Faced with a depression unparalleled in the history of the United States, in the winter of 1933 newly-elected President Franklin Delano Roosevelt embarked upon an ambitious yet politically pragmatic series of programs designed to jump-start the American economy from crisis to credibility. This series of programs came to be known as "The New Deal." Central to the advisor-initiated policies of the New Deal was the belief held by Mr. Roosevelt that the key to American economic recovery lay in the agricultural sector. Specifically, the President and his inner circle of economic advisors contended that by increasing agricultural income, combined with limited inflation and modest federal spending for relief and construction, his administration could pull the country out of the deep doldrums it had slipped into during the just ended, anti-federal-activism presidency of Herbert Hoover. To that end, during his first one hundred days in office, the thoroughly activist-oriented president pushed through a pliant Congress the Agricultural Adjustment Act - and brought into being the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, or AAA.
It is important to know just how badly off the country was during this period, just four years into the twelve-year cycle of economic misery that has come to be termed "The Great Depression." Beginning with the infamous Stock Market Crash of October 1929 - "Black Monday," when so many fortunes were lost in a single day that legends of the suddenly ex-wealthy leaping from the skyscrapers of New York persist to this day - since then the nation had been on a downward economic slide. The world economy was going down with it; whether one brought down the other, or they all sank together, is still a matter of debate. Europe had never fully recovered from the physical, manpower, psychological and economic ravages of The Great War, ended only a decade earlier. But the United States had suffered little from that confli...