The American Agrarian-Distributists of the 1930s

Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue canad1enne d'etudesamericames Volume 27, Number 2, 1997, pp. 71-102 The American Agrarian-Distributists of the 1930s Edward S. Shapiro 71 The breakdown of American capitalism during the 1930s presented the greatest challenge to the American intellectual community since the Civil War. Virtually all intellectuals believed the Great Depression signalled the end of the political, economic, and social system the country had known prior to 1929, and that radical reform was imperative and inevitable. The only question concerned the nature of such change. A majority of the American intelligentsia, along with the nation's leading magazines of opinion, particularly the New Republic and the Nation, championed left-wing political programs emphasizing political centralization and economic egalitarianism. As the historians Daniel Aaron, Richard H. Pells, Alan R. Lawson, and others have shown, the heyday of American socialism, communism, and left-wing liberalism was during the Great Depression. One group of disparate intellectuals, however, responded to the economic collapse by rejecting both the economic collectivism of finance-capitalism as well as the political centralization of modern liberalism and socialism. They went under such names as agrarians, distributists, cooperationists, and decentral ists. Here they will be called "agrarian-distributists." In the conflict between 11 republicanism 11 and "liberalism," which some contemporary American historians have seen as the key to American political history during the past two centuries, the agrarian-distributists were squarely on the side of republicanism. They opposed modern capitalism, the corporation, and the 72 Canadian Review of Amencan Studies Revue canadzenne d'etttdes amencaznes free market, defended regionalism and localism, and sought the restoration of a decentralized and propertied society. They believed that limited government , individualism, and economic freedom-the central tenets of classical liberalism-had to be subordinated to the republican impulse to create a virtuous society. The fate of the agrarian-distributists during the 1930s was symptomatic of the crisis of republican values in America during the twentieth century. It also revealed the seeming incoherence of conservative thought and the widespread popular confusion over the meaning of conservatism during this, the most important political decade for American politics of the twentieth century . In the 1930s, the public came to associate conservatism with big business , capitalism, the Liberty League, and the economics of the Manchester school. And yet all of these were anathema to the agrarian-distributists, the most important group of American conservative intellectuals of the 1930s. The agrarian-distributists included disciples of the British distribut1st movement, the Southern Agrarians, members of the Catholic rural-life movement , the National Committee on Small Farm Ownership, proponents of the cooperative movement, and a hodge-podge of back-to-the-land and handicraft enthusiasts such as Ralph Borsodi. Founded by Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton in the early twentieth century, the British distributist movement opposed economic collectivism and centralized political planning and championed the widest possible distribution of property, hence the term 11 d1stributist .11In What's Wrong With the World (1910), Chesterton held up the "idea of private property universal but private, the idea of families free but still families, of domesticity democratic but still domestic, of one man one house" (97). Two years later Belloc's The Seruile State (1912) warned that political paternalism and a servile state were inevitable when people lacked private property to provide for their own sustenance. The various names the English distributists considered for their organization reflected their political objectives. They included the Luddite League, the League of Small Property, the Lost Property League, Cow and Acres, and the League of Little People, before selecting the Distributist League. Belloc and Chesterton were familiar with America. They had visited the United States, and Chesterton even wrote two books containmg his impres- EdwardS. Shapiro/ 73 sions of America. Both men appreciated the country's individualism, democratic impulses, and numerous farms, small businesses, and small towns, but they were also dismayed by its large-scale industrialization, pervasive advertising and salesmanship, and decline in property ownership. In What I Saw in America (1922), Chesterton predicted that the fate of America would be determined by the struggle between democracy and industrialism. "Upon the issue of that struggle, 11 he said," depends the...