Perhaps no other piece of legislation was more important to the development of South Dakota (unless, of course, you include railroad legislation, but even then...) than the Homestead Act, passed in during the Civil War when the anti-"free soil" Southerners were out of Congress. Anyway, George Will is taking note of the law in an article entitled "Homestead Act serves as model for conservatism." Excerpts:
Its provisions were as simple as the problem it addressed was stark. The problem was writ large on American maps at that time, which often designated the Great Plains as the Great American Desert. Under the act, fees totaling $18 entitled homesteaders to farm 160 acres which they would own with no other price after five years, or after six months if they paid $1.25 an acre.
Rarely has a social program worked so well. Indeed, a few years ago historians voted the Homestead Act, which remained in effect in the contiguous United States until 1976 and in Alaska until 1986, the third-most important legislative achievement in U.S. history, ahead of, among others, the Social Security Act, the GI Bill and the Voting Rights Act, and behind only the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854.
More than 270 million acres -- 11 percent of today's America -- were put into private hands. These approximately 422,000 square miles are almost as much land as the combined area of 19 of today's states. According to Mark Engler, superintendent of the National Park Service's Homestead National Monument in Beatrice, Neb., 30 of today's 50 states had homesteads in them and there are up to 93 million descendants of homesteaders. ...
That is the crux of modern conservatism -- government taking strong measures to foster in the citizenry the attitudes and aptitudes necessary for increased individual independence. That is what the Homestead Act did, out in what no longer is the Great American Desert.
The Great American Desert. That used to be the popular description of where we live. The goal of the Homestead Act was widespread private ownership of small chunks of land. When land becomes centralized, it often generates calls for "land reform," i.e. greater distribution of land, which often gets bloody. To wit, see the article entitled "Venezuela Land Reform Looks to Seize Idle Farmland" in yesterday's New York Times. Excerpt:
There may be no more explosive issue in Latin American politics than land reform, or how to address the problem of too much land in the hands of so few people. In Latin America land reform has been met with mostly dire results in recent decades - failure and widespread violence in Colombia and Brazil, coups and revolutions in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. In Africa, President Robert G. Mugabe has all but plunged Zimbabwe's economy into ruin in the effort to redistribute vast - and vastly unequal - colonial-era holdings.
Now comes President Hugo Chávez, Venezuela's left-leaning populist, who has promised to end what his government calls "latifundios," estates of at least 5,000 hectares, or about 12,350 acres, that remain idle, as part of a fast-moving land reform that is being closely watched across the region and in Washington, where Mr. Chávez is no favorite of the Bush administration.
Initially, the effort, which began with a land-reform law passed in 2001, was met with few complaints as the government redistributed some five million acres of public land to peasants. But now, as Mr. Chávez's government trains its sights on 6.6 million acres of private holdings, farmers are increasingly worried that it will recklessly seize private property.
If you're really into these sentiments and how they shape politics on the High Plains, see the chapter on the "corporate farming debate" in my book American Agriculture and the Problem of Monopoly.
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