| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 58

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Mark A. Lause, Young America: Land, Labor and the Republican Community (Champaign: University of Illinois Press 2005)

THE NATIONAL REFORMERS, antebellum working men who crafted a movement advocating the right to land for the landless, were ignored by historians for decades after the publication of the first book-length treatment of their movement in 1941. Over the past two decades, the National Reformers have undergone a surprising resurgence. They have been studied as part of the process of American class formation; in terms of their relationship to the New York Anti-Rent movement; in terms of their relationship to the Democratic party; and alongside the Chartists as part of a transatlantic land-reform movement. Mark Lause adds to this flourishing literature with Young America, a history of the internal politics and the leadership of the movement, and the relationship of the movement with the political trends of the time.

The National Reform Association was founded in New York by George Henry Evans, longtime editor of the Working Man's Advocate, and a group of other veterans of the working men's movements of the 1830s. Calling for free farms for actual settlers, limitations on landownership, and the exemption of homesteads from seizure for debt, the leaders of the National Reform movement made their ideas remarkably pervasive — at least throughout the North — in a short time.

The National Reformers' innovative methods and willingness to ally themselves with like-minded groups ensured them a national audience. Masters of propaganda, they used the press to their advantage, but also held regular meetings and sent speakers to evangelize in the countryside. They made common cause with any logical ally, appealing to Socialists, to Fourierites, and to cooperators, by proposing land monopoly as a general framing device through which other aspects of oppressive social relations could be understood. The National Reformers also allied promiscuously with representatives of any political party, as long as the politician would commit to National Reform goals. Lause helpfully traces the relationship of the National Reformers to, variously, the Democratic party, the Free Soil Party, and the Republican party (the founder of which, Alvan E. Bovay, was a National Reformer well before he was a Republican). In some states, like New York, National Reformers were elected to the state assembly, and helped to craft policy on issues like homestead exemption.

While the ideologies and discursive strategies of the National Reformers have been discussed elsewhere, Lause adds to our knowledge on this topic by emphasizing the way in which the National Reformers crafted their own version of history, summoning up both the Roman republic and the American Revolution. Lause also emphasizes the extent to which National Reformers were conscious of class—and makes a compelling argument, if class is defined as perception of differing interests between employers and employees.

Lause argues that National Reform as an independent movement died out in 1848–1849, when its platform was coopted by the Free Soil party. Whether or not this is really true depends on what is seen as most important: the administrative organization of the association, and the existence of its newspaper, Young America, or the persistence of its ideas and their permeation into the political culture. In fact, as Lause himself shows by following National Reform leaders into the 1850s and 1860s, the movement had more of an impact than it had had during its brief era of administrative cohesiveness.

During the 1850s, individual leaders continued attending Industrial Congresses, annual meetings at which many different labour-oriented reforms were advocated and discussed. Many National Reform leaders and members joined the Brotherhood of the Union, George Lippard's pro-worker secret society, in which land reform continued to be a central plank. While some leaders became wrapped up in, and arguably derailed by, spiritualism, others spearheaded the campaign to flood Congress with petitions from all over the Northern half of the country, advocating free homesteads for actual settlers. There were even attempts to settle Free Kansas with land reformers.

Lause has previously written about the Greenback-Labor movement, and his greatest contribution in Young America is the unprecedented attempt to draw together the National Reformers and late 19th-century greenbackers, socialists, and populists. One might have thought the 1862 Homestead Act was the culmination of the land reformers' desires; but according to Lause, the National Reformers did not sit on their laurels. Some National Reformers volunteered for Civil War service — a gesture that Lause assumes was due to their desire to create a free and level playing-field for labour.

In the 1870s, land reformers contributed to American sections of the International Workingmen's Association, and helped to make a better distribution of land important tenets of the Greenback- Labor, Socialistic Labor, and Populist parties. More importantly, by introducing the land question to thousands of urban working people, National Reform paved the way for the enthusiastic reception that Henry George received. Yet even as the early land reformers had done these later movements such service, Lause argues, they did the memory of National Reform a disservice by classifying it as a utopian movement out of step with both scientific socialism and the tenets of modern sociology.

It is clear throughout Young America that Lause, who has already written about George Henry Evans, greatly sympathizes with his historical subjects and their idealistic project. Unfortunately, that sympathy occasionally leads to strained readings of the evidence. On the topic of slavery and black equality, Lause depicts the National Reformers as uniformly non-racist. In fact, leaders of the movement spanned a continuum: some were clearly dedicated to the elimination of all slavery, but others invoked the language of "wage slavery" not out of common cause with black workers, but rather to expose the horror of white workers being inappropriately consigned to slavery. The argument that National Reform welcomed black participation is particularly untenable, since Lause notes only one black participant. Lause's argument that the National Reformers had a militant arm and were prepared for violence seems intended to reinforce his vision of them as class-conscious proletarians rather than bourgeois reformers. It is not, however, borne out by the great body of the evidence from which Lause has selected his few examples.

Because Young America is an institutional history of the National Reform movement, Lause begins his story with its founding in 1844 (although he does include a brief biography of George Henry Evans). The decision not to discuss in detail the roots of the movement, both in terms of ideology (the physiocrats, Thomas Spence, Thomas Jefferson) and personnel (the trades' union movement and working men's movements of the 1830s) means that this short treatment omits much of the essential historical context.

As a result, the book would be problematic for assignment to undergraduates, but students of labour history will find that it is an essential and thought-provoking contribution to the field.


Jamie L. Bronstein New Mexico State University

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