Light On Dark Water

Who Owns America? Herbert Agar and Allen Tate, editors. Contributors: David Cushman Doyle, Lyle
H. Lanier, John C. Rawe, Frank Lawrence Owsley, Richard B. Ransom, Allen Tate,
Herbert Agar, Donald Davidson, James Muir Waller, George Marion O’Donnell, John
Crowe Ransom, Douglas Jerrold, Willis Fisher, Andrew Lytle, John Donald Wade,
Robert Penn Warren, T.J. Cauley, Henry Clay Evans, Jr., Mary Shattuck Fisher,
Cleanth Brooks, Hilaire Belloc. ISI
Books, 1999. $24.95

—

A great many people seem to have an instinctive
conviction, which no statistics can dispel, that the domination of our economy
by large corporations is not a good thing. Yet we are hard put to explain
exactly what harm is done. The idea that the corporations are reducing us all
to poverty doesn’t hold much water, considering our affluence, so we fall back
on complaints about anonymity and sameness.

The same goes for our complaints about big government.
Despite some ominous signs that the federal government is passing out of
citizen control, few of us can claim to be seriously oppressed by our
government and are in fact financial benficiaries of it in ways that make our
complaints about taxes a touch hypocrital.

In short, our basic contentment with McDonald’s,
Wal-Mart, and Uncle Sam is proved by our continued patronization of the first
two and our continued refusal to elect politicians who have serious intentions
of shrinking the third.

And yet the disquiet remains. Who would have thought to
look to a seventy-year-old collection of genteel and somewhat literary essays,
mostly by Southern academics of traditionalist bent, for illumination of these
obscure misgivings? In the midst of the Great Depression, some of our finest
Southern thinkers and writers, including John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate, put forth a question which is perhaps more
challenging now than then: Who Owns
America?

I’ll give you a hint: the answer is not “the
people”. This book, both revolutionary and deeply conservative, is in fact a proposal
for the introduction of something we already think we have plenty of, but which
is in reality rather scarce: private property. Let me explain.

For quite some time now—decades, at least—our political
life has been a struggle between the two positions we call “liberal” and
“conservative”. Setting aside the so-called “social issues”, which have to do
with our public approach to personal morality, and looking at these positions
in political and economic terms, it is more accurate to say that the debate is
between socialism and capitalism. For liberalism as it is practicedtends toward the position that economic (and
therefore political) authority should reside in the government; while
conservatism as it is practiced tends
toward the position that economic and political power—not authority in any
official sense, but practical power—should reside in the large corporations
which have been most adept at accumulating capital. This is not, of course, an
explicit aim of conservative though­t—indeed, the present volume comes to us
from a conservative publishing house, and with a preface treating it as a
conservative document— but it is a feature of conservative politics, if only as
a consequence of conservatism’s reluctance to restrain such accumulation.

So let us speak here not of liberal and conservative, but
of socialist and capitalist, and observe that in practice both encourage the
dominance of society by large centralized institutions. Both propose a society
in which real productive property is in the hands of a small number of people,
and all the rest are in a state of dependency on great institutions and the
managers who run them. And our political debate is in great part only a tug of
war between those who would increase the power of the state and those who would
increase the power of the so-called “private sector”, which means,
disproportionately, big business.

The
essayists in Who Owns America?
consider this a false dichotomy and offer a different way of looking at the
situation. The book is a sort of sequel to the famous Southern Agrarian
manifesto of 1930, I’ll Take My Stand.
It includes essays by most of those who contributed to I’ll Take My Stand: John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, Allen
Tate, and others. But where I’ll Take My
Stand was explicitly regional and agrarian, Who Owns America? is an attempt to apply the principles underlying
Southern agrarianism—not the idea of agrarianism itself—to the country as a
whole, and to the industrial economy. It considers industrial society as it was
in the late 1930s, sees something fundamentally wrong with it, and proposes
reforms.

The fundamental wrong, as these essays present it, is the
concentration of productive property in too few hands, the impoverishment of
too many, and the reduction of a free people to irresponsible wage slavery—or
worse, unemployed destitution. The proposed reform is the wide distribution of
property, with a consequent decentralization of power and increase in the
economic self-reliance of individual families and of entire regions.

But is there really any fundamental wrong? Are the
questions raised here even relevant? This book was written in the 1930s, when
industrial society seemed in immediate danger of collapse or revolution. Since
then, it might be argued, the grossest injustices and instabilities of
capitalism have been ameliorated, and, after all, we are prosperous, and most
of us seem to have no fundamental objections to our current economic system.
Yet there are signs that there is something rotten beneath the glittering surface.

It is a curious and interesting phenomenon that
industrial civilization seems to breed people who hate it. No sooner did we
begin to industrialize in the early 19th century than the alienated artists of
the Romantic era appeared, and the party of estrangement continued to grow
throughout that century and into the 20th, reaching some sort of peak in (and
since) the 1960s when a significant number of the most privileged middle class
which had ever lived declared their desire to pull down the society that had
created them. Since then a fundamental cynicism has been more or less
institutionalized and dominates popular cultural expression. Millions of people
live and work in a society which they give every appearance of regarding with
something approaching contempt.

This, as I say, is curious. It is unnatural for a healthy
society to harbor so many people—a large and influential minority, at least—who
sneer at its fundamental principles though they are not mistreated and in fact
are rather more privileged than the vast majority of the human race has ever
been.

Neither I nor the authors of the essays in Who Owns America? would presume to
advance a single all-encompassing explanation for this cynicism, but the title
of the book refers to what might be called a pyscho-economic fact which is
surely involved in our problem: ordinary Americans do not, for the most part,
truly own anything much. Do you own your home?
Really? Free and clear of mortgage? If so, you are in a fortunate
minority. What we call home ownership does not, for most of us, become actual
ownership until quite late in life, if at all; we are, rather, continually
paying toward ownership, and most of us could be thrown out of our “own” homes
after a few months’ unemployment.

What is most significant, of course, is that we do not
own the means of our livelihood. Most of us are wage earners. We do not possess
the property or, to use Marx’s famous phrase, the means of production, to
support ourselves. Rather, we perform—even if we are in the fairly high ranks
of a wealthy company—paid labor which we are in continual anxiety about losing.
Getting fired means a distinct and immediate possibility of losing most of what
we appear to own, most especially the roof over our heads. It is for us what famine
or plague once were for people who lived much more at the mercy of nature than
we do.

One effect of this is that we see ourselves less and less
as free citizens, and more and more as helpless dependents. The authors of
these essays are concerned with the unemployment, poverty, and deprivation of
the Depression. More fundamentally, though, they are concerned with citizenship
in a democracy, which is in at least as much danger now as it was then. And
they believe that the ownership of property—not appliances or automobiles, not
stocks which are bought and sold for their speculative value, but real
livelihood-producing property—is the means by which people become both
independent and responsible. The household that owns the means of its
livelihood knows a liberty which those who live from paycheck to paycheck do
not, and at the same time it knows its liberty to be dependent on a healthy
commonwealth and thus has an incentive for participation in government, which
is another way of saying an interest in preserving democracy, and in limiting
the concentration of power. Whereas the propertyless household is always
conscious of its precarious position, and always in a position to be talked out
of its liberty with promises of security.

What we see happening now is not so much a direct trading
of liberty for security, though we can see that tendency in regard to medical
care: how much independence will the American people give up in order to be
free of the threat of being brought to financial ruin by medical expenses?
There are more subtle ways than welfare of becoming dependent. If the popularity of certain movies and
television shows is any sort of proof, we have adopted a national worship of a
very shallow sort of adolescence, the essence of which is a claim to unlimited
pleasure without responsibility. And it carries a presumption that somewhere
there is a grown-up who is paying for everything and will intervene in an
emergency. (I have in fact heard a Congressman say that we should “think of
government as a loving parent.”) This is not the condition of citizens capable
of maintaining a democracy.

Well, one might reply, what of it? If the people are
comfortable and content, does it matter whether they vote or not? Does it
matter whether they choose their rulers or not? Might they not just as well
leave all that hard and boring stuff to the people who have a knack for and
interest in it?

To such a challenge the agrarians might answer something
like this: “Set aside the excellent possibility that such a society would soon
be dominated by tyrants, and that your comfort and contentment might be of
somewhat less importance to them than to you, and that if they decided to take
it away you would be in no position to argue. Set that aside, and suppose that
you could remain as happy as a pig in sunshine: you have discarded and
forgotten the old idea of liberty, and if you have to ask why that matters there isn’t much to
discuss.”

But let us look more closely at the essays. The titles of
some reveal that fundamental concern for the preservation of democracy: “The
Small Farm Secures the State” (Andrew Lytle); “Notes on Liberty and Property”
(Allen Tate); “That This Nation May Endure—The Need for Political Regionalism”
(Donald Davidson); “Big Business and the Property State” (Lyle H. Lanier); “The
Foundations of Democracy” (Frank Lawrence Owsley). Not everything here is of
equal interest, of course. Some of the essays are more dated, because more
concerned with the specifics of contemporary conditions, than others. A few are
more technical in their treatment of economics than I myself have the patience
for (in particular, “America and Foreign Trade”, by James Muir Waller, is
likely to be soporific for any who do not have a great interest in the
subject). But overall the range is wide, encompassing everything from rather
abstract economic treatises to Willis Fisher’s eloquent defense of the
much-maligned small town, “Small Town Mid-Westerner”. There is more than one
defense of the family farm, and an
essay on the situation of “The Emancipated Woman” by Mary Shattuck Fisher (she
regards emancipation from the farmhouse to the factory or office as a cruel
trick). The literary quality in general is high; Tate, Ransom, and the other
Agrarians do not disappoint.

I’ll Take My Stand
was widely mocked and condemned for its supposed backwardness, but it was read
and remembered. Who Owns America?
suffered a worse fate: it was mostly ignored, and then it was mostly forgotten.
But it strikes me as being at least as important. It is worth reading not
because it is the document of a forgotten social movement, but because it sheds
light on what is happening today.

And, speaking of forgotten social movements, there is a
fascinating connection between this book and an English movement called distributism
which held ideas very similar to those of the Agrarians. Distributism, at least
by that name, was a predominantly Catholic movement whose major figures were
G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, two colorful and vigorously opinionated
writers. Chesterton and Belloc tied distributism quite explicitly to
Catholicism. Distributism was little known in this country, but it had a few
disciples. One of them was Herbet Agar. Agar, it seems, was a friend of Allen
Tate, who was a Catholic convert, and Agar and Tate edited this volume. And the
last essay in it, which takes the discussion to the frontiers of theology, is
by Hilaire Belloc. Thus the English and the American streams, as well as the
religious and secular streams, of agrarian-distributist thought are brought
together here.

And, perhaps, do not end here. Distributism is not
entirely dead in Catholic circles; in recent years it has experienced a small
and quiet revival, especially among the younger Catholic intellectuals
dissatisfied with the false dichotomy of Roosevelt liberalism vs. Reagan
conservatism which dominates the Catholic conversation. If Southern
intellectuals were to stop trying to be hip and look to their roots; if the
Catholic distributist revival were to take hold and spread…well, who knows
but what something might come of it?