As a nation, the United States is committed to a creed of free market capitalism. But this belies a heritage of egalitarianism and economic equality in American political thought. Among the oldest and most potent strains of American thinking about democracy is the belief that free government cannot exist in tandem with mass immiseration and gross disparities of wealth and status.
I gestured toward this idea last week when I wrote that today’s opponents of democracy are driven by an opposition to the “more equitable distribution of wealth and status, which a robust democracy — and only a robust democracy — makes possible.” Here, with a little more space and time, I want to show my work.
As the historian Daniel R. Mandell notes in “The Lost Tradition of Economic Equality in America, 1600-1870,” there were versions of this belief about self-government and economic equality in circulation in New England as early as the 17th century. But it came to fruition with the movement for Anglo-American independence in the mid-18th century.
Mandell finds a number of voices who articulated this view during and after the American Revolution.
“To maintain the freedom of elections,” a New Jersey Presbyterian minister wrote in 1780, “there should, as much as possible, be an equality among the people of the land.” In 1784, Kentucky settlers petitioning the Confederation Congress for statehood asserted that “It is a well-known truth that the riches and strength of a free Country does not consist in Property being vested in a few Individuals, but the more general[ly] it is distributed, the more it promotes industry, population, and frugality, and even morality.”
As ardent republicans, the authors of the Constitution were also attuned to the link between self-government and economic equality, even as they resisted the “leveling” tendencies of more radical revolutionaries in Pennsylvania, western Massachusetts and other areas.
“The republican conception of liberty was not noninterference but non-domination — freedom from both private and public overlords,” Joseph Fishkin and William E. Forbath write in “The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution: Restructuring the Economic Foundations of American Democracy.” This republican brand of freedom, they continue, required material independence: “Either a want of ample resources for ordinary citizens at the base of society or a permanent concentration of wealth at the top would doom it.”
This insight is what inspired figures as otherwise opposed as John Adams and Thomas Jefferson to make similar observations about the need to keep inequality in check.
“The balance of power in a society,” Adams wrote in a 1776 letter,
accompanies the balance of property in land. The only possible way, then, of preserving the balance of power on the side of equal liberty and public virtue, is to make the acquisition of land easy to every member of society; to make a division of land into small quantities, so that the multitude may be possessed of landed estates. If the multitude is possessed of the balance of real estate, the multitude will take care of the liberty, virtue, and interest of the multitude, in all acts of government.
“Whenever there is in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right,” Jefferson wrote in a 1785 letter to James Madison. “The earth is given as a common stock for man to labor and live on. If, for the encouragement of industry we must allow it to be appropriated, we must take care that other employment be furnished to those excluded from the appropriation.” The small landowners, he continued, “are the most precious part of a state.”
You can see this sentiment play out throughout the 19th century, as conflicts over land, labor and the concentration of wealth took center stage in American politics. “The Democracy” (as they liked to style themselves) of Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren saw itself as the keeper of the democratic flame against the winds of concentrated political and economic power.
“It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes,” Jackson wrote, when he vetoed the 1832 recharter of the Bank of the United States. To oppose the bank was, for Van Buren, to defend “the vital principle — the sovereignty of the popular will — which lies at the foundation of free government.”
The political conflict over slavery in the 1840s and 1850s was also as much about the corrosive effect of concentrated wealth and power on free government as it was about the morality of slavery. “There are certain elements of the security, welfare, and greatness of nations, which we all admit or ought to admit, and recognize as essential; and these are the security of natural rights, the diffusion of knowledge, and the freedom of industry,” William Seward declared on the Senate floor in 1850. “Slavery is incompatible with all of these; and, just in proportion to the extent that it prevails and controls in any republican state, just to that extent it subverts the principle of democracy, and converts the state into an aristocracy or a despotism.”
Wherever you look in U.S. history, you see Americans grappling with the connection between equality, inequality and democracy. Crucially, many of those Americans have struggled to make democracy itself a tool for the more equitable distribution of wealth and status. As the historian Lawrence Goodwyn recounts in “The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America,” “A large number of people in the United States discovered that the economic premises of their society were working against them” and so they tried “through democratic politics to bring the corporate state under popular control” and use its power to bring a measure of equality to their lives.
There are many other Americans — some famous, some less so — who have made this connection between democracy and economic inequality. Key to their thinking is the idea that democracy is more than just a set of rules, institutions and procedures: It is a way of life all on its own, one that informs the shape of our society as much as it does the structure of our government. And at its most robust — much to the chagrin of the keepers and defenders of wealth and privilege — democracy holds the promise of a more egalitarian world.
Or, as the philosopher and social critic John Dewey observed in the eve of the Second World War: “To get rid of the habit of thinking of democracy as something institutional and external and to acquire the habit of treating it as a way of personal life is to realize that democracy is a moral ideal and so far as it becomes a fact is a moral fact. It is to realize that democracy is a reality only as it is indeed a commonplace of living.”