Accounting and rural rehabilitation in New Deal America

Description
The enabling potential of accounting is explored through an investigation of practices
attending the rural rehabilitation program in 1930s USA. The paper examines the attempts
of a progressive government agency to encourage the adoption of accounting on a substantial
scale through ‘supervised credit’. This episode is analyzed by reference to concepts of
supervision derived from the work of theorists such as Foucault and Giddens. The accounting
techniques applied by rural families under supervision are discussed and their rehabilitative
impacts assessed at the levels of the objectified population and its individuated
subjects. It is shown that accounting featured prominently, at diverse levels of government,
in what has been identified as the most significant attempt to address rural poverty in
American history

Accounting and rural rehabilitation in New Deal America
Stephen P. Walker
?
University of Edinburgh Business School, 29 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh EH8 9JS, UK
a b s t r a c t
The enabling potential of accounting is explored through an investigation of practices
attending the rural rehabilitation program in 1930s USA. The paper examines the attempts
of a progressive government agency to encourage the adoption of accounting on a substan-
tial scale through ‘supervised credit’. This episode is analyzed by reference to concepts of
supervision derived from the work of theorists such as Foucault and Giddens. The account-
ing techniques applied by rural families under supervision are discussed and their rehabil-
itative impacts assessed at the levels of the objecti?ed population and its individuated
subjects. It is shown that accounting featured prominently, at diverse levels of government,
in what has been identi?ed as the most signi?cant attempt to address rural poverty in
American history. While the educative functioning of supervised accounting had facilita-
tive and enabling effects, its administrative functioning was surveillant, controlling and
directing of those targeted for intervention.
Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
‘I fully believe that America will rise or fall in her greatness
in proportion to her maintenance of a satisfactory self-
sustaining rural life.’
W. Kerr Scott, Commissioner of Agriculture for North
Carolina
(Hearings, 1944, Part 4, p. 1450).
Introduction
There exists a voluminous history literature which
demonstrates the functioning of accounting in the opera-
tion of genocide, oppression, exploitation and social exclu-
sion. Studies of indigenous peoples for example, have
revealed the disabling effects of accounting as a technology
of governance; a device which facilitated dispossession
and the transmission of the mentalities of the dominant
(Greer & Neu, 2009). But there are also contributions to
the literature which illustrate the potential for calculative
techniques to counter such malevolent practices. It has
been argued that accounting can be utilized as a moraliz-
ing force, a source of improvement (Francis, 1990). Histori-
ans of accounting and emancipation highlight the ways in
which ?nancial disclosures have been deployed in ven-
tures to liberate and challenge inequality (Gallhofer &
Haslam, 2003). Even in the unlikely setting of chattel slav-
ery, where quantitative technologies were integral to
exploitation, less sinister and moderating in?uences of
accounting and accountability are discernible (Oldroyd,
Fleischman, & Tyson, 2008).
The focus of this paper is on the role of accounting in a
comprehensive, state-operated project designed to address
rural poverty. Accounting was deployed in response to an
unparalleled economic and social crisis in the United States
which demanded ameliorative action on a massive scale.
At least three-quarters of a million farm families were ob-
liged by a federal agency to practice accounting in order to
achieve their rehabilitation. The object population were
small farmers during the 1930s and 1940s and the
accounting they were prescribed was designed to achieve
individual, familial and national betterment. This focushttp://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.aos.2014.01.007
0361-3682/Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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E-mail address: [email protected]
Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 208–235
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contrasts with previous historical studies. The extant liter-
ature on emancipatory agendas invariably concerns the
use of accounting disclosures to expose, critique, challenge
and resist ‘alienation, repression and injustice’ (Gallhofer &
Haslam, 2003, p. 159). The rehabilitative variant discussed
here stresses the performance of accounting by the objects
of intervention. Whereas most historical research on
accounting as a technology for governing peoples focus
on the accumulation of knowledge in centres of calcula-
tion, the current paper also emphasizes the experience of
those on the periphery (Graham, 2010; Miller & Rose,
1990; Neu, 2000; Neu & Graham, 2006).
The accounting prescription examined in this paper was
implemented by progressive agencies of the New Deal era.
The Resettlement Administration (RA) and its successor,
the Farm Security Administration (FSA), attempted to ad-
dress a deep social problem in an innovative and impactful
way (Couto, 1991, 123). For its supporters the FSA
constituted:
. . .an heroic institution designed to secure social justice
and political power for a neglected class of Americans; a
pioneering effort to strike at the causes of chronic rural
poverty; a unique and largely successful experiment in
creative government; an agency embodying the social
conscience of the New Deal; or a model effort in agrar-
ian reform which was destined to serve as a seedbed for
future wars on poverty in the United States and in some
of the emerging nations of the world (Baldwin, 1968, p.
4).
For its critics, the agency represented a dangerous vehi-
cle for Socialist experimentation and the anti-libertarian
regulation of the lives of farming families. These contrast-
ing assessments derived substantially from the activation
of the principal technologies of rehabilitation – supervised
credit and the supervised accounting that accompanied it.
They resonate with seemingly divergent concepts of super-
vision in modern-day discourse, concepts which have sel-
dom been the subject of explicit discussion in accounting.
For theorists such as Foucault and Giddens supervisory
activity is fundamental to surveillance. The perpetual and
direct supervision of individuals by those in positions of
power is an important device for knowledge gathering
and disciplining. In certain ?elds such practices are
perceived as threatening and constraining. However,
supervisory processes are also associated with compe-
tence-building and liberating the individual. The analytical
framework used in the study is drawn from literature
which explores these contrasting concepts of supervision
and reveals the often dyadic character of its functioning.
The paper also seeks to contribute to a recent reasser-
tion of American studies on core debates in critical
accounting history. While local practitioners express fears
about the demise of their discipline in the US (Fleischman
& Radcliffe, 2005), accounting historians elsewhere are
alert to the signi?cance of this site for exploring controver-
sies in the ?eld. For example, Bryer (2012, 2013a, 2013b)
has presented a Marxist accounting history of America’s
transition to capitalism. Walker (2010) argued that child
accounting systems in the US represent a potent
illustration of Foucauldian analyses of accounting as a dis-
ciplinary technology.
The rural setting examined in this study points to an-
other intended contribution. Among the arenas which have
been identi?ed as potential sources of interdisciplinary
engagement and searches for new research agendas in
accounting history are the agricultural economy and rural
society (Walker, 2005, 2006). These sites offer the prospect
of advancing beyond the traditional emphasis on the
industrial organization in the modern Anglophone world
(Carmona, 2004).
1
It is often overlooked that the British
industrial revolution was linked to its agricultural predeces-
sor and that around its height, in 1851, agriculture remained
by far the largest source of employment (Bryer, 2004, 2006;
Mathias, 1969, pp. 259–263). In the USA, 44% of the popula-
tion lived in rural locations as late as 1930. Rural-agrarian
societies are potentially important locales for exploring the
interfaces between accounting and the construction and
maintenance of social structures, relationships and identi-
ties, in both past and present contexts.
The paper is structured thus. Concepts of supervision
and the notion of an educative–administrative duality,
are discussed in the next section. The context in which
state projects for the rehabilitation of small farmers
emerged in the US, the nature of the resultant programmes
and the chronology of the agencies which implemented
them, are then outlined. The accounting prescriptions de-
signed to facilitate rehabilitation are subsequently ana-
lyzed according to the educative (progressive) and
administrative (repressive) functions of supervision. Evi-
dence relating to the emancipatory impacts of accounting
is then discussed on two dimensions. The ?rst relates to
the macro-level of the objecti?ed population and the use
of accounting data by the state to assess rehabilitative out-
comes. The second focuses on the rehabilitative effects of
supervised accounting at the micro-level of the individual
subject. The implications of the study are discussed in
the conclusion.
Supervision, surveillance and emancipation
In the episode investigated it was supervised account-
ing that was deployed as an essential technology for the
achievement of rehabilitation. In accounting the concept
of supervision is seldom subject to explicit or sustained
discussion. However, supervision surfaces in a number of
important contexts. These include studies of budgetary
control systems and budgetary participation, ?xed over-
head cost reduction, performance monitoring, regulatory
oversight mechanisms, the effectiveness of audit teams,
and the pedagogy of doctoral programmes. In particular,
Hopwood’s (1972) identi?cation of different ‘supervisory
styles’ focused numerous subsequent studies on role con-
?ict and role ambiguity in research on accounting perfor-
mance measurement (Hartmann, 2000). In their
1
Among the few studies which have explored accounting histories in
agricultural settings are Freer (1970), Macve (1985, 2002), Razek (1985),
Carnegie (1995, 1997), Juchau and Hill (1998), Juchau (2002), Ji (2003),
Bryer (2004, 2006), Jack (2005), Planas and Saguer (2005), Mussari and
Magliacani (2007), and Ezzamel (2012).
S.P. Walker / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 208–235 209
in?uential historical study, Miller and O’Leary (1987, p.
263) charted how scienti?c management, industrial psy-
chology and costing successively offered new techniques
for the observation, measurement and supervision of
individuals.
The management literature invariably locates supervi-
sors as ?rst-level, departmental, managers who assign
tasks and monitor the performance of employees under
their charge. Historically, in industrial contexts, supervi-
sors or foremen increasingly assumed a marginal status
in organizational hierarchies, becoming a conduit for the
transmission of decisions made by senior managers to
the shop ?oor (Child & Partridge, 1982, pp. 3–12; Senker,
1995). In the workplace, supervision is often characterized
by the direct, front-line, overseeing of the employee and
therefore contrasts with the often remote planning and
controlling functions performed by higher-level manage-
ment. The shifting nature of supervision in organizations
during industrial capitalism has featured large in debates
about the labor process (Coopey & McKinlay, 2010).
In the ?eld of human services, supervision is under-
stood as more than a mode of directing people at work.
The supervision of social workers by their employing agen-
cies is perceived as a core facilitating process which not
only improves the effectiveness of service delivery but also
enhances the pro?ciency of the worker (Smalley, 1967). In
this context supervision serves an educational function,
becomes part of continuing professional development
and a basis for self-re?ective practice (Bernard & Goodyear,
1998; Robinson, 1936; Scaife, 2001). The educational and
training function of supervision is also evident in arenas
such as postgraduate degree programmes, and in appren-
ticeship systems where learning by doing under the eye
of an expert is a condition of gaining access to a commu-
nity of practice.
Supervision thus potentially embraces a range of
activities. According to Kadushin (1976) there are three
complementary functions of supervision in social agencies
– administrative, educational and supportive. Administra-
tive supervision recognizes that supervisors feature in the
hierarchy of bureaucratic organizations and assume
responsibility for the effective implementation of agency
policies and procedures. Administrative supervisory tasks
include co-ordination, monitoring and the evaluation of
work performed. They also involve the supervisor acting
as a channel of communication through the organizational
hierarchy. By contrast, educational supervision concerns
imparting to the supervisee the competencies necessary
to practice the role assigned. This function is developmen-
tal – it seeks to nurture the speci?c knowledge and skills
required by the supervisee through individual conferences
and/or group meetings with the supervisor (Kadushin,
1976, pp. 125–127). The third function of supervision is
supportive. This involves the supervisor providing ongoing
support to the supervisee in situations which may disrupt
the performance of the roles assigned (Kadushin, 1976, pp.
198–205). Other models of supervision also tend to iden-
tify distinctive administrative–managerial dimensions on
the one hand and facilitative–developmental dimensions
on the other (see Heron, 1989; Nicklin, 1997; Powell,
2004; Proctor, 1987).
Evidently, in its administrative–managerial guise super-
vision assumes a monitoring function. The supervisor
watches over the supervisee to ensure adherence to pre-
scriptions. The supervisee is accountable to the supervisor
for tasks performed and is obliged to give ‘an account or
recording of her work’ (Inskipp & Proctor, 2001, p. 1). Here
the evaluative component of supervision is emphasized
and this is attended by the formulation of corrective re-
sponses to address de?cient performance. In its adminis-
trative functioning supervision is often perceived as
surveillant. If surveillance essentially concerns making
‘visible the identities or behaviors of people of interest to
the agency in question’ (Lyon, 2002, p. 2) then supervision
is one of its technologies. Indeed, a recently published
introductory text on the surveillance society bears the title
SuperVision (Gilliom & Monahan, 2013). While it tends to
emphasize direct, physical forms of ‘watching’ in close
proximity, the supervisory gaze may be extended beyond
the face-to-face by the maintenance of bureaucratic re-
cords and ?les pertaining to the supervisee (Lyon, 2007,
pp. 76–81).
Not surprisingly, the identi?cation of administrative–
managerial supervision as a potentially ominous mode of
surveillance has encouraged Foucauldian analyses, espe-
cially in clinical ?elds. For example Gilbert (2001, p. 199)
contests that re?ective practice and clinical supervision
in nursing represent techniques of surveillance designed
to render visible the activities of professionals and ensure
their disciplining. Foucault (1991, p. 299, emphasis added)
himself elucidated the ‘institutions of supervision’ within
the carceral. He emphasized the key observational role of
the supervisor in disciplinary society, ‘where panopticism
reigns’ (1994a, p. 70):
With panopticism, something altogether different
would come into being; there would no longer be
inquiry, but supervision [surveillance] and examination.
It was no longer a matter of reconstituting an event, but
something-or, rather, someone-who needed total, unin-
terrupted supervision. A constant supervision of indi-
viduals by someone who exercised a power over
them-schoolteacher, foreman, physician, psychiatrist,
prison warden- and who, so long as he exercised power,
had the possibility of both supervising and constituting
a knowledge concerning those he supervised (Foucault,
1994a, p. 59, emphasis in original).
Importantly, in the context of the current study, Fou-
cault considered that the supervisor was a functionary
with responsibility for connecting ‘the individualized
behavior of the inmate’ with ‘knowledge of the general so-
cial body’ (Simon, 2005).
Some other commentators place supervision at the
heart of their conceptualization of surveillance. According
to Giddens (1981, pp. 169–170; 1985, pp. 13–15) surveil-
lance represents an authoritative resource of time–space
distanciation which generates administrative power, par-
ticularly that concentrated in, and exercised by, the mod-
ern nation-state. Surveillance assumes two forms, the
collection and storage of coded information, and ‘the direct
supervision of the activities of some individuals by others in
positions of authority over them’ (1985, p. 14, emphasis
210 S.P. Walker / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 208–235
added). These two dimensions are closely connected, espe-
cially when the information amassed is deployed ‘in a di-
rect way to the supervision of human activities’ (1985, p.
47). Similarly, for Dandeker (1990, p. 38) ‘surveillance in-
volves a deliberate attempt to monitor and/or supervise ob-
jects or persons’. ‘Supervisory discipline’ pertains where
surveillance involves the gathering of information for the
purpose of monitoring behavior and ensuring the compli-
ance of the subject person(s) with instructions (Dandeker,
1990, p. 37).
In recent times disquiet has been expressed about creep-
ing ‘supervisory discipline’ in the ?elds of health and social
care. Here the intrusion is deemed antithetical to the educa-
tive functionof supervision. Indeed, supervisionhas become
a contested practice. In a context where accountability and
performance management increasingly feature in service
delivery (Freeth, 2007, p. 167), debate has ensued over
whether modern forms of clinical supervision constitute
surveillance (Gilbert, 2001; Grant & Townend, 2007; North-
cott, 2000). In social work concerns have been expressed
about the extent to which a focus on risk management has
promoted forms of supervision which emphasize the mi-
cro-managerial surveillance of practitioners (Beddoe,
2010; Peach & Horner, 2007). Contrasts are increasingly
drawn in the literature between ‘emancipatory’ modes of
supervision and technical supervision. According to Johns
(2001) when the intention is to create a liberated practi-
tioner supervisory processes are facilitative, empowering
and enabling. When the object is to produce a practitioner
concordant with organizational priorities supervision veers
towards controlling and directing.
The concepts of supervision articulated in the foregoing
discussion are summarized in Table 1.
Although the content of Table 1 clari?es the discussion
of opposing notions of supervision, it does construct an
overly dichotomous and static view. As organizational re-
search shows, formalized procedures may be constructed
in ways which are both enabling and coercive (Adler &
Borys, 1996). The functioning and technologies of manage-
rial supervision may shift in a single organization over
time (Coopey & McKinlay, 2010). The achievement of
supervisory projects designed to build competence invari-
ably requires knowledge of progress toward that aim, gath-
ered through surveillance.
Likewise, techniques associated with educative–
supportive supervision, such as teaching, can have the
controlling and directing impacts associated with adminis-
trative–managerial supervision. Although administrative–
managerial supervision operates with a view to achieving
conformity and is restraining, its corrective and
re-orientating effects may discipline in ways which place
the deviant on the path to improvement, and thus have
impacts more commonly associated with educative–
supportive supervision. Further, it is through monitoring
and evaluating performance that those in need of support-
ive supervision become visible. Even though he is often
invoked in the context of sinister aspects of supervision/
surveillance, Foucault conceded that there remained scope
for emancipatory actions through the alteration of such
practices at the micro-level (Hindess, 1998).
Such complexities are apparent in the historical instance
explored here. It will be suggested that, in common with
other state-operated case-based ‘welfare’ projects, supervi-
sion exhibited both educative–supportive functions (which
are facilitative and enabling) and administrative–manage-
rial functions (which are surveillant and controlling). The
former function was dominant in the case of state provision
of supervised credit to achieve rural rehabilitation. How-
ever, the achievement of this objective required the signif-
icant presence of the former, and the intrusion which this
represented became a source of criticism of the rural reha-
bilitation programme. As will be shown later, these poten-
tially dual functions of supervisory activity centred on the
performance of accounting by client families. Before
exploring these tensions, it is ?rst necessary to explain
how the focal programme came into being.
The emergence of the rural rehabilitation program
Rural rehabilitation was directed at farm tenants and
sharecroppers who permanently experienced standards
of living below levels considered acceptable. These were
small, low-income family farmers whose plight aroused
deep concern during the interwar depression in American
agriculture.
The depression in agriculture
During the First World War and its immediate after-
math demand for American grain, meat and ?bers in-
creased substantially. In response, millions of acres of
land were brought into production, particularly in the
Great Plains. However, as European agriculture recovered,
as cotton was challenged by synthetic ?bers, and as pat-
terns of domestic food consumption changed, agricultural
prices collapsed. By 1932 commodity prices stood at 52%
of their pre-war average (Mitchell, 1975, p. 68; Young,
1993). With the decline in prices came falls in farm income
and real-estate values (Mitchell, 1975, pp. 64–67, 181–
183; Saloutos, 1982, p. 5).
2
Table 1
Concepts of supervision.
Type Educative–supportive Administrative–
managerial
Function Building the competence
of the supervisee to
pursue an assigned role
and the provision of
support during its
performance
Conformity of the
supervisee to agency
policies, procedures and
rules in the performance
of an assigned role
Techniques Instruction, teaching,
tuition, coaching, hand-
holding, assessment
Observation,
surveillance, monitoring,
evaluation, ‘supervisory
discipline’
Impacts Facilitating, empowering,
enabling, liberating
Controlling, restraining,
directing, con?ning
2
In 1932 40% of farms in the US were mortgaged (Mitchell, 1975, p. 68).
The mortgage debt on the average American farm increased from $1700 in
1910 to $3500 in 1930 (First Annual Report, 1936, p. 3; Wall & Engquist,
1935, pp. 1–2).
S.P. Walker / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 208–235 211
The bank failures and contracted markets which fol-
lowed the crash of 1929 ensured that the already fragile
‘agricultural structure gave way’ (Asch & Mangus, 1937,
p. 3). The annual incomes of farmers fell by a further 50%
between 1929 and 1932 and farm property values declined
by almost a third (Gaer, 1941, pp. 49–50). It was the tradi-
tional, family farmer who suffered most. When prices for
foodstuffs had been high many borrowed heavily to invest
in land and machinery. But now they were unable to meet
debt repayments (Grant, 2002, pp. 16–18; Temin, 2000, p.
303). Their distress was evidenced by rising rates of bank-
ruptcy, ‘abandoned farm homesteads, dilapidated build-
ings, equipment in disrepair, longer working hours. . . a
reduced level of living, lack of ready cash or credit, and a
rising wave of political discontent in rural areas’ (Baldwin,
1968, p. 32).
In 1930 47% of American farm families lived in poverty
(Grant, 2002, p. 29). By the autumn of 1933 almost
1.15 million families in rural areas were receiving public
assistance as unemployed (Asch & Mangus, 1937, pp.
3–6; First Annual Report, 1936, p. 1; Wiley, 1937). This
represented one-third of all families on the relief roll.
Numerous others not receiving relief earned income at
levels associated with poverty (Farm Security Administra-
tion, 1941, p. 7; Gaer, 1941, pp. 7–8; Maddox, 1939).
The early to mid-1930s were years of the Dust Bowl,
The Worst Hard Time (Egan, 2006), of chronic poverty in
the Cotton Belt (Mertz, 1978, pp. 1–19). This was the per-
iod of mass migration from the Great Plains to the Paci?c
coast, as captured by John Steinbeck in The Grapes of
Wrath (1939) (also Security for Farm Tenants, 1940, pp.
6–9; Worster, 2004, pp. 44–63).
Policy makers turned their attention to addressing the
chronic poverty af?icting rural families. The issue featured
large in Roosevelt’s successful presidential election cam-
paign of 1932 (Young, 1993). By ‘1933 the plight of farmers
was of more immediate concern to New Deal policy-mak-
ers than the problems of industrial workers’ (Badger, 1989,
p. 147). In May 1933 the Agricultural Adjustment Act was
passed in an attempt to limit farm production and thereby
increase prices (Young, 1993). In the same month the Fed-
eral Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) was estab-
lished to relieve mass unemployment (Mitchell, 1975, pp.
185–200; Oppenheimer, 1937). This suite of ‘federal pro-
grams to alleviate poverty during the New Deal were with-
out precedent’ (Echeverri-Gent, 1993, p. 39).
Rural rehabilitation agencies
From the mid-1920s localized experiments in rehabili-
tating subsistence farmers had been performed (Baldwin,
1968, pp. 35, 61; Grant, 2002, pp. 88–89). During the early
1930s those administering relief in rural areas called for
measures which would restore farmers ‘as self-respecting
citizens’ (Kirkpatrick, 1938, p. 1). In April 1934 the federal
government responded when FERA established a Division
of Rural Rehabilitation and Stranded Populations. The ob-
ject was to assist destitute farmers not by temporary ‘re-
lief’, but by offering a more permanent solution to rural
poverty (Asch & Mangus, 1937, pp. 15–21; Baldwin,
1968, pp. 62–63; First Annual Report, 1936, p. 9; West-
brook, 1935).
3
Loans would be provided for farm equipment
or stock, or relocation offered, with the object of helping
family farmers to become self-supporting at a decent stan-
dard of living. Funds for that purpose were to be distributed
to the emergency relief administrators in each state, who in
turn, devolved them to county relief of?cials. A year later
FERA established state rural rehabilitation corporations to
administer loans to farmers (Hearings, 1944, Part 3, pp.
982–983; Larson, 1947, pp. 18–40; Westbrook, 1935).
Although FERA’s rehabilitation program was considered
innovative it proved an insuf?cient response to the prob-
lem of rural poverty (Baldwin, 1968, p. 84). In mid-1935,
as part of the ‘Second New Deal’ and re?ective of a leftward
shift in policy, responsibility for rural rehabilitation was
transferred to the Resettlement Administration (Baldwin,
1968, pp. 85–94; The Resettlement Administration, 1935;
Wiley, 1937). The RA, a centralized federal agency under
the direction of Rexford G. Tugwell (whose advocacy of
central planning and communitarian ventures earned
him the nickname ‘Rex the Red’), pursued a more coordi-
nated national program (Grant, 2002, pp. 86–96).
Whereas rehabilitation was initially conceived as an at-
tempt to help farmers ‘get back on their feet’ (Helping the
Farmer Help Himself, 1936), it was now understood as an
assault on rural poverty and an attempt at social reform
(Gilbert & Howe, 1991). The goal of rural rehabilitation be-
came ‘the improvement of the human condition’ (Baldwin,
1968, p. 107). Contrasts were drawn between the degrad-
ing effects of distributing relief under the Elizabethan poor
laws and the new philosophy of the state taking responsi-
bility for the unemployed (Larson, 1947, p. 44; Walker,
2008). The more expansive concept of ‘rural rehabilitation’
was to become the major focus of the RA. The administra-
tive vehicle for pursuing this object was its Rehabilitation
Division (First Annual Report, 1936, p. 9).
Following the ?ndings of The President’s Committee on
Farm Tenancy, 1936, and the passing of the Bankhead-
Jones Farm Tenant Act, 1937 the work of the RA, including
that of its Rehabilitation Division, was transferred to a new
agency – the Farm Security Administration (Maddox,
1937).
4
The FSA was to become ‘one of the most forward-
looking as well as one of the most bitterly fought agencies
sponsored by the New Deal’ (Saloutos, 1974, p. 411). Rural
rehabilitation was the largest of the FSA’s programs as mea-
sured by funds deployed and families assisted (Maddox,
1968; McConnell, 1953, pp. 89–90). Under the FSA the shift
towards addressing the deeper economic and social adversi-
ties af?icting rural communities was more profound (Gaer,
1941, p. 8; Kirkendall, 1982, p. 111; Larson, 1947, p. 4).
Rehabilitation was now understood as a ‘very broad concept’
(Hearings, 1943, Part 1, p. 77), as the process by which low-
income farm families became permanently self-sustaining
and the conditions of rural life were improved (Gaer, 1941,
p. 201; Grant, 2002, pp. 112–113). Given the contemporary
3
According to Baldwin (1968, p. 63, fn. 18), the term ‘rehabilitation’
emanated from attempts to restore disabled servicemen to occupational
?tness after World War One.
4
The circumstances attending the demise of the RA and the establish-
ment of the FSA are comprehensively described by Baldwin (1968, chaps.
4–6).
212 S.P. Walker / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 208–235
socio-economic signi?cance of this group their rehabilita-
tion would represent an important contribution to advanc-
ing ‘the general welfare of the nation’ (Larson, 1947, p. 4;
Supervisors’ Guidebook, 1942, p. 1).
Scope of the programme
The work of the RA and FSA represented a large-scale
assault on rural poverty. A Congressional committee con-
cluded that ‘never before in the history of our country
has a more all-embracing programme for the relief of nee-
dy farmers been undertaken by the Government’ (Report of
Select Committee, 1944, p. 3). At the end of June 1935
366,945 farm families were included in the rural rehabili-
tation programme operated under the FERA (First Annual
Report, 1936, p. 9). By mid-1936 the RA had 536,302 rural
rehabilitation families on its books and spent $95m on the
programme (Baldwin, 1968, p. 108; Report of the Adminis-
trator, 1937, p. 3; Kirkendall, 1982, p. 117). Given that
the average standard loan family comprised 5.1 persons,
the number of potential bene?ciaries was clearly consider-
able (First Annual Report, 1936, p. 10).
Appropriations for the rural rehabilitation programme
operated by the FSA were $118.3m in 1937–1938 and
peaked at $183.9m in 1941–1942. Appropriations for a
tenant purchase programme (which provided loans for
the acquisition of farms) totaled $10.0m and $52.5m in
the same years (Baldwin, 1968, p. 317; Echeverri-Gent,
1993, p. 58).
5
Between 1936 and 1943 $809m was loaned
to families for rehabilitation purposes (Hearings, 1944, Part
3, pp. 986–987; Report of Select Committee, 1944, p. 21). In
1936 the average rural rehabilitation loan granted was
$404. By 1940 it was $600. Approaching 770,000 families
across the US (though especially in the South) received stan-
dard rural rehabilitation loans between 1935 and 1945.
Although there is evidence that a number of farmers did
not apply for loans due to fear of debt and government inter-
ference, and the programme discriminated against many of
the poorest and African American farmers,
6
by 1945 12% of
all farm families in the nation had received one (Baldwin,
1968, pp. 200, 398; Larson, 1947, p. 2; Mertz, 1978, p.
191).
7
Given that each client was accepted on the basis of
preparing plans and budgets and were obliged to keep ?nan-
cial records, the scale of the accounting performed on the
programme was substantial (Report of the Administrator of
the Farm Security Administration, 1940, p. 6).
As the data above suggests the FSA’s programmes
expanded until the early 1940s. Thereafter, economic
recovery and wartime mobilization took precedence over
addressing rural poverty. Long-standing critics of the
agency – anti-New Dealers, ?nancial institutions and ‘con-
servative agricultural forces’ (the American Farm Bureau
Federation in particular) – found that their arguments fell
on more fertile ground (Gilbert & Howe, 1991, p. 215;
Kirkendall, 1982, pp. 114–117, McConnell, 1953,
pp. 97–111; Rural Relief, 1942). Rural rehabilitation was
increasingly perceived as a radical and costly experiment.
Despite the protestations of organizations representing
tenant farmers, African Americans and religious groups,
Congress wielded the budgetary axe after 1942 (Grant,
2002, pp. 182–190; Mertz, 1978, pp. 219–220). In 1946
the agency was abolished and replaced by the Farmers
Home Administration (Baldwin, 1968, chaps. 11–12, Report
of Select Committee, 1944, pp. 24–28).
8
Supervised credit
The main instrument utilized by the RA and the FSA was
the Standard Rural Rehabilitation Loan, a ‘unique develop-
ment in the ?eld of farm credit’ (Hearings, 1944, Part 3, p.
983) and the ‘essence’ of the rural rehabilitation pro-
gramme (Baldwin, 1968, p. 200; Report of the Administrator
of the Resettlement Administration, 1937, p. 3). These loans
were characterized by an emphasis on ‘welfare objectives’
rather than ‘conventional banking principles’ (Baldwin,
1968, p. 200; Report of the Administrator of the Resettlement
Administration, 1937, p. 3). Credit was made available at
reasonable rates of interest to those unable to secure ?-
nance from commercial lenders (due to insuf?cient equity
and/or limited skills in farm management). Standard Rural
Rehabilitation Loans were available at 5%, over a short
term and were secured by liens on crops and chattels.
The loan funds could be used to purchase tools, machinery,
livestock, feed, seed, fertilizer and also to repair buildings
and meet household needs (Helping the Farmer Help Him-
self, 1936). As critics pointed out, loans were available ‘to
meet almost every conceivable wish of a farmer’ (Report
of Select Committee, 1944, p. 26). The FSA also provided
3% loans over 40 years to assist tenants seeking to secure
permanent improvement by purchasing a farm (Security
for Farm Tenants, 1940, p. 12).
Rehabilitation and tenant purchase loans were made
available as forms of supervised credit. This combination
of loans plus supervision and associated techniques (ie
accounting) was a new approach to alleviating rural pov-
erty (Larson, 1947, p. 11; Supervisors’ Guidelines, 1942, p.
iii) and considered a ‘social invention of high signi?cance’
(Black, 1945). As borrowers could offer little security and
public monies were at risk, the loan would be supervised
(Larson, 1947, pp. 130–132). Successive Administrators of
the FSA af?rmed that supervision was the key to rural
rehabilitation (Hearings, 1943, Part 1, p. 126) and the sine
qua non of the success of the programme (Hearings, 1944,
Part 4, p. 1475):
5
Fewer loans were granted under the Tenant Purchase Programme than
under the rural rehabilitation programme. The scheme was criticized from
the outset for its meagre appropriations (Maddox, 1937). At 30 June 1943
33,559 borrowers had been loaned a total of $191m (Ban?eld, 1949;
Hearings, 1944, Part 3, p. 1017). Borrowers represented no more than 2% of
tenant farmers in the US (Baldwin, 1968, p. 199; Saloutos, 1974).
6
See Baldwin (1968, pp. 201, 218), Gaer (1941, p. 65), Grant (2002, pp.
99, 113–114), Kirkpatrick (1938, pp. 7, 32), Mertz (1978, pp. 192–193),
Myrdal (1944, pp. 273–278), Taeuber and Rowe (1941, p. 1), and Wiley
(1937).
7
Many clients received supplemental loans in addition to their original
borrowings (Hearings, 1943, Part 2, p. 817; 1944, Part 3, pp. 988–989).
8
Although the latter retained some of the less ‘socialistic’ elements of
the rural rehabilitation programme, its focus was on the provision of
supervised loans to facilitate tenant purchase (A Brief History, 1989).
S.P. Walker / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 208–235 213
Supervision is the heart of our several programs. It was
early found that the Federal Government could not
make any headway in solving the problems inherent
in rural poverty by credit alone. While credit is an
essential tool of rehabilitation, since most of the fami-
lies we have been dealing with lack resources which
they can only obtain through credit, those families are
also de?cient in other respects. In particular, they are
at a disadvantage because many of them lack the neces-
sary skills to carry on successful farming operations
(Hearings, 1943, Part 1, p. 7).
Through the close monitoring of the client family and
their instruction in farm management, supervision would
constitute ‘the real security for the loan’ (Maddox, 1939,
p. 893) and effect the transformation to a successful busi-
ness and domestic operation (The First Step, 1945, p. 7).
The supervisory function was performed by legions of
agency employees (Larson, 1947, pp. 62–83). These occu-
pied the frontline of an administrative hierarchy designed
for the regulation and advancement of the objecti?ed pop-
ulation. Under the FERA, rehabilitation supervisors and
home rehabilitation assistants might be appointed if there
were suf?cient clients in the county. A more comprehen-
sive, uniform and hierarchical structure was introduced
by the RA and continued by the FSA. Responsibility for
the implementation of all FSA programmes focused on 12
regional of?ces, whose work was overseen by the national
of?ce in Washington D.C.
9
Each of the 47 States also had a
director who maintained administrative supervision over
275 district and 2150 county of?ces (Hearings, 1943, Part
1, p. 119, 121; Part 2, p. 804). Each district contained around
seven counties and was headed by a ‘district supervisor’ who
monitored the work performed in the counties and approved
loans to rehabilitation clients (Baldwin, 1968, pp. 244–
249).
10
The direct supervision of clients was performed by
county-level staff. The County Rural Rehabilitation Super-
visor (the ‘farm supervisor’, usually male) dealt primarily
with farm management and loans processing. Associate
Supervisors (usually female), or County Home Manage-
ment Supervisors (or ‘home supervisor’) (Larson, 1947,
pp. 132–133), ‘encouraged farm women to improve their
standard of living through careful budgeting, self-suf?-
ciency, bartering, and supplemental income’ (Grant, 2002,
p. 111). In 1943 the FSA employed 3478 farm and 2238
home supervisors (Hearings, 1943, Part 2, p. 821).
Within counties supervisory work was organized
around de?ned geographical areas on the basis of case load
and distance (Supervisors’ Guidebook, 1942, p. 43). A sur-
vey in 1942 indicated that each farm supervisor serviced
an average of 200 borrowers while home supervisors ser-
viced 286 (Hearings, 1943, Part 1, p. 106; Larson, 1947, p.
147). In 1943 the total cost of supervision represented
45% of the FSA’s appropriation and 83% of its administra-
tive expenses (Hearings, 1943, Part 1, p. 207; 1944, Part
3, p. 1171). Much of this expenditure arose as a result of
supervised accounting.
Accounting prescriptions
Rural rehabilitation depended on the sustained applica-
tion of improved farm and home methods by families
(Gaer, 1941, pp. 66–67). Foremost among these methods
was accounting (Maddox, 1968, p. 1358). As Fig. 1 illus-
trates vividly, the FSA cultivated the notion that borrowers
who were attentive in accounting would secure better-
ment while those who were neglectful would remain in
poverty. Accounting was also a key focus of supervisory
practice. An FSA manual for county-level supervisors as-
serted that supervision was offered to client families ‘in or-
der that they may develop sound farm and home plans,
learn better methods of farm and home operations, and
keep and use records of these operations as a basis for im-
proved planning’ (Supervisors’ Guidebook, 1942, p. 3).
Fig. 1. Account keeping and rehabilitation. Source: Farm Plan (1940),
Farm Security Administration.
9
The FSA was also divided into a number of divisions, one of which was
responsible for Rural Rehabilitation (Gaer, 1941, chap. 8). In 1943 the Rural
Rehabilitation Division had four sections covering farm management, home
management, farm debt adjustment and tenure improvement. Communi-
cations with the US National Archives suggest that there are no surviving
records of the farm and home planning sections, potentially an important
source for tracking the development of accounting prescriptions.
10
Baldwin (1968, p. 249) provides the example of FSA Region 4
(comprising Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and North
Carolina) where, in 1938, 55,000 client families were supervised by 315
County Rural Rehabilitation Supervisors and 218 County Home Manage-
ment Supervisors, operating from 226 county of?ces. The work of county
supervisors was reviewed by 23 District Rural Rehabilitation Supervisors
based in the same number of district of?ces and 14 District Home
Management Supervisors. Surviving archival records for this region also
indicates that: District Home Management Supervisors compiled weekly
reports of the number of client plans examined and technical assistance
given; the Associate State Director of Rural Rehabilitation prepared
monthly reports of supervisory ?eldwork (visits made, miles travelled,
plans approved) in each district; and monthly summaries of home
management supervision were prepared at the regional level (Miscella-
neous Reports, 1934-1940).
214 S.P. Walker / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 208–235
The importance attached by the RA and FSA to account-
ing re?ected contemporary efforts to encourage farmers to
adopt modern management practices. Research performed
by the Division of Farm Population and Rural Life in the
U.S. Department of Agriculture after World War One found
that account keeping was de?cient among farming families
and urged more budgeting and planning (Larson &
Zimmerman, 2003, pp. 71–86). Organizations such as the
American Farm Economic Association distributed account
books, abstracted their contents and reported the results
at farm management demonstrations (Case, 1921). Credit
agencies increasingly required that applicants prepare
inventories, estimates of net worth and budgetary plans.
The county agents of the Extension Service of the US
Department of Agriculture offered educational pro-
grammes for farmers and homemakers on bookkeeping,
budgeting and the analysis of ?nancial performance. From
the 1920s the work of the Extension Service gave rise to
farm accounting associations (Hudelson, 1933; Wilson &
Dixon, 1947). During the interwar years accounting and re-
cord keeping were identi?ed as the foundation of ‘any
Farm Management extension program, state or county’
(Arnold, 1931; Berg, 1939, p. 326). However, under the rur-
al rehabilitation programme accounting was taken to an-
other level and made compulsory. Accounting took the
form of farm and home plans and farm family record
books.
The farm and home plan
A series of agency of?cials emphasized the centrality of
the Farm and Home Plan to the achievement of rural reha-
bilitation. For James Maddox, Director of the Rural Rehabil-
itation Division of the FSA, it was the ‘key instrument’
(Ban?eld, 1949, p. 473). For Gaer (1941) it constituted
‘the very foundation of rehabilitation’ (p. 121), ‘the hub
of the Farm Security program, from which radiate all the
other activities’ (pp. 98–99). As shown in Fig. 2 FSA staff
sometimes deployed propagandist imagery to illustrate
how sound farm and home planning was the route to
socio-economic advancement (Economic Development.
Education, January 1935–December 1939 (Community
Newsletters)).
Re?ecting the state’s attempts to restore the fortunes of
the family farm as an essential American institution, the
farm and home plan focused on the whole family (Baldwin,
1968, p. 193; McConnell, 1953, p. 87). Accordingly, the plan
involved family members inscribing and analyzing the cur-
rent ?nancial position, identifying capital investment
needs, constructing a budget for farm and family living
and determining the amount and type of loan necessary
to achieve rehabilitation (Baldwin, 1968, p. 252). Once
agreed, the plan was to be ‘the family’s guide to a better liv-
ing’ and future security (Supervisors’ Guide Book, 1942,
p. 11), the foundation of improvement (Larson, 1947,
p. 139). The plan was prepared and implemented with the
active support of farm and home supervisors (Grant,
2002, p. 111; Supervisors’ Guidebook, 1942, p. 17; The First
Step, 1945, p. 5). It was estimated that on average a whole
day was required to prepare a plan (Report of the Adminis-
trator of the Farm Security Administration, 1940, p. 6). Not
surprisingly supervisors often preferred to formulate plans
in group meetings of borrowers (Report of the Administrator
of the Farm Security Administration, 1940, p. 6).
An example of a Farm and Home Plan is provided in
Fig. 3. Part 1 of the document concerns data which facili-
tated administrative supervision by spatially locating the
farm and identifying its inhabitants. Part II comprises a re-
view of farm production, sales and cash position in the pre-
vious year and thereby set a benchmark against which
future advancement could be gauged. Part III concerns esti-
mates of crops and livestock produced and the value of
sales therefrom for the coming year. Its content illustrates
the detailed and instructive calculations which the rehabil-
itating farm family were expected to perform under super-
vision. In Part IV the family and supervisor documented
?xed and current assets and liabilities with a view to pre-
paring a ‘?nancial statement’ and a calculation of current
net worth. The latter too, would be utilized as the key mea-
sure of progress towards rehabilitation.
In a series of statements comprising ‘Part V – Financial
Plans for the Coming Year’, estimates of all farm and home
payments were abstracted and items of capital expendi-
ture identi?ed. The amount to be borrowed from the FSA
was determined as the difference between total expenses
and what the family could pay to meet these outlays. By
comparing changes in revenue, expenditure and net cash
income, a ‘?nancial summary’ was compiled which
showed short term advances (or otherwise) in farming
operations. A ‘loan analysis’ and ‘repayment schedule’ re-
vealed likely progress towards repaying the rehabilitation
loan. The farm and home plan was signed by the applicant
and the county and home supervisors and forwarded for
approval to the district supervisor. Once signed, the com-
pleted plan constituted an agreement between the bor-
rower and the agency and was to be adhered to as
closely as possible. It was expected that the farmer would
henceforth be suf?ciently disciplined to operate in ‘reason-
able conformance’ with the approved budget (The First
Step, 1945, p. 6).
As its name suggests, the plan was to encompass the ?-
nances of both farm and home. This re?ected the assump-
tion that the family farm functioned as an integrated space
of production and consumption. The accounting regimen
was con?gured to capture the ‘total economy’ of the busi-
ness and household family (First Annual Report, 1936, p. 10;
Reid, 1939). Domestic food supply for example, might be
produced on the farm. Further, not only were family mem-
bers potential contributors to the business enterprise, they
could also be a drain on the resources it generated
(Baldwin, 1968, pp. 250, 289–290; Hearings, 1944, Part 3,
p. 984). There was a risk that non-participation by a spouse
in the planning and accounting process would imperil the
repayment of the loan and frustrate the rehabilitation pro-
ject (Oppenheimer, 1937, p. 483).
The ‘Home Section’ of the plan is illustrated in Part VI of
Fig. 3. Its detailed contents were a focus for the supervised
instruction of the homemaker in domestic accounting and
management. The Home Section commenced with ‘Our
Plan for Food’. This presented a detailed budget of the food
and fuel requirements of the household and whether each
item would be bought or produced on the farm. Much
S.P. Walker / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 208–235 215
emphasis was placed on maximizing the amount of food
which was cultivated and preserved for consumption at
home. A series of other tables in the ‘Home Section’ were
designed to assess whether the family was properly
housed, and had provided suf?ciently for household equip-
ment, furnishings, clothing and medical care (Supervisors’
Guidebook, 1942, pp. 24–29). The need to provide an
‘explanation’ for non-food costs might encourage greater
discipline among those prone to frivolous expenditure. A
summary table headed ‘Our cash family expenditure will
be limited to’ potentially had similar controlling effects.
The farm and home plan was the beginning of super-
vised accounting and focused on the strategy for achieving
rehabilitation. Its preparation and monitoring disciplined
the family towards that objective. It was assumed that
each borrower would keep their farm and home plans cur-
rent and sensitized to changing circumstances.
11
Inability
to make repayments as a result of adversities such as death,
illness, weather or market conditions could result in the for-
mulation of a revised plan (Hearings, 1944, Part 3, p. 984). It
was expected that a new plan would be produced each year
in the form of an Annual Farm Business Statement and Farm
Plan
12
and an Annual Home Business Statement and Home
Management Plan.
13
The annual process of ‘analysis and
planning’, involving the review of previous farm and home
plans, was perceived as conducive to keeping the goals of
the subject family to the fore and identifying the ways of
achieving them (Supervisors’ Guidebook, 1942, p. 48).
The farm family record book
Reviewing the achievement or otherwise of the plan in-
volved an analysis of the contents of a Farm Family Record
Book (record book). Borrowers received new proforma
books each year and were expected to complete them dil-
igently. Both spouses were required to sign an agreement
that they would keep the book to the best of their ability
and follow the Farm and Home Plan as closely as possible
(Hearings, 1943, Part 1, p. 290). The record book issued by
the FSA was described as a document offering space ‘under
a single cover, to keep a year’s record of all happenings
regarding your farm business and family living’ (Farm Fam-
ily Record Book, 1940, p. iii).
14
The con?guration of the record book also suggests the
elemental status of the household-family in governmental
projects designed to improve the welfare of segments of
the population (Foucault, 1994b). While its keeping was
intended to educate the farm family in a technique which
would contribute to their advancement, it also disciplined
the client into day-to-day activation of the plan, helped se-
cure adherence between episodes of direct observation by
the supervisor, and connected each peripheral farmstead
to the informational hierarchy of the agency. As will be
shown later, the informational contents of farm and home
plans and record books were accumulated and analyzed by
the agency at its county, district, regional and national cen-
tres of calculation in order to monitor the progress of
its dispersed communities of clients. By determining its
content in accord with agency objectives, and through its
completion by the farm family, the record book facilitated
Fig. 2. The farm and home plan as the foundation of prosperity. Source: Farm & Home Management Report for 30 Farms in Montgomery County, Texas, 1938.
Economic Development. Education, January 1935–December 1939 (Community Newsletters).
11
Larson (1947, p. 150) contends that this expectation was not achieved
in the early years of the rehabilitation programme but by 1943 borrowers
were ‘On the whole. . .operating with current plans’.
12
This contained the following: a report of last year’s business, a balance
sheet and calculation of net worth, a crop and livestock plan for the
following year, and a budget of income and expenditure for the coming
year.
13
This contained statements detailing consumption in the previous year
and budgeted consumption in the coming year for food; clothing; supplies
and household furnishing and equipment; housing, health, medical,
personal and family development.
14
The record book used by the FSA was most likely based on account
books developed for the Bureau of Home Economics of the US Department
of Agriculture. These were made available to facilitate the wise manage-
ment of the ?nancial affairs of farm families by meticulous recording and
analysis of receipts and payments and reviews of changes in net worth
(Farm family account book., 1935). As this only covered the home it was
also necessary to keep a separate account book for farm operations.
216 S.P. Walker / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 208–235
action at a distance. The data contained in record books
was not only used by supervisors to discipline individual
borrowers, it was also the foundation for the subjecti?ed
borrower disciplining her/himself.
The numerous details to be inscribed in the 40+ pages of
the record book illustrate the range of ?nancial, production
and consumption activities the agency sought to govern.
The accounting forms included: a farm inventory of land
and buildings, machinery, and equipment, livestock feed,
seed and supplies (with instructions for charging deprecia-
tion); a household inventory of equipment, furnishings and
food; a statement of net worth; an analysis of creditors and
the payment of debts; a monthly record of money received
from farm and home operations analyzed by source; a
monthly record of all farm payments, analyzed by expense
category; a monthly record of all family living expenses,
Fig. 3. Farm and home plan of a standard rural rehabilitation client. Source: Rural rehabilitation loan case ?les, Siskiyou County, Box 51.
S.P. Walker / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 208–235 217
analyzed by category; a record of purchases and sales on
credit, analyzed by type, payments made/received and bal-
ances due at the year-end; annual statements summarizing
the monthly totals for money received, farm operating ex-
penses, family operating expenses, capital goods pur-
chased; an analysis of monthly cash ?ow; a statement of
progress made in the payment of debts; a statement
detailing the monthly totals of home produced food which
had been conserved by canning and drying, including year-
end stock and a comparison with budgeted production; an
account of food produced for home use, analyzed monthly
by type with estimations of market values, amounts con-
sumed and comparisons with planned production; crop
production and disposal records, analyzing actual yields
Fig. 3 (continued)
218 S.P. Walker / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 208–235
and values with those budgeted in the farm plan; a live-
stock production and disposal record, also identifying vari-
ances from the plan; a record of livestock purchases and
sales; and a yearly summary of livestock (Farm Family
Record Book, 1940; Larson, 1947, pp. 140–142).
In addition to enabling comparisons with the farm
and home plan, two ?nal summary ?nancial statements
in the record book were intended to review and mea-
sure progress towards rehabilitation. The Annual Farm
and Family Business Summary (see Fig. 4) showed pro-
gress over the year in relation to cash generation, net
farm and family income, debt and net worth. A state-
ment titled ‘Measuring Our Success’ (see Fig. 5) con-
tained a wide range of indicators of advancement
Fig. 3 (continued)
S.P. Walker / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 208–235 219
(Farm Family Record Book, 1940, pp. 45–47). These ran-
ged from gain (or loss) in net worth, investments in
farm and home assets, to the state of the family’s health.
A ‘family record’ of all those resident in the household
indicated the extent to which the family was pursuing
the FSA’s object of greater social integration and
citizenship through involvement in outside organizations
and activities.
15
Fig. 3 (continued)
15
The ?les of some rehabilitation clients also contain an annual ‘Report of
Family Progress’ prepared by the agency.
220 S.P. Walker / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 208–235
As well as measuring progress towards rehabilitation
the record book was advocated as ‘an indispensable tool’
for exposing past mistakes, indicating remedies and con-
taining expenditure (Gaer, 1941, p. 122; Supervisors’ Guide-
book, 1942, p. 41). Its completion was also important to the
inculcation of enduring accounting habits and persistent
observation by the borrower (Report of the Administrator
of the Farm Security Administration, 1938, pp. 3–4). Given
that rehabilitation was about instilling a permanent desire
for familial and individual improvement, it was important
that record keeping be sustained. The discipline encour-
aged by adherence to the farm and home plan was to be
supplemented by a regular accounting regimen which
encouraged self-analysis. In this way accounting contrib-
uted to the subjecti?cation of the borrower (Foucault,
1994c):
Fig. 3 (continued)
S.P. Walker / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 208–235 221
An important byproduct of the farm and home plan is
the way it in?uences the thinking of the family. In order
to follow the plan, the family must keep records of what
it earns and spends, must analyze the cost of all the var-
ious farm enterprises, and must prepare a balance sheet
at the end of each year. These accounts give the farm
family a better insight into their own business than
most small farmers ever get. Moreover, sound planning
requires an analysis of past mistakes and an outline of
future goals (Report of the Administrator of the Farm
Security Administration, 1940, p. 6).
It was assumed that the interaction of the farm and
home plan and record book would ensure that gradually
‘the planning becomes a continuous process, which can
be carried on pro?tably by the farmer and his wife long
Fig. 3 (continued)
222 S.P. Walker / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 208–235
after they are back on their feet and beyond the concern of
the Administration’ (Report of the Administrator of the Farm
Security Administration, 1939, p. 3).
Accounting, educative supervision and rehabilitation
We now turn to an examination of the supervision
attending the accounting prescriptions of the rural rehabil-
itation programme. In this section the focus is on the man-
ner in which supervised accounting functioned as
educative–supportive. The next section concerns the
administrative–managerial aspect.
The evidence, drawn from contemporary investigations
and agency sources, suggests that rural rehabilitation
placed a ‘heavy emphasis’ on the educational function of
supervision. Its primary purpose was securing the better-
ment of client families through nurturing their accounting
skills (McConnell, 1953, p. 90). The agency recognized that
most impoverished farm families required more than
?nancial assistance. They also needed technical guidance.
Many had failed because they lacked the knowledge and
business skills necessary to properly manage a farm (Har-
ness, 1944, p. 4; McConnell, 1953, p. 90; Report of the
Administrator of the Farm Security Administration, 1940, p.
3; Report of Select Committee, 1944, p. 20). Existing farm
and home management practices were often poor (Taeuber
& Rowe, 1941, p. 3).
16
Farmers of small family concerns had
not attended agricultural college. Neither were they pos-
sessed of the ?nancial resources necessary to access the
knowledge that could revitalize their operations. As far as
conventional providers of credit were concerned, their lim-
ited business skills rendered small farmers high risk.
Indeed, these were ‘average folks’ (Larson, 1947, p. 50).
Investigations showed that many of the recipients of rural
relief had achieved lower than normal grades, and had left
school before acquiring the education necessary to meet
‘the ordinary demands of life’. Studies of poor rural families
indicated that the basic literacy and numeracy skills neces-
sary to manage a farm were often lacking (Swiger & Larson,
1944, p. 2). It followed then ‘that the ?rst step in the reha-
bilitation problem is education’ (Roskelley & Larson, 1939,
p. 25; also Asch & Mangus, 1937, pp. 69–71). Studies also
suggested that potential rehabilitation families showed
‘little ability or aptitude for managing a farm without
supervision’ (Kirkpatrick, 1938, pp. 5, 19). It was clear that
intensive training in farm and home management would
be the earliest and most important task of rehabilitation
(Swiger & Larson, 1944, pp. 2, 18). Education would not
only impart necessary skills, it would instill con?dence
and build the self-esteem necessary to secure permanent
improvement.
Accordingly, the rural rehabilitation agencies were im-
bued with a strong educative ideal. Mertz (1978, p. 199) re-
lates how the FSA perceived supervision as an essentially
educational process. One of its of?cials asserted in 1937
that client families ‘are to be educated out of their condi-
tions through supervision, and not merely credited out of
it through a loan’ (also Hearings, 1944, Part 4, p. 1475).
Contemporaries observed that the FSA, when ‘properly
Fig. 4. Annual farm and family business summary. Source: Farm Family Record Book, 1940, p. 45.
16
A study of farm women in 1920 revealed that 30% kept household
accounts and 32% kept farm accounts. However the percentage was likely
to be much lower among the wives of small, impoverished farmers (True,
1928, p. 181).
S.P. Walker / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 208–235 223
understood, is an educational as well as a credit agency’
(Gaer, 1941, p. 91). Larson (1947, p. 130) re?ected that
the emphasis at the FSA was on a facilitative mode of
supervision: ‘Basic to this intention is the belief in the
capacity of the average individual to develop, if provided
an opportunity; and the assumption that most of the
causes of low economic status are not inherent but arise
from circumstances that can be corrected’.
According to one witness who appeared before the
House Committee established to investigate the activities
of the FSA (the Cooley Committee) the educational element
of the programme was one of its ‘most wonderful features’,
Fig. 5. Measuring our success. Source: Farm Family Record Book, 1940, pp. 46–47.
224 S.P. Walker / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 208–235
because the knowledge gained enabled the improvement
of farm families (Hearings, 1943, Part 1, p. 297). Maddox
(1939, p. 893) emphasized the rehabilitative impact of
educative supervision thus:
Obviously, this program of farm and home planning,
followed by supervision and guidance, is an adult edu-
cation program of vast scope. It strikes at ignorance
and carelessness, two of the causes of rural poverty.
Its results go far beyond the increased farm income
and higher standard of living which it directly brings
about. It not only brings renewed hope, but also
increased ability. Over a long period of time it must
inevitably tend to both cure and prevent rural poverty.
The farm and home supervisors were the principal
agents for the pursuit of this educational mission. Both
were ‘expected to play the part of a teacher or educator
as experts in farm and home management’ (Baldwin,
1968, p. 252; Larson, 1947, p. 133). The county supervisor
advised on farming techniques, and the home supervisor
offered guidance in home management, including
planning, budgeting and record keeping (Ban?eld, 1949;
Larson, 1947, p. 133). Educational activity was performed
through individual consultations in the agency of?ce, visits
to the homes of client families, group meetings,
demonstrations, exhibits and newsletters (Gaer, 1941,
pp. 111–116). Of these, visiting the client was considered
‘supervision at its best’ (Larson, 1947, p. 142). It was recog-
nized that some families required more instruction and
guidance than others and clients were categorized accord-
ingly (Excerpts from Home Supervisors’ Weekly Reports;
Hearings, 1943, Part 1, p. 223).
17
Among the factors which
determined a client’s category was the ability to carry out
the farm and home plan and keep the farm family record
book (Supervisors’ Guidebook, 1942, p. 49).
Although accounting was considered pivotal to the fam-
ily’s rehabilitation and was therefore the focus of ‘the gov-
ernment’s educational effort with the farmer’ (Ban?eld,
1949, p. 473; Gaer, 1941, p. 62), studies suggested that
many farm families were reluctant or unable to keep ac-
counts, unless they received assistance and frequent
encouragement (Berg, 1939). Borrowers who had received
limited schooling were confused when changes were made
to the format of the record book (Larson, 1947, p. 141).
There were low expectations of clients in this regard and
a consequent need for direct educative supervision:
Just as the farm and home plan is based on the belief
that the low-income farmer does not use good manage-
ment practices, so in the case of the record book it must
be assumed that the low-income farmer has neither the
skill nor the patience for complicated accounting. The
County Supervisors should teach the families how to
keep and use the records. In many instances it is possi-
ble to train an older child in the family to take charge of
this duty. At no time should the record book become a
necessary evil tolerated and despised by the family
and kept, not for the bene?t of the family, but for the
Farm Security Administration.
The supervisors should be able to convince almost any
family that, regardless of how dif?cult the task may
be, the bene?ts to be derived from knowing exactly
what they are doing, and from having a constant check
on all their expenditure, are as important to their reha-
bilitation as careful farm and home planning (Gaer,
1941, pp. 122–123).
It was assumed that making accounting prescriptions a
condition of receiving credit, supported by educative
supervision, would encourage farm families to recognize
the enduring value of calculative techniques to their reha-
bilitation. Hence, supervisors encouraged ‘good records by
explaining the reasons for them and the ways they may be
used, teaching the family how to make entries, making
some use of the record at the time of each farm and home
visit’ (Larson, 1947, p. 141). While the supervisor might of-
fer instruction in accounting it was also important that s/
he did ‘not keep the record for the family’ (Supervisors’
Guidebook, 1942, p. 41). Supervisors were cautioned not
to permit accounting to ‘degenerate into mere routine’
(Supervisors’ Guidebook, 1942, p. 48). There was too much
at stake. Transforming the fortunes of previously unsuc-
cessful families was a matter of altering ‘human destinies’
(Supervisors’ Guidebook, 1942, p. 48).
Insights to the educative supervisory techniques de-
ployed on the ground may be gained from the following in-
stance. In spring 1941 the Washington of?ce of the FSA
requested reports on supervisory materials and ideas in or-
der that effective practices could be exchanged. In re-
sponse, Home Management Supervisors operating in Area
3 of FSA Region 9 (California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona) com-
piled a list of their supervisory methods. Reference was
made to group meetings for writing farm and home plans
‘to demonstrate the value of good record keeping’ and
the checking of record books by the supervisor:
At each home visit the record book is checked and the
client helped to bring it up to date. The supervisor then
initials the book after the last entry. On subsequent vis-
its by the RR [rural rehabilitation] supervisor or by her-
self the work is carried up to date and again initialed.
This has value in keeping the books up to date, in insur-
ing a fair distribution of record book work among all
supervisors in the of?ce and in teaching the client the
value of daily accounts (Excerpts from Home Supervi-
sors’ Weekly Reports).
The County Supervisor in Sonoma County, California
emphasized the importance of the whole supervisory team
‘seeing that the client thoroughly understands the neces-
sity of keeping records’ (Excerpts from Home Supervisors’
Weekly Reports). Others reported ways ‘to give the client
a de?nite feeling of responsibility and encouragement in
17
In 1939 it was estimated that on average clients received ?ve visits
during the year (Larson, 1947, p. 148; also Ban?eld, 1949, fn 7). In the same
year Maddox (1939) suggested that ‘Each borrower is usually visited from
four to twelve times per year either by the home supervisor or the farm
supervisor. In addition, the borrowers commonly visited the supervisor’s
of?ce several times a year’. Grant (2002, p. 112) relates how a home
supervisor in Kansas during the early 1940s visited her 200 client families
biannually. An average of three visits would be scheduled per day. Most
time was spent on visits ‘showing farmwives how to keep books, sew, use a
pressure cooker, and grow vegetables’.
S.P. Walker / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 208–235 225
their record keeping’, and how monthly group meetings
developed regularity in accounting (Excerpts from Home
Supervisors’ Weekly Reports).
Accounting, administrative supervision and
rehabilitation
Although the educative–supportive function of supervi-
sion was to the fore in the utilization of accounting for the
rehabilitation of rural families, the administrative–mana-
gerial dimension was also inevitably present. This was
associated with ‘intensive observation’ (Larson, 1947, p.
136), the surveillance of borrower-clients. In this reading
it is possible to perceive agency supervisors as the moni-
tors of a spatially dispersed but administratively enclosed
population, separated into farm family cells, rendered
amenable to intervention. Within this space ‘the slightest
movements’ could be supervised, all events recorded, and
the ‘uninterrupted work of writing’ pursued (Foucault,
1991, p. 197). Such intrusion re?ected the depth of knowl-
edge necessary if the state was to attempt a transformative
project on such an ambitious scale (Scott, 1998, pp. 183–
184). Indeed, the effective implementation of educative
projects also depended on dividing practices which objec-
tivized the subjects of rehabilitation (Foucault, 1994c).
In relation to accounting, agency supervision was decid-
edly surveillant, focusing not only on education but also on
control and correction (Foucault, 1994a, p. 70). Surveil-
lance and discipline via accounting were rendered constant
through a combination of procedures. First, direct observa-
tion of client accounts in the form of periodic visits to farm
and home. Second, scrutiny of accounting records submit-
ted by the client to the agency of?ce. These records com-
prised monthly accounts of actual expenditure, quarterly
farm progress reports and annual ?nancial reports (Hear-
ings, 1943, Part 1, p. 214; Larson, 1947, pp. 132–138).
Thirdly, the practice of regular account-keeping by the cli-
ent instilled routines and generated knowledge which dis-
ciplined the self. The last two devices facilitated agency
governance at a distance, between visits to the client.
While the everyday maintenance and review of
accounting records by the client facilitated self-policing,
the foremost disciplinary device was that which permitted
direct, physical observation – the home visit. Supervisors
were advised that ‘only on a farm and home visit can you
see what’s going on’ (Larson, 1947, p. 142). Once farm
and home plans had been agreed and credit advanced,
the supervisor made periodic visits to ensure that the plans
were being carried out (Hearings, 1943, Part 3, p. 983).
Supervisors were advised that ‘Other methods of supervi-
sion will supplement farm and home visits, but cannot re-
place them’ (Supervisors’ Guidebook, 1942, p. 50, emphasis
in original). During such a visit it was suggested that the
supervisor use accounting information to probe the ?nan-
cial affairs of the client:
Make use of the information in the record book. Fami-
lies will keep records when they learn how to use the
information. You can point out the usefulness of keep-
ing records by asking a few questions. For example,
what have been the sources of income since the family
was last assisted in their record? Have there been
changes in conditions that warrant a change in plans?
Did the income meet family living and farm operating
expenses? What food is being bought that might have
been produced? How much buying ‘‘outside the plan’’
has been done? Were any ‘‘bad’’ buys made? It is only
be making use of the information in the record book
throughout the year that you can show the family the
value of records (Supervisors’ Guidebook, 1942, p. 53).
Home visits were also an opportunity for the supervisor
to inspect assets and ensure that ‘Government security is
being well cared for’ (Supervisors’ Guidebook, 1942, p. 46).
The supervisor inscribed ?eld notes on observations during
the visit (Supervisors’ Guidebook, 1942, p. 55). In particular,
a proforma ‘farm visit report’ was completed. This pro-
vided space for comments on the borrower’s attention
(or otherwise) to accounting and suggestions for improve-
ment, if necessary. Some versions of this form required the
supervisor to assess whether farm records were in a ‘good’,
‘fair’ or ‘poor’ condition. Borrowers who were persistently
neglectful were required to sign a ‘pledge of cooperation’
to af?rm their adherence to accounting obligations. They
might also be classi?ed as a ‘problem family’, and sub-
jected to more intensive supervision as a result. In extreme
cases the loan might be liquidated (Supervisors’ Guidebook,
1942, pp. 50, 77).
According to the Supervisors’ Guidebook (1942, p. 42)
supervisors were to perform ‘analysis and planning’. This
involved activities such as ‘(1) observing operations on
the family’s farm, (2) analyzing last year’s business and
starting new records, (3) comparing results with last year’s
plan, (4) meeting with a group of families to talk over last
year’s business and next year’s plans’. Such planning
should be instigated as soon as the farmer had suf?cient
production and ?nancial data to render supervision mean-
ingful. More speci?cally, there was to be an annual bor-
rowers’ meeting to compare actual performance against
the budget and discuss factors which had contributed to,
or impeded, progress. In advance of annual borrowers’
meetings, families were requested to:
A. Close their Records.
B. Compute gains and losses in net worth.
C. Compare last year’s plan with last year’s progress as
shown in the Record Book.
D. Enter the inventory in the next year’s Record books.
E. Make any necessary tenure adjustments (Supervi-
sors’ Guidebook, 1942, p. 44).
Another source of administrative supervision arose
from the fact that county-level supervisors were important
agents in the collection of data for monitoring programme
performance and developing future policy. Supervisors
were reminded about the importance of gathering, record-
ing and distributing information for the purpose of review-
ing the achievement of agency objectives (Supervisors’
Guidebook, 1942, p. 65, 73). Annual reports of the progress
of individual families, which summarized their farm oper-
ations, income and expenditure, assets and liabilities, net
worth, home production, standard of living and
226 S.P. Walker / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 208–235
community participation, and whether the family had kept
a record book, were sent to the FSA in Washington D.C. for
analysis. Close supervision of client accounting would en-
sure that key data used by the agency would be recorded
in a complete, accurate and consistent manner (Berg,
1939). In this way knowledge of a multitude of distant
clients dispersed over a vast geographical space was trans-
mitted to county, district, regional and national centres of
calculation (Miller & Rose, 1990; Neu & Graham, 2006).
Further evidence of the administrative functioning of
supervision emerges from discourses critical of the rural
rehabilitation programme. Although many observers per-
ceived the work of the RA and FSA as a progressive attempt
by the state to lift a backward population through im-
proved agricultural education (McConnell, 1953, p. 26;
True, 1928, pp. 100–126), for conservative groups the prac-
tice of administrative supervision was dangerously social-
istic. Indeed, the Washington-based agency comprised a
bureaucratic hierarchy of 20,000 staff (Baldwin, 1968, p.
398; Hearings, 1943, Part 2, p. 804). As with some other
New Deal policies supervised credit was seen as an inva-
sive encroachment on personal liberty, designed for pur-
poses of social control by an increasingly interventionist
federal government (Landis, 1936). In 1943 it was com-
plained that the FSA had become ‘a super-supervising
agency which will dominate and control all the farming
activities of the people’ (Hearings, 1943, Part 1, p. 122).
In 1943 the Cooley Committee, which considered that
the FSA was a vehicle for experiments in ‘un-American
ideas’, concluded that the scope of supervision had
extended too far:
Families have been colonized, regimented and super-
vised to an extent which cannot possibly be justi?ed.
It has been insisted arbitrarily that they keep records
which many of them have found impossible to keep
and maintain. They have been told what crops to plant
and how they must be cultivated. They have been told
from whom they must purchase and to whom they
must sell. Their bank accounts have been completely
controlled and kept under joint ownership by the Gov-
ernment, and they have not even been permitted to
select their own work stock and other equipment.
Supervisors of the Farm Security Administration have
insisted upon discussing with members of the family
the most intimate relationships (Report of Select
Committee, 1944, p. 6, also p. 2).
As ‘highly individualized’ and ‘paternalist’ (Gaer, 1941,
p. 7; Grant, 2002, pp. 172–173), the mode of supervision
attending the rural rehabilitation programme was alleged
to have destroyed the autonomy of farmers who were
unaccustomed to being instructed about how to live and
work (Grant, 2002, pp. 173–175). The plethora of adminis-
trative impositions and monitoring devices associated with
supervised credit ‘bothered farmers who treasured their
freedom to run their operations as they pleased’ (Grant,
2002, p. 119; McConnell, 1953, p. 104).
Apologists for the rural rehabilitation agencies con-
ceded that supervision involved intrusive bureaucratic
processes – forms, instructions, authorizations, rules and
regulations. But these were not the ‘essence’ of the
programme. They were mere ‘tools’ necessary for the
achievement of the greater object of farm security (Gaer,
1941, p. xii). When ‘properly conceived and executed’ there
was ‘no regimentation’ about this mode of supervision, just
sound business practice (The First Step, 1945, p. 7). Given
the nature of the programme, it was essential that poten-
tial clients be prepared to disclose ‘complete information
about their assets and liabilities . . .follow plans, operate
with budgets . . . [and] keep records’ (The First Step, 1945,
p. 8). The supervisory and accounting conditions attached
to the receipt of the rehabilitation loan were no different
to the safeguards that a bank would require of borrowers
(Gaer, 1941, p. 121).
Moreover, the detailed monitoring of the ?nancial af-
fairs of high-risk clients through the preparation and scru-
tiny of farm and home plans and record books was a
condition of supervised credit and essential if public mon-
ies were to be protected and the prospect of default mini-
mized (Baldwin, 1968, pp. 181, 200; Oppenheimer, 1937, p.
483). Supervision was thus a ‘form of underwriting’ (Lar-
son, 1947, p. 130; Supervisors’ Guidebook, 1942, p. 15),
‘the only safe way to lend to people who could offer no
security’ (Mertz, 1978, p. 195). Observers such as Larson
(1947, p. 152) did note, however, the desirability of achiev-
ing a balance between the obligatory administrative func-
tions of supervision and ‘the more intangible educational
type of supervision’.
Accounting and rehabilitative impacts
We now turn to a discussion of the available evidence
on the contribution of accounting to achieving rural reha-
bilitation. The structure of the discussion is informed by
the two connected ways in which the state deploys surveil-
lance as an authoritative resource. The ?rst relates to the
accumulation and storage of information ‘used to adminis-
ter the activities of individuals about whom it is gathered’
(Giddens, 1985, p. 14). Here, we explore the manner in
which accounting information was collected and utilized
by state agencies to monitor the object population and as-
sess the success of the programme. The second concerns
the direct supervision of individuals by superordinates in
bounded settings. Here, the discussion focuses on how
the performance of supervised accounting had emancipa-
tory impacts at the micro-level of participating families.
These two analytical planes also chime with Foucault’s
(1994c, pp. 326–327) identi?cation of different modes of
objecti?cation. One of these concerns objecti?cation as a
dividing practice for locating and categorizing the section
of the population identi?ed for intervention (here, rehabil-
itation). Another concerns the process, mediated by pow-
erful others (here, agency supervisors), through which
the individuated object of intervention is transformed into
a subject (a rehabilitation client).
Accounting and the objecti?ed population
For Giddens (1985, pp. 46–47) authoritative resources,
such as the collection and retention of information, facili-
tates the exercise of administrative power by the modern
S.P. Walker / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 208–235 227
state. Such resources condition the state’s capacity to reg-
ulate the timing and spacing of human activity. Relatedly,
Foucault (1994b) contended that in the modern era, the
improvement of the population became ‘the end of govern-
ment’ and that statistics were the technology which en-
abled the ‘art of government’. Rose (1988, 1991) has also
argued that the achievement of programme objectives by
governments in liberal democracies increasingly depended
on technologies of calculation that ‘statisticalized’ target
populations. But as Foucault (1994c) also reminded us,
the exercise of ‘new pastoral’ power by the modern state,
and its pursuit of welfare objectives, requires knowledge
about the target population which is not only totalizing
but also individualizing. The accounting records main-
tained by individual rural rehabilitation clients were par-
ticularly important in this respect. They constituted raw
material for state agencies seeking to amass data about
progress made towards improving the condition of family
farmers. In this regard the individual family comprised a
‘privileged segment’ – the principal instrument through
which information was collected for the governance of
the target population (Foucault, 1994b).
The period of crisis in agriculture and rural life dis-
cussed here witnessed the expansion of a state-activated
movement in empirical sociology. This sought to generate
knowledge about the farming population as a foundation
for pursuing its amelioration and advancement. Data was
required to devise public policy and implement progres-
sive programmes at local, regional and national level (Lar-
son & Zimmerman, 2003, vii). During the New Deal in
particular, when the statistical systems of the federal gov-
ernment were upgraded in response to the increased scope
of state intervention (Rose, 1991), considerable resources
were made available to satisfy the demand for knowledge
by ‘action agencies’, such as the RA and FSA (Larson & Zim-
merman, 2003, pp. 4–5, 196). The resultant surveys served
to ‘link government with the lives of the governed’ (Rose,
1991, p. 673).
Agency research into the rural population often focused
on data relating to standards of living and this involved the
analysis of farm and household income, expenditure, as-
sets and liabilities (Larson & Zimmerman, 2003, chap. 6).
Indeed, progress towards rural rehabilitation was com-
monly measured by reference to accounting data on the
repayment of loans by borrowers, improvements in their
disposable income and net worth, and indicators of greater
ef?ciency in farm and domestic operations. This informa-
tion was readily obtainable from the farm and home plans
and record books maintained by borrowing families and
scrutinized by agency supervisors. Information could be
extracted from client ?les and abstracted for transmission
through the administrative hierarchy of the agency at com-
munity, county, district, state and regional and national
levels (Gaer, 1941, pp. 127–150). In the Washington Of?ce,
accounting-based data on the implementation of the pro-
gramme was processed by the Rural Rehabilitation Divi-
sion and was also used by divisions with responsibility
for investigations, information and procedures (Gaer,
1941, pp. 130–141).
The annual reports produced by the FSA summarized
the results of surveys of borrowers. These drew on
accounting data to chart the increasing net income, asset
base, production, and net worth of the object population.
The statistics published in annual reports revealed impres-
sive advances. A survey of 232,000 rehabilitation borrow-
ers at 31 December 1937 discovered increases in net
worth of $252 per family since the receipt of loans, and in-
creased expenditure on ‘More lasting betterments’ (Report
of the Administrator of the Farm Security Administration,
1938, pp. 8–10). A survey of borrowers at the end of
1938 indicated an increase in net worth of 17% in the last
year alone (Report of the Administrator of the Farm Security
Administration, 1939, p. 13). A similar study of 360,000 bor-
rowers at the close of 1939 reported an average increase in
net worth of $230 per family, and substantial increases in
home produced food and purchasing power (Farm Security
Administration, 1941, p. 15; Report of the Administrator of
the Farm Security Administration, 1940, pp. 6–7).
18
Such surveys were performed by the Division of Social
Research of the RA-FSA. Its work was often conducted in
association with other agencies of the U.S. Department of
Agriculture with responsibility for research into policy
implementation and development. These included the Bu-
reau of Agricultural Economics (which had a Division of
Farm Management and Costs), the Bureau of Home Eco-
nomics, and the Extension Service (Gaer, 1941, p. 105).
The numerous joint reports produced by these organiza-
tions were ‘designed to supply administrators with infor-
mation concerning the problems and conditions with
which the agency programs for the rural disadvantaged
were concerned’ (Larson & Zimmerman, 2003, pp. 198,
200). They were also used to evaluate programme out-
comes. The studies deployed information amassed from
thousands of case ?les (Kirkpatrick, 1938) or from the peri-
odic reports prepared by farm and home supervisors
sourced from those ?les (Taeuber & Rowe, 1941).
For example, in 1939 the FSA commissioned the Bureau
of Agricultural Economics to investigate the characteristics
and progress (or otherwise) of rehabilitation loan borrow-
ers and the factors which contributed to their success or
failure (Larson & Zimmerman, 2003, pp. 203–204). This in-
volved the study of a sample comprising 39,295 case ?les
kept in the regional of?ces of the FSA. Farm and home
plans and the results of ‘last year’s business’ were impor-
tant sources of data for this investigation, which continued
to report to 1943. Its numerous reports and statistical anal-
yses were distributed for ‘administrative use’ to the FSA
Administrator, the Director of the Rural Rehabilitation Pro-
gram, and the 12 FSA regional directors. The latter received
reports containing 123 tables on subjects such as the pro-
gress of borrowers in their areas (Baldwin, 1968, p. 212;
Larson, 1947, pp. 16, 425–427; Larson & Zimmerman,
2003, p. 204).
The results of these studies showed that by September
1943 26% of the recipients of standard rural rehabilitation
18
Evidence presented to the Cooley Committee showed that before being
accepted as borrowers the average net worth of clients was $871. By 1941
this had increased to $1242 and to $2008 the following year. Critics
questioned whether the improvements in disposable income and net worth
were suf?ciently material to suggest enduring change (Rural Relief, 1942, p.
39).
228 S.P. Walker / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 208–235
loans had paid-up and were therefore of?cially ‘rehabili-
tated’, 11% had been ‘dropped’ as defaulting or as offering
little hope of eventual rehabilitation, 16% were repaying
loans but were not receiving supervision (and therefore
deemed not to have been rehabilitated
19
), and the remain-
ing 47% were active clients for whom the outcomes were not
yet determined (Hearings, 1943, Part 1, pp. 198, 215; 1943,
Part 2, pp. 816–817; Larson, 1947, pp. 309–331). At the
end of February 1943 it was also reported that 86% of the
principal due on rehabilitation loans had been repaid and
that a signi?cant proportion of borrowers were making
repayments in advance (Baldwin, 1968, p. 201; Hearings,
1943, Part 2, p. 902; 1944, Part 3, p. 993). This was deemed
an impressive achievement given that ‘all rehabilitation bor-
rowers are ‘‘bad credit risks’’ according to normal business
standards’ (Report of the Administrator of the Farm Security
Administration, 1940, p. 8).
20
Studies by the Division of Social Research of the Works
Progress Administration into the economic and social
characteristics of the object population on the rural reha-
bilitation programme also relied on samples of case ?les
(Asch & Mangus, 1937, pp. 161–202). The accounting
forms contained therein were utilized to analyse shifts
in the economic status of clients by tracking changes in:
net worth, indebtedness, and operating income and
expenditure (Kirkpatrick, 1938, pp. 38–46). In 1941 the
Division of Farm Management and Costs of the Bureau
of Agricultural Economics worked with the regional
of?ces of the FSA to study cotton growing families in a
district of Texas. The study was based on data drawn
from farm and home plans and record books (Larson &
Zimmerman, 2003, p. 202). The latter also provided raw
material for regional, state and local based studies
involving the Extension Service and agricultural colleges
(Simmons, Macy, & Allbaugh, 1940).
Accounting and the subject
As we have seen, Giddens (1985, p. 14) identi?es an-
other mode of surveillance in addition to that concerned
with the accumulation of information about object popula-
tions. He also refers to direct supervision as an individual-
ized mode of surveillance. Likewise, as well as drawing
attention to the macro-level art of governing target popu-
lations, Foucault (1979, pp. 92–102; 1991, pp. 26–27) ex-
horts a focus on the ‘micro-physics’ of power – the
technologies operating on the molecular elements of soci-
ety. He emphasizes how, following the intervention of
powerful others (such as an agency supervisor), the indi-
vidual becomes a subject, and as such, self-analyses con-
duct for conformity with the expectations associated
with that status. Here we examine the rehabilitative im-
pacts that were associated with the directly-supervised
accounting of the micro-level borrower and her/his
subjecti?cation.
As the FSA conceded, assessing the extent to which
rehabilitation clients performed prescribed accounting
and management techniques ‘post-graduation’ is dif?cult
(Hearings, 1943, Part 1, p. 219). The agency did not conduct
comprehensive surveys of the effectiveness of this aspect
of its work. It also recognized that not all the farm and
home plans constructed under its supervision were ‘per-
fectly made’ or comprehensively followed (Report of the
Administrator of the Farm Security Administration, 1940, p.
6). In the South there were doubts about the extent to
which farm and home management practices would en-
dure among the poorest borrowers given their ‘heritage
of deprivation’ (Mertz, 1978, pp. 200–201, 205–207).
That said, some indirect evidence on the improving ef-
fects of planning and budgeting on individual clients is
available from an unpublished study of tenant purchase
borrowers conducted by the Bureau of Agricultural Eco-
nomics in 1946. This revealed that 82% of Southern bor-
rowers and 74% of Midwestern borrowers had altered
their farming operations since receiving a loan but only
15% and 25% respectively, spontaneously mentioned the
farm and home plan in this connection. However, the study
also reported that half of borrowers found the plans help-
ful. One quarter of wives in the Midwest and one-half in
the South indicated that they would have run their homes
differently without the farm and home plan (Ban?eld,
1949).
Higher standards of living, greater self-respect,
participation in community activities and better farming
practices were attributed to the formulation and imple-
mentation of farm and home plans (Report of the Adminis-
trator of the Farm Security Administration, 1937, p. 4).
Larson’s comprehensive study reported the bene?cial ef-
fects of accounting on rehabilitation clients. He observed
that ‘Gains have been made toward the acquisition of skills
and abilities to manage the farm and home successfully
and independently’ (1947, p. 326). For the majority of bor-
rowers improvements in farmand home management con-
tributed to the better use of the human and physical
resources of the farm, and increases in family income, net
worth and working capital. The control of household
expenditure facilitated by accounting had helped secure
advancement in ‘the material aspects of family living’
(Larson, 1947, p. 326).
Local analyses of the results of the accounting records
kept by clients could also reveal positive impacts. Farmers
on a rehabilitation project in Wisconsin were informed in
1940 that ‘many of the farmers of the state as the result
of keeping farm accounts have changed their methods
and practices so that they now have the most pro?table
farms of the state’ (Economic Development. Education,
7.1.1941). A ‘Farm and Home Management Report’ distrib-
uted to 30 FSA farmers in Montgomery County, Texas, re-
lated how ‘those who use their records as a basis for
organizing their farm and home business are able to rise
above average and stay there’ (Economic Development.
Education, January 1935–December 1939 (Community
Newsletters)). A similar report for 98 FSA farmers in
Jackson County, Oklahoma extolled the value of keeping
19
Rehabilitation was deemed to have been successfully achieved when
the farmer had returned to economic independence on the basis of
competence in farm and home management.
20
On the Tenant Purchase Programme, as clients were carefully chosen
and preference was given to those who had well-equipped farms, delin-
quencies were few and a high rate of repayment was achieved (Baldwin,
1968, p. 199; Hearings, 1944, Part 3, pp. 1015–1016; Report of Select
Committee, 1944, p. 18).
S.P. Walker / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 208–235 229
?nancial records, stating ‘When you made your plans you
knew where you were trying to go; you kept good records
along the way, and now you know where you have been
and how you got there. You have a good basis for charting
your future course’ (Economic Development. Education,
January 1935–December 1939 (Community Newsletters)).
When appearing before the Cooley Committee, V.R.
Schaefer of the First National Bank, Viroqua, Wisconsin
indicated that the effect of supervised accounting on bor-
rowers had been transformative. There had been a notice-
able improvement in farm management practices and a
good many of those who had ‘graduated’ from supervision
had continued to follow the practices they had learned. He
observed, given that ‘there are a number of people that
cannot keep books, that cannot handle their money very
well. . .I think the supervisors have done a splendid job’
(Hearings, 1943, Part 1, p. 305). Taeuber and Rowe (1941,
p. 10) reported that in Laurens County, Georgia, landlords
complimented FSA staff on the improvements being made
on the farms and homes of clients and also on the keeping
of records.
There is evidence that educative supervision in account-
ing and business practice proved especially bene?cial to
African-American farming families (Sterner, 1943, p. 298).
Although contemporary observers critiqued the pro-
gramme’s ‘differential treatment of the Negro’ (Myrdal,
1944, p. 274), they also lauded the attempt at instruction
in accounting: ‘Nobody who has had any contact with
those doing ?eld work for the Farm Security Administra-
tion can escape becoming impressed by these attempts
to rehabilitate farm families by making up plans for almost
every aspect of the farm-household economy and by ‘‘help-
ing the clients to help themselves’’’ (Myrdal, 1944, p. 278).
While the FSA conceded in 1940 that only 12.5% of
rehabilitation loans had been made to Negro farmers (Ster-
ner, 1943, pp. 298–301) substantial bene?ts had accrued to
them through ‘learning to keep their books, make their
budgets, and live within them’ (The Southern Negro,
1940). Signi?cant advances in ?nancial position, improved
living standards, self-respect, and a more business-like ap-
proach to farming practice were all observed. Although
illiteracy had prevented some from taking advantage of
the bene?cial effects of directly supervised record keeping
(Sterner, 1943, p. 297), most ‘Negro’ families in receipt of
FSA loans had made ‘a great educational stride’ which en-
abled them ‘to associate with others on equal terms’ and
achieve improved social status (Hubert, 1945).
21
L.L. McAlister, who appeared before the Cooley Com-
mittee as the representative of eleven Negro tenant farm-
ers in North Carolina, rescued by FSA loans from
bankruptcy, explained:
I give a major part of the credit to the supervision they
have received, and I give another part of the credit to
the system of budgeting that is an integral part of the
Farm Security plan, under which the Farm Security
supervisor sits down with the tenant and his wife at
the beginning of the crop year. . .to enable that family
to operate a balanced farmprogram. Then by estimating
rather conservatively the probable income that that
family can expect, they work out a budget covering
the operating needs of the family for a year. Then they
set up the loan to cover those budget items (Hearings,
1943, Part 1, pp. 337–338).
The farmers concerned were expected to keep their
expenditure within the agreed budget, were issued with
a record book and instructed on how to make entries of re-
ceipts and payments therein (Hearings, 1943, Part 1, p.
344). In consequence of these arrangements farmers not
only achieved ?nancial security they also enjoyed ‘com-
plete freedom and independence, a state they have never
hitherto experienced’ (Hearings, 1943, Part 1, p. 345).
McAlister observed further:
I have seen apathy and indifference give way to awak-
ened interest and personal pride, and indolence
replaced by ambition. I have seen life given a meaning
and purpose to about 85 men, women, and children,
and made something more than a mere subsistence. I
have noted a de?nite improvement in the health and
well-being and happiness of these families. I have
watched them apply newly learned principles of thrift
and good citizenship and good management and of
foresight as they have responded to the slowly grasped
realization that they are being offered for the ?rst time
an opportunity to better themselves (Hearings, 1943,
Part 1, p. 345).
The application of business principles was a construc-
tive element of the program, one that ‘?rmly establishes
a promise of ultimate release to the tenant farmer from
the virtual slave status which he has for generations been
forced to endure’ (Hearings, 1943, Part 1, p. 346).
Another witness, J.E. Clayton of Texas, representing a
self-help organization for ‘colored farmers’ in the Southern
states, observed that until the advent of the rural rehabili-
tation program African-American farmers ‘knew nothing in
the world about keeping any accounts or anything of that
kind, no books of any kind, they knew nothing about
how to ?nd a market for anything. So the Farm Security
Administration was a God-send to those people’ (Hearings,
1943, Part 1, p. 352). Mrs. W.C. Martin, a plantation owner
from Marshall, Texas, observed of her share-tenants that
the FSA ‘helps these fellows keep books. . . it is the greatest
education in the world for the farmer’ (Hearings, 1943, Part
1, p. 372).
At the level of the individual client, Grant (2002, p. 98)
relates the case of Mrs W.L. Hannon of Kansas who wrote
to Eleanor Roosevelt to express her gratitude for the work
of the FSA. Having fallen into debt, the Hannons had ap-
plied for and received an FSA loan. This had restored the
‘health, happiness and courage’ of the family. Moreover,
the need to keep accounts had transformed her husband
into a businessman. Available oral testimony of farmers
who were FSA borrowers reveal that educative supervision
in accounting could also provide skills which later opened
alternative sources of employment (Ganzel, 1984). For
example, Lynn and Madge May received a rehabilitation
21
Not surprisingly, the rural rehabilitation programme was perceived as a
threat to the interests of Southern rural elites (Echeverri-Gent, 1993, pp. 71,
79).
230 S.P. Walker / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 208–235
loan to support their chicken farm in Nebraska. Madge be-
gan keeping the prescribed record books, discovered her
competence in bookkeeping and continued the practice
once the loan was repaid. The skills acquired secured her
appointment as a bookkeeper in a clothing store in Lincoln
(May, 1978).
Some home supervisors prepared newsletters for distri-
bution to local clients. These could also report the positive
impacts of accounting on individual families. A newsletter
distributed in San Diego in 1939 related how one client
had been unaware that part of his business was unpro?t-
able until he commenced account keeping (Economic
Development. Education, January 1935–December 1939
(Farmer Newsletters)). ‘The Reporter’ in the counties on
East Riverside, East Imperial and Yuma Counties, Califor-
nia, related how proper home budgeting had resulted in
families that were better clothed and fed, and happier
(Economic Development. Education, January 1935–Decem-
ber 1939 (Farmer Newsletters)). Another newsletter, dis-
tributed in California in Fall 1941, contained an item
under the banner ‘THIS LADY SAYS ‘‘ACCOUNT KEEPING
WORTH WHILE’’’. This discussed a letter from Mrs Fidel
who narrated how vigilant completion of the Farm Family
Record Book over three years had taken the guess work out
of farm management and ‘helped toward our goal of a
‘‘Happier, Better Family Life’’’ (Economic Development.
Education, 7.1.1941).
Additional insights to the speci?c impacts of accounting
prescriptions and practices on individuals are available
from periodic reports authored by home supervisors. These
were prepared for distribution to their agency superiors
and to share experiences in the ?eld with co-workers. Rare
surviving examples are the weekly reports of home super-
visors operating in the California Rural Rehabilitation Divi-
sion of the FSA, 1938–1939. These testify to the bene?ts of
accounting in relation to improved ?nancial management,
expense control, and the identi?cation of pro?table or
unpro?table operations. They also illustrate the manner
in which borrowers, following agency intervention, could
be transformed into self-analyzing subjects. Instances
were reported of clients reviewing their accounting re-
cords, discovering extravagant spending or loss-making
activities, and altering their behavior as a result. One home
supervisor reported that a Mrs. Cureton had stated ‘‘I want
to thank you for making me keep accounts. I didn’t realize
before just how much it actually costs for family living’’
(Excerpts from Home Supervisors’ Weekly Reports). In an-
other case accounting practices were even deployed to ad-
dress problems of health:
Mrs. Finch in Hanford presents a problem in nutrition.
Her weight is now 306 pounds. She has had an unsuc-
cessful hernia operation due chie?y to excess fat. Some
time ago she asked me to tell her how to reduce her
weight. I did this but she did not make any effort to fol-
low the plan. In fact she did just the opposite with an
increase in weight. Now she says she will do anything
and I have again outlined a plan. Each month she is to
put her weight at the bottom of the account sheet. This
will encourage her perhaps, and keep me informed
(Excerpts from Home Supervisors’ Weekly Reports).
A recurring theme in home supervisor reports and other
sources is the improved peace of mind and sense of secu-
rity which arose from the performance of accounting.
Gaining control of ?nances and reducing the scope for con-
?ict between husband and wife in money matters were
identi?ed as important psychological bene?ts of planning
and record keeping (Reid, 1939, pp. 193–194; Swiger &
Larson, 1944, pp. 38–39; Taeuber & Rowe, 1941, pp. 18–
19).
Conclusions
This study has attempted to illuminate the enabling po-
tential of accounting by revealing its performance in a
state-engineered, nationwide project to address the plight
of small farmers in the US during the 1930s and 1940s. It
has also sought to augment the sparse critical literatures
on the history of accounting in the US, rural society and
poverty alleviation. The paper contrasts with previous his-
torical studies which report the application of accounting
technologies in the subjugation or exploitation of speci?c
populations. Its ?ndings also suggest that agricultural-rur-
al arenas may be the site of innovative ventures in
accounting.
Studies on accounting and emancipation have hitherto
revealed the role of quantitative technologies in giving vis-
ibility to negative elements of social functioning and dis-
closing the plight of the repressed (Gallhofer & Haslam,
1997). By contrast, the case examined here has focused
on the performance of accounting as an emancipatory tech-
nology. The rural rehabilitation programme was founded
on the concept of supervised credit and this emphasized
the practice by client families of mandatory accounting
in the guise of farm and home planning and farm family re-
cord keeping. The preparation and analysis of these docu-
ments reveal the application of accounting prescriptions
on a substantial scale, at various levels of government,
but especially in household-family systems.
The study illustrates the manner in which accounting
contributed to the achievement of rural rehabilitation
through dispersed forms of government. It facilitated inter-
ventions at the level of the state, the household and the
individual. As the evidence concerning ?nancial restraint,
consumption containment and habit inculcation illustrate,
its application by family members made the business and
domestic arenas scenes for the everyday practice of gov-
ernment and the disciplining of the self (Nadesan, 2008).
It has been suggested that record keeping was more than
a technology of data gathering for state agencies. At the
micro-level it was also a focal point for supervised, educa-
tive activity designed to secure the betterment of the rural
poor.
Although the study reveals how liberal state agencies
drew on accounting techniques to improve the status of a
distressed group, the mechanisms employed to ensure
the performance of accounting by families, and the use of
accounting records to amass knowledge about the objecti-
?ed population, also implied what contemporaries as-
sumed was a less progressive dimension of agency
solutions. The rural population was subjected to a series
S.P. Walker / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 208–235 231
of intrusive actions and technologies, including accounting,
deemed necessary to secure its advancement. This was a
consequence of the fact that as the improvement of popu-
lations became the aim of government, and the family-
household was identi?ed as the essential instrument of
government, quantitative analysis became necessary to
activate government (Foucault, 1994b, p. 215). As Giddens
(1985, p. 309) reminds us, although information collection
is ultimately ‘a source of potential freedom’ for the recipi-
ents of welfare, its provision ‘cannot be organized or
funded unless there is a close and detailed monitoring of
many characteristics of the lives of the population’.
The study therefore reveals the potentially con?icting
impacts of the application of accounting for the purposes
of socio-economic improvement, especially where supervi-
sion was deployed as a technology of policy implementa-
tion. Under the rural rehabilitation programme, the
actions and techniques used to secure the betterment of
the population (such as supervised accounting), were
administrative as well as educative in character. It has
been shown that conceptualizations of supervision empha-
size its administrative–managerial and educative–support-
ive functioning. During the 1930s and 1940s
contemporaries recognized both the enabling and poten-
tially repressive operation of supervised accounting and
the need for ‘balance’ between them (Hearings, 1943, Part
1, p. 126). While the principal objective of the supervised
accounting provided for RA and FSA clients was declared
to be facilitative and improving in its effects, the applica-
tion of techniques to secure that outcome were also con-
trolling and restraining. Modern-day commentators on
vocational rehabilitation recognize that a truly empower-
ing rehabilitation is ‘a process that enables the individual
to build their capacity’ (Waddell & Burton, 2004, p. 34,
emphasis added); it demands a recognition of the rights of
its subjects as individuals and citizens as opposed to cli-
ents, and preserves their capacity to make choices and re-
tain control of life planning (Emener, 1991; Niesz, Koch, &
Rumrill, 2008). In the case discussed here a degree of con-
trol over individual life planning was appropriated by state
agencies in order to achieve the improvement of the tar-
geted population.
Foucault and Giddens alert us to the synonymity of di-
rect supervision and surveillance. The rural rehabilitation
programme was administered through an organizational
hierarchy which effectively enclosed the client population
and divided it in ways which expedited observation and
data gathering. In the rural rehabilitation project super-
vised accounting was elemental to the exercise of disci-
pline and administrative power. For the agency
concerned, micro-level accounting served not only as a
technology for the activation of its policy of improving rur-
al families but also as a vehicle for recording and transmit-
ting knowledge about programme effectiveness, sourced
from widely dispersed client families to centres of calcula-
tion. Supervision was necessary to ensure that the infor-
mation inscribed in proforma accounting documents by
thousands of peripheral clients was reliable. As Rose
(1991, p. 691) has argued, the functioning of government
in liberal democracies ‘requires a pedagogy of numeracy
to keep its citizens numerate and calculating’.
A variety of surveillance techniques were deployed in
the name of betterment. Some (such as home visits) in-
volved direct observation of the client. Others, such as
the preparation and submission of monthly accounts,
were operated remotely. These devices encouraged self-
policing by the client subject and ensured that ‘panoptic
principles of supervision [extended] beyond the struc-
tural limits of vision’, thus enabling action at a distance
(Simon, 2005, p. 13). In this manifestation, the supervi-
sion of accounting could be intrusive, evaluative and
directing. The manner in which agency accounting pre-
scriptions assumed, and effectively cemented, the gen-
dered separation of business and home on the
farmstead was also less than progressive. In this respect
the case also illustrates how the accounting attending
state projects can reproduce dominant ideologies such
as separate spheres.
Contemporaries tended to explain the contradictions
between enabling and controlling aspects of intervention
by asserting that most impoverished farmers were unable
to look after their own affairs. Intrusive forms of govern-
ment were therefore necessary if the object population
was to be rehabilitated. Some of?cials described the pro-
gramme as an exercise in ‘paternalistic supervision’ (Gaer,
1941, p. 7), which implied submission to authoritarian
control and the sacri?ce of individual liberty in return for
benevolent protection. For critics, this suggestion of regi-
mentation rendered supervised accounting alien to Amer-
ican individualism. Others have argued that it
contributed to ‘the greatest attempt to cope with the prob-
lem of rural poverty – perhaps the only signi?cant attempt
– in the nation’s history’ (McConnell, 1953, p. 112). The RA
and FSA envisioned a permanent solution to the problems
confronting low income, rural families. The leading histori-
an of the agencies concluded that the rural rehabilitation
programme had ‘profound consequences for the human
condition of the low-income farm families who were
served’ (Baldwin, 1968, p. 212). Its ideals and impacts were
far from revolutionary but for struggling farm families it
was a ‘source of salvation’ (Baldwin, 1968, p. 277).
Accounting practices featured large in the efforts of this
agency to ‘reclaim for the family a decent life’ (Report of
the Administrator of the Farm Security Administration,
1941, p. 8).
Although some contemporary critics and subsequent
commentators have argued that rural rehabilitation was
merely an emergency measure which failed to address fun-
damental issues of farm tenancy or secure permanent
improvements in standards of living (Grant 2002, pp.
100, 157–160; Oppenheimer, 1937; Wiley, 1937), most
concur that the work of the FSA ‘improved the human con-
dition for hundreds of thousands of destitute farm families’
(Baldwin, 1968, p. 193). A report in 1943 identi?ed the
rehabilitation program as ‘one of the most signi?cant so-
cial inventions developed in the ?eld of agriculture in re-
cent decades’ (Baldwin, 1968, p. 389). The FSA’s emphasis
on educating struggling tenants in farm and home man-
agement with a view to their becoming self-supporting
represented an attempt to achieve greater equality and
provide the tools for socio-economic advancement (Couto,
1991).
232 S.P. Walker / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 208–235
Doubts persist about whether the rehabilitation of cli-
ent families under the programmes of the RA and FSA
proved permanent. As with more recent interventions such
as micro?nance schemes in developing countries
(Fernando, 2006; Woolcock, 1999), observers have ques-
tioned the extent to which the New Deal programmes of
the 1930s resulted in enduring socio-economic transfor-
mations. Studies of earlier historical episodes suggest that
where accounting featured in state systems of poverty alle-
viation, negative impacts on the subjects of relief are
discernible (Walker, 2004, 2008). Yet, there is considerable
evidence that on the rural rehabilitation programme bet-
terment could be achieved during the period in which
supervised credit was activated. C.B. Baldwin, Administra-
tor of the FSA, contended that of the almost one million
farm families on relief when the program commenced,
hundreds of thousands had become ‘self-supporting citi-
zens’ (Hearings, 1943, Part 1, p. 129; Kirkendall, 1982, p.
131; Saloutos, 1974, p. 412). As in contemporary micro?-
nance contexts, the provision of business training as well
as credit could have positive effects (Karlan & Valdivia,
2006).
The educative impact of supervised accounting also ap-
pears to have been perceived as bene?cial by the ‘subjects’
who practiced it. In the scenario reported here accounting
was understood as a technology which helped improve life
chances, contributed to achieving material advances in
family income and net worth, and enabled greater control
of business and home operations. Contemporaries noted
how the ?nancial management which accounting encour-
aged had positive psychological effects. For families
attempting to make ends meet during a period of depres-
sion its practice resulted in greater peace of mind and
helped instill the con?dence necessary to address their
plight. The most vulnerable and impoverished group –
African-American tenant farmers in the South – bene?tted
from the empowering effects of acquiring knowledge
about a hitherto unfamiliar quantitative technique. Indeed,
their education may have contributed to longer-term
socio-political advancement. One commentator has gone
so far as to conclude:
The New Deal rural poverty alleviation programs
bequeathed an important legacy to American political
development. Their bene?ciaries became wealthier
and healthier than comparable nonbene?ciaries. More
of their children went into professional, technical, and
managerial occupations. African-American bene?ciaries
became mainstays of the organizational life in their
communities and later provided critical support for
the civil rights movement (Echeverri-Gent, 1993, pp.
86–87; also Salamon, 1979).
Acknowledgement
The author is grateful to the anonymous reviewers and
the editor, Joni Young, for their many constructive sugges-
tions which signi?cantly improved this paper. Helpful
comments were also received during presentations at the
Workshop on Accounting and Management Control (Rafael
Donoso Memorial Lecture), Segovia; London School of
Economics and Political Science, University of Sydney,
Queensland University of Technology, University of Exeter,
and the University of Glasgow.
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