Over time, many historical events take on a romantic aura that obscures what actually occurred. As I have written previously, that was true of the passage of the 1862 Morrill Act, which launched land-grant colleges..
The 1862 Homestead Act, too, acquired “a halo of political and economic significance which has greatly magnified the importance to be attributed to it,” as historian Paul Gates wrote in 1936. [1] Free land! Yes, it sounded (and still sounds) humanitarian. Under the Homestead Act, a person could obtain ownership of 160 acres (320 acres for a husband and wife) by building a cabin, improving the land, and living on it for 5 years.
Yet homesteading created heartache.
By the time the act was passed in 1862, much of the good, well-watered farmland in the Midwest and West had already been taken. And even after the passage of the Homestead Act, other laws (such as the Desert Land Act and the Timber Culture Act), along with corrupt land grabs, enabled railroads, speculators, cattle ranchers, and others to get large tracts of land that were closed to settlers.
But the problem was more fundamental. The title of Richard Stroup’s article on homesteading is suggestive: “Buying Misery with Federal Land.”[2]
In order to find available land, families had to go beyond what is called the “farm frontier,” the point where, at that moment in time, there was enough buildup of transportation and markets for a family to sell its produce and obtain supplies.[3] Essentially, homesteaders had to pick their land and then wait for the frontier to catch up, while carrying out the requirements of the act. Most never lasted that long on the homestead. Historian Fred A. Shannon reports that before 1890 (often called the end of the frontier) only a third of those who had staked a claim ever completed the process.[4]
But that does not exhaust the problems with the Homestead Act. It may have caused the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.
The Dust Bowl was the devastating drought described in The Grapes of Wrath (“In the morning the dust hung like fog, and the sun was as red as ripe new blood.”)[5] Two economists described it more objectively: “Severe drought and damaging wind erosion hit in the Great Plains in 1930 and lasted through 1940. Strong winds blew away an average of 480 tons of topsoil per acre, degrading soil productivity, harming health, and damaging air quality.”[6]
These two economists, Zeynep Hansen and Gary Libecap, have argued that the severity of the impact was caused by homesteading. Here’s how:
The Great Plains stretch from North Dakota and Montana to Texas, and from Colorado to Iowa and Missouri (the official definition is based on counties). Much of that region is arid, and it was homesteaded in farms of 160 or 320 acres—plots too small to cope well with low precipitation.
Hansen and Libecap explain that a farmer had only one or two options for preventing soil erosion. One was to create a windbreak with trees and “brush,” but trees were hard to grow. The other was to create fallow (uncultivated) strips that protected the soil with stubble from previous cultivation. But any land set aside that way meant less land for cultivation for a farmer whose success was marginal to begin with.
Furthermore, many of the benefits of stopping wind erosion went to other farmers. The incentive to cut production in order to protect other farms as much or more than one’s own farm discouraged the level of erosion control that was needed. To be effective, everyone had to do it.
In his summary of the Hansen/Libecap article, economist Daniel Benjamin wrote:
“In principle, the small farmers of the 1930s could have voluntarily banded together to jointly agree on the use of best practices in soil conservation. But this would have required contracts among thousands of landowners spanning hundreds of thousands of acres—a daunting proposition at best.”‘[7]
It was only after 1937, when the federal government created the Soil Conservation Service and its multiple conservation districts, that the problem declined. SCS districts could force farmers to adopt erosion control measures, and also provide subsidies to small farmers to help them do so.
In addition, farms gradually got larger, Hansen and Libecap point out. In 1930, 27 percent of all farms in the Great Plains were less than 180 acres. By 1964 that figure had fallen to 15 percent. In 1930, 65 percent of the farms were under 500 acres; that fell to 39 percent in 1964.[8]
Slowly, the detrimental impact of homesteading became a distant memory and the romanticization began.
[1] Paul Wallace Gates, “The Homestead Law in an Incongruous land System,” American Historical Review 41 (1936): 652-681, at 653.
[2] Richard L. Stroup, “Buying Misery with Federal Land,” Public Choice 57, no. 1 (1988): 69-77.
[3] Stroup cites Gilbert Fite as the source of this term. Stroup, 70.
[4] Fred A. Shannon, “The Homestead Act and the Labor Surplus,” American Historical Review 41, no. 4 (1936): 637-51.
[5] Quoted in Zeynep K. Hansen and Gary D. Libecap. “Small Farms, Externalities, and the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.” Journal of Political Economy 112, no. 3 (2004): 665-94, at
[7 ]Daniel Benjamin, “The Dust Bowl Reconsidered,” PERC Reports 22, no. 4 (December 2004), https://perc.org/2004/12/10/the-dust-bowl-reconsidered/.
[8] Hansen and Libecap, 673.
Homesteading is back, albeit with some pretty big modifications. Unlike in the 1800s, today’s homesteaders are not economically struggling people seeking a new start on their own farm. Rather, they tend to be educated and middle class. Instead of growing cash crops on 100+ acres as their primary source of income, today’s homesteaders tend to have plots as small as 3-5 acres and other incomes; many are tech or knowledge workers who can work remotely over the Internet. Others have jobs in a nearby town.
The intent is to become more self-sufficient, somewhat independent of supply chains. Many desire cleaner, or organic sources of food and water. A typical 21st century homestead will have a few chickens for eggs and meat, a few goats for milk, a large vegetable garden, a few fruit trees, and maybe a wooded area for firewood and not much more.
Although some homestead in suburban communities, many homesteaders are ex-urbanites who explicitly want to get away from cities. There is a political tinge to it, although not always. Many want to get away from government, and there is a large contingent of home-schoolers who homestead. In some ways, it has roots in the survivalist movement of the 1970s as much as it does in the 19th century form of homesteading.
Between COVID-19, the Antifa/BLM riots, and the potential for drastic transformation or upheaval after the election next month, 21st century homesteading is not likely to slow down any time soon.
What an interesting take on homesteading, ie., contributing to the loss of soil during the drought. This makes a lot of sense. I do not doubt that poor homesteaders did not plant trees. Seedlings may have been difficult to come by (and probably costly) and they also require care and water to grow. Water and time were both very scarce resources. What I want to know is, when was “strip farming” as a conservation technique started? I remember studying it in school in the mid 40s. I thought it came about as a way to prevent soil erosion as a result of the dust bowl disaster. Did people know about this technique prior to the dust bowl?
Ramona: A very good question. It appears that the technique was used earlier, but I will try to find out more. Jane.
Could we consider whether strip farming is a variation on medieval strip assignment, crop rotation, and fallow system?
Certainly, there was medieval strip farming. Some of it was for fallowing and later for crop rotation. Dierdre McCloskey, in a chapter on the open fields of England (available at http://econweb.rutgers.edu/ewhite/McCloskey1989.pdf), explained that the initial purpose was to scatter small acreages in order to spread the risk of bad soil, bad climate, infestations, or other risk factors. The idea of strip farming for soil protection in arid areas may have had another source.
Agreed: federally subsidized homesteading caused much misery. But the upside is that it moved huge tracts of real estate permanently into the private sector.
It is true that if privatization is not done carefully, it can cause short-term hardship and can feed corruption. But even imperfect privatization is better, in the medium-to-long run, than socialism.
Today the federal government owns 28 percent of the country—mostly land with no particular environmental or scenic value: scrub, desert, grassland, etc. That situation has caused enormous distortions in our constitutional/political system, not to mention bad economic and environmental policies (think “wildfires”). But a powerful and ruthless national lobby has grown up around government land ownership, misrepresenting every effort to ease the situation as “selling the national parks” or the like. This lobby feeds on direct mail ads to well-meaning Easterners who know nothing about Western conditions and who have been misled into thinking that Western forests are disappearing, Glacier National Park is being torn down, and elk are becoming extinct.
Without the homesteading acts, this toxic situation would have been even worse.