A Capital Writing interview with the editor of Government Project by Edward Banfield.
A Capital Writing interview with the editor of Government Project by Edward Banfield.
As part of a project for Capital Matters, called Capital Writing, I’ll be interviewing authors of economics books for the National Review Institute’s YouTube channel. This time, I talked with AEI’s Kevin Kosar, the editor of a new edition of Edward Banfield’s book Government Project. Below you will find an edited transcript of a few key parts of our conversation as well as the full video of our interview.
Dominic Pino: For the first time ever, we have not an author but an editor of a book that is by an author who passed away many years ago. The book is called Government Project. It is by Edward Banfield. So I guess to start off it would help to know who the author actually was. Who is Edward Banfield?
Kevin Kosar: He was a giant both in scholarship and in conservative thought. He lived from 1916 to 1999. He was a guy who grew up in Connecticut, “modest stock” as they would have said back then, went off to local college to study English and learn about journalism. Then he joined the New Deal, and he was writing press releases and doing PR for the Timber Salvage Administration. And then later he moved on to the Farm Security Administration. He was an ardent supporter of the various government interventions during the Great Depression. But in the course of being there, he saw this project, the government project, as he later called it, out in Casa Grande in Arizona. And Ed studied it. And then Ed went off to grad school at the U of Chicago, where he got his Ph.D. and worked with luminaries such as Leo Strauss and Frank Knight and various eminent sociologists. And later he spent most of his career at Harvard, where he wrote a lot about urban politics and policy and American governance issues.
DP: And so he’s one of these conservatives who came out of the New Deal, which is sort of the opposite of what you might expect. Milton Friedman was another example of someone who worked for the government during the New Deal and then became an opponent of government intervention for much of the rest of his life after that. So Banfield, you mentioned he was in Arizona. He was looking at this farm that was run by the Farm Security Administration. Can explain a little bit what the thought process was behind the New Deal planners for what they were trying to accomplish with this project in Arizona?
KK: So various factors came together to create a kind of rural homelessness. One factor was the invention of the tractor. What does a diesel tractor have to do with the eruption of poverty? Well, what it meant was that this expensive piece of machinery could be purchased by corporations that could use it to get a whole lot more crops, a whole lot better yield, lower labor costs. They need fewer people. It also leads to the creation of these kinds of mega farms and to the dying off of the smaller farms that couldn’t compete because they couldn’t reach the economies of scale and produce fruits, vegetables, and the like for lower prices. And we also had the Dust Bowl, very terrible thing in middle America, massive droughts, crops failing, farmers going broke. We had the Great Depression. A lot of stuff was coming together. And the FDR administration created something called the Resettlement Administration. And it was just done with the stroke of the pen, didn’t go through Congress, didn’t get the legislators’ blessing. And an offshoot of that was to create this government project out in Arizona.
Originally, it was drawn up that they were going to make 40 small farms. So the government acquired a whole bunch of land and they started to create irrigation for it, build housing for it. But then they realized that each of these farms was doomed to fail because they couldn’t compete with the corporate-size farm. So then they said, “Well, let’s get these people instead to farm their own mega farm cooperatively. And we will take people who have only the shirt on their back and a few paltry possessions and we’re going to give them the world. They’ll get nice new houses, they’ll get yards. We’ll have a whole community that we’ll build for them. They’ll get a paying wage job, pretty much guaranteed work every single day. They’ll get an equity stake in this larger cooperative farm.” And so that’s what they set up around 1937. And the farm lasted about seven years before the settlers walked away.
DP: There’s a story arc in the book. It’s not just sort of a dry historical account. Banfield really kind of makes it a narrative. And at the beginning, when you have very poor people who for the first time, as we said before, have running water, electricity, a stable roof over their head — at the start, it seemed pretty promising, right?
KK: Absolutely. Once they got enough bodies on the farm, they were able to get things up and running. And, you know, the people were generally with it. The situation was aided greatly by the presence of the first kind of foreman or manager to oversee the place. It was a guy with the last name of Faul. And he was a kind of old-school, private-sector tyrannical sort of boss. He wasn’t evil. He just was, you know, “My word is the law and you shall obey, and if you don’t, I’ll kick you off the farm.” And so he came in with a very firm hand and basically bossed people around and told them exactly what to do. And the people just initially kind of complied.
Although it’s true, a faction of them, who had heard this idea of cooperation, got their hands on a copy of the bylaws. And they, during a rainy day, went out to the dairy barn and read the bylaws. And the bylaws said that they were supposed to have an equity stake in this, that they were supposed to vote. And so they took a vote amongst themselves to appoint their own manager, not Faul, some other guy that they liked. The government very quickly shot them down. Faul came down on them like a load of bricks. And this kind of incipient democratic eruption was crushed and kept under control for a couple of years. And then the farm was prospering. It was uneven prospering, different things worked better. But on the whole, the place was actually covering its operating costs.
DP: And you used a word that was very important, which is “faction,” because we see in this book how factions arise very quickly, even in this very small group of people. You know, usually “faction,” when we talk about it, when James Madison talks about it in the Federalist Papers, he’s talking about it in an entire country. But this is just one farm. But because it is a democratic system, or at least it’s supposed to be, right away you have people who, very much like we saw in the early United States, are pro-administration or pro-government and anti-administration or anti-government. And those two factions show up, and then conflict ensues from there.
KK: The premise of cooperatism and the premise — you could go even further and say the premise of a kind of collectivism and of Sovietism — is an assumption about human egalitarianism that people are basically all the same and they can be persuaded to adopt a similar worldview and everybody can just kind of get in line and it’ll be fine.
No. It won’t be fine. People are different. They’re partial. They very quickly separate among themselves into groups. That’s the brute fact of pluralism. People organize these groups. Birds of a feather will flock together. And out at the farm, groups very quickly formed.
Part of it was a class-line thing. There were people who were just super-impoverished migrant farm workers with much less education, maybe only a couple of years, often couldn’t read. These are people who lived kind of moving from place to place, just picking on corporate farms. Some of them have never seen a flush toilet before. And then there were other farmers at Casa Grande who had experienced a little bit of a better life and they’d been in urban areas. And these groups looked at each other and very quickly kind of made a qualitative distinction between them.
Banfield also cites that all of these people were more or less to some degree individualistic. They were people who didn’t want to be on the dole. They didn’t want to be taking government largesse. They were to some degree thankful for it, but they were also resentful. And this stew of emotions fed into the factionalism, where some of them were like “I want to get close to the FSA people who are overseeing this so I can influence them” and exert power that way. And others broke into a faction who were just anti-FSA, “fight the power.” It was a very remarkable thing. Very small number of people who had all come from desperate situations, but once they had enough food to eat and houses to live in, moved into politicking.
DP: You mentioned one farmer who was talking about how he couldn’t go see a movie with his wife if he wanted to. And Banfield records that guy talking at length. It goes on for a couple of pages, and it reads like a rant of him basically saying why he thinks this project is terrible. And what was remarkable about it is — and this is what I really appreciate about the way that Banfield tells a story — is that, especially for free-market conservatives, we’re pretty familiar with the arguments against government planning, with the inefficiencies that come about, the huge allocation problems that happen when you don’t have price signals, and all the rest. And we sort of get this on a theoretical level, but in that guy’s rant, you’re reading the actual real-life consequences of this. And this is someone who, as we said before, is not well educated. He has not read Hayek. But when you read what he’s saying, it’s exactly what you would predict if you have read Hayek.
KK: One of the trade-offs that keeps coming up is that the people who drew up this plan had a goal of putting people to work, men in particular, and let’s keep them steadily employed because it’s bad to have idle hands. Oh, okay, that’s all well and fine. But by the way, we also want this farm to be efficient, and we want it to be able to cover its operating costs and preferably profit. Okay, well, very early on, you have farmers coming up and saying, look, hand-milking the cows is silly. We have machines. Let’s acquire these machines and we’re not going to need nearly as many people. And in the long run, it’s going to be cheaper, more efficient, we’ll clear greater money. And they were fired. The boss at the time told them “No” and “Get out.” Some of them were later hired back, but how do you square that? You can’t. That’s just one of the many inherent tensions that were baked into it. And what should management look like? How do you have managers who work for the people that they’re ultimately bossing around, whom they’re trying to tell to do things that they may not want to do? Some jobs are more glorious than others. To be a foreman and get to drive around in a pickup truck and kind of keep an eye on other people instead of standing out in the hot baking sun and picking cotton and getting your knuckles all bloody. There are clear status differences in the jobs, and management has to make those decisions about where people go. But at the same time, the manager is supposed to be answerable to these people. Not easy to square that either.
That fellow’s rant was really something. He kept saying, Well, this place could be better run if this was changed or that was changed or something else was changed. But he kept circling back to the fact that, ultimately, I’d just rather have my own farm.
