Acres for Cents: Delinquent Tax Auctions in Frontier Iowa (review)

BOOK REVIEWS173 tion of Montana resources for the national benefit, the lack of adequate federal appropriations, taxation without representation and the intolerable burden of supporting recipients of the federal patronage system. Only statehood in 1889 stilled these complaints despite the fact that Montana, according to Clark Spence, was treated as well as any other territory. The political history of Montana Territory is presented by the author chronologically, except for analytical chapters which deal with the territorial legislature, judiciary, territorial officers and finance. The depth of Spence's research is exceptional. Manuscript collections, published documents, newspapers and secondary sources are skillfully blended together by lucid prose and the logical exposition of concepts. While the principal focus is Montana Territory, Spence relates its history to the nation and the politics and practices of the Gilded Age. This exemplary volume ranks with Earl S. Pomeroy, The Territories and the United States and Howard R. Lamar, Dakota Territory as an important contribution to our understanding of Western history. Donald J. Berthronc Purdue University Acres for Cents: Delinquent Tax Auctions in Frontier Iowa. By Robert P. Swierenga. (Westport, Ct.: Greenwood Press, 1976. Pp. xix, 262. $14.95.) Legal historians never cease to be amazed by the ingenuity of nineteenth -century lawmakers on the Upper Mississippi Valley frontier . Men were impatient to force the pace of economic development , and they devised a bewildering array of legal mechanisms to mobilize scarce capital resources and thus give leverage for productive effort. Willard Hurst, whose Law and Economic Growth (1964) is a veritable digest of such devices, aptly termed the process "bootstrap finance." Robert Swierenga's remarkable book on Iowa tax titles is an empirical study of perhaps the most disarming manifestation of midnineteenth -centuiy lawmaking along these lines. Between 1850 and 1880 Iowa farmers had an insatiable appetite for short-term capital, and demand far outstripped available supplies of credit at the legal interest limit. At the same time governmental units, with the farmers ' full support, maintained relatively high tax rates in order to finance public improvements. But governmental bodies could hardly collect sufficient funds to service their debts when taxpayers were faced with a persistent credit crunch. The law of tax titles, as amended by the Iowa legislature on a score of occasions, enabled settlers to overcome all these difficulties. Local farmers in need of 174CIVIL WAR HISTORY working capital simply "borrowed" their taxes. Tax-title investors, attracted by state-sanctioned penalty and interest rates far above prevailing usury limits, "stood in" for delinquent property owners and paid their taxes, thus permitting government to finance its operations. The land itself served as security for the tax buyer's "loan." Local farmers then had five years to redeem (or liquidate) the tax buyer's equitable title. And between 1850 and 1880 more than 80 per cent of Iowa tax titles were in fact redeemed. "Thus in a real sense," Swierenga concludes, "owners, tax buyers, and the general public all benefitted from tax auctions" (p. 9). For all its utility during the initial stages of settlement and development , the tax title served quite different functions after 1880. Voluntary "borrowing" of taxes fell off sharply with the accompanying decline of the ratio between the farmers' tax bills and their available cash reserves. Thereafter increasingly mature financial institutions met demands for short-term loans, tax delinquency tended to indicate genuine distress among Iowa farmers, and the tax-buying business affected land tenure patterns to a far greater degree. It was in this quite different social setting that the law of tax titles assumed such great prominence during the Great Depression . Acres for Cents thus delineates the changing functions of tax titles and makes a substantial contribution to the social history of American law. For the skeptic, Swierenga has generated more than one-hundred pages of carefully prepared statistical tables, figures, and appendices to support the generalizations offered in a text of approximately equal length. The book will undoubtedly be employed in graduate seminars as a model application of both quantitative methods and legal records to the study of American history. Charles W. McCurdy University of Virginia The New Country: A Social History of the American Frontier, 17761890 . By Richard A. Bartlett...