The Farmer's Benevolent Trust

Americans have always regarded farming as a special calling one<br/>imbued with the Jeffersonian values of individualism and self-<br/>sufficiency. As Victoria Saker Woeste demonstrates farming's<br/>cultural image continued to shape Americans' expectations of<br/>rural society long after industrialization radically transformed<br/>the business of agriculture. Even as farmers enthusiastically<br/>embraced cooperative marketing to create unprecedented industry-<br/>wide monopolies and control prices they claimed they were simply<br/>preserving their traditional place in society. In fact the new<br/>legal form of cooperation far outpaced judicial and legislative<br/>developments at both the state and federal levels resulting in a<br/>legal and political struggle to redefine the place of agriculture<br/>in the industrial market.<br/>Woeste shows that farmers were adept at both borrowing such<br/>legal forms as the corporate trust for their own purposes and<br/>obtaining legislative recognition of the new cooperative style.<br/>In the process however the first rule of capitalism - every<br/>person for him- or herself - trumped the traditional principle of<br/>cooperation. After 1922 state and federal law wholly endorsed<br/>cooperation's new form. Indeed says Woeste because of its<br/>corporate roots this model of cooperation fit so neatly with the<br/>regulatory paradigms of the first half of the twentieth century<br/>that it became an essential policy of the modern administrative<br/>state.