In his presidential address Jess Gilbert examines two democratic experiments of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) during the New Deal: first, county planning that coordinated federal programs through citizen committees, and second, land redistribution to landless southern farmers, including a small number of black sharecroppers and tenant farmers, creating self-governing resettlement communities. Their importance is two-fold: first, these were projects promoted by the state; and second, sociologists were involved in their success. And so, concludes Gilbert, if in the past so why not in the future? In this article, the author explores the role that sociologists play in these experiments.