During the 1930s, Lyndon Johnson embraced the agrarian policies of the early New Deal. Labeling farmers the backbone of the nation, the young congressman funneled newly available land, water, and power programs to the rural inhabitants of his district. In so doing, Johnson not only laid the foundation for his own spectacular rise but also helped create a new national landscape: a political and environmental order explicitly linked to the premise that government action should arrest economic decline by creating a constituency for rural conservation assistance. But Johnson's career also revealed the limitations of agrarian policy: rural development programs really aided those most able to stay on their farms and to expand their operations with government help. When the country began to mobilize for war, the adept politician therefore seized the opportunity to expand his region's industrial infrastructure and its urban centers. In effect, World War II provided Johnson with the opportunity to build an industrial future upon Central Texas's agrarian base.

The country as a whole navigated the same transformation. As the Depression lingered and farm incomes remained stagnant, economic thinkers and New Deal administrators revised their prescriptions for recovery. They worried that the agricultural modernization and conservation programs did not address farm poverty sufficiently, nor raise agricultural incomes uniformly. They also began to argue that only industrial jobs yielded high incomes, and that poor and marginal farmers would be best served by policies that encouraged out-migration, urbanization, and industrialization.