The Farm Security Administration: meeting rural health needs in the South, 1933-1946

Abstract

During the Depression, New Deal relief agencies found that their clients also needed medical care. Conditions were especially dire in the rural South. Beginning with the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) government funds were applied to health needs. After FERA and the Department of the Interior's Division of Subsistence Homesteads established resettlement communities for displaced workers and farmers, both agencies expanded the medical work with nurses and clinics. In 1935 Rexford Tugwell's Resettlement Administration (RA) assumed most of the resettlement projects and continued the work initiated by its predecessors. The RA found also that its regular rehabilitation clients needed health care. In response, it originated the medical cooperative, or association, where farmers pooled their funds. Two years later Congress passed the Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Act, transferring most of the work of the RA to the newly created Farm Security Administration (FSA). The FSA expanded the RA's health programs over the next several years, reaching a membership peak in 1941. In 1942 the Department of Agriculture assigned the FSA the task of administering six experimental rural health programs modeled after its medical cooperatives. By 1946 Congress had decimated the FSA's budget and its involvement in the cooperatives ended.