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America's Dichotomy:
Advantage Versus Equality
Edward J. Dodson
[A discussion of the relationship between progress
and poverty in the nineteenth century political economy, submitted
toward partial completion of requirements for the course, "The
World We Have Lost," Temple University, Fall 1985, Dr.
Ershkowitz]
When it is said that the ideal
is as little government as posible, the controlling principle is
liberty rather than justice. This explains the falsity of
Jefferson's maxim, that that government governs best which
governs least, which is carried to absurdity in the statement by
Thoreau, that that government governs best which governs not at
all. The truth of the matter is that that government governs
best that governs most justly, regardless of the amount of
government that is required to achieve the fullest possible
realization of the idea of justice -- Mortimer J. Adler (The
Common Sense of Politics)
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The story of America in the nineteenth century is the saga of a
dichotomy unraveling. Certain aspects of our political economy were
providing tremendous opportunity to the individual; other elements
made certain the growth of a class structure plagued by conflicts
between the haves and the have nots.
By the eighteenth century, Europeans (mostly English) had estab1ished
small communities along the Atlantic coast and its tidewater channels.
Some had come to escape religious or political persecution; most,
however, came because of the opportunities free access to land
provided. And yet, even at that early date the colonies of England,
France and Spain experienced the establishment of clearly-defined
class structures. Alongside the presence of growing individualism and
participatory government there stood the exclusionary institutions of
slavery and indentured servitude. Already in existence was a dramatic
inequality in the distribution of wealth, which became the cause taken
up by reformers during the 1830s and thereafter.
America has, in fact, been the battleground on which the great
struggle between individualists and statists began, and is still being
fought -- neither possessing a clear understanding of the fundamental
issues affecting civilization. Within this struggle has been a quest
for both philosophical and practical dominance over America's
politica1 economy, waged by republicans on the one hand and
supremacists on the other. Participants adopted confused and divisive
characteristics as groups were labeled or labeled themselves as
Jeffersonians, Federalists, Whigs, Democrats, Republicans, Populists,
Progressives, Fabian socialists, Social Darwinists, and so on. In the
end, we were left to ask what one means by the modern terms "liberal"
and "conservative." Politics, as they say, makes strange
bedfellows; and in America politics created a difficult environment
for pure ideology to emerge and survive.
All of that was and is America, even to this day. The day-to-day
events are related to us in observations by those who\ experienced
them and by those who have later attempted to pull it all together as
history. As child is father to the man, we carry with us remnants of
our forefathers' experiences. We live by codes substantially evolved
during a period of civilization thought to have been much simpler,
although the conflict continues over the same fundamental issues --
human rights versus positivist law; tyranny by the majority
versus tyranny by the few; anarchy versus the
supremacist state; the sanctity of property versus a
definition of what limits there are to legitimate forms of property;
the separation of church and state ... and so on. Everything has
changed. Nothing has changed.
And so it was at the beginning of the nineteenth century, remaining
largely unresolved even as our own era dawned. Amidst the chaos of an
evolving political economy, we have forever searched for order and
understanding . From time to time we have become exalted as we "discovered"
what seemed the solutions to our social problems. Such "golden
variables" would, we hoped, make ours the first realized
expression of utopian civilization.
That, in effect, was an important aspect to the intellectualization
of the democratic experiment which became the United States. The
nineteenth century severely tested the premises on which this
experiment rested, and there are those of us who look upon the
cumulative weight of change in that century as both catastrophic and
inevitable. The reasoning for this conclusion is to be found in our
very humanness.
A number of nineteenth century writers recognized the necessity for
exploring human nature as a prerequisite to unlocking the mysteries of
political economy. Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill were
instrumental in paving the way. Following in their footsteps came
Henry George. "Political economy" wrote George, "seeks
to trace mutual relations and to identify cause and effect. The
premises from which it makes its deductions are truths which have the
highest sanction; axioms which we all recognize; upon which we safely
base the reasoning and actions of everyday life, and which may be
reduced to the metaphysical expression of the physical law that motion
seeks the line of least resistance."[1]
Examining human nature from the above perspective, George was led to
the axiom "that men seek to gratify their desires with the least
exertion."[2] He then identified man's historical efforts to gain
control over nature and over other men (i.e., to monopolize) as an
integral part of human motivation. To monopolize might be beneficial
to the individual but to civilization as a whole monopolies could only
destroy. Accordingly, George warned that the overriding concern for
true republicans was to prevent monopolies from arising. Taking his
thought one step further, man's absolute dependency on access to
nature for survival made the concentrated control over nature the
worst of all such monopolies. Land monopoly was, then, anathema to
justice and to republican society.
George was only one of many intellectuals, writers and statesmen who
recognized the injustices inherent in a system that countenanced
monopolies and the resulting concentration of wealth, income and
political power. Two perspectives, however, separated him from most of
his contemporaries -- his truly humanitarian belief that the earth is
the birthright of all mankind, and his great confidence in the
resiliency of the human spirit. George's own words express this
eloquently:
Against temptations that thus appeal to the strongest
impulses of our nature, the sanctions of law and the precepts of
religion can effect but little; and the wonder is, not that men are
so self-seeking, but that they are not much more so. That under
present circumstances men are not more grasping, more unfaithful,
more selfish than they are, proves the goodness and fruitfulness of
human nature, the ceaseless flow of the perennial fountains from
which its moral qualities are fed.[3]
As Henry George exemplifies the highest order of thinking during the
late nineteenth century, Thomas Jefferson made a similar contribution
to the intellectual dialogue during his lifetime. The extent to which
his world suffered from the dichotomy of progress and poverty is
evidenced by the conflicts within his own intellectual and personal
life. He was both spokesman for the common man and slave owner. The
troubled nature of his thoughts are nowhere more apparent than when be
expressed his fears for the future of republican democracy. From hisNotes
On The State Of Virginia in 1781 came this foreboding:
The time for fixing every essential right on a legal
basis is while our rulers are honest and ourselves united. From the
conclusion of this war we shall be going down hill. It will not then
be necessary to resort every movement to the people for support.
They will be forgotten, therefore, and their rights disregarded.
They will forget themselves, but in the sole faculty of making
money. ...The shackles, therefore, which shall not be knocked off at
the conclusion of this war, will remain on us long, will be made
heavier and heavier.[4]
Thus, even as the war against England raged on, the rebellious
colonists carried no torch for equality -- neither equality of
opportunity nor equality of condition (the basis for debate over
reform in the twentieth century) were a factor. Such measures would
have been vehemently opposed to not only by the aristocratic and
propertied class but by Americans in general. Liberty and property
were the primary concerns of revolutionary Americans -- and not
necessarily in that order of importance.
In examining our history, we must remember that the American
continent bad been fought over for many centuries among its indigenous
tribes. Victory in warfare bad already given tremendous territorial
control to such tribal clans as the Iroquois League. Then, the first
Spanish, Dutch, French and English explorers and settlers arrived,
members of a civilization that bad abandoned the hunter-gatherer way
of life thousands of years before. European civilization was
unquestionably superior in technology and was equal of tbe Indians
in ruthlessness and brutality in war. Consequently, the opportunity to
turn back the European invasion was lost before the Indians ever
seriously recognized the threat.
By the end of the eighteenth century, the Indians were nearly
vanquished. The first and last real effort to unite the tribes against
the Europeans was made by the Shawnee chief Tecumseh early in the 19th
century. His efforts were doomed to fail, not simply because of
technological inferiority but also because Indian civilization was far
too decentralized to be marshaled into one unified force. In the end,
Tecumseh was forced into an alliance with the British against the
Americans. The British withdrawal after the War of 1812 sealed the
Indian fate. The westward advance would continue, heroically but
inconsequentially resisted. As to the future of the Indian, Tecumseh
made that clear to his followers:
What I have tried to do in uniting all Indians to stop
the whites who have been pushing us back, has failed. Our cause is
done. No longer raise your weapons against the Americans; it can
only end in disaster for you and all your people. Make peace with
them in any way you can; be loyal to them in all ways; defend them
against their enemies if need be, even should those enemies be other
Indians, for, hear me, my brothers, the Indians can never win
against the Americans. Join them, that you and your people may
survive.[5]
At most, the unresolved conflict between the Indians and Whites
barely slowed conquering of the frontier. A weaker (though in many
ways a more egalitarian) civilization gave way to one more adept at
settled existence. And yet, there was very little that could be said
about the conquerers that made for a homogeneous citizenry. Though
Anglo-Saxon at the core, the nation was rapidly being populated by
people of diverse heritage. Many had no experience at self-government;
most came from impoverished backgrounds. The clash of cultural
differences was added to other dynamics in the 19th century that
caused inevitable friction and a political environment characterized
by intense factiona1ism.
As long as the continent's supply of good agricultural land, fresh
water and other raw materials cou1d be freely had in the unsettled
frontier, American society possessed a reserve which kept poverty at
bay. True, opportunity was not strictly speaking equal; however, while
it might be true that in the coastal cities and areas such equal
opportunity had already disappeared even by the beginning of the 19th
century, one could always go west --beyond the local "margin"
to a place where the best nature could offer was still obtainable
without payment, to a titleholder. This was an opportunity to
accumulate wealth absent in Europe for all but a very small minority.
In Europe, however, rumblings were being heard.
In England, Adam Smith had attacked the mercantilists and their
monopolistic ways; Frenchmen such as Turgot and Quesnay, of the
physiocratic school of economists, did likewise and were attempting to
open up the French economy. Franklin, Jefferson and Paine were
particularly influenced by both the physiocrats and Smith. Then, early
in the 19th century another Englishman, David Ricardo, expanded on the
groundwork of his mentors. Ricardo's labor theory of value later found
its way into Marx's attack on capital owners, whom he targeted as the
confiscators of labor-produced wealth. Ricardo's analysis of land as a
factor production and the relationship between population growth, the
development of manufactures and the increase in the value of land
became the basis for George's attack on the private collection of rent
("rent" being the return to landowners for the use of land).
In the struggle for dominance, Ricardo foresaw that the capitalist
would EVENTUALLY lose and the landowner would win, labor's share in
the distribution of wealth always tending toward subsistence level.
What the physiocrats, Smith and Ricardo failed to see (but which
George witnessed firsthand) was the eventual merging of the landed and
capital interests to form a politically potent new class, then the
growing militancy of workers as they recognized the necessity to act
collectively.
The debate among historians, economists and others over the
importance of the frontier and supply of free land was transmuted into
political activity during the last quarter of the 19th century. Henry
George, himself, ran for mayor of New York against the traditional
party candidates. Among George's converts were a number of United
States congressmen, including Tom L. Johnson of Ohio who was elected
mayor of Cleveland in 1901. Though not surprising, Jackson Turner Main
has given an account of the period strongly supportive of George's
arguments:
When the frontier stage had ended, and society became
stable, the chance to rise diminished. All the land worth owning was
now occupied, and land prices rose, so that the sons of pioneers and
the newcomers could not so easily improve their positions. Mobility
therefore diminished as the community grew older.[6]
Nevertheless, in comparison with the Old World, the new nation
presented far greater opportunity for almost all new arrivals (or at
least their descendents) to eventually rise above subsistence level
existence. There were, however, serious limitations imposed on
advancement in social and economic status. One reason was simply that
one had to pass through the established colonies before reaching the
frontier. The coastal regions bad originally been settled by members
of England's middle class and its better farmers, who arrived with
substantial financial resources and became the colonies' large
landholders. With them they brought other English citizens as
indentured servants, and these people eventually paid their way to
freedom and themselves acquired landed property. What is interesting
is that African slaves and other Europeans made their way to the New
World in significant numbers only rather late in the 17tb century.
This occurred in part because England imposed a ban on the emigration
of additional skilled artisans (the loss of whom was raising wages in
England -- a dangerous precedent and a challenge to the established
order).
Another important factor in the development of the American political
economy and class structure was the early establishment of higher
education. Harvard College was founded in 1636. At the time there were
already between 125-150 alumni of English universities who bad settled
in New England. These individuals were staunch believers in English
institutions and in the mother country's system of common law on which
the concepts of property would be based. And, as Henry Stee1e Commager
has observed, these transplanted Englishmen were concerned not at all
with equality; rather, their sense of opportunity was limited to that
dictated by an imported class structure and a narrow sense of
community. One consequence was that by the beginning of the 18th
century free allotments of empty land throughout the colonies ended as
"older settlers and their descendants saw no reason why they
should not profit by [the] flood of [Scotch and Irish] immigration by
buying land cheap and selling dear."[7] Land speculation soon
became a major preoccupation of the established colonists, so that "by
1720 so much land bad been taken up ... that the only recourse for a
poor man who had not the wherewithal to satisfy a land speculator, was
to 'squat' without leave on Crown or proprietary land; and to repeat
the process if he were forced to move on."[8] Thus, free access
to land began to disappear long before settlement of the frontier;
first the colonial legislatures and then the states had adopted the
English system of property law that sanctioned the concentrated
control of the nation's land, an aspect of the new nation's structure
which Henry George and others later identified as the root cause of
mass poverty and social problems.
Economic rights incorporated into the republic's new Constitution
aimed at guaranteeing the preservation of property, not at the means
to ensure its equitable distribution. One result was that the
advantage of being born into a family of early colonial landholders
remained an important determinant of social and economic position in
the America of the 19th century. For, example, of "the wealthiest
[100] Virginians in 1787, 79 or 80 inherited all of their wealth.
These were members of the First Families -- the old, established
aristocracy of the colony which survived the Revolution intact."[9]
I believe it crucial, then, to ask why both the intellectual and
political challengers of the status quo concentrated their attack on "capitalists"
rather than on the large "landowners."
Some insight into this enigma is provided by historian Douglas T.
Miller, who observes that many historians "have made a
distinction between mercantile and landholding families on the one
hand and rising capitalist-industrialists on the other, imp1ying that
these groups ... were somehow diametrically opposed to one another."[10]
Reformers and historians would do well to give strong consideration to
Miller's conclusion that "Although all barriers between the
so-called 'old' family rich and 'new' were not entirely broken down so
far as the drawing room was concerned, it was no longer meaningful to
speak of these precise divisions by the 1850's." [11] Almost
without exception, the rich were rich in part because of land
speculations and the monopolies secured by the use of such wealth and
its inherent political power. Land monopoly begot influence and
capital, which begot greater land monopo1y, which expanded
opportunities for political and finance manipulation -- all of which
set the stage for the entrenchment of monopoly-capitalism. In
response, American society was opened to the rise of reactionary
philosophies and their protagonists -- the union organizers, the
fabian socialists, the nativists, the protectionists and the
interventionists.
The acceleration of industrialization in the second half of the 19tb
century created a potent environment for change, but one which
contained the seeds of destruction for the Jeffersonian vision. The
possibility of becoming a society of educated, bard-working yeoman
farmers became a quaint dream. The frontier remained, but much of it
was now controlled by absentee owners or the government. New
technologies enhanced the production of many goods, reducing the unit
cost of production and-- theoretically -- adding to the purchasing
power of the wage laborer. Immigration and the freeing of blacks from
slavery, on the other hand, increased the competition among such
laborers for employment in industry, resulting in a reduction of money
wages toward subsistence. Unemployment became an ongoing social
problem.
The premature enc1osure of America's unused land put the unskilled
laborer at the mercy of the "robber baron"
landowner-capitalist, and made inevitable class conflict. As a
consequence, a republican future characterized by the protection of
individual liberty against the exercise of license by either
monopolists or the State (the quest of Henry George and of those who
subscribed to his reform program) failed to emerge as the preeminent
challenge to the status quo. People who bad never been farmers or had
never owned land saw as their oppressors the factory owners and the
finance manipulators. Those who were initially capitalists may have
gained control of much of the unused land; however, failing to
understand the connection between landed monopoly and mass
unemployment, reformers chose a path that would eventually subordinate
individual rights to the hoped for security of a supremacist state.
Labor resorted to unionism, capital to protectionism and then
secondarily to other ways of strengthening their respective
monopolies. As the large landholders ventured into capital ownership
and "stewardship" of the financial system, they consolidated
their ability to impact the distribution of wealth in America.
Reformers attacked monopoly-capitalism and put forth socialist
programs as the alternative. Slowly, statist interventionism worked
its way into the political system; the supremacists were, in the end,
victorious over the individualists, because of the latter's
unwillingness to compromise for a fair field with no favor as
opposed to unbridled liberty (i.e., the license to monopolize). With
each new wave of immigration and after each recessionary period,
Americans looked more and more to government to solve the problems of
a political economy plagued by unequal opportunity.
Real reform proved to be impossib1e in 19tb century America, as this
description of the political nvironment by Robert Wiebe clearly shows:
The established leaders in urban-industrialized America
properly believed that their opponents would destroy them, or at
least their functions, if they could, just as the protectors of the
community accurately sensed the existence of a league of
unrestrained power. ...Both then assigned the enemy a monolithic
consistency and machinelike organization, invested it with a
conspiratorial design, and imputed to it an almost supernatural
potency. Honors for distortion divided about equally.[12]
This explains why a sincere attempt such as George's to bring about a
more humane system of politica1 economy had very little chance against
the established system of industrial-landlordism or the supremacist
doctrines hailed by the socialists. As Wiebe goes on to conclude, "The
mediator simply could not function" and even a "well-intentioned
citizen like Frederick Jackson Turner, who tried from the middle
ground ... to explain the radical West to the respectable East, had to
a wait a saner day."[13] Unfortunately, that day has yet to come.
As a voice in the wilderness, Henry George fought on the battlefield
right up until his death in 1897. That so many people in this world
suffer from political oppression and unrelenting poverty should be
warning enough that despite all the advances in science and
technology, despite the efficiencies of mass production, despite
participatory government -- we have not done what we must do. George's
fundamental reform was directed toward a permanent end to land
monopoly, peacefully and in an evolutionary manner through the use of
government to collect the annual rental value of land for use as
society's common fund. Even then, he anticipated a long and hard
struggle to secure lasting improvements in civilization:
Let me not be misunderstood. I do not say that in the
recognition of the equal and unalterable right of each human being
to the natural elements from which life must be supported and wants
satisfied, lies the solution of all social problems. I fully
recognize the fact that even after we do this, much will remain to
do. We might recognize the equal rights to land, and yet tyranny and
spoliation be continued. But whatever else we do, so long as we fail
to recognize the equal right to the elements of nature, nothing will
avail to remedy that unnatural inequality in the distribution of
wealth which is fraught with so much evil and danger. Reform as we
may, until we make this fundamental reform our material progress can
but tend to differentiate our people into the monstrously rich and
the frightfully poor. Whatever be the increase of wealth, the masses
will still be ground toward the point of bare subsistence -- we must
still have our great criminal classes, our paupers and our tramps,
men and women driven to degradation and desperation from inability
to make an honest living.[14]
Somehow, throughout it all, the human spirit remains ever resilient.
Perhaps we will look again at the 19tb century, to its lessons and the
ideas of its clearest thinkers, for a path which will take us into the
21st century absent the problems of poverty, mass unemployment and
class conflict that now plague our civilization.
REFERENCES
1. Henry George, Progress and
Poverty (New York, 1879. Reprinted, Robert Scbalkenbacb
Foundation, 1975) pp 11-12.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid., p. 461.
4. Cited in Fawn M. Brodie, Thomas Jefferson NY: W.W. Norton &
Co., 1974) p. 156.
5. Cited in Allan W. Eckert, Gateway to Empire (Boston:
Little, Brown & Co., 1983) p. 689.
6. Jackson Turner Main, The Social Structure of Revolutionary
America (Princeton: Princeton University Press , 1965) p. 177.
NOTE: It is hard to ignore the influence on Main of his namesake, and
of Henry George on Frederick Jackson Turner. Researching this
connection, one historian compares George and Turner, noting that "George
[predicted] that the open frontier would end before the. turn of the
century, and with its ending would come a host of social evils if our
land tenure system were not improved." He goes on to conclude "Here
was the frontier thesis of Turner right down to the key safety valve
idea. ...It could hardly have failed to attract Turner's attention,
and Indeed, recent historical scholarship has put the matter beyond
speculation. Turner's biographer, Dr. Fulmer Mood ... discovered that
Turner owned a copy of Progress and Poverty and that the young
historian had read and marked the book in 1888-9 while a graduate
student at John Hopkins; in the same year Turner took part in a
seminar discussion of the book." (Steven B. Cord, Henry
George: Dreamer or Realist? [Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1965] pp. 75-76.)
7. Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager, The Growth of
the American Republic (NY: Oxford University Press, 1962) p. 104.
8. Ibid. NOTE: That land hunger becomes a factor so early in
American history was a clear warning of the developing class
conflicts. Absentee landlordism sent millions of Irish to their graves
and to America. "In that new world which had been called into
being to redress the balance of the old tbere was to grow up a
population among whom animosity to England was a creed, whose burning
resentment could never be appeased, who, possessing the long memory of
Ireland, could never forget. The Irish famine was to be paid for by
England at a terrible price; out of it was born Irish America."
(Cecil Woodham-Smith, The Reason Why (NY: McGraw-Hill, 1953),
p.136.
9. Main, pp. 183-184.
10. Douglas T. Miller, Jacksonian Aristocracy, (NY: Oxford
University Press, 1967) p. 124.
11. Ibid., 127.
12. Robert H. Wiebe, The Search For Order 1877-1920 (NY: Hill
and Wang, 1967), p.96
13. Ibid., 97.
14. Henry George, Social Problems (NY: 1883. Reprinted by the
Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, 1966), p.201.
COMMENTS BY PROFESSOR ERSHKOWITZ
Passage of time
forces shifts in position. A Jefferson faced with an autocratic
and aristocratic corporate leadership might have acted as
Theodore Roosevelt did to increase the power of government to
balance out this threat to republican government. Perhaps, the
Adler statement solves all problems. A government which governs
justly governs best.
Although there were problems with Jefferson as a slaveholder
and a southern aristocrat, his basis philosophy has provided a
guideline for all reformers since 1776.
Attitude towards the Indians relate both to a desire to take
their land because it stood in the way of progress and an
attitude in which all non-whites were lumped together in an
inferior status, to be enslaved or removed to some distant part
of the world.
By 1985 the ending of land monopoly would do little to bring
large corporations along the track to republicanism.
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