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Agricultural Adjustment Act Essay

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Short Report: Agricultural Adjustment Act
The Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 was passed by Congress under the encouragement of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The bill combined an earlier, unsuccessful bill written by Representative Marvin Jones with a proposal by Henry A. Wallace, Secretary of Agriculture at the time. Wallace had also worked with farm organizations in drafting his proposal (Hefner-Babb). Its purpose was to manipulate the prices of certain crops in order to improve the economic situation of farmers. Specifically, the act hoped to achieve “parity” for farmers. “Parity” was the condition in which farmers’ operating and personal expenses approximately equaled their revenue from agricultural products. Believed by government economists to have been reached in the years before World War I, parity was lost in the Great Depression as agricultural prices plummeted (Ganzel).
To accomplish this, the act established a new agency of the US Department of Agriculture, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration. For most of the lifetime of the act, the administration was directed by Chester C. Davis. In accordance with the act, the administration accomplished its task primarily by working with farmers to reduce the supply of certain crops, thereby …show more content…

While ameliorating the plight of large landowning farmers, the act was actually detrimental to tenant farmers and sharecroppers. Due to political pressure from planters, the administration only paid the owners, not the workers, of farms that reduced production. The lack of aid for subordinate laborers exacerbated the hardships of the depression for them. Also, the reduced production mandated by the act led to a decline in employment for tenant farmers and sharecroppers, because with less farming being done on farms, their labor was unnecessary

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