Suburban DFW's Forgotten New Deal Colony Part 2

[You can find Part 1 here and I fibbed there's a third part coming. Photos of DWG subsistence farmstead in both posts all courtesy of the Library of Congress.]

As we left off yesterday Dalworthington Gardens, Texas looked to be on the ropes a bare year into its founding as a New Deal planned farm community. But slowly and stubbornly those 26 remaining families hung on and through their own self-organization and tighter administration from New Deal entities conditions start shifting from god-awful to livable.

In 1935 the overstretched administration of the program (it's running similar colonies of varying scales all throughout the country such as this beautifully-documented one outside Dayton, Ohio) is shifted to the newly-created Resettlement Administration headed by the magnificently-named Rexford G. Tugwell. 

The shift in program administration accidentally and narrowly saves both the national program and Dalworthington Gardens as a few months later the Supreme Court strikes down the NIRA in its entirety (that formerly administered the program.)

“Rex the Red” as he is branded by large Southern landowners is a frequent target for his “socialistic” practices of trying to undercut the “labor supply” (sharecroppers) of the tenant farm system. At any rate his vision is even more sweeping, subsistence homestead colonies are to be not just back-to-the-land programs to better living conditions for urban workers but to transform the American urban landscape from the top down: “My idea is to go just outside centers of population, pick up cheap land, build a whole community and entice people into it. Then go back into the cities and tear down whole slums and make parks of them."

Subsistence homesteads nationally are still relatively small affairs never more than 200 homes, Resettlement Administration plans for large greenbelt cities begin getting hothoused. Tugwell is supported by the left-populist then Secretary of Agriculture, Henry Wallace (who would later famously go on to be Vice President and then the 1948 presidential candidate for the Progressive Party), himself trying to push through a number of nationally-coordinated and planned farm production programs.

Despite Tugwell's drive and broader vision the program is under pressure from within and without. Conditions in Dalworthington Gardens though improving in 1935 are still borderline squalid. Local residents change the name of one of the three bisecting gravel roads from Eleanor Drive to Park Drive in symbolic protest. Nationally the program is hitting all kinds of heat from Congress for its skyrocketing costs

Finally in June 1936 Dalworthington is removed from full administration from DC and given over to to the locally run (but still federally-supervised) Dalworthington Homestead Association with each family contributing a representative. The new local association holds collective title to the all land, controls the resident selection process, collects loan payments, and maintains the community properties

With greater local autonomy the struggling homestead seems to take off, thrive even. Guy Estil, a local resident is elected to be settlement project manager and he proves to be able and hands on. By early 1937, all but nine of the over 50 abandoned homesteads are resettled and the community house and park become a functional and actively used center of the community. Fences are built, repairs kept up, school bus service organized and gas lines laid.

Self-organization goes one interesting step further too, in 1937 residents form Texas Industries, an industrial cooperative. Run out of the community house, the coop builds and sells butter churns, ladders, and household furniture.

But as Dalworthington's fortunes wax, the national program quickly wanes. Under heavy fire from the Farm Bureau and Dixiecrat allies Tugwell resigns and Congress passes a provision in the Bankhead–Jones Farm Tenant Act that ends new construction of subsistence homesteads (though 50 including Dalworthington muddle on).

By 1942 with WW2 underway the federal government is looking to consolidate and slim down its many varied New Deal housing experiments and the Subsistence Housing Department gets sloughed off with all the rest into the National Housing Agency.

Post-war, residents are ready to hang it up and in 1949 they abolish the association and incorporate as a town. The why is poorly documented but one can only guess that its victim of that time and place when pre-war struggle and rising hope for radical transformation slumps into the post-war order (which has its seeds in the New Deal itself). But lets pick at some of that thorny knot tomorrow.

[Tomorrow we wrap it up with a broader look at the subsistence homestead experiment and the contradictions of top-down reform in the New Deal against the then rising tide of workers struggles. The Packinghouse Workers organizing of the Fort Worth slaughterhouses and packing plants gets some love alongside the Southern Tenant Farmers Union. Stay tuned.]