| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Virgil W. Dean. An Opportunity Lost: The Truman Administration and the Farm Policy Debate. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. 2006. Pp. xv, 275. $39.95.
The United States emerged from World War II in rare form. Unlike other major combatants, America's industrial and agricultural infrastructure was unscathed and ready for expansion. Virgil W. Dean explores the tumultuous postwar struggle to craft a new national farm policy to fit the transformed countryside. Like other essential industries, American farms had received generous government assistance during the war to boost production. In the postwar era, farmers feared an agricultural depression with wartime farm supports slated to end in late 1948.	1
The hub of this book is the legendary 1948 presidential election. During the campaign President Harry S. Truman attacked the Republican-led "Do Nothing" 80th Congress, charging it with putting "a pitchfork in the farmer's back" (p. 104). Truman's secretary of agriculture, Charles Brannan, fallaciously claimed the GOP would end the farm program that farmers had depended on since the early New Deal. Both Truman and Brannan interpreted the Democrats' winning of the White House and Capitol Hill that year as a mandate for extending liberal Fair Deal programs in postwar America. A farmer himself, Truman gave his secretary of agriculture free rein to create a new agricultural policy. In early 1949 Brannan proposed to substitute market price supports with direct income payments to farmers. His plan set ceilings on the amount a farmer could receive and limited the program to farmers who did not exceed a set production mark. The Brannan Plan was supposed to foster the "family-sized farm" while providing affordable food for American consumers.	. . .

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