Oral history interview with Rexford Tugwell, 1965 January 21 Funding for the digital preservation of this interview was provided by a grant from the Save America's Treasures Program of the National Park Service. Contact Information Reference Department Archives of American Art Smithsonian Institution Washington. D.C. 20560 www.aaa.si.edu/askus Transcript Preface The following oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with Grace and Rexford Tugwell on January 21, 1965. The interview took place in Santa Barbara, CA, and was conducted by Richard Doud for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Interview Richard Doud: I sort of hate to bore you with going back into all this preview material but I would like you to sort of review a little bit about what happened just prior to your association with the government and tell me how you managed to get into this agricultural department thing, and why. Rexford Tugwell: I might say, that in the beginning, all of this material will be found in the Columbia University Oral History Project. I had done some interviews for them and gone over this period pretty well, but roughly, I was a professor at Columbia and got to helping Roosevelt during the campaign, and then I was asked to be assistant secretary of Agriculture, and then I became under-secretary of Agriculture. Then I conceived the idea of the Resettlement Administration and Roosevelt set it up by executive order, and we operated with emergency funds. It was the companion piece really to the WPA with Hopkins and the various preceding organizations. We operated in the rural areas. What we had in mind was largely the rehabilitation of the poor farmers, but we had a great many jobs to do which were of the relief sort, because we not only had the emergency of the Depression, but we had, while this was going on, two very serious years of drought, which created what was then called the Dust Bowl, and blew away a lot of soil in the West which had come into use unwisely during the war, and left the people really stranded, and they began to drift away. The drought in ’34 started all this, but the drought in ’36 completed it. This was so extensive, that the people simply couldn’t all leave. It would have taken all the people in Oklahoma, North and South Dakota, part of Nebraska and Colorado. We had millions of them, of course, on relief, on account of the drought, and this was quite aside from our problem of rehabilitation, and resettlement. Because this was so dramatic, and because it meant misery and tragedy for so many families, and because we hoped it would never happen again, at least, not in the same way, we thought not only that we ought to have a record of it, for future generations—that is the historical part—but also to show people who weren’t involved in it, how extremely serious was. Then, of course, there was the other part, that these people who had all these skills in order to do this, were mostly unemployed themselves and they were delighted to get the opportunity to work. I think Stryker has explained to you, that it wasn’t any soft job for them, either. They had very small allowances and quite small pay, and yet they did this enormous, wonderful job—record making. I know we were all very proud of them later. Richard Doud: Before we get onto the Stryker project, could you summarize what some of your plans were with resettlement? I sort of get the idea that part of what you were trying to do dealt with teaching the people who were in certain areas help themselves out of problems. Rexford Tugwell: There was always a reason why a man was poor, and why he was in trouble. Sometimes the reason was that he was poor human material, but this was not often. The trouble usually was that he was in difficulty with his land, because it had eroded, or because he was in the wrong place and drought had come along, or some other similar reason; his land perhaps had worn out. This problem really centered in two places largely: what they now call Appalachia, which is still in trouble, and in the Great Plans area where the droughts were. These were really the great areas, the work we had to do. We had several different programs as far as the poor farmers were concerned. When I spoke of relief, that was simply getting them through the crust. Then the rehabilitation part was that we tried to find them better farms if we thought they were good farmers, and then we made them what we called farm and home loans to start them off in business, under supervision. That part of our program was very successful. Years afterwards, long after I had left the Government, they had a survey that reported that the loans had been repaid more than one hundred percent; that is to say, the loans and the interest that had been paid back were more than the loans had been. I was a little ashamed of that, to tell you the truth, because this came out of the pockets of some people who were very hard up and it was probably difficult for them to pay it back. I used to talk to Harry Hopkins about this. He was giving his money away. I was only lending it and I was getting it back for the Government. Grace Tugwell: Wasn’t there some requirement that you had to charge interest? Didn’t I recall that we didn’t want to, but we had to? Rexford Tugwell: Yes, we had to charge five percent interest. This was a required thing. I tried again and again to get the regulations changed on that, but I never could. Any loans that the Government made had to be at the rate of five percent. Grace Tugwell: Competition with local banks and so on was— Richard Doud: That was terribly high for that time. Rexford Tugwell: They didn’t want us to compete with the local banks. Grace Tugwell: In spite of the fact that the banks were not in a position to do any loaning at the time, but still … Richard Doud: Not the kind of people you were working with … Grace Tugwell: No, they had no security, you see. Rexford Tugwell: Nobody was interested in these people. They didn’t belong to any farm organization and usually their better-off neighbors either used them for part-time help or sharecroppers or some such way as this, and they were simply not interested in their welfare. They were an abandoned lot of people. Richard Doud: Were there any cases of mass resettlement where large communities— Rexford Tugwell: Yes, we took over from Harry Hopkins who had begun it somewhat before. You see, Resettlement was organized in 1935 and Harry had begun his operations early in 1933, almost at once after the President’s inauguration. He had begun a certain number of communities. He had set up a section for this, and he had begun a certain number of communities, which were spread mostly throughout the South and West. As I recall, there were about one hundred of those, but I wouldn’t remember the number exactly. Grace Tugwell: Those were not the subsistence homesteads. Rexford Tugwell: No. Then there was the organization called Subsistence Homesteads, which was in the Department of the Interior, and which had been a favorite project of President and Mrs. Roosevelt and Louie Howe. This is the one that came under so much criticism in the newspapers and magazines at that time. Arthur Dale was the favorite target. This was one of Mrs. Roosevelt’s favorite projects down in West Virginia near Morgantown. Rexford Tugwell: The idea was that they would build homes for the people and then try to get industries to move in, but the industries didn’t usually move in, and if they did, they didn’t stay. They were pretty much a flop. The head of this organization was M.L. Wilson who later succeeded me as under-secretary of Agriculture when I left. When we organized the Resettlement Administration, I discovered that the President put in the executive order setting up the Resettlement Administration that this group was transferred to us in Resettlement, so that we had to try and do the best we could with what was really a failing project. I was always a little resentful that I got blamed for what the newspapers insisted on calling “subsistence homesteads” a failure, but I really had nothing to do with this organization. I simply tried to carry it on. Grace Tugwell: I remember you arguing with Mrs. Roosevelt before they set them up. Rexford Tugwell: Oh yes, it goes away back. Mrs. Roosevelt put forward this idea during the campaign, and I said, “For heaven’s sake, don’t say it out loud, or they will laugh at you.” She was indignant. They when they got into the White House, she and Louie Howe began the organization. Richard Doud: After you got the Resettlement established, was there any feeling of rivalry or perhaps irritation in the Department of Agriculture towards what you were doing? Rexford Tugwell: Not in the Department of Agriculture. We had trouble from the start, but it came from understandable places. In the first place, the farm organizations made up of the more prosperous farmers didn’t want us to do this.