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This paper aims to study the role of non-corporeal Actant theory in historical research through a case study of the trajectory of the New Deal as one of the foremost institutions in the USA since its inception in the early 1930s.

The authors follow the trajectory of the New Deal through a focus on Vice President Henry A. Wallace. Drawing on ANTi-History, the authors view history as a powerful discourse for organizing understandings of the past and non-corporeal Actants as a key influence on making sense of (past) events.

The authors conclude that non-corporeal Actants influence the shaping of management and organization studies that serve paradoxically to obfuscate history and its relationship to the past.

The authors drew on a series of published studies of Henry Wallace and archival material in the Roosevelt Library, but the study would benefit from an in-depth analysis of the Wallace archives.

The authors reveal the influences of non-corporeal Actants as a method for dealing with the past. The authors do this through the use of ANTi-History as a method of historical analysis.

The past is an important source of understanding of the present and future; this innovative approach increases the potential to understand.

Decisions are often black boxes. Non-Corporeal Actants are a new tool with which to see the underlying inputs of choice.

The Congress of Industrial Organizations’ (CIO) choice to build a labor party in New York was facilitated by an unusual institutional context that permitted unions to back a labor party while simultaneously endorsing other party's candidates. Though the CIO–ALP (American Labor Party) became a major political force in New York, CIO links to the party were ultimately severed after factions in the CIO–ALP opted to back a third party presidential candidacy. The rise and fall of the CIO–ALP highlights the need to be attentive to institutional context when explaining organized labor's “exceptional” choice to forgo building a national labor party in the United States.

As academic fields increasingly turn to social action and seek partnerships with groups beyond the academy, so too are we looking for guidance. Rural sociology developed out of applying research to social action and within this field was a unique unit. The purpose of this paper is to present a history of the Division of Farm Population and Rural Life, which was part of the US Department of Agriculture from 1919 to 1953 was a pioneer in applying sociological knowledge to policy and action.

This article looks back to the history of this unit to examine the lessons to be learned.

Placing these lessons within the context of contemporary issues underscores the continuing relevance of this historical experience.

The issues surrounding engaging external partners are both particularistic and universal. However, without an historical sense of the challenges, each time we encounter them, the challenges feel new and somehow unique. This article looks back to history to examine lessons that can be learned. Placing these lessons within the context of contemporary issues underscores relevance of the historical experience from events and people that occurred several generations of professionals ago.

Washington.—The Government of the United States at the Copenhagen Conference of the Food and Agricultural Organisation last September firmly supported the twin objectives of Sir John Orr's World Food Hoard proposals of raising the diets of all nations to a health standard and of stabilising agricultural prices at levels fair alike to both producers and consumers. Sir John's specific proposal for a World Food Board was not considered at Copenhagen. Instead, the U.S., the United Kingdom and all other nations represented at Copenhagen unanimously agreed to refer the whole question to a 17‐nation Preparatory Commission which met in Washington from October 28th to January 24th. The Commission was specifically instructed by the terms of reference to consider Sir John's proposal and any other alternative proposals which might be offered. The preparatory commission in its recommendations followed the instructions in the terms of reference and its final recommendations as made public on January 24th containing little of the specific machinery of the original proposals of Sir John's. But the twin objectives of Sir John's proposals were retained in the final recommendations. Had a show down come to Sir John's proposals at Copenhagen, the U.S. would have opposed it. Of this there can be no doubt. As early as August 9th, a month before the Copenhagen Conference, the U.S. Department of State issued a public statement on the Orr proposals. Any doubt as to the U.S. position was dispelled by Under Secretary of Agriculture Norris E. Dodd, who was chief American delegate at both Copenhagen and Washington. In his opening speech before the preparatory commission in Washington on October 28th, Mr. Dodd gave four reasons why the U.S. opposed the Orr proposal. He said: “First, we consider it doubtful whether a World Food Board or any similar device would, by itself, be adequate to deal with the effect that widespread government intervention threatens to have upon the agricultural demand and supply situation over the world once the present emergency has come to an end. Second, we consider it doubtful whether any combination of buffer‐stock and surplus‐disposal operations which contemplates the establishment of a two‐price system can be operated successfully without quantitative controls of supply. In our view such controls are not adequately provided for. Third, there is the fact that price, production and distribution problems differ greatly between different commodities and at different times. An over‐all body such as the proposed World Food Board would not suffice for dealing effectively with these so different and rapidly changing problems, which ought to be dealt with by special negotiations, commodity by commodity. Fourth, Governments are not likely to place the large funds needed for financing such a plan in the hands of an international agency over whose operations and price policy they would have little or no control. In view of these considerations, we believe that it is fortunate that the Copenhagen Conference has given this Commission a free hand to consider alternative machinery for achieving the basic objectives which we all support.” The original Orr proposals called for an internationally‐managed and internationally‐financed World Food Board. It would have bought and sold exportable surpluses at agreed minimum and maximum prices, thus providing a buffer‐stock against fluctuation in price and supply. Excess supplies under the Orr plan were to be sold cheaply to feed chronically malnourished people. FAO would work with such nations and with other international argencics to build producing and buying power so as to remove the underlying causes of poor diets. A statement by Under Secretary of Agriculture Mr. Norris E. Dodd, made on January 24th in connection with the report of the FAO Preparatory Commission on the food proposals, said, in part: “The principal ideas which the U.S. has advanced in the Commission are: (1) That the problems of better diets and price stabilisation mustbe approached in connection with the general expansion of production, employment, trade and consumption, as envisaged in the proposals for an International Trade Organisation, which we consider as complementary to the FAO programme. (2) That particular problems of price stabilisation can best be met through separate but co‐ordinated international agreements covering the specific commodities affected, within the general framework of principles for such agreements provided in the proposed ITO. (3) That under such commodity agreements the participating nations should consider methods of using excess supplies to support special food programmes to improve the diets of the most needy groups in connection with long‐term development plans designed to overcome the causes of malnutrition. (4) That the co‐ordination of national agricultural and nutritional programmes is so important the FAO should bring about annual consultation upon such programmes among the responsible national officials.” The principal U.S. proposals incorporated in the final report and recommendations of the FAO Preparatory Commission published on January 24th may be summarised as follows: The international commodity agreement approach to the stabilisation problem. The use of excess supplies under commodity agreements to support supplemental food programmes for vulnerable groups. Annual consultation of national agricultural and nutritional officials for the purpose of bringing about co‐ordination and integration of national programmes. Appointment of an interim co‐ordinating committee on international commodity agreements to bridge the gap between FAO and the projected International Trade Organisation. Acceptance in the final report of the American proposal for international commodity agreements may be construed as not merely an American victory since the commodity agreements would be negotiated within the framework of the proposed International Trade Organisation. Governments of 18 nations are represented on the ITO Preparatory Committee which met in London simultaneously with the FAO Preparatory Commission sessions in Washington. Here is the basic difference between the Orr World Food Hoard proposals and the final recommendation. Under a commodity agreement, such as provided for in the final report, each nation holds its own reserves, and finances its own operations. It provides for a co‐ordinated system of nationally managed and nationally financed buffer stocks of individual commodities. The Orr proposal envisaged an internationally managed and internationally financed World Food Board operating in many commodities. The U.S. position with reference to tieing in ITO with FAO was set out fully by Mr. Dodd in his October 28th speech before the FAO Preparatory Commission. Mr. Dodd said: “In putting forward its suggestions for an International Trade Organisation, the Government of the United States has had in mind the importance of securing— with the help of a reduction in trade barriers and other measures—a world‐wide expansion in employment, production, trade and consumption. We consider that action toward this end is of fundamental importance to the achievement of the objectives which this (Prepara‐tary) Commission is considering… It is the considered view of the United States Government that the ITO proposals provide a useful starling point for the deliberations of this Commission.” Previous U.S. experience in attempting to solve the riddle of farm surplus in the midst of hunger has been uneven and spotty. Perhaps the worst failure in this regard was the ill‐fated Federal Farm Board created in 1929 to arrest the drastic decline in farm prices. The Board advanced large sums to farmers' co‐operatives which extended loans to its member co‐operatives to induce farmers to withhold wheat and cotton from the market, without, however, controlling production. The Farm Board finally concluded that no such scheme could succeed without control over production, and production control therefore became a salient feature of the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933. This Act was amended in 1936 to meet the objections of the U.S. Supreme Court, which held it unconstitutional, but the essential requirement of control over production was retained and remains in effect to‐day. The Commodity Credit Corporation, a Government buying and selling agency created in 1933, has succeeded where the Farm Board failed, because the Government has exercised a degree of control over production. At Copenhagen last September, Mr. Dodd referred to the success of the Commodity Credit Corporation in these words: “Some people have expressed fear that stabilisation of farm prices would keep food prices above the reach of many consumers, but in the United States we have used the Commodity Credit Corporation effectively to protect farm prices, and food consumption, meantime, has increased. Furthermore, Commodity Credit stocks have served as reserves against years of bad weather and poor crops—reserves that were welcome indeed during the last war.” The Biblical idea of Joseph—of an ever‐normal granary—wherein surplus farm supplies are carried over from years of good harvest as a reserve against lean years of crop failure and hunger war and popularised in the United States by Mr. Henry A. Wallace during his service as Secretary of Agriculture, 1933–40. Sir John's World Food Board proposal also envisaged this evernormal granary concept, but failed of adoption because of the heavy expense involved, together with lack of adequate controls over production. It was this absence of production control in the Orr plan that led the U.S. to oppose the Orr plan, even though the country was in sympathy with its humanitarian objectives of raising living standards through expansion of consumption.

Iowa City is located on banks of the Iowa River in a gently rolling region in the eastern half of Iowa, about 250 miles west of Chicago. It was the state capital until 1858, when the government was moved to a more central location in Des Moines. In 1919, the year the Frank H. Knight family moved to Iowa City, it was a small university community of about 15,000. No doubt Knight and his wife Minerva found it a pleasant enough place to live and raise their young family. To Frank, the town and surrounding area must have seemed much like that of Bloomington, IL, near where he was born and raised. For the first few years in Iowa City the Knight family lived in an 1890s vintage house close to the campus, and just around the corner from a public elementary school.³

We document how inflation expectations evolved in the United States during the fall of 1933 using narrative evidence from historical news accounts and the forecasts of contemporary business analysts. We find that inflation expectations, after rising substantially during the spring of 1933, moderated in the fall in response to mixed messages from the Roosevelt Administration. The narrative accounts and our econometric model connect the dramatic swings in output growth in 1933 – the rapid recovery in the spring and the setback in the fall – to these sudden movements in inflation expectations.

This chapter discusses the “seigniorage argument” in favor of public money issuance, according to which public finances could be improved if the state more fully exercised the privilege of money creation, which is, today, largely shared with private banks. This point was made in the 1930s by several proponents of the “100% money” reform scheme, such as Henry Simons of the University of Chicago, Lauchlin Currie of Harvard and Irving Fisher of Yale, who called for a full-reserve requirement in lawful money behind checking deposits. One of their claims was that, by returning all seigniorage profit to the state, such reform would allow a significant reduction of the national debt. In academic debates, however, following a criticism first made by Albert G. Hart of the University of Chicago in 1935, this argument has generally been discarded as wholly illusory. Hart argued that, because the state, under a 100% system, would be likely to pay the banks a subsidy for managing checking accounts, no substantial debt reduction could possibly be expected to follow. The 100% money proponents never answered Hart’s criticism, whose conclusion has often been considered as definitive in the literature. However, a detailed study of the subject reveals that Hart’s analysis itself appears to be questionable on at least two grounds: the first pertains to the sources of the seigniorage benefit, the other to its distribution. This chapter concludes that the “seigniorage argument” of the 100% money authors may not have been entirely unfounded.

This paper discusses the American debate over price controls and economic stabilization after World War II, when the transition from a war economy to a peace economy was characterized by bottlenecks in the productive system and shortages of food and other basic consumer goods, directly affecting the living standard of the population, the public opinion, and political discourse. Specifically, we will focus on the economist Franco Modigliani and his proposal for a “Plan to meet the problem of rising meat and other food prices without bureaucratic controls.” The plan prepared by Modigliani in October 1947 was based on a system of taxes and subsidies to foster a proper distribution of disposable income and warrant a minimum meat consumption for each individual without encroaching market mechanisms and consumers’ freedom. We will discuss the contents of the plan and its further refinements, and the reactions it prompted from fellow economists, the public opinion, and the political world. Although the Plan was not eventually implemented, it was an important initiative for several reasons: first, it showed the increasing importance of fiscal policy among postwar government tools of intervention in the economic sphere; second, it showed a third way between direct government intervention and full-fledged laissez faire, in tune with the postwar political climate; third, it proposed a Keynesian macroeconomic approach to price and income stabilization, strongly based on econometric and microeconomic foundations. The Meat Plan was thus a fundamental step in Modigliani’s effort to build the “neoclassical synthesis” between Keynesian and Neoclassical economics, which would deeply influence his own career and the evolution of academic studies and government practices in the United States.

This chapter opens with a brief historical account of the vision and development of the land grant college and university system. This account begins to frame the land grant model as an important American social innovation. Next, the legacy of the land grant system as a social innovation is extended through a review of the role the Cooperative Extension System in enacting the New Deal during the Great Depression era. The topic culminates in the chapter with a critical exploration of the revenue-driven university technology transfer system that is currently in place and presents an alternative model that is anchored in the principles and practices of social entrepreneurship. Land grant colleges and universities are positioned as key agents in advancing such an alternative model, which is consistent with the historical role these institutions have played in advancing the economic and social interests of the nation.