Who Still Owns America?
By: William Matthew Mccarter
Tags: America, Society, American History, Politics, History

The legacy of Jeffersonian Democracy is still radical today.

Photo by Ashton Bingham on Unsplash

Jeffersonian democracy is characterized by an agrarian economy made up of small property owners; a decentralized government that derives its strength from the community; and individual responsibility for the environment. These tenants of Jeffersonian democracy continue to resonate among Americans who stand opposed to corporate agriculture, the ever expanding hegemony of the federal government, and the loss of small town values that seem to have vanished along with rural American life.

An interesting book that looks at the role Jeffersonian democracy has in our own country is called Who Owns America? A New Declaration of Independence The book, edited by Herbert Agar and Allen Tate, revisits the political theory first laid out by Thomas Jefferson, one of the Founding Fathers of our country.

American Capitalism in Crisis

In 1936, the year Who Owns America? was published, American capitalism was in crisis. Our country was in the midst of an economic depression and everyone questioned America’s ability to maintain its political, economic and social system.

The Great Depression presented American government with its greatest challenge since the Civil War and nearly everyone thought that radical reform was not only necessary, but was possibly America’s only option. While many Americans supported President Roosevelt’s “New Deal,” the regionalist writers of Who Owns America?: Herbert Agar, Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom had other ideas about how to revitalize America.

Jeffersonian Democracy as the Cure

For these men, the contributing authors of Who Owns America?, the cure for America’s ills was Jeffersonian democracy — the Agrarian ideal — the original American Dream. Agar, Tate, and Ransom argued for political and economic independence and saw being dependent upon big government or big business as a threat to what they believed America was supposed to be.

Most of the nation’s intellectuals (including Roosevelt’s “brain trust”), in contrast to Agar, Tate, and Ransom, favored a centralized economic plan grounded in modern technology. For these thinkers, the Agrarian ideal was an anachronism. For them, the power of modern industry had permanently transformed society into an industrial one where centralized cities eclipsed small towns and family farms.

Who Would Control America?

For these thinkers, it was not whether Jeffersonian agrarianism was even possible — they believed that the industrial economy was inevitable. For them the only question was who would control it — the banks and industrialists or the government in Washington?

Essentially, the authors of Who Owns America? suggest that there are more choices than “Shall we be ruled by the industrial plutocrats?” or “Shall we be ruled by an increasingly encroaching central government?”

In 1936, during the midst of The Great Depression, Agar, Tate, and Ransom were making pretty radical statements about our country. Without a decentralized political and economic system and the widespread distribution of property, they argued, America would no longer be America (in the Jeffersonian sense). This was the only solution that would provide an authentically American response to our economic, political, and social struggles.

The Problem With Liberals

Agar, Tate, and Ransom agreed with the liberals in that the industrialists and bankers who had all but ruled the country (through laissez faire economic policies) since the late nineteenth century had failed America and Americans. However, they thought that the liberals were not “liberal enough” in that they appeared to accept the inevitability of corporate finance and industrialization.

For them, the liberals were only seeking to take the system as it was and merely transfer the control of that system from the plutocrats to the government bureaucrats. “From my point of view,” Allen Tate writes, the Marxists “are not revolutionary enough” in that they “want to keep capitalism with the capitalism left out.” Tate and his fellow contributors advocated a “third way” that would check both the communist inclinations of the political Left and the fascist inclinations of the industrial and commercial plutocrats.

Relevance Today

2016 marked the 80th anniversary of the publication of this forgotten classic of American protest and still challenges many of the assumptions that Americans have about our country.

Americans should resurrect this forgotten treasure of American letters. More than any other time since The Great Depression, Americans need to challenge what Americans typically think is “common sense” or “a given” about our economic system, corporate capitalism, and the Leviathan state.

As Edward Shapiro writes in his foreword to the newest edition of the book:

“The urgency of the questions posed by Who Owns America? has not changed since 1936, nor has the answer.”

For the authors of Who Owns America? that answer is a Jeffersonian vision of America based on the widespread ownership of property as the foundation for an independent citizenry that defends their individual liberty and lives a morally responsible life.

This was a radical statement for Agar, Tate, and the other contributors to Who Owns America? in 1936 and it remains a radical statement and an agrarian ideal seventy five years later.