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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - IV. Economics - 12. New Blows to Southern Agriculture During the ’Thirties: Trends and Policies - 10. Social Evaluation of the A.A.A
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268 An American Dilemma
expressed in the price-parity and later in the income-parity formula. From
this point of view the A.A.A. was parallel to other relief policies during
the depression. Huge amounts have been spent for this purpose. The total
appropriations for direct payments to farmers during the period 1934-1941
has been estimated to be over $5,300,000,000, or more than three-fourths
of the total costs for all farm policies (including special appropriations for
land utilization, soil erosion, rural electrification, farm security, and so on).®^
In view of these high financial sacrifices, one could have expected much
more positive results for those within the agricultural population who
were in particularly great need. Yet, for reasons that we have stated, large
numbers among those most in need of assistance lost rather than gained
because of the A.A.A. More generally, as we shall now point out, the
benefits were not distributed in relation to needs.
The total agricultural cash income for nine Southeastern states, according
to certain estimates of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, was twice as
high in 1940 as in 1932. Nevertheless, it was still more than 20 per cent
below the 1929 level.®® There is no way of telling how large a share in the
income gains the Negroes have received. More Negroes than whites have
been made to leave the land, and those who left, of course, got nothing of
the increase of farm income or of A.A.A. benefits. In regard to wage
workers it can be argued that the higher cotton prices and the A.A.A bene-
fits indirectly allowed higher wages, and that this force on the labor market
was stronger than any adverse force due to the increase of labor supply on
account of dismissal of tenants. Independent Negro farmers have probably
come to share in the benefits rather equally with white farmers of the same
economic status, even if the set-up of local administration has not given
them much of a voice. Negro tenants have increasingly received their share.
The A.A.A. payments in these nine Southeastern states amounted to
about $170,000,000 in 1940, or 13 per cent of the total cash income of
agriculture for that year, and more than one-fourth of the cash income gain
in agriculture since 1932.®® The Negroes^ share in this agricultural relief
was by no means proportionate to their numbers and still less with their
greater needs. For every tenant and sharecropper had to let his landlord
get part of the benefit payments for the plot of land he was operating, and
the wage laborer received no part of it at all. And there are more white
landlords and fewer white wage laborers.
But this question of the Negroes^ sharing in the A.A.A. benefits is only
part of a bigger problem: the distribution of the A.A.A. benefits among
various income groups in agriculture. As we mentioned, the distributional
objective of the policy was defined in terms of some ‘^parity” for the
agricultural foptlation as a wholcy compared with other population groups
and with an eye on conditions prior to the First World War. Specifically,
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