40 Credits & A Mule, Part V: Maybe Radio

January 13, 2015June 4, 2023 ~ Blue Cereal

The original element of despotism is a MONOPOLY OF TALENT, which consigns the multitude to comparative ignorance, and secures the balance of knowledge on the side of the rich and the rulers.
If then the healthy existence of a free government be, as the committee believe, rooted in the WILL of the American people, it follows as a necessary consequence, of a government based upon that will, that this monopoly should be broken up, and that the means of equal knowledge, (the only security for equal liberty) should be rendered, by legal provision, the common property of all classes.
In a republic, the people constitute the government, and… frame the laws and create the institutions, that promote their happiness or produce their destruction… It appears, therefore, to the committee that there can be no real liberty without a wide diffusion of real intelligence; that the members of a republic, should all be alike instructed in the nature and character of their equal rights and duties, as human beings, and as citizens…
(Report of the Workingman’s Committee of Philadelphia On the State of Public Instruction in Pennsylvania, 1830)

These were white working men in the semi-industrialized north. They lived in an age of reform – the time of Lucretia Mott, William Lloyd Garrison, Dorothea Dix, and Horace Mann. It is unlikely that most owned land. Their ‘report’ echoes that of other labor organizations of the era – we need universal public education for our kids.

This was not a majority sentiment.

It’s dangerous to project backwards regarding motivations and intentions, but it seems that even when public education was barely a thing, they realized it would soon become essential if their sons were to flourish in the next generation. I don’t know if they were worried about ‘personal fulfillment’ stuff as well, but I’m an idealist, so… let’s assume maybe they did.

Their report demonstrates impressive cognizance regarding their target audiences. Rather than plead on behalf their offspring, they argue founding values, and the well-being of the republic to those in positions to change the system – to pass the laws, devote the resources, reshape the society. They don’t ask for opportunities, even democratic ones; rather, they promise better citizens. They reference aristocracy and oligarchy, anathema to ‘real Americans’ a generation after the Revolution, and lay out a simply path towards better functioning. It’s a great argument.

It’s also about a century ahead of its time. Education was starting to matter in 1830, at least in the North, but land was still the universal key.

And then a century passed.

In the 1930’s, everything changed. The Great Depression, of course, and the Dust Bowl – game changers for the nation and for the world. Something else was going on as well, though – an abrupt shift in land ownership and what it meant.

Once California belonged to Mexico and its land to Mexicans; and a horde of tattered feverish Americans poured in. And such was their hunger for land that they took the land… and they guarded with guns the land they had stolen. They put up houses and barns, they turned the earth and planted crops. And these things were possession, and possession was ownership.
The Mexicans… could not resist, because they wanted nothing in the world as frantically as the Americans wanted land.

Steinbeck was entirely capable of being racist by the standards of today, but I don’t think this was one of those times. His venom here is towards what we’d today call “the man,” and he’s mildly sympathetic towards Mexico’s loss. Keep in mind he was essentially a Socialist, which tends to happen to people who spend enough time among the disenfranchised.

Then, with time, the squatters were no longer squatters, but owners; and their children grew up and had children on the land. And the hunger was gone from them, the… tearing hunger for land, for water and earth and the good sky over it… They had these things so completely that they did not know about them any more… and crops were reckoned in dollars, and land was valued by principal plus interest, and crops were bought and sold before they were planted.

Jefferson would have peed himself. T.J. liked a good income, but he had a healthy sense of delusion regarding the holiness of agriculture as well. Remember Jesus turning over the tables of the money-changers in the temple?

Then crop failure, drought, and flood were no longer little deaths within life, but simple losses of money. And all their love was thinned with money, and all their fierceness dribbled away in interest until they were no longer farmers at all, but little shopkeepers of crops… Then those farmers who were not good shopkeepers lost their land to good shopkeepers. No matter how clever, how loving a man might be with earth and growing things, he could not survive if he were not a good shopkeeper. And as time went on, the business men had the farms, and the farms grew larger, but there were fewer of them…
And there were pitifully few farmers on the land any more…
(John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath – 1939)

Land didn’t work anymore.

It would still grow stuff – more effectively than ever, actually. But it wasn’t LAND (*cue majestic music*) in the way it had been land before. Jefferson’s agricultural ideal was all but extinguished, and the most sacred of pursuits – the one previously regarded as the best possible indication of a man’s capability, responsibility, moral potential, and stake in the prosperity of the nation – became just another business. It mattered, sure – but so did the weaving and the manufacturing and the shipping and the lawyering. It was no longer special.

This is not my anti-capitalism rant. I’ll leave that to Tom Joad and his spirit moving among the hungry children and such. I’m more or less a Libertarian, but the Libertarian Ideal in MY interpretation requires a capable citizenry with actual options and real opportunity. It’s fine to support free will and full consequences for our actions, but to believe this and sleep at night we need something akin to a ‘equitable starting position’ or the proverbial ‘level playing field’.

That’s not the same as waiting until you’re way, way ahead, and then suddenly cutting the ropes to the bridge. That’s not libertarianism, that’s just being a bastard. Not always a clear distinction, I realize, but an important one nonetheless.

But I digress.

Land was a big deal. It was readily available by some standards, and not at all available by others. It came to define more than your right to vote or otherwise participate – it blurred into individual worth and identity. It was taken from the Amerindians, who didn’t even buy into the system, and denied to Black Americans, who did. Eventually, it ceased to be what it had been – the key to opportunity, responsibility, capability… all the -ilities.

“Ma,” she said. Ma’s eyes lighted up and she drew her attention toward Rose of Sharon. Her eyes went over the tight, tired, plump face, and she smiled. “Ma,” the girl said, “when we get there, all you gonna pick fruit an’ kinda live in the country, ain’t you?”
Ma smiled a little satirically. “We ain’t there yet,” she said. “We don’t know what it’s like. We got to see.”
“Me an’ Connie don’t want to live in the country no more,” the girl said. “We got it all planned up what we gonna do… Connie gonna get a job in a store or maybe a fact’ry. An’ he’s gonna study at home, maybe radio, so he can git to be a expert an’ maybe later have his own store. An’ we’ll go to pitchers whenever… An’ after he studies at night, why – it’ll be nice, an’ he tore a page outa Western Love Stories, an’ he’s gonna send off for a course…”

Ma was right – no one knew what it was gonna be like. Rose was pregnant, so that’s literary, and Connie – ironically – wasn’t far off track in terms of how the future was going to work for those able to claim it. As in, NOT the Joads.

Right at the end of that conversation, the truck carrying them all to California breaks down. That Steinbeck and his symbolism – what a nut.

Education became the new land. There were hints in the early 19th century, and Connie Rivers had a glimpse of it, but it takes awhile to remake the core of a faith. Enlightenment ideals certainly should have anticipated this, but the New World had far more available soil than acres of free pedagogy, so…

Sometimes the beliefs shape the facts, sometimes the facts shape the beliefs. Land it was, then.

By the time of the Cold War, starting with the G.I. Bill, the rules had somehow changed. From there forward it’s all going to be about who shapes the learning. As Schoolhouse Rock so wisely intoned, “It’s great to learn, because Knowledge is Power.”

Exactly.

Related Post: 40 Credits & A Mule, Part I – This Land

40 Credits & A Mule, Part IV: The Measure of a Man

January 11, 2015June 4, 2023 ~ Blue Cereal ~ 1 Comment

I previously covered some of the reasons land ownership was inseparable from representative government in the early American model, but I’ve left out at least one pretty important one.

Thomas Jefferson, letter to Edmund Pendleton, August 1776:
You seem to have misapprehended my proposition for the choice of a Senate. I had two things in view: to get the wisest men chosen, & to make them perfectly independent when chosen. I have ever observed that a choice by the people themselves is not generally distinguished for its wisdom. This first secretion from them is usually crude & heterogeneous. But give to those so chosen by the people a second choice themselves, & they generally will chuse wise men…

Jefferson is suggesting a method of electing Senators similar to what was later done for the Presidency – a kind of electoral college. As is often the case with Jefferson, his hybrid of grand insight and colorful language is almost irresistible. He begins with typical Enlightenment precision followed by intentional understatement with a touch of ‘snide bastard’. The choice of the masses, left to their own direct democracy-type devices, “is not generally distinguished for its wisdom.”

Then the imagery – “the first SECRETION from them is usually CRUDE and HETEROGENEOUS…” Before you tab open dictionary.com, “heterogeneous” means diverse – in this case, an incoherent mess. And this is the guy who LIKES the common man – er… in theory. Kind of. Some days. From far away.

That the Senate as well as lower (or shall I speak truth & call it upper) house should hold no office of profit I am clear; but not that they should of necessity possess distinguished property… my observations do not enable me to say I think integrity the characteristic of wealth.

The Senate was intended to be the more austere, deliberative body – holding longer terms and intended as a balance on the more reactionary House of Representatives, elected every two years and thus presumably more responsive to the whims of the people. Jefferson’s parenthetical commentary is a nod to the superior role and trustworthy wisdom of the crude mess-secretors from a few sentences before.

I said he was brilliant, not consistent.

In general I believe the decisions of the people, in a body, will be more honest & more disinterested than those of wealthy men: & I can never doubt an attachment to his country in any man who has his family & peculium in it…

We can’t trust the rich and powerful to run things, but neither can we trust the destitute. The landed citizen, however, in composite with others of his ilk – THAT’s a foundation. He is “attached” to his country – he has his family and his stuff here. Of course he wants the nation to do well – he has a vested interest uncharacteristic of those without such things.

If I buy my groceries at Wal-Mart and they go out of business, it’s inconvenient but not devastating. I may shop there, but I won’t organize the shelves or clean the bathrooms because that stuff is neither my job nor my problem. If, on the other hand, I not only work there but have stock in the company – my entire life savings and retirement, perhaps – you’ll find me helping people even on my day off, and replacing the toilet paper without begin asked. In that scenario, I NEED Wal-Mart to survive. I’m counting on it to succeed. Its destiny and mine are the same.

Substitute ‘Merica for Wal-Mart (not much of a stretch, really) and there you have it.

I was for extending the right of suffrage to all who had a permanent intention of living in the country. Take what circumstances you please as evidence of this, either the having resided a certain time, or having a family, or having property, any or all of them. Whoever intends to live in a country must wish that country well, & has a natural right of assisting in the preservation of it. I think you cannot distinguish between such a person residing in the country & having no fixed property, & one residing in a township whom you say you would admit to a vote…

The final reason land was so essential to early American democracy was that it established a stake in the success of the nation for those who held it. There are no stakes higher than protecting one’s home and sustenance – men will do almost anything to ensure success, even become informed voters.

Well, that’s the theory, anyway.

After the Civil War, many Freedmen believed they deserved – and that they had in fact been promised – “40 Acres and a Mule.” Some had actually been granted such at the unauthorized discretion of Union generals who, reasonably enough, took land from defeated plantation-owners and redistributed it to former slaves.

These few instances were reversed to smooth the transition into Reconstruction and maintain the almost cultish commitment Americans had to property rights – and, apparently, irony. The freedmen received nothing.

Well, that’s not entirely true. They received freedom. That was a pretty big deal. But freedom to do… what?

With no education, no land, no resources, no momentum – what the hell were they going to do?

Many stayed where they were, working the same land they’d been working, in exchange for food and shelter. Others left their former “masters” and wandered, either seeking loved ones from whom they’d been separated or simply wanting to go… somewhere else.

Many ended up working for white landowners under various arrangements. The South had just lost a rather brutal war – they didn’t have money to pay anyone. But food, shelter, a place to be… that they had. Eventually sharecropping and tenant farming were ubiquitous.

Freedmen didn’t have any land, or a realistic way to obtain land. Carpetbaggers from the North began establishing schools, the government had a few agencies, but overall opportunity was… limited. Just over a decade after the South surrendered the war, the North surrendered Reconstruction and brought their troops home in exchange for the Presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes.

You all remember Hayes, right? A President for whom it was worth giving up the closest we’d ever come to realizing our founding ideals?

Yeah, me neither. And maybe we weren’t as close as we should have been in such a position – war won, Amendments ratified, South destroyed. But still…

Hayes fought bimetallism, stopped a railroad strike, and sped assimilation of Amerindians. In short, after Lincoln’s death, the Republican Party went to hell fairly rapidly. Their only real saving grace was that they weren’t Democrats.

The freedman had gained everything – in theory. On paper, they were FREE! The men could vote! Land ownership! Education! Equality before the law! Unalienable rights, in your FACE!

Without land, though, they couldn’t provide for themselves. The system didn’t facilitate advancement via laboring for others – just ask the Lowell Girls, the Newsies, or any ox. Freedmen (or others without land) couldn’t do the things people had been conditioned to expect as a prerequisite for suffrage – for being a ‘full American’.

Despite written law, it became difficult to vote. It was impossible to gain economic ground, individually or as a community. Expression is severely limited when any unpopular thought can result in loss of livelihood. How does one maintain a sense of self against so much negation? At what point do we become our labels?

That’s the suffrage part. If Jefferson was correct about the spiritual and moral benefits of ‘laboring in the earth’, working the land of another may or may not have been worth partial divine credit. In terms of ‘vested interest’ in our national success, whatever support black Americans lent to their country came without terrestrial reciprocation.

White men who succeeded under the system believed they deserved to succeed. Most had genuinely worked hard and made good choices by the standards of the time. It was not perhaps logical, but WAS very human, to see those who did NOT flourish as undeserving… obviously. We all want to be part of a good system, an ordered universe, and to be justified in whatever satisfaction we draw from our efforts. Generally, ‘facts’ adjust themselves to fit our paradigms rather than the reverse.

That’s not even a white thing – that’s just a people thing.

What began as a checklist for civic participation became the default measure of a man. What was intended to protect representative government from the incompetent or slothful became an anchor on those who didn’t fit certain checklists as of 225 years ago. You are unworthy. Not quite a full American – and thus not quite a full person.

The issue becomes your state of being rather than whatever rules you have or haven’t mastered, or whatever goals you haven’t met. It was self-perpetuating and self-reinforcing. It became circular.

And then it stopped being about land and started being about something else. A new ultimate requirement and cure-all, which must be made theoretically available to all for ‘democracy’ – such as it is – to survive.

Related Post: 40 Credits & A Mule, Part I – This Land

40 Credits & A Mule, Part III: Manifest Destiny

January 6, 2015June 4, 2023 ~ Blue Cereal

When my kids were little, we used to go to Bishop’s Cafeteria to eat with my dad. He was old, and old people like cafeterias – so we went.

My son would fill his tray with everything he could fit in, including that cafeteria classic – brightly colored, cubed Jello. My daughter was much pickier, but inevitably she chose the wiggly cubes as well. The boy would snarf down his selections in minutes; the girl would take hours if we let her.

It is worth noting that she didn’t usually eat the Jello.

She liked to look at it. The table would inevitably get jostled a bit, or otherwise nudged, and the Jello would wiggle. It’s what Jello does. She loved that. And, to be fair, that’s just as valid a use for Jello as any other. (Just because something is edible doesn’t mean it serves no other function – otherwise, neither houseplants nor family pets would be around long.)

But that’s not how my son saw it.

“Sis, you gonna eat that Jello?”

“No.”

“Can I have it, then?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“It’s my Jello.”

“Are you serious?”

Of course she was serious. I had to question his bewilderment, given that this scene was played out repeatedly over the years. Still, his outrage seemed to build quite genuinely, every time…

“Come on, Sis – you’re not going to eat it!”

“No.”

“But WHY?!?”

“It’s MY Jello.” And at this point, she’d usually give it an extra lil’ nudge – *wigglewigglewigglewigglewiggle*

“DAD!”

“Yes, Son?”

He’d explain, as if perhaps I’d been on business abroad the whole time, rather than sitting there at the same table while things unfolded according to sacred family tradition. I’d express my condolences, but had to concur with Sis that the Jello at issue was, in fact, HER Jello. It didn’t help his case that he’d snarfed an entire platter of foodstuffs only moments before – including a very similar chalice of… cubed Jello.

It never went well.

As the United States began to expand west, its people encountered numerous native tribes who were – to be blunt – in the damn way. Our national sin in regards to Amerindians is not that we overcame them, it’s that we did so hypocritically. Rather than declare war, we declared eternal friendship. We killed them in peace and in the name of a faith built on martyrs, and took everything from them in the name of giving them everything we wished they wanted – civilization, religion, modernity.

To be fair, we needed the land. They had it, but… well, they weren’t really using it properly. The Plains tribes especially were the worst sort of land-wasters – hunting when hungry, gathering when gathering was useful, hanging out, carousing and eating and socializing and such…

We lacked the words to declare them hippies, but ‘utopians’ didn’t seem harsh enough. Not one single factory. Very little organized agriculture. No hospitals. No schools. Just relationships alternating with quiet reflection.

I’m overgeneralizing, of course – there were hundreds of tribes and cultures and such – but by and large, they weren’t doing proper America things with the lands they claimed as theirs. And, as with the Jello, subjected to repeated wiggling but remaining unconsumed, our frontiersmen forebears weren’t impressed by the arguments of those claiming that land ownership requires neither cultivation nor mall-building.

(And don’t even try to pretend there was no such thing as ‘owning land’. That doesn’t even make sense. That’s like saying you can’t own people – ridiculous.)

It was genuinely maddening. Let’s not overlook that. Mixed in with the greed and selfishness and prejudice and maybe even some dark damnable thoughts was palpable frustration – an almost holy outrage – that this land was being denied them by a people unwilling to do more than jiggle their Jello.

We needed that land – we deserved that land (because if having it allows us to establish worthiness, then we should have it BECAUSE we’re worthy – it makes perfect sense, if you don’t think about it too closely).

This is not just about me and mine – although it IS very much also about me and mine. We’re here as part of something bigger – something important – something holy – something democratic – something special.

Killing Indians for personal reasons wasn’t considered particularly onerous by the standards of the day. Most of the civilized world was still pretty comfortable with what today would be considered the worst sorts of racial and cultural elitism. This was beyond that, though – this was brushing aside a backwards culture and a darkened people (figuratively?) to make room for progress. Light. Democracy. The New Way.

Because we NEEDED this land for settlers. For homesteaders. For citizens. Without it, there’s no progress. Without sufficient land, the whole of-the-by-the-for-the concept clogs up – it could even fail. And if American democracy fails, the new nation fails. If it fails here, it fails everywhere. Tyranny returns, darkness wins, and monsters rule the earth.

Conflict with Mexico was not much different. Their culture was nothing like most Amerindian peoples, but neither did we particularly fathom or appreciate their social structure, economic mores, or anything else – nor they ours. Perhaps outright disdain for one another played a larger role than with the Natives, and certainly by that point the sheer momentum of Westward Expansion eclipsed whatever underlying values or beliefs had fueled it a generation prior, but whatever the immediate motivations, the same sense of unquestioned rightness oozed from the words and letters of those pinche gabachos manifesting their destiny.

It’s not logical, but it is very human to devalue how others process their world and the goals they choose to pursue. The Natives had every opportunity to make themselves productive – to get a little schooling (hell, we offered it to them FOR FREE), learn a little civilization, even to take care of themselves through the miracles of modern agriculture. The Mexicans had plenty of chances to be, um… not Mexican!

Let’s set aside for a moment that we were inflicting antithetical values and lifestyles on a diversity of proud peoples. We’ll ignore the generations of broken treaties and outright deception. I’d like to focus on the third element of the equation – the final key to mass failure by so many Amerindians.

Poor tools. Bad soil. Spoiled supplies. If there’s such a thing as a ‘level playing field’, this wasn’t it.

They were assigned a value system and lifestyle they didn’t want, with the full weight of state and federal governments forcing compliance. They were assigned the worst land on which to practice this new system, and given inadequate tools and other supplies. The stakes were incredibly high – at best, they were expected to emulate those with the right equipment, in which case they could perhaps almost survive as second-class citizens. More likely, they would fail, starve, or simply give up – this not being a game they’d wished to play anyway.

The dominant citizenry would then point to this “failure” and label them as lazy, incompetent, or otherwise flawed.

This is, in my view, one of the major travesties of American History. Except that I’m no longer just talking about 19th Century American History.

Through bold and subversive rhetoric, I’ve effectively transitioned it into an analogy for something else.

Man, I’m good.

Related Post: 40 Credits & A Mule, Part I – This Land

40 Credits & A Mule, Part II: Chosen People

January 1, 2015July 31, 2023 ~ Blue Cereal

I last opined on the almost sacred role of land in founding a new democracy – United States version. It was, to many Framers, the most obvious and tangible measure of a man’s legitimacy, his potential value as another voice in the national discussion.

Land was about provision, responsibility, independence – individually-sized portions of national ideals. Its role was not asserted so much as recognized – much like many other “self-evident” truths bandied about in those days.

But the issue wasn’t solely terrestrial.

Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever He had a chosen people, whose breasts He has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which he keeps alive that sacred fire which otherwise might escape from the face of the earth. Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an example. (Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1782)

I’m no authority on Jefferson, but you don’t know that – so let’s just play along and not make trouble, alright?

Jefferson’s preference for the poetic over the particular could be a bit chaffing at times, although it also gave us such timeless idealizations as “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” – whatever that means. The tension between his rhetoric and his behavior has been subject to much analysis, and rightly so, but at the risk of seeming an apologist, not living up to one’s words – even to the point of hypocrisy – doesn’t negate the potential value of the words.

Maybe we’re just not living up to them.

(Seriously, if we did background checks on every motivational meme on Pinterest, which of you would escape untarnished? Let he who is without sin post the first troll.)

“Those who labor in the earth…” I suppose he could have just said “farmers,” but this paints a more vivid picture to set up where he’s going. It’s not about a role in the economy or the food chain – it’s about the agency of individuals, applied not merely to ground or soil but to the “earth”. It’s a wide-angle lens on an idealized way of life – Jefferson’s strength.

“…the chosen people of God, if ever He had a chosen people…” Wow. Jefferson getting all allusion-y up in here. The most obvious antecedent would be the Israelites of the Old Testament. Jefferson wasn’t a huge fan of biblical literalism, but that wouldn’t negate its value as a frame of reference. The addition of “if ever he had a chosen people” may be read as emphasis (“that’s a miracle if ever I saw one!”) or a touch of skepticism (“if there are such things as miracles, this would be one”) – an ambivalence consistent with his few recorded thoughts on scripture. But the power of the image – the holy role of the Hebrew children – that he utilizes quite intentionally.

It’s like he has a point to make.

It wasn’t much of a leap from Old Testament progenitors to fresh young Americans – the City on a Hill, the people whose destiny was quickly becoming manifest, and who a century later would carry their “white man’s burden” well past the boundaries of the continent.

But for now the issue was land – or at least the way of life it promoted.

Farmers worked 365 days a year. Soil still needing tilling on your birthday, cows needed milked on Christmas, and no matter how sick you might be, those crops weren’t going to reap themselves. It was labor-intensive and the hours were long, and yet after doing all you could do, all day every day – you waited.

You waited for the rain. You waited for the growth. You waited for the births. You waited for the universe to do its part.

Sometimes it didn’t. Often, even when it did, it took too long and was too slow and there was no way to rush it, but many ways to ruin it. This combination of intense human application and eternal patience is inconceivable generations later. Almost nothing works that way anymore – at least not the sorts of things to which you set your hand when young, ways of life from cradle to grave. Sometimes enough years and sufficient survival teach similar lessons in the 21st century – but they come too late to shape much more than your reflections.

The laboring Jefferson extols, however, produced “substantial genuine virtue” – a type of perspective and wisdom unavailable minus the requisite experiences.

You won’t find accounts of farmers going rogue in meaningful numbers, he claims. Presumably this is related to all that virtue and sacred fire. I have to think myself they couldn’t possibly have found the time or energy to be particularly corrupt. The immediate, tangible consequences of immorality or irresponsibility would be a sufficient deterrent should all else fail. Like playing in the traffic or juggling chainsaws, any screw-ups would be quickly self-correcting.

Agriculture… is our wisest pursuit, because it will in the end contribute most to real wealth, good morals and happiness. The wealth acquired by speculation and plunder, is fugacious in its nature, and fills society with the spirit of gambling. The moderate and sure income of husbandry, begets permanent improvement, quiet life, and orderly conduct both public and private.” (Thomas Jefferson, Letter to George Washington, 1787)

Jefferson had a distrust of bankers, stock markets, or anything financial industry-ish – so much so that he took great personal pride in never having the foggiest idea how to make his estate solvent (he died in substantial debt). Farmers raised essentials. They produced raw materials which could be woven into clothing, smoked for pleasure, eaten to survive. “Real wealth.”

Bankers scribbled numbers in little books, in stuffy rooms, producing nothing, but somehow always taking from you. Farmers dealt in uncertainty, but financiers gambled. While farmers produced, money men “plundered.” The soil, properly tended, would always be there – would always prove reliable. Paper numbers and percentage points never were.

Jefferson is claiming an essential role of land beyond voter qualifications. He’s claiming it as a lifestyle – a moral anchor, social stabilizer, and the only true source of economic security. Husbandry grows in men the essential traits of a fledgling democracy – applied labor, determination, patience, and pragmatism. It’s the wisdom of the earth in the hands of the earth’s masters.

(Look, those Enlightenment types thought science-y thoughts, but whether they’d admit it or not, they were quite comfortable with a little melodramatic sheen to their ageless words and divine mission and all that. They sang into their hairbrushes in front of the mirror just like the rest of us – they just did it with bigger words and paradigm-altering consequences.)

I think our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries as long as they are chiefly agricultural; and this will be as long as there shall be vacant lands in any part of America. When they get piled upon one another in large cities as in Europe, they will become corrupt as in Europe.” (Thomas Jefferson, Letter to James Madison, 1787)

Uh-oh.

As yet our manufacturers are as much at their ease, as independent and moral as our agricultural inhabitants, and they will continue so as long as there are vacant lands for them to resort to; because whenever it shall be attempted by the other classes to reduce them to the minimum of subsistence, they will quit their trades and go to laboring the earth.” (Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Mr. J. Lithgow, 1805)

So…

Land ownership allows the property owner to demonstrate his capability, his competence, his potential to be a useful voice – a valid voter.

Land ownership promotes solidity, character, ethereal virtues reflected in wise words and actions – valuable in and of themselves, sure, but especially necessary in a nation relying on the people themselves to provide beneficial leadership – directly or through their choices regarding representation.

Land must be available to meet the demands of an expanding nation. Without sufficient, arable land, the ideals on which the nation was founded lack the requisite elements to survive. It’s not an optional ingredient – it’s the eggs in the democracy omelet, the flour in the ‘Mericake.

Finally, in a nod to inconveniently unfolding realities, Jefferson argues that even the POTENTIAL of land ownership – its availability – provides an essential safety valve, a check on the industrializing leaven of Europe as it attempts to leaven the entire American loaf. That he so easily adjusts his faith to accommodate current events I leave to you to interpret as you see fit.

This land. Chosen people. If it fails here, it fails everywhere. Darkness. Tyranny. Monsters rule the earth.

We’re gonna need more land.

Related Post: 40 Credits & A Mule, Part I – This Land