Feature
by Glenn Roberts Jr.
Editor’s note: The remarkable homeownership rate in America is not a free-market phenomenon. Since the time of our founding fathers, the government has had a deliberate policy of promoting and subsidizing property ownership. From the Declaration of Independence to the Homestead Act of 1862 to modern policies of President Bush, the federal and state government have made it easy for more and more families to own a home. In this four-part series, we dig up the history around how the U.S. government seized on this idea of democratic ownership of property and made it the envy of the world.
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of property. Many Americans would finish this sentence, instead, with pursuit of happiness—that’s what it says in the Declaration of Independence.
And while the final draft of this famous declaration does not mention the word property, there is little doubt among historians that individual property ownership and property rights were high priorities for the founding fathers of this country.
The debate continues today on whether Thomas Jefferson had intended to include the phrase life, liberty and the pursuit of property in the historic document that served as a symbolic break with England’s rule over the colonies.
Jefferson, like other founding fathers, drew heavily on the writings of John Locke, an English philosopher who died in 1704, in their vision for a new nation.
It was Locke who wrote that under the law of nature, every man has “a power not only to preserve his property—that is, his life, liberty and estate, against the injuries and attempts of other men, but to judge of and punish the breaches of that law in others.” Life and liberty, as well as owned land, were all considered property in Locke’s view, and his text spells out very clearly the concept of natural property rights entitled to all men.
Locke also wrote that “as much land as a man tills, plants, improves, cultivates, and can use the product of, so much is his property. He that, in obedience to this command of God, subdued, tilled and sowed any part of it, thereby annexed to it something that was his property, which another had not title to, nor could without injury take from him.” So by Locke’s philosophy, if a person farmed or improved an area of land, that land could become his property.
And the allure of Locke’s views on natural law and God’s law was that commoners could own land—land was not something reserved only for aristocrats. Of course, Locke noted that this state of equality in property ownership was attainable when there was more
than enough land available for all.
“Nobody could think himself injured by the drinking of another man, though he took a good draught, who had a whole river of the same water left him to quench his thirst. And the case of land and water, where there is enough of both, is perfectly the same,” he wrote.
That thinking—despite the fact that it originated with an English philosopher—became a very American ideal. This fundamental philosophy of property ownership for many, and the accompanying fever for opportunity in a vast frontier, aided in the rapid expansion of the United States from the Atlantic Coast to the Pacific Coast in less than a century.
Ken Blanchard, a political science professor at Northern State University in Aberdeen, S.D., said, “There is no question that Locke’s theory of property turned out to be one of the most successful economic ideas ever pronounced.”
Locke’s philosophy adopted by our nation’s founders “basically is the idea of capitalism. We can dramatically increase the value of whatever nature gives us by working it hard,” he added.
“There is no question that the founding fathers hoped that everybody would have some property. Jefferson’s ideal certainly was that we would be a land of small farmers and nobody with too much. [Property] roots you in the society—gives you a vested interest.”
While there was a strong notion of inheritance in Britain at the time—that you inherit property through a family lineage, for example—“America was a very different place in that respect,” Blanchard said. “There was so much open territory. I don’t think that having that frontier was absolutely necessary for America to develop the way it developed, but it certainly made it easier.”
Blanchard also said, “One of the greatest innovations in Locke’s writings was the notion that not only could people be individually free, but that the sort of almost unlimited pursuit of property was a good thing.”
Jefferson and other founders might be shocked at just how much wealth has been amassed in the United States since Independence Day in 1776, Blanchard said. It likely would be a shock, too, that the size of families is shrinking and that we are no longer a nation of family farms. “Jefferson and some others would be astounded at how much wealth some Americans have,” he added.
Locke’s influence is still visible in the modern United States, Blanchard said, and the notion of individual liberty is still very strong.
The concept of individual liberty in the early days of this nation, though, had limits. Jefferson, and some other founding fathers owned slaves, and the phrase “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence obviously did not apply to all men. Some freed slaves did own property, though, during the colonial era.
In his writings, Locke challenged slavery and stated, “The natural liberty of man is not to be under the will or legislative authority of man, but to have only the law of nature for his rule.”
While the Declaration of Independence contained no specific language on property rights, the Fifth Amendment in the U.S. Constitution appears to clearly link Locke’s writings and the founding fathers’ beliefs. The amendment states that no person shall be “deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.”
And the Fourteenth Amendment provides that no state shall “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any
person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
Marshall Croddy, director of programs and materials development for the Constitutional Rights Foundation in Los Angeles, a nonprofit and non-partisan education group, said the framers of the Constitution “wanted to make sure that the rights of property owners would be protected. The founders thought that if they put controls on government, and particularly the central government, that they would pretty much protect property rights.”
While it’s difficult to say whether the founding fathers would have anticipated the world we live in today, Croddy said, “I do think that they would have approved of a yeoman class of landowners.”
He added, “The idea of property ownership and the fact it is open to anyone who can gain the wherewithal to [own land] is a stabilizing force in society.” Though Croddy said he has seen no definitive evidence that the Declaration of Independence at first contained the phrase life, liberty and the pursuit of property, he said that using the word happiness instead of property may have lent the founding fathers a nobler justification for the freedoms that they were seeking.
Using the word property, he said, may have relegated their cause to more of a “monetary squabble,” he said.
But the original draft of the Declaration of Independence, as penned by Jefferson, did include one reference to property. Referring to King George III of Great Britain, this original draft stated, “He has incited treasonable insurrections in our fellow-subjects, with the allurements of forfeiture and confiscation of our property.”
There are other examples in the writings of the nation’s founders about the importance of property. Samuel Adams in 1772 wrote, for example, “Among the natural rights of the colonists are these first: a right to life; secondly to liberty, thirdly to property, together with the right to support and defend them in the best manner they can—those are evident branches of, rather than dedications from the duty of self-preservation, commonly called the first law of nature.”
And William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, in 1687 wrote of the “Excellent privilege of liberty and property being the birthright of the freeborn subjects of England.”
Today, too, individual property rights issues continue to be discussed and debated.
John Klotz, a New York attorney, said that one of the hottest issues before the Supreme Court this year is a case that relates to private-property rights outlined in the Fifth Amendment. The case, Kelo v. New London, is an effort by homeowners in New London, Conn., to stop the city’s power of eminent domain for a private development project that includes a hotel, town homes and office park.
According to court documents, each of the property owners involved in fighting the eminent domain testified that “they wished to remain in their homes for a variety of personal reasons. Two of the people referred to the fact that their families have lived in their homes for decades.”
An earlier court decision had dismissed eminent domain actions against four individuals but upheld eminent domain actions against other property owners, who appealed to the Supreme Court.
Klotz said it remains to be seen whether the Supreme Court will share the founding fathers’ conservative views on the preservation of individual private-property rights. “The real issue from a home-ownership perspective is will there be (restrictions) put on the power of government to take property for essentially private purposes?”
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the viewpoint of SFAA or the San Francisco Apartment Magazine. Copyright © 2005 by Inman News. All rights reserved.