Source: Fourth International, Vol.10 No.5, May 1949, pp.139-143.
(William F. Warde was a pseudonym of George Novack.)
Transcription/Editing/HTML Markup: 2006 by Einde O’Callaghan.
Public Domain: George Novack Internet Archive 2006; This work is completely free. In any reproduction, we ask that you cite this Internet address and the publishing information above.
A clear and correct conception of the place occupied in American history by Indian society throws much-needed light upon another fundamental question of this country’s social evolution – the struggle for possession of the land. That struggle begins with the wresting of the tribal hunting grounds from the Indians and the transmission of this land to new owners belonging to a different type of social organization who needed it for new economic activities – agriculture, trade, mining, ranching, city-dwelling, industry, etc.
At various stages along the route this struggle has involved the principal state and clerical powers of Western Europe as well as the various classes transplanted to American soil. Our land has changed hands, several times since the sixteenth century, passing not only from country to country but also from class to class and from person to person. Questions concerning the use, distribution and ownership of the land have played crucial roles in every great American upheaval: in the wars against the Indians, as well as in the fight against British domination (the abolition of crown lands and other royal restrictions, abolition of entail and primogeniture, confiscation and sale of Loyalist estates) and in the Civil War (the Homestead Act, the land question in the Southern states).
The outcome of all this has been to disperse the land among various categories of individual owners and to concentrate the best situated and most productive areas in the hands of a wealthy minority. At no time since the overthrow of Indian tribalism by the bearers of landed private property has the American earth belonged to the inhabitants thereof, even when it formally belonged to the government. For each of these governments, controlled by the propertied classes, served as no more than a temporary custodian before turning titles to the land over to private owners.
The unexpressed assumption of all except the most radical representatives of bourgeois thought on this problem (such as Henry George) is that the land along with the other means of production shall forever be used and abused by private proprietors and any subsequent redistribution will take place within the framework of private ownership.
It cannot be denied that they have what the jurists call a “prima facie” case, since that has been the main trend for over four hundred years and appears to be the unshakable state of affairs today. The monied men with their banks, insurance companies and corporations continue to gather the best part of the land into their hands and reap its benefits. At the same New York Herald Tribune forum, where Harvard President Conant in October 1948 spoke about the blessings of democratic capitalism, cries of alarm were raised by other speakers over the mismanagement and waste of our national resources owing to capitalist anarchy and greed.
What will be the ultimate conclusion of the contest which began with the dispossession of the Indian? Will the American people permit the small fraction of wealthy proprietors to engross the land and its wealth, to ravage the national resources, and exclude the majority of the population from rational management and enjoyment of the land?.
It would be an illusion to think that the struggle over the land which has already passed through so many changes will stop at its present point and at the limits imposed by the interests of the rich. In fact, the fight against their monopoly and misuse of the land is bound to flare up again as it has during every great social crisis.
In his autobiography Oscar Ameringer tells an interesting anecdote in this connection about an Oklahoma cattleman who had firmly opposed socialist ideas until he was ruined by the 1929