The Farmer's Benevolent Trust

Law and Agricultural Cooperation in Industrial America, 1865-1945

Nonfiction, Social & Cultural Studies, Political Science, Politics, Labour & Industrial Relations, History, Americas, United States, 20th Century
Cover of the book The Farmer's Benevolent Trust by Victoria Saker Woeste, The University of North Carolina Press
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Author: Victoria Saker Woeste ISBN: 9780807867112
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press Publication: November 9, 2000
Imprint: The University of North Carolina Press Language: English
Author: Victoria Saker Woeste
ISBN: 9780807867112
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Publication: November 9, 2000
Imprint: The University of North Carolina Press
Language: English

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

View on Amazon View on AbeBooks View on Kobo View on B.Depository View on eBay View on Walmart

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

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