Part 20

The phrase "our United States" as used by the great majority of the people is a misnomer. With the exception of a theoretically valuable but practically unimportant right called "freedom of contract," the majority of the wage earners in the United States have no more excuse for using the phrase "our United States" than the slaves in the South, before the war, for saying "our Southland."

The franchise is a potential power, making it theoretically possible for the electorate to take possession of the country. In practice, the franchise has had no such result. Quite the contrary, the masters of American life by a policy of chicanery and misrepresentation, advertise and support first one and then the other of the "Old Parties," both of which are led by the members of the propertied class or by their retainers. The people, deluded by the press, and ignorant of their real interests, go to the polls year after year and vote for representatives that represent, in all of their interests, the special privileged classes.

The economic and social reorganization of the United States during the past fifty years has gone fast and far. The system of perpetual (fee simple) private ownership of the resources has concentrated the control over the natural resources in a small group, not of individuals, but of corporations; has created a new form of social master, in the form of a land-tool-job owner; has thus made possible a type of absentee-landlordism more effective and less human than were any of its predecessors and has decreased the responsibility at the same time that it has augmented the power of the owning group. These changes have been an integral part of a general economic transformation that has occupied the chief energies of the ablest men of the community for the past two generations.

The country of many farms, villages and towns, and of a few cities, with opportunity free and easy of access, has become a country of highly organized concentrated wealth power, owned by a small fraction of the people and controlled by a tiny minority of the owners for their benefit and profit. The country which was rightfully called "our United States" in 1840, by 1920 was "their United States" in every important sense of the word.

FOOTNOTES:

"Estimated Valuation of National Wealth, 1850-1912," Bureau of the Census, 1915, p. 15.

"Addresses of President Wilson," House Doc. 803. Sixty-fourth Congress, 1st Session (1916), p. 13.

IX. THE DIVINE RIGHT OF PROPERTY

1. Land Ownership and Liberty

The owners of American wealth have been molded gradually into a ruling class. Years of brutal, competitive, economic struggle solidified their ranks,--distinguishing friend from enemy; clarifying economic laws, and demonstrating the importance of coördination in economic affairs. Economic control, once firmly established, opened before the wealth owning class an opportunity to dominate the entire field of public life.

Before the property owners could feel secure in their possessions, steps must be taken to transmute the popular ideas regarding "property rights" into a public opinion that would permit the concentration of important property in the hands of a small owning class, at the same time that it held to the conviction that society, without privately owned land and machinery, was unthinkable.

Many of the leading spirits among the colonists had come to America in the hope of realizing the ideal of "Every man a farm, and every farm a man." Upon this principle they believed that it would be possible to set up the free government which so many were seeking in those dark days of the divine right of kings.

For many years after the organization of the Federal Government men spoke of the public domain as if it were to last indefinitely. As late as 1832 Henry Clay, in a discussion of the public lands, could say, "We should rejoice that this bountiful resource possessed by our country, remains in almost undiminished quantity." Later in the same speech he referred to the public lands as being "liberally offered,--in exhaustless quantities, and at moderate prices, enriching individuals and tending to the rapid improvement of the country."

The land rose in price as settlers came in greater numbers. Land booms developed. Speculation was rife. Efforts were made to secure additional concessions from the Government. It was in this debate, where the public land was referred to as "refuse land" that Henry Clay felt called upon to remind his fellow-legislators of the significance and growing value of the public land. He said, "A friend of mine in this city bought in Illinois last fall about two thousand acres of this refuse land at the minimum price, for which he has lately refused six dollars per acre.... It is a business, a very profitable business, at which fortunes are made in the new states, to purchase these refuse lands and without improving them to sell them at large advances."

A century ago, while it was still almost a wilderness, Illinois began to feel the pressure of limited resources--a pressure which has increased to such a point that it has completely revolutionized the system of society that was known to the men who established the Government of the United States.

This early record of a mid-western land boom, with Illinois land at six dollars an acre, tells the story of everything that was to follow. Even in 1832 there was not enough of the good land to go around. Already the community was dividing itself into two classes--those who could get good land and those who could not. A wise man, understanding the part played by economic forces in determining the fate of a people, might have said to Henry Clay on that June day in 1832, "Friend, you have pronounced the obituary of American liberty."

Some wise man might have spoken thus, but how strange the utterance would have sounded! There was so much land, and all history seemed to guarantee the beneficial results that are derived from individual land ownership. The democracies of Greece and Rome were built upon such a foundation. The yeomanry of England had proved her pride and stay. In Europe the free workers in the towns had been the guardians of the rights of the people. Throughout historic times, liberty has taken root where there is an economic foundation for the freedom which each man feels he has a right to demand.

2. Security of "Acquisitions"

Feudal Europe depended for its living upon agriculture. The Feudal System had concentrated the ownership of practically all of the valuable agricultural land in the hands of the small group of persons which ruled because it controlled economic opportunity. The power of this class rested on its ownership of the resource upon which the majority of the people depended for a livelihood.

The Feudal System was transplanted to England, but it never took deep root there. When in 1215 A. D. (only a century and a half after the Great William had made his effort to feudalize England) King John signed the Magna Carta, Feudalism proper gave way to landlordism--the basis of English economic life from that time to this.

The system of English landlordism (which showed itself at its worst in the absentee landlordism of Ireland) differed from Feudalism in this essential respect,--Feudalism was based upon the idea of the divine right of kings. English landlordism was based on the idea of divine right of property. English landlordism is the immediate ancestor of the property concept that is universally accepted in the business world of to-day.

The evils of Feudalism and of landlordism were well known to the American colonists who were under the impression that they arose not from the fact of ownership, but from the concentration of ownership. The resources of the new world seemed limitless, and the possibility that landlordism might show its ugly head on this side of the Atlantic was too remote for serious consideration.

With the independence of the United States assured after the War of 1812; with the growth of industry, and the coming of tens of thousands of new settlers, the future of democracy seemed bright. Daniel Webster characterized the outlook in 1821 by saying, "A country of such vast extent, with such varieties of soil and climate, with so much public spirit and private enterprise, with a population increasing so much beyond former examples, ... so free in its institutions, so mild in its laws, so secure in the title it confers on every man to his own acquisitions,--needs nothing but time and peace to carry it forward to almost any point of advancement."

"So free in its institutions, so mild in its laws, so secure in the title it confers on every man to his own acquisitions,"--the words were prophetic. At the moment when they were uttered the forces were busy that were destined to realize Webster's dream, on an imperial scale, at the expense of the freedom which he prized. Men were free to get what they could, and once having secured it, they were safeguarded in its possession. Property ownership was a virtue universally commended. Constitutions were drawn and laws were framed to guarantee to property owners the rights to their property, even in cases where this property consisted of the bodies of their fellow men.

The movement toward the protection of property rights has been progressive. Webster as a representative of the dominant interests of the country a hundred years ago rejoiced that every man had a secure title to "his own acquisitions," at a time when the property of the country was generally owned by those who had expended some personal effort in acquiring it. It was a long step from these personal acquisitions to the tens of billions of wealth in the hands of twentieth century American corporations. Daniel Webster helped to bridge the gap. He was responsible, at least in part, for the Dartmouth College Decision (1816) in which the Supreme Court ruled that a charter, granted by a state, is a contract that cannot be modified at will by the state. This decision made the corporation, once created and chartered, a free agent. Then came the Fourteenth Amendment with its provision that "no state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty or property, without due process of law." The amendment was intended to benefit negroes. It has been used to place property ownership first among the American beatitudes.

Corporations are "persons" in the eyes of the law. When the state of California tried to tax the property of the Southern Pacific Railroad at a rate different from that which it imposed on persons, the Supreme Court declared the law unconstitutional. This decision, coupled with that in the Dartmouth College Case secured for a corporation "the same immunities as any other person; and since the charter creating a corporation is a contract, whose obligation cannot be impaired by the one-sided act of a legislature, its constitutional position, as property holder, is much stronger than anywhere in Europe." These decisions "have had the effect of placing the modern industrial corporation in an almost impregnable constitutional position."

Surrounded by constitutional guarantees, armed with legal privileges and prerogatives and employing the language of liberty, the private property interests in the United States have gone forward from victory to victory, extending their power as they increased and concentrated their possessions.

3. Safeguarding Property Rights