Plowed under : food policy protests and performance in New Deal America / Ann Folino White.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

White, Ann Folino, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Agriculture and state--United States--History--20th century.

Agriculture and state.

Protest movements--United States--History--20th century.

Protest movements.

New Deal, 1933-1939.

History.

United States.

Physical Description:

x, 307 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Bloomington : Indiana University Press, [2015]

Summary:

During the Great Depression, with thousands on bread lines, farmers were instructed by the New Deal Agricultural Adjustment Act to produce less food in order to stabilize food prices and restore the market economy. Fruit was left to rot on trees, crops were plowed under, and millions of piglets and sows were slaughtered and discarded. Many Americans saw the government actions as a senseless waste of food that left the hungry to starve, initiating public protests against food and farm policy. White approaches these events as performances where competing notions of morality and citizenship were acted out, often along lines marked by class, race, and gender. The actions range from the "Milk War" that pitted National Guardsmen against dairymen to the meat boycott staged by Polish-American women in Michigan to the black sharecroppers' protest to restore agricultural jobs in Missouri. White provides a riveting account of the theatrical strategies used by consumers, farmers, agricultural laborers, and the federal government to negotiate competing rights to food and the moral contradictions of capitalist society in times of economic crisis. Book jacket.

Contents:

The New Deal vision for agriculture : USDA exhibits at the 1933-34 Chicago World's Fair

Milk dumping across America's dairyland : the May 1933 Wisconsin dairymen's strike

Playing "housewife" in Polonia : the 1935 Hamtramck (Michigan) women's meat boycott

Hunger on the highway in the cotton South : the 1939 Missouri sharecroppers' demonstration

Staging the Agricultural Adjustment Act : the Federal Theatre Project's Triple-a plowed under (1936)

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 281-294) and index.

ISBN:

9780253015402

0253015405

9780253015372

0253015375

OCLC:

877364901