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Nine-tenths of the Law. Hannah Dobbz
Читать онлайн.Название Nine-tenths of the Law
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781849351195
Автор произведения Hannah Dobbz
Жанр Юриспруденция, право
Издательство Ingram
Homesteading was theoretically free of charge, except for the land office fees, which totaled $16 (or about $336 in 2010). To fulfill a claim, homesteaders were required to occupy a property for five years, though a claim couldn’t be canceled until after seven years. Beginning in 1872, Civil War veterans were permitted to count their service time toward a homestead claim, which usually left them with only one year of occupancy required until title was granted. Each settler was only allowed one Homestead application, but another loophole allowed for a settler to receive one piece of land via Homesteading and another via the Preemption Act, as long as it didn’t interfere with occupation requirements.[40]
Because of the simplicity of obtaining free land, “very many [homesteaders or preemptors] did not go west with the purpose of farming, but merely wished to get title to a piece of land.”[41] Indeed, one of the problems of the land-giveaway program was that some used it to make a profit through privatization. Meanwhile, changing factors made land more difficult to attain for those who intended it for personal occupation and use: The railroads were granted twenty million acres a year, and, by their swallowing up land, the Homestead limit for individual families had to be reduced to 80 acres from 160. Furthermore, 127 million acres within 50 miles of the railroad was off-limits to claimants, as were 140 million acres of state land and 175 million acres of Indian land. With limited homesteading options, some considered purchasing outright from speculators, but by 1870, buying had become unaffordable, as average prices tripled between 1862 and the end of that decade.[42]
Still, in the 1860s, almost 100,000 Homestead applications were processed from Illinois, Missouri, Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin, Indiana, Minnesota, Kansas, and Nebraska. While only 8,000 were submitted in 1863, the program grew in popularity over the years, and by its last year, 1890, 40,000 applications were received. Homesteading hit its height in 1886 with 61,600 applicants.
According to Gates, “the Homestead Act breathed the spirit of the West, with its optimism, its courage, its generosity, and its willingness to do hard work.”[43] But not everyone was so impressed by the Homestead Act. Joshua K. Ingalls of Massachusetts saw the act as a token concession to land reformers rather than true progress. In fact, “he considered it ‘so emasculated by political trickery’ that it did little to alleviate the conditions of the increasing numbers of the landless, while enough land had been voted to railroads by the politicians to have furnished a farm of twenty-five acres to every family in the country.”[44]
Ingalls became interested in the theory behind land reform in 1841, the year that the Preemption Statute passed, and he got involved with groups such as the National Land Reform Association, and the Land and Labor League of New England. Ingalls and his contemporaries wanted to restrict the legal size of land holdings and do away with land monopolies, and they saw the movement to abolish land monopolies as linked to the movement to abolish slavery: If a man were prohibited from owning more land than he alone could work, then slavery and slave plantations would become an impossibility. In this way, the two campaigns were paralleled in as much as land monopolies and slavery both reflected “one man profiting from the hands of many men.”[45]
Ingalls was published prolifically in anarchist newsletters and magazines of the time. He called the U.S. land-law system “half-feudal and half-civil,” comparing industrial tycoons of the day to land-wealthy nobility in other countries.[46] He tended to charge the government with the crimes of land usurpation (by reducing land to the status of a commodity) and land hoarding, calling it the “great land monopolist.”[47] In his book Social Wealth, Ingalls chastised economists for sidestepping the subject of land title origins because they “could give no justification to the system, for to trace any title back will yield us nothing…but forceful and fraudulent taking, even were land a proper subject for taking at all.” He went on to write, “Possession remains possession, and can never become property, in the sense of absolute dominion, except by positive statute. Labor can only claim occupancy, and can lay no claim to more than the usufruct.”[48]
Ingalls was not interested in simply eliminating private landlordism, because that shift would inevitably make way for public landlordism—in other words, the state as landlord—which he saw as equally disturbing. He was certain that a state-owned property system would again tax the lowest class the most, compromising its prospects for autonomous living. He wrote, “Any system securing a premium to capital, however small, must result in the worst degradation and servitude of one class, and in bestowing unearned wealth and power upon another…. The product of human labor can only be exchanged for the product of human labor.”[49]
Ingalls’s position on property was averse to institutions, not individuals. He theorized that increases in population yielded a reduction in landholders and an increase in tenancy—thus, he held, the demons of the rent system were in interest and profits, not in the rent itself. Still, he viewed rent as a political affair instead of an economic one. And similarly, he saw the compulsory taxation of land by the state as indisputably a political system of “despotism.”[50] Anders Corr, a hundred years later, in his essay “Anarchist Squatting and Land Use in the West,” agrees with Ingalls in that “the only landowner who does not dominate others, and is thus not a thief, is the one who uses no more than their fair share of land, and who receives no payment for other people’s use of land. Indominative landowners, or those who do not dominate, by the very fact that they had to pay for the land they use [are] oppressed like others who pay for land in the form of rent.”[51]
Eventually, Ingalls grew disillusioned with land-reform groups that wanted to introduce more laws to control the unfair distribution of land. He wanted to remedy the situation by repealing old laws that protected monopolists rather than by drafting new ones to punish them. He disagreed with reform as well as violent revolution; he was interested in property justice through education over legislation. He hoped to do away with land monopolies, gradually, and over time gear property practice more toward occupation and use.[52]
In 1849, Ingalls abandoned the land reform fight and sought to establish an intentional community (which he called a “colony”) in West Virginia. His goal, as he wrote years later, was “to build up a community where rent and interest and even speculative profit are virtually unknown.” Ingalls received a cascade of responses, from Maine to Ohio, of people interested in his cooperative land experiment. Disenchanted with activism to reform the U.S. legal system, he focused on designing an egalitarian microcosm using the capitalist mechanism of allodial title. [53] Corr dismisses this tactic as escapist and privileged. “Only people with economic resources are able to buy land and become self-sufficient,” he charges. “Utopianism satisfies the ‘back to the lander’ because they have land to construct their isolated utopia, and it satisfies the landlord because they are receiving money, but those who do not have money for country land are left in the same position as before, paying rent or fighting eviction.”[54]
In the 1870s, Ingalls became politically active again outside the personal sphere and started campaigns to repeal laws that protected land titles not based on personal occupancy. According to James J. Martin, “He identified capital as merely past labor and land frozen into a particular form and undeserving of increase in itself. To him the granting of a share of production to capital was placing a premium on past labor at the expense of present labor.”[55]
Many of Ingalls’s ideas were echoed in land struggles well into the next century. Ingallsian notions took a unique twist in the late 1800s with the rise of the conservation movement in the United States. This movement carried with it convictions that we, today, would consider contradictory. In fact, in our current age of increased environmental awareness, conservation seems like an innocuous—even essential—move toward preserving the natural world. Many wealthy, white Americans of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries believed the same thing. But the conservation movement, and its subsequent National Parks development, had catastrophic effects on indigenous peoples as well as poor whites across the country.
The conservation movement was born of a Vermonter named George Perkins Marsh, who, in 1864, published his seminal work Man and Nature, in which he discusses the importance of preserving the natural landscape and its pristine grandeur. He considered himself a forerunner of a burgeoning environmental ideology, and in many ways, he was.