Arizona Fiasco: A Story of American Collectivism

It’s always worth reading Amity Shlaes’s examination of some of the forgotten (or overlooked) corners of American history. And those corners will often be featured in Amity’s fortnightly column for Capital Matters,  The Forgotten Book.

In her most recent column, she describes a government-sponsored attempt to establish collective farming in the U.S. in the 1930s, a venture that came as a surprise to me.

Shlaes:

Back in the 1930s, the Roosevelt administration launched a number of isolated collective communities, including a 3,600-acre farming collective in the Arizona desert between Phoenix and Tucson. Physical traces of Casa Grande Farms are long gone. Roads, office parks, and malls line the site now, part of the conurbation known as the Arizona Sun Corridor.

It may not be a surprise to regular Capital Matters readers, but this project did not work out too well. As a species, we may lean towards the tribal, and we seem to appreciate the value of community. But our fondness for the communal only goes so far. We’ll share stuff, and we cooperate, but deep down, we tend not to be collectivist. As a rule, anyway: There have been exceptions in certain societies — typically not known for their prosperity — and within certain cults — typically not famous for their grasp of reality.

It is telling that the 20th century’s infamous experiments in collectivism had to be imposed by deception, brutal force, or both, and that, not least because of their disregard of the value of individual incentive, they were, at best, episodes in economic underperformance. See the Soviet Union for details. It is also worth noting that one reason that the USSR was able to survive for so long was the way that its variety of communism, like other nominally egalitarian systems, is better seen as a form of feudalism, in which those in the higher parts of the social hierarchy were well rewarded for their efforts to keep the show on the road.

It’s also telling that the USSR’s minuscule (by acreage) private sector did a disproportionate amount to keep the Soviet Union fed.

Here’s an extract from the synopsis of a 2017 book on Soviet agriculture:

In 1966, for example, the private sector produced 55,800,000 tons of potatoes or 64 percent of the USSR’s total gross production of potatoes; 7,400,000 tons of vegetables or 43 percent of total production; 40 percent of its meat; 39 percent of its milk; and 66 percent of its egg production (see table). Of paramount significance is the fact that the private sector produces these quantities on only slightly more than 3 percent of the USSR’s total sown land.

And to so back to Amity and the Arizona collective farmers:

In its first years, Casa Grande bloomed, and even earned some profits. After more time, officials hoped, Casa Grande would learn to run itself, with settler families receiving yet more profits from their share of the co-op.

But after more time, that was not what happened. Profits notwithstanding, those settlers who had believed that they would be free to homestead after an initial land grant did not overcome their disappointment: “We came on the project because it was painted rosy to us.”

What’s more, the farmers found they didn’t like sharing. They wanted their own tractors. And their own cows, and even their own chickens. There was something in the settlers’ nature that resisted even a lavish collective. Outsiders found the resistance almost humorous, like slapstick: Why were the farmers rejecting their gifts? But the resistance was also deeply human.

Indeed it was.

Please read the whole thing.

The book in which this fiasco was described is Government Project by Edward Banfield (1951). It is being republished by AEI and will be available soon. It sounds fascinating (I shall look forward to reading it), although ghouls will be disappointed that it will lack the deportations, mass arrests, famines, and executions that would feature so prominently in any (honest) account of the Soviet collectivization of agriculture.