One of several programs of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal designed to ease hardships endured by farmers and sharecroppers during the Great Depression.
The Farm Security Administration (FSA) was created by the Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenancy Act of 1937, itself inspired by an alarming report on the spread of farm tenancy filed earlier that year by the Special Committee on Farm Tenancy chaired by Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace. (In farm tenancy, farmers remain in debt to landowners and exchange a portion of the harvest for use of the land, seed, and supplies.) Rexford G. Tugwell, a close adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and a professor of economics at Columbia University, headed the FSA. Along with taking over the work of the 1935 Resettlement Administration, which had as its purpose the elimination of migrant and tenant farming, the FSA set up decent migrant labor camps and helped to establish cooperative homestead communities to assist farmers driven off their land by bankruptcy and foreclosure and exploited by large growers. It also extended long-term, low-interest loans to farmers and sharecroppers to help them regain their independence, although these loans were spread thinly over more than 650,000 recipients.
The historical section of the FSA’s Information Division became well known during the Great Depression by employing more than a dozen first-rate photographers to generate sympathy and support for the FSA by documenting harsh rural conditions. Led by Roy Emerson Stryker, this notable group included John Collier, Jack Delano, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Carl Mydans, Arthur Rothstein, John Vachon, and Marion Post Wolcott. Lange’s “Migrant Mother” became arguably the most famous image from the Great Depression.
The FSA attracted sharp criticism, especially from large commercial farmers who feared losing cheap labor. In reaction, in 1941, Stryker’s photographers shifted their focus from farming to patriotic subjects related to the impending world war. The agency’s funding was cut dramatically in 1942, and it was abolished in 1946, its programs taken over by the Farmers Home Administration.
