III.3. The Worker’s Flight into Freedom

But however seductive the temptations may be with which capitalism approaches the worker, however strongly they may work on weaker minds, one may still doubt whether what capitalism was able to offer the worker would by itself have sufficed to make him, in almost all strata, into the peaceable citizen that he is, if the worker had not been induced from yet another side to reconcile himself with the ruling economic system, or at least not to adopt a hostile attitude towards it. For American capitalism too lays tight fetters on men; American capitalism too cannot deny the relation of slavery in which it holds its workers; American capitalism too has had times of stagnation, with all their pernicious consequences for the worker: unemployment, pressure on wages and so on. Then an oppositional spirit would surely in time have entered the breasts at least, had not the strong, those who began to feel the chains chafe, the rebellious, the enterprising among the workers, the far-sighted, the uncomfortable, the defiant, had open to them the flight out of the sphere of the capitalist economy, or at least out of the narrow circle of wage-labour.

With this I touch that peculiarity of the American national economy which has become of the very greatest importance for the development of the proletarian psyche. In all the chatter of Carnegie and his imitators, who want to lull “the people, the great booby” to sleep by telling them wonder-stories of themselves and others who began as newspaper boys and ended as milliardaires, there is after all a grain of truth: the chances of rising out of his class were undoubtedly greater for the worker over there than for the worker in old Europe. The newness of society, its democratic character, the smaller distance of the employing class from the working class, the colonial freshness of many immigrants, Anglo-Saxon ambition and much else worked together to let the simple worker climb in by no means so rare cases the rungs of the ladder of the capitalist hierarchy up to the highest or almost the highest steps. Others again were enabled by the (in comparison with European conditions) much broader basis of their savings to make themselves independent as petty-bourgeois existences (shopkeepers, innkeepers and so on).

But the great mass of discontented wage-labourers was beckoned by yet another goal, which hundreds of thousands and millions actually strove for and reached in the course of the past century, and which brought them liberation from the pressure of capitalism, and that liberation in the fullest sense of the word: the free homestead in the unsettled West.

I believe in fact that in this circumstance — that practically any number of people with sound limbs and without any means could make themselves independent farmers by settling on free land — lies above all the explanation of the peculiar peaceable mood of the American worker.

This is not the place to sketch the history of the settlement legislation and of the actual settlement of the wide country even in its main features. It suffices for our purposes to establish the following points:

Through the homestead legislation of 1860 ff., every person over 21 years of age who is a citizen or declares his wish to become one receives the right to take possession of 80 acres (1 acre = 0.4 ha) situated between reserved railway lands, or 160 acres of public land situated elsewhere, if he declares on oath that he will actually and exclusively occupy and cultivate the plot for his own use, and will not wish to turn an advantage directly or indirectly thereby to anyone else. For this permission nothing but an insignificant fee is to be paid. The right of property in this “homestead” is granted to the settler after 5 years — under certain conditions that are easily fulfilled.

That it is a matter of millions who have settled in the United States as farmers during the last half-century is a well-known fact for which no evidence need be brought. Only to give the right idea of magnitude do I cite the number of farms as it was ascertained in each census year. It was

And these are all new peasant holdings that arose on virgin soil; for in the same years the area of land taken into cultivation rose almost parallel with the number of farms.

There were, in acres,

That is to say: in the two decades 1870–1890 an area of twice the extent of the German Empire was newly taken into cultivation!

In this new settlement, however, the Americans themselves have had the greatest share; that is, the free land in the West was just as much, if not to a greater extent, the goal of the inhabitants of American states, who pushed off their “surplus population” there, as of the foreign immigrants. Internal migrations take on greater dimensions in the United States than in any other country. And their character, moreover, is fundamentally different from that of internal migrations in the European states. With us it is essentially the movement from predominantly agrarian regions into the towns and industrial districts that sets the population in motion. This is by no means lacking in the United States, especially in the East, and grows stronger from year to year. But beside it, and far outstripping it in strength, there nevertheless goes an opposite movement: from the more densely settled, more industrial regions into the empty districts with free land.

That these are migrations of peoples in the grandest style is shown by a glance at the figures that the census offers us in superabundant fullness:

In 1900, of the persons born in America, 13,511,728 or 20.7 per cent lived outside their state of birth, of whom 6,165,097 lived outside the group of states usually brought together in a “division”: North Atlantic states, South Atlantic states, North Central states, South Central states, Western states. These 6 millions, then, had migrated into the distance. And for the most part, as may be supposed, from the eastern states into the central and western states: these had taken in round 5 millions of the 6 millions. If we pick out some of the states with more developed industry and look at how much surplus human material they had pushed off by 1900, and that into other, more agrarian groups of states:

So two and a half million people have gone off into freedom from these 8 states alone during one generation; that is about a fifth to a quarter of all the American-born inhabitants of these states!

That these migrations, however, are connected in great part with the development of capitalism, that they mean in great part, as I represented it, a flight out of the nexus of capitalist organisation, is taught us by other figures: the figures of the “homesteads” granted in the individual years. We can, namely, follow clearly how their number swells rapidly in times of economic depression, without this finding any explanation in a rising immigration. That is to say: it is the “industrial reserve army” that in these years rolls out of the industrial districts on to the land and settles there. That holds especially for the earlier periods, in which settlement was still easier. Thus, for example, the number of acres disposed of under the “Homestead” Act, and since 1875 also under the “Timber Culture” Act, rose from 2,698,770 in 1877 to 6,288,779 and 8,026,685 in the two following years, in which the industrial “crisis” reached its height, while immigration in 1878 was smaller than at any time since 1863. The economic depression then lasted through the whole of the 1880s. Immigration accordingly sank by half: from 669,000 and 789,000 in the years 1882 and 1883 to 395,000 and 334,000 in the years 1885 and 1886. Nevertheless the number of acres disposed of rose from 7–8 million at the beginning of the 1880s to over 12 million in the second half of the 1880s. In the middle of the 1880s there was strong unrest among the American working class, thanks to the continuing depression: in Chicago and other cities anarchism raised its head; the number of the originally strongly socialist Knights of Labor grew from 52,000 to 703,000 between 1883 and 1886, only to sink by almost half as early as 1888: the force of the storm was broken. The rebellious surplus population began to move off in ever stronger measure to the West, into the regions of the terra libera.

But the fact that American capitalism has developed in a country with immense areas of terra libera is by no means exhausted in its importance for the shaping of the proletarian psyche by establishing the number of settlers who, in the course of the years, have actually withdrawn themselves from the capitalist relation of service by flight. Rather, it is to be taken into account that the mere consciousness of being able to become a free peasant at any time was bound to give the American worker a feeling of security and calm that is foreign to the European worker. One bears any constraint more easily if one lives at least in the illusion of being able to withdraw from it in the utmost need!

That the position of the proletariat towards the problems of the future shaping of economic life was bound to become quite peculiar thereby is obvious. The possibility of being able to choose between capitalism and non-capitalism turns every budding hostility to this economic system from an active into a passive one, and breaks the point of every anti-capitalist agitation.

How very much the cheerful and frank basic trait of the American, his inner satisfaction, his being at one with the world at large and with the social world in particular, are most closely bound up with the existence of free, unsettled land, Henry George has portrayed excellently in the following words: “The public domain, the great extent of land that was still to be handed over to private possession, the immense common good, to which the eye of the energetic turned, was the chief circumstance that has formed our national character and coloured our national thought since the times when the first settlements began to fringe the Atlantic coast. It is not because we have fled a titled aristocracy and abolished the right of primogeniture; not because we elect all our officials from the school director to the President; not because our laws run in the name of the people instead of in the name of a prince; not because the state knows no religion and our judges wear no wigs, that we have remained free of the evils that the orators of the Fourth of July used to call the characteristic marks of the outworn despotisms of the Old World. The general intelligence, the widespread comfort, the active spirit of invention, the capacity for adaptation and assimilation, the free, independent spirit, the energy and self-reliance that distinguish our people, are not causes but effects — they have grown out of the free soil. The public land has been the transforming force that has changed the slack European peasant into the self-reliant farmer of the West; it gave even the inhabitants of populous cities a consciousness of freedom, and was a fountain of hope even for people who never thought of taking refuge in it. When the child of the people in Europe grows to manhood, he finds all the best places at the banquet of life marked “taken”, and must fight with his fellows for the falling crumbs, with a chance of one against a thousand of forcing or sneaking a place for himself. In America he had in any case always the consciousness that the public domain lay behind him, and the knowledge of this circumstance has, in action and reaction, permeated the whole national character and lent it generosity and independence, elasticity and ambition. Everything that fills the American with pride, everything that makes American institutions better than those of the older countries, can be traced back to the fact that the land in the United States was cheap, because the virgin and unsettled soil stood at the disposal of the immigrant.”

* * *

These, roughly, are the reasons why there is no socialism in the United States. My view is now, however, this: that all the factors that have hitherto held back the development of socialism in the United States are on the point of disappearing or of being turned into their opposite, so that in consequence socialism in the Union will in all probability come to the fullest flower in the next generation.

To furnish this proof, however, requires a thorough analysis of the whole American state of politics and society, and in particular of the American national economy, such as I hope to be able to give some day.