Adam Smith famously coined the metaphor of the ‘invisible hand’ to describe a capitalist market that was driven by individual aspirations and promises for profits but produced, somehow miraculously, something resembling a common good. Although the image of the invisible hand appeared in a rather marginal and fleeting passage in The Wealth of Nations, it became a key metaphor in nineteenth- and twentieth-century economic language and thinking.Footnote 1 Despite its alluring imaginary, the metaphor did not go uncontested. Rexford Tugwell, an economist who played a key role in designing Franklin D. Roosevelt’s agrarian New Deal in the 1930s and served as director of the Agricultural Adjustment Act, sarcastically wrote in 1935 that the image of the invisible hand provided nothing more than a rhetorical veil to conceal ‘the destructive forces of the unrestrained competition’ that had been wrongfully portrayed as the ‘Siamese twin’ of democracy. But now, Tugwell wrote, ‘the jig is up. The cat is out of the bag. There is no invisible hand. There never was. [. . .] We must now supply a real and visible guiding hand to do the task which that mythical, nonexistent, invisible agency was supposed to perform, but never did.’ In the eyes of Tugwell, social and economic planning were fundamentally important for increasing the visibility of the ‘guiding hand’. Tugwell regarded planning not as something that was detrimental to democracy but rather as something that prevented democracy from being ‘stifled by competition’.Footnote 2 Already a few years earlier in 1932, Tugwell had delivered a paper at the Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association in which he portrayed economic and social planning by government agencies as a necessary instrument to find a way out of the ‘disasters of recent years’ and associated the concept and the practice of planning with a ‘possible mastering of future history’.Footnote 3
Tugwell was no exception, even though his optimism regarding social and economic planning and his high modernist belief in science, technology and the state exceeded that of most of his colleagues in agricultural economics.Footnote 4 But still, in the age of ‘high modernity’, planning became deeply important within the international epistemic community of agricultural economists, especially from the late 1920s onwards.Footnote 5 As Tugwell and other agricultural economists began to implement far-reaching planning efforts to come to terms with the impact of the Great Depression on American agriculture in the 1930s, their endeavours were closely followed by Swiss observers who equally struggled with the consequences of the economic crisis on farming in Switzerland. Planning in agriculture was thus one of the significant arenas in which the United States developed ‘an important and consequential presence in the European political imaginary’.Footnote 6 It was a widely shared view among agricultural economists on both sides of the Atlantic that the age of laissez-faire capitalism was over and that the planning of agricultural production, land conservation and combating soil erosion, the international regulation of trade with agricultural produce, the state-led fixing of prices and the mobilisation and organisation of the farming population were key strategies to tackle the multiple crises that haunted industrial societies and their agricultural sectors throughout the inter-war years.Footnote 7 However, the converging forces among them did not go much further than acknowledging that planning was necessary, and the implementation of planning remained a deeply contested concept among agricultural economists.
Planning in agriculture has often been associated with ‘high modernist’ aspirations.Footnote 8 This concept is usually taken from James Scott’s influential book Seeing Like a State. According to Scott, high modernist ideology is
best conceived as a strong, one might even say muscle-bound, version of the self confidence about scientific and technological progress, the expansion of production, the growing satisfaction of human needs, the mastery of nature (including human nature), and above all, the rational design of social order commensurate with the scientific understanding of natural laws.
High modernists were also ‘unscientifically optimistic about the possibilities for the comprehensive planning of human settlement and production’, Scott argues, and they tended to be authoritarian insofar as they were incapable of incorporating experiential, tacit and local knowledge into their planning schemes that were geared towards scientific and technical rationality.Footnote 9 Certainly, these elements played a key role in the planning schemes that appeared in the politics of agricultural modernisation in industrialising societies from the mid-nineteenth century onwards.Footnote 10 However, examining agricultural planning in America and Switzerland during the inter-war period reveals unease with such far-reaching planning in the spirit of a ‘machine-age ideology’.Footnote 11 Such ‘high modernist’ planning schemes triggered fears that all too powerful bureaucracies would disregard the political and practical significance of democratic participation. From these reservations arose what Jess Gilbert calls ‘low modernist’ visions of planning. The agrarian intellectuals whose ideas will be analysed in the following pages did indeed believe in planning, science, technological progress and an activist state, yet with an important qualification: that in order for planning to become a vehicle for progressive social, economic and political reform, all these modernist institutions and activities had to be shaped by democratic participation and decentralised structures, education and research on the ground.Footnote 12
While Jess Gilbert has convincingly argued that the intellectuals who forged the early agricultural New Deal in the United States deliberately sought to turn farmers into an active part of democratic planning in agriculture, his argument has been critiqued for examining ‘low modernism’ in a rather ‘narrow domestic furrow’ and hence overlooking the ‘globally interconnected nature of agricultural science and reform’.Footnote 13 Indeed, as European dictatorial regimes in the 1920s and 1930s began to design far-reaching authoritarian agricultural planning schemes, a counter-movement was triggered that sought to forge planning ideas that were aligned with republican and democratic political cultures. These endeavours were by no means restricted to national spaces and were instead shaped by the transnational movement of concepts and ideas.Footnote 14 The fact that Swiss agricultural economists and agricultural scientists looked favourably to the United States when it came to adapting planning ideas to the challenges facing Swiss agriculture in the 1930s and 1940s provides an instructive and yet unexplored example for these transatlantic interconnections. To be sure, many European countries received their share of attention when Swiss agronomists widened their gaze to look for solutions to the agricultural crisis of the 1930s, yet no other region triggered more sustained interest than North America in the age of the agrarian New Deal.Footnote 15
By drawing on sources that document the entanglements between agricultural planners in the United States and Switzerland in the inter-war period, I will argue that low modernist planning provided a shared epistemic framework for exploring the potentials and limits of agricultural planning in two societies that share a long history of perceiving each other as ‘sister republics’.Footnote 16 The Swiss and American cases thus provide two interconnected examples of liberal democracies whose governments both endeavoured to address the impacts of the Great Depression on agriculture and to modernise their agricultural sectors, and who were facing the rise of European dictatorships with their own authoritarian planning schemes. Hence, my argument is less about the international diffusion of US planning ideas than the transatlantic entanglements in the intellectual history of low modernist planning in agriculture. Analysing the transatlantic currents that linked agricultural planning in Switzerland and the United States therefore allows us to unshackle the history of planning from its nation-state and urban middle-class biases and to move beyond the much-discussed topic of the Tennessee Valley Administration (TVA) as the embodiment of New Deal rural planning and ‘granddaddy of all regional development projects’.Footnote 17 Certainly, the varieties of low modernist planning that take centre stage in this article were only one part of the multitude of planning discourses in agricultural economics that were in circulation between the two world wars. Nevertheless, it is an element that deserves scrutiny, especially because it provides evidence of a transatlantic intellectual history of democratic planning in agriculture that has not yet received any historiographical attention.
Moreover, by focusing on the controversies of planning in agriculture, the inter-war years and the aftermath of the Great Depression are rendered visible as an important formative period in the transnational history of twentieth-century planning. To be sure, planning was seen as an embodiment of the framing and intervening power of the nation-state and a symbol of its governing capacities.Footnote 18 Therefore, contemporary planners were often keen to actively obscure the global links of planning for reasons of political legitimacy. Yet, as a transnational perspective on the history of planning shows, even state-centred narratives must consider that the challenges that led to heightened state intervention and triggered planning initiatives were not confined to the borders of the nation-state. Adopting a transnational perspective allows us to trace the circulation of planning ideas across time and space and makes us aware that planning ideas, even if they were eventually put into practice through the institutions of the nation-state and their collaboration with civil society, emerged from a history of transnational motion, mutual observation and selective appropriation. Planning ideas transcended national boundaries by circulating across transnational connections, yet these networks were by no means just channels of idea-transfer, but rather arenas of competing visions of planning in agriculture.
From Organisation to Planning in the Inter-War Years
At the Third International Conference of Agricultural Economists in 1934, influential Swiss agronomist and leader of the Swiss Farmers’ Union Ernst Laur noted in his concluding speech that ‘the idea of planning has made progress in all countries. The Governments have to-day accepted solutions which, a few years ago, would have been considered utopian.’Footnote 19 It may well be that the early 1930s witnessed an intensification of governmental intervention in agriculture that went much further than any previous measures. Yet state intervention stretches further back, particularly the regulation of international trade and state-led efforts in promoting agricultural science and education.Footnote 20 The late 1920s and 1930s witnessed a diversification and intensification of government-led intervention in agriculture that appeared to contemporaries like Laur as a threshold in the history of agricultural policy. Piecemeal state intervention and a focus on the mobilisation and organisation of the farming population in cooperatives and farmers’ interest organisations appeared to give way to more comprehensive economic and social planning schemes. This change was accompanied by a significant semantic shift in the discourse of agricultural economics: a shift from organisation to planning. Moreover, this shift also indicates a changing perception regarding the role of the state and its relationship with the farming population. Instead of solely fostering agricultural education and science, encouraging farmers to join cooperatives and regulating international trade through tariffs and quotas, the state now appeared to intervene more directly in farmers’ decisions and production practices and began to regard agricultural associations as intermediary bodies that could execute state-led agricultural planning and food-security policies directed at providing the growing non-agricultural population with food and resources.Footnote 21
To understand this shift, it is necessary to look further back into the history of agriculture and its regulation. Facing the challenges of a rapidly intensifying global economy in the final third of the nineteenth century, many industrialising societies witnessed increasing civic efforts to mobilise and organise the farming population, as well as a first wave of state intervention. As food markets were profoundly reshaped by the transformative forces of globalisation and industrialisation and farmers wrestled with the challenges of the agrarian crisis of the 1870s and 1880s, an associational momentum was observable in most industrialising European countries as well as in North America.Footnote 22 While this first ‘shock of the global’ contributed to a broad politisation of the countryside, it also triggered a proliferation of agrarian associations and farmers’ cooperatives that attempted to address the new economic challenges that emerged from more integrated global markets and the social transformations of industrialisation.Footnote 23 To give the fragmented farming communities a voice, organisation became the rallying cry of agrarian movements on both sides of the Atlantic in the final third of the nineteenth century. It became, as Daniel Rodgers notes, a ‘talismanic phrase’ among agriculturalists.Footnote 24
The increasingly integrated global economy did not only generate fear and selective protectionist measures in the final third of the nineteenth century. At the same time, greater integration also facilitated a more intense exchange and mutual observation of the strategies taken by other societies to address the new challenges of globalised markets and industrialising economies.Footnote 25 Moreover, this period also witnessed the first attempts to establish international congresses on agriculture and create international agricultural organisations.Footnote 26 Organisation, therefore, became a strategical leitmotif that joined efforts in mobilising and institutionalising the countryside and the farming population on both sides of the Atlantic, not least in making them more ‘legible’ to the modernising state.Footnote 27 When the US Country Life Commission published its report on the problems and challenges of rural life in North America in 1909, it referred to European experiences to underline the need for infusing a ‘cooperative spirit’ within the farming community in America and to foster the efforts of organising farmers. In comparison to their European counterparts, American farmers were ‘relatively unorganized’, and in the light of this comparative perspective, the Country Life Commission urged: ‘It is essential that all rural organizations, both social and economic, should develop into something like a system, or at least that all the efforts be known and studied by central authorities. There should be, in other words, a voluntary union of associative effort.’ Only by uniting a ‘cultivated cooperative spirit’ from below with the powers of government on the state and federal level from above would a ‘complete organization of rural affairs’ be possible.Footnote 28
It was not only American reformers who longed for a ‘complete organization of rural affairs’, and similar claims and efforts were made in Europe as well, although with significant variation.Footnote 29 These concentrated efforts at integrating the farming population into a matrix of agricultural institutions that focused on political, economic, social, scientific and cultural efforts was of crucial importance for the planning schemes that emerged first as temporal measures in the context of the war economy during the First World War and then, in a more consolidated and lasting form, as a response to the farm crises of the 1920s and to the Great Depression and its impact on agriculture in the 1930s.Footnote 30 While the inter-war years have long been portrayed as an age of resurgent nationalisms and economic de-globalisation, recent historical scholarship has highlighted that the decades between the two world wars were also marked by intense forms of knowledge circulation across political boundaries and national borders.Footnote 31 This holds true for agricultural economics too, especially because the farm crises of the 1920s and the Great Depression provoked a search for international solutions to address the challenges of the time and thus generated mutual observations and transnational exchanges.Footnote 32 The founding of the International Association of Agricultural Economists in 1929 is a symbolic embodiment of this increased and intensified connectivity.
It was within this context that the notion of organisation was gradually adapted and integrated into the concept of planning.Footnote 33 Yet, the two concepts remained deeply connected, as the systematic organisation of the farming population was widely perceived as a necessary precondition for successful agricultural planning within democratic societies. The existence of an institutional matrix of consolidated agrarian organisations also meant that state planners had to account for the relative power of these intermediary institutions when governments began to bring farmers’ organisations and cooperatives into their planning schemes in the 1920s and 1930s. Agricultural associations and interest groups thus became integral parts of ‘corporatist’ inter-war political economies, and this ‘evolution toward corporatism’ was closely intertwined with the rise of planning.Footnote 34 For agricultural planners who were dedicated to democracy but at the same time felt the necessity of state action and planning to overcome the crisis of the early 1930s, there was one crucial question: how can planning, a seemingly elite function based on scientific research, technical expertise and state action, be combined with democracy, citizens’ participation and civic action? Or, as American agricultural economist Bushrod W. Allin asked in 1937: ‘Is planning compatible with democracy?’Footnote 35
Democratic Planning and Agriculture: Lessons from the Agrarian New Deal
As Allin’s question from 1937 already indicates, efforts to reconcile the perceived tensions between democracy and planning are observable among some of the leading agricultural economists from the 1930s onwards. These issues became burning questions, particularly in the liberal and democratic societies that more or less resisted the temptation of authoritarianism.Footnote 36 In the United States, the observation of autocratic tendencies in Europe and their luring power in domestic politics forced liberals to recast their views on planning and development and to search for a means ‘that would demonstrate that planned economic and social development was possible without autocratic methods’.Footnote 37 These struggles, however, were not confined to domestic debates and were instead indissolubly bound to global trajectories.Footnote 38 This section focuses on North America and presents some of the planning ideas that emerged out of the agrarian New Deal in the early 1930s, before examining how these ideas were received among the international community of agricultural economists in general and among Swiss exponents in particular.Footnote 39
In 1932, M.L. Wilson, an agricultural economist and leading figure in the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), presented a paper entitled ‘Economic Planning as Applied to Agriculture’ to the annual meeting of the Western Farm Economics Association. ‘The present situation’, Wilson declared, is ‘like a fault line in the earth’s crust, a shifting and adjusting due to stresses and strains in society which have been brought on by the machine age and the growth of rationalism, and changes in the ways and outlook of life’. The Great Depression was not just ‘a lull in business activities’, he maintained, but a ‘fault line in civilization’: a threshold towards a new age. ‘We have reached the end of laissez-faire’, Wilson said in reference to John Maynard Keynes, but the future was open, it was, in fact, frighteningly open. It was within this very moment of contingency that Wilson offered an intervention: ‘the urge to find a way out to conduct social experiments is upon us. The economic liberals in the United States are now looking upon the planning idea as a fruitful line of experimentation’.Footnote 40
In the years that followed, Wilson had ample opportunities to conduct social experiments based on the planning idea. In 1933, Wilson became chief economist in the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), shortly afterwards he served as assistant and under secretary from 1934 to 1940 in the USDA, and he was appointed as director of the extension of the USDA in 1940. Indeed, Wilson became one of the chief architects behind the agrarian New Deal, and the idea of planning loomed large throughout his whole career in the administration. Together with Henry A. Wallace, Howard R. Tolley or Bushrod Allin, he engaged in what they called ‘democratic planning’. These ‘agrarian intellectuals’ had deep concerns about authoritarianism and the state-led control mechanisms that existed in so many societies that had been unsettled by the Great Depression.Footnote 41 Thus, they envisioned a theory and practice of planning that seemed to be in tune with democracy and advanced what Wallace relentlessly called for: the ‘build[ing of] an economic democracy that will match our political democracy’.Footnote 42
But what exactly did these agrarian intellectuals mean when they spoke of democratic planning in agriculture? Their vision was articulated in a paper that Wilson delivered in 1940, entitled ‘A Theory of Agricultural Democracy’. This talk encapsulated some of the guiding ideas that framed agricultural planning in the early New Deal.Footnote 43 First, Wilson made clear that when he spoke of democracy, he referred to this concept as not a description of a ‘form of government’ but rather a ‘cultural pattern’. Drawing upon sources such as John Dewey’s philosophy, the cultural anthropology of Ruth Benedict or Robert and Helen Lynd’s community studies in Middletown, Wilson developed a concept of democracy that emphasised its cultural ‘embeddedness’ and its interaction with, as he wrote, ‘a number of processes going on all the time – education, the application of science through production technology, the administrative processes of government, the economic processes of exchange and distribution’.Footnote 44 Most of the studies conducted in economics, sociology or political science that were used as a basis for government planning were, according to Wilson, ‘segmental studies’ that were made ‘without any conscious recognition of the cultural patterns of which they are a part’. Facing these difficulties, planners may be tempted to stylise themselves as the great integrators of fragmented research, hammering out elaborated plans by synthesising specialised studies. Yet, Wilson was deeply sceptical of such an idea of planning.
Taking the concept of democracy as a cultural pattern seriously, he favoured another approach to planning, one that put participation at centre stage: ‘Participation is one of the most fundamental concepts or elements of the democratic pattern of culture’, Wilson proclaimed.Footnote 45 Reviewing the agricultural planning that he himself had shaped in the New Deal, Wilson explained how he and his colleagues had tried to translate these convictions into their planning approach. Basically, democratic planning in agriculture during the New Deal stemmed from four principles:
1. Decentralised administration through community, county and state farmer committees.
2. The use of referendums in determining administrative policies such as quotas and penalties.
3. The use of group discussions and other adult education techniques as a means of promoting understanding of the problems and procedures involved in planning.
4. Cooperative planning in policy formulation and localisation of programmes.Footnote 46
Wilson claimed that farmers’ committees, referendums, agricultural cooperatives and farm organisations that were seen as integral and active parts of the planning effort offer ‘not only opportunity for, but encourage and add prestige to participation in these activities at the community level’. Local farmers’ committees and the use of referendums, group discussions and adult education as well as participatory action research by scientists and citizens all grew out of Wilson’s belief that ‘Agricultural democracy has to grow out of the existing environment. It cannot be superimposed by any set of agricultural officials or social experts in Washington, or any other center of government or of research and learning.’ Planning thus was not merely called to respect democracy and the voice of those concerned by state planning but should also be about ‘stimulating the democratic process in the local community and on the different levels of government in the States, in the same proportion that development and responsibility are necessarily enlarged on the Federal level’.Footnote 47
While Wilson’s ideas on agricultural planning and democracy might have been the most elaborated and sophisticated, it is important to emphasise that his vision was shared by other New Dealers too, at least in broad terms. Howard R. Tolley, an influential economist and social scientist who shaped the agrarian New Deal and became the director of the Planning Division in the AAA, wrote in 1939:
There is a clear need, in a democracy, for direct farmer participation in the planning process, in order that the farmers may understand the work of the researchers, and in order that the researchers and planners may best understand the views and problems of the farmers and work with them in developing a practical program.Footnote 48
The idea that planning should be subject to deliberative and participatory processes and that the people affected by a decision should have a voice in making it was a view shared by Bushrod Allin from the USDA’s Division of State and Local Planning: ‘For planning in a democracy is not the making of a blueprint, with specifications fixed for all time’, Allin urged,
it is a social process in which the participation of the layman is as important as that of the expert. The layman’s function in the process, however, is not merely that of a blotter to absorb ‘wisdom’ and thereby become ‘educated’ by the expert. It is a two-way process by which each learns from the other and together produce a better plan than either one alone could have made.Footnote 49
Out of this milieu of agrarian intellectuals arose a distinctive concept of planning that differed in significant ways from the high modernist aspirations that many of their contemporaries associated with it. To be sure, Wilson, Wallace, Tolley and Allin were persuaded of the importance of modernist institutions and activities such as planning, scientific research, the active role of the state and progressive social reform, but they nevertheless did not exhibit blind faith in technocratic planning, science and the state. They were convinced that planning was essential for a modern democratic society and the modernisation of agriculture, but planning could only be successful if it involved progressive reform through citizen participation. Translated into the realm of agriculture, this meant that planning was based on bottom-up cooperation and deliberation among farming communities, researchers and administrators. The state, in their imagination, was to be a deliberative-participatory state whose planning and research activities were to be controlled and shaped by local farmer participation. It was only through this participation that scientific research and the state could act as genuine agents of progressive-democratic reform and narrow the gap between scientific and administrative elites and the farming population. Theirs was not so much a high modernist conception of planning but rather a low modernist vision.Footnote 50
This democratic commitment was more than a rhetoric device, yet it also had its blind spots. When reviewing the policies of the agrarian New Deal in 1941, the political scientist John D. Lewis portrayed the programmes and research emerging from the USDA as a ‘remarkable experiment in democratic planning’. So far, Lewis argued, planning had been regarded ‘as a matter for the experts’. The gap between experts and layman concerned by planning has led many observers ‘to regard the whole idea of systematic planning [. . .] as undemocratic in its general trend’ and as leading towards ‘bureaucratic centralization of responsibility’. Against the backdrop of this critical perception of the relationship between planning and democracy, Lewis acknowledged the orchestrated efforts of the agrarian intellectuals in the New Deal to reconcile economic planning with democratic participation:
Since the inauguration of the A.A.A. program, the Department has consistently attempted to base its more important action programs as much as possible on active farmer participation and farmer consent. Particularly since 1935, the Department has emphasized the importance of using the practical experience and local knowledge of farmers in both planning and administering agricultural programs.Footnote 51
For Lewis, the New Deal agricultural policy raised questions that stretched well beyond empirical planning, its challenges and its failures. In his eyes, the agrarian New Deal touched on the fundamental question of how planning in democracies was actually possible without hollowing out democratic values and principles, and what role associations and cooperatives should play in the democratic state. Political theory has long portrayed associations and pressure groups as ‘actual or potential centers of resistance to government encroachments’, Lewis argued, but in the light of the New Deal planning in agriculture, this view had tended to ‘subordinate the importance of the positive, creative role of government action and of the positive cooperative relationship that can be created between the state and other associations’. Many committees that the government itself called into existence, but also previously existing committees, were not solely ‘centers of resistance’ but rather ‘organs for positive collaboration in the making, interpreting, and administering of government policy’.Footnote 52
As much as the noble intentions of the agrarian New Dealers contributed to changing the relationship between the state and rural civil society, Lewis did not fall short of noticing that in many regions of the United States, especially in the South, there was a considerable gap between the democratic intentions of the planners and the realities of life on the farms. ‘In the greater part of nine or ten southern states’, Lewis wrote, ‘the determination to maintain white supremacy is obviously irreconcilable with any immediate realization of equal economic and political rights and opportunities for the Negro population’. In Lee County, Alabama, for instance, 65 per cent of all farmers were African American, 72 per cent were tenants and 53 per cent were sharecroppers, but in the county committee that was set up to debate and administer the land-use planning programme, there was no single African American person or sharecropper, and only a few tenants.Footnote 53 Thus, despite its emphasis on democratic participation in agricultural planning, the actual implementation of these ideas on the ground laid bare the structural racism, the patterns of discrimination and the class bias that shaped American society and that the agrarian New Dealers addressed only reluctantly at best.Footnote 54
Transatlantic Repercussions of Democratic Planning in Agriculture
Although this vision of democratic agricultural planning was met with strong opposition from different corners and was finally dismantled in 1942 by conservative anti–New Dealers in Congress and across rural America, its practical efforts remained in action long enough to attract attention from elsewhere.Footnote 55 Indeed, the agrarian New Deal – with its emphasis on long-range planning and control of production, resettlement and education programmes, as well as its fight against soil erosion and its projects in participatory social research – aroused the interest of many leftist observers and progressives, as well as agronomists, in Europe.Footnote 56 The International Conferences of Agricultural Economists provided one of the platforms to discuss the chances and limits of agricultural planning during the inter-war years and to reappraise the ideas of the agrarian New Dealers. At the fifth International Conference of Agricultural Economists, which was held at MacDonald College in Montreal in August 1938, Wilson was invited to speak on ‘The Social Implications of Economic Progress in Present-Day Agriculture’. In this lecture, Wilson described his trajectory from high modernist to low modernist inclinations:
I believed that ultimately technology would put the individual family farm at such a disadvantage that we should be led into some sort of industrially organized agriculture. I do not believe to-day that the trend in the United States is in that direction. It has turned out that the family-sized farm is capable of great engineering efficiency, and specialized plant and animal breeding can be performed by experts and the benefits of the efficiency widely disseminated.Footnote 57
Yet, Wilson emphasised that this particular version of modernised family farming was deeply tied to democratic planning in agriculture. Wilson confronted the international audience of agricultural economists with his contention that:
the present condition and the present trends involve the unavoidable implication of social planning. This is really no longer a debatable subject. It is a fact. [. . .] I believe that social planning, even of an extensive nature, is possible within the framework of genuine democracy. Planning in a democracy involves planning upon all the different levels of government. The policies upon which planning is based must of necessity be approved by a substantial majority of the citizens. In a democracy we still have much to learn in the way of devising new institutions and new mechanisms for making planning a product of the democratic process.Footnote 58
Essentially, Wilson explained to his international colleagues the key ideas of democratic planning that he and his fellow intellectuals at the USDA had developed and put into practice in previous years.
These planning ideas provoked ambivalent reactions within transnational networks of agricultural economists. The dialectics between ‘planning euphoria’ and ‘planning phobia’ were obviously not expressions of the post-war era, but their roots stretch back into the inter-war years.Footnote 59 While representatives of the National Socialist Reichsnährstand, such as Konrad Meyer, belittled attempts at democratic planning as piecemeal and ridiculous, and instead advocated for an authoritarian conception of ‘total planning’, others remained sceptical because they believed in the self-reforming forces of the market and questioned the capacity of the state to adequately plan both the economy and society.Footnote 60 Many made the concession that state intervention and planning were necessary as emergency measures but clearly favoured a rapid transition to the ‘free play of economic forces’. This is something that Carl E. Ladd, the Dean of the College of Agriculture at Cornell University, had already urged two years earlier: ‘The real danger lies in the attempts of emergency activities to perpetuate themselves as permanent institutions and so clutter up our economic system with clumsy and unwise centralized control and uneconomic processes.’Footnote 61
Low Modernist Agricultural Planning in Switzerland
While Wilson’s ideas were thus met with reservations from authoritarian and liberal camps alike, the connection between planning, democracy and the involvement of farmers and their organisations in agricultural policy was an issue that some Swiss agronomists and planners wrestled with at the very same time as Wilson gave his speech at the fifth International Congress of Agricultural Economists.Footnote 62 Wilson and his colleagues at the USDA were not unknown figures within the generation of Swiss agronomists who began to shape a new food and agricultural policy in the inter-war period. Many of the leading Swiss agricultural scientists, such as Albert Volkart, Georg Wiegner, Hans Bernhard and particularly Friedrich Traugott Wahlen, who was to become the leading architect of the New Agricultural Policy, had travelled to the United States in the inter-war years and studied the agricultural policies of the agrarian New Deal in some detail. Wahlen, for one, had left Switzerland in 1920 and become director of the Canadian Agricultural Experiment Stations in Ottawa shortly after, before returning to Switzerland in the late 1920s when he was appointed as director of the Agricultural Experiment Station in Zurich. Throughout the 1930s, he remained in close contact with many of his fellow agronomists and agricultural economists across the Atlantic and followed closely the agricultural policies of the New Deal.Footnote 63
It is not by accident that the Swiss agricultural economists and agronomists who attempted to address the crises of the 1930s looked across the Atlantic in search of inspiration. While there were also influential agricultural economists like Ernst Feisst who had, in the words of the German-American political scientist Carl J. Friedrich, a ‘Fascist bias’ and embraced a programme of authoritarian modernisation and technocratic planning inspired by fascist Italy and national-socialist Germany, others were more inclined to follow the low modernist path that the agrarian New Dealers in the United States had laid out.Footnote 64 Before pushing the analysis in this direction, however, it seems worthwhile to sketch some of the crucial structural challenges of Swiss agriculture and the major lines of conflict in agricultural policy during the inter-war years in order to understand why American planning ideas met with such resonance in Switzerland.
Obviously, Switzerland had a small, export-oriented and heavily industrialised economy, which meant that Swiss actors advocated for different measures in terms of agricultural and food policies than their American counterparts.Footnote 65 Swiss agricultural and food policies in the inter-war years were deeply shaped by the unsettling experiences of the First World War. The shattering of global markets and resulting price volatilities, the threat of food shortages, the menace of collective hunger and the social conflicts culminating in the General Strike of November 1918 unleashed an organisational effort throughout the agencies that were involved in food supply and agricultural production.Footnote 66 The turmoil of the war economy not only demonstrated the fragility of a food provisioning system that depended heavily on the functioning of global trade and the transport system but also generated a widespread awareness of the vulnerability of a society that directed its agricultural production towards global competitiveness while neglecting the domestic politics of food security. To combat the vulnerability of the economy, a three-pronged strategy of diversifying agricultural production systems, integrating economic associations into the corporative political economy and introducing the multilateral regulation of the international agricultural markets was regarded as the most promising way to create a more resilient agricultural sector whose key role was now defined in securing the food demands of the industrial society and the growing urban-industrial population.Footnote 67 As the economist Julius Landmann noted in his account on the ‘agricultural policy of the Swiss industrial State’ in 1928, this trend was far from a ‘Swiss peculiarity’ and instead mirrored an internationally visible trend in the ‘high-capitalist economic order’.Footnote 68 The Great Depression strongly hit the agricultural sector as the agricultural crises of the 1920s continued to haunt the farming population and its representatives in the emerging corporative political economy continued to search for a middle ground between the conflicting demands of the free-trade and export-oriented industrial bourgeoisie and the organised labour movement. It was within this context in the early 1930s that an alliance between industrial unions, employee’s associations and farmers’ associations launched the so-called crisis initiative, which demanded a more active and interventionist economic policy. Proponents of the initiative actively referred to the American New Deal, where ‘similar forms’ of a ‘comprehensive response to the crisis’ were set up.Footnote 69 Although the initiative was not endorsed in a public vote in the summer of 1935, the concerns expressed in it continued to be promoted by the so-called Richtlinienbewegung, a political and social movement that called for the active defence of democracy in the face of totalitarian regimes in Europe, struggled to find a balance between farmers’ and workers’ interests, and advocated social and economic planning as indispensable measures to deal with the ongoing crisis.Footnote 70
This multifaceted search for stability provided the backdrop against which agricultural planning in Switzerland gained traction and the agrarian New Deal in the United States began to ignite deep interest among Swiss observers. This attraction stemmed from the contemporary perception that the planning schemes developed in North America provided an example of planning in a democracy that appeared to be more in tune with the republican self-understanding of large segments of Swiss society. Moreover, they seemed to point to a third way between laissez-faire capitalism and a socialist planned economy. As the internationally renowned agricultural economist Ernst Laur noted in 1933:
We will not get through with laissez faire, laissez aller. Manchesterism is outlived and done. Certainly, we have not yet found the new solutions, but we must explain that they are not in socialism and not in communism [. . .]. But between these two extremes there is a middle line, and this line must be found and respected.Footnote 71
As Laurs’s words indicate, Swiss agricultural economists and agronomists were cautious in distancing their newly discovered fascination with planning from any resemblance to socialist planning. As early as 1933, the agronomist and teacher Walter Marbach noted that laissez-faire capitalism had resulted in intolerable social polarisations and in a ‘false and deficient allocation’ of goods that could only be countered by a ‘certain planned economy, although without leaning too much towards the exaggerated example of Russia’.Footnote 72 Wahlen equally went to great lengths to explain that Switzerland was not an ‘appropriate country for executing experiments in planned economy’ and that the planning that had become necessary was far from Soviet-style collectivisation.Footnote 73 American planning ideas were thus a source for legitimising the planning efforts that had allegedly become necessary and that appeared particularly compelling because they emerged out of democratic processes and were shaped by democratic means. In 1936, economist Wladimir Woytinsky wrote in the Union Review, the flagship journal of the Swiss Labor Union movement, that the agrarian New Deal provided a model for ‘a planned economy in a peculiar form’ that not only attempted ‘to direct agriculture’ but was also proof that a planned economy was achievable by ‘democratic means’.Footnote 74 This reconciliation between planning and democracy was also on the mind of Wahlen. As he reflected with the benefit of hindsight, by the mid-1930s the ‘fundamental need for some control of agricultural production’ was ‘hardly up for serious discussion anymore’. Even ‘the great democracies were intensively engaged in these questions’ and, he continued, ‘it is obvious that we all have cause to follow very closely the plans under discussion’.Footnote 75 With this, Wahlen undoubtedly meant the planning emerging during the agrarian New Deal in the United States.
It was Wahlen who launched the first systematic account of the so-called New Agricultural Policy in 1938 when he declared that the federal state required the active support of all farmers to contribute to the Swiss population’s food security. The state, Wahlen continued, was willing to guarantee farmers the ‘right to work’ and a ‘fair wage’, on the condition that they produced what the administration decided was required by consumers and according to the government’s ‘systematic production plans’.Footnote 76 In a massive effort to collect data on different regional agricultural production systems, Wahlen continued the research that Hans Bernhard, a professor for agricultural geography at the University of Zurich, had launched in the 1920s. Bernhard was well informed about the agrarian New Deal in the United States and had travelled to the country on several occasions throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Towards the end of the First World War, he had become the mastermind behind the Swiss Association for Industrial Agriculture and Internal Colonisation, and he used this position to develop a systematic cadastral land register that would deliver all necessary information on the resources and potential of agricultural production in every Swiss commune.Footnote 77 Bernhard’s vision of a ‘rationalisation of the agricultural economic space’ led to a comprehensive mapping of farm type areas and settlement structures, as well as the identification of land reclamation areas and transport and shipping networks across Switzerland.Footnote 78 Bernhard’s activities resembled many of the social engineering projects that could be found across different Western societies in the inter-war years, linking land reclamation activities with resettlement, a new understanding of rural–urban and agricultural–industrial relations and social improvement.Footnote 79 Wahlen in many ways built upon this tradition, whose Swedish variation has been aptly described as the ‘romanticism of the drawing board’.Footnote 80 The systematic scientific analysis of agricultural resources and their most favourable allocation were regarded as crucial means for agricultural production planning. Anticipating the challenges of agriculture and food production in the upcoming war economy, Wahlen declared in 1939 that such ‘detailed knowledge is an indispensable precondition for the planning of agricultural production’ because it would enable a ‘differentiated handling of the different regions regarding their natural, economic, settlement-related and sociological conditions’.Footnote 81 Looking back at these ventures in the post-war era, Wahlen wrote that almost
every meadow, every field, and every pasture in Switzerland has been inspected and assessed by an expert. The working conditions and tractive power, the availability of machinery and equipment, and the possibilities for storing agricultural products were also examined and recorded in the cadastre.Footnote 82
With his confidence about scientific progress and the expansion of production, the mastery of nature and the rational design of agricultural production plans, Wahlen seems to personify what James C. Scott has called ‘high modernism’.Footnote 83 Yet, if we take a closer look at how these planning schemes were implemented and examine the intentions of their architects, a more nuanced picture of agricultural planning in Switzerland becomes visible. While Wahlen was deeply persuaded of the positive effects of planning, scientific agricultural research and technological progress as crucial instruments to foster agricultural productivity, he distanced himself from the authoritarian and top-down measures that were favoured by some of his colleagues in the Division of Agriculture of the Swiss government’s Department of the Economy, especially Ernst Feisst. In his own words, Wahlen thought it necessary ‘not so much to decree the indispensable interventions in economic freedom from above, but to let the order grow out of the sense of responsibility of each individual farmer himself as far as possible, and to ensure that this sense of responsibility is awakened and strengthened through tireless education’.Footnote 84 While the representatives of the Federal States’ Division of Agriculture were clearly willing to impose a structure of control and long-range planning upon agriculture and organised farming interests, and also made clear that a return to ‘full freedom of production’ would be ‘an illusion’ even after the war, Wahlen nevertheless favoured an approach that stressed a cooperative relationship in the making, interpreting, and administering of government planning in agriculture.Footnote 85 In contrast to the tendency towards centralised planning that proliferated throughout many wartime economies, Wahlen endorsed a decentralised approach that built upon the strong federalist tradition in Swiss political culture that was itself a result of a transatlantic dialogue in the Age of the Atlantic Revolutions.Footnote 86 Moreover, Wahlen’s vision endeavoured to integrate major agrarian associations, local farmers’ organisations, communities and the cantons in the planning of agricultural production. In his view, planning should therefore be designed ‘not in a centralised manner, but with the extensive involvement of our state self-governing bodies, the cantons and the municipalities, as well as with the participation of professional organisations’.Footnote 87
Admittedly, Wahlen had deep faith in science, planning, technology and an activist state. At the same time, however, he rejected crucial aspects of the ‘catechism of high modernist agriculture’. Instead of dismissing local knowledge and supporting the implementation of technocratic visions of modern agriculture from above, he tried to involve the existing farmers’ associations and organisations in his plans of agricultural modernisation and relentlessly called for democratic deliberation as the central method for persuading farmers to accept the states’ agricultural production plans.Footnote 88 Rooted in a humanistic and republican tradition, he had deep respect for the farmers’ knowledge upon which agricultural planning depended because farming was so closely embedded within local climatic, topographic and pedological systems. Moreover, as director of the Agricultural Experiment Station in Zurich, Wahlen was part of a broader culture of participative and cooperative scientific research that his predecessor Albert Volkart had developed along with Gustave Martinet at the turn of the century.Footnote 89 Continuing this legacy, Wahlen was clearly inclined to bridge the gap between scientific experts and citizen-farmers to advance progressive reforms in agricultural production. Because of this, Wahlen rather resembled the low modernist agrarian intellectuals that assembled around Wilson on the other side of the Atlantic. Writing in hindsight on his own role in the planning of agricultural production in Switzerland in the late 1930s and early 1940s and on its interconnectedness to the agrarian New Deal in North America, Wahlen stressed the fact that ‘the United States followed very similar paths as Switzerland did’ and that the US ‘agricultural regulatory regime displays striking similarities’ to the proposals that had been set up in the course of the New Agricultural Policy in Switzerland from the late 1930s onwards.Footnote 90
Conclusions
This article has explored the transatlantic entanglements of low modernist democratic planning in agriculture by following the intellectual currents that linked agricultural planners in Switzerland and the United States in the inter-war years. Despite all the variations and the specific characteristics of agricultural planning ideas that emerged in the United States and Switzerland in the inter-war period, there were also common features resulting from mutual observations and transnational borrowings. The architects of the American agricultural New Deal were equally interested in European agricultural policies, as Swiss agronomists looked across the Atlantic in search of inspiration for setting up their New Agricultural Policy in the 1930s. Following these traces of knowledge transfer on planning provides a more nuanced picture of planning in agriculture that is no longer solely centred on the nation-state but that accounts for the currents of knowledge that run across its mental and territorial borders. Moreover, this approach makes visible key epistemic patterns in the history of planning that found their common gravitation field in struggling with the reconciliation of planning and democracy. Thus, the historical analysis of the entanglements between US and Swiss agricultural planning schemes in the inter-war years reveals that within both societies, high modernist, authoritarian and technocratic conceptions of planning did appear and did play a role, but that they were curtailed by counter-movements and alternative planning visions. In their place, low modernist conceptions of planning emerged, conceptions that stressed democratic participation and decentralised structures and the cooperation between farmers, farmers’ associations, scientists and administrators – a cooperation that was, of course, hard-fought and riddled with conflict in practice.
In some ways, the contested early history of agricultural planning in North America and Switzerland in the inter-war period already hints towards a development in the history of planning that became more important in the post-war era and found one of its most intriguing conceptions in Karl Mannheim’s posthumously published Freedom, Power and Democratic Planning. As Mannheim wrote in 1947, echoing some of the essential assumptions that low modernist agricultural planners emphasised earlier, the quest for ‘the principles of a society that is planned yet democratic’ would have to navigate in the waters ‘beyond Laissez-Faire or Total Regimentation on the one hand, and beyond the alternatives of Fascism or Communism on the other’. The ‘Third Way’ that Mannheim proposed, which called for an incorporation of ‘the painful experiences of the last decades into a new pattern of Democracy’, required analysis of the ‘interdependence’ between ‘economic structure’ and the ‘alterations on the political and cultural level’ as the indispensable precondition for outlining the ‘essentials of democratic planning’.Footnote 91 With its emphasis on the interconnections between political, social, economic and cultural factors in shaping democratic planning, Mannheim’s approach may be situated in an intellectual lineage that stretches back to the struggles that agricultural planners fought in the inter-war period. Beyond this, many of the agrarian intellectuals whose reciprocal observations across the Atlantic reshaped thinking and policies of agricultural planning in the 1930s and 1940s embarked upon careers in international rural development in the post-war era. After continuing his work at the USDA’s Bureau of Agricultural Economics until 1953, Wilson was involved in the international rural development programmes of the Ford Foundation, particularly in India. Tolley helped to organise the Conference on Food and Agriculture in Hot Springs in 1943 that became the nucleus for the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), where Tolley worked subsequently as chief economist from 1946 to 1951. At the FAO, Tolley was joined by Wahlen, who took the office of Director of the Division of Agriculture at the FAO in 1949.Footnote 92
Beyond making visible this longer trajectory as well as the transnational connections that shaped the intellectual history of planning, focusing on democratic planning in agriculture also indicates that state planners were indispensably dependent on intermediary organisations and associations, as well as cooperatives that mediated between government offices and the farmers. They explained the purposes, aims and methods of planning to farming communities and became quasi-executive organs of the government’s agricultural policies. However, they still depended on the support of their grassroots members (individual farmers) and often became outlets for farmers’ anger and opposition towards the state. Thus far, these obscure entanglements and interactions within the institutional matrix of interest groups and associations of civil society, scientific institutions and state agencies have received little historiographical attention, yet they seem to be crucial for understanding the contested nature of agricultural planning on the ground. It seems that the countless organisations and intermediary bodies that states attempted to harness for national planning schemes turned out to be sand in the machinery of planning, rather than oil. In the post-war years, chief planners such as Wahlen were often retrospectively celebrated as miracle-men who devoted their intellectual capacities and their tireless energy to ensuring a rise in food production and organising the resources necessary to fight the danger of hunger and food shortages during the war.Footnote 93 According to these mythologised narratives, they contributed to national unity and independence in an era of totalitarian menace. Planning is usually a crucial element in these narratives as it is portrayed as the symbol of intellectual mastery and sovereign action within a context of disruption and crisis and as a means to unite the nation behind the war effort.Footnote 94 Yet, such unifying heroic narratives conceal the conflicts that planning ideas have triggered. Beyond the mythical and heroic narratives of control and management, there lies a history of contestation regarding the purpose, means and social, economic and political implications of planning. This contested nature of planning is at least partly responsible for the fact that agricultural planning remained in many ways scattered, piecemeal, pluralistic, incremental and dispersive. George B. Galloway of the American Planning Association likened the planning efforts of the New Deal polemically to ‘Don Quixote who mounted his horse and rode off in all directions at once’.Footnote 95 While rather exaggerated, this metaphor hints at the fact that within complex modern societies, there were many competing priorities that planners were inclined to channel and control, and that the history of planning is indeed shaped by more than one quixotic episode. But, at the same time, historical examinations of these quixotic episodes provide valuable insights that sit at the crossroads of the history of planning, agriculture and democracy.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Philipp Müller, Peter Moser, Andreas Stucki, Siobhán Hearne and the colleagues contributing to this Forum as well as those participating at the conferences ‘Planning, a Global Political Religion?’ at the University of Strasbourg/Sciences Po Strasbourg in 2021 and the ‘Atelier Chaire Alfred Grosser’ at Science Po in Paris in 2024 for their thoughtful comments and for their valuable criticisms on earlier drafts of this article.
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