Rexford Tugwell

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Rexford Tugwell : biography

July 10, 1891 – July 21, 1979

Tugwell is mentioned in the Ernie Pyle book Home Country.

Early life and education

Rexford Tugwell was born in Sinclairville, New York. In his youth he gained an appreciation for workers’ rights and liberal politics from the works of Upton Sinclair, James Bryce, and Edward Bellamy.Namorato, Michael. Rexford G. Tugwell: A Biography. 1988. 11-18. Tugwell began studying economics in graduate work at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and completed his doctorate at Columbia University. At university, he was influenced by such professors as Scott Nearing, Simon Patten, Carl Parker, and John Dewey.Namorato, Michael. Rexford G. Tugwell: A Biography. 1988. 21-54.

Career

Academic economist

After graduation, he served as a professor at the University of Washington, American University in Paris, and Columbia University.

Tugwell’s approach to economics was experimentalist, and he viewed the industrial planning of World War I as a successful experiment. He advocated agricultural planning (led by industry) to stop the rural poverty that had become prevalent due to a crop surplus after the First World War. This method of controlling production, prices, and costs was especially relevant as the Great Depression began.Namorato, Michael. Rexford G. Tugwell: A Biography. 1988. 35-54.

Roosevelt administration

In 1932 Tugwell was invited to join President Franklin Roosevelt’s team of advisers known as the Brain Trust. After Roosevelt’s inauguration in 1933, Tugwell was appointed first as Assistant Secretary and then in 1934 as Undersecretary of the United States Department of Agriculture. He helped create the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) and served as its director. The AAA consisted of a domestic allotment program, which paid farmers to voluntarily reduce their production by roughly 30%, funded with a tax on processing companies that used farm commodities. Tugwell’s department managed the production of key crops by adjusting the subsidies for non-production.Sternsher, Bernard. Rexford Tugwell and the New Deal. Rutgers University Press, 1964. 183-193.

Tugwell was also instrumental in creating the Soil Conservation Service in 1933, to restrict cultivation and restore poor-quality land.Namorato, Michael. Rexford G. Tugwell: A Biography. 1988. 81-82. This was especially necessary given the widespread damage of the 1930s’ Dust Bowls. He additionally played a key role in crafting the 1938 Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act.

In April 1935 Tugwell and Roosevelt created the Resettlement Administration (RA), a unit of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. Directed by Tugwell, the RA sought to create healthy communities for the rural unemployed with access to urban opportunities. Some of the RA’s activities dealt with land conservation and rural aid, but the construction of new suburban satellite cities was the most prominent. In her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the author Jane Jacobs critically quotes Tugwell on the program: "My idea is to go just outside centers of population, pick up cheap land, build a whole community and entice people into it. Then go back into the cities and tear down whole slums and make parks of them."Chapter 16, "Gradual Money and Cataclysmic Money," p. 310 She believed that he underestimated the strengths of complex urban communities and caused too much social displacement in "tearing down" neighborhoods that might have been renovated.Chapter 16, "Gradual Money and Cataclysmic Money," p. 310

The RA completed three "Greenbelt" towns before the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit found the program unconstitutional in Franklin Township v. Tugwell. It ruled that housing construction was a state power and the RA was an illegal delegation of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration’s power.Myhra, David. "Rexford Guy Tugwell: Initiator of America’s Greenbelt New Towns, 1935 to 1936." Journal of the American Planning Association. 40, no. 3 (1974).Arnold, Joseph. The New Deal in the Suburbs. Ohio State University Press, 1971.