The divide between the assumptions of Great Society planners and realities of how the urban poor lived

See ‘Government Project’ Review: Big Dreams, Bitter Harvest-A cooperative farm in Arizona, a New Deal project, sought to transform displaced agricultural laborers into independent farmers by Leslie Lenkowsky. He is an emeritus professor at Indiana University. Excerpts:

"Edward C. Banfield, a political scientist who taught for nearly four decades at Harvard University, is probably best known as a conservative critic of Great Society programs. His 1970 book, “The Unheavenly City,” argued that these programs were likely to fail, in no small measure because the urban poor they aimed to help were trapped in a “lower-class culture” of short time-horizons, criminality and broken families that government efforts would not be able to overcome. For this, Banfield (1916-99) was pilloried as a racist, and his lectures were disrupted by protesters.

It may come as a surprise then to learn that at the beginning of his career, Banfield was a New Dealer."

"Despite its age, the book is remarkably timely. Its major conclusion was that government-sponsored social programs, however well-intentioned, face such daunting challenges that achieving their goals is almost impossible and doing even a little good is difficult. Not only can the details of implementation present problems but so too can the values and attitudes of those the programs are trying to help."

"Casa Grande Valley Farms, the project’s centerpiece, was established in 1937 on 3,600 acres of land halfway between Phoenix and Tucson. Its aims included providing income for up to 60 agricultural workers, many displaced from “Dust Bowl” states like Texas and Oklahoma and now living in poverty. But income wasn’t the only goal: The project sought to change their lives, transforming dispirited laborers into independent farmers with their own land, houses and communities. The Christian Science Monitor, with some reason, called Casa Grande “a modern Brook Farm,” a reference to the 19th-century utopian experiment in New England. The FSA supplied the money, chiefly as long-term loans, while other New Deal agencies chipped in by building roads and giving agricultural advice. Federal bureaucrats came in to manage the project."

"From the start, however, Casa Grande ran into trouble. The FSA set up the project as a cooperative, which meant that land, crops, livestock and equipment were owned by an organization, not by the individual households. Inevitably, decisions about who should be in charge and what to do became political. After a first harmonious year, factions began to form, with the “settlers” grouping themselves around status markers, such as their level of education and prior experience. The management decisions of the Farm Security Administration triggered a variety of complaints: Most notably, Casa Grande residents wanted to be paid more for the work they were expected to do. (Strikes were threatened.) The project’s inability to escape the stigma of being a form of public “relief” or a Soviet-style “commune” added to the difficulties.

By 1941, Banfield reports, a visiting researcher found that Casa Grande “seethes with dissatisfaction.” Only six of the 30 settlers interviewed said they were glad to have come. Financially, the farm was not doing badly, and its residents were living better than they had previously. But the accumulating troubles they faced wore them down: They couldn’t agree on who should be in charge or whether they should produce more crops or raise livestock; they quarreled over wage differences. In 1946 the FSA liquidated the project, selling off its land and other assets. The families that lived there scattered, often winding up in close to the same circumstances they were in before going to Casa Grande. “We not only killed the goose that laid the golden egg,” one resident told Banfield, “we even threw the goddam egg away.”"

"Throughout his career, Banfield returned to the question of how government projects actually worked. Most notably, “The Unheavenly City” showed the divide between the assumptions of Great Society planners and realities of how the urban poor lived. In other works, too, Banfield emphasized the interplay of politics and culture. He believed that, when practiced well, politics could produce surprisingly creative results. But he also understood that such results were rare. Before embarking on the next plan to change one part of society or another, today’s policy makers should revisit “Government Project” and ponder its cautionary tale."