Beyond Blue
by WALTER RUSSELL MEAD
The frustration and bitterness that fills American politics these days
reflects the failure of our current social, political and economic institutions
and practices to deliver the results that Americans want and expect. It’s
comparable to the frustration and fear that swept through the country in the
late 19th and early 20th century as the first American dream – that
every family could prosper on its own farm – gradually died.
From the era of the first European settlements in North America up through
World War I, the family farm was the key social, economic and even political
institution in the country. Until the 1920 census, a majority of
Americans lived in rural areas and, unlike the oppressed peasants of Europe
most owned and worked their own land.
The individual family farm was, in mythology and often enough in reality,
prosperous and independent. For Thomas Jefferson and a long line of
ideological descendants, the family farm was the cornerstone of American
democracy. For generations, government policy sought to ease the path to
cheap and — after the Homestead Act — free western land for American families.
The limits of this approach did not begin to appear until after the Civil
War. As the best land was taken, the remaining land available for homesteading
was increasingly marginal. It was too cold, too dry or too remote.
The dependence of farmers on politically powerful railroad companies to ship
their crops to market and the power of banks and speculators in the commodity
markets put family farms at a disadvantage. The global commodity glut that
developed as new techniques opened up new land not only in the American west,
but also in Russia, Canada, Argentina and Australia depressed the prices
farmers could get.
The last great burst of traditional American farm policy came with the
Oklahoma land rush of 1889. The federal government opened former tribal
lands for homesteading, and thousands of families rushed to stake their claims
on new land. Many of these families would be among the dispossessed “Okies” who
fled the Dust Bowl a generation later.
The family farm and the social and political model that rested on it didn’t
die easy and it didn’t die quick. (Even today huge agribusinesses shelter
their vast subsidy payments behind the public affection for the family farm.)
Waves of populist protest against the decline of the original American social
model roiled politics for decades. William Jennings Bryan built his political
career on the economic and political frustration of millions of small farmers
caught up in an inexorable and, to many, incomprehensible set of economic
changes.
I’ve written in earlier posts about the shift from the first American Dream to the second: from the
family farm to the suburban “homestead.” It was a profound change in American
life and culture that has not yet been fully explored. The family farm
integrated production and consumption, work and leisure, family and
business. The family wasn’t just a union of sentiment: it was an element
of production. Mom and Dad worked as a team to feed, house and clothe the
family, and as the kids grew up they took on greater and greater
responsibilities in the common effort. Their lives at home prepared them
for the new lives they would lead on their own: the kids would grow up, marry,
and start farms.
The 20th century suburban homestead was a very different place.
In the early, “pure” form, Mom and Dad were still a team, but their roles were
more differentiated than on the farm. Dad worked in the office or the
factory and brought home the money; Mom organized the home and raised the
kids. The kids might do chores around the house (girls more than boys),
but their lives were increasingly outside of the family circle. They went
to school full time from the age of six on, and instead of learning basic work
and social skills in the family with their parents, they were taught skills and
patterns of living in school to prepare them, in turn, for lives in which
working life and home life were divided.
After the 1960s, Mom started working in a factory, an office or a store,
and for girls as well as boys the center of gravity of their educational and
social life moved away from the family circle.
Both the family farm and the “crabgrass frontier” (as Kenneth Jackson calls
20th century suburban America in a remarkable
book) had their advantages and
their drawbacks, and both allowed for broad prosperity and reasonable dignity
and economic security for tens of millions of Americans. Generation after
generation embraced both social ideals while millions of people from all over
the world came to the United States, hoping to share in the American Dream.
Today the 20th century model of the American dream faces the same kind
of crisis the 19th century version experienced 100 years ago.
International competition and technological advances mean that the American
factory worker’s earnings and opportunities are depressed in the way farmers
were going to the wall 100 years ago. In the last twenty years,
well-intentioned government efforts to put more people in owner-occupied
housing led to a housing bubble and mass bankruptcies in the face of a
financial panic and the ensuing recession, the worst in eighty years.
Our political battles today reflect the same kinds of frustrations we saw
in the old populist era. Many cannot fathom another and “higher” form of
the American Dream beyond the old crabgrass utopia. They want to turn back the
clock and restore the old system because they don’t know of anything else that
will work. The explicit political demand for this kind of restoration is
usually found on the left, where it is often coupled with demands for the
protection of American industries from foreign competition. But nostalgia
for the old days isn’t just a left wing emotion; a free floating anger stemming
from the breakdown of a broadly accepted social model helps power political
currents on both ends of the spectrum.
In the 1890s, the “restorationists” were the agrarian populists. They
wanted to protect family farmers from the forces that were undermining this
hallowed way of life and they genuinely could not imagine that the end result
of the shift out of agriculture could lead to richer and better lives for most
Americans. This was perfectly understandable and rational: few people in
1890 could have predicted or imagined the new social system that would emerge
on the basis of mass production and mass consumption in the 20th century.
