Selling the Land
MARGOLIS, RICHARD J.
States of the Union SELLING THE LAND BY RICHARD J. MARGOLIS "The land was ours before we were the land's," intoned Robert Frost at JFK's damp Inaugural. "Not quite," the corporations might have...
...The two notions were fused and reshaped in the writings of Thomas Jefferson and Ralph Waldo Emerson...
...The problem, White went on, was that Kansas kept attacking Wall Street...
...The Homestead Act of 1862, which made cheap farmland available to pioneers, wanderers and people down on their luok, was pure Jefferson...
...he wanted to know...
...The claim is disengenuous, since the fund will both lease and manage farms, and derive its profits soley by the private enterprise system?from rentals, crop sales and real estate investments...
...At going farmland prices in the Midwest and South, the regions on which the plan will concentrate, $50 million buys about 30,000 acres today...
...When I think of that 1896 election I also think of William Allen White, the legendary publisher of the Emporia Gazette...
...Legislate the thriftless man into ease, whack the stuffing out of the creditors...
...To argue that Ag-Land I need not pay income taxes because its customers are tax-exempt is to say that General Motors need not pay taxes on profits made from the sale of buses to schools across the country...
...If Ag-Land I is here, can AgLand II, in and IV be all that far behind...
...he mocked...
...The United States was settled by persons in search of a little grazing room, both agricultural and spiritual: space for sheep and conscience...
...Oliver Goldsmith wrote a long poem, "The Deserted Village," about an entire rural English town abandoned in the face of enclosure...
...Perhaps it was an early strain of Babbittry, an American craving for respectability, that finally defeated Bryan in 1896...
...The land was theirs before the rest of us knew what hit us...
...Neither of these attitudes?dreams, really—was strong enough to resist the tide of technology and big money that arose in the city and spilled into the countryside...
...Although the Farmers Alliance was bullish about America, it went down with Bryan in the 1896 election, when Big Business got a grip on the country that to this day has not been broken...
...go north and they have forgotten her...
...Perhaps the last great political attempt to beat back this urban wave was made by the Farmers Alliance, a radical association of ruralists who believed in the coming of the Cooperative Commonwealth...
...He broke loose and stalked off to the Gazette, where he wrote one of the finest, angriest and most wrong-headed editorials in the annals of American journalism...
...Last December, the Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust Company in Chicago announced it had teamed up with Merrill, Lynch, Pierce, Fenner and Smith to form a $50-million pooled agricultural land investment fund...
...Indeed, thus far it has been smooth sailing for Ag-Land I. The fund has gotten the go-ahead from both the Comptroller of the Currency and the Securities Exchange Commission...
...Continental Bank officials themselves seem slightly embarrassed by this peculiar logic...
...Ag-Land I is merely the latest in a long procession of disastrous business schemes for bilking farmers, with most of the schemers serene in the conviction that what's good for them is good for rural Americans...
...In the last century the railroads grabbed several hundred-million acres of land in the shoddiest government giveaway on record, and they still own 23 million...
...White, then a young man, had been walking to his office when a "shabbily dressed gang" of Populists accosted him, "hooting, jeering, nagging me about some editorial utterances I had made...
...That's the stuff...
...Dooley's Supreme Court: "No matther whether th' constitution follows th' flag or not, th* supreme ccort follows th' iliction returns...
...the early ecology movement, with its cult of the "natural" was pure Emerson...
...All of us continue to be victims of that critical election, of 'the subsequent capture of rural America by "the corporate ethos...
...In effect, "The collapse of Populism meant...
...The only impediment now is the Internal Revenue Service: Continental Illinois and Merrill Lynch have asked that the fund be granted tax-exempt status on the grounds that Ag-Land I's non-profit investors qualify for exemptions under Section 401 (a) of the Internal Revenue code...
...While White's vision may not have been Jeffersonian, it was nonetheless as American as apple pie, and as petit bourgeois as Main Street: "Cities on the fertile prairies . . . well-dressed men on the streets...
...Ag-Land Fund I, as it is called, will try to attract investments from employe pension and profit-sharing plans...
...the 6-milhon-acre Virginia holdings of Lord Fairfax...
...Goldsmith's best-remembered lines in that work remain evergreen: "111 fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,/Where wealth accumulates and men decay...
...go west and they sneer at her...
...Secretary of Agriculture Bob Bergland warned a Congressional suibcomimittee that Ag-Land I would be "a disaster," driving up land and food prices and forcing farm families to either abandon their land or else stay on as renters, in peonage to banks, corporations and mutual real estate funds...
...During the Kennedy-Johnson decade over 7,000 corporations entered agricultural production, with the result that today more than half the nation's farm acreage is controlled by just 5 per cent of all farm owners...
...Not quite," the corporations might have answered, "but we've been working on it...
...that the cultural values of the corporate state were politically unassailable in 20th century America...
...since then a lot of farmibelt Congressmen have written a lot of nasty memos...
...What's the matter with Kansas...
...go south and they "cuss" her...
...That, however, was in December...
...they flourished briefly in what is now Merrill Lynch's target territory, the South and the Midwest...
...Continental Illinois' announcement stirred up a small storm among Midwestern farmers and their representatives in Congress...
...Now the banks and brokerage houses have begun to dream of rural portfolios...
...It has already held hearings on the question and, according to spokesmen for the fund, has given "tentative approval" to the bid for tax exemption...
...to Emerson, he represented transcendentalism—a way of living in nature without feeling the need to conquer it...
...And with heavy sarcasm: "What we need is not more money, but less capital, fewer white shirts and brains, fewer men with business judgment...
...To Jefferson the independent farmer meant political liberty...
...The banks and the minions of agribusiness are hardly the first in our history to forage for a fast dollar in rural America...
...at times we have even tried to flesh them out...
...Meanwhile, the IRS is treading its own fine line...
...That is not a significant portion of the nation's 390 million acres of cropland, but the fund is the first of its kind, a precedent-maker, and it could hurt small-farm proprietors, already an endangered species...
...Give the prosperous man the dickens...
...Other investment houses are watching the fund's progress and wishing it luck...
...Go east and you hear them laugh at Kansas...
...Other subcommittee witnesses issued similar Cassandra-like prophecies...
...As one of them commented in an interview with American Banker, "There's sort of a fine line we'd walk so as not to be considered doing business...
...Even if the fund is shot down at the eleventh hour, the fundamental problem of land tenure—who should own what—is certain to remain with us...
...What's the Matter with Kansas...
...McKinley's victory, as historian Lawrence Good-wyn points out in his Democratic Promise, was "the conclusive triumph of the corporate ethos...
...It is a Hobson's choice with which rural Americans have long been familiar: migration or tenancy, the twin curses of agriculture since Roman times...
...the inhabitants, deprived of grazing ground for their sheep, packed up and fled to America...
...supporting McKinfey and execrating rural Populism...
...From the beginning of the American experiment the small, independent farmer was seen as a happy alternative to the Old World's system of serfdom and enclosure—the little farms of the Puritans vs...
...We don't need population, we don't need wealth, we don't need well-dressed men on the streets, we don't need cities on the fertile prairies...
...We have carried around both these ideas for the greater part of two centuries...
...But there was little the Congress could do, since there is no Federal law prohibiting the investment of urban capital in rural soil...
...The lure will be earnings from crop sales, farm rentals and land speculations...
...Ultimately the IRS, a political animal draped in judges' robes, may behave like Mr...
...The timber interests hold 35 million acres—enough to make seven New Jerseys—while the energy corporations own another 90 million (with about a fifth of that belonging to Standard Oil of Indiana alone...
Vol. 60 • March 1977 • No. 7
