Who Owns America: A New Declaration of Independence

Who Owns America: A New Declaration of Independence by Herbert Agar (Editor), Allen Tate (Editor), Robert Penn Warren, Andrew Lytle, Mary Shattuck Fisher, John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, Cleanth Brooks, Lyle H. Lanier, Hilaire Belloc. Hardcover: 304 pages. (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 1999), Retail, $24.95, Amazon.com $15.72.

Review by Ryan Setliff

Who Owns America: A New Declaration of Independence was put together by a group of midwestern and southern agrarians thinkers who advance a sobering culture critique. Therein, they make the case for decentralised politics and widespread distribution of private property. The agrarians extoled the need for vibrant regionalism within the the nation-state. They recognized that one must surely be an Ohioan, Texan or Virginian as they are an American.

This book was published in 1936 as the Great Depression become more depressing. This is the classic sequel to I'll Take My Stand, but the contributors frame their critique in national terms rather than southern sectional terms. It is an anthology that is a selection of articles and essays from various agrarian and conservative writers, mostly from the South and Midwest. Moreover, the contributing authors essentially represented a cross-section of thinkers from southern conservatives to Midwestern agrarians. They have much common ground, but some differences as well. There major focus in the book was a critique of American society, political economy and its increasingly centralized socio-economic-political structure. As Edward Shapiro notes in the introduction:

The decentralists sought to reverse the trend toward large-scale industrialization, mass merchandising, and form dispossion which, they argued, were transforming a population of property-owning small manufacturers, merchants, and farmers into servile white-collar employees, proletarians, and farm tenants. Without the widespread distribution of property there could be no real economic or political freedom, only a form of serfdom, a condition to which America was rapidly approaching. If this trend toward dispossession was not reversed, they said, it was likely that the economic collectivism of modern large-scale capitalism would be replaced by the political collectivism of socialism. (p. xiii.)

The agrarians in turn offered a prescriptive formula for a renewed America landscape and body politic. This was to be characterized by widespread ownership of private property, small-scale enterprises coupled with preservation of the American entrepreneurial spirit and a decentralised political system amenable to the people at the state and local level. The agrarians emphasized that with political devolution that such a cultural, economic and social order could take hold, and those structures would be on a more humane scale.

Allen Tate's 'Notes on Liberty and Property' in my estimation is the keystone of this book. Tate's essay concentrates on the correlation between political freedom and the widespread diffusion of freehold private property amongst the citizenry.

Andrew Lytle's 'The Small Farm Secures the State' is also a meaningful contribution. Donald Davidson's ideas on regionalism were rather unlikable to me given that he favors establishing regional political blocs at the expense of state sovereignty. It seems evident that making politics more decentralised would not entail annihilating state sovereignty. The shared ideal embodied in the text of this New Declaration of Independence was that Americans should be independent not only of big government but its attendant companion big business.

The agrarians are not anti-capitalist per say or demagogues; but as Anglo-Catholic distributist G.K. Chesterton quipped that "the problem with capitalism is that there are not enough capitalists." The contributors together reasoned that the increasing corporate collectivism and growth of collectively-managed property is tantamount to the destruction of private property, and will inevitably yield to the attendant perils that come with socialism.

The authors buoy the case that there is a strong correlation between political freedom and a widespread diffusion of political power and economic resources. They were, by and large, critical of an interventionist imperial foreign policy and tended to favor trust-busting to uproot monopolistic cartels. They offered a bleak prognosis if the continuing concentration of power and capital goes unabated. The agrarian writers seem to be enmeshed with ideas of trade protectionism which was be anathema to their southern agrarian forefathers John Taylor of Caroline and John Randolph of Roanoke. While against the New Deal, a few contributors tinge on advocacy of too much government meddling in economy. I say this not to malign the agrarian spirit of the book, but for an accurate reflection. It is worthy of note, that the agrarian authors emphasized political decentralization and a localized market economy rooted in the principle of subsidiarity.

Mary Fisher's essay entitled 'The Emancipation of Woman' is eerily prophetic of bad sociological trends in early twentieth century that have reached fruition today. Fisher addresses how women ostensibly seeking "emancipation" from motherhood have been pushed into a dehumanizing existence in the workplace. Today, the woman has to work to pay family's share of income tax. Erstwhile children have come to be viewed by many as a liability, a burden and something entirely undesirable.

Feminism is perhaps the greatest misnomer of all time, and it ran amok where it disavowed the femininity of women in favor of androgyny. The trauma of the Second World War which shook up the home, the explosion of the New Deal Welfare State and the ual Revolution exacerbated the attack on traditional womanhood and the family. Nature and tradition set the ordinary course of a woman in day-to-day life as being involved with family in her distinct role as nurturer, as the life-giver, and as a mother.

Fisher's essay is alarmist, but a needed critique as the so called Emancipated Women is becoming an atomized cog in an economic machine. The Emancipated Women is actually alienated as her natural state of being is attacked by an increasingly materialistic and socialistic society. Today, being a homemaker carries the stigmatism of being a pariah in some cosmopolitan urban quarters. Women have been wrongly conditioned to loathe their natural state of being, and quell the maternal desire.

The final essay features English Anglo-Catholic distributist Hilaire Belloc who offers a critique of 'Modern Man.'

All things considered, this book is a spirited critique of crass Yankee capitalism run amok; big business and big government go hand in hand. It offers so sound, prudent social and culture criticism with Southern and Midwestern sobriety. The ideas pressed forward in this book generally have a largely Jeffersonian flavor, a trenchant Tocqueville style of analysis and Calhoun's clarity of communicating ideas.

There is an aura of populist conservatism with a distinctively Southern and Midwestern sense of sobriety, in such statements as:

"The diversity of regions rather enriches the national life than impoverishes it, and their mere existence as regions cannot be said to constitute a problem. Rather in their differences they are a national advantage, offering not only the charm of variety but the interplay of points of view that ought to give flexibility and wisdom... The regions should be free to cultivate their own particular genius and to find their happiness..., in the pursuits to which their people are best adapted, the several regions supplementing and aiding each other, in national comity, under a well-balanced economy."
—Donald Davidson

"...The diffusion of an energetic population over our vast territory is an object of far greater importance to the national growth and prosperity than the proceeds of the sale of the land to the highest bidder in the open market..."
—Andrew Johnson

"Corporate mergers and all devices of economic and legal control, usurious interest with wholesale foreclosure, unsound manipulation of the nation's volume of money by banker, broker, and politician-all these have made of us a nation of dispossessed people."
—John C. Rawe

"The joint-stock corporation, when overgrown, is the enemy of private property in the same sense communism is. The collectivist state is the logical development of the giant corporate ownership, and, if it comes, it will signalize the triumph of Big Business."
—Richard B. Ransom

"The elected candidate, in the President's chair and in Congress, was supposed to represent the people and to foster the general welfare. In practice, they represented the will of the Northeast and fostered the welfare of the Northeast..."
—Donald Davidson

"The Northeast has manipulated the Federal mechanism so as to encourage, as a cardinal objective of national policy, a gross overemphasis on industrialism and speculative finance, with a corresponding injury and neglect of agriculture and small business, to say nothing of the general injury resulting to manners, morals, and human happiness."
—Donald Davidson

If you find this book interesting than I would recommend reading economic critiques and treatises by Wilhelm Roepke, G.K. Chesteron and Hillare Belloc.