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BEAUTY IN THE SERVICE OF A POLITICAL AGENDA
By Dr. Ruth Schwartz Cowan
 Power
in the Land is very beautiful, so beautiful that it
is sometimes hard to remember that it is also propaganda,
political advertising: beauty in the service of a political
agenda. The directors, the script writer, the composer—all
renowned artists—were being paid to promote the work
of a federal agency, the Rural Electrification Administration.
Over, under and through its elegant photography, its poetic
script and its delightful score, the film exaggerates in
order to make its point, as all propaganda does, highlighting
some aspects of the Parkinson’s lives while ignoring
others.
 The
film actually has two political agendas, each intended for
a different audience. From the moment of its inception,
REA had been the subject of intense political criticism.
Some powerful people, bitter opponents of the New Deal,
regarded rural electrical co-operatives as socialistic institutions;
they thought of the REA loans made to the co-operatives
as unwarranted governmental interference in the capitalistic
free market. Power in the Land was meant to speak
to those critics and counter their criticisms. In addition,
the film was addressed to the nation’s farmers. In
the first several decades of the 20th century rural Americans
had been moving from the countryside to the cities in droves—a
demographic shift that worried federal officials a good
deal. How will the nation feed itself, they asked, if the
rural exodus continues? Will Americans become dependent
on imported foods? What will happen if there is, as appeared
likely, another World War?
Thus, REA was created, in part, to keep
farmers from leaving their farms; to make farm families
happier with farming by making their lives easier and their
incomes higher. In service to this goal, Power in the
Land was meant to advertise electrification as the
one best way to achieve modernized farming.
 When
I show Power in the Land to undergraduates who
have been raised in cities and suburbs, I usually introduce
the film by identifying it as propaganda and asking the
students to watch it critically in an effort to determine
which truths are being highlighted and which are being cast
in shadows. Our subsequent class discussions have been very
interesting. Most of the students, media savvy as they have
been trained to be, recognize the way in which music, action
and text were designed (in, for example, the harvesting
corn scene which concludes with the farmers striking their
scythes in a post) to convince the viewer that the co-operative
movement is wholly and traditionally American. Those students
with some knowledge of the history of the 1930s also understand
which criticisms of the New Deal that was meant to counter.
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My students have a harder time, however,
recognizing the ways in which the film distorts reality
in order to advertise modernization to farmers. My students,
of course, have no idea what farm life was, or even is,
all about. Raised in post World War II affluence, almost
none of them (except the recent immigrants from undeveloped
nations) have even the foggiest notion of how people managed
their lives without modern conveniences. Not yet heads of
households themselves, they have no idea what consumer durables
cost. Rich or poor or somewhere in between, they just assume
that all houses, apartments and dormitory rooms, automatically
come outfitted with indoor plumbing, central heating and
refrigerators, if not washers, dryers and dishwashers. Not
well versed in any of the social sciences, they just assume
that gender roles are historically and culturally fixed:
traditional, universal, maybe even biological, never changing.
Men plow and plant and harvest (or something equivalent),
wringing a living from the land, while women cook and sew
and do laundry (or something equivalent) caring for the
members of the family.
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