In Search of a Democratic Agrarian Tradition: A Conversation with Pete Daniel and Jess Gilbert

What is the relationship between American agriculture and democracy? At the 99th annual Agricultural History Society meeting, I sat down with Jess Gilbert, a rural sociologist, and Pete Daniel, a curator and public historian, to talk about recent changes in the field of agricultural history, democracy, and whether works of history can change policy. Jess has recently published Planning Democracy: Agrarian Intellectuals and the Intended New Deal (2015), which he discussed with Edge Effects in a 2015 interview. Pete is the author of seven monographs on agricultural history and the American South, most recently Dispossession: Discrimination Against African American Farmers in the Age of Civil Rights (2013).

Though both scholars have written extensively about the relationship between agriculture and the state in the 20th century, examining the agricultural policy of the USDA, they have arrived at seemingly opposing arguments about the role of the state in advancing democracy. In his most recent book, Jess contends that big states as well as social scientists have been effective agents of democracy, while Pete has argued that the USDA repeatedly subverted democracy, especially in the rural South. In this lively conversation, the two scholars try to get to the root of their disagreement, and they debate what effects the writing of agricultural history has had on agricultural policymaking and might have on the soon-to-expire Farm Bill.

The careers and experiences of these two scholars have differed widely, and in this conversation, they also discuss how their different paths to agricultural history contributed to their approach to history and political activism. While Pete was an established scholar, curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History and the first public historian to serve as president of the Organization of American Historians, Jess entered the field as a rural sociologist who spent a long and productive career advising (and co-publishing) with students at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In this conversation about their different career paths, Pete and Jess provide insights on the many ways that scholarship can (and should) leave the ivory tower to enter the public sphere.

Stream or download our conversation here.

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Interview Highlights:

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity. 

Anastasia Day: I’m sitting here with Jess Gilbert and Pete Daniel at the 99^th year of the Agricultural History Society’s annual meeting down here in St. Petersburg, FL. Thanks for sitting down with me guys. I wanted to first ask you how each of you came to history as a discipline. Pete, you’ve gone on the record saying “when I was growing up I didn’t even know there was such thing as a historian,” and Jess, you are actually not a historian, but a sociologist.  So, how did the three of us get to be sitting here talking about agricultural history?

Jess Gilbert: Well, I have always loved history from college and minored in it. And then, before I went to grad school in 1976, I got a grant from the then-new National Endowment for the Humanities—a youth grant to study Southern Agrarianism in the 1930s. I interviewed lots of people and did a lot of archival work, sort of like masters’ level research, and published my first article in agricultural history. Much of my sociological work is historical, and that’s sort of where I fit. And then more recently, in the middle of my career, I decided to look at New Deal agricultural policy, and really I think almost became a historian. So I drifted into this organization probably over twenty years ago.

AD:  What about you Pete?

Pete Daniel: Well, history was the only thing I was really good at. In college I had very good professors. Probably the thing that really converted me to become a historian was the class on Southern history by Professor David Smiley, who basically challenged every concept of the old traditional Southern interpretations that were based on segregation and all that. He just killed all the sacred cows, and I learned that attacking is much better than defending.

AD: So, we’ve talked about how each of you came to history. How did each of you come to agriculture? It strikes me that each of you have in common that you grew up in Southern farmland. Could you speak a bit to how that shaped your interest and perspective and your position as a scholar?

JG: Well, my field within sociology is rural sociology, and I’m from a town of fewer than a thousand people in Northeast Louisiana. And once I discovered that there was such a field as rural sociology, that’s just where I felt comfortable. You know, my dad farmed. I worked on the farm, baled hay in the summer and that kind of thing. And I just sort of understood—through growing up in that way— rural ways in agriculture and farming. That’s just where I felt most comfortable. And it seemed like I had a head start on some people in that subfield and so could make a contribution there, as opposed to, say, urban sociology or urban history.

PD: Similar to Jess, my grandfather was a tobacco farmer, so I did a lot of farm work, but the thing that really got me into agricultural history was that after I had gone off to college and then graduate school, and returned to a rural town of just over a thousand where I grew up, everything had changed. The town where I grew up was bustling on Saturday afternoons, farmers coming in to get their hair cut, to visit the bank, to go to the pharmacy, to do whatever, and when I came back in the late ‘60s, it was just a dead place because a lot of farmers had left agriculture, and people shopped at malls. And I’m scratching my head about what had happened. And it happened so fast! And that, I think, was the basis for me doing Breaking the Land—to try to figure out what happened.

AD: In so many different book acknowledgements and the CVs of scholars I admire, I see both your names pop up. Students of Jess Gilbert who also boast of having Pete Daniel as their advisor at the Smithsonian. You two have cumulatively shaped a huge number of scholars working in their field and across environmental history more broadly. What do you think you have been trying to impart to the scholars each of you has mentored?

JG: I should say first that I think there is an order of magnitude difference in the impact we have each had in the field, even in terms of individuals. I mean, though my writing on the New Deal and being at Wisconsin through this interdisciplinary center, The Nelson Institute’s Center for Culture, History and Environment, that’s where I came across lots of history grad students and history of science grad students. And that’s only through the last twenty years, say. Not half as long as Pete.  But I think, to answer your question, to look again at the conventional wisdom or current interpretations of the New Deal. My research takes a different slant than Pete’s and other people who established the field.

PD: Well, I’ll say first that the fellows I work with [at the Smithsonian] have taught me more I think than I ever taught them. They are bristling with ideas and new scholarship, and so I listen to them a lot. I encourage them every way I can. I now have three and a half shelves that the scholars wrote. So: they were good. 

AD: I’d love to hear, first from Pete, what you think your main interpretive thrust has been over your career as you see it, and then from Jess, a bit about how you see yourself responding to it.

PD: It would be very difficult for me to say it in just a few words. I just remember that when I was working on Breaking the Land, I’d done the research, and when I started reading those notes, I was like “oh! This is not what I thought happened. It’s different.” And a lot of that difference was in the way that the transformation of agriculture went on. Basically, I look for things that are not apparent or are conventional wisdom. When I hear conventional wisdom, I just automatically try turning it around, trying to look behind it.

JG: Before I get to your question, let me say, when I was developing my interpretation of New Deal agricultural policy, giving talks or developing lectures, I would always start by saying “this is the known New Deal”—what historians know over the last ten or fifteen years. And then I realized, preparing for this podcast partly, what I meant by the “known New Deal” was “what Pete Daniel had written about it.” That’s why it was “known.” Meaning an interpretation of the first big Ag. Act, the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 that set up the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, and, as Pete emphasizes in his work, the devastation that that Act did, especially to Southern sharecroppers and tenant farmers, black and white. And that’s why early on, I was critical of the New Deal. Because I was following Pete Daniel’s work.

What happened, I think, when I got in the archives, was that I focused on a different New Deal. That’s one way to put it. Much later, not starting until 1938, and not really going strong until the 1940s. Most historians say the New Deal is long gone by then, but I’m looking at what some historians calls the Third New Deal (starting in the late ’30s). I’m looking at a particular thrust of the US Department of Agriculture: the left-wing of the USDA, the Progressive, reformist agencies like the Farm Security Administration. It’s telling a different story, so that leads to different emphases and stresses.

AD: One of the themes running through both of your stories is democracy. Jess, you’ve written that big states as well as social scientists have been effective agents of democracy, and you want to suggest that they can be again; big government can democratize society. Whereas, Pete, a lot of your work on the USDA has focused on ways in which the USDA has “cheated democracy” and subverted the representation and voices and farmers, through voting suppression, though undermining their rights through collaborations with private interests. So, this common theme of democracy makes me want ask both of you, why is studying agriculture important to understanding democracy in American history? What do you see as the essential connection between democracy and agriculture?

JG: That’s a great question!

PD: The things that I looked at have been things like local agricultural committees, and especially these African American communities who I deal with in my book Dispossession, looking at how these local committees subverted democracy. They fixed the system so that African Americans couldn’t vote, couldn’t elect people to these ‘democratic’ committees. So there are things like that where I’m on the ground looking at these particular committees, and so that’s how I can say that some of these USDA-aided programs subverted democracy.

JG: And I totally agree with Pete’s interpretation in his latest book, Dispossession. I also fully agree with Pete’s interpretation of post-WWII changes in USDA and in agricultural policy more generally. In an odd way, my work is similar to Pete’s in that while he is reviving and celebrating the memory, and writing about recovering the “losers,” the people who were tractored-off or New Dealed-off, I’m looking at policies that lost. This program and these policies, I think, were just forgotten. So I’m trying to revive what I see as the democratic agrarian tradition within a certain part of the US Department of Agriculture. And I think it’s important because democracy is at risk today. It always has been. It’s always an ongoing struggle—a contestation. Cornel West said somewhere, you know, wherever you find democracy, celebrate it.

AD: It’s clear that both of you think of your work in explicitly political terms. Pete, you’ve testified before the House a number of times on various issues. You’ve talked about how curators and museums need to be taking political stands with the history they present to the public. Jess, it’s equally clear that you’re engaged. You’ve co-authored agricultural policy papers based on your research. How do you see the role of the scholar-activist changing over time, and what are your hopes for the future of academic activism?

JG: I think the first thing that scholars need to do is to do good research. But, being in rural sociology, it’s not just abstract theoretical work. [From the beginning of the field] the idea was to improve rural life, to work with rural citizens, farm families and others to see how positive social change could come about. So I see myself in that tradition.

PD: Well, I don’t know how historians really change policy. I’ve thought that after a book like Dispossession, or Breaking the Land, or my book on pesticides that there might be some reaction from people who had failed to do the things I had pointed out. But I’ve never heard a word. They’re like big Pillsbury Doughboys. They’re so big and flexible, you punch it and it pops right back out. It doesn’t matter. And I don’t think anything I’ve ever written has ever made a bit of difference as far as changing policy.  And I don’t see how that can happen because of all of the things that are between scholarship and implementing changes. And that has to do with lobbyists, it has to do with farm organizations, and the conservative nature of the Department of Agriculture itself.

JG: Let me disagree with Pete on this, using his work and not mine. We both know, and have sometimes worked with, the largest organization of black farmers in the country, a civil rights era born organization, the Federation of Southern Cooperatives. And I get their newsletter and I’m in touch with them, and they use your book, Pete. They use your book because it documents, unequivocally, the history that they have suffered. And because of their history, their persistence, and their good works, they have access to policy makers in the Department of Agriculture. So, it’s indirect, but I see historical research like Pete’s working its way through farm organizations that do testify before Congress and do have access to policy makers.

AD: Thinking practically about the very specific issues facing us today, we do have a Farm Bill that is going to expire in September. What do each of you think that your scholarship brings to the conversations we should be having about what this new Farm Bill could or should look like or take into account?

JG: Well, my first reaction is to side with Pete on his pessimism. I mean this Farm Bill—I’ve read some summaries of it— is just unbelievably bad. And the small little crumbs that past Farm Bills have thrown towards small farmers and black land grant institutions, even those have been taken out.  In the Trump Administration in particular, and the USDA more specifically, I’ll try to come up with some optimism, but at the moment it’s just very hard. But then I do remember my colleagues and friends at organizations like the Federation of Southern Coops.  You know, they can’t afford to give up.

AD: And do all of these thoughts lead you to have hopes or ideas for future directions in the field? Do you have any great ideas for dissertation topics for undecided early career scholars who are listening to this recording?

JG: There’s been this tremendous growth of overlap between environmental historians and agricultural historians. In other words, they’re the same thing in many cases. And I think that is a very exciting area, and a growing area.  Another thing, I think, is transnationalism, another big trend in the history profession.

PD: I’ve always been wanting to know more about pesticides, and there are a lot of things, in terms of litigation, you could study. There’s a lot of documents in the National Archives and the EPA. And also these local committees. I’d really like to know more about how they’ve operated over time.

AD: You two have been so kind in sitting here and talking to me. I want to thank you so much for this.

JG: Well, I greatly enjoyed it.

PD: Me too.

Featured image: An African American farmer plowing his field on a farm near Talladega, Alabama, 1941. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

Podcast music:“Gloves” by Julian Lynch. Used with permission.

Pete Daniel was a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, a past president of the Organization of American Historians, and the author of seven books including Dispossession: Discrimination Against African American Farmers in the Age of Civil Rights , Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950s; Breaking the Land: The Transformation of Cotton, Tobacco, and Rice Cultures since 1880, and Toxic Drift: Pesticides and Health in the Post-World War II South. Contact.

Jess Gilbert is an emeritus professor of Community and Environmental Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a former director of the Nelson Institute’s Center for Culture, History, and the Environment. His publications include a special issue of Agricultural History on “Minority Land and Community Security” and Planning Democracy: Agrarian Intellectuals and the Intended New Deal (2015). Contact.

Anastasia Day is a history doctoral candidate and Hagley Scholar in Capitalism, Technology, and Culture at the University of Delaware. She identifies as a historian of environment, technology, business, and society, themes that collide uniquely in food. Her dissertation is entitled “Productive Plots: Nature, Nation, and Industry in the Victory Gardens of the U.S. World War II Home Front.” Her last contribution to Edge Effects was “Rethinking American Agriculture: Fertilized Farms and Victory Gardens” (January 2017). Website. Twitter. Contact.

Many thanks to Amrys Williams, Associate Director and Oral Historian at the Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society at the Hagley Library in Wilmington, Delaware, for her loan of recording equipment—and gracious agreement to fly it down to Florida and back.