Review of *Planning Democracy: Agrarian Intellectuals and the Intended New Deal*

The Midwestern farm boys who oversaw the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) during the New Deal era take center stage in Jess Gilbert’s Planning Democracy: Agrarian Intellectuals and the Intended New Deal. This excellent study demonstrates that the underexplored third phase of the agricultural New Deal (1939-1942) intended to cultivate a robust participatory and democratic approach to agricultural planning and development. Through efforts to build consensus and break down binaries, such as local/federal, citizen/expert, or democracy/bureaucracy, these visionaries imagined an agricultural system organized around symbiotic relationships among farmers, experts, and government bureaucrats. All the while, the Planning Democracy touches on broader themes of American democracy, citizenship, expertise, and the state.

Gilbert argues that a cadre of Midwestern agrarian intellectuals spearheaded a movement to develop agricultural policy in the United States that brought together top-down (federal) and bottom-up (democratic) approaches. Led by two-term secretary of agriculture Henry Wallace and his deputies M.L. Wilson and Howard R. Tolley, the USDA envisioned a participatory approach to the nation’s agricultural system. Planning Democracy ultimately asks a trio of framing questions: Can federal officials generate participatory democracy, can they stimulate citizen participation, and have government bureaucrats ever accomplished such a feat in modern America? Gilbert answers all three questions with an emphatic yes.

These questions structure Gilbert’s argument about participatory democracy, which he develops in two primary sections. Initially, he presents a collective intellectual biography of the agrarian intellectuals who led the efforts to implement this more democratic approach. In addition to three primary leaders, he adds USDA officials Lewis C. Gray, Carl C. Taylor, and Bushrod W. Allin. Gilbert effectively characterizes this group as a cohort of rural Midwesterners trained at Midwestern universities. These intellectuals’ roots gave them crucial insight into agricultural economics but it also meant they occasionally lacked direct knowledge of the concerns of other regions of the country.

Gilbert then proceeds to examine how these agrarian intellectuals implemented this vision. He identifies three main initiatives: education, research, and planning. These included cooperative land use initiatives and adult education programs, which started not only discussion groups but also philosophy schools for government officials and citizen planners. Participants engaged with diverse opinions and cutting-edge research by rural sociologists and land economists. Local farmers worked to determine how to make the best use of their land and attempted to implement programs based on their findings. Each of these initiatives informed the others and intentionally engaged both everyday farmers and government officials.

Despite the vision of the agrarian intellectuals and their broad programming agenda, this intended New Deal failed. Public support waned, Wallace assumed the vice presidency, and WWII commanded the nation’s attention. These changing tides swept away the visionary third phase of the New Deal that Gilbert so meticulously traces in Planning Democracy.

Planning Democracy tills new ground in the historiography of the New Deal. Working in the wake of cultural and social historians who studied the New Deal from the bottom up, historical social scientists who focused on the state, and high modernists and political historians who often viewed the agrarian intellectuals as rationalizing elites and technocratic modernizers, Gilbert takes a more synthetic approach. He combines the personality of the agrarian intellectuals with portions of the high modernist interpretation. Gilbert argues that men like Wallace, Wilson, and Tolley opposed authoritarian high modernism and embraced what he coins low modernism: the decentralization of programs that involved local citizens in substantive, meaningful ways, embodying a combination of top-down (federal) and bottom-up (local) approaches to policy.

One of the book’s strengths is Gilbert’s framing of the intellectual biography of these thinkers, especially as rural Midwestern farm boys who completed their education in the Midwest under the tutelage of thinkers like historian Frederick Jackson Turner and agricultural economists John R. Commons and Richard T. Ely. By focusing on intellectual formation, Gilbert situates the agrarian intellectuals’ approach in a way that illumines both their strengths and blind spots. These thinkers had little experience with tenant farming and lacked much direct exposure to how racial strife affected agriculture, especially in the South. They also resisted the high modernist impulses of their eastern counterparts. Planning Democracy offers a superb glimpse into how a robust intellectual history can provide insight into the motivations, failings, and actions of these leaders and the government programs they shaped.

Planning Democracy’s attention to a cadre of men who shaped agricultural policy during the final years of the New Deal provides valuable insights, yet this focus also means that there is ample room for future study beyond these intellectual leaders. Since the agrarian intellectuals drive the narrative, few women, people of color, or everyday farmers’ perspectives appear. These additional perspectives, while outside of the scope of Gilbert’s book, would add significant depth in future studies of this intended New Deal and further test the extent to which one can still answer Gilbert’s three framing questions in the affirmative.

In Planning Democracy, Gilbert presents the story of a group of rural Midwestern intellectuals who worked to democratize agricultural policy during the twilight of the New Deal. It investigates the tensions that sprung up both in the state and the countryside as government officials and farmers attempted to collaborate with one another. It is a smart and engaging study of American agriculture that offers valuable insight into New Deal policy, Midwestern intellectual traditions, citizenship, and ultimately American democracy.