New Deal Policy and Southern Rural Poverty

NEW DEAL POLICY AND SOUTHERN RURAL POVERTY, Paul E. Mertz, hardcover with unclipped dust jacket (price never printed), first edition (according to publisher’s method), illustrated with 13 photos, 1978. BOOK CONDITION: near fine. The text block is in fine condition, with no tears, dogears, or marks. No bookplate or signature of a prior owner. Not a library book or remainder. The red cloth boards are in very good condition (bumped spine). The dust jacket is in good condition (light crinkling along top and bottom edges, tiny hole near spine, some white spots). 9 x 6, 279 pages, 23 ounces XX [From the dust jacket flaps] One of the persistent themes of southern history has been the region's chronic rural poverty. At no time was this impoverishment more pervasive than during the Great Depression when Franklin Roosevelt called the region the nation's number one economic problem. In New Deal Policy and Southern Rural Poverty Paul Mertz assesses the various programs successively developed by the Roosevelt administration to conquer this poverty. According to Mertz, New Deal thinking about remedies for southern poverty ran in three patterns. Some policy makers, especially in the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, saw parity prices for crops as the region's principal need. Others, especially in the relief agencies and the Resettlement Administration, were more cognizant of the chronic nature of the problem and promoted plans to rehabilitate poor people on the land. By 1938 still other New Dealers stressed the need for a general economic development of the region in order to create a broad prosperity. None of these policies, however, was adequate for eliminating widespread deprivation. In this first complete evaluation of New Deal policies Mertz shows that this failure was for the most part a result of congressional restraints, as well as lack of vision in the administration itself. XX PAUL E. MERTZ received his doctorate from the University of Oklahoma. He is currently an associate professor of history at the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point.…