The New Deal: When the Motive Wasn't Money
Strauss, Bert W.
The New Deal: When the Motive Wasn't Money By Bert W. Strauss People frequently accuse federal bureaucrats of accomplishing little or nothing, sometimes at great expense. There is another side,...
...We worked in the days of John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, when family after family, driven from little farms by the drought, dust storms, and rock-bottom prices, packed the few possessions they could into ancient trucks and headed west...
...Each year our supporters were a sort of heterogeneous 'Gideon s Army'-Senator La Follette, liberal Roman Catholics...
...Every year we change operations enough so they can't get set in their way...
...But the spirit we felt in the face of national disaster could have as powerful an effect today as it did then...
...I wonder how many bureaucrats care that much now...
...Jointly, the farmers and the Rural Rehabilitation Representatives itemized the crops borrowers would plant, the livestock they intended to raise, the equipment they needed, and the building improvements to be made...
...We were able...
...He demonstrated the need for constructive farm relief to Agriculture Secretary Henry A. Wallace, who sold that need to President Roosevelt and then to the Congress...
...But that mutually prepared plan remained the basis of the farmer's program, and cooperative effort was the key to the plan's success...
...Shining examples of outstanding administration are easy to overlook or forget...
...We fired several who tried to use congressional support for promotion...
...By mid-1942, when farm prices were still in a very early stage of their World War II rise, those once-destitute farmers had repaid 83 percent of the amounts due on their loans, plus 5 percent interest...
...From its beginning in the mid-1930s until it ended in 1946, Rural Rehabilitation helped get some 893,000 families off relief and productively back on farms...
...What might today's and tomorrow's public officials learn from our example...
...With the plan completed, the supervisors helped the farmer and his wife rent the farm...
...In the Rural Rehabilitation Program of the Farm Security Administration, we aimed at getting our clients off relief permanently and bringing neglected land back into productivity, a job that the program carried out with surprising success...
...In the New Deal days, 40-odd years ago, I had the good luck to be an official in an organization that worked...
...Yet we were politically innovative...
...Bert W Strauss is the coauthor of three books, including How to Get Things Changed...
...Nelson Cruikshank, an early staff member who became director of the Migratory Farm Labor Program, recently put his thinking in a nutshell for me: "The personnel had a deep commitment to the social purposes of the program...
...As the planning went on, the supervisors described methods the borrowers had never heard of that would be useful on the farm they were about to rent...
...we who are about to die salute you!' Politically we had no status...
...In the center, sitting around a cheap table, government supervisors would help farm, couples put broken lives back together...
...and damn few of the Agricultural Establishment-and we could raise hell with our guerrilla-like political strategy...
...After Rexford Tugwell resigned in 1937, the people he had brought into top-level jobs in the administration led the FSA to its greatest successes...
...a sense of doing something for people, and we were able to relate our routine work to that overall purpose...
...FSA was just giving us a chance, to do what we would have liked to be doing even in the absence of a government program...
...In making personnel decisions, Washington officials asked...
...The players made bets loudly with, "I'll raise you five dollars...
...I served as an associate chief fiscal officer, supervising activities in the northeast quarter of the country...
...Another thing we simply would not stand was efforts of employees to use congressional influence...
...The original inspiration was that of Rexford G. a former professor of economics at Columbia University who became undersecretary of agriculture...
...The government supervisors contributed from their own farm backgrounds and their technical knowledge...
...We were very tough about his...
...How did Rural Rehabilitation do it...
...The challenges are new, often more complex than oil's were...
...None of us had tenure, none of us could expect more than to survive the current fiscal year...
...Headquarters functioned smoothly...
...That intense feeling dominated the work of top lad staff, but there was relaxation, too...
...Lawrence Hewes Jr., from fife beginning a member of the Washington staff and later a regional director, explained that the Rural Rehabilitation Program worked because "we were terrifically insecure...
...and second, the cooperation among bureaucrats, regardless of rank...
...Mary Hare whose husband Mason Barr was an FSA administrator, cast an additional light on the intensity of top staff feelings: "One night when Congress was debating the passage of a bill far into the night, a bill FSA deemed necessary for the victims of poverty and dust storms, Mase came home at 1 a.m., sat on the edge of the bed, and sobbed...
...The vision, faith, and determination of the people who ran the Farm Security Administration in Washington fueled the work in the field...
...As months passed, they were frequently in touch, helping the clients apply the new skills...
...The borrowers brought their experience, interests, and abilities to the shared activity...
...My God...
...There was about its a touch of that famous Roman salute, 'Hail Caesar...
...Hewes also stresses organizational factors, which had much to do with motivation and success: "Not being under civil service meant we could hire and fire at will...
...Quakers, the Farmers Union...
...Two recollections stand out: first, the sense we bureaucrats had that we were partners, not `adversaries, of the farmers we served...
...When they planned policy changes, they toured field offices to explain the adjustments to senators, congressmen, and local officeholders...
...The 1980s differ considerably from the 1930s...
...Ultimately, we received a 94.8 percent financial return...
...It was small and plain, with a nondescript desk in one corner and a typist at work in another...
...There is another side, too, but instances of agencies doing their jobs well seldom make the news these days...
...Regional officials were free to deviate from standard procedure to meet special problems...
...Train trips to the field provided the perfect opportunity for staff poker games...
...These officials sought ideas from their subordinates and acted on them...
...Sundays saw key department and FSA staff members pitching horseshoes or throwing, boomerangs with Secretary Wallace in Rock Creek Park...
...Each sear was a terrific battle to secure appropriations for the next...
...C. Benham (Beans) Baldwin, an assistant administrator, explained at the time, "We don't let people get into ruts...
...Who is the man who gets things done...
...were we able...
...Strong leadership was rewarded at every turn...
...Through all the years, it's still essential that management inspire subordinates to work together smoothly and creatively, The Rural Rehabilitation experience, with its clues for private industry, as well as public administration, has too many valuable possibilities to remain overlooked...
...The typical Rural Rehabilitation county office was above a store in a building on Main Street, across from the courthouse...
...But five dollars meant five cents...
...Next came the yields the clients could expect to obtain and the income each of their farm products should bring...
...Washington officials maintained much more active communication with the field than is typical in a federal organization...
...Passage had failed, and the defeat was agonizing...
...None of us thought we were entering into a permanent career...
Vol. 17 • May 1985 • No. 4
