Homesteading was huge in the 1930s. With a shortage of jobs in urban areas and a lack of market for large-scale farmers, many New Deal leaders believed that the best solution for unemployed people was to help them go back to the land on five-acre “subsistence homesteads,” where they could farm part-time and grow their own food, while still working a job.
One of the most successful projects that received funding as part of the New Deal Subsistence Homesteads program was the Granger Homestead project in the town of Granger, Iowa. Granger Homestead was a project of the National Catholic Rural Life Conference, an organization founded in 1923 to strengthen the Catholic Church in rural America. The NCRLC provided both spiritual and physical help to rural Catholics, emphasizing family life, Catholic education, and good farming practices. While the NCRLC originally focused on helping existing farmers, president Luigi Ligutti broadened the organization’s mission in the 1930s to promote Catholic subsistence homesteads as a middle-of-the-road approach (between socialism and capitalism) to the Depression-era economic ills.
“You can’t talk citizenship and patriotism, social justice and charity to men on relief,” Ligutti and John C. Rawe wrote in their 1940 book Rural Roads to Security: America’s Third Struggle for Freedom. “What they want and need is good food in a sufficient quantity. To have these means having a little plot of earth somewhere out on the land with vegetables, a few chickens, a few pigs, and a cow.” But Ligutti and the NCRLC went one step beyond the secular agrarianism of the New Deal. They explained that the roots of the crisis of the 1930s went far deeper than an economic downturn. The real crisis was the materialism brought on by industrialism and the loss of a spiritual connection with God and with the land.
“The soil is not a machine for producing cotton, as the loom is a machine for weaving,” Ligutti and Rawe warned. “Animals and crops are living things and they follow laws of nature that we must respect. We too are living things, spiritual as well as material living things, but rather than adjust ourselves to the laws of life in our material and spiritual being, we have in recent years spent most of our time in destructive efforts to reduce ourselves to machinery.”
The antidote to the destruction caused by industrialization was a return to an agrarian, decentralized society. Each family unit would have its own homestead and produce its own food, giving them what we would now call food security even if they were laid off from work in a factory. But homesteading was about far more than food production. It was, at heart, a return to “a thorough knowledge of the value of God’s earth, of the soil attached to the homestead.”
The families who moved into the Granger homesteads were predominately coal miners, who had been living in dilapidated company housing. With a loan from the federal government, the miners were able to move into new, modern houses on “five-acre plots of good Iowa land,” where they could grow their own food but still be within commuting distance of “the mines where they work.” Perhaps because its members were united with a common religion, Granger was one of the most successful New Deal homesteading projects, with the community able to pay back the federal loan by 1951. No one seems to have recorded whether any of the Granger homesteaders used the biodynamic methods recommended by Ligutti and Rawe, but if any of them did, they could have been the first non-anthroposophic community to farm biodynamically.
Thank you for this. It is fascinating to me. And the fact that by 1951 the homes were paid for or fully financed is amazing.