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p During the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries a stable Utopian tradition emerged in American fiction and sociopolitical theory—in novels, treatises, manifestoes and the like. For all their diversity, these Utopias can be grouped into several types which differ from one another more or less substantially and offer a picture of the major directions of American Utopian thought, of the ideals and problems of Americans.

p Many U.S. historians (specifically, V. L. Parrington, Jr.) note that the theocratic Utopia was one of the first, if not the very first, to emerge during the Colonial period.

p The idea of setting up a model theocratic state in the New World was born in Europe. The Puritans, who played a very important part in the shaping of American society, crossed the Atlantic in the hope of establishing piety-their ideal-as the ruling order of things and of building a sort of a model ecclesiastical state. Prominent religious public figures—John Cotton, John Winthrop and John Eliot who published his Christian Commonwealth in 1659—made a particularly great contribution to the development of the national theocratic Utopia. In the list appended to Pairington’s American Dreams, Eliot’s treatise features as the first American utopia.

p Eliot’s utopia proceeded from the precept that the divine law was to be followed unquestioningly and proposed a government based on a system of magistrates. It was neither original nor profound, but it brought to a logical conclusion many ideals of 17th-century American theocrats who sincerely believed that the best possible society should embody the social ideals of the Old Testament and that democracy and free will were diametrically opposed to these ideals.

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p The theocratic Utopia failed to develop further as an independent branch of the American Utopian tradition. The only thing that established itself in the latter was the theocratic form, used occasionally by American Utopians of different leanings.

p Equally, the sway of theocrats in the New England of the late 17th and early 18th centuries could not prevent the emergence of democratic ideals in the thinking of some of the colonists in opposition to the ruling groups (Thomas Hooker, Roger Williams  [71•1 ). The future of these ideals, still not fully formed, was to be decided in the course of the political struggle which began after independence was proclaimed and which was linked directly with the debate over which road America should take. The road it finally did take blocked the realization of "agrarian democracy" ideals. One of the results was that these ideals were sublimated in a distinctive type of utopia, in what might be called the Utopias of a farmers’ America. Subsequent developments proved that this type of utopia was firmly embedded in national social thinking and, in one way or another, always made itself felt, especialy at times of crisis—first in the 1830s (during the first major economic crisis) and then from the 1870s to the 1890s, the decades of the Grangers’, Greenbackers’ and Populists’ movement.

p Petty-bourgeois in their social content, these Utopias expressed above all the ideals and illusions of the masses of farmers, the age-old dreams of the petty landholder about a free farmer on free land. However, the Utopias of a farmers’ America were much broader in their social and political scope: they expressed the petty-bourgeois egalitarian thinking of the individualistic petty proprietor, typical not only of farmers but also of artisans and some industrial workers who, although not property owners, were striving to acquire it (which, incidentally, has always encouraged the centrifugal trends among the American proletariat). 72 Meanwhile, the moral virtues connected with the domination of a system of petty property holders and clearly noticeable against the background of the contradictions generated by industrialization and urbanization made the ideals inherent in the Utopias of a farmers’ America attractive for social strata to which the desire of petty property was alien.

p In theoretical and emotional terms, the Utopias of a farmers’ America were rooted in the ideas of the American Enlightenment of which many were imbued with the spirit of agrarian democracy. Moreover, the Enlighteners were the first to respond to the industrialization tendencies which appeared as early as the 1780s and to formulate ideals which formed the basis for the Utopias of a farmers’ America.

p This applies, first and foremost, to Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. While they did not produce any socioutopian works which could be called integral or allembracing, they left certain sketches to be used, directly or indirectly, by later generations of Utopians. In a letter to Benjamin Vaughan ("On Luxury, Idleness, and Industry"), Franklin wrote about his dreams of a world from which "want and misery would be banished", where "every man and woman would work for four hours each day on something useful", their labor "sufficient to procure all the necessaries and comforts of life", and where "the rest of the twenty-four hours might be leisure and pleasure".  [72•1  In Franklin’s opinion, the national economy should be based on agriculture, with the petty proprietor as the central figure, and industry playing a secondary and subordinate role: "While there is land enough in America for our people, there can never be manufactures to any amount of value.”  [72•2 

p Thomas Jefferson produced what was perhaps the most consistent and complete expression of the Utopia of a farmers’ America (in its original form). The ways in which the rights proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence should be exercised were always a topical question for the Declaration’s author. One Utopian ideal inevitably 73 produced another. Jefferson realized that the Federalists’ policies would obstruct the implementation of the Declaration’s principles and that a different way toward this goal should be sought.

p Jefferson saw this way in a self-governing commonwealth of free petty property owners securely tied to their land. He sketched such a society in his "Notes on the State of Virginia" (1782). To be sure, neither Notes, nor other works by Jefferson, nor, as a matter of fact, many other writings by American politicians that are going to be discussed in this book, can be, strictly speaking, termed as Utopias. Yet it is an important feature of Utopian consciousness that it may be present in this type of compositions as an organic element. The Notes is one confirmation of this: "We have an immensity of land courting the industry of the husbandman. Is it best then that all our citizens should be employed in its improvement, or that one half should be called off from that to exercise manufactures and handicraft arts for the other? Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever He had a chosen people, whose breasts He has made His peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue.

p “...Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an example. It is the mark set on those, who, not looking up to heaven, to their own soil and industry, as does the husbandman, for their subsistence, depend for it on casualties and caprice of customers.

p “Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition. This, the natural progress and consequence of the arts, has sometimes perhaps been retarded by accidental circumstances; but, generally speaking, the proportion which the aggregate of the other classes of citizens bears in any State to that of its husbandmen, is the proportion of its unsound to its healthy parts, and is a good enough barometer whereby to measure its degree of corruption. While we have land to labor then, let us never wish to see our citizens occupied at a workbench, or twirling a distaff. Carpenters, masons, smiths, are wanting in husbandry; but, for the general operations of manufacture, let our workshops remain in Europe. It is better to carry provisions and materials to workmen there, than bring them to the 74 provisions and materials, and with them their manners and principles.... The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body. It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigor.”  [74•1 

p In their analysis of Jefferson’s social program (and specifically, of certain provisions of his Notes) spearheaded against the Federalists, the Soviet historians Grigori Sevostianov and Anatoli Utkin wrote: "An ideologist of the radical bourgeoisie in 1776, Jefferson saw that a system based on equality only before the law would not lead the nation to a better future. And so he turned to the social Utopia.... Jefferson sought to consummate the revolutionary cause by establishing a kind of self-imposed isolationism—with friendly relations maintained vis-a-vis the more progressive European regimes—so as to guarantee the country’s independence and security from wars and invasions; to complete the struggle by stabilizing society through reliance on American resources and not on European powers; he especially wanted woodland, frontier democracy where everyone was always ready to come to his neighbor’s aid to become well-established. Jefferson’s dream and utopia was not an America of smokestacks and overcrowded slums but an America of small land holdings sufficient for prosperity, an America of farmers, of people tilling their land. He connected every civic virtue to the patriarchal life of farmsteads and saw the only chance of improving the lot of the popular masses in constant and fruitful work in the woods and fields.”  [74•2 

p Although subsequently Jefferson somewhat revised the principles proclaimed in his Notes—particularly, he softened his critical attitude to the work of craftsmen— his credo remained basically unchanged. He still advocated a society which, if not completely homogeneous in social terms, would at least display no clear-cut social contrasts, let alone polarization of classes—a society whose prosperity would be based on free self-employment of petty property owners and where there would be no place for either a proletariat or an oligarchy.

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p The democracy which dominated Jefferson’s utopia relied on local self-government as a principle naturally stemming from American conditions. In 1824, already an old man, he dreamed of legally establishing a system under which "each ward would thus be a small republic within itself, and every man in the State would thus become an acting member of the common government, transacting in person a great portion of its rights and duties, subordinate indeed, yet important, and entirely within his competence. The wit of man cannot devise a more solid basis for a free, durable and well-administered republic.”  [75•1 

p Essentially, Jefferson did not reject the state as a legal and political institution. But he wanted it to be quite different from what it had long become in Europe and what it was threatening to become in America—centralized, despotic, expressing and upholding the interests of a minority. Jefferson’s ideal was a state responsive to the will of the majority and striving to ensure universal prosperity. "A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.

p “This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.”  [75•2 

p Jefferson did not reject the legal aspect of the state’s activity either. But abstract justice, he held, was secondary to the will of the majority, and each new generation should be autonomous and independent of its predecessors in expressing its will. "The government that he desired," Parrington wrote, "would not rest on the legal fiction of an abstract justice above statutes and constitutions, whereof a group of judicial gentlemen were the repositories and guardians. It would be like Paine’s, ’a plain thing, and fitted to the capacity of many heads’, for ’where the law of the majority ceases to be acknowledged, there government ends; the law of the strongest takes its place’.”  [75•3  In other words, the state should be no more than an instrument in the 76 practical realization of the natural rights of man originally proclaimed by Jefferson in his draft Declaration of Independence.

p While not rejecting private property, Jefferson wanted America to steer clear of the contradictions arising from the logical development of private property relations and bourgeois individualism, ultimately leading to concentration of property, proletarianization of farmers and moral crisis, and eroding those popular democracy institutions which Jefferson had always upheld sincerely. In other words, he wanted to build, by following the classical logic of Utopian thinking, a society which would make the best of the advantages of capitalism while protecting itself securely against the disadvantages.

p This contradiction between a desire of property and the wish to avoid the negative consequences in the development of a system based on private property not only failed to destroy the utopia of a farmers’ America from within but also, at first glance paradoxically, helped these ideals to survive. This is clear even from the fact that the latter have been reproduced in this or that form at virtually every decisive stage (accompanied by upsurges in mass movements) of America’s transition from free competition capitalism to monopoly capitalism.

p That happened in the 1830s, when the United States was feeling the impact of its first serious economic crisis. The only difference was that while Jefferson and his supporters had obviously tried to prevent or at least slow down America’s advance along the industrial capitalist road, now that it was clear the nation had already chosen this path, the farmers’ utopia acquired a new objective-to at least ease the consequences which affected the petty proprietor, to give him his chance.

p That period produced neither great thinkers (like Jefferson) nor gifted authors advocating the ideals of the utopia of a farmers’ America. At the new stage in the evolution of this utopia, however, when Grangers, Greenbackers and Populists (supporters of the People’s Party) appeared on the political scene, the Utopian ideals of a farmers’ America were expressed by outstanding political figures of the times, such as Henry George and Ignatius Donnelly. Populism absorbed and applied to the new situation a number of traditional ideas of bourgeois democratic radicalism tracing 77 their American genesis to Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson and the republican democratic clubs of the late 18th century.

p Vastly popular was the utopia advanced y Henry George, the prolific author of books like Progress and Poverty and Social Problems; they became reference books for several bourgeois reformers. George sometimes called his project socialist, but he was never a socialist. According to Frederick Engels, "George is a genuine bourgeois and his plan of defraying all governmental expenditures out of ground rent is only a repetition of the plan of the Ricardo school and hence purely bourgeois.”  [77•1 

p Still, George’s bourgeois thinking and his utopianism both developed in the spirit of the ideals of a farmers’ America. The reader of his books inevitably concludes that what Jefferson and his supporters feared, warned and fought against has come to pass. Unnatural injustice rules society: there is the "unnatural distribution of wealth which gives one man hundreds of millions and makes other men tramps",  [77•2  there is "the unnatural distribution of population", because some suffer "in body, mind and soul from being crowded into too close contact" with their fellows while rural dwellers suffer equally "from being separated too far from them"; there is the separation of man from land and the unnatural severance of his ties with nature. Degradation threatens man and society, and this calls for immediate action in the spirit of the principles proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. Natural justice must be restored—above all, a "natural distribution of population, which would give 78 every one breathing space and neighborhood".  [78•1  America needs neither to slow down "material progress" nor eliminate capitalism, for capital is not to blame for what has befallen the nation. He returns to this precept in virtually all his works. In The Condition of Labor he says that " oppression does not come from the nature of capital, but from the wrong that robs labor of capital by divorcing it from land, and that creates a fictitious capital that is really capitalized monopoly".  [78•2 

p “All we need do to secure a just distribution of wealth, is to do that which all theories agree to be the primary function of government—to secure to each the free use of his own powers, limited only by the equal freedom of all others, to secure to each the full enjoyment of his own earnings limited only by such contributions as he may be fairly called upon to make for purposes of common benefit.”  [78•3  The only thing necessary for it is to ensure " common right to the soil" (elsewhere he calls it "equal right to the soil") through tax reforms, specifically through the establishment of a "single tax on land" (a "tax on the value or profitability of land") combined with the repeal of all other taxes. In other words, this means nationalization of land through the transfer of rent to the bourgeois state or nationalization of land rent; in George’s opinion, this would necessarily redistribute wealth while retaining the institution of private property.

p Henry George was firmly convinced that he had found the cure-all Utopians had always been searching for, that had his project been translated into practice, it would have immediately eradicated all social ills and ushered in an era of universal prosperity.

p “With the resumption of common rights to the soil, the overcrowded population of the cities would spread, the scattered population of the country would grow denser.

p “When no individual could profit by advance in the value of land, when no one need fear that his children could be jostled out of their natural rights, no one would want more land than he could profitably use. Instead of scraggy, 79 half-cultivated farms, separated by great tracts lying idle, homesteads would come close to each other.... The use of machinery would not be abandoned: where culture on a large scale secured economies it would still go on, but with the breaking up of monopolies, the rise in wages, and the better distribution of wealth, industry of this kind would assume the co-operative form ... labor would be far more productive ... rural life would tend to revert to the primitive type of the village surrounded by the cultivated fields, with its common pasturage and woodlands....

p “That the masses now festering in the tenement houses of our cities, under conditions which breed disease and death, and vice and crime, should each family have its healthful home, set in its garden, that the working farmer should be able to make a living with a daily average of two or three hours’ work, which more resembled healthy recreation than toil, that his home should be replete with all the conveniences yet esteemed luxuries, that it should be supplied with light and heat, and power if needed, and connected with those of his neighbors, by the telephone; that his family should be free to libraries, and lectures, and scientific apparatus, and instruction; that they should be able to visit the theater, or concert, or opera, as often as they cared to do so, and occasionally to make trips to other parts of the country or to Europe; that, in short, not merely the successful man, the one in a thousand, but the man of ordinary parts and ordinary foresight and prudence, should enjoy all that advancing civilization can bring to elevate and expand human life, seems, in the light of existing facts, as wild a dream as ever entered the brain of a hasheesh eater. Yet, the powers already within the grasp of man make it easily possible.”  [79•1 

p This lenthy excerpt from Henry George is worth quoting if only because this used to be the dream of millions of American farmers, industrial workers, unemployed and lumpens of the late 19th century. One can, of course, smile condescendingly at the naive illusions with regard to the practicability of the ideals of a farmers’ America ( recognizing, in a modified form, the rapid growth of industry and the proletariat, the introduction of scientific and technological advances into everyday life, and the 80 strengthening of the state) combined with the retention of private property and the further advancement of capitalism, with concentration and centralization of capital as its inescapable concomitants. However, this paradox is what the entire Utopia of a farmers’ America stands on.

p This Utopia found its place in fiction during the last quarter of the 19th century. In 1890 Ignatius Donnelly, a popular leader of the People’s Party, journalist and author, wrote Caesar’s Column, a novel with a built-in Utopia based on modified ideals of a farmers’ America.

p “The end of everything earthly," Donnelly writes, "is the good of man; and there is nothing sacred on earth but man, because he alone shares the Divine conscience."  [80•1  To this end, inequality should be eradicated-at least in its more blatant forms. But as practical people well-versed in the subtleties of economics, Donnelly’s protagonists propose that it should begin with the elimination of interest rates, of usury which, they believe, "is the cause of the first aristocracy, and out of this grow all the other aristocracies".  [80•2  Donnelly also suggests the establishment of a “maximum” of possible wealth. "But just as I limited a man’s possible wealth, so should I limit the amount of land he could own. I would fix a maximum of, say, 100 or 500 acres, or whatever amount might be deemed just and reasonable. I should abolish all corporations, or turn them back into individual partnerships,"  [80•3 â€™ says one of the novel’s protagonists. The government, which is "only a machine to insure justice and help the people",  [80•4  could take care of much of what each used to take care of himeslf-water supply, postal sevice, education, law and order. It could also redistribute "surplus wealth" to the advantage of the poorer classes. This, Donnelly maintains, would lead to an order of things under which no one would be hungry or poor and people would cease robbing one another—in short, universal justice, and "universal justice means equal opportunities for all men and a repression by law of those gigantic 81 abnormal selfishnesses which ruin millions for the benefit of thousands".  [81•1 

p One can easily see that, while striving to uphold the interests of the common folk, Donnelly-acting fully in the spirit of the times—made an important step toward recognizing such functions of the state (the central government) which would have been rejected out of hand by the Utopian advocates of a farmers’ America a mere three-quarters of a century before. A new trend was developing, combining the defense of the ideals of petty property, inalienable rights and equal opportunities with the recognition of a strong centralized state. The state, which the petty proprietor once used to regard as his foremost enemy, was now yielding its position to a still stronger and more ruthless enemy, the monopolies. And so, one was forced not only to accept the existence and consolidation of strong and centralized government but also to regard it as a force capable of curbing the monopolies.

p The transition from free competition to monopoly capitalism shaped the further transformation of the utopia of a farmers’ America. The further capitalism advanced and the less promising and stable the position of the petty proprietor (above all, the petty land holder) became, the more urgent it was to reconcile ideas like petty private property and individual enterprise on the one hand and, on the other, political freedom, democracy and local self-government within a single structure. History was offering new examples proving that, in order to uphold and implement some ideals, one had to sacrifice others, resorting to means which used to be considered contrary to the ends. To uphold the institution of private property and private enterprise, one had to sacrifice the ideal of local self-government and accept the authority of a strong state, for the latter was the only ally the petty proprietor could rely on in his life-or-death struggle with the monopolies. Naturally, the Utopian dreamed of a state whose entire might would be spearheaded against big capital, which would be financed out of superprofits, and whose bureaucracy would not restrict the freedom of the petty proprietor.

p The Great Depression of the 1930s strengthened the conviction of a large part of farmers, industrial workers and 82 unemployed that the chief enemy of the petty proprietor was not the state but the monopoly which negated the principle of "equal opportunity". "If one may speak about some central idea of the agrarian radicalism of the 1930s," a Soviet historian says, "one should acknowledge that it was embodied most frequently in antimonopoly protest, in the overriding desire to throw off the yoke of finance and industrial capital which held petty and medium farmers in economic bondage, robbed them with the help of credit and price policies and rigid control over the agricultural market, and infringed painfully on the interests of the agricultural bourgeoisie too. In 1936 one of the sponsors of a conference of farmer organizations’ leaders said: ’Our common ground is a belief that monopoly capitalism is evil and self-destructive, and that it is possible, while preserving private ownership, to build a true democracy in which men would be better off both morally and physically.’"  [82•1 

p Simultaneously, however, a directly opposite view, nurtured by the developments that had led up to this situation, was emerging: that, to uphold the institution of petty private property, it was no longer enough to simply accept the need for a strong centralized state which turned its repressive power against the monopolies; that protection of petty private property and private enterprise demanded not merely a better-equipped state but restrictions on democracy and the establishment of "strong government". These views, broadly supported at the grassroots level in the 1930s, were reflected in numerous Utopian projects, the most popular of them put forward by Huey Long and Charles Coughlin.

p Senator Huey Long, "dictator of Louisiana", presidential contender and "idol of shopkeepers, petty businessmen and moderately well-off white farmers",  [82•2  was famous for his "redistribution of wealth" plan. He promised to make every American an uncrowned king (in the words of William Jennings Bryan, a Populist leader). Long’s 83 plan  [83•1  was essentially to redistribute wealth—with the help of the state—in such a way which, without undermining the foundations of private enterprise, would make it possible to consolidate the prosperity and the position of the petty proprietor by somewhat restricting monopoly capital. While he insisted on the financing of his project out of taxes levied on big capital and through limitations on the power of banks, Huey Long connected its implementation with curbs on the “ineffective” system of democracy and with virtually dictatorial powers for the government. Thus the possibility of preserving petty property and protecting private individualism was presented as directly dependent on restrictions for democracy and a stronger central government.

p Coughlin offered a similar plan. Like Long’s project, it ignored objective trends in the development of American capitalism and expressed the illusions and expectations of the petty bourgeoisie oppressed by the monopolies. Proceeding from the traditional Utopian precept of a farmers’ America, the one maintaining that private property is the metaphysical basis of freedom and democracy, Coughlin interpreted it in a clearly anticommunist and antidemocratic light. "Private ownership," he said in one of the radio lectures he specialized in for years, "must be protected against corporate ownership. Small business must be safeguarded reasonably against monopolistic business. Were we to permit private ownership and small business gradually to be assimilated by corporate and monopolistic creations, then we are only preparing the way either for state capitalism or for communism.”  [83•2 Coughlin also suggested the introduction of a progressive income tax, nationalization of banks (Franklin Roosevelt’s refusal to take this road resulted in his break with Coughlin who had previously supported the President vigorously), and sharp reductions in the bureaucracy which he saw as the epitome of the ills of democracy.

The plans of. Long, Coughlin and several other pettybourgeois reformers of the 1930s proved that the Utopia of a farmers’ America as the mass democratic Utopia it had been almost throughout the 19th century was no longer 84 viable. Those essentially liberal ideals, like equal opportunities, private enterprise, petty private property, local selfgovernment, the minimal government, etc., which had been the target of Utopian effort, remained attractive to many Americans. However, having retained their critical function, in the new historical conditions they lost their formerly progressive role-both in their traditional composition and in combination with other, previously alien ideals, like those of a "strong state" or "strong government”.