculture Act was passed in 1962. One of its provisions permitted USDA to make and insure loans of up to $1 million for rural water systems, which USDA believed was “the key that unlocks the door to industrial development."44
RAD and TAPs
The cornerstone of all the USDA programs of the next several years was the local Rural Areas Development (RAD) committees, which were usually composed of business and political leaders. The Extension Service was responsible for organizational and educational leadership.
Overseeing these committees was the Office of Rural Areas Development (ORAD), consisting of a Director (Almon Turley Mace) and five "field representatives" who were actually headquartered in Washington, DC. ORAD began as a liaison between USDA agencies that furnished information to ARA and the Commerce Department but soon grew into acting as a general clearinghouse for information on federal programs available for rural needy and rural development.45
ORAD had a staff of 26 professionals, many of whom were paid out of ARA funds. For the most part, they were a highly dedicated and energetic group and many look back on their years with ORAD (and its successor the Rural Community Development Service) as the high point of their careers.46 Unlike most Washington-based employees of USDA, the staff of ORAD had frequent contact with rural people and could often see the beneficial results of their work.
Morale remained high among the staff because they felt they were actually "doing something to help people."
Rural Areas Development Program Goals
In the early days of the Rural Areas Development Program, a USDA official identified eight ambitious goals:
"1. To preserve and improve the family pattern of American agriculture.
2. To increase the income of people living in rural America -- per person and per family -- and to eliminate the causes of underemployment.
3. To expand more rapidly the job opportunities by stimulating investments in rural America. . .
4. To develop rapidly but in an orderly way a wide range of outdoor recreational opportunities. . .
5. To readjust land use, nationwide, to achieve a balance so that each acre and resource are used for purposes to which they are adapted, and to meet national needs.
6. To provide appropriate services and adequate financial support for the protection, development, and management of our soil, water, forest, fish and wildlife, and open spaces.
7. To improve existing rural community facilities and institutions and where needed to build new ones so that people in our rural areas are assured pure water supplies, first-rate schools and hospitals, adequate streets and roads, and other services that are standard in a modern community.
8. To make continuous and systematic efforts to eliminate the many complex causes of rural poverty."48
The ARA act stipulated that 50 percent of the grant funds went to rural areas because the bill's sponsors had feared that rural communities would not be able to compete successfully with urban areas. One measure of ORAD's dedication is that rather than preventing discrimination against rural areas, the 50-percent requirement soon acted as a brake on aid to them. Without the 50-percent requirement, ORAD would probably have been able to secure a higher percentage of ARA funds for rural areas.
The philosophy of local initiative continued under the Kennedy administration and the Extension Service's county agents remained as an important force in the field. They increased their efforts to organize local groups so that by February 1962, 1,012 counties in 43 States had functioning local rural development committees. County agents also provided technical advice in implementing the educational component of redevelopment efforts. The State of Georgia was the first to have all its counties organized into RAD committees.47
The Kennedy administration generally favored FmHA, which also had an extensive system of local offices, and during the 1960s it expanded considerably its role in rural development. Because so much of the effort involved Federal loans, it was only logical to rely on this agency and its 12-year history of making loans to farmers. Therefore, FmHA took the lead in the new program of grants and loans involving the building of public community facilities authorized under ARA.
Title III of the Food and Agriculture Act of 1962 consolidated and expanded existing loan programs, thus allowing FmHA increased flexibility in helping a broader spectrum of credit-risky farmers to purchase land and amass working capital. In addition FmHA also assumed responsibility for community water system loans. A new Housing Act of 1961 extended the agency's housing loan assistance for the first time to nonfarm rural residents and providers of low-cost housing for domestic farm laborers. Thus, FmHA was able to expand its rural housing loans from less than $70 million dollars to nearly $500 million in 1965, or about enough to provide for 50,000 new or rehabilitated housing units.49
Because it had expanded its loan activities to encompass many aspects of rural development, Secretary Freeman gave FmHA the task of organizing so-called Technical Action Panels (TAPs) on State and district (multicounty) levels. TAPs were composed of local representatives of USDA agencies and local community members, and served as resource boards which local RADs could call upon for advice when drawing up resource plans. (A joke among USDA personnel was that it was called TAPs because “we’re on tap, not on top.”50) In keeping with the philosophy of local initiative, TAPs were supposed to act only when asked to do so, but there were undoubtedly some instances where they took the lead in promoting new projects. By the end of 1961, 151 TAPs had been organized and the number grew to nearly 3,000 by 1964.
The idea for TAPs came from a task force chaired by the Director of Agricultural Credit, John Baker (soon to be an Assistant Secretary of USDA) in May 1961. After several meetings with the group, Baker told Dr. Willard W. Cochrane, Acting Director of Agricultural Economics, of his hopes for an expanded USDA role in rural development.
"What we need is a blueprint of the best thinking from research studies bearing on this problem. It is our hope, as you know, to initiate, area by area, a series of programs to build buying power in the trade areas of rural America by starting to do what needs to be done to eliminate ultimately the causes of rural poverty."51
Baker told Cochrane the problem was too great to be dealt with exclusively by voluntary groups or a single agency. He pointed out that most USDA agencies were concerned "with some facet of resource use or farm and family life" and that they had the flexibility to adapt their programs to changing problems and needs. According to Baker, a chief objective was to obtain a coordinated interagency approach to rural development. He then proceeded to outline the TAPs’ structure as it would exist for the next several years.
"Such coordinated direction would be the function of interagency boards operating at National, State, and local levels to furnish strong direction and incentives for program formulation and action. The Rural Areas Development Board should serve this need at the National level. Some agencies will have a larger role to play than others, but there must be a clear-cut understanding of the respective roles and responsibilities of each agency. Failure in this respect will result in lack of real development achievement. Therefore, a primary need within the Department is for a thorough examination of agency functions and how these functions are performed in rural depressed areas."52
TAPs’ principal clients were the State and county Rural Area Development Committees (RADs). Although in many cases they were organized by agents of the Extension Service, USDA employees did not serve on them. Instead, TAPs members were to attend RAD meetings as observers and "to serve as consultants and advisers to the committees." One of the principal functions of the county RADs was to draw up economic development plans and forward them for review to the State RADs before going to USDA and ARA.53 More typically, however, the RADs undertook projects without ARA support.
The following is an example of such a project in 1962 from Laramie County, WY. The first tangible project submitted to the local RAD committee was the possibility of a potato chip and/or flaking industry. Extension marketing specialists were contacted and facts and figures for building such an installation were made available to the area’s potato growers. As a result of these deliberations, the RAD committee determined that rather than promote an expensive industrial operation, it would be better for them to form a disease-free quarantined "foundation seed-potato production area." The growers then organized themselves for this purpose.
Another RAD project was to upgrade meat packing facilities in the Cheyenne, WY area since an old facility with antiquated equipment had closed. A local business was able to secure a Small Business Administration (SBA) loan to expand an existing packing and processing plant, and this stimulated some local businessmen to take over and recondition the defunct packing plant. By the end of 1962, this plan was in "full operation and doing very well, both as a salvage industry and financially."
One town became concerned with its municipal water supply program. Its mayor, a member of the RAD committee, requested information on available loans and technical assistance for installing additional water storage facilities. The local FmHA representative was invited in and other sources of loans were surveyed and the information presented to the mayor.
After sharing this information with the community, residents discussed the cost of storage and possible other methods to address their problem. They found that by revising their pumping facilities, they could supply their potential needs without additional storage. The pumping revision was much more cost-effective than borrowing heavily to upgrade storage facilities. Several other projects of a similar nature were also being planned.
Perhaps reflecting the Extension Service’s continuing ambivalence with rural development work, the Laramie County Extension Agent who prepared this report for his superiors concluded that the story of the Laramie County Rural Areas Development Committee "is in itself an unusual success story," but that, on the other hand, measured in terms of large projects requiring vast sums of federal loans, "it may be construed as a complete flop. The reader is free to give it his own interpretation."54
