The problem of political management: Two historical episodes examined

John Mark Hansen Department of Government Harvard University March 2002 Prepared for the Conference on Political Accountability, Center for the Study of Democratic Politics and the Political Economy Program, Princeton University.

List of acronyms

AAA Agricultural Adjustment Administration

AFBF American Farm Bureau Federation

BAE Bureau of Agricultural Economics

FSA Farm Security Administration

OMS Office of Marketing Services

PMA Production and Marketing Administration

USDA United States Department of Agriculture

If democratic government rests on accountability, then democratic administration demands bureaucratic responsiveness to political directives. If presidents are to be accountable for the faithful execution of the laws, then they and their appointees must be able to control their unelected subordinates. Democratic administration requires political authority.

Against this normative expectation, however, is widespread skepticism that presidents and their appointees can in fact exercise their power over subordinates. “After he gets the big hello at the White House,” a Fortune columnist wrote of Truman’s political executive, “he rides off to the battlefield, where his deflation begins. There he will meet his ‘administrative officer,’ a man whose name he has never heard before, upon whom Gulliver will find himself, in the first few weeks, painfully dependent.”1

This image of political Gullivers lashed down by bureaucratic Lilliputians is a common and venerable one. “Despite all the resources devoted to more topside staff, new management initiatives, more elaborate analytic techniques, and so on,” Hugh Heclo writes in summary, “there remain few … places where political executives can look for reliable political support in any efforts at leadership in the bureaucracy. Political appointees in Washington are substantially on their own and vulnerable to bureaucratic power.” The problem, as Heclo and others see it, is that political appointees need bureaucrats a lot more than bureaucrats need political appointees. Bureaucrats have permanence; appointees do not. Bureaucrats have institutional memory; appointees do not. Bureaucrats have contacts; appointees do not. And bureaucrats have expertise and information; appointees do not. Formal authority, in short, does not much matter. “It is inevitable when an individual has been in a Cabinet position,” Richard Nixon once commented, that “after a certain length of time he becomes an advocate of the status quo; rather than running the bureaucracy, the bureaucracy runs him.”2

As much as this account might resonate with executive appointees and academic reformers, however, it stretches credulity to think that it is always and everywhere true. After all, political bureaucrats have resources that they alone control, resources they possess by virtue of their position, and resources that subordinate agencies and civil servants need but singularly lack. Political leaders, for example, control the movement of subordinates into policy-level jobs. They control the formal and informal organization of their own domains. And, most importantly, they control policy initiatives. Indeed, recent analysis of legislative delegation to

1Robert Sheehan in Fortune, quoted by Marver H. Bernstein, The job of the federal executive (Washington: Brookings Institution, 1958): 180.

2Hugh Heclo, A government of strangers (Washington: Brookings Institution, 1977): 112 and passim; Louis Fisher, The politics of shared power, 2d ed. (Washington: Congressional Quarterly Press, 1987): 146. See also, on this general point, Bernstein, Executive: chap. 4; and Harold Seidman, Politics, position, and power, 5th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998): chap. 3. For a similar complaint from the Reagan administration, see Philip Longman, “Reagan’s disappearing bureaucrats,” New York Times Magazine, 14 February 1988: 42 ff.

executive bureaucracies would suggest, by analogy, that the extent of political control is the conscious choice of the political executives themselves, made with due regard to its benefits—in more expert policy development and administration—and due regard to its costs—in alienation of authority over policy direction.3

This paper approaches the question of political control in the federal bureaucracy inductively, pondering the lessons in two episodes in the history of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). With its long tradition of clientele service, its tight bonds with Congress, its close relations with powerful lobbies, and its ancestral allegiance to the interests of farmers, the Department of Agriculture was surely an unlikely setting for the effective exercise of political authority. But in fact, in the 1930s and 1940s, the political leadership of the USDA wrested control of the federal agricultural program away from the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), a subordinate agency with a strong, well-organized clientele. Through reorganization, they gave themselves better control over subordinates and broader scope of policy choice. Their actions, and the effects on clientele relations and the balance of power in the Department, are the subject of the first section of the paper. The objective of the second section is to reach some understanding of why bureaucratic reform, initiated from above, was possible, and indeed why it was undertaken at all. The impulse toward administrative reform, and the ability to achieve it, depended jointly upon the political goals of the leadership, the relationship of its goals to the administrative structure of the Department, and the opportunities for the agencies, their clientele, and their congressional allies to resist. The paper closes by using the findings to reassess prospects for leadership in the American federal bureaucracy. Bureaucratic politics in the Department of Agriculture, 1935–1948

By the summer of 1935, the two-year-old Agricultural Adjustment Administration dominated the USDA. “From the time the Triple-A came to the Department of Agriculture,” AAA official M. L. Wilson recalled, “we kind of had two Departments of Agriculture. If you’d made a flow-sheet here, you’d have [Agriculture Secretary] Henry Wallace at the top, and you'd have Triple-A over here, and the rest of the Department of Agriculture over here.”4 (See figure 1.) Together with its financial affiliate, the Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC), Triple A spent more money, employed more people, and generated more press than any USDA agency before or since. The political importance of even its lesser officials outstripped their formal rank. Triple A leaders, for instance, reported directly to Henry A. Wallace, but the older bureaus

3See especially Terry M. Moe, “The politics of bureaucratic structure,” in Paul E. Peterson and John E. Chubb, Can the government govern? (Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 1989): 267–329; Mathew D. McCubbins, Roger G. Noll, and Barry R. Weingast, “Administrative procedures as instruments of political control,” Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 3 (Fall 1987): 243–77; and Kathleen Bawn, “Political control versus expertise: Congressional choices about administrative procedures,” American Political Science Review 89 (March 1995): 62–73. 4Reminiscences of Milburn L. Wilson, Columbia Oral History Collection (COHC): 1443–44.

reported through Under Secretary Rexford G. Tugwell.5 Similarly, at White House functions, AAA section heads rubbed shoulders with old-line bureau chiefs, who out-ranked them, much to the latter’s consternation. To USDA’s other bureaus, the Triple A’s political importance was obvious. “It should be brought out,” one chief observed, “that the other bureaus of the Department are seriously raising the question in their minds as to whether or not they are to become satellites and agents for the Agricultural Adjustment Administration [and whether] their work … will be modified to reflect the political situation.” Soon after its founding, then, Triple A “became, in effect, a department within the Department.”6

Likewise by the summer of 1935, commercial agricultural producers wholly dominated the Triple A. Responding to nearly a decade of agrarian agitation, Congress passed the Agricultural Adjustment Act in May 1933, and President Roosevelt staffed the early AAA with men who were sympathetic to the farmer’s plight. Over the course of Triple A’s first two years, however, farm producers strengthened their hold on it still further. In December 1933, disputes over the AAA’s marketing agreements program forced the resignation of AAA’s first administrator, George N. Peek, and his associates, and the abolition of AAA’s Division of Processing and Marketing Agreements, the single beachhead of agricultural handlers, marketers, and processors. Moreover, in February 1935, battles over the rights of tenants and sharecroppers in the farm relief program culminated in the famous “purge” of USDA liberals Jerome Frank, Gardner (Pat) Jackson, Frederic C. Howe, and others, and the dismemberment of the AAA’s Legal Division and Consumers Counsel. Because of these two events, by the summer of 1935 the spectrum of interests represented within the AAA was far narrower than in 1933. The Agricultural Adjustment Administration was fundamentally indifferent to consumers and farm laborers, overtly hostile to the agricultural trades, and openly solicitous of commercial farmers, especially those represented by the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF).7 5This was doubly galling to the older bureaus because Wallace had scientific expertise that Tugwell lacked. Wallace, an important developer of hybrid seed corn, was deeply respected by the chiefs of the scientific bureaus. Tugwell, one of Roosevelt’s “Brains Trust,” was an academic economist with only the faintest agricultural background. See Wilson’s reminiscences, COHC: 1052–54, 1443–51; and Russell Lord, The Wallaces of Iowa (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin and Co., 1947): 343.

6Richard Lowitt, ed., Journal of a tamed bureaucrat: Nils A. Olsen and the BAE, 1925-1935 (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1980): 198; John M. Gaus and Leon D. Wolcott, Public administration and the United States Department of Agriculture (Chicago: Public Administration Service, 1940): 196. Also, Lowitt, Bureaucrat: 193.

7Van L. Perkins, Crisis in agriculture: The Agricultural Adjustment Administration and the New Deal, 1933 (Berkeley: University of California, 1969); Theodore Saloutos, The American farmer and the New Deal (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1982): chaps. 4–8; Persia Campbell, Consumer representation in the New Deal (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940): chap. 3; “The Farm Bureau’s part,” Bureau Farmer, April 1934: 3 ff; “C. C. Davis announces reorganization of AAA,” Commercial and Financial Chronicles, 6 January 1934: 60; “Milk—also a noble experiment,” Business Week, 31 March 1934: 12 ff; Kiplinger Agricultural Letter (KAL) No. 125, 18 December 1933, No. 142, 28 July 1934, No. 146, 22 September 1934, and No. 156, 9 February 1935; “Permanent AAA,” Business Week, 2 November 1935: 34; Paul W. Ward, “The AAA puts on false whiskers,” Nation, 22 January 1936: 93–94. See also Gregory Hooks, “From autonomous to captured state agency: The decline of the New Deal in agriculture,” American Sociological Review 55 (February 1990): 29–43. While Hooks is correct that the purge was a debilitating blow to the direct interests of consumers and the poor, I will show later that it was by no

The USDA in 1935, therefore, presented two challenges to its political leaders. First Agriculture’s leaders had to wean Triple A away from the farm producer groups; then they had to reclaim the Department from Triple A.

Political leaders accomplished this reassertion of political control largely in two waves, the first spanning 1936 to 1939 and the second 1945 to 1947. Over the course of Franklin Roosevelt’s second term, Agriculture Secretary Henry A. Wallace first curtailed farm group participation in Triple A administration and then countervailed AAA influence within the USDA. During Truman’s first term, moreover, Agriculture Secretary Clinton P. Anderson built upon Wallace’s reforms, effectively dismantled Triple A and further concentrated policy authority in Washington. The results, as we will see, were significant. By 1947, the USDA was more broadly representative of the agriculture community as a whole, more insulated from farm group pressures, and more independent in its policy initiatives. From that time on, it would be the major sponsor of innovation in U.S. farm policy. Administrative reform in Roosevelt’s USDA, 1936-1939

The first steps on the road to reform came in 1936, when Henry Wallace appointed Howard R. Tolley to succeed Chester C. Davis as Administrator of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration. In his background and orientation, Tolley was a striking contrast to his predecessors. George Peek and Chester Davis were both veteran farm lobbyists, and both had close ties to the American Farm Bureau. Peek had formulated the idea of the “equalization fee” in the early 1920s, and he had led the efforts of the farm organizations to pass the McNary–Haugen legislation that incorporated it. To the same end, Davis had worked for the Farm Bureau off and on for almost a decade. Tolley, on the other hand, was an agricultural economist and a member of the USDA’s Bureau of Agricultural Economics (BAE) in the 1920s. Since then, he had alternated between the USDA and the academy. He served as the first director of AAA’s Planning Division, but in 1935 he returned to the Giannini Foundation at the University of California at Berkeley. Wallace summoned him back to Washington in January 1936 to help the Department draft and implement the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act. When Davis resigned in June 1936, Tolley became the first administrator of the Triple A who was not a votary of the farm lobby.8

That aspect was significant, because in March 1936 Tolley moved to do what Peek and Davis had never dared: to cut Triple A administration loose from the Farm Bureau. More out of

means a lasting triumph for farm producer interests.

8Richard S. Kirkendall, Social scientists and farm politics in the age of Roosevelt (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1982): 15–152 passim; Gilbert C. Fite, George N. Peek and the fight for farm parity (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1954); Reminiscences of Howard R. Tolley, COHC; Reminiscences of Chester C. Davis, COHC.

convenience than anything else, the AAA had called upon the agricultural Extension Service to administer the farm program in the field in 1933, and it had maintained that arrangement subsequently. To nobody’s surprise, Extension’s role in field administration opened Triple A to a significant degree of Farm Bureau influence. The Extension Service had, in essence, created the Farm Bureau, and in many states local farm bureaus contributed to the salary of the county agricultural extension agent. The consequence, Tolley recalled, was “ossification.” “More and more of the people [within AAA] were feeling satisfied with … what they were doing, and there was less effort to pioneer and make things better. More people were following unquestioningly the line taken by interest groups, farm organizations, cooperative groups, and so on.”9

Immediately after the passage of the new farm act, therefore, Acting Administrator Tolley

“announced that under the leadership of the agricultural extension services work already has started to set up field organizations to administer the new farm program in the various States.” In Triple A’s first few years, state directors of extension had headed the state AAA committees and had often appointed their members. These committees, moreover, had reported directly to AAA commodity offices in Washington. Tolley’s 1936 directive, in contrast, set up five regional AAA offices, established five-member AAA committees in each of the states, and vested power of appointment of state AAA chairmen with AAA division heads in Washington. Subsequent legislation and directives from Tolley went still further, and by 1938 Triple A regulations confined extension officials to ex officio appointments on state and local AAA committees. In certain areas, especially in the South and West, county extension agents continued to play an important role in local AAA administration—practices varied widely. Nevertheless, by making the state committees responsible to Washington rather than to the state extension services, Tolley eased Extension out of Triple A’s chain of command.10

In practical terms, AAA’s new administrative order was different more in kind than in degree. Because local administration still depended upon the elected farmer committees, producer influence in the farm program remained formidable. Compared to the county extension agents, however, AAA committees tended to be more responsive to directives from Washington. 9Tolley reminiscences, COHC: 440; Richard S. Kirkendall, “Howard Tolley and agricultural planning in the 1930s,” Agricultural History, 39 (January 1965): 28–29; Gladys Baker, The county agent (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939): chap. 4. “At least outside the South,” a 1935 study by the Brookings Institution concluded, “a laudable degree of success has been attained in making [local administration] responsive to the desires of the producer group.” Edwin G. Nourse, Joseph S. Davis, and John D. Black, Three years of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (Washington: Brookings Institution, 1937): 266; for a similar but less charitable conclusion, see T.R.B., “Washington notes,” New Republic, 15 August 1934: 17.

10”AAA establishes five regions for administration of new farm-aid bill,” Commercial and Financial Chronicles, 21 March 1936: 1920; Kirkendall, Social scientists: 153 ff; Reed L. Frischknecht, “The democratization of administration in the farmer committee system,” American Political Science Review, 47 (September 1953): 707–08. One measure of the increasingly limited role of Extension in AAA administration is the rapid disappearance of articles about the farm program in its official publication, the Extension Service Review, after 1935. Contrast their absence with, for example, W. H. Brokaw, “Adjustment program influences Extension,” Extension Service Review (December 1934): 179–80.

Their members drew their salaries and per diems from Triple A rather than the land grant colleges and county farm bureaus. More importantly, they tended to attract committeemen who were basically supportive of the New Deal agricultural program.11 Balky local administration did not end with Tolley’s restructuring; the AAA committees would themselves become a target of Clinton Anderson’s later reforms. Still, Tolley’s architecture reoriented local administrators more toward Washington and away from the American Farm Bureau.12

The political significance of Tolley’s shake-up was not lost on the nation’s largest farm organization. Extension’s demotion rekindled the AFBF’s fears that the Administration intended to promote the elected AAA committees as its main link to farmers, skirting the Farm Bureau. “They fear that the time is coming,” Kiplinger’s newsletter related in 1938, “when the membership slogan ‘See what your farm organization can get for you,’ will compete with, ‘See what your county committee can get for you.’” Concerned for its influence, the Federation launched massive—and successful—membership drives, intending to coopt farmer committeemen, especially in the South. Even so, the Farm Bureau discovered that its relationship with Triple A would never again be as close or as friendly. Tolley had pushed Extension out of AAA administration without even bothering to inform his erstwhile ally, and after 1936 Farm Bureau leaders found their access to Triple A’s high councils much reduced.13

Howard Tolley’s reforms, then, helped to pull the Triple A away from the farm lobby even while it preserved AAA's basic orientation toward commercial producers of politically important crops. They did not and could not, however, address the bigger problem of Triple A’s influence within the Department of Agriculture.

For reasons that I will explore later, the problem of AAA’s position within the Department loomed larger as the Roosevelt Administration entered its second term. “Henry Wallace was quite a little worried,” M. L. Wilson, then Under Secretary, recalled, “about this kind of farm movement becoming a kind of water-tight compartment agrarian movement.” Wallace’s fears of Triple A domination within his Department were fueled by his aide-de-camp, Paul H. Appleby, a journalist turned bureaucrat and one of the fathers of modern public administration. “Appleby’s study of public administration and his experience in the Department with AAA Administrators who tended to insist that the Secretary approve without question any decision made by them convinced him that AAA was both too big and too powerful in relation to other agencies. … 11USDA’s New Dealers believed the midwestern extension services to be Republican in their politics and therefore unsupportive of the agricultural adjustment program.

12To use Selznick’s terms, Tolley’s reorganization replaced the “informal cooptation” of the Farm Bureau with the “formal cooptation” of the local committees. Philip Selznick, TVA and the grass roots (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), pp. 13–16.

13KAL No. 237, 5 February 1938, No. 207, 26 December 1936, and No. 209, 23 January 1937; Christiana McFadyen Campbell, The Farm Bureau and the New Deal (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1962): chap. 6 and 53, 85–86, 156–58.

Appleby was able to interest Wallace in the problem and to convince him that a reorganization was needed to secure structural balance.”14

On the pretext of implementing the Mount Weather Agreement, a memorandum of understanding that clarified the roles of the Department and the land grant colleges in administration of the farm program, Wallace announced a sweeping reorganization of the Department of Agriculture on 16 October 1938. (See figure 2.) The Secretary’s order pulled all of the agricultural marketing programs, including marketing agreements, out of Triple A and placed them in four different agencies reporting to the Secretary through a Director of Marketing and Regulatory Work. (Eventually these agencies were combined into the Division of Marketing and Marketing Agreements.) The order also dismantled the AAA’s Planning Division and reconstituted it within the Bureau of Agricultural Economics (BAE). These moves were taken, Wallace stressed in his press release, to establish USDA’s “part of the machinery needed to integrate State and local planning [by the land grant colleges] with general planning and program-forming activities within the Department,” as agreed at Mount Weather.15

In fact, though, as one observer noted, “last week’s major Wallace maneuver amounted to dismantling AAA and moving it behind the lines. Although the name and a skeleton organization remain, AAA’s major functions were parceled out among four new Department divisions.”16

Wallace’s intent in the reorganization was three-fold. First, by moving program planning out of the AAA and into the BAE, the Secretary entrusted policy initiatives to an agency whose viewpoint was much broader, and historically much closer to the Secretary’s, than Triple A’s. Created in 1922 while Wallace’s father, Henry C. Wallace, was Secretary of Agriculture in the Harding administration, the Bureau was the bastion of professional agricultural economists. BAE, consequently, was the wellspring of policy innovation. In the early 1920s its staff formulated the theories that underlay the Agricultural Adjustment Act, and now, in the mid-1930s, its staff promoted a farm policy more oriented toward consumption than current AAA programs, an idea much to Wallace’s liking. BAE’s assumption of policy planning

14Wilson reminiscences, COHC: 2038; Gladys L. Baker, “‘And to act for the Secretary’: Paul H. Appleby and the Department of Agriculture,” Agricultural History, 45 (October 1971): 256; Paul H. Appleby, Big democracy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1945): 149; Wilson reminiscences, COHC: 2039–65.

15“Department organization changed to meet new responsibilities,” USDA press release dated 6 October 1938, Records of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, Record Group 83, Box 212, National Archives. Formally, the Division was still part of AAA, but the Department treated it as a separate entity. Although its leader was an Associate Administrator of AAA, the 1939 Government Manual described the Division as “formerly a part” of AAA, and it appears separately on USDA organization charts (see figure 2). Under Roosevelt’s Reorganization Plan No. III, effective in 1940, the Division was merged with the Federal Surplus Commodities Corporation into the Surplus Marketing Administration.

16“Farmers: Cart behind the lines,” Time, 17 October 1938: 14.

responsibilities, in fact, marked their return; BAE lost them to AAA in 1933 only because of the implacability of its chief, a Hoover Administration holdover. Together with the new responsibilities, moreover, came a new leader, Triple A Administrator Howard R. Tolley, a Wallace loyalist. The removal of policy planning to BAE and the installation of a sympathetic chief returned policy initiative to the Secretary’s orbit.17

Second, by moving the marketing programs out of AAA, the reforms served to narrow Triple A’s influence within the Department. The 1933 Agricultural Adjustment Act had given the USDA two significant rights and responsibilities: production limits and price supports on the one hand and marketing agreements on the other.18 As the repository of both powers, Triple A held most of the cards in Department, and it did not hesitate to play them. Control over the stringent marketing agreements program, for example, enabled AAA officials to harass the processing companies, especially after Peek’s departure, and control over the popular crop adjustment programs allowed AAA agrarians to overrule those who were more sympathetic to consumers and non-commercial farmers, even superiors. Consequently, Triple A’s political position in the Department was of central concern to the architects of the reorganization. As Wallace explained to his bureau chiefs, “The foregoing consolidation and transfers in the planning and marketing work more clearly delineate the function of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration. Its major responsibilities will continue to be administration of the national conservation and adjustment program,” and, he might have added, nothing else.19

Finally, by uniting the marketing programs outside of the Triple A, Wallace placed USDA marketing activities in a more nurturing environment. AAA’s control over the distribution programs, coupled with its fealty to farmers, insured that marketing and the interests of the trades would take a back seat to adjustment and the interests of producers. As Kiplinger explained it to his industry clients, “For legal as well as political reasons, the producer must be AAA’s first consideration. This makes inherently complicated any machinery for getting specific trade suggestions during the formative stages of AAA’s program.” At best, Triple A’s suzerainty caused the USDA to neglect initiatives that would involve food and fiber distribution. At worst, it precluded them. Thus, in order to broaden USDA’s compass, Wallace wrote in his press release, “We need to integrate these types of activity so that we might devote the same

17Kirkendall, Social scientists: chaps. 5–8. Tolley’s willingness to trade the top job at AAA for the top job at BAE was another sign of the diminution of the political status of AAA within the Department.

18In brief, marketing agreements are contracts between the Secretary and the agricultural trades that set prices for commodities (most often fruits, vegetables, milk, and other perishables) below which no handler can legally buy. The Act gave USDA the power to enforce the agreements by licensing trading and processing firms in recalcitrant industries. See Edwin G. Nourse, Marketing agreements under the AAA (Washington: Brookings Institution, 1935).

19“Memorandum for chiefs of bureaus and offices,” 6 October 1938, RG 83, Box 212; “Outline of the [1939] annual report of the Secretary of Agriculture,” 1938, RG 83, Box 212; “Violent upheaval in A.A.A.,” Food Industries, January 1934: 29; “Cease coddling processors, Bureau demands,” Bureau Farmer (Minnesota ed.), January 1934: 10a; KAL No. 148, 20 October 1934.

concentrated attention to marketing that we now devote to production and conservation, … and so that citizens who deal with our marketing agencies may have a central point of contact.”20

The expansion of Agriculture’s focus was quickly apparent to those outside the Department, especially those in the agricultural trades. “There’s a new attitude toward agricultural trades among officials of the Dep’t. of Agriculture," Kiplinger exulted in December 1938. “It’s no crack-down against middlemen that Wallace is hatching. Quite the contrary. There’s definite effort, backed by much thought, to get agricultural trades’ help, to get trades to suggest methods.” As head of the Division of Marketing and Marketing Agreements, Wallace eventually chose his former special assistant, Milo R. Perkins, a Texas manufacturer of burlap and cotton bags and current Assistant Administrator of the Farm Security Administration.21 Virtually at the same time, Wallace assigned to Perkins his first task: formulate a workable plan to subsidize consumption of food and fiber by relief recipients. Perkins’s approach to this problem set the tone for the Division’s subsequent dealings with the trades. As Fortune recalled fondly, “When the [prototype food stamp] plan was explained to representatives of the food industry called to Washington for the purpose of discussing it, there was almost no dissension. Details of the operation were worked out after consulting over a thousand leading food men throughout the country. For once a government project received almost unanimous approval—except for some of the national officers of the politically powerful Farm Bureau Federation, who object to seeing any department appropriations benefiting anyone but the farmer directly.” The contrast with the trades’ reception at Triple A could not have been more stark.22

In total, the reforms of Wallace’s second New Deal moved the balance of power within the USDA toward the Secretary and his lieutenants and away from the Triple A and its organized farmer clients. In 1936, Wallace’s choice of an outsider to lead AAA and his renovation of AAA field administration conduced to more top-down administration, responsive to farmers but less well penetrated by the farm groups. In 1938, likewise, his revision of USDA structure curtailed and countervailed Triple A’s influence within the Department. Wallace’s reorganization 20KAL No. 172, 7 September 1935; “Department organization changed to meet new responsibilities,” press release, RG 83, Box 212; “Outline for the [1939] annual report of the Secretary of Agriculture,” RG 83, Box 212.

21Wallace also named BAE chief Albert G. Black, a close political associate, as Director of Marketing and Regulatory Work.

22KAL No. 260, 23 December 1938; “Mr. Perkins goes to Washington,” Fortune, October 1941: 67; “Farm problem comes to a head,” Business Week, 29 October 1938: 17–18; KAL No. 259, 10 December 1938, No. 265, 25 February 1939; “Representation,” Market Growers Journal, 15 January 1939: 30; “The stamp plan shows the way,” Business Week, 1 February 1941: 29–37; Janet Poppendieck, Breadlines knee-deep in wheat: Food assistance in the Great Depression (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986): chap. 12. The change in focus was apparent to the farm lobby as well. In a memorandum to Roosevelt after the 1940 election, Chester Davis assessed the reason for the Midwest’s defection to Wendell Willkie. Farm leaders “could have been kept in camp if the Department of Agriculture had continued to treat them as consultants and friends. … For nearly two years the men in the Department [have] ceased to consult with the Farm Bureau, the Co-operatives, or the Grange, on important matters.” Campbell, Farm Bureau: 180–81, 178, 177, 184.

reclaimed policy planning for the Secretary. Moreover, it removed important powers from the AAA and deposited them in a separate agency, around which a distinct new clientele might be created. Political leadership, consequently, exercised more control over policy options and priorities than it had just three years before. Administrative reform in Truman’s USDA, 1945-1948

Henry A. Wallace’s administrative reforms in the Department of Agriculture were a remarkable achievement, increasing the scope of action for the political leadership even at the expense of an agency tied closely to Congress and clientele. In themselves, however, the reforms did not reassert the full measure of political control, and some were effectively undone during the guerrilla actions of the Second World War. Consequently, in 1945 Agriculture Secretary Clinton P. Anderson also inherited a department in need of reform.

First, despite Wallace’s moves toward greater administrative centralization, subordinate Triple A officials still enjoyed considerable independence. In 1943, for example, the chief of AAA’s North Central Division, Harry Schooler, “decided that the time for being a good sport and trying to work with the Farm Bureau was passed. So he set out on his own.” In clear violation of Department policy, he mobilized AAA committeemen to oppose Farm Bureau initiatives—including a few supported by Agriculture Secretary Claude Wickard—at a time when Wickard was struggling to hold onto responsibility for the wartime food program. Under pressure from the Farm Bureau and its allies in Congress, Wickard soon fired Schooler, a close friend and advisor, but the broader administrative problem did not go away. “Each regional office was an AAA by itself,” Anderson’s aide, Nathan Koenig, remembered, “and each director had his own kingdom. Some of the people in the field became too powerful for the job they were supposed to be doing.” In addressing the problem of farm group penetration of AAA administration, Wallace had still not solved the problem of AAA’s administrative independence.23

Likewise, despite Wallace’s efforts to broaden the Department’s focus and to empower the leadership to set policy, Triple A still exerted a strong pull on the USDA’s direction. AAA consistently dragged its feet on the production-oriented wartime food program and extracted concessions from Wickard that only strengthened its position in the Department. The end of the war brought more of the same. The armistice signed, top USDA officials foresaw rapid inflation and disastrous shortages and sought to loosen restrictions on agricultural production. Triple A, on the other hand, feared a postwar glut and depression that would rival the 1920s, and its position in the Department and on Capitol Hill kept USDA leaders from doing much of anything. 23“Appeasing the farm bloc,” New Republic, 19 April 1943: 497; Interview with Nathan Koenig, Washington, D.C., December 1986; “Hog prices to come down,” Wallaces’ Farmer (WF), 17 April 1943: 253. On the administrative problem, see Charles M. Hardin, “Reflections on agricultural policy formation in the United States,” American Political Science Review 42 (October 1948): 881–905.

As one observer put it, the Truman “Administration doesn’t like … the strict orders to keep farm prices up on the market,” but it “can’t openly say so.” Even when the administration’s worries proved well-founded, the Department of Agriculture clung to a “bare shelves” policy.24

But Wallace’s reforms had also created political possibilities for Clinton Anderson that Wallace himself did not enjoy. In the seven years since Wallace had pulled the marketing programs out of Triple A, the marketing agencies had developed an appreciative following in the agricultural trades. Because of the food stamp program, Kiplinger wrote in 1940, the “Rank & file of the Department of Agriculture … have learned a great deal about techniques of cooperating with business and businessmen. This will be felt by the permanent staff long after the current top officials are gone.” Indeed, the departures of Henry Wallace and Milo Perkins and the demise of the food stamp program affected cooperation with the food industry not at all. The “increased attention given food distribution and nutrition problems” during the war, in fact, redoubled USDA’s efforts to keep tabs on the trades.25

On 18 August 1945, only three months after his appointment by Truman as Secretary, Anderson played his card. Based on the recommendations of his Committee on Reorganization and its chairman, former USDA official Milton S. Eisenhower, Anderson first dismantled both the Agricultural Adjustment Agency and the Office of Marketing Services (OMS), the successor to the Division of Marketing.26 Next, the reorganization consolidated their personnel and powers into a new Production and Marketing Administration (PMA), organized not by function but by commodity to bring the “producer men” from AAA directly together with the “trades men” from OMS. Third, it took what was left of Triple A, renamed it the Field Service Branch and designated it PMA’s contact with the state PMA committees. Finally, nearly a year later, it reconstituted the state AAA committees as PMA committees “by adding farmers whose primary interest is now marketing. It’s part of a general move to make [the] whole agency really ‘PMA,’ farmer run. [The] move will give co-ops and private trade representation according to the chief farming interests in each state.” In fact as well as in name, from top to bottom, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration was abolished.27 (See figure 3.) 24Wayne Darrow’s Washington Farmletter (WDWF), 8 September 1945, 29 July 1944, 25 August 1945, No. 111, 27 October 1945; KAL No. 439, 22 September 1945; “Food subsidies to end soon,” WF, 17 November 1945: 842; Clinton P. Anderson (with Milton Viorst), Outsider in the Senate (New York: World Publishing Co., 1970): 63; Allen J. Matusow, Farm policies and politics in the Truman years (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967): chap. 6.

25KAL No. 292, 17 February 1940; Walter W. Wilcox, The farmer and the Second World War (Ames: Iowa State College Press, 1947): 351; KAL No. 333, 30 August 1941, No. 353, 4 July 1942.

26The marketing agency went through many incarnations after 1938, but the Division of Marketing and Marketing Agreements was essentially intact within OMS. By this time, too, the AAA was more properly titled the Agricultural Adjustment Agency. For a helpful organizational history, see Government Information Service, United States Government Manual (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1946): Appendix A.

27WDWF No. 137, 27 April 1946, 28 July 1945, 4 August 1945, 11 August 1945, No. 158, 21 September 1946; “Memorandum,” 18 August 1945, RG 83, Box 211; KAL No. 431, 2 June 1945, No. 457, 1 June 1946; Matusow,

From the standpoint of political administration, the super-agency that Anderson created in 1945 and 1946 was radically different from the old Triple A. Both the farm groups and the trades complained of losses in the shuffle, accusing Anderson of sacrificing them to the enemy. In truth, neither and both were correct, and that was exactly the point. “The Department of Agriculture, in the opinion of some people, has a better balance in the point of view and the experience of its administrators, than before,” USDA economist Walter Wilcox wrote in 1947. “Before the war, the dominance of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, administered by farmers with continued farm connections, was a source of concern to some students of public administration. Although former Agricultural Adjustment Administration officials maintain several key positions in the Department of Agriculture [including PMA Director], the processing point of view is well represented in the commodity branches.” Unlike the separate AAA and OMS, then, the Production and Marketing Administration forced advocates of producers and champions of the trades to confront each other in formulating and implementing both the marketing and adjustment programs. In the farm program in particular, it lent greater weight to proposals for moving crop surpluses into consumption and export rather than merely preventing them. As Darrow summarized, the “practical effect is to break up the once-mighty AAA, … which has been a thorn in the flesh of some trades and others for years. [The] main business significance to farmers is that producer influence will be much weaker in policy and program making. [The] significance to farm and food trades is assurance that PMA policies and programs will be developed in an atmosphere more favorable to business.” USDA’s new structure was well adapted to where USDA’s leaders wanted to go.28

The construction of the PMA, however, was only the first phase of a three-step reform designed to fortify the position of the Secretary in agricultural policymaking and implementation. The second phase, achieved in the fall of 1945, consolidated policy planning responsibilities in the Office of the Secretary. By accretion, AAA and OMS had picked up policy prerogatives during the war, counterpoising them to the traditional powers of the BAE. “A lot of the authority and thinking in the Department of Agriculture was broadly scattered,” Nathan Koenig recalled. Consequently, Anderson extracted policy planning, first from the PMA (in October) and then from the BAE (in December), and unified it in his own office. The Secretary tightened his grip on policy initiative.29

Farm policies: 72–78; James L. Forsythe, “Clinton P. Anderson: Politician and businessman as Truman’s Secretary of Agriculture,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of New Mexico, 1970: chap. 14.

28Wilcox, Second World War: 351; WDWF No. 159, 28 September 1946; Wilcox, Second World War: 357–60; John Morton Blum, The price of vision: The diary of Henry A. Wallace, 1942-1946 (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Co., 1973): 545; WDWF No. 112, 3 November 1945; KAL No. 452, 23 March 1946; “May pay more for light hogs,” WF, 20 April 1946: 387; “Put AAA men back in power,” WF, 4 May 1946: 436. Wayne Darrow, a journalist, served in the USDA’s Office of Information in the 1930s.

29Koenig interview; “Origin, structure and functions of the U.S. Department of Agriculture,” mimeo, 1 November 1946, USDA Office of Information: 12; WDWF, 6 October 1945; Charles M. Hardin, “The Bureau of Agricultural Economics under fire: A study in valuation conflicts,” Journal of Farm Economics 28 (August 1946): 651;

In the third phase of his reforms, finally, Anderson brought PMA’s field administration under Washington’s harness. In June 1946, PMA Director Robert Shields took state program planning and policymaking responsibilities away from the elected state committees and gave them instead to federally-appointed PMA directors. In September, moreover, Shields abolished the regional PMA offices, replaced the Field Service Branch with an Assistant Administrator for Field Operations, and directed the PMA commodity branches to deal directly with the state PMA committees. The trend, Darrow noted in his newsletter, “is toward [a] centralized, push-button, type of administration from Washington to states to counties, and away from [the] old committee system of state operation. In the states, PMA directors and assistant directors will be in full charge, [and] boss virtually all PMA field programs.” The “Production and Marketing Adm.’s new policy of centralized, top-down administration,” he continued, “means that more and more key decisions will be made in the office of Director Shields.” The state and county committees were “put under the strictest Department discipline [they have] ever known.”30

Anderson’s order, especially the abolition of the regional offices, precipitated a blowup. “To its enemies,” Matusow noted, “this order meant the destruction of the last vestiges of the AAA and farmer influence in Washington.” The regional directors, the state committee chairmen, the Farmers Union, and the Farm Bureau, strange bedfellows all, took their protests to Congress and the White House. Under pressure and concerned that the “issue was being agitated” in the midst of the 1946 elections, Anderson rescinded his decision two weeks later, on Truman’s order. The opponents’ hopes of a permanent reversal, though, proved illusory. “As soon as the 14 state PMA directors … hit town,” Darrow reported in February 1947, after the election, “Anderson laid down the law: that he would be Secretary as long as Truman was President; that he, not the old AAA, was going to run USDA; [and] that the old days of AAA domination over USDA policy (under Wickard) are over.” In January acting PMA Director Jesse Gilmer “more or less suspended” the ringleader of the AAA dissidents, and by late February the rebellion had subsided. By April it had ended. The task had taken nearly a year, but Clinton Anderson had beaten the Triple A.31

Kirkendall, Social scientists: 232–33, 237–38; Herbert Emmerich, Essays on federal reorganization (University, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 1950): 48.

30WDWF No. 145, 22 June 1946, No. 153, 17 August 1946, No. 136, 20 April 1946; KAL No. 459, 29 June 1946, No. 466, 5 October 1946; “Anything could happen now,” WF, 1 September 1945: 591; “Thinks crop control may be needed,” WF, 19 October 1946: 1007. For a dissenting opinion, see Richard Wilson, “The farmer’s Washington,” Successful Farming, July 1946: 12.

31Matusow, Farm policies: 74; KAL No. 467, 19 October 1946; WDWF No. 178, 8 February 1947; Richard Wilson, “The farmer’s Washington,” Successful Farming, February 1947: 6; WDWF No. 154, 24 August 1946, No. 155, 31 August 1946, No. 161, 12 October 1946, No. 164, 2 November 1946, No. 168, 30 November 1946, No. 184, 22 March 1947, No. 189, 26 April 1947, No. 199, 5 July 1947; KAL No. 469, 16 November 1946; “Shall we go back to acreage control?” WF, 2 November 1946: 1059; “Will new Congress change farm program?” WF, 7 December 1946: 1175; “Congress wants to cut farm funds,” WF, 1 March 1947: 228; Matusow, Farm policies: 74–76.

In total, the reorganization of 1945 to 1947 contained the influence of the agencies and expanded the power of the leadership within the USDA. It broke Triple A into pieces, scattered it into dozens of new PMA branches, and countered it with marketing specialists and their allies in the agricultural trades. It harvested policy planning responsibilities from the bureaus and deposited them in the Office of the Secretary. Finally, it moved control of USDA administration out of the country and into Washington, subjugated the elected committees to the appointed directors, and closed down the fiefdoms in the regional AAA offices. Conclusion

In the 1930s and 1940s, then, two Secretaries of Agriculture extended leadership’s range of decision over matters of policy. By tightening the reins on field administration, the Secretaries restricted the ability of subordinates and clients to interfere in the implementation of policies they opposed. Further, by consolidating policy planning within their orbit, the Secretaries limited the power of subordinates and clients to squelch proposals they disfavored. Finally, by countervailing subordinates and clients within the Department, the Secretaries created opportunities to play their demands off against each other.32

Thus, the significance of the USDA reforms in the thirties and forties was not that leaders acted contrary to the wishes of agencies or interest groups (even though Anderson’s reforms encountered stiff opposition from both). Rather, the significance was that leaders took the opportunity to build political and institutional barriers against the demands of agencies and interest groups. The Secretaries bought insurance against the day when they would have to oppose them—and that day was not long in coming.

Even so, the reassertion of the political control in the Department of Agriculture is a remarkable story. It is remarkable that it succeeded. It is remarkable that it encountered so little resistance. And it is remarkable that it was undertaken at all. What do the circumstances of reorganization in the 1930s and 1940s suggest about the conditions under which political bureaucrats can extend their control over the direction of their own departments? Why did Wallace and Anderson try, and why did they succeed, in the exercise of political leadership in the federal bureaucracy?

Delegation and political authority One of the key powers of political leaders in the federal bureaucracy is their control over 32Readers will recognize these as some of Eric A. Nordlinger’s “autonomy-enhancing strategies.” See Nordlinger, On the autonomy of the democratic state (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981): 90–98, 109–15, 128–34.

the formal and informal organization of their own domains. Political executives are charged by legislation passed by Congress to manage specific programs, but the precise form administration takes is subject to their discretion. To be sure, their choice is constrained. Enactment coalitions in Congress make administrative assignments in the anticipation that particular interests will be served and protected. Oversight committees control budget and prerogatives. Citizens cooperate in administrative programs or resist, collectively or individually. But the instruments of constraint are blunt. Enforcement of congressional preferences over administrative structure and routine requires collective action, and even if achieved not only deprives departmental executives but also clientele agencies and, importantly, constituents. Political leaders enjoy considerable scope of action within parameters quite broadly defined by Congress. Accordingly, the primary issue that confronts political executives in the administrative design of their departments is the issue of delegation: how much discretion shall be granted subordinate agencies and on what terms? As Bawn argues of legislative delegation, the “degree of agency independence on an particular policy reflects the legislature’s willingness to trade uncertainty about policy consequences for uncertainty about agency behavior.”33 So, too, of department leaders. Political bureaucrats must balance the benefits of more expert administration against the danger that agencies will use delegated powers to set their own course. As the department’s vulnerability to policy uncertainty gives way to vulnerability to administrative uncertainty, as it will, leadership might be expected to attempt to reclaim authority it had previously and willingly alienated. The Wallace reorganization: Policy uncertainty As a starting point, such is a reasonable interpretation of the reorganization of Triple A in the 1930s. The Agricultural Adjustment Act of 12 May 1933 charged the department to implement the voluntary domestic allotment program for each of seven “basic” commodities, wheat, cotton, corn, hogs, tobacco, rice, and milk.34 The allotment plan required farmers to scale back production in return for benefit payments made from the proceeds of a “processing tax” on millers, ginners, packers, crushers, and manufacturers. Administratively, the undertaking was immensely complex. As a Brookings Institution study summarized, the design of the program in Washington entailed

(a) Analysis of the existing and prospective situation with particular reference to the economic position of producers as measured by the standard of purchasing power “parity.”

(b) Determination of the rate of the processing tax which would be indicated in this situation in

33 Bawn, “Political control”: 63. 34 The number of basic commodities was soon expanded to 13 by the Jones-Connally Act of 1934. The list of supported crops expanded and contracted, but wheat, corn, cotton, tobacco, rice, peanuts, and milk were consistently covered.

accordance with the act and estimation of the probable revenue from such a tax.

(c) Decision as to the amount of reduction in production of the commodity which should be sought to effectuate the purposes of the act.

(d) Consideration of the rate of payment to producers which would be necessary in order to obtain their participation in the plan….

(e) Determination of a representative base period from which reduction of acreage or production would be computed with the highest degree of equity to the several interested parties.

(f) The setting of such quotas as were to be allotted and the manner in which they were to be distributed geographically and, finally, to the individual.

(g) Specification of rates of payment to be made for compliance with the adjustment program. (h) Preparation of instructions, forms, and other administrative details.35

Additionally, the implementation of the program in the field required

(a) The preparation of publicity material to give popular exposition of the details of the plan and how it was expected to affect participants….

(b) Organization and supervision of actual sign-up campaigns…. (c) Checking and often adjusting participants’ data as to previous farming operations. These were

indispensable elements in determining the terms of each participant’s contract with the Secretary of Agriculture and the basis of payments to be made to him subsequently on proof of compliance.

(d) Completing the routine of acceptance in the name of the Secretary so as to constitute a valid contract.

And, moreover, once participants were enrolled, successful execution of the contracts demanded

(a) Computing preliminary payments which were to be made during the growing season in accordance with the terms of the contract and having payment checks prepared in Washington and distributed to millions of contract signers in all parts of the country.

(b) Planning and supervising the activities of local agencies in checking contract signers’ farming operations during the growing season to see that they were complying with the terms of the contract.

(c) Dealing with such special circumstances as might arise during the period of operation which might call for special interpretations of the contract terms or even modification of the original plan….

(d) Securing final check of compliance with the terms of the completed contract and submission of final proof of such compliance.

(e) Computation of the year’s final payments due in accordance with the terms of the contract and issuance and distribution of final settlement checks.36

In the first year, the four largest programs—in cotton, tobacco, wheat, and corn and hogs—wrote nearly two million production control contracts with nearly three million farmers, monitored

35 Nourse, Davis, and Black, Three years: 61–62. 36 Nourse, Davis, and Black, Three years: 65–66.

compliance, and issued benefit payments.37 Thus, in 1933, policy uncertainty loomed large. With tasks like these, program implementation simply could not be done from Washington. It required too much local knowledge, and time was too short: by the time the Act was passed, most field crops were already planted, and wheat was ripe for harvest in the southern plains. Thus, delegation of field administration to the agricultural Extension services and to committees of farmers appointed by county extension agents helped to overcome acute difficulties in program implementation. The nature of the difficulties was threefold. One uncertainty was purely informational. In order to implement the allotment program for field crops, AAA needed to establish a “base acreage,” an historic benchmark of previous production for each commodity, for each farm producer. It needed moreover to ascertain whether each farmer in fact complied with the terms of production contracts by reducing plantings or destroying crops already planted. In reporting their practices in years previous or in carrying through on their contractual obligations, farmers had incentives to misrepresent, or to be more charitable, to guess on the high side whenever they did not know for sure. Nationwide, for example, compared to official USDA estimates, cotton producers “overestimated” their previous acreage in cotton by 6.6 percent and their previous production of cotton by 22.6 percent. In the most startling instance, Oklahoma producers overstated their typical production by nearly 50 percent. Such experience was not peculiar to cotton. In all the programs, the sum of farmers’ individual claims of historic acreage and historic production usually exceeded the county estimates that BAE’s crop reporting bureau had made, sometimes by a wide margin. But Triple A insisted that the numbers be made to match, and “newspaper accounts of the failure of Farm Bureau leaders to persuade [AAA Production Division chief] Chester C. Davis … that the quotas should be relinquished resulted in many communities returning with renewed vigor to the work of adjusting production figures in [acreage reduction] contracts.” Their neighbors, the county agents and the county committeemen, knew the situation on the ground.38

37 Even mundane administrative tasks, like issuing benefit checks, took place on an unprecedented scale. At its peak, AAA turned out 80,000 checks a day, and it averaged 25,000 checks a day during its first two years. Its ability to do so was made possible by innovations in data processing technology, in particular the Hollerith card, the precursor of the IBM punch card. “One of the amusing stories of the processing tax period with those Hollerith cards was of the sharecropper’s family in Texas,” recalled Mordecai Ezekiel, an economist who was special assistant to the Secretary. “They got one of those process tax checks … on a tabulating card. They had never seen one of these before … and they couldn’t figure out what it was. But finally they thought, ‘Well now, that looks just like a player piano roll—maybe it’ll fit the player piano,’ and they had a player piano so they put this on the old player and pumped it up to see what would happen. Sure enough it worked. The tune that came out was ‘Happy Days Are Here Again.’” Reminiscences of Mordecai Ezekiel, COHC: 86. 38 Richard H. Roberts, “The administration of the 1934 corn-hog program in Iowa,” Iowa Journal of History and Politics 33 (October 1935): 352; Henry I. Richards, Cotton and the AAA (Washington: Brookings Institution, 1936): 120 and more generally chap. 7; D. A. FitzGerald, Livestock under the AAA (Washington: Brookings Institution, 1935): chap. 6; Joseph Stancliffe Davis, Wheat and the AAA (Washington: Brookings Institution, 1935): chap. 3. Some farmers pleaded, apparently straight-facedly, that BAE’s county estimates were biased downward because farmers habitually underreported acreage and production to county assessors, to lower their taxes, and routinely underreported acreage and production to the BAE, to mislead the commodities markets.

A second element of uncertainty for AAA was farmers’ response to the agricultural adjustment program. The voluntary domestic allotment plan was exactly that—voluntary—and its success depended upon the willingness of farmers to participate in the program.39 Partly the uncertainty was a technical problem: AAA economists in Washington had to strike the right balance between benefits and obligations. But partly the uncertainty was an administrative problem: AAA officials in the field had to encourage the perception that the administration of the program—in the allocation of allotments and in the oversight of compliance—was fair and even-handed. As Gaus and Wolcott put it, “lines of action thus running directly to the farmer on his farm, programs the success of which depended upon the extent of voluntary cooperation, the waiver implicit in such, particularly of the unrestricted right of the owner to use his property in any way he pleased—all made substantial farmer support absolutely essential.” AAA officials, in fact, chose Extension for its field service over a second option, the state commissioners of agriculture, so as to divorce the AAA from partisan politics and to maintain USDA control, even if nominal, over field administration. Moreover, Extension’s ties to the nonpartisan Farm Bureau enabled AAA officials to call upon local farm bureau leadership in promoting the production control program. Producer participation in field administration and the involvement of highly-regarded county agricultural extension agents, that is, were also devices to secure farmers’ vital involvement in the program. “At least outside the South,” Brookings Institution researchers found, “a laudable degree of success has been attained in making [local administration] responsive to the desires of the producer group.” 40 The third element of uncertainty for AAA, though not really an informational deficit, was political support for the agricultural adjustment program. The Act had passed the Congress by a large margin, but still it faced the implacable hostility of the agricultural trades, which opposed the processing tax and the coercive use of marketing agreements. In hopes of blunting their objections, AAA Administrator George N. Peek staffed the Processing and Marketing Division with officials sympathetic to business—Charles J. Brand from the American Fertilizer Association as co-administrator and General William I. Westervelt from Sears, Roebuck as Division head—and actively sought the trades’ counsel. The reward was obstruction and delay,

39 Later, in 1934, the Bankhead Cotton Control Act and the Kerr-Smith Tobacco Act gave AAA the authority to compel participation in the cotton and tobacco programs. See Henry I. Richards, Cotton under the Agricultural Adjustment Act (Washington: Brookings Institution, 1934): 122–25. 40 Gaus and Wolcott, Public administration: 151; Nourse, Davis, and Black, Three years: 266; Wilson reminiscences, COHC: 1471–88; “One year old,” Bureau Farmer, April 1934: 12; Nourse, Davis, and Black, Three years: 64, 119-20, 137, 140, 273–74; John D. Black, The dairy industry and the AAA (Washington: Brookings Institution, 1935): 352. Beginning in 1934, AAA submitted the programs to farmers for approval in referenda, which approval was nearly always granted and nearly always by large margins. See Robert E. Martin, “The referendum process in the agricultural adjustment programs of the United States,” Agricultural History 24 (January 1951): 34–47; “Wheat men vote ‘yes’,” WF, 8 June 1935: 345; “Corn-hog farmers back AAA,” Literary Digest, 2 November 1935: 6.

to the point that Kiplinger warned of “trouble in Congress next winter if [AAA] doesn’t speed up” and Farm Bureau president Edward A. O’Neal complained that “much more progress has been made in raising wages and prices for industries and distributors under the N.R.A. codes than has been done for agriculture under the A.A.A.” The Production Division, in the meantime, solicited and solidified farmer support for AAA with ostentatious regard for the farm organizations’ viewpoints. “Never before has such tremendous effort been made to see that ‘dirt farmers’ themselves were consulted at every stage of developing the program,” Wallaces’ Farmer noted at the end of 1933, “and that ‘dirt farmers’ themselves were given the power to administer the program after it was developed.” USDA’s delegation of policy authority to AAA was instrumental in creative an appreciative constituency for the Department’s new program.41 In the first years of the agricultural adjustment program, then, delegation of policy development to AAA and delegation of field administration to Extension and its farmer clients was an outstanding success. Through close consultation with far producers, the USDA implemented a vast program of production control and subsidy payments that was without precedent anywhere in the world. Starting with very little information, it allocated allotments, enforced production controls, and paid out millions of dollars in benefits with a mrximum of cooperation and a minimum of fraud. “Unquestionably [AAA’s] principle of ‘economic democracy’”—AAA’s term for farmer involvement in program administration—“has been a major factor in helping the AAA to succeed in an administrative task of staggering dimensions,” a 1935 study by the Brookings Institution concluded. “The AAA stands out as one of the best administered of New Deal agencies.”42 But by 1936, in fact, delegation in field administration had already served its purpose. Triple A had always viewed Extension’s role in administration of the agricultural adjustment program as a temporary expedient, to be replaced as soon as possible by AAA’s own field service and elected farmer committeemen. So, for that matter, had Extension.43 AAA had gotten

41 KAL No. 118, 9 September 1933; “Clear the road,” Bureau Farmer, October 1933: 3; Perkins, Crisis: 100; KAL No. 108, 6 May 1933; KAL No. 117, 26 August 1933; Campbell, Farm Bureau: 56, 63; Davis, Wheat: 71–72; FitzGerald, Corn: 12n; Wilson reminiscences, COHC: 1550; Lowitt, Tamed bureaucrat: 177; KAL No. 122, 4 November 1933; Paul H. Hayward, “The first year in milk planning,” Nation’s Business, June 1934: 29; “Farm troubles,” Business Week, 16 September 1933: 16. For more on Peek’s approach to the trades, and its aftermath, see Nourse, Davis, and Black, Three years: 71, 76, 225, 391; Black, Dairy: 102–08; Edwin G. Nourse, Marketing agreements under the AAA (Washington: Brookings Institution, 1935): chaps. 2, 11; “Farm reliever,” Business Week, 24 May 1933: 18; “AAA fails to recognize farmers’ cooperatives,” American Farm Bureau Federation Weekly News Letter, 5 September 1933: 3; George N. Peek, Why quit our own? (New York: D. Van Nostrand Co., 1936): 144–45, 154–55. 42 Nourse, Davis, and Black, Three years: 257, 246; Perkins, Crisis in agriculture. See also the series of Brookings studies of particular commodity programs, cited fully in Nourse, Davis, and Black, Three years. For a particularly detailed portrait of the implementation of the tobacco program, see Anthony J. Badger, Prosperity road: The New Deal, tobacco, and North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980). 43 The land grant colleges and state extension services in the Midwest and Northeast welcomed Tolley’s decision to discharge Extension from farm program administration. The Triple A program, they felt, had eclipsed their

the detailed local information it needed to implement the production control program. Information is costly only while it is unknown; information is costless once it is revealed. The successful implementation of the agricultural adjustment program diminished the value of delegation for informational purposes. The Wallace reorganization: Agency uncertainty Nothing in the USDA’s experience with delegation, however, necessitated the sweep of Henry Wallace’s reforms of departmental administration. Delegation had achieved its intended purposes, to enable program implementation and to solidify political support for the agricultural adjustment program. AAA’s practice of consultation with the farm lobby had proved a magnificent success; its attempt to accommodate the trades had proved a political disaster. But still, Wallace pressed ahead with reforms that trimmed the influence of producers and broadened the influence of the trades within the Department of Agriculture. Wallace’s own plans for the Department of Agriculture, as a policy leader in his own right, appear to have caused the costs of delegation to figure more prominently in administrative planning. For his own policy plans, Wallace had in mind to elevate the status of agricultural marketing programs within the USDA, and he believed that in order to do so, he needed to bring AAA more firmly under control. In the 1930s, the Secretary’s vision diverged significantly from the basic orientations of the bureaucrats who staffed the AAA.

At the heart of Agriculture’s restructuring in the Roosevelt years lay the food stamp plan, USDA’s first systematic attempt to channel farm surpluses to needy consumers. In its very conception, the program ran counter to Department traditions. The essential article of the agrarian faith of the twenties and thirties found the source of the farm problem in over-production. It was the intellectual basis for the agricultural adjustment plan, and, not surprisingly, it suffused the Triple A. In the 1930s, however, other USDA economists located the farm problem in under-consumption. The implications of their argument, of course, were radical: Agriculture should move away from programs that restricted production and toward programs that promoted consumption.44

In the mid-1930s, the views of the “liberals” won the attention of the Department’s top leadership. Their appeal was a mix of ideological sentiment and hard-nosed political calculation. Despite its fundamental agrarianism, the New Deal USDA was a refuge for a variety of

educational work and drawn county agents into a partisan issue. The southern extension services, however, were less pleased. Their state legislatures had never funded them as generously as in the North, and because federal Smith–Lever funds were apportioned on a matching basis, they were starved for resources before AAA came along. They did not wish to go back, and in fact, Extension involvement in AAA administration persisted in the South. See Wilson’s reminiscences, COHC: 2001–11 44Kirkendall, Social scientists: 79–81, 163.

experiments ranging from the mildly progressive Soil Conservation Service to the brash new Farm Security Administration (both of which transferred to the Department from elsewhere). In the early days, many of these projects were the tutelage of Under Secretary Rexford G. Tugwell, whom the Triple A regarded as a dangerous radical. Gradually, though, the challenge and purpose they generated drew Secretary Henry A. Wallace away from his ancestral agrarianism. Initially devoted to the farmers’ cause, Wallace agonized over the 1935 “purge” of the liberals and afterward harbored disappointment approaching resentment that Triple A had forced the decision upon him. Ideologically, the New Deal worked on Wallace as it worked on others, turning a cautious man of progressive intentions toward a broader vision of reform.45

As striking as Wallace’s intellectual journey was, however, the pivotal appeal of the liberal program was more purely strategic. Observers sized Wallace up as a potential successor to Roosevelt as early as 1934, and by 1937, according to aides, Wallace himself cherished the thought. For the Secretary and his advisers, presidential ambitions vastly extended the political frontier, and by 1938 two of its features were apparent.46

First, the New Deal had long since shifted its course away from the corporatism of the “first” New Deal and toward the welfare statism of the “second.” As is well known, the constituency for the second New Deal was urban workers and the disadvantaged.

Second, in Congress and in the countryside, farmers’ alienation from the New Deal was palpable. Legislation to create a permanent farm program languished in Congress for almost a year before its passage early in 1938. Unnerved by the bill’s tough production quotas, farm state lawmakers temporized despite ferocious pressure from Farm Bureau leaders. It was well that they should. Within months of approval, Democrats (and the Farm Bureau) backpedalled rapidly from the 1938 Agricultural Adjustment Act, an accurate portent of November’s disaster.47 The Midwest’s rebellion was not news to the Department, however. Based on assays of voting trends, Gallup polls, and USDA surveys, Department analysts had already traced the general decline in farmers’ support for the New Deal, although they were at a loss to explain it. In any case, the answer was really beside the point. Despite the solicitude extended to them,

45[Raymond Gram Swing], “The purge at the AAA,” Nation, 20 February 1935: 216–17; Paul W. Ward, “Wallace the great hesitator,” Nation, 8 May 1935: 536; Dean Albertson, Roosevelt’s farmer: Claude R. Wickard and the New Deal (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961): 103; Edward L. Schapsmeier and Frederick H. Schapsmeier, Henry A. Wallace of Iowa: The agrarian years, 1910-1940 (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1968): 241 and passim.

46Stanley High, “Will it be Wallace?” Saturday Evening Post, 3 July 1937:. 5 ff; KAL No. 210, 6 February 1937, No. 231, 13 November 1937; Reminiscences of Paul H. Appleby, COHC: 167–71.

47Another straw in the wind in 1938 was the Farm Bureau’s call for an independent board to administer the farm program after 1940, a proposal symptomatic of its growing distrust of the political leaders of USDA. See “Final action near on farm bill,” WF, 29 January 1938, p. 73; KAL No. 259, 10 December 1938; Campbell, Farm Bureau: 177–78.

midwestern farmers returned to the Grand Old Party.48

In the context of 1938, then, Wallace’s adoption of the agricultural consumption program was a clever solution to a difficult problem. Politically, it limited his dependence on a constituency that was fast abandoning him. At the same time, in its appeals to the poor of the cities, it staked his claim to inheritance of the New Deal. Given its departure from the Department’s attentions hitherto, plans to develop the food stamp plan made liberation of the marketing agencies from Triple A an absolute necessity. Left to its own devices, AAA would either ignore the marketing programs or impede them. In the reorganization of October 1938, therefore, “Wallace was mainly motivated by his convictions concerning the type of work the Department will do by force of circumstances during the next 5, 10, 15, even 20 years.”49 Deviating as they did from the Department’s past, Wallace’s aspirations for the Department—and his ambitions for himself—required greater administrative control. Delegation was more costly to the political leadership in 1938 than it was in 1933. The motivations for administrative reform during Henry Wallace’s secretaryship, in sum, reflect a logic of delegation that trades off more informed policy development and implementation against the loss of control. Early in Wallace’s administration, when USDA was building the agricultural adjustment program from the ground up, the informational—and political—benefits of delegation were immensely attractive. Later in Wallace’s administration, when USDA wished to shift the emphasis of its policies, the loss of control in delegation was far less tolerable. Delegation in wartime: policy information and political positioning 48KAL No. 219, 29 May 1937, No. 222, 10 July 1937, No. 226, 4 September 1937, No. 233, 11 December 1937, No. 244, 14 May 1935, No. 247, 25 June 1938; “Starting work on farm bill,” WF, 6 November 1937: 813 ff; “Washington adjusting self after adjournment,” National Butter and Cheese Journal, 10 July 1938: 36; T.R.B., “Washington notes,” New Republic, 24 November 1937: 73; Donald R. McCoy, “George S. McGill of Kansas and the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938,” Historian 45 (February 1983): 186–205; “Farmer attitudes toward the New Deal,” preliminary report, 11 June 1938, RG 83, Box 211. The 1938 public opinion study was representative of USDA political analysis. The Department of Agriculture, and Wallace in particular, was acutely interested in analysis of election returns, so interested, in fact, that the earliest attempts to forecast elections were made in the 1930s by Louis H. Bean, a USDA economist who was special assistant to the Secretary. See Bean’s book, How to predict elections (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948) and popular articles about his election forecasts, for example, “Up the Bean poll, Newsweek, 15 November 1948: 29; Louis Bean, “Who will win in November,” New Republic, 16 September 1946: 316–18; Bean, “Forecasting the 1950 elections,” Harper’s Magazine, April 1950: 36–40.

49KAL No. 255, 15 October 1938, No. 245, 28 May 1938; Lord, Wallaces: 469-72. The Farm Bureau’s displeasure with the elevation of consumption programs was so extreme that a proposal to revive food stamps in the Truman Administration raised it to anger. “We do not believe that the Department of Agriculture should be concerned about people in the cities,” a director of the Washington Farm Bureau told Clinton Anderson. “Its job is to see that the farmers get adequate prices.” See Angus McDonald, “Anderson’s program,” New Republic, 10 November 1947: 30; KAL No. 428, 21 June 1941, No. 333, 30 August 1941; Richard Wilson, “It’s Reno for the Bureau,” Successful Farming, September 1942: 28.

As we will consider momentarily, Anderson’s motivations for administrative reform had important parallels with Wallace’s. Both secretaries sought to reorient farm policy toward greater emphasis on consumption. In fact, because of a policy environment that was massively changed by the war, Anderson’s plans for change made Wallace’s look halting and timid. But the logic of delegation that created the administrative problem for Anderson seems to have been very different. In fact, the Department’s informational needs seem to have played little role in the wartime delegation to the Agricultural Adjustment Administration. Although the federal agricultural program expanded during World War II—by the war’s end, the number of commodities with price support had increased to 20 from 6—the main outlines of the program were unchanged. Where in 1933 the Department had created the programs de novo, in 1941 it simply applied policy and administrative expertise that was already well developed.

Instead, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration accrued powers through the exploitation of its improved political position during the War. In the early forties as in the late thirties, the USDA saw a deep and widening rift between the agrarians in the AAA and the “liberals” in the Bureau of Agricultural Economics (BAE) and the Farm Security Administration (FSA). The war mobilization focused their rivalry on two old but repackaged issues: the vigor of the Department’s mobilization efforts and the Department’s orientation toward different classes of farmers. True to its past, Triple A counseled caution in expanding production and sought to steer price guarantees primarily toward large, commercial producers. Farm Security, on the other hand, urged a more aggressive mobilization effort targeted primarily at small farmers.50

Agriculture Secretary Claude R. Wickard, a close political associate of Henry A. Wallace, struggled valiantly to maintain an even hand, but when crucial decisions had to be made, Wickard sided largely with AAA. In July 1941, the Secretary merged seven types of USDA county committees, including AAA and FSA committees, into county Defense Boards, and he put the chairs of the county Triple A panels in charge. In December 1941, moreover, Wickard consolidated AAA, FSA, and Soil Conservation Service into the Agricultural Adjustment and Conservation Administration. Once more, he put Triple A on top, moving AAA Administrator Rudolph M. (Spike) Evans up to lead it. In December 1942, finally, Roosevelt created a two-branch Food Administration inside the USDA, placing the marketing services in the Food Distribution Administration and the adjustment and conservation agencies in the Food Production Administration. This time, Wickard appointed an FSA official, Herbert W. Parisius, to the top Production post. Parisius lasted 36 days. Clifford Townsend from Triple A succeeded him. As Howard Tolley put it, Wickard “was supremely conscious of the Triple-A—an organization that he had helped to build—and he would tend to look upon that as the real unit of 50KAL No. 318, 15 February 1941, No. 340, 6 December 1941, No. 343, 17 January 1942, No. 345, 14 February 1942, No. 361, 26 September 1942; Carlyle Hodgkin, “Agriculture’s got troubles,” Successful Farming, March 1943: 22 ff; “Farm price prop?” Business Week, 8 March 1941: 26; Albertson, Roosevelt’s farmer: chaps. 9–17; Reminiscences of Rudolph M. Evans, COHC: 215–55.

organization in the Department of Agriculture.51

The decisions under Wickard re-established and re-enforced Triple A’s hegemony in the Department of Agriculture. On one side, liberals allied with FSA labeled them a “sell-out.” On the other side, the Farm Bureau rejoiced that the agencies were “in the hands of a practical man who thinks in farm terms.” One journalist’s view of the Defense Boards, then, was more generally true of the Department: “Instead of remaining the errand boy of the county war boards, AAA has virtually taken over all of their functions.”52 Once again, the interests of farm producers dominated the USDA’s agenda.

Wickard’s capitulation to the AAA had little to do with the Department’s need for more expert policy development and information. Rather, it had to do with the Department’s untenable position in wartime politics. Throughout his term, the Secretary was caught between the demands of the White House and the congressional farm bloc, each of which had the resources to enforce its will.

One option for Wickard was to lean toward Triple A and Capitol Hill, ease restrictions on production slowly, and keep farm prices high. The White House, however, provided the argument against it. Administration officials dropped broad and frequent hints that the President might consider a separate Food Administration, such as Woodrow Wilson created during World War I, if Agriculture did not act more responsibly. Waxing hot and cold for price control, Wickard retained authority over the wartime food program until March 1943, when Roosevelt, exasperated by the Department’s resistance to agricultural price controls, pulled the “action agencies” out of the USDA.53 51Tolley reminiscences, COHC: 554; Albertson, Roosevelt’s farmer: chaps. 2–8; Eugene Butler, “What’s new in agriculture,” Progressive Farmer, March 1941: 10; “Dirt farmers are in charge,” WF, 22 February 1941: 116; “Cliff Townsend heads AAA,” WF, 27 June 1942: 374; “Names Wickard food boss,” WF, 12 December 1942; KAL No. 341, 20 December 1941, No. 346, 28 February 1942, No. 356, 18 July 1942, No. 367, 19 December 1942, No. 369, 16 January 1943; “Food czar at last,” Business Week, 12 December 1942: 16–18; James G. Patton, “Why food is scarce,” Nation, 13 March 1943: 374–76; Albertson, Roosevelt’s farmer: 229–30, 251, 288–91, 330–51; Wilcox, Second World War: 47–48; Sidney Baldwin, Poverty and politics: The rise and decline of the Farm Security Administration (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968): 325–77. The marketing agencies survived the war intact. Under the leadership of Roy Hendrickson, they established industry advisory committees to help formulate their program, the first institutionalized consultation with the trades since George Peek left AAA. The practice was continued by the War Food Administration. See Wilcox, Second World War: 357; “War food boss,” Business Week, 23 January 1943: 19–20; KAL No. 371, 13 February 1943.

52“Keeping tab on Washington,” Nation’s Agriculture, February 1943: 9; Richard Wilson, “The farmer’s Washington,” Successful Farming, January 1944: 37; “As the editor sees it,” Nation’s Agriculture, February 1943: 2; Michael Straight, “The fight for food,” New Republic, 1 February 1943: 138–40; “War food boss,” Business Week, 23 January 1943: 19.

53KAL No. 343, 17 January 1942, No. 347, 14 March 1942, No. 348, 28 March 1942, No. 349, 11 April 1942, No. 355, 4 July 1942, No. 358, 15 August 1942; “Henderson wins,” Business Week, 7 February 1942: 17. The leadership of the War Food Administration was no more responsive to Roosevelt than Wickard. In obeisance to Congress, Roosevelt appointed two Administrators whose fundamental orientations were agrarian: Chester C. Davis, the

Wickard’s other option was to implement the reforms needed to hew to the President’s course of greater production and lower prices. But this course would have required Wickard to get behind a program strongly opposed by the AAA. Moreover, it would have required the Secretary to come to the aid of the FSA, an agency that had fewer and fewer strong supporters in the White House—its attention diverted from social reform by the war—and almost none on Capitol Hill. In 1941, Farm Security came under the scrutiny of the Joint Committee on Reduction of Nonessential Federal Expenditures, an inquisition into the expense and “socialistic tendencies” of the New Deal chaired by Virginia senator Harry F. Byrd. Inspired by the Farm Bureau, a bitter enemy of FSA, the Byrd Committee charged that the agency paid its clients’ poll taxes, an accusation that sent southern conservatives into a high dudgeon. Byrd’s attacks on FSA scattered its few congressional supporters, and in 1942 the Appropriations Committees lopped 40 percent off of its budget. Elevating the Farm Security program within the Department, then, was simply not a viable choice. As Howard Tolley put it, “I don’t think Congress would have supported such a program of all-out production as the Farm Security people wanted at that time.”54 The Anderson reorganization: Agency uncertainty However delegation might have benefited Claude Wickard during the War—and it is not clear that it benefited him very much—to maintain the AAA’s strong position in the Department promised few advantages for Clinton P. Anderson. As the war came to a close, the task for the Secretary was clear. The need to overhaul the farm program was the most open secret in Washington. “The furrowing of official brows is most intense about the two-year period during which Congress has promised price supports on certain crops at 90 percent of parity,” Darrow’s newsletter reported in 1944. “But farm program thinkers in both parties also look beyond that period to some system of keeping farm income at financially—and politically—satisfactory levels. The Government has a bear by the tail and can’t let go.”55 second Administrator of AAA, and Marvin Jones, the chairman of the House Agriculture Committee during the 1930s. KAL No. 374, 27 March 1943, No. 381, 3 July 1943; “Keeping tabs on Washington,” Nation’s Agriculture, May 1943: 3; “Keeping tabs on Washington,” Nation’s Agriculture, September 1943: 8–9; Eugene Butler, “What’s new in agriculture,” Progressive Farmer, November 1943: 12; Richard Wilson, “The farmer’s Washington,” Successful Farming, September 1943: 50; Washington Farmletter, 29 January 1944; Irvin M. May Jr., Marvin Jones: The public life of an agrarian advocate (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1980): 195–225; Wilcox, Second World War: 133–34; Murray R. Benedict, Farm policies of the United States, 1790–1950 (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1953): 427n.

54Tolley reminiscences, COHC: 575; KAL No. 345, 14 February 1942, No. 361, 26 September 1942; Helen Fuller, “Who speaks for the farmers?” New Republic, 23 February 1942: 267–68; Oren Stephens, “FSA fights for its life,” Harper’s, April 1943: 478-87; William G. Carr, “The return of the carpetbagger!” Nation’s Agriculture, April 1942: 7 ff; “The spotlight on FSA,” Pacific Rural Press, 4 April 1942: 248; “Don’t destroy the FSA!” Progressive Farmer, March 1942: 6; Baldwin, Poverty and politics: 347–62.

55Washington Farmletter, 2 September 1944.

The political dilemma was acute. Under the provisions of the Steagall Amendment of

1941, as amended, the federal government was obliged to support basic commodities and 14 “Steagall commodities” at 90 percent of parity until two years after cessation of hostilities.56 Thereafter, unless the law was changed, the farm program would revert to the terms of the 1938 Agricultural Adjustment Act, to its strict production quotas and (in the context of wartime prosperity) its relatively stingy subsidy levels. Viewed from one side, the impending problem was a farm price collapse similar to 1920s. The evident solution was to limit production, maintain subsidies and let prices rise. Viewed from the other side, the problems were more numerous. First, generous federal price guarantees would put a serious strain on the Treasury. Second, rigid production quotas would hamstring American relief efforts in war-ravaged Europe and Asia. Finally, low stocks and high prices would almost certainly aggravate inflation, already in double digits.57

Periodic rumors out of USDA placed Anderson firmly on the side of the Administration on the issue of long-range farm policy, but in his first two years as Secretary he studiously avoided a specific position on the issue. Fortunately, he had the luxury. The Steagall Amendment postponed consideration of postwar agricultural policy until two years after the president declared an end to hostilities, or until 1948.58 When revealed, in October 1947, the Administration’s plan was everything the farm bloc feared: subsidies pegged to running averages of market prices (instead of the benchmark 1910–14) at rates that varied inversely with carryover stocks (rather than at legislated rates).59

Anderson’s plans for policy reform, however, had an identifiable provenance. The

Secretary was a three-term Representative from New Mexico and a successful insurance agent who happened to own a dairy farm.60 Otherwise, he had few personal ties to agriculture. As a

56The “basic” commodities were corn, cotton, peanuts, rice, tobacco and wheat. The “Steagall commodities” were those covered separately under the terms of the amendment. With the exception of potatoes and eggs, they were less significant to the politics of the issue than the basics.

57Washington Farmletter, 29 July 1944, 25 November 1944; Wilcox, Second World War: 243–46.

58WDWF, 2 June 1945, 25 August 1945, 20 October 1945, No. 111, 27 October 1945, No. 115, 24 November 1945, No. 117, 8 December 1945; KAL No. 439, 22 September 1945, No. 445, 15 December 1945; “Food subsidies to end soon,” WF, 17 November 1945: 842; “Farm cutbacks,” Business Week, 25 August 1945: 21; Anderson, Insider in the Senate: 63. At the same time Anderson was avoiding a stand on long-term farm policy, he was actively working to undermine Office of Price Administration controls on farm commodity prices. See Barton I. Bernstein, “Clash of interests: The postwar battle between the Office of Price Administration and the Department of Agriculture,” Agricultural History, 41 (January 1967): 45–58; and Matusow, Farm policies: chap. 3.

59KAL No. 493, 18 October 1947, No. 503, 6 March 1948; WDWF No. 215, 25 October 1945, No. 226, 10 January 1948; Matusow, Farm policies: chap. 6.

60Even before his election to Congress, Anderson had already earned a footnote in political history. As a young reporter in Albuquerque he uncovered the involvement of Interior Secretary Albert B. Fall, formerly senator from

congressman who represented a state below the national median in agricultural production, in fact, his interest in farm policy was brand new: in March 1945, only three months prior to his appointment as Secretary, Anderson called for a probe into meat and sugar shortages and, having opened his mouth, found himself chairman of the Select Committee to Investigate Food Shortages. Truly a newcomer to agriculture, Anderson had no obvious affinity for the farm lobby, an attribute that probably weighed in his favor with Truman. He was the first Agriculture Secretary of the Democratic era who was a genuine outsider. As an outsider, he was a wild card, liable to pursue policy as technical necessity and susceptible to the direction of the president.61

But no plans for policy reform could be accomplished without administrative reform.

AAA and its farmer clients had clearly demonstrated their resistance to departures from the policy status quo, even during the flush of wartime patriotism. The agency costs of delegation engaged the leadership precisely because it felt compelled to pursue a policy direction that was fundamentally at odds with the preferences of its delegated agents.

Both Henry Wallace and Clinton Anderson wanted to take national agricultural policy in

directions the farm bloc opposed. For Anderson, independence was easy. He had no particular background, and indeed no particular interest, in agriculture, and no particular ties to the farm lobby. For Wallace, independence was acquired. His grandfather the founder of an influential agricultural weekly, his father a secretary of agriculture himself, Wallace was an advocate for farmers by birthright. But Wallace assumed bigger ambitions for leadership. Anderson and Wallace needed to extend their scope of action because their preferences were fundamentally at odds with the views of the agrarians who controlled the Department. The calculus of delegation had its roots in the actual stuff of the policy debates.

But why no sanctions? The actions that Henry A. Wallace took in the 1930s and the actions that Clinton P. Anderson took in the 1940s were plainly deliberate, made with consideration of objectives and expectation of consequences. The secretaries sought administrative change with particular policy goals in mind. They appreciated that structure is politics. New Mexico, in the Teapot Dome scandal. In fact, his entry into the insurance business was financed by the sale of his newspaper to some of Fall’s associates. See M. R. Werner and John Starr, The Teapot Dome scandal (London: Cassell and Co., 1961): 64–65; Baker, County agent: 15–17.

61KAL No. 431, 2 June 1945; Washington Farmletter, 31 March 1945; “Getting food facts, letting headlines go,” Business Week, 18 April 1945: 18; “Fourth food chief sets his goal,” Business Week, 30 June 1945: 32; Koenig interview; Matusow, Farm policies: 7–10; Richard Allan Baker, Conservation politics: The Senate career of Clinton P. Anderson (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1985): 23. In May 1948, Anderson left Agriculture successfully to seek a vacant Senate seat from New Mexico. In four terms in the Senate, he evinced only slight continuing interest in agricultural policy.

But seeking change is not the same as accomplishing change. In common portrayal,

political bureaucrats seeking effective control over their domains are hamstrung by dictates from Congress, demands from clientele, and indifference from the White House. Attempts to extend political control might be met by cooperation withheld in planning and implementing vital departmental programs. They might be defeated when agencies and clientele take objections to Congress, asking that legislators sequester departmental resources.62

Remarkably, however, nothing of the sort occurred when Henry A. Wallace and Clinton P.

Anderson downgraded the AAA and farm producers and elevated the marketing agencies and the trades. None of the secretaries’ initiatives was successfully resisted. Indeed, only one, Anderson’s reform of AAA field administration, was even contested. How did they get away with it?

One possibility is that nobody among agencies and clientele either noticed or cared about

the stakes in administrative reform. In parts of this story, a reasonable case might be made. The Extension Service did not resist its removal from field administration, for instance, because it was only too happy to be relieved of the responsibility. But in most instances, the contemporary record indicates the opposite. In both the 1930s and the 1940s, agencies and clientele appreciated the consequences of administrative reform quite well. AAA and the farm lobby viewed the Wallace reorganizations as demotions; the trades viewed them as new opportunities. Likewise in the 1940s: AAA and the farm lobby saw that the purpose in the reorganization was to limit farm producer interests in USDA policymaking.

A second possibility is that the subordinate agencies, their clientele, and their congressional associates, because of the political circumstances, lacked the opportunity to contest political bureaucrats’ actions. Certainly, there are circumstances that constrain rather than enable leadership in the executive branch. The very urgency of the war mobilization, for instance, put tight limits on Secretary Wickard’s scope of choice in his relations with AAA. But vulnerabilities exist even in more ordinary times. In 1935, for example, the Department’s liberals (grouped loosely around the Legal Division’s Jerome Frank) joined battle with Triple A’s agrarians on a variety of fronts, in particular over the terms of marketing agreements and the legal obligations of landlords to tenants. The disputes were nothing new; they had raged inside AAA from the beginning and played a part in George Peek’s ouster in 1933. The crucial element in 1935, rather, was Wallace’s submission to Congress of amendments to the Agricultural Adjustment Act. This legislative initiative gave the agrarians the lever they needed. As soon as Frank issued his controversial interpretation of tenant rights, southern legislators, at the behest of AAA’s Cotton Division, “informed Roosevelt that no significant piece of [farm] legislation would come out of Congress until matters were resolved in the Department of Agriculture.” His hand forced, Wallace allowed Chester Davis to fire the lawyers and dismantle 62 Bernstein, Executive: 84–89; Aaron Wildavsky, The politics of the budgetary process, 2d ed. (Boston: Little, Brown Co., 1974): 63–84; Francis E. Rourke, Bureaucracy, politics, and public policy, 2d ed. (Boston: Little, Brown Co., 1976): 112–14.

their offices.63

In contrast, the timing of both major administrative reforms is quite striking. Wallace

undertook reorganization when legislation was safely past. In March 1936, fresh on the heels of the passage of the 1936 Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act, which restored the farm program after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Hoosac Mills, Howard Tolley overhauled AAA’s field units. And in October 1938, immediately after congressional approval of the 1938 Agricultural Adjustment Act, so-called “permanent legislation” for the farm program, Henry Wallace reformed the USDA’s marketing units. Clinton Anderson undertook reform when legislation was safely in the future. The Steagall Amendment postponed consideration of postwar agricultural policy until two years after the president declared an end to hostilities, an announcement that Truman delayed until after the 1946 elections. The timing, apparently, was deliberate. Political leadership anticipated opposition and used circumstances to isolate themselves from sanctions.

The final possibilities focus on Congress. Political bureaucrats have unilateral powers

vis-à-vis subordinates. As we have already seen, political executives delegate powers and take them back. But executive departments depend upon Congress for their own powers. Congress can delegate powers and Congress can take them back.

In the 1930s and 1940s, Congress did not. Congressional actors, or those who might try to

mobilize them, knew that to reverse the decisions of USDA’s leadership would be costly. Wallace used reorganization to pursue the goals of the second New Deal, Roosevelt’s goals. Anderson likewise used reorganization to pursue a new long-range farm program, Truman’s program. Both Wallace and Anderson operated under the protective umbrella of presidential support.

Equally, congressional actors, or those who might try to mobilize them, knew that

effective oversight is difficult for Congress to achieve. It requires making oversight a priority relative to all of the other issues that engage congressional attention. It requires positive collective action in a body that is radically decentralized into two chambers and dozens of decision points. Finally, it requires careful application so as to deny political leaders without also depriving favored agencies and constituency clientele. The ease with which Clinton Anderson put down the rebellion of the regional offices of the Triple A, after backing down once before the 1946 election, could not but have been helped by the Republicans’ having taken control of Congress for the first time in 16 years. Given the opportunity costs for members of

63Roy V. Scott and J. G. Shoalmire, The public career of Cully A. Cobb (Jackson: University and College Press of Mississippi, 1973): 231; KAL No. 156, 9 February 1935, No. 138, 2 June 1934; Wilson reminiscences, COHC: 1806; Cully Alton Cobb, “The Cotton Section of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, 1933–1937,” interview, University of California Regional History Office: 83–84; William J. Briggs and Henry Cauthen, The cotton man: Notes on the life and times of Wofford B. (“Bill”) Camp (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1983): 131–34. Cobb and Camp were the Cotton Division officials most closely involved.

Congress, the contest was not worth the candle.

Precisely because oversight is difficult, Congress “stacks the deck” to bias administration

toward favored interests.64 And indeed Congress made a considered decision when it placed administration of the Agricultural Adjustment Act in the Department of Agriculture, as Secretary Wallace wished, rather than forming an independent administrative agency, as George Peek argued. In 1933, administration by the Department of Agriculture seemed a sound idea. Henry Wallace’s sympathy for farmers was well known: he was the son of another popular Agriculture Secretary, the grandson of the founder of a major agricultural journal, and an active participant in the campaign for farm relief in the 1920s. The farming sector’s previous experiment with an independent agency, the Hoover Administration’s Federal Farm Board, was an inept, unpopular failure.65 The spectacular success of the AAA program could only have reassured Congress that it had made the right choice.

But of course, people change and times change. Wallace grew in office to a broader

conception of his role as Secretary. Anderson came into office with a mandate for change. And as the policy environment changed, subsequent Secretaries of Agriculture like Charles Brannan, Ezra Taft Benson, Orville Freeman, Clifford Hardin, and Bob Bergland took Agriculture in directions that frequently displeased its core constituency of commercial producers of price-supported crops.66 But Congress, once having delegated, has a much harder time forcing political bureaucrats to stay the course.

Conclusion and implications

This essay has demonstrated two things. First, extensions of political authority in the American federal bureaucracy are indeed possible. Second, the conditions under which they may occur are surprisingly common. If the preferences of leaders and agencies diverge and if agencies lack the opportunity to impose sanctions, then leaders are very likely to broaden their influence over matters of policy and administration.

What are we to make of the skeptics’ tales, then? If political bureaucrats have such resources and abilities, why is there such deep pessimism that political leadership really matters?

The doubts arise, I think, from the strange perspective that observers have tended to adopt. First, the doubts arise because political bureaucrats and the scholars who study them have embraced an unrealistic criterion for leadership success. Appointees complain that they could

64 McCubbins, Noll, and Weingast, “Administrative procedures”: 246–53; Moe, “Bureaucratic structure.” 65 David Hamilton, From New Day to New Deal:American farm policy from Hoover to Roosevelt, 1928–1933 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). 66 John Mark Hansen, Gaining access: Congress and the farm lobby, 1919–1981 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991): chaps. 5–6.

not accomplish all that they wanted because the civil service stymied them. No doubt this is true. It does not follow, however, that they accomplished nothing at all. The readily apparent differences between presidential administrations is ample evidence that political leadership does indeed matter. Second, the doubts arise because the bids for political control that have drawn the most attention are the ones that political bureaucrats are most likely to lose. For appointees and observers alike, epic battles over administrative direction and reform are the most interesting and the most memorable. They are not necessarily the most representative, however. As we have seen in this paper, conflict is endogenous to the process of reform. It arises when agencies have an opportunity to sanction leaders; hence, it arises in circumstances where leadership efforts to reform are most likely to fail. Finally, the doubts arise because of the severe ahistoricism of political leaders and students of bureaucracy (at least within political science). Expectations of what political bureaucrats can and cannot accomplish depend upon their institutional power versus agencies and clientele. Therefore, unless one observes bureaucracy over time, one misses the crucial fact that the possibilities themselves change. That which was a struggle before becomes routine and therefore unremarkable. But part of the skepticism arises as well from a consideration of the possibilities for political control that is removed from the political context. Henry Wallace and Clinton Anderson created a department that represented more than the interests of commercial farmers. Because of their actions, the department was able to entertain and to pursue policies to encourage consumption and meet the needs of consumers, not just policies to restrict production and protect growers of basic crops. But USDA’s new pluralism was still a clientelistic one. It did not include consultation with the representatives of consumers. It did not include consultation with the representatives of landless tenants and sharecroppers. To the extent that the USDA’s broader vision served their needs, it was because it happened also to serve the needs of agricultural traders, processors, and handlers. But it did include opportunities to accomplish the goals of the political leadership. Wallace and Anderson could not escape the strictures of a department oriented by history and politics toward constituency service. But they could construct a more competitive clientelism and use it to pursue policies of broader benefit not only to the agricultural trades but also to consumers and taxpayers.

The despair over the prospects for democratic administration, then, runs too deep. Political bureaucrats are not always and everywhere subject to their subordinates; indeed, in a number of circumstances, political appointees can increase their power over policy and administration. To be sure, control is incomplete, and it always will be. Political appointees cannot solve every agency problem, but they can—given the motivation, and the right circumstances—do better.