Introduction

The People's Land

Peter Barnes

[Reprinted from The People's Land, A Reader on Land Reform in the United States, edited by Peter Barnes for the National Coalition for Land Reform, printed by Rodale Press, 1975]

With three out of four Americans now jammed into cities, no one pays much attention to landholding patterns in the countryside. How things have changed. A hundred years ago, land for the landless was a battle-cry. People sailed the oceans, traversed the continent and fought the Indians, all for a piece of territory they might call their own. America envisioned itself - not entirely accurately-as a nation of independent farmers, hardy, self-reliant, democratic. Others saw us this way too. De Tocqueville noted the "great equality" that existed among the immigrants who settled New England, the absence of rich, landed proprietors except in the South, and the emergence in the western settlements of "democracy arrived at its utmost limits."

Along with industrialization, however, came urbanization and the decline of the Arcadian dream. Immigrants forgot about land and thought about jobs instead; the sons and grandsons of the original pioneers began to leave the farms and join the immigrants in the cities. Radical agitation shifted from farm to factory. Frontiersmen's demands for free land and easy credit were supplanted by workers' demands for a fair wage, decent conditions and union recognition. In due course a kind of permanent prosperity was achieved, and America directed its energies outwards, not inwards. Consumers bought their food in neatly wrapped packages, at prices most of them could afford, and forgot about the land.

Why, then, should we turn back to look at our land today? One reason is that the land is still the cradle of great poverty and injustice. Another is that the beauty of the land is fast disappearing. A third is the deterioration of our cities; population dispersal in some form is a necessity. There is also a growing recognition that nagging social problems - burgeoning welfare rolls, racial tensions, the alienation of workers from their work-have not responded to treatment. Many of these problems have their roots in the land, or more precisely, in the lack of access to productive land ownership by the poor, the young and the non-white.

In the last year or two a new phrase has entered the American vocabulary, a phrase usually associated with impoverished and distant nations: land reform. The object of land reform is not merely to alter and control land use, but to alter and control land ownership, for it is the latter that inevitably determines the former. It is ownership - and the economics surrounding ownership - that determines whether land is farmed or paved, strip-mined or preserved, polluted or reclaimed. It is ownership that determines where people live and where they work. And, to a great degree, it is ownership that determines who is wealthy in America and who is poor, who exploits others and who gets exploited by others.

One third of the nation's land (including Alaska) is still publicly owned, mostly by the federal government. The rest of America, including almost all of the good farm and residential land, is in private hands. Who owns this land? What are the social, economic and environmental consequences of present land ownership patterns?

Few questions are more important for the future of America's land and people, yet there are no government reports, and almost no academic studies, that provide adequate answers. What little is known has been gleaned in recent years by students, reporters and Nader-style investigators from a maze of assessors' rolls, annual reports and obscure legal documents.

The picture that emerges is a gloomy one of highly concentrated, almost feudalistic ownership patterns. Despite the large number of Americans who own homes (or rather, who own title to mortgaged homes), the fact is that a mere five percent of the population probably owns close to two-thirds of the private property in America. In any given county, whether urban or rural, the ten largest property owners alone often own ten to fifteen percent of the assessed valuation. (Check your county by paying a visit to the assessor's office.) In many parts of the country, it is giant absentee landlords - timber companies, railroads, energy companies, corporate farms - that dominate the lives and livelihoods of local citizens.

How did this come about? Strange as it may seem to Americans weaned on the sanctity of private property, the notion that individuals or corporations might appropriate more land than they can use, and then charge others for the privilege of using it, is not one that has always been accepted. In fact, traditional notions of land ownership are quite different. The African's right to land, according to Julius Nyerere, prime minister of Tanzania, "was traditionally simply the right to use it. He had no other right to it, nor did it occur to him to try to claim one." The American Indian tradition was similar. "The earth was created without lines of demarcation," said Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce, "and it is no man's business to divide it." Indian and Hispano villages in Mexico developed around what was called the ejido - lands held by the village in perpetuity for common use by its members.

The American idea of private property in land derives from imperial Rome. When the Roman republic first emerged from the veils of history, each citizen possessed a small homestead, which was inalienable, and enjoyed rights to the general domain. It was from the public domain that the patrician families began to carve their great estates. Later they absorbed the homesteads as well, forcing the small proprietors to become either rent-paying coloni or slaves, or to flee to the cities and newly conquered provinces. From Italy the latifundia spread to Sicily, Spain and Gaul, as military leaders were rewarded with large grants of land. Eventually, in the view of many historians, the social polarization brought about by the latifundia undermined Rome's strength and led to its demise.

From the moment of independence the United States faced the question of how to dispose of its seemingly limitless lands. There was never any doubt that private, as opposed to common ownership, would prevail. The debate was between those, like Thomas Jefferson, who favored equitable distribution of small parcels to settlers, and most of the other politicians of the day, who willingly and eagerly bestowed land upon wealthy interests and speculators-including themselves.

The history of the giveaway of America's public lands - hundreds of millions of acres over a century and a half - constitutes one of the most inglorious scandals in the annals of modern man. Fraud, chicanery and corruption were there aplenty, but even more grievous was the disregard for the social consequences of uneven land distribution. Congress did at times enact such foresighted measures as the Homestead Act of 1862 and the Reclamation Act of 1902, granting title to actual settlers who would cultivate up to 160 acres. More commonly, however, Congress and the State legislatures authorized the wholesale disposal of public lands to railroads, cattle barons and assorted speculators.

The social consequences of such wanton giveaways were not limited to the quick enrichment of a fortunate few. The pattern of large landholdings, accompanied by racial exploitation, became ensconced in the West and the South. The Jeffersonian vision of a democracy of small freeholders was scarcely tested. Great disparities of wealth and power were etched into the national landscape. Eventually the landless and powerless of rural America began drifting into the cities, ill-prepared, poorly educated and deprived of cultural roots. The path was paved for the urban crisis and the corporate feudalism that we have today in rural areas.

It may well be too late to build a society based on democratic egalitarian and ecological principles, but that is the goal of the American land reform movement. It is an awesome challenge, since the forces of privilege and despoliation are immensely powerful. But stirrings of change are abroad in the land. The relationships between people and land are coming under renewed scrutiny. There is great interest in returning to rural areas, in organic farming, in local ownership of land and resources. Land reform groups in all parts of the country, each in their own way, are engaged in a kind of two-pronged effort. On the one hand, they are vigorously chipping away at the policies and institutions that separate us from and devour the land. On the other hand, they are building alternative institutions and advocating alternative policies that can lead us toward a better society.

This reader is both an outgrowth and a tool of the land reform movement. It includes excerpts from many articles, studies and statements dealing with land and people in America. The selections are of varying length and cover a wide range of topics. All are clearly written and eminently readable. Taken together, they present a concise yet comprehensive picture of the problems and possibilities that confront the land reform movement in the United States today.