An Hour Before Daylight: Memories of a Rural Boyhood

The Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) of 1933 was one of Roosevelt’s New Deal programs. Its goal was to stabilize farm prices by cutting output. The act favored large landowners over sharecroppers, and the US Supreme Court struck it down in 1936. A different version of the law was passed in 1938. Carter details how the Act had some negative consequences in his local community by mandating the destruction of good crops and livestock, which infuriated his father and many other locals.

Day laborers, as opposed to tenant farmers, worked for weekly wages rather than a percentage of the crops they produced. Since they were paid weekly, they could pay cash for goods at a commissary and avoid paying credit and interest charges. Carter’s father hired many day laborers to work on the farm throughout Carter’s youth, and although Carter praises his father as a just and fair-minded landowner and landlord, Earl never regarded his Black laborers as his equals.

The New Deal was President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s response to the economic devastation of the Great Depression. It consisted of a series of domestic programs and reforms that aimed to provide relief from poverty, economic recovery, and reforms in various fields, including agriculture.