I can remember, when I was a kid, Aunt Ellen, the Congressman's wife, had a picture of The Threshers. She explained that in "those days" people all worked together and were happy. I have never been able to locate exactly the days she spoke of, but I do remember we had corn-shucking (not "husking") when I was young, both in Texas and Virginia.

Also, we traded with a nearby farmer for hay-compress, which we operated with Nigger, a black mule, and Beck, a brown mule. Co-operation among the farmers has always been a stark necessity, but it had about passed out when I left the farm back in 1912 to go to the Virginia Military Institute.

From that year until recently farming has passed through revolutionary changes. For instance, driving up in the Northwest one time on the way to Mayo's clinic, I saw great machines, reapers and plows twenty times bigger than I had ever seen before, rusting by the wayside. They were the industrial and agricultural skeletons of the World War—the aftermath of the rise of wheat—and of selling to the hungry and warring nations, of inflation, and economic collapse. And there they sat, slumped in the earth, some covered near to the tops with wind-blown dust.

These problems worried every part of the government, but especially Rex Tugwell's Resettlement. With big ideas boiling in an imaginative brain, Rex put his outfit to work. At least, offices were opened and every manner of plan and idea was considered which might benefit the land or the human who had to live on it.

For indeed the organization set out to conquer a very complicated world—the "rural problem." I wrote to one official and asked for an account of what they were doing. He answered, "We constitute an agency of wide agricultural, economic and social objectives. We desire to co-ordinate the rural problem, and——" It was a three page letter, and some day I will put it in the Congressional Record, but what he meant to say was this: "We are trying to help everybody who lives on the land."

That is the biggest order in America.

Resettlement acted as a farm relief agency, taking the rural part over from Harry Hopkins. They probably saved the lives of a million or so hungry farmers—particularly when the drought came along and burned the crops and pastures of the middle west to a crisp. About half of the money that Resettlement paid farmers was in hand-outs for straight relief purposes. The other half they gave out in what they called "rehabilitation loans."

The idea of "rehabilitation" is that the best way to help a farmer who is broke and dispossessed is to help him get started farming again. Resettlement lent him some money to buy seeds and tools and fertilizer—that much is certain. Then they worked out a "farm plan" so he could pay the loan.

I have read some sweet and rosy stories about this (press releases written by the smart boys in Washington). And there was another case where seed money brought fruit and full payment in a few months—a borrower had bought a little circus with the money. But on talking to numerous farmers I find a great many who have no idea how much money they owe. Millions of dollars paid out, no doubt, never have been and never will be paid.

On the other hand, millions have been paid back by share-croppers and tenants who never had a chance before, and the record is substantial. Many got straight-out relief, which will not be paid back any more than city relief. But this is the only time in our history that the rural problem has ever been attacked at all. Considering the drawbacks and the size of the problem, I am surprised that Rex and his outfit did so well. I, for one, am willing to give Rex credit.

Resettlement did one thing that had never beeen done completely before—it made an agricultural census to find out how many farms there are on which no one could be expected to make even half a living. There is no use in handing out relief and loans to farmers whose land won't produce crops.

They found about 650,000 farms that should be taken out of crops because the land could never support the families living on them. Some in the South were ruined by cotton and erosion a hundred years ago. Others, as on the Great Plains, were only devastated in the last few years of drought. Many of them should never have been settled by farmers.

But practically all of this poor farmland can be used for other purposes, and doesn't have to be allowed to go to ruin. These farms cover a total of 100,000,000 acres. Resettlement started in by buying out nine million acres and putting it to proper use. Some of the land is being turned over to grazing, some to forests, some to recreation areas. They are establishing wildlife refuges on part of the nine million acres, and some of this land is even being turned over to the Indians. This has been done not only because the land was not profitable in farms, but also to save and improve wide areas that were being washed and burned and blown away, and to keep this devastation from spreading to adjoining lands.

Resettlement was supposed to help the poor farmers stranded on this wasted land to move to better farms. That is the idea from which the organization took its name, I suppose. But most of them are still sitting on the same poor farms they were on two years ago, broke.

But what is the reason of this? The reason is that there were just too many hundreds of thousands of farmers and tenants who could not be moved. Indeed, for actually resettling farmers Resettlement has very little to show—but with the money it had, it didn't do so badly.

The problem of tenantry has not yet been touched. It is a blight stretched over the entire nation. Resettlement has started to make a pattern. And this nation cannot call itself civilized until that pattern is developed.

I have visited the Resettlement work throughout the country. Speaking of those in charge, I find in one place a professor who acts like a fish out of water. In another is a real estate man who does not like his job, but has been forced on the government by influential people. In one Mississippi town the boss was a smart-alecky old maid, secretary of the Chamber of Commerce, who was disloyal to her Resettlement job, hated the people she was working with, and thought the thieves and robbers who had put up the textile plants in her neighborhood to exploit cheap labor were grand patriots.

I have seen a great deal of inefficiency. I have seen bad administration. I have seen waste. I have seen a vast dream started, with only a tiny bit of it accomplished. So. . . .

We have, then, Tugwell's Folly. But I am moved to think that Tugwell's Folly will eventually rank by the side of Fulton's. When Fulton's Folly steamed up the Hudson, people cried and prayed and screamed and thought the world was coming to an end. Tugwell caused the reactionaries to do the same thing. The idea that Tugwell tried to put over is just as essential as Fulton's—and more so.

Why has Resettlement been called a failure?

One, Rex got all the mistakes everybody made before him. The subsistence homesteads program, which was already washed up when taken, half-baked attempts to put the unemployed back on the land, and a basket full of trashy state rehabilitation corporations—all the programs and projects that nobody else wanted, were handed like hot potatoes to Resettlement, and Tugwell took the rap for them. To undo all these Chinese puzzles would have given any one a headache, much less to start it over and get it going.

Two, Resettlement got the hardest people to deal with—share-croppers, starved out submarginal farmers—the poorest and most shiftless, the most demoralized and broken down of our rural people.

I know of my own people in Texas and the South who do not know the fundamental rules of health, sanitation, building, planning for the winter, child-rearing. Going out among my own free-born Americans, I see a peonage and peasantry just about as low as anything I have ever seen in Mexico or Europe. There are millions of people like that, how many I don't know, but enough.

Smack up to the edge of the house grows the cotton with not even room for a garden. No vitamins. House no better than a tent; worse—for it can hold filth. Why this is I don't know. Maybe it is because the Machine Age rolled in, caused them to lose their independence, and taught them nothing else.

This demoralized, disorganized, broken mass was dumped in Papa Tugwell's lap. He got people who existed on farms they did not own, others who lived on land not worth owning; still others who had nothing but the shabby clothing on their backs. The land was ugly, hideous, and often treeless; school conditions were bad, social and religious life dull and the land taxes were increasing.

No government agency can help people who are physically and mentally under-nourished without monumental patience, with plenty of education and money. Considering the diverse and complex problems attacked by Resettlement, it did "as well as could be expected."

But I have been talking of the lowest economic levels. What of the ones slightly better off? I have been from farm to farm and have noted that there is no electricity. I visited a cousin over in Virgina, his house sitting on the side of a pretty hill. No electricity. An electric power line was not far off, but the cost of bringing electricity to the farm was prohibitive. That was the condition I saw everywhere.

Whereas I had no illusions on the subject in the first place, I lately had a friend of mine telling me what the utility corporations have done for America. He should have said to America. He showed me pictures. They were pretty.

And so (this is one benefit in being a Congressman) I called up Morris Cooke of the Rural Electrification Administration and asked him to make a "survey." What's the answer? Only seven hundred thousand of the seven million farmers in America have electricity from central generating stations. In addition there are another three hundred thousand that produce their own electricity at home. But even those who get power from public utility companies do not have nearly enough—many of them buy power only to run a few electric light bulbs, and can't afford power to do the big jobs of refrigerating, washing, and running motors for general farm work.

In fact, our country is one of the worst electrified countries for farmers in the world. My own state of Texas has population of twenty-two people per square mile, and about two percent of the farms are electrified. New Zealand, with a population of fifteen, is sixty-six percent electrified! About ten percent, roughly, of American farmers have power line electricity. Holland is one hundred percent served with electricity.

Here then, is another problem. Industry built itself haphazardly and it will be necessary to go back and tear most of it out, and do it over. Now we know agriculture is on the road to industrialization, and since we know in advance, we ought to plan ahead so that we will not repeat the errors of our city building and industrial development.

Much of the rural electrification will be established through co-operatives, as in the Scandinavian countries. Many of these have already been established, with success.

Considering this problem on a wide, general basis, it includes all of the people who live rurally and generally upon the land. It is a task to make a modern genius of economics, politics, human emotions and thoughts weep. It includes one great, gigantic plan and hope of our country. It is a superhuman job, and it will take leadership, with engineers, thinkers, brave men and women who will stay by their guns until the work is done.

What I have said concerns the nation as a whole, from the viewpoint of agriculture and the land. But there is also another problem—that of settlement and land use near cities, big and little. I can remember all the idealistic talk about getting people who work in factories to locate on farms where they could spend part of their time. I had thought of it before I came to Washington, as I told you in the first part of the book. Resettlement tried to finish a set of small communities that had been started by the Subsistence Homestead Division.

Down near San Antonio was the Three Rivers project, which Resettlement took over. It was placed in flood land, sold too high and where people couldn't get jobs. In one Mississippi town, the one run by the lady secretary of a Chamber of Commerce, nearly all the people had moved because the place was too far out, there was actually no electricity, no one know who had the real title, or, if they bought a place, how much they had to pay for it. The viewpoint of many who moved away was expressed by one who said: "I ain't going to stay lost way out in the country messin' with no carrots and onions."

Here I have suggested city problems that look like they can't be worked out. But there are thousands of people in America who do like to live in the country, and will willingly do so if they can have modern conveniences like electricity and good plumbing, and can get into town. With good roads and cheap automobiles, there is no reason why people should not enjoy country life if they want to, and still be able to work in the city and go to town for a movie when they feel like it. And if they want to keep chickens and raise prize tomatoes, that is all to the good.

But developments like that, whether done by the government of private business, have to be carried out on the basis of horse-sense planning. A lot of people who talk most about planning forget all about it when they go into action. They turn out failures like these subsistence homesteads that are based upon a perfectly good idea.

Near the nation's capital is Greenbelt Village. It's another Tugwell Folly that scares the back-lookers, but may yet rank as one of the accomplishments of the New Pioneering in America.