This chapter considers the south–north intellectual exchange of the 1930s. First, it examines how a cadre of left-leaning US reformers, led by the peripatetic academic Frank Tannenbaum, attempted in 1934 and 1935 to translate the blueprint of Mexican agrarian reform into political action for the US South. That campaign ultimately played an essential role in the founding of the Farm Security Administration, one of the most ambitious federal agencies of the New Deal. Second, the chapter looks at the myriad Mexican pilgrimages undertaken by a host of influential US rural reformers during the Cárdenas era. Perhaps no group outside Washington, D.C., was more renowned—or feared—for its agrarian radicalism than the multiracial Southern Tenant Farmers' Union whose political legacy has been closely studied.
