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Show USE AND ABUSE OF SETTLEMENT LAWS, 1880-1904 483 of Tweeddale's 1,750,000 acres, and others, totaling 20,747,000 acres. The report estimated that an additional 10 million acres in smaller holdings were owned by aliens. This was effective documentation of the complaint that the public land system was making for large ownerships altogether too much like the land ownership pattern in England.58 The feeling against anti-alien land ownership was exacerbated by the rackrenting policies of William Scully in Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, and Missouri where he had acquired 220,000 acres which he had rented to tenants. A wave of anti-alien-landowning measures swept the West with news of these huge holdings. Thirteen states adopted restrictive measures banning further acquisition of lands by aliens and in 1887 Congress bowed to popular feeling by restricting ownership of land in the territories to citizens.59 There was emerging deep and widespread resentment against a land system that permitted the establishment of large alien ownerships, that enabled the railroads to withhold their millions of acres of land from sale and development, and that allowed native "monopolists" to establish great empires of timber and grazing lands on the public domain. The Census 68 The table was presented to show that public lands of the United States were being gobbled up at a dangerous rate by English aristocrats but it breaks down somewhat on examination. The largest holding of 3 million acres was in Texas, not a public land state, another, of 600,000, the second largest, was in West Virginia. Furthermore, some of the holdings were surely exaggerated. Yet discounting all this, there was a large amount of land that had been acquired within a few years by aliens and much by misuse of the land laws. For the list and the report of Payson see House Reports, 49th Cong., 1st sess. (Serial No. 2445) , Vol. XI, 3455, p. 2. See also Herbert O. Brayer, "The Influence of British Capital on the Western Range-Cattle Industry," The Tasks of Economic History, Supplement IX (1949) , pp. 85-98; and Ernest S. Osgood, The Day of the Cattleman (Chicago, 1929) , pp. 98 ff. 58 Gates, Frontier Landlords and Pioneer Tenants (Ithaca, N.Y., 1945), pp. 57-59. of 1880, which revealed the existence of farm tenancy in the newer states as well as its rapid growth in many older ones, contributed to this resentment. Kansas and Nebraska, where farm making was still going on and where the number of homestead entries reached its peak in the eighties were shown to have, respectively, 16 and 18 percent of their farms operated by tenants in 1880, the first year for which figures were available, and 28 and 24 percent so operated in 1890. South Dakota, a state only one year old, had 13 percent of its farms tenant operated in 1890; in four of its counties the number of tenant operated farms ranged from 20 to 26 percent. These statistics on tenancy alarmed thoughtful people who feared that at the rate tenancy was growing, tenant farmers would soon out-number owner operators of farms. Thus the old Jeffersonian ideal of America as a democratic country of small landowners whose stake in the land would assure their support of sound but conservative measures would not be realized.60 Land monopolization, alien ownership, the now much detested railroad land grants, tenancy, and mortgage indebtedness attracted the attention of able writers like Henry George and George W. Julian who, in their sometimes unrestrained fashion, may have exaggerated the data they were presenting and their possible evil consequences. Together with other writers who were focusing on the way that the settlement laws were permitting western land to be "monopolized," they provided the kind of support Holman and Payson needed to carry through their reform measure.61 60 The census data is partly computed from the agricultural volumes of the United States Census, 1880 and 1890. 81 Roy M. Robbins, Our Landed Heritage the Public Domain, 1776-1936 (Princeton, 1942) , pp. 269-70; Patrick W. Riddleberger, George Washing- (Cont. on p. 484.) |
