Hundreds of thousands of African American farm laborers were forced off their land by the New Deal’s two Agricultural Adjustment Acts. As economic historian Gavin Wright points out in his book Old South, New South, the New Dealers wanted to force the South to shift from an agricultural and low-wage economy to a modern, industrial, higher-productiviy and wage economy. Wright suggests that the New Deal policy worked out in the end, though this happy ending strikes me as more fortuitous than causal. Regardless, there was great short-term human cost to the New Deal’s more tepid version of Stalin’s and Mao’s modernization programs, as this Chicago Defender cartoon suggests. Moreover, there were some negative long-term consequences as well. Contrary to popular myth, the Great Migration in the ’40s and ’50s was as much a result of “push” (AAA, mechanization (not always unrelated to the AAA), uniform national minimum wage) as “pull,” and African Americans who went North found themselves living in areas with among the highest unemployment in the country, sowing some of the seeds of today’s “underclass” (see chapter 5 of this book).
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