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Women tending to a smoky firepit and washing clothes in a bin, with onlookers. The surrounding land is arid and the trees are barren.
People washing clothes at a camp for evicted sharecroppers in Missouri (1939). (Photo: Library of Congress)

The Agricultural Adjustment Act leads to forced evictions of sharecroppers.

1939

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People washing clothes at a camp for evicted sharecroppers in Missouri (1939). (Photo: Library of Congress)

Congress passes the Agricultural Adjustment Act as part of the New Deal. The act allocates funds for farmers to pay sharecroppers who live on their land. Some landowners replace tenants with day wage laborers by using a loophole, thereby keeping the subsidies owed to the sharecroppers for themselves. As a result, many sharecroppers are evicted from their homes.

The act also pays farmers to limit the acreage of certain crops they plant to increase their prices. This deepens the practice of controlling agricultural products as commodities that continues to this day.