The Farmer's Benevolent Trust
Law and Agricultural Cooperation in Industrial America, 1865-1945
By Victoria Saker Woeste
392 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 16 illus., 22 tables, 4 maps, 4 figs., appends., notes, bibl., index
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Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8078-4731-2
Published: September 1998 -
eBook ISBN: 978-0-8078-6711-2
Published: November 2000
Studies in Legal History
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Awards & distinctions
2000 J. Willard Hurst Prize, Law & Society Association
A 1999 Choice Outstanding Academic Title
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.
About the Author
Victoria Saker Woeste is a research fellow at the American Bar Foundation in Chicago.
For more information about Victoria Saker Woeste, visit
the
Author
Page.
Reviews
"To chronicle this complex history, a scholar must be sophisticated in economics, law, and agricultural politics. Fortunately, Woeste brings a very good level of understanding of these diverse but essential topics to her history. . . . A comprehensive, historical case study of the complex problems--legal, economic, and social--that confronted and still confront American commercial agriculture."--Law and History Review
"An important contribution to economic and business history and one whose main and specific arguments will be debated at length. . . . The study is a valuable contribution to establishing agriculture as a realistic participant in a modernising economy."--Business History
"Woeste skillfully weaves legal, business, and agricultural history. . . . A well researched, well-argued book. . . . An excellent contribution to the study of the transformation of American agriculture during the first part of the twentieth century."--American Historical Review
"Woeste's richly nuanced and tightly argued ten chapters deliver a new understanding of the cooperative movement and horticulture in California. Moreover, by shunning simplistic assumptions she exposes flaws in much theory-based history of agriculture’s place in the national market revolution."--Agricultural History
"[A] concise, intelligent study. . . . Unsettles even the most sophisticated reader’s sentimental notions about traditional nineteenth-century farm cooperatives. . . . An important contribution to understanding the transformations of agriculture in the twentieth century, through an articulate, detailed, multidisciplinary analysis of legal and social history."--Journal of American History
"An important contribution to economic and business history and one whose main and specific arguments will be debated at length. . . . A valuable contribution to establishing agriculture as a realistic participant in a modernising economy."--Business History
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