[Editor’s Note: Despite the firm advice of counsel, Louis Warren is back to talk to us about the Homstead Act. Louis is also the author of this book, which won every prize ever. Louis’s a bit selfish, you see. One really big prize wasn’t enough for him.]
On this day in history President Lincoln signed the Homestead Act, thereby inaugurating one of the most popular government programs in American history. Under the terms of the act, settlers could get 160 free acres — sometimes more — in return for making them into a private farm. Hundreds of thousands of settlers — black, white, immigrant, women and men — took up claims on the frontier, launching one of the great sagas of American history.
For all that, like so much else in the American West, homesteads have recently fallen into that dark and dreary world of right-wing symbolism. Homesteaders have long been icons of individualism. In recent years, advocates for privatizing social security have hailed the Homestead Act as a model (or a fable) of resource privatization. George W. Bush lobbied to privatize Social Security with the Homestead Act as an example of how Americans have found “ the dignity and security of economic independence, instead of laboring on the edge of subsistence.” David Brooks is certain that private investment accounts can replace Social Security and turn people into capitalists because, after all, “the Homestead Act turned people into pioneers.” George Will points out that homesteaders privatized 270 million acres, about 11 percent of today’s America. “Rarely has a social program worked so well.”
But even a cursory glance at the Homestead Act’s real history belies these simplistic conclusions. Sure, the Homestead Act had its successes. Many American families have homesteader ancestors, and many of them were genuine heroes who endured privation and hardship to root their crops and kin in New World soil. The fact that my great-grandfather earned a homestead is a high-point in family lore.
But the law’s failures were profound. Homesteaders may have privatized more than one in ten of America’s acres, but in fact, most who tried homesteading never gained a square inch from the law. For every settler who staked a claim and built a cabin between 1862 and the day the frontier closed, in 1890, at least two packed up and left their claims without ever gaining title. That’s right: the failure rate among would-be homesteaders was sixty-six percent.
Why did those resilient, risk-taking frontier settlers pack it in? To resolve that very question, Congress investigated much, and legislated often. Efforts to stem the flow of failed farmers led to bigger parcels and extra acres for planting trees and digging irrigation ditches. But with high prices for barbed wire, livestock, plows, and other equipment, and with the unreliable rainfall of the Far West, and with the fact that railroads and other speculators acquired most of the best land, making the frontier into farms was still too expensive for the vast majority, even when the land was free. Even with added incentives, the failure rate of aspiring homesteaders never fell much below fifty percent, and may have been much higher. Passed in hopes that urban citizens would take to the country, farming proved so difficult that the flow of farm dwellers to the city actually increased in the years after 1862. In the end, most of the West’s successful farms were not earned under the law, but bought from railroads or other large owners, by customers with cash. For every 160 acres earned by homesteaders, 400 acres were bought on the open market. Think of it this way: homesteaders settled 11 percent of the current United States, but home buyers settled more than twice as much.
Even these were not the full extent of the law’s failures. For those who stuck it out and earned their acreage, the future was often worse, not better. The global increase in farm production drove the price of crops sharply downward for decades after the Civil War. A new round of crop deflation hit in the 1920s, making it increasingly difficult for farmers to pay their bills. In the 1930s, drought turned many a green homestead to dusty brown. Banks foreclosed on mortgages. Debt drove farmers to sell cheap and move to town. The exploding numbers of the rural poor (among them my grandfather, the homesteader’s son) inspired John Steinbeck to conjure the Joads, and at the national level helped mobilize the public to create programs like Social Security in the first place. Except for in Alaska and a few other places, homesteading ended in 1935, when Franklin Roosevelt withdrew all remaining public lands from settlement.
The history of the Homestead Act is astonishing and often inspirational. When it concerns successful settlers, it offers remarkable tales of risk and reward.
But it also provides a cautionary tale about forcing private citizens to shoulder too much risk, and the hard death and eye-popping failure rates of the frontier’s most famous land law should make us think twice about following anyone bent on re-creating its supposed “successes.” In fact, Social Security has provided far more Americans with more wealth than the 1862 law ever did. At least, it hasn’t inspired songs like this one:
Frank Baker’s the name and a bachelor I am,
I’m keeping old batch on an elegant plan.
You’ll find me out west in the county of Lane,
I’m starving to death on a government claim.
My house is built of the natural soil,
The walls are erected according to Hoyle.
The roof has no pitch but is level and plain,
And I always get wet when it rains.
Hurrah for Lane County, the land of the free,
The home of the grasshopper, bedbug and flea.
I’ll sing loud its praises and tell of its fame,
While starving to death on a government claim.
Nineteenth Century Folk Song – Author Unknown
Indeed, if giving young people the chance to build wealth for the future is our aim, there are other laws that might provide more useful lessons. Decades before the Homestead Act, Congress began endowing public universities with land grants. The same year the Homestead Act came into being, Congress also adopted a less famous but ultimately more successful measure, the Land Grant Act, which endowed state universities with tens of thousands of acres. Institutions of higher learning sprang up and expanded across the West. The public acquired new access to college education, and the investment continues to pay handsome returns. Today more than ever, university education provides tools to make careers and build wealth, in a far more reliable way than western farming ever did. The state of California, for a brief few decades, and not so long ago, even made university education as free as land in the frontier West. Recreating that opportunity would cost much less than privatizing Social Security, and it seems certain to provide more wealth, too.
10 comments
May 21, 2008 at 3:46 am
Kevin
I am reading Warren’s book right now and it is absolutely fascinating.
May 21, 2008 at 4:06 am
The Modesto Kid
After receiving his Ph.D. (Entomology, from some university in Indiana), my great-grandfather homesteaded in North Dakota. After a few years he found himself unable to hack it and moved out to Delano, where he spent the rest of his life working for an agricultural combine — this is how my family came to the Central Valley. I know very little of his life story beyond this bit; but I find it sort of encouraging to know that compromise was alive and well, three generations up my family tree.
May 21, 2008 at 7:17 am
John Emerson
I agree that Brooks and those guys are ifiots.
The most successful homesteaders seem to have been immigrants. My area of Minnesota was settled by Scandinavians, Germans, and Dutch, and I think that they mostly homesteaded. Maybe not, though — they mostly came after 1880, and the land was homesteaded after the civil war.
Besides the problems small farmers always have had, North Dakota farmers had another big one: North Dakota is too dry to be good farming land. Some of the plans for settling of the West seem to have been made by people who looked at blank spaces on the map and imagined things that weren’t there (for example, water sources. A similar but different case is the people who look at the blank spaces on the map of Brazil and imagine things there — notably the Ludwig fiasco).
One thing I’ve always wondered about is why there weren’t any significant number of ex-slave homesteaders. (I can easily guess why, but know no details). Quite a bit of the Midwest and West was settled after the Civil War, and I believe that some land was even reserved for freed slaves, but nothing much seems to have happened. It’s pretty notable that enormous areas were settled by Europeans while the ex-slaves remained landless. (Lanza’s “Agrarianism and Southern Reconstruction Politics” talks about the Southern Homestead Act, but I find it a bit mushy on the question of ex-slaves, and it doesn’t cover the homesteading in the Midwestern areas where there actually was good land to divide up.)
May 21, 2008 at 9:13 am
Vance Maverick
I agree with this post (and the one before) about the wisdom of making education accessible. Surely it would be possible to build some sane and persuasive political rhetoric around the analogy between “giving away” education and homesteading. In both cases, obviously, the value of the gift only justifies its cost if it’s used properly, built on, “improved”. And further, the comparison is to the advantage of education in that the resource being “given away” is renewable….
May 21, 2008 at 9:23 am
Vance Maverick
…that is (thinking aloud here, or preaching to the choir, whichever is lamer): subsidizing education is clearly a risk, in that there’s no return on the investment unless the recipient makes use of it wisely — and yet the same can be said of the Homestead Act, which we know by the transitivity of right-wing narrative appropriation to have been a good thing.
May 21, 2008 at 10:38 am
charlieford
“The most successful homesteaders seem to have been immigrants.”
As I recall, immigrants were more open to scientific agriculture, whereas Americans had a tradition of using the land up and moving on. The American way worked fine as long as the land was easy to cultivate, rainfall was plentiful, etc. Sometimes this difference is explained by the frontier–Americans could keep moving, whereas Europeans had learned to make their farms sustainable.
“Besides the problems small farmers always have had, North Dakota farmers had another big one: North Dakota is too dry to be good farming land.”
There was a lot of ridiculous boosterism going on–“rain follows the plow!”–but some of it seems to have been sincere. One fellow, noting how often Civil War battles had been followed by rain, theorized that the percussive effects of artillery were the cause. He started a business where he brought artillery to drought-plagued areas and just blast away at the sky. Sometimes it worked.
“One thing I’ve always wondered about is why there weren’t any significant number of ex-slave homesteaders.” There were the “Exodusters,” of course (see Nell Painter’s book). But mainly, the vicious circle of sharecropping along with black codes (requiring work contracts) kept blacks too poor to migrate and legally tied to the land. There was also the little problem of illiteracy and lack of information. Whites in the south did their best to ensure blacks remained ignorant of opportunities other than cotton picking, and the limitations on reading abilities and reading-material went much of the way (intimidation of anyone getting other ideas went the rest).
May 21, 2008 at 10:57 am
drip
Following up on charlieford’s comments about immigrants, I recall reading somewhere that Russians (including Russian Jews) and Ukrainians brought winter wheat to the midwest in the 1880’s. Is this true? Is it part of the Homestead Act story?
May 21, 2008 at 4:39 pm
Louis
Great comments all (ESPECIALLY the praise for the last book- – special thanks to Kevin.)
I’d second the recommendation of Nell Painter’s book, EXODUSTERS, on the movement of black homesteaders to Kansas after Reconstruction. The Kansas State Historical Society has a great webpage on the Exoduster movement here:
http://www.kshs.org/audiotours/kansasmemory/019_exodusters.htm
Here’s a link to a travel site with pictures and info about an Exoduster settlement,
http://www.legendsofamerica.com/OZ-Nicodemus.html
More on the Exodusters in a minute.
But first, in terms of why some homesteaders succeeded and others didn’t, and why there were relatively few African-American homesteaders, it’s good to keep in mind the real-life constraints of farm-making. The historian Clarence Danhof once provided a very careful estimate showing that setting up as a farmer on 160 acres in the Midwest – – building home, barns, fences, buying livestock and feed and seed and farm implements and so on – – usually took about $1,000 (in 1850s dollars). This meant that prospective farmers either had capital already or they borrowed it.
Out west, there were plenty who borrowed, lining up to take on debt from among the 40 major lending agencies operating in Kansas by 1880, for example. In the decade that followed, the state’s per capita private debt was four times the national average. (Because of private borrowing like this, and public bond issues to lure railroad companies with amenities like free railroad stations, the West was also the nation’s most indebted region).
These trends made events like the Panic of 1893 and the depression that followed a very difficult time for homesteaders (90% of farmers in west Kansas could not meet their loan obligations by the early 1890s), but they also suggest how central access to credit was for western settlers. I have not investigated the case of African-American homesteaders, but I suspect they found fewer willing lenders than many other settlers, and this would have been a major constraint. In general, poorer people did not homestead for precisely these reasons. African American successes in homesteading were thus all the more remarkable when they did occur.
Finally, I note in today’s USATODAY the sad news that Zelma Henderson, the last surviving plaintiff in Brown v. Board of Ed, has died. One of the mostly unremarked peculiarities of this most famous desegregation case is that it did not originate in the South, but in the West. In fact, Brown v. Board redressed inequities that arose partly because of the promise of the Homestead Act. Hoping to achieve independent farms in Kansas, and to escape the rise of the Klan in the post-Reconstruction South, thousands of black settlers arrived in Kansas in the 1870s. Comparing their journey to the flight of the Hebrews from Egypt, they called themselves Exodusters.
This surge in black population motivated white Kansas leaders to design separate schools for black and white children. A long series of lawsuits by black plaintiffs followed, culminating decades later in 1951 with a case by Oliver Brown and a host of other parents of black children (including Zelma Henderson) against the Topeka Board of Ed. In a sense, the Brown case was the culmination of efforts by descendants of Exodusters – – Oliver Brown among them – – to realize the original exoduster dream of a more inclusive community.
May 25, 2008 at 11:32 pm
Notional Slurry » links for 2008-05-26
[…] The Homestead Act, with Notes on Faith in Private Property and Private Money « The Edge of the Amer… “I’ll sing loud its praises and tell of its fame, / While starving to death on a government claim.” (tags: economics public-policy government lawyers election social-security homestead history) […]
May 28, 2008 at 1:08 am
california home for heroes program
[…] won every prize ever. Louis’s a bit selfish, you see. One really big prize wasn’t enough for him.https://edgeofthewest.wordpress.com/2008/05/20/the-homestead-act-with-notes-on-faith-in-private-prope…Providing comfort: Military chaplain shares the stories, fears and tears of soldiers The Salt Lake […]