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Resettlement Administration
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The Resettlement Administration (RA) was a U.S. federal agency that, between April 1935 and December 1936, relocated struggling urban and rural families to communities planned by the federal government.
The RA was the brainchild of Rexford G. Tugwell, an economics professor at Columbia University, who became an advisor to Franklin D. Roosevelt during the latter's successful campaign for the presidency in 1932 and then held positions in the United States Department of Agriculture.
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Encyclopedia
The Resettlement Administration (RA) was a U.S. federal agency that, between April 1935 and December 1936, relocated struggling urban and rural families to communities planned by the federal government.
The RA was the brainchild of Rexford G. Tugwell, an economics professor at Columbia University, who became an advisor to Franklin D. Roosevelt during the latter's successful campaign for the presidency in 1932 and then held positions in the United States Department of Agriculture. Roosevelt established the RA under Executive Order 7027, and Tugwell became its first and only head. In the face of Congressional criticism, in January 1937 it was folded into a new body, the Farm Security Administration (FSA), which operated until 1942.
The RA worked with nearly 200 communities on its projects, notably including:
- Cahaba Village in Trussville, Alabama (begun by the Works Progress Administration)
- Jersey Homesteads (begun by the Division of Subsistence Homesteads)
- Greenbelt, Maryland, completely planned and constructed by the RA outside Washington, D.C.
- Greendale, Wisconsin, another new town built by the RA, outside Milwaukee, Wisconsin
- Greenhills, Ohio, the third of the RA's new towns, built outside Cincinnati, Ohio
- Hickory Ridge, Virginia (now Prince William Forest Park)
- Greenbrook, New Jersey (planned by the RA but never built)
The RA also funded projects recording aspects of its work and context, including:
- The Photography Project, which documented the rural poverty of the Great Depression, producing thousands of images that are now stored and available at the Library of Congress
- The Film Project, which produced two documentaries about farm life directed by Pare Lorentz, The River and The Plow That Broke the Plains;
- Sidney Robertson Cowell's recordings of folk songs, conducted during the summer of 1937, sponsored by the RA's Special Skills Division, and now stored at the University of Wisconsin.
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