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Who Owns America?: Decentralization and Technology in the 1930s
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11409 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1986 |
4,839 Words |
| Author
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Edward Shapiro
Edward Shapiro is professor of history emeritus at Seton Hall
University. He is completing a book on the Crown Heights
(Brooklyn, New York) riot of 1991. |
Reconciling industrialization with Jeffersonian democracy has been a major concern of America's leading thinkers and imaginative writers. Some, such as Thoreau, believed the two to be incompatible and fled to a variety of Walden Ponds where they could lead lives uncontaminated by the grosser aspects of factory production. Others, including Theodore Dreiser and Edward Bellamy, concluded that decentralization was inconsistent with the demands of mass production and would have to be replaced by strong leadership and political collectivism if the nation was ever to secure the economic abundance promised by mass industrialism. Most Americans, however, have been unwilling to repudiate either decentralization or industrialism. American history is cluttered with efforts to reconcile economic, social, and political decentralization with the collectivist implications of modern industrialism. From the beginning of American manufacturing there has been the dream of using technology to create a decentralized industrialization.
The case for economic collectivism was presented most forcefully in the 1930s. That collectivism was the wave of the future was not so much argued as assumed by The Nation and New Republic, the nation's leading political and social weeklies; and the majority of the country's most prominent intellectuals, including John Dewey, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Edmund Wilson, debated not the desirability of collectivism but merely what version should be adopted. And yet not all American intellectuals during the 1930s were so pessimistic about to the future of individualism and decentralization or so despairing of the possibility of reconciling industrialism with Jeffersonianism.
During the 1930s a group of decentralist intellectuals contended that neither the cause of nor the solution to the depression lay in collectivist economics and politics. The decentralist intellectuals were a diverse lot. They included Catholics fearful of big government and familiar with the papal teachings regarding the sanctity of private property and farming, the Southern Agrarians of I'll Take My Stand fame, advocates of subsistence homesteading, proponents of consumer and producer cooperatives, and a hodgepodge of back to the land, anti-industrial enthusiasts.
The most important statement during the 1930s of the conservative program of economic and political decentralization and the widespread distribution of property was in the 1936 volume Who Own America? A New Declaration of Independence edited by the historian and journalist Herbert Agar and the poet Allen Tate. The book can be traced back to discussions among the Agrarians during the
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