The Subsistence Homesteads Idea

THE SUBSISTENCE HOMESTEADS IDEA

The Redistribution of Population

The legislation creating the subsistence homesteads appeared as a rider to the National Industrial Recovery Act, passed in June, 1933. To Title II, an omnibus $3 billion appropriation for “Public Works and Construction Projects,” Senator John Bankhead of Alabama attached “Section 208,” a last minute allocation for $25 million urged by Franklin Roosevelt himself to provide

. . . for aiding in the redistribution of the overbalance of population in industrial centers . . . to be used by [the President] through such agencies as he may establish and under such regulation as he may make, for making loans for and otherwise aiding in the purchase of subsistence homesteads. The moneys collected as repayment of said loans shall constitute a revolving fund to be administered as directed by the President for the purposes of this section.

Three days later, the President signed Executive Order 6209, placing responsibility for implementing Section 208 with Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes. Ickes placed most of Title II’s massive new programs within the new Public Works Administration, but decided to create a separate agency, the Division of Subsistence Homesteads, to devise and enact the program adumbrated in Senator Bankhead’s amendment.

Ickes’ solicited advice on the general problem of resettlement from a variety of experts in the basic features of Section 208’s mandate. They included Robert D. Kohn, head of the Public Works Administration; Dr. Arthur E. Morgan of the Tennessee Valley Authority; Henry Harriman, president of the United States Chamber of Commerce; John Nolen, a noted city planner; and a number of farm experts from the Department of Agriculture, including the new Secretary Henry A. Wallace, Rexford Guy Tugwell, Elwood Mead, and Milburn L. Wilson. After considering a number of possible candidates to lead the new agency, Ickes named Wilson, who assembled his own team of planners to...