American Nightmare. Randal O'Toole

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СКАЧАТЬ of large land grants presaged debates over home- and landownership in post–Revolutionary America. Although many of the young nation’s leaders had an egalitarian spirit and wished to increase the share of Americans who owned their own farms and homes, the nation was slow to make government-owned lands available for such ownership. The result was homeownership rates that fell below 50 percent soon after the Revolution and remained there until after World War II.

       2. The Agrarian Dream

      Thomas Jefferson may have been the first to express what has become known as the American dream of homeownership. “It is not too soon to provide by every possible means that as few as possible shall be without a little portion of land,” he wrote to James Madison in 1785. “The small landholders are the most precious part of a state.”¹ At that time, Jefferson’s ideal was near-universal farm ownership, rather than what we think of as urban homeownership, but the sentiment remains the same.

      The Agrarian Myth

      Many historians and popular writers make much of the fact that Jefferson, in the 1780s, believed that the United States should be a nation of farmers. They have built this belief up into a mythical “agrarian movement” that somehow stood up against Alexander Hamilton and others who would turn America into a nation of mercenary bankers and filthy industrialists—with an unwritten and sometimes written regret that the agrarians lost.

      Jefferson did express a preference for farmers in 1785. “Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens,” Jefferson wrote to John Jay in that year. “They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous and they are tied to their country and wedded to its liberty and interests by the most lasting bands.”² Widespread farm ownership, Jefferson thought, would lead to better government. “I think our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries; as long as they are chiefly agricultural,” he wrote to Madison in 1787. “When they get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, they will become corrupt as in Europe.”³

      In the 1780s, Jefferson apparently believed that subsistence farmers were more self-sufficient than office or factory workers, and thereby more inclined to liberty. “Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God,” Jefferson wrote in the early 1780s, while “dependence begets subservience and venality.”⁴ “Jefferson is saying that it is impossible to corrupt an entire nation so long as the majority of its citizens are small landowners, dispersed across the landscape, dependent on no one but themselves for their livelihood,” comments environmental historian Donald Worster.⁵

      Jefferson himself was a farmer, but the fact that he romanticized that occupation does not mean that there was a significant anti-industrial, pro-agrarian movement in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. “Jefferson was not an agrarian fundamentalist,” says one historian. “He did move with his times.”⁶ The myth of Jeffersonian agrarianism sprang up around 1943, the bicentennial of Jefferson’s birth, and was probably influenced by the Southern Agrarians, a group of writers featured in a 1930 book titled I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition. Ironically, considering Jefferson’s role in eliminating feudal land policies in Virginia, one idea suggested by the Southern Agrarians was to restore feudalism in order to “bind” people to the land and create the small, independent farmers that the Agrarians (and Jefferson, at least in the 1780s) believed were essential to a free country. ⁷

      After the end of the Revolutionary War in 1783, the United States developed a thriving trade with England, exporting agricultural crops such as tobacco and importing manufactured goods. When Jefferson wrote the quotes above, he had never seen an American factory because the first such factory (which produced spindles of yarn) did not open until 1790.⁸ By 1810, New England alone had at least 250 such factories, small and large.⁹

      Perhaps exposure to those factories helped soften Jefferson’s stance after he became president. “I trust the good sense of our country will see that its greatest prosperity depends on a due balance between agriculture, manufactures and commerce,” he wrote in 1809.¹⁰ He doesn’t say what that balance is, but no doubt it is less than the 100 percent agriculture he appeared to favor in 1785.

      A few years later, the nation went through another war with Britain, and Jefferson realized the country should not rely exclusively on England for manufactured goods. “Experience has taught me that manufactures are now as necessary to our independence as to our comfort,” he wrote in a letter in 1816.

      “You tell me I am quoted by those who wish to continue our dependence on England for manufactures,” the letter notes. “There was a time when I might have been so quoted with more candor, but within the thirty years which have since elapsed, how are circumstances changed! We were then in peace. . . . A commerce which offered the raw material in exchange for the same material after receiving the last touch of industry, was worthy of welcome to all nations.”

      The War of 1812 completely altered Jefferson’s perception of industry. “We have experienced what we did not then believe, that there exists both profligacy and power enough to exclude us from the field of interchange with other nations: that to be independent for the comforts of life we must fabricate them ourselves. We must now place the manufacturer by the side of the agriculturist.” The question of the day, Jefferson wrote, was, “Shall we make our own comforts, or go without them, at the will of a foreign nation? He, therefore, who is now against domestic manufacture, must be for reducing us either to dependence on that foreign nation, or to be clothed in skins, and to live like wild beasts in dens and caverns. I am not one of these; experience has taught me that manufactures are now as necessary to our independence as to our comfort.”¹¹

      A Nation of Farmers

      If Jefferson changed, it was from emphasizing the self-sufficiency of individuals and their families to emphasizing the self-sufficiency of the nation as a whole. Yet whatever Jefferson and Hamilton wanted, the bulk of the American population remained rural through the end of the 19th century. That circumstance is at odds with our stereotypical view of the nation in, say, 1790, when we might think of Samuel Adams in Boston, Alexander Hamilton in New York, and Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia. But these examples are atypical of how people lived in the nation’s early years. The 1790 census found that the combined populations of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia (including the Northern Liberties and Southwark “suburbs” of Philadelphia) had fewer than 100,000 people, or just 2.4 percent of the nation’s population.¹² For comparison, in 2008, when the nation’s land area had grown tenfold, the Boston, New York, and Philadelphia urban areas held more than 9 percent of the nation’s population.

      That census also found only 24 communities—not all of them incorporated as cities—with more than 2,500 people. The combined population of those two dozen communities was just over 200,000, or about 5.1 percent of the nation’s 3.9 million residents. Although some people lived in communities with fewer than 2,500 people, the vast majority of the nation’s population was rural.

      As of 1790, it is likely that the majority of Americans did not own the homes they lived in. The Census Bureau did not record homeownership status until 1890, but scattered data indicate that farm ownership and homeownership rates at the end of the 18th century were low and declining.

      Breaking the Feudal Chains

      In rural areas, the 1890 census found that 66 percent of farmers owned their homes, but there are several reasons to believe that the share was lower in 1790. Most importantly, farm ownership and homeownership were hampered by the large land grants created in the colonial era combined with the customs of primogeniture and entail that prevailed in most of the colonies before the Revolution. In many of the colonies, those customs kept much of the land in a few large estates. In addition, the 1790 census found that СКАЧАТЬ