Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 January 2016
Every government policy has positive and negative externalities: offshoots and spin-offs that either are unplanned or exceed calculated expectations. New Deal agricultural policy was no exception. One controversial aspect of it is the alleged role of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) in southern tenant and sharecropper displacement. Whether or not the officials of the AAA underestimated or even cared about this phenomenon, many contemporaries and most historians have criticized the Roosevelt administration for it.