Herbert Agar andFree America: A Jeffersonian Alternative to the New Deal

Abstract

In analyzing the thought of the 1930s, historians have usually concentrated on the reactions of various liberal and leftist critics of Roosevelt's New Deal reform programs. A few, however, have stressed that in opposition both to the New Deal's regulated welfare capitalism and to the left's many-faceted demands for a more openly radical program, the period also witnessed some significant theorizing that remained conservative and even reactionary. Considerable attention, for instance, has been given to the Nashville Agrarians who in November 1930 published I'll Take My Stand, their ardent manifesto of Southern cultural independence from the capitalistic, urban-industrial north. Yet it is not so well known that the Jeffersonian social theory they espoused was the basis for a broader, national effort to promote the decentralization of American government and industry and to foster greater economic self-sufficiency through a wider distribution of property. For ten years, 1937–1947, the journal Free America served as an organ for this “decentralist” movement.