Farm Security Administration
Rural Health Grant
The Farm Security Administration was one of several New Deal agencies whose collective purpose was to provide for Americans left indigent by the massive economic collapse of the 1930s. The agency helped low-income farmers, sharecroppers, and migrant workers to form farming cooperatives, created model resettlement communities, and provided tenant farmers and sharecroppers with their own land.
During the course of its rehabilitation work, the FSA learned that as many as half of all loan defaults were due to ill health. In response, the agency began a medical care program that the Saturday Evening Post labeled "a gigantic rehearsal" for national health insurance. At its peak, the FSA programs provided some 650,000 people and more than a million migrant workers with needed medical care, and represented the New Deal's most significant involvement in health care delivery. The Farm Security Administration programs were terminated in 1946
Source: New Deal Medicine: The Rural Health Programs of the Farm Security Administration, by Michael R. Grey, Johns Hopkins University.
Depression-era girl after a long day of grueling farm work.
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1930's farmer's wife in her Sunday clothes proudly displays the farm's premium asset.
