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Who Owns America: A New Declaration of Independence
Who Owns America? A New Declaration of Independence is the classic sequel to I'll Take My Stand, the famous defense of the South's agrarian traditions. But whereas I'll Take My Stand was theoretical and sectional, Who Owns America? sought to be concrete and national, and it succeeded. The book evokes and defends in realist terms an America characterized by small-property ownership, decentralized politics, and responsible stewardship of the nation's natural resources.
It was a radical statement in 1936 and remains one at the end of the twentieth century. How should a republic exercise power over its citizens? How may economic goods be justly distributed? What status should the small farm have in the life of a nation? By what means may family life be rendered stable? What is the economic role of women in a free society? These are just some of the issues raised, and answered in unique ways, in this book. Though written over sixty years ago, Who Owns America? still challenges many assumptions at play in the American public psyche and is also indispensable in understanding a crucial period of American history.
It was a radical statement in 1936 and remains one at the end of the twentieth century. How should a republic exercise power over its citizens? How may economic goods be justly distributed? What status should the small farm have in the life of a nation? By what means may family life be rendered stable? What is the economic role of women in a free society? These are just some of the issues raised, and answered in unique ways, in this book. Though written over sixty years ago, Who Owns America? still challenges many assumptions at play in the American public psyche and is also indispensable in understanding a crucial period of American history.
450 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1936
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
August 26, 2017
This is an old book (published 1936) with a timely message for today. The authors' solutions are sane and simple. We just need to stop supporting these mega-monopolies. We need to support small scale organic farmers and small businesses. G. K. Chesterton has said that the only thing wrong with capitalism is that there are not enough capitalists. Small scale farmers and businessmen are likely to be more sensitive to the conditions of the environment, since they live in the environment that they create. They are also more likely to be sensitive to the health of their customers, since they are their neighbors.
Industrial capitalism has run rampant across the globe for eight decades since the publication, and it has been destroying the environment and devastating our health for all those years. If we don't heed the messages, from authors such as the essayists featured in this book, we are literally dooming future generations. Industrial agriculture is killing our soils, driving hundreds of thousands of species to extinction (including vital pollinating insects), polluting our waterways and oceans so terribly that nothing can live in the dead zones that they cause, and creating frankenfoods that have escalated our rates of heart disease, diabetes and cancer.
The authors also saw the social diseases brought on by loss of community. Families drifting apart, social isolation and loneliness impacting our children and elderly in particular. Small local businesses add to the sense of community, whereas big business causes social migration and consequently destroys them. Everything that can be done locally, should be done locally. We need to listen to these essayists before it is too late. The future of mankind depends upon it.
Industrial capitalism has run rampant across the globe for eight decades since the publication, and it has been destroying the environment and devastating our health for all those years. If we don't heed the messages, from authors such as the essayists featured in this book, we are literally dooming future generations. Industrial agriculture is killing our soils, driving hundreds of thousands of species to extinction (including vital pollinating insects), polluting our waterways and oceans so terribly that nothing can live in the dead zones that they cause, and creating frankenfoods that have escalated our rates of heart disease, diabetes and cancer.
The authors also saw the social diseases brought on by loss of community. Families drifting apart, social isolation and loneliness impacting our children and elderly in particular. Small local businesses add to the sense of community, whereas big business causes social migration and consequently destroys them. Everything that can be done locally, should be done locally. We need to listen to these essayists before it is too late. The future of mankind depends upon it.
June 23, 2022
4.5 stars. This sequel to the Southern Agrarians' I'll Take My Stand is an overlooked companion to the English distributists (e.g., Chersterton and Belloc, who has his own essay in this collection too), Wilhelm Ropke's third way of economic humanism, the 19th & 20th century Catholic social and economic writers, and more recently, Allan Carlson. The best essays in this collection, to me, were: (1) Allen Tate on the concept of property and its relation to liberty, (2) Robert Penn Warren on writers, region, and culture, (3) T.J. Cauley on the absence of true leisure in technocracies, (4) Richard Ransom on corporate personhood and private property,(5) Donald Davidson on political regionalism, (6) Herbert Agar's dispelling of common misconceptions, and (7) Lyle Lanier on big business and property.
A few good passages:
"No country can be reformed by the people who hate it--a fact which our left-wing intellectuals tend to miss." (Herbert Agar)
"We have been mere economists, and now we have got to be political economists as well. Economy is the study of wealth. But political economy is the study of human welfare." (Allen Tate)
"Ownership and control are property. Ownership without control is slavery because control without ownership is tyranny." (Allen Tate)
"[W]ith the loss of this old religion the modern man has also lost the obvious truth that a culture is based upon the philosophy it holds." (Hilaire Belloc)
"The effective ownershhip of property entails personal responsibility for the use which is made of a given portion of the means of production. A true property system will be composed of a large population of owners whose property is not to be expressed solely in terms of exchange-value, but retains, for the owner, the possibility of use-value." (Allen Tate)
"Large corporate practice has thus transferred to the field of American business precisely the same deadening economic and social results that flow from absentee landlordism. . . ." (Richard Ransom)
"It is obvious that the peculiar dissociation of ownership from control of property which characterizes the corporation, and the reduction of a progressively increasing number of real property owners to the status of wage-earners, create conditions not contemplated by the founders of the American Republic." (Lyle Lanier)
"[T]here is a point at which effective ownership ceases, although the legal fictions sustaining 'property' may hold that beyond that point ownership endures. Effective ownership ceases at the point where a certain kind of effective control ceases. So, a defender of the institution of private property will question not only the collectivist State, but also large corporate property." (Allen Tate)
"Let everyone have all of everything that he can use and as much more as he will enjoy wasting, and any particular natural resource as it now exists will be exhausted in a surprisingly short time." (TJ Cauley)
"Private enterprise is a basic human instinct which, like all instincts, can be a good thing if it is made to serve a moral purpose, or a bad thing if it is turned loose to go its own way. . . The relation between enterprise and property is similar to the relation between sex and the family. Few would contend that the institution of the family would be served by taking all social controls off the sexual instinct. Similarly, it is absurd to say that the institution of private property is served by taking all social control off private enterprise." (Herbert Agar)
"In simple words let me repeat that private property, widely distributed, which formed the basis of the early American State, has all but diappeared. The keystone of the arch which supported the free State, the property State, which was able to challenge the theory of the totalitarian State, whether the absolutism of a monarch by divine rights, an absolutist British Parliament, or a modern fascist or communist State, is crumbling." (Frank Lawrence Owsley)
"Many of our people believe that we are on the fringe of an unlimited supply of goods and services of all sorts, and that, consequently, the necessity for economic sacrifice has disappeared. Just beyond us lies a land that flows, not only with milk and honey, but with automobiles and gasoline and radios and electric refrigerators and oil furnaces and movie tickets and elegant bathrooms and permanent waves and two-pant suits." (TJ Cauley)
"The regions need a safeguard against imperialism at two points: first, in their economic pursuits, since on these they depend for the security which . . . Americans now desire more passionately than equality; and second, in their cultural and social institutions, which, in the South especially, have suffered from outside domination." (Donald Davidson)
A few good passages:
"No country can be reformed by the people who hate it--a fact which our left-wing intellectuals tend to miss." (Herbert Agar)
"We have been mere economists, and now we have got to be political economists as well. Economy is the study of wealth. But political economy is the study of human welfare." (Allen Tate)
"Ownership and control are property. Ownership without control is slavery because control without ownership is tyranny." (Allen Tate)
"[W]ith the loss of this old religion the modern man has also lost the obvious truth that a culture is based upon the philosophy it holds." (Hilaire Belloc)
"The effective ownershhip of property entails personal responsibility for the use which is made of a given portion of the means of production. A true property system will be composed of a large population of owners whose property is not to be expressed solely in terms of exchange-value, but retains, for the owner, the possibility of use-value." (Allen Tate)
"Large corporate practice has thus transferred to the field of American business precisely the same deadening economic and social results that flow from absentee landlordism. . . ." (Richard Ransom)
"It is obvious that the peculiar dissociation of ownership from control of property which characterizes the corporation, and the reduction of a progressively increasing number of real property owners to the status of wage-earners, create conditions not contemplated by the founders of the American Republic." (Lyle Lanier)
"[T]here is a point at which effective ownership ceases, although the legal fictions sustaining 'property' may hold that beyond that point ownership endures. Effective ownership ceases at the point where a certain kind of effective control ceases. So, a defender of the institution of private property will question not only the collectivist State, but also large corporate property." (Allen Tate)
"Let everyone have all of everything that he can use and as much more as he will enjoy wasting, and any particular natural resource as it now exists will be exhausted in a surprisingly short time." (TJ Cauley)
"Private enterprise is a basic human instinct which, like all instincts, can be a good thing if it is made to serve a moral purpose, or a bad thing if it is turned loose to go its own way. . . The relation between enterprise and property is similar to the relation between sex and the family. Few would contend that the institution of the family would be served by taking all social controls off the sexual instinct. Similarly, it is absurd to say that the institution of private property is served by taking all social control off private enterprise." (Herbert Agar)
"In simple words let me repeat that private property, widely distributed, which formed the basis of the early American State, has all but diappeared. The keystone of the arch which supported the free State, the property State, which was able to challenge the theory of the totalitarian State, whether the absolutism of a monarch by divine rights, an absolutist British Parliament, or a modern fascist or communist State, is crumbling." (Frank Lawrence Owsley)
"Many of our people believe that we are on the fringe of an unlimited supply of goods and services of all sorts, and that, consequently, the necessity for economic sacrifice has disappeared. Just beyond us lies a land that flows, not only with milk and honey, but with automobiles and gasoline and radios and electric refrigerators and oil furnaces and movie tickets and elegant bathrooms and permanent waves and two-pant suits." (TJ Cauley)
"The regions need a safeguard against imperialism at two points: first, in their economic pursuits, since on these they depend for the security which . . . Americans now desire more passionately than equality; and second, in their cultural and social institutions, which, in the South especially, have suffered from outside domination." (Donald Davidson)
May 19, 2020
I was led here by Ralph Nader's book Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State although I had heard of the Southern Agrarians before. I imagined my introduction to them would be through I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, but this sequel to it did not disappoint! I found a copy of it on the Web Archive's National Emergency Library and felt compelled to take copious notes, for many of the essays had important lessons for today. The Southern Agrarians are products of their time, but their writing remains strikingly timely too.
This is a paean to the rural smallholder, something Jefferson would surely appreciate. Many essays call for a more diffuse distribution of property to save American democracy. Scorning communism and fascism, the authors seek a “genuine property state -- that is, a state in which a considerable majority of the families participate in real ownership” (Agar 103). Real ownership means control of the means of production themselves (Allen Tate 92). Property, especially the small farm, furnishes a sense of responsibility and self-sufficiency that creates true freedom (Andrew Lytle's essay elucidates this link). Written at the height of the Great Depression, "Who Owns America" lambastes industrial monopoly capitalism throughout, reflecting the Depression's course. This is probably one of the closest things to an American distributist agenda (Belloc even makes an appearance towards the end with a great essay entitled "The Modern Man").
Some of the suggestions I gleaned included: antitrust enforcement; ensuring good education, roads, and healthcare; abolishing corporate personhood; cutting the middlemen out of economics; redistributing landholdings; ensuring that ownership and control coincide more frequently. Many of these points are still true, but in different ways. In the post-Buckley, post-Citizens United era, corporate influence over politics is greater than ever. Financialization wreaked havoc on our economy in 2008 and yet nobody seems to have learned their lesson. Pollution leads to climate change (George Marion O'Donnell prophetically proclaims on page 167: "Man must stop exploiting the land, or the land itself will stop him) and we face the consequences. John Crowe Ransom's proposals for rural electrification and infrastructure investment resemble the discussions around commodification happening today on issues like broadband access. Ralph Nader, to his credit, picks out a few examples in "Unstoppable", but it's worth reading all of "Who Owns America" for full effect.
More modern works like Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity back similar ideas for an era dominated by big tech. Giving people control over their land lends itself to giving people control over their data. Additionally, even back then, essays like "The Illusion of the Leisure State" (one of my faves), address mechanization and the ferment it could lead to. Modern politics suggests that TJ Cauley was spot on in! Just listen to what Andrew Yang has to say about automation, job losses, and populism. We should have listened to TJ long ago!
However tempting though, I don't give "Who Owns America" 5 stars for a few reasons. One is its blind spot on race. One essay deals with gender (and in fact does a nice job of it), but there is very little addressing the plight of African Americans. Perhaps I shouldn't knock a book based on the time it was published in though. After all, many of the Southern Agrarians weren't racial progressives and I knew that coming in. Nonetheless, essays like "The Foundations of Democracy" are a little jarring when they claim that the Constitution is illiberal in nature or that Germany would move away from economic nationalism (you turned out really wrong, Douglas Jerrold...).
Putting that aside with understanding of the setting, some of the essays were a little convoluted or lacked relation to the rest of the works. A few were too densely written and tough to get through, with Robert Penn Warren and "Literature as a Symptom" as an example. Additionally, while these authors artfully celebrate rural life, I can't help but sense hyperbole. Some definitely over-romanticize rural life; the weather (or a dust storm) can break a family farm, but that's largely absent from these portrayals.
Society most certainly has changed since the 1930s. We've made great progress on issues of race and gender, and urbanization lessens the practicality of a wide-scale back to the land movement. I don't think we have to all take up a plow to make this work useful though. It's worth thinking about how leaders today can rein in excessive financialization and create political/economic/social systems closer to the people themselves. I, for one, agree with Herbert Agar that "We must not allow our people to be persuaded that freedom, self-government, equality mean nothing better than what we have attained. We must remind them that the monopoly capitalism of modern America is almost the antithesis of our ideal" (viii).
This is a paean to the rural smallholder, something Jefferson would surely appreciate. Many essays call for a more diffuse distribution of property to save American democracy. Scorning communism and fascism, the authors seek a “genuine property state -- that is, a state in which a considerable majority of the families participate in real ownership” (Agar 103). Real ownership means control of the means of production themselves (Allen Tate 92). Property, especially the small farm, furnishes a sense of responsibility and self-sufficiency that creates true freedom (Andrew Lytle's essay elucidates this link). Written at the height of the Great Depression, "Who Owns America" lambastes industrial monopoly capitalism throughout, reflecting the Depression's course. This is probably one of the closest things to an American distributist agenda (Belloc even makes an appearance towards the end with a great essay entitled "The Modern Man").
Some of the suggestions I gleaned included: antitrust enforcement; ensuring good education, roads, and healthcare; abolishing corporate personhood; cutting the middlemen out of economics; redistributing landholdings; ensuring that ownership and control coincide more frequently. Many of these points are still true, but in different ways. In the post-Buckley, post-Citizens United era, corporate influence over politics is greater than ever. Financialization wreaked havoc on our economy in 2008 and yet nobody seems to have learned their lesson. Pollution leads to climate change (George Marion O'Donnell prophetically proclaims on page 167: "Man must stop exploiting the land, or the land itself will stop him) and we face the consequences. John Crowe Ransom's proposals for rural electrification and infrastructure investment resemble the discussions around commodification happening today on issues like broadband access. Ralph Nader, to his credit, picks out a few examples in "Unstoppable", but it's worth reading all of "Who Owns America" for full effect.
More modern works like Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity back similar ideas for an era dominated by big tech. Giving people control over their land lends itself to giving people control over their data. Additionally, even back then, essays like "The Illusion of the Leisure State" (one of my faves), address mechanization and the ferment it could lead to. Modern politics suggests that TJ Cauley was spot on in! Just listen to what Andrew Yang has to say about automation, job losses, and populism. We should have listened to TJ long ago!
However tempting though, I don't give "Who Owns America" 5 stars for a few reasons. One is its blind spot on race. One essay deals with gender (and in fact does a nice job of it), but there is very little addressing the plight of African Americans. Perhaps I shouldn't knock a book based on the time it was published in though. After all, many of the Southern Agrarians weren't racial progressives and I knew that coming in. Nonetheless, essays like "The Foundations of Democracy" are a little jarring when they claim that the Constitution is illiberal in nature or that Germany would move away from economic nationalism (you turned out really wrong, Douglas Jerrold...).
Putting that aside with understanding of the setting, some of the essays were a little convoluted or lacked relation to the rest of the works. A few were too densely written and tough to get through, with Robert Penn Warren and "Literature as a Symptom" as an example. Additionally, while these authors artfully celebrate rural life, I can't help but sense hyperbole. Some definitely over-romanticize rural life; the weather (or a dust storm) can break a family farm, but that's largely absent from these portrayals.
Society most certainly has changed since the 1930s. We've made great progress on issues of race and gender, and urbanization lessens the practicality of a wide-scale back to the land movement. I don't think we have to all take up a plow to make this work useful though. It's worth thinking about how leaders today can rein in excessive financialization and create political/economic/social systems closer to the people themselves. I, for one, agree with Herbert Agar that "We must not allow our people to be persuaded that freedom, self-government, equality mean nothing better than what we have attained. We must remind them that the monopoly capitalism of modern America is almost the antithesis of our ideal" (viii).
June 23, 2020
This collection of essays is penned by a veritable "who's who" of 1930s literary figures--many of whom conspired to write the timeless classic, I'll Take my Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition. Allen Tate, Andrew Nelson Lytle, Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, Frank Lawrence Owsley, and Donald Davidson are joined by other luminaries including Hilaire Belloc.
The unifying theme is summarized perhaps by the title of Schumacher's later book, "Small is Beautiful." Avoiding ideology, the authors lament the rise of big business and its deadening effect on the human soul in its transformation of a once free land of small proprietors into a mass of wage slaves, the proletariat.
Covering such broad topics as industrialism, agriculture, regionalism, foreign trade, literature, and Protestantism, there is no prescription herein, only a humane attempt to draw distinctions between the good life secured by property-holding freeman over and against the tyranny of industrial capitalism.
There is much food for thought in the collection, and applicable still to the 21st century. I withheld five stars, though, due to a few subpar essays and some that haven't aged wellm
The unifying theme is summarized perhaps by the title of Schumacher's later book, "Small is Beautiful." Avoiding ideology, the authors lament the rise of big business and its deadening effect on the human soul in its transformation of a once free land of small proprietors into a mass of wage slaves, the proletariat.
Covering such broad topics as industrialism, agriculture, regionalism, foreign trade, literature, and Protestantism, there is no prescription herein, only a humane attempt to draw distinctions between the good life secured by property-holding freeman over and against the tyranny of industrial capitalism.
There is much food for thought in the collection, and applicable still to the 21st century. I withheld five stars, though, due to a few subpar essays and some that haven't aged wellm
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