The River, Pare Lorentz's 1937 documentary film on the Mississippi Valley, opens with a trickle of water high in the mountains. The trickle turns into a small brook; the brook runs into a rushing stream, the stream into a river, and the river into the mighty Mississippi. This grand drainage system, the narrator informs the audience, empties two-thirds of the American continent, carrying water “from as far west as Idaho and as far east as Pennsylvania.” But all is not well. In time, the peaceful movement of the tributaries is replaced by images of surging floodwaters. The Mississippi – the nation's very lifeblood – has gotten badly out of joint. Up and down the valley, miners and foresters have lopped off the tops of the mountains, and farmers have plowed up the slopes and wrecked the soil. These resources, the audience hears, built the nation, but at too great a cost. Water has rushed and swirled over the denuded land, fueling more violent floods and leaving behind a generation of destitute farmers who face a life of disease and drudgery. “Poor land makes poor people,” the narrator intones, “and poor people make poor land.”

No statement could have served as a more fitting précis for the agrarian conservation of the New Deal. For the first time, policymakers took as their starting point the central premise of the New Conservation: that rural living standards would improve with proper use and fair distribution of natural resources.