This is an old-fashioned sort of book: a careful study of six white, male bureaucrats in a federal department, based on extensive study of their papers and those of the department. Together, the six men, “simultaneously federal bureaucrats and participatory democrats” (p. 79), launched an impressive but abortive attempt to remake American agricultural policy through coordinated planning. This “Intended New Deal,” as Jess Gilbert terms it, brought officials in the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) together with farmers and other rural people in counties across the land to plan how best to use its resources. The effort began in earnest in 1939, long after the New Deal’s heyday, and expired in 1942, when Congress forbade funding “for State and county land use planning” (p. 241). Planning Democracy offers a close and sympathetic narrative of their failed effort, one that convincingly deepens conventional interpretations of New Deal agricultural policy. The book’s great strength, its intense treatment of a few executives at the Department of Agriculture, is also its weakness. Gilbert pays little heed to the broader dynamics, in Congress and in the party and pressure systems, that constrained possibilities for planning.

The book’s subjects—Gilbert collectively terms them “agrarian intellectuals”—are Henry A. Wallace, secretary of agriculture from 1933 to 1940, and five of his deputies: M. L. Wilson, Howard R. Tolley, L. C. Gray, Carl C. Taylor, and Bushrod W. Allin. All were Midwesterners save Allin, a Kentuckian. After training in practical-minded social science (several under John R. Commons at Wisconsin), they moved into federal service. The six men shared a broadly civic-republican ideology, inculcated in boyhood on family farms and nurtured in the “left wing of the land-grant system” and the pages of John Dewey (p. 71).

Early New Deal agriculture policy proceeded largely in silos. Most importantly, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) gave direct payments to farm owners in exchange for limits on production. When a passel of radical lawyers at the AAA aimed to overturn existing cotton policy, which benefited powerful landlords to the detriment of tenant farmers, many of them African American, Wallace reluctantly fired them. Separately, the Soil Conservation Service worked to prevent erosion, the Rural Electrification Administration to light rural homes, and the Farm Security Administration, the most radical agency, to provide tenant farmers with credit. And the Extension system and land-grant colleges still worked with farmers to teach them how to till the soil. As Wilson argued, “the situation had produced disorganization and made incompatible demands on the farmer” (p. 109).

The heart of the book explores the agrarian intellectuals’ response. Working principally through the USDA’s Bureau of Agricultural Economics, they established county planning committees, with farmers in the majority, to work with USDA agents and coordinate land-use planning. These county plans—involving nearly 200,000 people at the peak in 1941—then informed state plans for land use, and were meant to synthesize into new national policies. Alongside these efforts, new plans for education aimed to make the planning committees schools for democracy. A who’s who of leading social scientists—Charles Beard, John Hicks, Robert Park—conducted seminars for the citizen-planners.

Unlike the ambitious social reformers of the early AAA, few of whom had grown up on the farm (one lawyer asked whether a AAA code was “fair to the macaroni growers”; p. 72), the agrarian intellectuals respected local knowledge and institutions. Planners and the public, they felt, could learn from one another. Gilbert terms this approach “low modernism,” in contrast to the imperious “high modernism” exemplified by the Easterners at the early AAA. Low modernism skirted the perils of top-down plans only at a cost: Especially in the Jim Crow South, it never confronted local power brokers, and across the country the planning committees overrepresented well-to-do farmers and local elites.

Even as the agrarian intellectuals emphasized listening to disparate voices from below, Planning Democracy emerges principally from official sources, and it shows. We hear little from farmers or others in rural communities across the country, whether included in or excluded from the USDA’s planning efforts. Did planning really encourage deliberation and deepen democracy? Did its effects linger after the formal plans ceased?

Yet the Intended New Deal remained stillborn. The central problematic of scholarship around the New Deal during the last generation asks how a Congress dominated by segregationist Southern Democrats shaped myriad policies to tame the market and build the state. That same Congress closed off funding for state and county planning. Gilbert fails to connect his story to that larger project; we do not even learn which chamber killed the USDA’s planning efforts. Nor does he connect the end of the Intended New Deal with the other ways that the conservative coalition shaped and limited reform. If Gilbert fails to tackle the question, one reason surely lies in the agrarian intellectuals’ own understandings of their obligations, around the department’s fiefs and outward to the various networks of land-grant colleges, state Extension services, and agents and farmers on the ground, rather than to their political principals.

The book closes the curtain—or, better to say, lays down the trowel—in 1942. By emphasizing his similarities with the other practical-minded agrarian intellectuals, Gilbert says little about the enigmatic Henry Wallace. In 1948, the Iowa farm editor and chicken breeder launched a radical insurgency alongside some of the very men he had fired in the purge of 1935. It would have been salutary to compare both the innovative planning proposals of the Intended New Deal and the Deweyan concepts behind them with the campaign Wallace waged in 1948.

Beyond the scope of Planning Democracy, the Intended New Deal went global. Taylor, Tolley, and Wilson all worked on agricultural development for the Ford Foundation in the 1950s and 1960s. Yet, as Daniel Immerwahr’s recent book (Thinking Small, 2015) about postwar international community development shows, its record was a decidedly checkered one. Did the farm boys from the American heartland ultimately leave their deepest mark in South Asia?

For all his careful reconstruction of the agrarian intellectuals’ hopes and plans, Gilbert is no antiquarian. The Intended New Deal, he suggests, offers contemporary lessons to avoid the perils of needless competition, centralized bureaucracy, and elite control alike, in favor of what Allin once termed “a working democracy in the planning process” (p. 246). Yet the very distance between the agrarian intellectuals’ “last gasp of a democratic Progressivism” (p. 255) and our own time suggests—even more than Gilbert wants to acknowledge—how distant now seems their dream.