The Quest for Land
The people who came to the Americas from Europe were, as Roosevelt suggests, motivated not so much by the promise of empire as by the promise of a freehold and minimal government encroachment on their freedom. Accompanying this mass migration of people from Europe to the North American coast and then into the vast interior a small number of transnational intellectuals recognized the incongruity of conquering a less advanced people in the interest of individual liberty. Opportunists and the agents of the State might continue to act out man's inhumanity to man in vulgar fashion; what appeared and then increased, however, was the number of voices in the wilderness, crying out against injustice. And yet, there was a recognition on the part of leaders among the Europeans as well as the indigenous tribes that justice demanded a sharing of the earth's bounty. Meeting with the lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania, George Thomas, in 1742, the Iroquois chief Canassateego drove to the heart of the problem between those who controlled the land and the newcomers:
We know our lands are now become more valuable. The white people think we do not know their value; but we are sensible that the land is everlasting, and the few goods we receive for it are soon worn out and gone.
The response by Thomas, measured
and thoughtful, provides the basis on
which the Europeans legitimately had
an equal claim, an equal birthright, to
the land:
To the extent that Thomas meant
exchange value as represented by
coinage or other form of money, he
espoused the demand theory of value.
Although the indigenous tribes
bartered and relied upon certain
commodity standards for money,
territory was acquired not by purchase
or exchange but held by force of arms.
With the creation of grants, charters
and titleholdings, the Europeans had
merely advanced the art of sanctioned
criminal license to a more cultivated
level. The indigenous people were,
however, only the first victims of the
privilege carried forward into the
socio-political arrangements and
institutions of the new confederation
become union of sovereign states.
After war between these states reduced
the states to subordinate positions
within a continental empire, the
consequences of privilege became
clear, at least to some. Among the
vanguard of those warning of
worsening conditions was Henry
George:
Even if universal history did not teach the
lesson, it is in the United States already
becoming very evident that political
equality can continue to exist only upon a
basis of social equality; that where the
disparity in the distribution of wealth
increases, political democracy only makes
easier the concentration of power, and
must inevitably lead to tyranny and
anarchy. And it is already evident that
there is nothing in political democracy,
nothing in popular education, nothing in
any of our American institutions, to
prevent the most enormous disparity in
the distribution of wealth. ...We already
have citizens whose wealth can be
estimated only in hundreds of millions,
and before the end of the century, if
present tendencies continue, we are likely
to have fortunes estimated in thousands
of millions -- such monstrous fortunes as
the world has never seen since the growth
of similar fortunes ate out the heart of
Rome.
What, after all, had brought millions
of Europeans to the Americas was the
quest for land and a better life.
Conditions in Europe were such that
"[t]he general productivity of
agriculture was still too low [as late
as the sixteenth century] that no
country could totally guarantee a
basic level of subsistence for the
whole of its population every year out
of its own resources." Peasants in
every country suffered from heavy
taxation and land rents as well as from
a denial of political liberty. Along the
coastal tidewaters of North America,
the descendants of earlier immigrants
had by the early eighteenth century
accumulated considerable personal
wealth; newer arrivals sought to repeat
the process by moving to the frontier.
Sounding very much like Henry
George, Jackson Turner Main found
that the North American promise of
equality of opportunity was amazingly
short-lived:
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.
Under these pressures, the civilization
of pre-European America had little
chance of maintaining a sovereign
existence. Their numbers were, in the
end, not even large enough for them to
become an important minority among
the minorities who eventually came
forward to challenge the dominant
European-American population. As
we know from the experience of the
last four hundred years, the pace of
change in the direction of adherence to
a doctrine of human rights has been
agonizingly slow. An argument can be
made that an equal or even larger
portion of the world's population today
suffers from oppression and economic
deprivation than in the seventeenth or
eighteenth centuries. Even in the
world's social democracies (a group of
societies recently enlarged, one might
argue, to include some of the eastern
European societies the various
republics comprising the Soviet
Union) power and privilege continue
to be concentrated, as is the control
over land and natural resources. In
some societies this control remains
largely private; in others, privilege
manifests itself in the hands of
bureaucrats and the State. In North
America during the period of frontier
expansion, control of the land was
taken away from the indigenous tribes
by people in constant motion along a
1,500 mile front that moved westward
from the Atlantic Ocean to the
Mississippi River, then converged on
the remaining tribes from all sides.
