The Farmer’s Benevolent Trust: Law and Agricultural Cooperation in Industrial America, 1865-1945
Victoria Saker Woeste.
Published September 1998. The University of North Carolina Press. ISBN: 978-0-8078-4731-2.
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.
Awards
2000 J. Willard Hurst Prize, Law & Society Association, A 1999 Choice Outstanding Academic Book
Related Titles:
- Neighbors and Strangers: Law and Community in Early Connecticut (Aug 13, 2001)
Bruce H. Mann. Published August 2001. Order online through The University of North Carolina Press. ISBN: 978-0-8078-5365-8. Combining legal and social history, Bruce Mann explores the relationship between law and society from the mid-seventeenth century to the eve of the Revolution. Analyzing a sample of more than five thousand civil cases from the records of local courts in Connecticut, …
- The Bar and the Old Bailey, 1750-1850 (Nov 30, 2003)
Allyson N. May. Published November 2003. Order online through The University of North Carolina Press. ISBN: 978-0-8078-2806-9. Allyson May chronicles the history of the English criminal trial and the development of a criminal bar in London between 1750 and 1850. She charts the transformation of the legal process and the evolution of professional standards of conduct for the criminal bar …
- Working Knowledge: Employee Innovation and the Rise of Corporate Intellectual Property, 1800-1930 (Sep 20, 2009)
Catherine L. Fisk. Published 2009. Order online through The University of North Carolina Press. ISBN: 978-0-8078-3302-5. Skilled workers of the early nineteenth century enjoyed a degree of professional independence because workplace knowledge and technical skill were their “property,” or at least their attribute. In most sectors of today’s economy, however, it is a foundational and widely …
- Juries and the Transformation of Criminal Justice in France in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Sep 20, 2010)
James M. Donovan. Published 2010. Order online through The University of North Carolina Press. ISBN: 978-0-8078-3363-6. James Donovan takes a comprehensive approach to the history of the jury in modern France by investigating the legal, political, sociocultural, and intellectual aspects of jury trial from the Revolution through the twentieth century. He demonstrates that these juries, …
- Crimes against Children: Sexual Violence and Legal Culture in New York City, 1880-1960 (Apr 30, 2005)
Stephen Robertson. Published April 2005. Order online through The University of North Carolina Press. ISBN: 978-0-8078-5596-6. In the first half of the twentieth century, Americans’ intense concern with sex crimes against children led to a wave of public discussion, legislative action, and criminal prosecution. Stephen Robertson provides the first large-scale, long-term study of how …