Agricultural Workers, Tenant Farmers, and the Midcentury U.S. Welfare State: A View from the Lower Mississippi Valley

Abstract

Abstract This article reconsiders what is often seen as a defining feature of the mid-twentieth-century welfare state in the United States: its exclusion of agricultural workers and tenant farmers. It shows that in the cotton-producing regions of the Mississippi Valley, agricultural workers and tenants were not excluded from the welfare state but unequally incorporated into and disciplined by it. In the absence of other government protections, agricultural workers and tenant farmers leaned heavily on food assistance in the form of federal surplus commodities and, from the mid 1960s, food stamps. These food programmes mimicked older agrarian credit relations between black workers and tenants and their employers and landlords. In this way, they affirmed hierarchies of race and class even amidst the region’s rapid transformation toward mechanized and petrochemical-based agricultural production. Civil rights protests against the workings of food distribution programmes in the lower Mississippi Valley would eventually spark a national movement that instigated a massive expansion of federal food assistance programmes by the 1970s. And yet the paternalistic form of these programmes would not be fully broken.