Owning a Piece of America
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
My parents own a home. I'm a homeowner. My sisters are homeowners. Land ownership was just something that we understood was part of the American dream for us.
For over 100 years, the U.S. government has helped everyday people pursue homeownership.
It is this awesome challenge.
But now this core part of the American dream is starting to feel more like a fantasy. And many people wonder if their own kids will have the same shot.
When I close my eyes, I want to know that he has his own home.
As an affordability crisis plagues the housing market, can the federal government once again put homeownership within reach? It's Sunday, June 28th. I'm Imani Moise for The Wall Street Journal. This is USA 250, a podcast series connecting America's economic present to its past. This is the fifth and final episode, Owning a Piece of America.
Now know we that there is therefore granted by the United States unto the said Peter Clarke the track of land above described.
That's Bernice Bennett. She's reading a deed from 1896 signed by President Grover Cleveland, bestowing 159.33 acres of land in Louisiana to her great-great-grandfather, Peter Clark, who just years before was enslaved.
I had chills when I opened it and I saw his name, his age, and understood that, wait a minute, he went through this process and he acquired that land. It just told me that this man, born enslaved, was definitely determined to own land.
Peter acquired the land at the ripe age of 38 through the Homestead Act of 1862, which granted citizens, or wannabe citizens of the United States, 160 acres of federal land for a small fee.
You have a receipt. Because he had to pay money, $18.
The catch? You had to farm that land for five years. They called it proving up. At the time, home and land ownership was an exclusive club made up almost entirely of wealthy white men. But that was about to change. Just about anyone could make a claim under the Homestead Act of 1862, as long as they hadn't taken up arms against the U.S. People came from all over, by ship, by train, by horse and buggy. There were men, single women, and even Black Americans recently freed from slavery. One historian has called it the most comprehensive form of wealth redistribution that has ever taken place in America.
It helped support the notion that poor people could, if they worked hard, could rise in society.
That's Rick Edwards, the director emeritus of the Center for Great Plains Studies at the University of Nebraska. Before Americans ever dreamed of owning a home, the key to building wealth in this country was through land.
Well, in a farming society, the biggest asset you had was the land you owned or rented. And so the idea that If you move to this new area, you could get land for free, was a bonanza.
Edward says about 3 million people tried their hand at homesteading, including tens of thousands of Black Americans like Peter Clark.
And so it's the first piece of national legislation that did not restrict its benefits to white people.
But that's not all. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants and single women heeded the government's call to the West.
In fact, it was a really beneficial law to immigrants. It encouraged immigration.
That's Jacob Frefeld, director of the Center for Lincoln Studies at the University of Illinois Springfield. He's also kind of like Edwards' protege. And together, they've literally written the book on homesteading.
And another thing you get is women claiming land, too. It's progressive in that way, that women are allowed to claim land in their own name.
But as egalitarian as the act was, it was only made possible through dispossession. Before America's homesteaders could settle the prairies, tens of thousands of Native Americans were pushed out. Success wasn't guaranteed either. Homesteaders arrived on a treeless prairie in the Great Plains. The only way to build a home was to quite literally dig up the ground beneath you and make heavy bricks out of dirt, grass, and roots.
Sometimes people complain that snakes would come in and out of the walls because you're building your house out of their home, essentially.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:02–5:41
2
How did the Homestead Act of 1862 enable formerly enslaved people to own land?
5:41–11:30
3
What challenges did 19th-century homesteaders face when proving up their 160 acres?
11:30–12:43
4
How did the Homestead Act change who could build wealth in America?
12:43–24:38
Speakers
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