The Lost Tradition of Economic Equality in America, 1600–1870 by Daniel R. Mandell (review)

Historians seeking to more explicitly link the past to current economic and political debates can choose between two basic strategies. One strategy—which the 1619 Project used to such great effect—is to expose the injustices of the past and trace their impact to the present. The other strategy—which Daniel R. Mandell employs in this thought-provoking synthesis—is to recover ideas and movements from the past that can inspire change and reform in the present. Mandell argues that from its colonial origins, a series of thinkers and activists believed that economic equality—whether achieved through universal education, land reform, or government regulation of market activity—was an important value that profoundly influenced government policy.

Mandell seamlessly analyzes a number of different egalitarian traditions with nuance and sophistication. He begins in early modern England, where groups such as the Levelers called for the end of great estates and the redistribution of property. Powerful landlords violently crushed the Levelers, but echoes of the movement survived in a republican commonwealth tradition that that linked economic inequality with political inequality and corruption. That tradition took root in colonial North America, where far higher percentage of households owned land. North American Indians—often portrayed in Enlightenment discourse as noble savages— came to symbolize full economic and social equality. As inequality grew in the second half of the eighteenth century, a revolutionary tradition developed that linked economic inequality with British corruption and aristocracy that influenced the anti-Federalists as well as the opponents of Hamiltonian economic policies.

Mandell proceeds to show how diff erent movements in the early republic grappled with inequality through the expansion of schooling, the removal of property requirements for voting, and the rise of workingmen parties that supported higher pay for journeymen workers and a ten-hour work day. While these reform movements achieved some significant political successes, they did not halt the advance of capitalism. The movement to expand education, which received strong support from farmers and workers, often resulted in a curriculum that tacitly endorsed inequality and social hierarchies. Political reformers successfully eliminated property requirements in a number of states, but universal white male suffrage did little to remove the influence of the wealthy and well connected. The workingmen parties sometimes put forth socialist ideas, but the Democratic Party successfully incorporated their attacks on wealth and privilege without “fundamental restructuring of the American economy” (119).

In the aftermath of financial panics and economic depression in the late 1830s and early 1840s, more radical critiques found significant traction. Some focused on developing communal alternatives to capitalism. Albert Brisbane found initial success in organizing cooperative communities founded on the ideas of the French socialists Charles Fourier. The communal enterprises ultimately failed, but managed to attract significant support from political and intellectual elites such as Horace Greeley, giving hope that a message of cooperation over competition might find traction. Founded in 1844, the National Reform Association (NRA) fused land reform, anti-rent rhetoric, and support for a ten-hour workday to put forward a political platform explicitly critical of great concentrations of wealth. The NRA could not find political traction as an independent movement, but its central idea that all government land should become free and open to ordinary farm families eventually found a home in the Republican Party. The failure to redistribute land to formerly enslaved families during Reconstruction marked the limits of the land reform movement. Liberal conceptions of private property triumphed throughout the Gilded Age.

Mandell successfully demonstrates that a number of vibrant egalitarian traditions offered important critiques of economic inequality in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The book represents a deep engagement with a broad array of thinkers, all of whom are put into specific political, cultural, and social contexts. Specialists and researchers will find Man-dell’s sophisticated and insightful analysis deeply engaging, yet the book’s writing is so...