OCTOBER 17, 1935-Pyle Learns What This Resettlement Business Is All About
Rexford G. Tugwell of the The Resettlement Administration
THE WASHINGTON DAILY NEWS — THURSDAY, OCTOBER 17, 1935
Pyle Learns What This Resettlement Business Is All About
By ERNIE PYLE
Up until 11:45 yesterday morning, if somebody had walked up and stuck a gun in my face and said, “Quick, where is the Resettlement Administration?” I could only have replied:“Brother, you’ve got me. Go ahead and shoot.”
But now I could just push the gun aside, and say: “Sure, sit down here on the curb for a couple of hours and I’ll tell you.” For I found out about it yesterday, thru the simple process of going down to the Agriculture Building and asking them.
The Resettlement Administration is one of the newest, as well as one of the biggest, of the New Deal agencies.
It has more than 12,000 employees, 4500 of them here in Washington. It was started last June, and ends next July, unless Congress extends it.
Brain Truster Rex Tugwell is in charge, and is giving his full time to it. The thing is so octopus-like that it’s a little hard to understand, and even hard to organize, as the administrators have jolly well learned.
But it’s all based on a theory, and if you know the theory, you can grasp more easily what the Resettlement Administration is.
The theory is that farmers, ever since we can remember, simply went out and farmed their land. In doing so, they wore it out, then moved on to new lands.
But in this country, there isn’t much new land left for them to move to. Their method of crop rotation (or lack of it), coupled with grazing, has exhausted the land, denuded it, and now it is blowing away.
They say that in 20 years our farm land is going to be pretty well shot unless something is done, and that in 75 years even a self-respecting cactus wouldn’t be seen on most of it.
So, the Resettlement Administration was formed to do something about this land and, more immediately, something about the people going hungry on it.
The Resettlement Administration has $261,000,000 to work with for a year. They’ll use $180,000,000 of this actually to help half a million farmers right where they are. In other words, it’s a form of relief. They keep them on their farms, give them some help, and try to get them back on their feet.
There are 1,000,000 farm families on relief. Resettlement has already taken over 550,000 of them. The others are to be taken care of on Works Progress projects.
In addition, 50,000 farm families will be moved this year by Resettlement. There isn’t any mass movement from one place to another. No covered-wagon caravans or long freight trains of furniture. Usually they’ll just be moved from a poor farm to a better one nearby. And the Government will help them get started again, thru loans and so on.
Resettlement will spend $40,000,000 in buying 10,000,000 acres of no-good land. Some of this will be made into parks. Some will be re-forested. Some of it the farmers will remain on, trying to build it back up.
This 10,000,000 acres will be a good big hunk of all the no-good farm land in the country, for the total is just 75,000,000. They buy it in blocks. The farmer who sells can either buy a new farm somewhere and move, or he can take his money and go get drunk. That’s up to him.
The WPA will spend another $40,000,000 in putting this land back in shape, either as farm land, or in forested park land; anything to keep it from blowing away.
Most of this land is being bought in the “dust belt” of the far Mid West, and in the cotton-raising South. That’s where most of the moving of the 50,000 is taking place, also.
There are all kinds of little off-shoots under the Resettlement Administration, some of them quite theoretical and experimental. For instance, the four suburban colonies to be created to give low-cost housing to 5000 families. Nobody knows how they will turn out.
Resettlement doesn’t plan to depopulate any vast areas. It isn’t as spectacular as that. But they feel that if the program of shifting from bad land to good can be continued for 20 years, with the proper reforestation, and the right kind of farming, and good fertilizing, all the bad land could be built back up again, and the bugaboo of a Great American Desert 75 years hence thoroly scotched.
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