The First “Green New Deal”
This talk focuses on the New Deal’s ambitious program to tackle the social, economic, and environmental crises of the 1930s by creating regional planning agencies that aimed to restructure society and its relationship to the land. In particular, the talk will focus on one of the first, and most important, experiments in regional planning: the Mississippi Valley Committee (1933-35) which developed a blueprint to transform the Midwest. We will explore the ideas behind this movement, its connections to progressivism (with the latter’s embrace of scientific expertise and management), and the key reforms it put forward to address poverty, tenancy, economic decline, drought, flooding, and the transition to clean energy. At a broader level, the talk and conversation (to follow) offer an opportunity to think about how these forgotten experiments of the 1930s might inform present-day debates about a “Green New Deal” as well as how we think about the legacy of Grinnell College, whose alumni played such an outsized role in shaping many facets of the original New Deal.
Faculty Member: Michael Guenther, Associate Professor in Education Studies, History, American Studies, and Digital Studies. He is also the chair of the history and science, medicine, and society departments.
Discussion Date: Thursday, March 28, 2 p.m. CT
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