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Show 454 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT the reservations and the transfer of land to white ownership.38 Monopolies and the Agrarian Movement Most frontier farmers in the newer states, still struggling to make farms on the raw prairie or plains, had a marked agrarian philosophy and were acutely sensitive to what they called monopoly. Jackson had early raised the cry of monopoly against the Second United States Bank and for the remainder of the century individuals and institutions which westerners found reason to dislike were pilloried as monopolists and monopolies. Steamboat combinations on the Upper Mississippi, stockyards and grain elevators, railroads, the pooling devices used by lumbermen to control the running of logs, the American Land Company and other combinations of capitalists owning large quantities of land, the English and Scotch capitalists who seemed to some to be bent on dominating the cattle ranching industry, all were monopolists. Against them were arrayed "honest" farmers who, however, might be taking advantage of loopholes in the land laws to sell relinquishments, to enter land for others, to swear that they had made improvements-including a house 12 by 14 that might be nothing but a portable doll house 38 A later generation came to regret the allotment policy written into the Dawes Act. It led to the division of reserves into white-owned tracts and Indian-owned heirships and wardships too small to operate as a unit but left the reserves no longer viable for group economy. In 1862 there were included in Indian reservations 175 million acres and at the time of the adoption of the Dawes Act about 138 million acres. By 1935 the amount had declined to 52 million acres when there were many fewer Indians than in 1887 or earlier Gates, "The Homestead Law in an Incongruous Land System," Vernon Carstensen (ed.) , The Public Lands. Studies in the History of the Public Domain (Madison, Wis., 1963) , p. 343; Indian Land Tenure, Economic Status and Population Trends, Part X of the Supplementary Report of the Land Planning Committee to the National Resources Board (Washington, 1935) . 12 by 14 inches-but who could justify their actions because the system, the government, was allegedly on the side of the rich and powerful. The first of these agrarian outbursts, the Granger Movement, failed to delve deeply into land questions and to demand far-reaohing reform. The reason for the Grangers' lack of interest in the land question seems to be that they constituted the more successful farmers of Illinois and Iowa, men with substantial acreages who had large crops and carloads of livestock to sell and wanted cheaper rates on the railroads, not land or tax reforms that might threaten their interests.39 Thereafter agrarian anti-monopolists placed high on their list of reforms the adoption of both Federal and state laws banning alien ownership of land, action to forfeit unearned railroad land grants and to compel the railroads to sell their undeveloped tracts, and to halt large entries of land by repealing the Cash Sale Act of 1820. Support for these proposals reached a high point in the eighties at a time when public land sales were again moving upward to 4, 5, and 6 million acres (exceeding every year since 1860). To some it appeared that the best of the public lands would soon be gone. Political platforms reflected this rising tide of opposition to policies that had enabled railroads, cattle companies, lumber companies, and speculative groups to acquire great quantities of land. It was the Democrats who first took up the land reform cry, although before the war it had been the Republicans who championed free homesteads. In 1868, in national convention, they had declared "the public lands should be distributed as 39 In Merchants, Farmers & Railroads. Railroad Regulation and New York State Politics, 1850-1887 (Cambridge, Mass., 1955) , Lee Benson pictures the Granger Movement as a part of the efforts of merchants, shippers, and farmers to strip from railroad executives the power they exercised to maintain discriminatory rates. |