The County Agent's Cotton Figures and the Agricultural Adjustment Act
Spring 1935, a cotton county in Georgia. Your county agent's annual report shows that 42 large landowners signed Agricultural Adjustment Act contracts cutting cotton acreage by about 30 percent and together received roughly $11,000 in benefit payments. Those same farms held 118 tenant families. By the end of the planting season, 37 of those families had been evicted, and 9 landowners used part of their payments to buy tractors. In a neighboring county, where the local AAA committee included tenant farmers alongside owners, only 4 evictions occurred on comparable acreage. A senator from the state has asked you, as a staff researcher, whether the AAA is helping the people it was meant to help, and what, if anything, Congress should change. You also have the act's stated purpose: to raise farm prices by reducing surplus production.
1. What conclusion about the AAA is best supported by these two counties, and what alternative explanation must you rule out?
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Conclusion: the problem is administration, not the act's purpose. The AAA did what it was designed to do - cut acreage and raise prices - but the payments went to whoever signed the contract, which was the landowner. A landowner who removes 30 percent of acreage has an immediate incentive to remove the tenants who farmed it, because the payment no longer depends on their labor.
The natural comparison. The two counties have similar crops and comparable acreage, so the difference in evictions (37 versus 4) points to the composition of the local committee. Where tenants sat on the committee, they could report evictions and contest payment distribution. That is a strong, quasi-experimental contrast.
Alternative explanations to rule out. (1) The neighboring county might simply have had fewer tenants; the answer must check tenants per acre before drawing a conclusion. (2) The tractor purchases might reflect an independent mechanization trend rather than the payments; the timing and the fact that purchasers were payment recipients make the payment link plausible, but causation needs purchase records. (3) Eviction could follow a bad harvest, not the contract. If both counties had similar yields, that explanation weakens. The defensible claim is that the AAA's design transferred leverage to landowners and that local administration determined how much of that leverage was used.
2. Was the AAA a sharp break with past federal policy or an extension of it? Explain using the evidence, and note what the answer implies about how you should describe it to the senator.
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Both, and the split matters.
Break. Before 1933 the federal government had never paid farmers to grow less. The AAA levied processing taxes to fund benefit payments, set production quotas, and treated agriculture as a national economic sector requiring management. That is a genuine departure, comparable in ambition to the National Recovery Administration in industry.
Continuity. The program reached farmers through existing institutions: county agents, land-grant extension services, local committees, and the credit and tenure system already in place. Those institutions were controlled by landowners, and Black tenants and sharecroppers were largely excluded from the committees that decided who received what. So a new federal program ran through an old hierarchy and reproduced its results. The two-county comparison is precisely the evidence for this: same law, different administration, different outcomes.
Implication for the senator's briefing. Do not describe the AAA as either salvation or failure. Describe it as a federal program whose effect depended on who administered it locally. That framing supports a concrete recommendation - require tenant representation on local committees and tie payments to keeping tenants on the land - and it also warns that any new program will inherit the same local power structure. It also explains why later legislation creating a tenants' share and, eventually, a federal role in rural poverty was necessary.
3. If the senator wants one fact to open a hearing, which fact from this record is strongest, and what would you warn against saying about it?
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Strongest opening fact: 37 evictions in one county against 4 in a comparable county under the same law. It is concrete, it is a comparison, and it isolates the variable the senator can legislate - the makeup of local committees. Numbers paired with a contrast are far more persuasive than a general claim that tenants suffered.
What to warn against.
First, do not say the AAA caused all 37 evictions. Some families may have left for other reasons, and the record does not show why each left. Say that evictions rose sharply on contract-signing farms and that the payment structure removed the owner's incentive to keep tenants.
Second, do not generalize from two counties to the South. The comparison is suggestive, not a sample.
Third, do not call the payments fraud. Most were legal under the act as written; the senator's argument is stronger if he asks Congress to change the law rather than accuse farmers of cheating.
Fourth, do not use the tractor detail as the centerpiece. It is vivid but anecdotal (nine farms), and it invites the counterargument that mechanization was inevitable.
The disciplined version: same law, similar land, different committees, different outcomes - therefore fix the committees.