Tag Archives: AAA

03/19/11

Not everyone liked the dealer

“I Think I’ll plow under every third parnip.”

This cartoon was published in 1935 by George Shellhase as a critique of the 1933 Agriculture Adjustment Act. George Shellhase was commenting on the inefficiencies and idiosyncrasy of the methods proposed by the act. In a bid to raise farm prices and income in order to help ailing farmers. Ironically, at the same time people were suffering from hunger whilst the government ordered farmers not to plant more and even had over 6 million pigs slaughtered. Although the AAA was successful in its goals not everyone benefited. It also brought upon inefficiencies and resulted in the eviction of numerous rural residents.

03/15/11

FDR and the New Deal

From the cartoon, we can see a man was surrounded by a bunch of dancing kids. The man in the middle was President Franklin D. Roosevelt; on the backs of the kids’ shirts were printed WPA, PWA AND AAA, which stand for Works Progress Administration, Public Works Administration (which constructed roads, dams, and public buildings), and Agricultural Adjustment Act (which provided funding to farmers to curtail their production). These were all the programs set up under FDR’s New Deal. There were some other kids facing us, which from the artist’s points should represent the other programs adopted by FDR, such as Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), which served to insure deposits in banks, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), which provided for navigation, flood control, electricity generation and economic development in the Tennessee River Valley and the National Industrial Recovery Act (NRA), which provided for codes of fair competition to regulate industry, and for the first time in American history guaranteed the rights of labor to bargain collectively, etc. These programs were responses to the Great Depression, and focused on what historians call the “3 Rs”: relief, recovery, and reform. That is, relief for the unemployed and poor; recovery of the economy to normal levels; and reform of the financial system to prevent a repeat depression.