ally 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 depression. In 1932 he approached Ameringer and declared:
“What we got to have is this here revolution you used to preach about.”
“You mean divide up and start all over again?” asked Ameringer.
“No, not divide up,” exclaimed the cattleman angrily, “but own our land and cattle and things in common like the Indians use to do before the government robbed them of everything by giving them title deeds.”
“That’s better,” Ameringer acknowledged, “provided we add railroads, banks, packing plants and a great many other things to those you mentioned.”
The impact of the oncoming social crises will undoubtedly call forth similar responses from considerable sections of farmers who today appear eternally wedded to “free enterprise.”
The actual cultivators of the soil, small farmers, indentured servants, tenants or slaves, never reconciled themselves in the past to the exploiters of labor on the land, to landlordism or absentee ownership. The embattled farmers carried through the fight for independence and democracy against British-backed feudalism during the First American Revolution. Their vanguard in Kansas first challenged in action the slave power, the forerunners of the farmers who filled the Union armies in the Civil War. The agrarian Populists conducted stubborn struggles against the tyranny of the plutocrats in the last part of the nineteenth century. These memorable precedents prefigure how the toilers on the land, whether small owners, sharecroppers, or wage workers, are bound to assert their presence and power as the oppressions – and depressions – of monopoly capitalism drive them to seek a new road. Whatever phases the struggle for the land will go through as class antagonisms become more pronounced, the method of its final solution has already been indicated by Marx:
“From the point of view of a higher economic form of society, the private ownership of the globe on the part of some individuals will appear quite as absurd as the private ownership of one man by another. Even a whole society, a nation, or even all 