Yesterday we looked at some of the positive baggage loaded
on to the term “Capital Homesteading.”
Yes, we know that “baggage” is often used in a pejorative sense, but try
and travel anywhere without it for any length of time.
Anyway, let’s continue with the list of advantages of using
the term. The original Homestead Act:
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| Own, or Be Owned |
Gave ordinary people the chance to become owners of landed capital
on easy terms. This made the Midwest and
the West the center of political power at a crucial time, although it has also
means that today’s Department of Agriculture wields influence and power far
beyond what you would expect. (Mike
Espy, when he was Secretary of Agriculture, understood the importance of
extending the land homestead concept to industry and commerce, but was
marginalized by the Clinton administration before he could do more than start
discussions.)
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| The guy doesn't look like Turner, but the quote is his. |
The 1890s, when the “free” land available under the
Homestead Act to all intents and purposes ran out, marked a watershed in U.S.
history. As Frederick Jackson Turner
noted in a paper he delivered at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893,
the end of “free” land under the Homestead Act meant the end of democracy.
The very next year in response to the Great Depression of
1893-1898 “Coxey’s Army” descended upon Washington to demand that the
government go into debt to create jobs rebuilding infrastructure and inflate
the currency to stimulate growth. Bumper
crops of wheat in 1897 and 1898, and crop failures in Europe brought the
country out of the depression, but nothing replaced the land frontier as a
source of capital ownership on easy terms for ordinary people.
Judge Peter Stengar Grosscup, presiding justice of the
United States Seventh Court of Appeals in Chicago wrote a series of articles
advocating the “people-ization” of large corporations, but because he relied on
past savings to finance expanded share ownership, nothing came of it.
Grosscup served on a committee investigating monopolies and
trusts with Archbishop John Ireland in 1907; Ireland made great efforts to get
landed capital into the hands of Irish immigrants to Minnesota, and seems to
have been investigating the potential of commercial and industrial capital, but
again, locked into past savings, nothing could be done on a broad scale.
Leo XIII’s encyclical, Rerum
Novarum, which the agrarian socialist Henry George believed was directed at
him personally as a result of his attacks on Catholic social teaching,
specifically pointed out that human beings have a natural right to own all forms of capital, “whether the
property consist of land or chattels.” (Rerum Novarum, § 5.)
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| Pope Leo XIII |
Given Leo XIII’s focus on the American Church and the general
situation in America, as evidenced by contemporary newspaper accounts that we
have collected (Leo XIII, to the surprise of many people today, was very
popular in the United States with both Catholics and non-Catholics), was
strongly advocating widespread ownership of industrial and commercial capital
in addition to land, seemingly using the American success with the Homestead Act
as an example of the benefits that expanded ownership brings. As he said,
“We have
seen that this great labor question cannot be solved save by assuming as a
principle that private ownership must be held sacred and inviolable. The law,
therefore, should favor ownership, and its policy should be to induce as many
as possible of the people to become owners.
“Many
excellent results will follow from this; and, first of all, property will
certainly become more equitably divided. For, the result of civil change and
revolution has been to divide cities into two classes separated by a wide
chasm. On the one side there is the party which holds power because it holds
wealth; which has in its grasp the whole of labor and trade; which manipulates
for its own benefit and its own purposes all the sources of supply, and which
is not without influence even in the administration of the commonwealth. On the
other side there is the needy and powerless multitude, sick and sore in spirit
and ever ready for disturbance. If working people can be encouraged to look
forward to obtaining a share in the land, the consequence will be that the gulf
between vast wealth and sheer poverty will be bridged over, and the respective
classes will be brought nearer to one another. A further consequence will
result in the great abundance of the fruits of the earth. Men always work
harder and more readily when they work on that which belongs to them; nay, they
learn to love the very soil that yields in response to the labor of their
hands, not only food to eat, but an abundance of good things for themselves and
those that are dear to them. That such a spirit of willing labor would add to
the produce of the earth and to the wealth of the community is self evident.
And a third advantage would spring from this: men would cling to the country in
which they were born, for no one would exchange his country for a foreign land
if his own afforded him the means of living a decent and happy life. These
three important benefits, however, can be reckoned on only provided that a
man's means be not drained and exhausted by excessive taxation. The right to
possess private property is derived from nature, not from man; and the State
has the right to control its use in the interests of the public good alone, but
by no means to absorb it altogether. The State would therefore be unjust and
cruel if under the name of taxation it were to deprive the private owner of
more than is fair.” (Rerum Novarum, §§ 46-47.)
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