Land!
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Land!

The Case for an Agrarian Economy

John Crowe Ransom, Jason Peters, Jason Peters

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eBook - ePub

Land!

The Case for an Agrarian Economy

John Crowe Ransom, Jason Peters, Jason Peters

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About This Book

The accomplished poet and scholar John Crowe Ransom made profound contributions to twentieth-century American literature. As a teacher at Vanderbilt University he was also a leading member of the Southern Agrarian movement and a contributor to the movement's manifesto I'll Take My Stand. Ransom's Land! is a previously unpublished work that unites Ransom's poetic sensibilities with an examination of economics at the height of the Great Depression. Politically charged with Ransom's aesthetic beliefs about literature and his agrarian interpretation of economics, Land! was long thought to have been burned by its author after he failed to find a publisher. Thankfully, the manuscript was discovered, and we are now able to read this unique and interesting contribution to the Southern Agrarian revival.

After the publication of I'll Take My Stand in 1930, Ransom, who provided the book's Statement of Principles in addition to its lead essay, became convinced that the book had not adequately proposed an economic alternative to Northern industrialism, which had fairly obliterated the Southern way of life. Land! was Ransom's attempt to fill this gap. In it he presents the weaknesses inherent in capitalism and argues convincingly that socialism is not only an inadequate alternative but inimical to American sensibilities. He proposes instead that agrarianism, which could flourish alongside capitalism, would relieve the problems of unemployment and the "permanently unemployed." In particular, he argues that what he calls the "amphibian farmer"—who can survive in both a monetary and a non-monetary economy— would never, so long as he relied on himself for necessities, have to fear unemployment. America, Ransom claims, is unique in offering this opportunity because, unlike in European countries, land is plentiful.

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Information

Year
2017
ISBN
9780268101961
Chapter 1
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HOMELESS PEOPLE AND VACANT LAND
Man’s inhumanity to man—resounding and portentous phrase—need not, I imagine, describe our inevitable or usual human relations, as Malthus1 might have thought it did if he had been asked to pass judgment. But it is terrifyingly apt at describing our present ones. A certain economic practice has brought us to a condition where we are competing with each other for survival. We are in business, and there is not enough business to go round. All must take part in this game of economic competition, not merrily but perforce, and nobody can win until somebody loses. The stakes are no longer the naive delights of power, glory, finery, and sumptuary extravagance, but the means of bare subsistence. The competitive condition is not less dreary because it is universal. Nor is our conduct the less murderous because we do not mean any harm, and bear no particular malice against our competitors. We are engaged in a kind of civil war, though hostilities have not been declared, and scarcely even intended.
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I suppose this way of putting it is hardly too strong in April of 1932. But I can be much more specific, and recount some commonplace bits of fact.
I live in a moderately well-to-do residential section of a fair-sized city. At the top of my street lives an undertaker, who has a “mortuary establishment” downtown. His business is doing badly, and he cannot hold out much longer. But it is not because people are not dying at a due and healthy rate; it is because there are suddenly far too many undertakers, and they could not support themselves on a normal death rate; they would require a series of plagues.
Very quick would be the answer which some earlier society, with its simpler ideas, would make to the undertaker’s complaint: Why does he not then try some other business? But since he himself has not been long an undertaker, it is certain that he must have thought of that, that his mind is open to the idea of changing his occupation again. As he looks over our neighborhood, however, or even our city, he cannot find that the men in the other businesses are doing particularly better than he is. All the businesses seem to be overmanned and overproductive, and there is no business for him to turn to. It is a new condition in American life, the rather tragic culmination of an economic development that has been vaster and more rapid than anything like it in history.
The undertaker is only a sample. An insurance salesman lives near; he has almost gone out of business, and is living on his “renewals.” Insurance is still being bought, though not on the scale of five years ago; but five years ago, and previously, there were coming into being too many insurance companies with too many salesmen, and there is simply not the trade to accommodate them all. Then there are several merchants, unanimous in reporting that they are not getting business, and times are very hard. They are the victims of an economy that has set up too many mercantile establishments, and allocated to their personnel too many shrewd, capable, honest men. There are also several sorts of salaried men in our community: managers, travelling salesmen, department heads, technicians. All are worrying. They do not know when they will be laid off. They are miserably aware that their service is scarcely paying for itself, that their employers have lost too much business under the condition of overcompetition and oversupply.
I myself am a college teacher, and I still have my job, but doubtless it is at the expense of a good many threadbare and desperate scholars who would like to take it from me. I know such men. There are far too many of us trying to make scholarship pay. And as for school-teachers, the teacher-training institutions of my State have been turning them out for the last ten years in impossible numbers. There cannot be found positions for them all unless the present teachers who did not go to college are discharged for their benefit; and when it comes to the question whether the old teachers or the new teachers are to become the supernumeraries of the economic order and retire into economic darkness, the political economist has no preference whatever.
There are other professional men in our section—doctors, a dentist, lawyers, preachers. All are trying to cut the throats of their competitors. Or trying to strangle them, I had better say; for they are rarely bloodthirsty by nature. Many of them preferred professional life to business precisely because they assumed that the competitive technique would not have to be so ruthless. But the professions are just as overcrowded as the businesses, and the alternative before their members is to fight for a man’s share of the limited patronage or waste away of inanition.
Beyond my section is the suburb where reside the big men who run big business. Their story is like our story but on a grander scale. The manufacturer is manufacturing only by fits and starts. His plant is like nearly half the plants in his industry: superfluous. The banker lives in fear of his economic life. Banking is a pretty business, and it is not strange that too many men, carrying too many capital funds, have entered it. Unfortunately it has been the recent fashion for banks which were having a hard struggle individually to merge, and to cut down their personnel, and some of them have not quite lasted until the merger could be completed. And what of the rentiers—the privileged ones who live on Easy Street itself, and whose economic function consists in clipping coupons from gilt-edged securities?2 The securities have too often turned out to be of no better composition than the edges. So these folk are retrenching from their former scale of living as their incomes have dropped off, and some of them are barely intact, economically speaking. For the rentier has his enemies too, though not mean-spirited personal ones. I hope; he has competitors, who are all the rentiers everywhere that have poured capital into productive investment until none of it produces as it should. As the tradesman and the manufacturer and the banker suffer so he must suffer, because it is his money that has set them up, and his money that must be lost when the business goes to pieces.
In the opposite direction from this rich-man’s suburb, toward the city, is the shabby district where the large families of day-today laborers lead their hand-to-mouth existence. Nobody can now find any gloss to spread over that picture! The laborers want labor, but the labor is insufficient, and so the hand of each is in effect raised against his neighbor. The laborer’s distress is cruder and more obvious than that of other members of the economic community. His position is exactly the same in the respect that, when his own particular occupation fails him, there is no other for him to enter.
Surplus of production, fierce competition, crowded occupations: the condition is so prevalent that it forms for us a sort of economic atmosphere; we feel it and breathe it everywhere we go. In such a situation there might be the makings of revolution and violence but for one consideration: all the ranks suffer alike, and there is no particular direction in which to attack. There is no villain nor set of villains in this drama. There are not even any great fools, for it is hard to smell out precisely where the folly lies, and it is evidently a kind of folly that has infected us all about the same.
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But we are loath to accept that as a picture of our “normal” economic condition and, without knowing precisely what is the matter, we are inclined to believe that it will give place sooner or possibly later to a picture which is bright and pleasant. To an uncertain extent that must be true. Let us hope it as hard as we can. Evidently our hope is mainly the not very rational one that, since good times and bad times seem to succeed each other in alternation, good times are coming back.
Good times consist in occupation for all; an economic function for everybody; it is the first desideratum of sound political economy. It is entirely too possible that we shall not see it realized again in our time. We look forward in fear, and we look backward in fondness, and ask ourselves, Why should it not obtain again as it obtained before? It is necessary to see how it obtained the last time, and what was really happening to make it obtain then, and to make it unapt to obtain quickly again.
The abundant occupation which offered itself in the flush times just before the crash was not an entirely sound condition. The event proves it, and a little economic logic will explain it. The occupation was abundant, but some of it was of a sort that could not last and must soon be withdrawn. This precarious or temporary occupation fell into at least three large groups.
(1) There was first the occupation of those who were working for businesses that were really on the point of breaking but did not dare to stop and see. They were producing goods that were increasingly failing to get sold, and cluttering up the market. They kept going in the hope that things would be better for them tomorrow. Monetary conditions helped them to keep going. Prices were rising, and tended to reimburse them each season for the costs of production in the previous season; these costs had been incurred on a lower price scale but they were nevertheless heavy because they had to cover wasted or unused production. If the businesses required to make loans to continue operation, they could probably do it, for credit was plentiful. But the longer they kept going the further they were getting behind and the greater would be the crash when they stopped.
These businesses were the weaker or “marginal” businesses in industries which on the whole were overproductive; and in being overproductive it is to be understood that they were simply producing more goods than the existing market could absorb. How there can be theoretically an overproduction in goods which are really desirable is still a great mystery to economists; but it is not denied that there is such a thing as an effective overproduction, and that it is a common thing.
The market by September of 1929 was so flooded with goods of all kinds, or at least so threatened with the flood of goods that managed barely to be held back from production by plants capable of producing and yearning to produce them, that advertising and salesmanship became aggressive as never before in the effort to move the consumers. But this resource failed in the degree that consumers were not willfully withholding their patronage but really had not the means to buy. Schemes of purchase by installment succeeded in selling many bills of goods; but they strained the credit of houses still further; and these transactions were often going to turn out not to represent sales at all because the purchase was never going to be completed.
(2) Another kind of occupation that could not last was that of the builders—almost the most sensitive and precarious of occupations. It was a period of prodigious building. It had to be, because it was an age when fresh money out of the profits of a business whose volume had never been equaled[,] increased by credit which was readily available, was pouring into investment; and investment means fundamentally the erection of plant.3 A boom period wears the look of feverish occupation largely because those who are not employed in the existing plant are being employed as builders of new plant. But the new plant is going to increase the existing volume of production, which is already an overproduction, and the building of the builders becomes a dangerous liability and not a source of strength. If only there might have been a series of well-planned earthquakes, or cyclones, which might have destroyed the new buildings as fast as they went up! Then no harm would have been done by the attempt to make extravagant additions to productive plant, and an age of building could have continued to be an age of building. But no such thing happened. The thing that did happen was inevitable. A season later, or a few seasons later, when the new plant was put to producing in its turn, it became apparent to everybody that it had no real economic function to serve, but was excessive plant. Then the building stopped, and the personnel engaged in it was no longer in receipt of wages and in a position to patronize the producers, so that even their old rate of production was now excessive. The units began to cease operations one by one. Each stoppage of a payroll cut down the market for the other units that were still producing, and the depression gathered head like a snowball. It was in this style that late 1929 passed drearily into 1930, into 1931, and even, to the general amazement, into 1932.
(3) The third group of perishable occupations was that of employees who were going to be superseded by technology—by labor-saving machinery, and by economies in organization and processes of production. Efficiency in production is admirable in principle, and sometimes the release of laborers from an industry whose new equipment enables it to spare them permits them to go into new industries that are waiting for manpower. Unfortunately it does not lie in the nature of business ownership to wait and see that this is going to happen before turning the laborers out. And when once the crisis has come, and the boom has turned into the depression, the productive plants must redouble their efforts to keep afloat by saving costs, and to save costs by devising fresh economies at the expense of payroll. Invention and management never work so hard to cut down the labor requirement as during hard times. And this reduction is in each case permanent. Labor is forever dispossessed4 of that much of its specific occupation, and can only live in hope that some other need for it will turn up.
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What then is the “normal” figure of production to which we may reasonably expect to return, and under which our productive plant, heavily reduced by that scrapping of plant which takes place through bankruptcies and forced liquidations, may expect to flourish once more? It seems reasonable to say that it will be a figure which will hardly re-engage soon all those who are now without occupation. We used to think we needed immigration to get the manpower for our promising industries. Is it possible that we need now to start emigration, in order to dispose painlessly of the superfluous citizens who have no economic function in our economic society?
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Humanitarians are much concerned today with relieving the unemployed, in the sense of finding money and handing it to them to live on. That is the least we can do for them at the moment. But economists are concerned with restoring them to livelihood, and making it unnecessary to resort to philanthropic drives for their relief. More employment for the unemployed, less employment for the humanitarians.
Let us conceive the economic problem of our society in its simplest sense as an occupational problem: how to find occupation for those who have none, and how to find remunerative occupation for those whose occupation has become only a formal or waiting one. The chief demand upon our statesmen at this moment, or it may be the chief demand upon our private but leading political economists[,] is to place every member of our society into some permanent economic position.
I suggest that one occupation is quite available for those of us who need it, and that, in fact, it is where we are least likely to look for it, or right under our noses.
Before naming it precisely, I should like to ask the question, From where did all these superfluous men, now squeezed out of their nominal occupations, originally come? The number of them is large, but they are the excess of workers in a plant that is huge. This plant produced in 1928, the last full year of our prosperity, something like five times as much as its nearest competitor. It had expanded to these proportions rather rapidly, and though the increase of productivity per capita through technology made much of it possible, it was obliged to make tremendous drafts upon a fresh source of manpower somewhere or other in order to operate. It recruited from several sources. There was first of all the “natural increase” in the given industrial population. But this was far behind the rate of increase which the expanding plant demanded. There was immigration, which took from the European populations on a very large scale. Even so, the immigrants who entered the American labor market were not, after a certain point, the chief source of supply, and as a matter of fact they finally ceased to be wanted. After the world war we legislated immigration nearly out of existence. Already we were feeling crowded, and the problem of occupation was presenting itself. Another accession of personnel was that made by the negro. In increasing numbers the negroes left the South and entered the industrial occupations in the East and Middle West. They made a considerable item.
But the chief source of manpower for our scheme of production was unquestionably the native American population that had been living quietly and a little bit primitively on the farms.5 The accession made by the negroes belongs really under this head, for they came out of a country life. It was because the old-fashioned farmers of America went industrial, and migrated in an accelerating stream to the towns, that the capitalistic community was swamped beneath a personnel greater than it could assimilate solidly into its econ...

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