Ploughing it Under

Based on a drawing made during his travels through South Carolina, Thomas Hart Benton's Ploughing It Under depicts an African American farmer guiding a mule across a field of freshly turned earth. Benton's characteristic sweeping contours and exaggerated forms lend movement and monumentality to an otherwise ordinary scene of agricultural labor.

Created during the Great Depression, the work also alludes to the agricultural policies of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. Under the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933, farmers received payments to reduce production, sometimes by plowing under growing crops, in an effort to raise agricultural prices. Although intended to stabilize the struggling farm economy, these policies often harmed tenant farmers and sharecroppers, particularly African Americans, who could lose both income from and access to the land they cultivated.