The Fight for the Soil: Washington's Early Constitutional Crisis
An 1870s editorial argues that without strict land ownership caps, Washington Territory faces a future of feudalism and labor exploitation.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
There is no question which so vitally affects popular rights and the general prosperity of the people of the future State of Washington, as that of the land tenure. As a fundamental principle, land is as much a right of the people as air or water. The inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is not complete without the right to a place to live and access to the natural elements of subsistence. The relation of landlord and tenant is practically the baronial system of lord and serf. It would be safer for the citizen to surrender his right of suffrage than his right to his reasonable portion of God’s earth. Without a home, man is without a country. The dependent upon others for a place to live, who has to divide with another the proceeds of his labor in cultivating the soil, is not a freeman. He is free to starve; free to die; but not free to live, or to enjoy the exclusive fruits of his own toil, because he is under contribution to others who have seized and appropriated to their own use his share of the natural elements of life. Of all the forms of oppression ever devised to divide the human family into task-masters and dependents, none have been more inexorable than land monopoly. The much-boasted Homestead law—'the freedom of the public lands to actual settlers'—was immediately turned into a hollow mockery, by enormous land grants to soulless corporations. All the labor distresses of the country are primarily attributable to land monopoly. In California, single tracts of thousands and tens of thousands of acres are held and cultivated by single individuals or companies, employing Chinamen and driving white labor to the cities for employment. There is no section of country which offers greater inducements to land monopoly than does Washington Territory. Its lands are all valuable: tide lands, timber lands, coal and iron lands, and extensive prairies. If some check or limitation is not provided in the constitution, the unparalleled resources of the State will be under the control of monopolists and the great mass of the people will be dependent upon the few for employment. We would not disturb titles already acquired, but the constitution can and ought to provide that no man or company can hereafter acquire more than one section, or one thousand acres at most, which would prevent large monopolies in the future.
“It would be safer for the citizen to surrender his right of suffrage than his right to his reasonable portion of God’s earth. Without a home, man is without a country.”
This 1870s editorial highlights a recurring tension in Washington's history: the battle between the promise of land as a public right and the reality of concentrated ownership. The fear that land monopolies would relegate the working class to a 'baronial system' mirrors current anxieties regarding housing affordability and corporate ownership of residential properties in the Pacific Northwest.
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