Jeff Roche

speaker

654 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Dec 2025 last heard 20 Dec

Jeff Roche’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 1.

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New Books in History · Jeff Roche, "The Conservative Frontier: Texas and the Origins of the New Right" (U Texas Press, 2025) · 20 Dec 2025 podcast

And it terrifies him.

He's one of these folks, and they were more prevalent then, but that are convinced that the health of the political economy and the health of democracy depends on having a strong rural class of farmers as part of your culture.

And what he's seeing happen across all agriculture communities, cotton in the south and pigs and corn in the Midwest, and certainly the wheat counties and cotton counties of West Texas, is failure.

So he works really hard to try to figure out ways to save the economy.

And originally, this is

You know, the super boring history, you know, American History 101 stuff.

But one of the ways that the New Deal tried to address the agricultural crisis was by limiting production.

So they start paying farmers not to grow things, and they're paying them with taxes on sort of mid-level producers.

Sure.

So, you know, you're a farmer and they'll pay you, you know, keep 30% of your acreage, let it lie fallow, and we'll cover some of your costs.

And this program saves the region.

There's no question.

I mean, when the wheat checks came in in 33, this was 20-point type headline news.

In the canyon news, for example, the wheat checks are here or the cotton checks are here.

So it works.

But at the same time, you know, the people who are remaining in that part of the world are the people who really can't go anywhere because they've got, you know, investments in land or they've got investments in buildings and the like.

So it's – whereas, you know, people –

lawyers or doctors or something, or sharecroppers or renters are leaving.

So there's still quite a bit of out-migration during this.

But the New Deal, by paying landowners in particular, helped preserve what population and the economy.

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