The People, The Land
and the High Cost of Living

Frederic C. Howe

[A pamphlet published by the National Single Tax League during Howe's
tenure as Commissioner of Immigration at the Port of New York]

During the past three years I have been Commissioner of Immigration at the Port of New York. Through Ellis Island, which is the greatest portal in the world, nearly a million people pass into the country each year in normal times. The European war has materially checked this inflow, although it still amounts to nearly 200,000 persons each year. And as I observe the incoming tide of able-bodied men and women from Scandinavia, Great Britain, Italy and Central Europe, eager for an opportunity to apply their energies to the production of wealth, to the building of homes, to the gaining of a foothold in a new land free from the oppressions of the Old World, I have been interested to know what becomes of this stream of human beings. And as I follow them to their destination I find that almost all of them go to the great cities and the mining districts of Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio and Illinois. They are drawn into the maelstrom of modern industry, ofttimes to be crushed in a few years' time by long hours of labor, periodic industrial crises, bad housing and insanitary conditions which surround the worker in the centers to which he goes.

WHAT BECOMES OF THE IMMIGRANT

I find that about 80 per cent. of the incoming immigrants are destined to States east of the Mississippi and north of the Ohio; that 56 per cent. of the foreign-born population is in this territory, and that in our larger cities between 70 and 80 per cent. of the population is either foreign born or immediately descended from those of foreign birth. In New York City 78.6 per cent. of the people are of immediate foreign extraction; in Boston, 74.2 per cent.; in Cleveland, 75.8 per cent.; in Chicago, 77.5 per cent. In other words, almost all of the immigration of the last twenty years has gone to the cities, to industry, to mining. The new immigrant is a peasant at home. He has been accustomed to working the soil. Yet upon his arrival in America lie is violently thrown into an environment and a line of work with which he is not familiar. Even more calamitous to him and the country, he is often used up in the industrial machine, and is then ruthlessly cast aside to make way for younger men from the same countries ever ready to fill in the gaps.

We are wasting human beings in a terrible way in the United States. We are wasting men and women. As a matter of fact, immigration during the last generation has been a kind of human fodder factory for the great industries of the country, which have made use of the surplus labor as a means of keeping down wages, of smashing unions, of lowering the standards of living, education and life of the workers of America.

LAND MONOPOLY

While this process has been going on, agriculture suffers from lack of labor. Farms are abandoned. Great stretches are inadequately cultivated. Far more important still, tens of millions of acres are practically held out of use. According to the most available census statistics of land ownership, 200,000,000 acres out of 800,000,000 acres used for cultivation in the United States are owned by less than 50,000 men and corporations. The average size of these holdings exceeds 1,000 acres. Many of them exceed 10,000 and even 50,000 acres. Some, in fact, exceed the 1,000,000 mark. There is one individual holding in the West said to exceed 16,000,000 acres. It is greater than many nations. States like Texas, California, Oregon, Washington, have great manorial reserves like those of England, Prussia and Russia, which have increased in value from a few dollars per acre to hundreds of dollars per acre.

Here is one of the anomalies of the nation. Our cities are crowded with people; and the land from which all life and industry comes is held out of use. Here are millions of people fresh from the farms and villages of Europe, and not more than one-third of the land of the country is under cultivation and a large part of it is held by speculators.

THE CURSE OF TENANCY

Not only has monopoly laid its hands upon the land of America, but tenancy is increasing so fast that it is rapidly becoming the rule. According to the investigations of the Commission on Industrial Relations, tenancy in Texas in 1880 comprised 37.6 per cent. of all the farmers in the State. By 1910 the percentage had increased to 53 per cent., and the number of tenant farmers to 219,571. In Oklahoma the percentage of farm tenancy in the State is 54.8 per cent., and for the forty-seven counties where the tenancy is highest the percentage rose to 68.13 per cent. Speaking of conditions in the Southwest, the Commission said: "Under the tenancy system tenants as a class earn only a bare living through the work of themselves and their entire families. Few of the tenants ever succeed in laying by a surplus. On the contrary, their experiences are so discouraging that they seldom remain on the same farm for more than a year, and they move from one farm to the next in the constant hope of being able to better their condition. Without the labor of the entire family the tenant farmer is helpless. As a result. not only is his wife prematurely broken down, but the children remain uneducated and without the hope of any condition better than that of their parents. The tenants having no interest in the results beyond the crops of a single year, the soil is being rapidly exhausted and the conditions therefore tend to become steadily worse. Even at present a very large proportion of the tenants' families are insufficiently clothed, badly housed and underfed. Practically all of the white tenants are native born."

"Very large proportions of the tenants are hopelessly in debt and are charged exorbitant rates of interest. The average rate on all farm lands is 10 per cent., while small tenants in Texas pay 15 per cent. or more. In Oklahoma the conditions are even worse, in spite of the enactment of laws against usury. Furthermore, over 80 per cent. of the tenants are regularly in debt to the stores from which they secure their supplies, and pay exorbitantly for this credit. The average rate of interest on store credit is conservatively put at 20 per cent., aid in many cases ranges as high as 60 per cent."

And this is in States which but a few years ago were free from the curse of tenancy.

THE HIGH COST OF LIVING

The problem of the people and the land is a far bigger question than the immigration problem. It is a national problem. Diminishing agricultural population means diminishing food production. Increasing city population means increasing food consumption. This means an increasing cost of living, an increase that is bound to continue unless a violent reversal of our land policy is brought about. The city uses up people. It destroys their virility. The country is the great vitalizing force. Yet people are being crowded off the land, not because they are unwilling to go to it, but because our land laws, transportation agencies, inadequate marketing facilities, and the hosts of middlemen that stand between the producer and the consumer are gradually stifling the agricultural life of the nation and bringing about premature agricultural decay. In my opinion America is face to face with the gravest kind of a problem. In some respects it is one of the gravest economic problems that has confronted the country. We cannot have a healthy life unless we have a healthy agriculture. And we cannot have healthy agriculture unless economic and social conditions make agriculture attractive. And students of the subject are coming to see that this can only be brought about by the interposition of the Government in an intelligent constructive and scientific way to protect agriculture as well as the farmer from the exploitation from which he now suffers.

What are the obstacles which stand in the way of a proper distribution of the immigrant? Far more important, what obstacles stand in the way of distributing such of our people, as desire it, back to the land? What are the forces that are driving the boys and girls from the farm to the cities, and causing farmers by the thousand to throw up their hands in despair and relinquish the homes and farms into which they have given the best of their lives, for the city? These causes must be susceptible of knowledge. They must be open to ascertainment. If they are not studied and if they are not corrected, the United States will face, in a relatively short time, a shortage in food production,* a diminution of its wealth, and far more serious, an impairment in the character of our people.

OUR UNFORTUNATE LAND POLICY

First: As to our land policy. There is no more unfortunate page in the history of America than the land policy pursued by us. Endowed with land for ten times our present population, we squandered it recklessly with the sole aim apparently of being rid of it as quietly as possible. In order to encourage the building of transcontinental railroad systems, we gave the Pacific roads about 150,000,000 acres of land. They took the best. Not content with that, they resorted to fraud to acquire mineral resources, forest lands, oil deposits, until today the great West is divided into feudal estates traceable back to the railroad land grants. The Southern Pacific, Northern Pacific and Great Northern Railroads have exploited the territory through which they pass, and now use the largesses of the Government to exploit even the people who have settled upon so much of the land as was dedicated to homesteads. A great part of the West is divided into immense estates. But these conditions are not confined to the West. All over the East we find land held for speculative purposes. It is kept out of use, while our cities are teeming with people who would go to the land if conditions were favorable.

The Department of Agriculture of New York State announces that out of 22,000,000 acres of land in that State only 8,250,000 acres are cultivated, while of 10,000,000 people in the State only 375,000 or less than four per cent. are engaged in agriculture.

The plight of the incoming immigrants has drawn my attention as never before to the necessity for a land policy. For free land makes free people. And today the would-be farmer can only go to the land as an agricultural laborer or tenant. And the investigations of tenancy, whether in Iowa or Texas or Oklahoma, disclose conditions dissimilar only in degree from the wretched conditions which drove half of the population of Ireland to this country as a result of alien landlordism.

TAXATION A WAY OUT

How can this absurd anomaly of cities close packed with landless people and a manless country crying aloud for farmers be ended? How can the millions of tenants, working listlessly and without ambition on the land of others, be freed to work for themselves? How can speculation of the resources of the earth and idle landholding be discouraged? How can the earth be made to yield of its abundance and the famine prices which now prevail be brought to normal? A frightened world is bending its energies to the planting of crops, but none of the agencies engaged in promoting production seem concerned over the cause of the famine. Just as the landlords of Great Britain talked of the "shiftless Irish" during the years of the famine, but refused to see that the people were dying of hunger by reason of alien landlordism, so today chambers of commerce and other organizations are pleading with the farmer with their eyes blinded to the causes which discourage production.

And of all the remedies thus far suggested for the solution of these problems the taxation of land values is the only one that strikes at the root of the disease. Land values taxation will break up the great estates; it will end speculation; it will open up the resources of the earth to labor; it will end tenacy by ending the landlord. All we need to do is to take all taxes off from houses, barns, improvements of all kinds, off growing crops and the things that are produced by labor, and permit the burden of taxation to settle automatically onto the land. Then idle landholding will be too costly to indulge in. Then speculation will be unprofitable. Then the land will call aloud for workers, while its selling price will fall to its economic or productive value. Then labor in the cities will be drawn to the land, while the production of food will be increased to meet the needs of the consumer. If we taxed the land of America heavily enough, it would be impossible to hold it out of use. It would come into the market. It would seek men. Round about our cities land now lying idle until it ripens for speculation would be used for the production of wealth, for marketing and truck gardening; while the undeveloped stretches of the West would be divided into small holdings similar to those which prevail in the agricultural countries of Europe like France, Denmark, South Germany, and Holland, where agriculture has reached its highest development.

Herein, too, is a solution of the immigration problem. For the United States could absorb many times its present population if the land were used as it is in many countries in Europe. Free land would lure people from the cities and the war-scarred countries of Europe just as it did during the lirst three centuries of our existence when land was to be had for the asking just beyond the line of settlement. Herein, too, is a solution of the industrial problem, for if the wage worker could go to the land, if he could have a place of his own and with it the freedom of home ownership, then the wages of the city would rise to the earnings of a free man on a free soil.

I know of no reason why men should live without labor; and I know of no reason why men should be enriched by the growth of society. And I know of no means by which society can take back that which society has produced except by the taxation of these social values, which have arisen in the land. The single tax, or the taxation of land values, is to me the first and most important step to be taken in a program for people, for immigration, for agriculture, and for the reduction in the cost of living as well.

THE RAILROAD PROBLEM

Second: Transportation. Next to land monopoly no single agency has contributed more to the decay of agriculture than railroad monopoly, excessive charges, and inadequate means of transportation. The railways are the circulatory system of the social body. They are the modern highways. Whoever controls the railways of the nation can control its whole life.

We saw this in September last when a temporary suspension of railway traffic by a threatened strike created an embargo on the industrial and agricultural life of the country. And that threatened railway strike was merely an acute manifestation of a permanent condition. For the railways of the country are rim for profit rather than for service. They charge what the traffic will bear. They devote their facilities, their cars, to the industries in which the railroads themselves are interested. And today the same persons who own or control the railroads own the anthracite and bituminous coal, the oil lands, the iron and steel industries, copper mining, agricultural implements, the great packing houses of Chicago, Kansas City and Omaha. In September last there was a great shortage of cart estimated at 108,000. It reached 143,000 the first of April, 1917. A few years ago the whole of the Northwest was threatened with financial bankruptcy because it could not market its grain. During the year 1916 scarcely a dollar of new money has been invested in railroad construction, while in the twenty-two months since January 1. 1915, only $13,000,000 in new money has been raised for railroad construction through the issuance of stock.

Railroading in this country has ceased to be railroading. The directorates of the great railroads are to be found in the banking houses of Wall Street. They are interested not in the welfare of industry or agriculture, but in the flotation of watered securities, in stock gambling and speculation. Transportation should be an industrial function. Railroads should be run for the producers and the consumers. Instead, they are operated by a handful of bankers in New York, who, according to the Pujo Investigating Committee, in 1913 controlled between them all of the great railroad systems, a great part of the mineral resources, as well as the great industries of the country, with a total capitalization of over $25,000,000,000.

THE TRANSPORTATION POLICY OF OTHER COUNTRIES

The United States, with Canada, is now the only great nation of the world that does not own its railroad system. And in the nations which own them, service is the motive of railway operation. In little Denmark the railways are an agency of agriculture. Rates are adjusted to the farmer. Everything is done to give him. a quick market, and a market at a minimum cost. A few years ago the farmers in the Danish Parliament insisted that the railroads should be operated at cost in order that their markets in Germany, England and elsewhere should have every advantage which the nation could offer. And Parliament acquiesced in this demand. Special rates are made for the farmers. As a result of this and a wonderful land policy, 90 per cent. of the people own their own farms. Denmark has done more for farmers than any country in the world. And Denmark is a country with a higher state of intelligence, more universal well-being, and with fewer millionaires than any country in Europe.

Germany owns her railroads. And Germany has built up industry and agriculture by consciously dev~oping the railroads as part of an industrial policy. Rates are adjusted to cheapen the cost of living, to encourage experiments, to enable Germany to outdistance her competitors in her struggle for the markets of the world.

THE FAILURE AT REGULATION

We have had railroad regulation for a generation. It has ended some abuses, but it has not relieved us from railroad monopoly. It has not materially reduced rates. It has not brought about new railroad extensions. It has left us with a shortage of 143,000 cars at a critical season. Regulation has greatly increased the earnings of the railroads. It has been a great boon to them. It has stopped the abuses which decreased their earnings, but it has not materially aided the producer.

The second necessity for an adequate agricultural and efficient industrial program is the Government ownership of railroads. And this need is acute. The railroads, like the highways, must be run for the benefit of the people, for the benefit of the producer and the consumer rather than for the making of profits.

THE TERMINALS AND WAREHOUSES

Third: Closely connected with the railways are the terminals, the warehouses, the packing houses, and the other privately owned agencies which increase the cost of living on one hand, and depress the prices to the producer on the other. A recent investigation in New York City showed that the middlemen, warehouse and cold storage owners increased the cost of food for the people of New York by over 100 per cent. It showed that the men who handled food products in New York exacted nearly twice as much from the consumer as did the farmer whose labor produced it. Out of every dollar paid by the housewife 35 cents went to the farmer and 65 cents to the railroads and the middlemen. Measured in dollars it involved an expense of hundreds of millions to the consumers of the city.

For years the States of the Northwest have been protesting against the fraudulent grading, the stock jobbing of the grain market, and the excessive terminal charges of the grain, elevator men. The stock raising industry is subject to the same monopoly. The great meat packing monopolies of Chicago, Kansas City and Omaha fix the price of beef on the hoof' to the producer on the one hand, and the price of food to the consumer on the other. Just as during the middle ages the barons who owned the inaccessible castles along the Rhine swept down upon the caravans and collected tribute from each passer-by, so the monopolists at the terminals exact tribute from everything that the farmer produces, and almost everything that the consumer buys.

There are only two nations in the world, England and the United States, in which the slaughtering of cattle is not done in government slaughter-houses, It is treated as a public function, as a means of insuring clean and wholesome meat on the one hand, and proper prices to the producer and consumer on the other. Every city in Germany has a splendid municipal slaughter-house to which the butchers and market men go to buy their cattle direct from the producer without the intervention of middlemen. A comprehensive land and agricultural policy demands governmental ownership in this field. There should be no private warehouses which are used for juggling the grain market, which tolerate or encourage fraudulent grading, and which control the industrial life of half of our people.

CONCLUSION

For thirty years we have sought to stop extortion by the regulation of the transportation and terminal monopolies. For a hundred or more years we have sought to end usury by regulation. Each year sees scores of laws placed upon the statute books making it a penal offense to forestall the market or make use of the agencies of transportation. and credit to oppress the producer or the consumer. Yet the jails and penitentiaries contain no more offenders than they did the day the first statute was enacted; while transportation charges grow larger and terminal monopolists increase their power.

We should learn something by experience. We should know by this time that you cannot regulate monopoly; that you cannot check extortion by the threat of fines or imprisonment. Railroad earnings have gone steadily upward; the trusts have grown more powerful; the conditions of life for the producing and consuming classes have become harder.

Regulation has not only failed; it has become the bulwark of monopoly. And we should by this time see that there is only one way out, and that is through public ownership of the transportation1 terminal and cold storage agencies of the nation. Only when the arteries of the nation are open and free to all on equal terms will the industrial evils of the present day be under control. And only when the whole people step in and insist upon the ownership of public agencies now in private hands will the farmer and the producer be shielded from the extortion to which they are now subject. All other countries that have successfully curbed monopoly have long since made this discovery and acted upon it. Germany controls monopoly, not by regulation, but by the ownership of the railroads, the terminals, the slaughter-houses and the markets. Denmark has become the world's agriculture experiment station by the same processes; and Denmark is one of the great democracies of the world. There is no country in Europe in which so large a percentage of the people live in comfort. The same is true of the Australian countries.

Government ownership of the transportation and terminal monopolies and the ending of land monopoly by taxation (by the taxation of land values), are the great issues before the American people if we would check agricultural decay, bring the people back to the land, free industry and agriculture, and open up opportunities for the people. There can be no freedom without free land, and there can be no freedom without free public highways.