| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.5 | The History Cooperative

Michael Johnston Grant. Down and Out on the Family Farm: Rural Rehabilitation in the Great Plains, 1929–1945. (Our Sustainable Future, number 15.) Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 2002. Pp. x, 232. $39.95.
Michael Johnston Grant studies the New Deal's rural rehabilitation programs in the four Plains states of Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, and North Dakota. What, he asks, did these programs mean for the thousands of farmers eking out a living in the depression? Why did they fail to lift them out of a grim, near-subsistence life and into the ranks of middle-class farm owners?	1
Grant identifies two groups of vulnerable farmers. One was made up of the region's "borderline" farmers who, with small farms, depleted soils, heavy debts, and little equipment, grossed less than $1,000 a year. Tenant farmers were the second. For some renters, tenancy was a way to avoid mortgage burdens and maintain mobility, but in general it meant poverty and insecurity. Even before the 1930s, these farmers were struggling to stay in farming because of the competitive pressures to expand the scale of mechanized wheat and grain farming in the Great Plains. The brutal price declines and environmental disasters of the 1930s reduced them to a miserable struggle for survival.	. . .

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