Land reform,race reform: Interwar anticommunism and U.S. racial capitalism

U.S. agrarian reform, anticolonial intimacies, and the social sciences

This essay begins by framing the Southern plantation system as a locus of interwar social scientific meditations on the management of racial difference and the circulation of capital that blurred the lines between U.S. agrarian reform and race reform. At the time, agricultural historian Jess Gilbert (2015: 212) argues, “there was action growing out of [cooperative land-use] planning in three major problem areas of the country, the plantation South, the northern Plains, and the Great Lakes cut-over region, before moving to the national level.” Yet, Gilbert (2015: 34) argues, even in the 1930s, the agrarian intellectuals at the center of such work—social scientists including Henry A. Wallace, Lewis C. Gray, and Bushrod Allin—“often failed to evince an adequate analysis of the class structure of agriculture, differentiated as it was sociologically as well as regionally.” Despite these shortcomings, agrarian reformers brought regional lessons in agricultural development to bear on federal decision making—promoting coordination among federal agencies and cooperative planning, and helping the Bureau of Agricultural Economics (BAE) become the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) central planning agency. ⁵ Critically, as sociologist Philip Selznick (1949: 221) argued at the time, the USDA went “much farther in developing both the theory and the practice of citizen participation” than other New Deal-era cooperative planning agencies, including the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). Yet, this approach to federal decision making was short lived. Despite its architects asserting the necessity of the USDA’s BAE for “economic democracy,” by 1942, key elements of this “intended New Deal” (e.g., the Program Study and Discussion Division) had reoriented their topics away from cooperative planning toward international affairs and agricultural-industrial relations (Gilbert, 2015: 165). Despite the diminishment of its grassroots elements, a cohesive vision of the nation’s approach to the “major problem areas of the country” remained firmly in place: that “economic democracy” was possible, and that it could be achieved through federally orchestrated agricultural development efforts attuned to local conditions.

What can be revealed about this cohesive vision—including its significance beyond agricultural development work alone—with an expanded account of the people who developed it? Though not regarded by Gilbert and others as agrarian reformers, per se, there were other segments of the emerging social sciences that shared their vision while centering the “sociologically”—and “regionally”—differentiated class structure of agriculture. Rather, it is within accounts of U.S. “race relations” and “race reform” that their role in regional planning and national policy is located. The reason is clear: as Melamed (2011: 64, 19) argues, during the 1920s and 1930s, the field of “race relations” was constituted “across multiple domains of governance, civil society, academic, and national culture,” and U.S. philanthropies heavily funded the social sciences to give a national platform to ideas of “race reform.” With the help of social scientists studying the U.S. South and Jim Crow racial despotism from across white and Black universities alike, the region quickly became the nation’s preeminent “problem area” concerning “race relations” (Melamed, 2011: 18). Yet, such social scientists did not disregard agrarian reform. Gilbert (2015: 11) himself recounts how they—“leading public intellectuals of the day such as the anthropologists Ruth Benedict and Robert Redfield, the sociologists Robert S. Lynd and Robert E. Park, the historian Charles A. Beard, and the economist John Kenneth Galbraith”—had frequently given “lectures on democracy to USDA employees” and joined New Deal-era agencies such as the Resettlement Administration (succeeded by the Farm Security Administration in 1937). As leading figures in the work on “race relations” their vision was that “economic democracy” must account for the “sociological” distinctions and agrarian political economy that characterized the nation’s “problem areas.” To see them as agrarian reformers or race reformers alone is to ignore the broader construction of state methodologies for managing the racial difference and the circulation of capital together, and the importance of the “problem area” of the U.S. South to such work.

An abolitionist account of this geoeconomic vision must also center the insurgent socialities that made the U.S. South a “problem area.” Although international communist platforms helped cohere anticolonial labor militancy across and beyond “American Mediterranean” plantation geographies, scholars of Black spatial thought, narrative, and practice (i.e., Black Geographies) have accounted for dimensions of Black life that precede and exceed such official communist platforms. In slave and postslave contexts, and colonial and postcolonial contexts, Katherine McKittrick (2013: 3) argues, the “colonial logics of the plantation” have given rise to the “differential modes of survival” of Black diaspora, involving practices and processes that entail “creolization, the blues, maroonage, revolution, and more.” Plantation geographies are thus “problem areas” of governance and capital accumulation in part because, as Lisa Lowe (2015: 19) argues, such “political, sexual, and intellectual” intimacies among colonized and enslaved peoples collectively break apart “the restrictions of … received [racial] categories.” The intimacies across plantation geographies further complicate efforts to govern such “problem areas” and peoples. As Jodi Byrd (2014: 612) argues, as part of the worldbuilding of anticolonial worker-led struggles, the geographic spaces of plantation life and resistance have long been “regionalized … within and then against the longue duréé of European new world ventures.” For example, between 1917 and 1928—before the Communist International’s declaration concerning the “Black Belt” of the U.S. South—the Cotton Farmer, a newspaper edited and published by Black tenant farmers employed by the Delta and Pine Land Company, once the world’s largest corporate cotton plantation located in the Mississippi Delta, reached Garveyite and West Indian migrant laborers on United Fruit Company’s plantations in Panama (McInnis, 2019: 523). Such ascendant anticapitalist and anticolonial solidarities would continue to confound the neatly delimited domains of governance and geoeconomic vision that agrarian reformers and race reformers alike were dealing in.

As social scientists labored to define the U.S. South and its peoples as national objects of knowledge and governance, they inherited a tradition of liberal reform set on preserving the nation’s racially hierarchical political economy. Between the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, efforts to extend rights, citizenship, and wage labor to Native peoples and African-descended peoples reinforced the grammars of what W.E.B. Du Bois (1935) termed the “counter-revolution of 1876” that overthrew Reconstruction and the prospect of “abolition democracy.” ⁶ For example, convenings such as the Mohonk Conference of the Friends of the Indian (1883–1916) and the Mohonk Conference on the Negro Question (1890–1891), as Sarah E.K. Fong (2020) outlines, “brought together policymakers, philanthropists, educators, and business leaders who hoped to resolve the so-called Negro Problem and Indian Problem through humanitarian social reforms.” Yet, Fong (2020) continues, many conference attendees were

careful to explain that they did not support immediate and complete equality for Africa[n]-descended people while making apologies for deepening physical and social segregation. Similarly, many argued that Native people could eventually be woven into mainstream US society, but only after they adopted normative models of domesticity, gender, and property.

By the interwar years, the emerging social sciences were key to helping the nation understand and address these challenges together. Central to this essay is how social scientists provincialized the “Negro problem” within the “problem area” of the U.S. South in ways that hinged upon their account of the economic bases of immiseration and the supposed cultural dysfunctions (manifest in anticolonial and worker-led insurgencies) that proper policy and planning would interrupt. This essay finds that their problematization of the Southern plantation system in particular helped render the (inter)nationalization of Southern agriculture an exercise in the nation’s “official” disavowal of white supremacy in the making of this “economic democracy” at home and abroad—at once consolidating and mystifying modern U.S. racial capitalism and its boundless scope. ⁷ Here, this essay takes cue from George Beckford, Lloyd Best, and other “Third World social scientists” who traced how the dominant social sciences positioned agrarian classes as key to the universalization of the state system and capitalist mode of production (Getachew, 2020: 2). They recognized how, in decolonizing and postcolonial societies, social scientists used “the peasant(ry)” and “the village” as abstract stand-ins for the ostensibly “traditional” or “premodern” character of such societies, and they framed the plantation as a “modernizing institution” and instrument of national development (Beckford, 1972: 49–50; Mitchell, 2002: 142–144; as cited in Getachew, 2020: 8). Conversely, in the U.S. context, it was the plantation system that they rendered “traditional” or “nonmodern” in part because its role in the ongoing immiseration of Black life. Yet, these two developmentalist imperatives and the processes of racialization at their heart converged in a key way: U.S. social scientists, policymakers, philanthropists, and business leaders argued that the benefits of national policy and planning could only be realized through U.S.-led international finance, in turn allowing their nation to guide such postcolonial development regimes in the name of a race-liberal “economic internationalism.” The following section traces how such work begins with the conceptualization of the Southern “plantation economy,” the Black “cultural pathologies” it gave rise to, and the national interventions it demanded.

Race, cotton culture, and the “plantation economy”

In the early twentieth century, the emerging social sciences helped enshrine Southern racial segregation, racial terror, economic exploitation, and political disenfranchisement. Yet, others believed that the largely conservative, Northern-backed intellectual disciplines could be repurposed to aid Southern Black liberation. For example, studying sociology at Harvard University, W.E.B. Du Bois believed that systematic scientific research of social phenomena would disprove to a white audience the ideology of Black inferiority underpinning Southern Jim Crow practices (Morris, 2015: 3). Receiving various forms of social science training at the University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania, Yale University, Columbia University, and other white universities, Black social scientists continued developing the field’s liberatory potential and established social science curriculum within segregated Southern Black schools (Morris, 2015: 59). In 1898, the Department of Sociology at Atlanta University under the direction of Du Bois began engaging in systemic study of social phenomena, and by the earliest years of the twentieth century, Fisk University, Atlanta University, Morehouse College, and others led the charge on social science research directed toward the U.S. South and structures of Black dispossession (Morris, 2015: 96). By the 1920s, Southern white institutions began following suit, with the 1920 establishment of University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill’s Department of Sociology under Howard W. Odum and the 1926 establishment of the University of Virginia’s Institute for Research in Social Science (Singal, 1982: 303).

To reform-minded social scientists from Black and white universities across the region, the U.S. South presented no shortage of subjects to study. Sharecropping, mill villages, chain gangs, lynching, paternalism, segregation, “backwoods folk culture”—all of these would be described in extensive qualitative and quantitative detail by researchers across these institutions (Singal, 1982: 302). Yet, rather than understand such dynamics of Southern Black subjugation and racial terror as discrete elements of Southern life, such researchers aimed to discern the relationship between these dynamics and the economic system of which they were a part (Morris, 2015: 20). Even further, they understood this economic system—and thus the significance and scope of their research—in national and ultimately international terms. In his 1934 essay, “Regionalism vs. Sectionalism in the South's Place in the National Economy,” Odum (1934: 342) argued for work that

centers the place of the South in the national economy, for whatever else the Southern Region may be, it is first of all a major part of the moving inventory of a powerful nation rebuilding its own fortunes and reconstructing its part in the world of nations.

In light of early-twentieth century revolutionary-socialist struggles born of the U.S. South’s “caste system” and plantation dispossessions, Davis and Gardner (2009: 454) and other social scientists’ concerns regarding the relationship between “the operation of solidarities and antagonisms between economic groups within the local society and … the operation of the national economic system” were not unfounded. Buttressed by the Communist International’s 1928 affirmation of Black self-determination, and fueling what Charisse Burden-Stelly has called the twin specters of the “Black Scare” and “Red Scare,” Black sharecroppers, miners, and other working-class Black people across the U.S. South carried out waves of strikes premised upon liberation of the “nation within a nation” and global anticolonial struggle (Singh, 2004: 110). Yet, political divisions among Black people in the United States were never as absolute as divisions between communists and anticommunists, and antiimperialists and U.S. patriots. Rather, as Nikhil Singh (2004: 109) argues, if there were such a divide within the modern Black freedom movement, it was between those who regarded U.S. state and social policy as an answer to Black subjugation, and those who regarded professions of U.S. universality and inclusiveness as subjection to racializing power. Through their research on racial inequality, reform-minded race-liberal social scientists reinforced this bifurcation and fostered further identification with U.S. state and social policy. Critically, they did so without abandoning the disidentification with communism. Recasting race as culture, and thus arguing racial equality was achievable through cultural intervention, they helped norm an idealized, race-liberal U.S. national culture that would ultimately demonstrate the superiority of U.S. democracy over communist imposition (Janos, 1991: 81–82; Melamed, 2011: 53).

By attending to Southern agrarian labor-capital relations, Southern race-liberal social scientists believed that they could discern the “South's place in the national economy” and the economic roots of Southern Black “cultural pathology”—a culture that they argued had reproduced Black immiseration and was incompatible with U.S. national culture. Through this cultural turn, the concept of the “plantation economy” collapsed the ostensibly nonmodern plantation and the agrarian classes living in its shadow into a coherent object of developmental intervention that helped ascribe universalist potential to the U.S. national economy that it presupposed. Among the earliest Southern social scientists who helped develop such through lines was Rupert B. Vance—a mentee of Howard W. Odum formally trained in economics, a sociology professor with the University of North Carolina, and a renowned white scholar of the cotton tenancy system. As the nation was reckoning with the nationalization of agriculture, Vance’s earliest contribution to questions of Southern agrarian labor-capital relations and cultural formations across the belt—“Black, Cotton, or Bible, as you prefer”—was his discussion of “cotton culture.” Published in 1929, Vance’s principal study, Human Factors in Cotton Culture: A Study in the Social Geography of the American South, argued that the success of the cotton farmer in the South was a matter of the degree to which he commanded a great deal of unpaid and underpaid human labor—including the labor of women and children. Not simply a regional culture divorced from agrarian labor-capital relations, but one tied to the reproduction of chattel slavery’s political economy, Vance (1929: 295) thus understood the social geography of the U.S. South as that of a “cotton culture complex.” A key feature of this complex was what Vance (1929: 45) referred to as “the structure and internal economy of the plantation.” It was this structure and internal economy that in turn shaped human behavior, including “the technique of cotton production, the disposition of human factors in production, their living standards, the management and relation of the plantation economy to the outside world” (Vance, 1929: 45). In these ways, Vance was instrumental in helping recast the plantation as a nonmodern social and economic institution by way of the incessant labor demands it required and the culture through which such labor demands and destitute conditions were normed and reproduced.

Fisk University sociologist Charles S. Johnson—a former student of Robert E. Park at the University of Chicago—further developed this through line yet focused on how the plantation economy shaped the lives of Southern working-class Black people in particular. For his seminal 1934 sociological study, Shadow of the Plantation, Johnson aimed to discern the conditions and struggles faced by residents of Macon County, Alabama—home to the Tuskegee Institute and adjacent to Tallapoosa County, a locus of communist-led Sharecroppers Union activity (Kelley, 1990: 44). His methodology involved thorough surveys of the work life, family life, education, and church life of 612 families in the county. Reflecting on Johnson’s methodology, University of North Carolina sociologist Joseph S. Himes (1996: xvii) argued that “a study of Negro culture should assume the technical form of a survey” because doing so would help discern “the very tenuous lines of connections which holds the rural population into any sort of solidarity.” Throughout the pages of the study, it was clear that the “shadow of the plantation” under which they lived, and thus the culture they shared, is what Johnson believed held Macon County’s residents into said solidarity. Yet, to Johnson and his contemporaries within the social sciences, this shared culture was not one of revolutionary-socialist struggle against a racially-hierarchical political economy. It was a culture characterized by maladaptation to racist institutions and practices, and a culture that only served to reproduce Black immiseration (Melamed, 2011: 60). In this light, Johnson’s (1934: 5) contribution was an account of how the defunct plantation economy explained and delimited Black cultural “pathology”:

The patterns of social behavior to which the Negros were exposed, whether set by planters or poor whites, cannot be said to have been ideal, from the point of current standards. Many crudities of manners, now largely abandoned by the white population, were at one time accepted rules of conduct and still survive deeply imbedded in the modes of social life of the Negroes, modified only as they have been able to escape their cultural isolation.

What are the current standards and rules of conduct? What defines this more ideal time? While Johnson (1934: 6) does not state explicitly what Macon County’s residents are isolated from, he is clear that what maintains their isolation is the economic system of which they are a part: “The marks of such an encircled life may be observed in their fixed accommodation to the prevailing economic system, an accommodation so complete as to be commonplace.” Although the “patterns of social behavior” of Johnson’s subjects were born of the “economic system” of slavery, Johnson (1934: 6) argued that even amidst “current standards,” Macon County’s “cultural isolation” was maintained by “the survival of the tradition of the plantation, which in turn embodies [this] economic system.” Johnson (1934: 113) was clear about how this economic system governed every aspect of residents’ lives as tenants, sharecroppers, farm laborers, and “casuals”—“the lowest class of farm laborers” who, for example, “did not receive a stipulated monetary wage, but were to get what was known as a ‘hand’s share” … [just] enough to keep them living.” ⁸ This idea of the plantation economy as a defunct spatial matrix for the organization of life after Emancipation was one that Park (1927: 35) himself posed in 1927:

The history of slavery in America is an incident in the history of the plantation system … Slavery has disappeared, to be sure, but the plantation system in one form or another remains, not merely in the South but in many parts of the world. The abolition movement when seen in its proper perspective is merely an episode in the history of a particular type of industrial organization. (cited in Vance, 1982: 22)

Agrarian abstractions and the “national economy”

Race-liberal social scientists conceptualized the Southern “plantation economy” and the cultural dysfunctions it generated with other pathologizing economies of racial and colonial dispossession, within and beyond the U.S. nation-state. In doing so, they helped fashion for U.S. state and social policy key geoeconomic rationalities of abstraction and commensurability that belabored the supposed universality of U.S. political economy (Byrd et al., 2018: 7). For example, Rupert B. Vance conceptualized the plantation economy through another early form of “industrial organization”: the U.S. settler colonial frontier. Vance argued in his 1932 book, Human Geography of the South: A Study in Regional Resources and Human Adequacy, that the plantation and frontier economies were part of a continuum, with the plantation “overcom[ing] and fus[ing] with the frontier.” Yet, Vance (1932: 61) argued, “at no time did the plantation system wipe it out” (cited in Singal, 1982: 312). Rather, helping explain the categorically nonmodern character of the plantation economy, Southern agrarian life “received the heritages of the frontier”: “primitive tasks are many and varied … there has developed no division of labor, no specialization, and no elaborate technology.” These heritages also helped explain the specific characteristics of cultural dysfunction born of the plantation economy: “the folkways of the frontier were … adjustments to conditions of crude culture … [with] rough and tumble fighting … required for survival against Indians and rough men in an area of sparse settlement and magnificent distances.” ⁹ Here, Vance not only defined the nonmodern nature of the plantation economy in terms of its racial antagonisms and economic disorganization, thus departing from the nineteenth century plantation mythology of aristocratic masters, brilliant heroines, and devoted slaves (Smith, 1970: 152). He also asserted that such dynamics reflected the plantation’s frontier heritage: “The highly urbane types supposed to be characteristic of the plantation society are thus confronted by crude types characteristic of the frontier” (Vance, 1932: 61). ¹⁰

Although rooted in a thorough study of a particular community of Black tenants, sharecroppers, farm laborers, and “casuals” in Macon County, Alabama, Charles S. Johnson also conceptualized the plantation economy with other pathologizing economies of racial and colonial dispossession. In the conclusion of Shadow of the Plantation, Johnson returned to his understanding of the inescapable “force of tradition” maintained by the plantation economy. As Johnson (1934: 208) argued:

What has resulted is an inevitable outcome of these traditions as expressed in the life of the subjects of this study. The community studied reflects a static economics not unlike the Mexican hacienda, or the condition of the Polish peasant—a situation in which the members of a group are muffled with vast apathy.

While studying convergent yet incommensurate agrarian labor-capital relations, and while rendering them commensurate in origins and consequences, the analyses of Park, Vance, Johnson, Odum, and other prominent Southern race-liberal social scientists had presupposed an idealized U.S. national culture. This national culture—animated by a creed of equality, opportunity, and liberty—underpinned the moral case for U.S. national and international developmental interventions alike (Melamed, 2011: 58–60). Johnson’s Shadow of the Plantation illustrates exactly how such work translated racial capitalism’s agrarian political economy into the ostensibly liberatory terms of U.S. nationalism, bearing the agency for international capitalism. In his closing chapter, Johnson (1934: 208) argued: “The basic assumption of much of the literature regarding Negroes in America, scientific and otherwise, is that they represent a culture which is, in itself, widely different from that of the Euro-American culture in which they live.” Yet, Johnson (1934: 208) continued, “the unique situation of the Negroes and their relationship to the American culture … raise questions of considerably wider range than this local and racial relationship.” Rather than localized incongruencies between Black culture and an amorphous “Euro-American” culture, what Johnson outlined were the incongruencies between Black culture and “American culture.” It is against this idealized national culture that Johnson and other social scientists locate and lament Southern agrarian Black peoples’ retention of the cultural dispositions of an earlier regrettable era of Euro-American processes of colonial and racialized appropriation—dispositions that have since been shed by “planters or poor whites,” in step with the nation as whole.

To Southern race-liberal social scientists, leaving behind the dispossessions and dispositions of the past meant embodying an idealized U.S. national culture. Critically, this national culture presupposed the idealized national economy being fashioned during this interwar moment (Cox, 1962: 29). Johnson (1934: 209) argues in the conclusion of Shadow of the Plantation that the

tradition, supported by what remains of the plantation structure, has given a measure of equilibrium to the social relations existing within the structure. From the nature of the external conditions determining the early social organization of this group it has taken form, naturally, outside the dominant current of the American culture.

Finally, describing how the U.S. nation-state would fold vestigial economies of dispossession into the new realities of the U.S. national economy, Southern race-liberal social scientists centered planners, engineers, and other technocrats. In the closing chapter of Human Geography of the South, “Reconstructing the Region,” Rupert B. Vance (1932: 483) outlined this techno-bureaucratic vision of “self-contained development” over the “absentee exploitation” of the plantation economy: “policy making is the task of statesmanship … and its goals must be defined through the traditional political processes. Science as technics or engineering is the handmaiden of policy.” Likewise, at the end of Shadow of the Plantation, Johnson (1934: 212) argued,

The greatest pressure is being felt at present by the tenants, dulled and blocked in by a backwardness which is a fatal heritage of the system itself. But the fate of the tenant is but an aspect of the fate of the Southern farmer generally, and the plight of all of these awaits a comprehensive planning, which affects not merely the South but the nation.

Informed by such accounts of the Southern plantation economy and its analogs, the federal government instituted regional techno-bureaucratic development schemes that helped model the form of U.S. “economic democracy” (e.g., USDA) as they targeted the supposed source of Southern Black hardship and unrest. In 1933, the federal government created the United States’ largest public works project, the Tennessee Valley Authority. Spanning parts of Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, and Virginia, the TVA linked together industry, hydroelectric power, transmission grids, river navigation, soil improvement, and scientific agriculture. ¹¹ Southern social scientists themselves affirmed the project as a component of a wholly integrated and inclusive national economy. Writing alongside Odum and his discussion of “the South's place in the national economy,” sociologist Thomas Jackson Woofter Jr.(1934: 334) argued that the “ultimate extension of regional self-sufficiency would lead to an economic regionalism parallel to the present trend toward economic nationalism” and that “the broad outlines of a regional plan will of necessity depend upon the relation of a region to a national plan.” Such “interregional dependency,” as Woofter termed it, would target the same isolated and impoverishing economies that preoccupied Southern social scientists at the time. Chicago-trained sociologist, Louis Wirth (1937: 493), wrote in 1937 that “segmentalized, technological society” like that which the TVA represented would consider “the functional and regional factors in communal life” in ways that not only countered the “localism” of the plantation economy of the U.S. South and the “sentimental antagonisms” it gave rise to. The project and others like it would also circumvent “the shortcoming of … overcentralization” of national planning, thus putting a finer point on the normative national economy Southern social scientists envisioned (Wirth, 1937: 493, 501). ¹² Such real and imagined economic geographies were instrumental in translating revolutionary articulations of race, nation, and capitalism into national means for managing racial difference and the circulation of capital.

Through interregional economic planning, so conceived, the nation could bolster its ability to combat communism directly while avoiding the perils of overcentralized statism. For many stakeholders, this was a key function of the TVA’s reconstitution of the political economy of the Tennessee Valley (see Ekbladh, 2010). At the time, the region was a hotbed for Southern Black communist organizing, with the first All-Southern Communist Party Conference held in Chattanooga, Tennessee in 1937—a crucial step toward party legality below the Mason-Dixon line. As Robin D. G. Kelley (1990: 133) writes,

One hundred thirty-one delegates from Alabama, Tennessee, Virginia, Kentucky, Florida, Louisiana, and North Carolina piled into the public auditorium in Chattanooga, Tennessee, to hear Earl Browder discuss the “revolutionary traditions of the old South,” James Ford speak on the pivotal role of blacks in the Southern struggle, and an array of Southern Communist and non-Communist organizers describe recent local victories in the struggle for legality.

Agrarian insurgency and the counterrevolution of international finance

Marxist scholars have long traced the development of capitalism in relation to global shifts in agricultural production and consumption. According to such accounts, during the nineteenth century rise of industrial capitalism, independent settler states, principally the United States, provisioned the growing European proletariat with wage-foods. Thus, competitive relations among politically independent nation-states developed with Europe’s direct administration of tropical export agriculture. These dynamics underpinned U.S. hegemony in the twentieth century in two ways: First, U.S. grain, cotton, and other agricultural exports underwrote the “completion of the state system,” with agriculture itself becoming an industrial sector (shifting from final use to industrial inputs). Second, transnational accumulation driven by U.S. agri-food corporations had doubly undercut the capacities of newly independent states to regulate domestic production and trade (Friedmann and McMichael, 1989: 94). Elaborating on how exactly the “nationalizing” of Southern agriculture and other “problem areas” enabled the United States to capture the markets of the West Indies, South America, Asia, and Africa, Trinidadian social scientist Oliver Cromwell Cox (1962: 4–5) argues:

By 1914, the United States had brought its superb natural resources within reach of intensive exploitation. Under the stimulus of its foreign-trade outlets, the financial assistance of the older capitalist nations, and a flexible system of protective tariffs, the nation developed a magnificent work of transportation and communication so that its mines, factories, and farms became integrated into an effectively producing organism having easy access to its seaports … [Likewise,] further internal expansion depended upon far greater emphasis on an ever-widening foreign commerce.

Such accounts clarify that this international division of labor was a result of more than Cold War-era agricultural development projects guided by U.S. private and public interests. Just as significant were the new (inter)national financial instruments and institutions that characterized the (inter)nationalization of the “New South” and the interwar U.S. emphasis on “ever-widening foreign commerce” (Hudson, 2017: 152; cited in Burden-Stelly, 2020: 11). From New Deal legislation that established the USDA as the “lender of last resort” to new financial institutions whose purview extended beyond agri-food systems, interwar constellations of finance capitalism hinged on geoeconomic abstractions while hardening the nation-states’ role in the supposed provision of social forms of security through the market (Goldstein, 2014: 52). Critically, such processes (inter)nationalized the racially hierarchical political economy of Southern agriculture. For example, the U.S. Federal Reserve was established in 1913 to supervise banking in the United States and manage the nation’s money supply through monetary policy. As David Stein (2019: 125) argues, this pillar of “Jim Crow monetary policy” was not only characterized by antidemocratic decisions about interest rates and the role of central banking. It also undermined the power of Black working-class people and eventually superseded the Jim Crow political bloc “as the most significant impediment to a full employment economy.” Further, Peter James Hudson (2017: 12) argues that “the Federal Reserve Act also contained “provisions crucial to the expansion of U.S. banking and markets abroad,” with the circum-Caribbean region the premier subject of such “internationalizing and imperial efforts of Wall Street's banks.” These efforts were clearly successful: during the interwar years, the United States transformed from a debtor nation into a creditor nation, and a leader international commerce and finance, broadly.

Of particular interest here is the buy-in from the U.S. public that international finance required and how such buy-in was achieved. As Cox (1962: 28) argues, by about 1920, the consensus among major U.S. businesses was that foreign investments had to accompany the expansion of exports, and that “probably for the first time in the annals of capitalism … the people, primarily, should provide the capital.” Further, they regarded public investment in foreign bonds a duty of citizenship. As the Vice President of the Union Trust Company argued at the 1921 National Foreign Trade Convention, “America's ability to extend credits [requires] the ability and willingness of our people to fill the role of citizens of a creditor nation,” and thus the cultivation of what Cox (1962: 30, 33) has termed a new “capitalist mind” among the U.S. public. During the interwar period, the social scientific reconceptualization of Southern Black agrarian labor militancy into the basis of a national “economic democracy” fostered this universalizing faith in a robust U.S. national economy. But to the U.S. public, how were postcolonial societies constructed as necessary recipients of U.S. finance, especially in relation to the economic democracy envisioned for their own nation? As Cox (1962: 227, 230) argues, because Black labor has been the “chief human factor in wealth production … the dominant economic class has always been at the motivating center of the spread of racial antagonism … especially at its proliferating source in the [U.S.] South” (cited in Burden-Stelly, 2020: 11). In this moment of U.S.-led market capture worldwide, Cox’s argument extends to the many Souths that constitute what George L. Beckford (1972) describes as a broader global economy that thrives on the “persistent underdevelopment” and “persistent poverty” of Black life—key components of Cox’s (1962: 19) account of “the rising American economy with the universal capitalist system.” ¹³ Thus, the geoeconomic recasting of racial antagonisms at home would converge with the geoeconomic recasting of racial antagonisms worldwide in service of a democratic “economic internationalism”—a task that U.S. policymakers, philanthropists, educators, business leaders, and social scientists faced head on as they garnered public support.

Reflecting their faith in a national project of “social engineering,” social scientists asserted that national publics worldwide needed to be educated in the principles of international finance, and that their disciplines were key to this work (Cox, 1962: 30; Melamed, 2011: 19). Their research on the Southern plantation economy was an exercise in this work, assert as it did the economic origins of supposed cultural maladaptations—rather than the fixity of racial difference and racial antagonisms—and invite as it did a faith in the U.S. national economy. Critically, the economism of their approach also afforded them the means of rendering such localized work—and its capacity to transform national cultural norms and sentiments alike—internationally applicable. For example, Herbert A. Miller (1928: 549), a white sociologist who had taught at Fisk University, among other Southern universities, and who co-authored works with Robert E. Park, had at the 1928 World Conference on International Justice professed the importance of fields such as anthropology and social psychology in “showing the basis similarity of people with respect to race and nation,” between nations. Yet, Miller (1928: 549) continued, it is in “the field of economics, in which our thinking and social organization has a genuine culture lag”—a problem not limited to the U.S. South nor the United States alone. Specifically, Miller states, “it is in the economic field that competition leads to hostilities…[yet] [i]f we consider this from the point of view of capital, commerce, and labor, the fact show that international relations are becoming more elemental than national inclusiveness.” In other words, Miller argues that it is within the realm of international commerce and finance that U.S. economic democracy can be modeled for the world. An exercise in the geoeconomic recasting of racial antagonisms worldwide in service of U.S.-led international finance and the role of social sciences in garnering support from the U.S. public and national publics worldwide, Miller argued, “It is the business of the university to clarify the extent of the economic basis so as to break down the provincial attitudes which are only of political value,” with the social sciences in particular “playing part in showing the unity of order, attitudes, codes, and ideals” and “debunking the basis of hostility.”

Although, by the 1930s, federal agricultural policy instituted only some of the far-reaching ideas promoted by agrarian reformers, what held was a broad vision of a U.S. national economy not mired by the nation’s “problem areas” and, by extension, robust in its leadership of international finance. Increasingly, U.S. business leaders, social scientists, and others critiqued the federal government’s inability to make do on the latter vision. To them, the 1933 Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) in particular—still an exercise in “national land planning”—was a masterclass in the perils of “economic isolation” (Gilbert, 2015: 57). Representing business and military interests as former chief accounting officer of the U.S. Navy, George Percival Auld’s, 1935 address at the 22nd National Foreign Trade Convention is instructive. Like others, Auld believed that faltering Southern agricultural production threatened U.S. international competitiveness, and that the AAA's crop reduction programs and underlying philosophy further undermined the prospect. Auld (1935: 6) declared, “the sensational shrinkage in our cotton exports is probably the most disquieting single event in our recent economic history … the logical result of a scheme conceived, though perhaps not consciously, in the true spirit of economic nationalism.” In making the case for “Economic Internationalism in a Nationalist World”—the title of his address, and a strategy that would reflect the nation’s commitment to “division of labor, co-operation and exchange”—Auld asserted that federal agricultural policy needed to be in service of international economic competitiveness. At the heart of Auld’s universalizing faith in a robust U.S. national economy (and federal policy that could foster it) were the racial antagonisms at home and abroad that he believed such an economy would ameliorate. International finance was key here. Auld said in no clearer terms, the

ideal [of economic nationalism] is fixed on the attainment of a substantially complete national self-sufficiency—of an exclusiveness of national life, which, wherever it is most favored, seems inevitably to tend toward racial intolerance and a consciously hostile attitude toward neighboring peoples.

Extending this geoeconomic preoccupation with agrarian “problem areas” to the decolonizing world was key to the epistemologies of commensurability and differential devaluation of an ascendant modern U.S. racial capitalism. Consider U.S. negotiations of agrarian labor-capital relations in the transitional Commonwealth of the Philippines. Writing in Foreign Affairs in 1936, political scientist and former Navy officer, Ralston Hayden (1936: 644), situated agrarian and industrial revolutionary-socialist struggles across the Commonwealth within an articulated (or articulable) Philippines national economy: “The most serious problems faced by the new Commonwealth are those of public order and national economy … aris[ing] from three sources: economic unrest, discontent, and unstable or dissatisfied minority racial groups.” Identifying their proliferating source in agrarian struggles, and signaling the larger infrastructure of colonial accumulation put at risk, Hayden (1936: 644) stated that

many tenants and agricultural laborers continue to live under well-night intolerable conditions. To these malcontents is now added a growing class of dissatisfied industrial workers, including the employees of the great tobacco factories, the bus companies, the lumber and coconut mills and the longshoremen.

Conclusion: Redress and liberation within and beyond the national economy

By the mid-1930s, after advocating for interventions of the sort, Southern race-liberal social scientists had become aware of the mass evictions wrought by the crop reduction programs of the 1933 AAA—bringing them in even closer alignment with U.S. business leaders who decried such policies of “economic nationalism.” Charles S. Johnson, Rupert B. Vance, Edwin R. Embree of Rockefeller and Phelps-Stokes foundations, and Will W. Alexander (1935: 51) of the Commission on Interracial cooperation co-authored the 1935 study, The Collapse of Cotton Tenancy, which presented a fierce critique of such New Deal-era programs: “It is but the blunt truth to say that under the present system the landowner is more and more protected from risk by government activity, while the tenant is left open to risks on every side”—a result of such programs being organized “under the direction of the planters themselves.” Yet, as this essay has argued, the issue with interwar U.S. agrarian reform was not simply the abandonment of the tenant by the U.S. government under ill-thought, poorly enacted, and exclusionary New Deal-era programs. Even if what had taken shape and remained in place was agrarian reformers’ “intended New Deal,” what is of concern here is what Southern race-liberal social scientists had a hand in crafting: the notion of the state as a geoeconomic agent and horizon of liberation, thus helping rationalize the containment of convergent anticolonial communist, labor, and peasant movements within and beyond the U.S. nation-state (Cowen and Smith, 2009: 22). For example, considering the mass evictions across the U.S. South, the authors advocated for a “re-homesteading project” intended to “establish in farm ownership a huge number of families heretofore excluded from ownership and now being cut off even from tenancy or crop sharing arrangements.” This plan would require that the federal government “buy up huge acreages of farm lands now in the hands of insurance companies, land banks, and others, and distribute this land in small plots”—a plan that resembled key New Deal resettlement programs (Embree, 1936; Johnson et al., 1935: 74). Yet, even these proposals and programs hinged upon the notion of a national “economic democracy.”

Ironically, Johnson (1934: 208) had argued only one year earlier in Shadow of the Plantation that Southern Black workers adjacent to—and part of—communist struggle were wrong in their understanding that “the [economic] system is the government and the government is the landlord.” Perhaps Johnson and others came to believe that Southern Black sharecroppers, miners, and other members of the working class in the region, and across the world’s many Souths, had it right all along. But the terrain of Black transnational and international labor militancy and broader revolutionary-socialist struggle had already been circumscribed in key ways. Consider, for example, the 1936 text, What is Communism?, where Earl Browder (1936), the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), had proposed a similar program as an avenue toward a robust race-liberal U.S. national economy—an economy that would lead the world in international economic assistance:

Such a socialist reorganization of industry would almost immediately double the existing productive forces of the country … bring to the farming population all the advantages of modern civilization … multiply manifold the productive capacities of American agriculture … [and] proceed at once to the complete liberation of the Negro people from all oppression, secure the right of self-determination of the Black Belt, and would secure unconditional economic, political and social equality … With the establishment of a socialist system in America … [t]he wealth of such a society will immediately become so great that tremendous surpluses will be available for use as free gifts to the economically backward nations …”