The Great Depression emboldened Americans to tolerate radical
experimentation in search of solutions to seemingly overwhelming
economic problems. Amongst the thorniest of those was rural
southern poverty. In "Trouble in Goshen," Fred C. Smith focuses on
three communities designed and implemented to meet that challenge.
This book examines the economic and social theories--and their
histories--that resulted in the creation and operation of the most
aggressive and radical experiments in the United States.
"Trouble in Goshen" chronicles three communitarian experiments,
both the administrative details and the struggles and reactions of
the clients. Smith covers the Tupelo Homesteads in Mississippi, the
Dyess Colony in Arkansas, and the Delta Cooperative Farm, also in
Mississippi. The Tupelo Homesteads were created under the aegis of
the tiny Division of Subsistence Homesteads, a short-lived, "first
New Deal" agency. Dyess Colony was the largest of the Resettlement
Administration's efforts to transform failed farmers into
Jeffersonian yeoman farmers. The third community, the Delta
Cooperative Farm, a product of the active cooperation between the
Socialist Party of America and a cadre of liberal churchmen led by
Reinhold Niebuhr, attempted to meld the pieties, passions,
propaganda, and theories of Jesus and Marx.
The equipment, facilities, and management styles of the projects
reveal a clearly delineated class order among the poor. "Trouble in
Goshen" demonstrates the class conscious angst that enveloped three
distinct levels of poverty and the struggles of plain folk to
preserve their tenuous status and avoid overt peasantry.
General
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