Category Archives: economics

by Joel | 14 July 2023 · 6:01 am

1989: Implosion More Than Explosion

From Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment, by Stephen Kotkin (Modern Library Chronicles Series Book 32; Random House, 2009), Kindle pp. 8-11:

What more could there be to say on this twentieth anniversary of 1989? Plenty. Most analysts continue to focus disproportionately, even exclusively, on the “opposition,” which they fantasize as a “civil society.” This fixation recalls the long and fruitless search for “the bourgeoisie” who supposedly caused the French Revolution of 1789. But just as “the bourgeoisie” were mostly an outcome of 1789, so “civil society” was more a consequence than a primary cause of 1989. Thanks to the repudiation of the single-party monopoly and its corollary, the state-owned and state-run economy, the 1989 revolutions would make civil society possible. That said, highlighting the opposition is understandable for Poland since, as we shall see, Poland had an opposition, which imagined itself as civil society. Such a focus almost works for Hungary, too, because, like Poland, Hungary had a negotiated exit from communism, though Hungary’s proreform Communists in 1989 had to bolster the anti-Communist opposition in order to have a negotiating partner. Be that as it may, for all other Eastern European countries the focus on the opposition falls into the realm of fiction. And even for the Polish case, analysts too often leave out the side across the table from the opposition—namely, the Communist establishment. The often overlooked establishment, which we call “uncivil society,” is a primary focus of our book, because that is where collapse happened.

The incompetent, blinkered, and ultimately bankrupt Communist establishments—party bosses and propagandists, secret policemen and military brass—deserve their due, but we do not examine every Eastern European country in depth. East Germany, Romania, and Poland are the case studies (in that unusual order) that we single out for extended treatment because, in our view, they best reveal how and why each establishment’s implosion occurred. Seeking to use the opposition to help push through tough economic measures to save the system, uncivil society in Poland (as well as in Hungary) discovered that it had instead capitulated; in East Germany and Romania (and elsewhere) the establishment just collapsed. The causes behind both these outcomes had a lot to do with internal elite dynamics and with geopolitics, as we shall show. But in cases where the uncivil society was determined to hold on, it had to be, and was, given a shove by mass social mobilization. Paradoxically, therefore, in 1989 the enormous street demonstrations took place not in the country with the formidable organized opposition (Poland) but in the lands of the formidable Securitate and Stasi—the dreaded security police of Romania and East Germany, respectively. No less paradoxically, the mass protests broke out without equivalent mass social organizations. Hence, a second goal of our book, beyond a close look at uncivil society, entails an explanation of the social mobilization absent corresponding societal organization.

Eastern Europe ended up shaping the destiny of the Soviet Union, but the Soviets had long held the fate of Eastern Europe in their hands. The “Brezhnev Doctrine”—employing military force, as a last resort, to uphold socialism in the bloc—was in many ways the Andropov Doctrine. Yuri Andropov, the long-serving KGB chief (1967–82) and briefly the successor to Leonid Brezhnev as general secretary (1982–84), had long undergirded the Soviet resolve. Andropov played a hard-line man-on-the-spot role as Soviet ambassador to Hungary during the crackdown in 1956; he manipulated the more cautious Brezhnev over using force in Czechoslovakia in 1968; and he took a tough stance on Poland in 1980–81 during Solidarity’s existence. The KGB underling who served as station chief in Poland from April 1973 through October 1984 recalled that Andropov had refused to countenance Poland taking the “capitalist” path, a scenario viewed as zero sum geopolitically. Other evidence, though, indicates that behind closed doors in 1981 Andropov lamented that the overtaxed Soviet Union had reached the limits of its ability to intervene militarily in Eastern Europe and goaded the Polish regime to conduct its own crackdown (it did). Be that as it may, in 1989 Mikhail Gorbachev’s Kremlin not only formally repealed the Brezhnev Doctrine but also worked to prevent Eastern Europe’s uncivil societies from themselves using violence to prop up their regimes. Almost immediately thereupon, the Communist systems in Eastern Europe were overturned. The ashes of Andropov—who more than anyone had helped put Gorbachev into power—must have been turning over in his Kremlin Wall urn.

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by Joel | 5 July 2023 · 5:52 am

Labor Unrest in Java, 1944

From Asian Armageddon, 1944–45, by Peter Harmsen (War in the Far East, Book 2; Casemate, 2020), Kindle pp. 84-88:

In the summer of 1944, the region of Indramayu on the East Indies island of Java exploded in violence. A student at an Islamic boarding school who was known only by the name of Mi’an began distributing holy water among the peasants in the area, telling them it would make them invulnerable to attacks from non-Muslims. They needed it, for they were preparing an uprising against their Japanese-supported rulers over grain levies that made life almost unbearable. A couple of low-ranking Javanese officials in the village of Bugis were the first to feel the wrath of the peasants. Angry mobs attacked them in their homes, beating them up and destroying everything inside. The Japanese military police rushed to the scene and confronted the protesting crowd. After attempting to threaten the peasants to disperse, the soldiers opened fire, mowing down the men and boys, who were carrying only sticks and machetes. About 200 people died on that blood-soaked day.

Many had expected a clash sooner or later. Tensions had been building up in this part of the former Dutch East Indies since the spring, as village after village had protested at the rising grain acquisitions, and some had openly rebelled. “We would rather die in battle than die of hunger,” they shouted when officials tried to convince them to go home. Instead, the desperate villagers went on rampages, hunting down tax collectors and others who acted as the face of the regime at the grassroots level. One was stabbed to death by a crowd wielding sharpened bamboo sticks, another was killed along with his son.

Anger was directed as much at local officials as at the Japanese, but it was the Japanese who had the power to enforce the unpopular decisions on the poverty-stricken people of Java. Few protesters were killed on the spot. Most individuals deemed to be the ringleaders of the riots were simply driven away, never to be heard from again. Still, even the Japanese did not have the power to rein in the escalating chaos following the riots during the summer months, and as roving bandits moved through the unpoliced countryside, attacking ordinary people and looting their homes, everyone suffered.

The unrest in Java reflected larger problems afflicting the Japanese throughout their vast empire by the middle of 1944. In the Dutch East Indies, the Japanese had ostensibly been attempting a policy of unifying the various ethnicities. On Java, this philosophy of a “fraternal order,” bringing together Japanese, Indonesian, Chinese, Arabs, and Eurasians, was propagated, in direct opposition to the “divide and rule” tactics that the former Dutch colonial masters had carried out, with significant success. In most Asian areas, Japan made the pretense of supporting indigenous government of some form, in conformity with its stated objective of ridding the region of western imperialism. The one exception until the end of the war was Indochina, where the French colonial administration remained in place.

In some cases, regular friendships had evolved between Japanese and representatives of the local population. An Indonesian journalist later explained his relationship with one of the Japanese officials, who had a genuine concern for the fate of the East Indies. “He was a frank and sympathetic friend, almost like a brother to us. His Indonesian was excellent… and we had many discussions with him about politics, Japan’s objectives and Indonesian independence. He helped us in a lot of ways; for instance, sometimes if articles we had written did not pass the censor, he would somehow try to get them in print.”

The reality, however, was often the reverse of the rosy images of inter-racial harmony described in the Japanese illustrated magazines. Since the early days of the occupation in 1942, the requirements of the local population had to yield to the demands of the Japanese military. After all, access to the rich natural resources of the East Indies had formed the entire basic rationale for Tokyo’s decision to unleash the Pacific War. “I had only to know how much exploitation the native population could endure,” said Major Miyamoto Shizuo, an officer in charge of logistics planning.

It was highly ironic that by 1944 Japan was reaping extraordinarily little actual gain from its possessions in Southeast Asia. Prior to Pearl Harbor, Japanese planners had calculated with Indonesian oil meeting most of their 7.9-million-ton oil requirement per year, but Allied sinking of Japanese transport shipping had caused the amount actually shipped to other parts of the Japanese empire to gradually dwindle, and for the fiscal year beginning April 1, 1944, no oil at all was transported from the East Indies. The output of other strategic materials such as rubber and coal also dropped to a fraction of their prewar levels, meaning essentially that the entire war had been in vain, insofar as it had started out as a grab for vital resources.

Only one resource was plentiful and could be exploited directly on the spot: labor. Young men known as romusha or “work soldiers” were recruited, often forcibly, and set to work at various large-scale projects under the supervision of Japanese engineers. They were often promised good treatment before their departure, but many never returned. Of 300,000 from Java who were sent off to islands elsewhere in the huge Indonesian archipelago, only 77,000 made it home again. What happened to the others is clear from an eyewitness account of the scene at a remote mountainside, where hundreds of workers hacked out a tunnel with adzes and hammers. “Their bodies were thin and parched—bone wrapped in skin,” the testimony reads. “Corpses were just like rubbish—walking skeletons no longer shocked people.” Another account detailed the abuse they were subject to: “Because of their weakened condition, they almost did not have enough strength to walk, so that they staggered on their feet like drunkards. To rest for a moment meant running the risk of getting abuse and blows.”

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by Joel | 2 July 2023 · 5:11 am

Japanese Homefront Mood, Jan. 1944

From Asian Armageddon, 1944–45, by Peter Harmsen (War in the Far East, Book 2; Casemate, 2020), Kindle pp. 39-41:

Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku, the architect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, had made only limited promises before committing to the offensive against US and Western possessions in the Asia Pacific in late 1941 and early 1942. He would be able to deliver one victory after the other during the first months of the war while the enemy was still reeling from the initial shock of being attacked, he said, but once that early advantage had been exhausted, the going would become much harder. Now, two years into the war, Yamamoto was dead, shot down by American pilots over the South Pacific, and the US counteroffensive had picked up, pushing back at the fringes of Hirohito’s vast empire.

At the dawn of the new year 1944, therefore, many of the emperor’s subjects were concerned about the future, and some put their bewildered thoughts on paper. “An important year has come. The days are coming that will decide history,” wrote liberal journalist Kiyosawa Kiyoshi in his diary on January 1. There was a pervasive sense that things might not stay the same. In every home in Japan when breakfast was served, he noted, people asked the same question: “Will we really be able to eat in this way next year also?” Yabe Teiji, a political science professor at the Tokyo Imperial University, was more straightforward in his diary entry: “The coming year will be Japan’s year of disaster.”

The Tokyo Metropolitan Police was keenly interested in the public mood and remarked in a secret report that although some clung on to a vague sense of optimism about the war, a note of caution was clearly discernible. “There are some who are frankly amazed at the quick and mighty strategy of the enemy and fear the threat of invasion of the mainland, some who desire the announcement of the truth, and some who fear for the safety of our fleet,” the anonymous author of the report wrote, adding that people who held these views were not few in number. There were other categories of opinion, all reflecting the fact that any early enthusiasm put on display at the start of the war was long gone: “Those who go to the extreme criticize military strategy, exaggerate the announcement of our losses, and consider the war to have already been decided. Also, those who are totally unconcerned with the war situation and show a trend toward defeat and war-weariness, just longing for speedy end of war, have been seen here and there.”

By early 1944, even the most optimistic among the 73 million Japanese could no longer fool themselves into believing that life went on as before. In February, the government issued “Outline of Decisive War Emergency Measures,” closing high-end entertainment and causing life in the big cities to take on an even drabber appearance overnight. The new rules were expanded to the entire empire with immediate effect, as Admiral Ugaki Matome found out when he stayed over in Japanese-occupied Shanghai and was entertained one evening by Japan’s governor general. “Banquets, restaurants, and geishas have been banned, as in Japan proper, but the governor general still seemed as full of life as before,” Ugaki wrote in his diary. The kimono, the colorful traditional Japanese dress, was also largely gone from the streets of Japan. As one observer noted, “to be a woman, basically, is not patriotic.”

As the war economy gradually caused an increasing share of available resources to be allocated to the military, getting enough to eat was suddenly a daily struggle for average Japanese families. There were lines of usually about a hundred people outside Tokyo food shops, and on any given day thousands of residents would leave the capital to buy supplies directly from farmers. The hard times were felt particularly keenly by the Westerners who had been caught inside the borders of the Japanese Empire when war broke out. In January, Red Cross delegate H. C. Angst visited a camp for civilian internees set up inside a Catholic monastery near Yokohama and subsequently described the poor conditions that the inmates lived under: “Space is insufficient and overcrowded. Some sleeping on tables. Light sufficient. No heating.” The anti-foreign mood showed up in other ways as well. Baseball, a favorite sport for the Japanese in the prewar years, was allowed to continue but was being cleansed of English-sounding vocabulary. Sutoraiki, an attempt to reproduce the word “strike” in Japanese, was replaced with the much more indigenous-sounding honkyū.

Actually, sutoraiki is a labor term; sutoraiku is the baseball term. I haven’t been able to find confirmation for honkyū, but it was probably 本球 ‘true/real/original ball’. Umpires had to call strikes with よし yoshi ‘good’ and balls with ダメ dame ‘not good’. Strikes were counted 一本, 二本 ippon, nihon, with the counter for long straight things, while balls were counted 一つ, 二つ hitotsu, futatsu, with generic numbers.

Two more nativized terms for balls and strikes, according to Japanese Wikipedia, were 悪球 akkyū ‘bad ball’ and 正球 seikyū ‘correct ball’, and the phrase 悪球打ち akkyū uchi ‘bad ball hitting’ is still used to describe batters who rarely walk because they swing at balls out of the strike zone. Anglicized terms for the same type of batter are バッドボール・ヒッター baddobōru hittā and フリー・スウィンガー furī suingā.

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by Joel | 13 June 2023 · 11:05 am

Homesteader Community Building

From Homesteading the Plains: Toward a New History, by Richard Edwards, Jacob K. Friefeld, and Rebecca S. Wingo (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), Kindle pp. 199-202:

4. Community policing of homestead claims was an effective mechanism to deter fraud. Homesteading scholars focused on what they assumed must have been paltry enforcement by overworked land office clerks and the miniscule force of GLO field investigators. In these conditions, they concluded, homestead claims must have been shot through with fraud; indeed, this conclusion buttressed the larger narrative to which they had already committed.

But it turns out that the Homestead Act also created a local network of watchful eyes. Mapping community relationships in the study area shows the emergence of keystone individuals in homesteading communities who helped create a local-community policing structure when no other existed. Neighbors, extended family members, would-be settlers in nearby towns, and others knew the ground, may have wanted it for themselves or their children, and didn’t want it stolen by swindlers and cheats. Just as in farming country today, where neighbors, family members, and others watch closely when ground in their vicinity becomes available due to the owner’s death or bankruptcy, so too it was in the homesteading regions. Indeed, [William G.] Comstock’s and [Bartlett] Richards’s attempted fraud came to disaster precisely because there were too many countervailing watchful eyes. What might have seemed anonymous and beyond scrutiny and hence ripe for fraud when viewed from Washington or New York or New Haven, or even from central Nebraska in the Comstock-Richards case, was in fact far more closely policed than expected.

…

6. The Homestead Act was not only a “single women’s law”; widows also participated at a high rate. In our study area, nearly as many widows filed initial entry claims as single women. But what greatly increased widows’ solitary participation—their unintended solitary participation—in homesteading was the deaths of their husbands. Women homesteaders succeeded by forming reciprocal socioeconomic relationships through employment and witness testimony between themselves and males in the wider community; they also created networks with other women that were crucial to their success. Our analysis highlights the need for scholars to further enrich this field.

7. Homesteading was not a solitary activity; it was a process of Americans from different backgrounds and regions mixing together to settle and form communities. They depended deeply on each other for survival and success. In our communities, keystone individuals emerged to provide economic, social, and political leadership in their neighborhoods. Immigrants from northwestern Europe tended to stake claims alongside native-born citizens, entering the social order of their new land. Central European immigrants, by contrast, more frequently created their own communities with their own leadership, thereby reproducing cultural landscapes more reminiscent of their homelands.

Settlement patterns and cultural differences thus separated communities of homesteaders. Different languages, religions, civic customs, community expectations, and patterns of family life all served to create distinctions. As Eric Foner noted, “In the late nineteenth century the most multicultural state in the Union was North Dakota,” but modern scholars have tended retrospectively to recategorize these varied peoples simply as “white,” thereby washing away their diversity. And while the walls between them were never as impermeable as those of race, these groups often required decades to overcome their differences and for diverse communities to become integrated. Even today we are left with certain communities that continue to proudly reflect their ethnic heritage in significant ways.

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by Joel | 11 June 2023 · 5:59 am

How Indian Territory Became Oklahoma

From Homesteading the Plains: Toward a New History, by Richard Edwards, Jacob K. Friefeld, and Rebecca S. Wingo (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), Kindle pp. 123-127:

In ongoing research we have been able to find comparable data for six other states. California, Kansas, and Minnesota appear to follow the Nebraska pattern; in southwestern Minnesota, the U.S.-Dakota War in 1862, with its tragic aftermath of the Mankato hangings, extinguished Indian land titles before the Homestead law became effective. New Mexico and Wyoming follow the Colorado pattern. Thus of the eleven states analyzed (counting North and South Dakota), in eight of them homesteading appears to have played little role in dispossession.

By contrast Indian Territory (Oklahoma) generally followed the Dakota pattern. Its particular history as the depository for Indian tribes from elsewhere, including the Five Civilized Tribes, imparted peculiar circumstances to the dispossession process, but clearly would-be homesteaders played a central role in dispossession.

The original inhabitants of what became Indian Territory were the Osage, Plains Apache, and to some extent the Comanche. Early in the nineteenth century their land titles were effectively extinguished to make way for other Indians, that is, to create Indian Territory (fig. 5.15). This original dispossession was unrelated to homesteading and predated it by several decades. There was, however, a second dispossession in Indian Territory that occurred when homesteaders and other whites desired the land of the resettled Indians.

…

As Rennard Strickland observed, “Oklahoma Indian tribes in a real sense were still sovereign—‘domestic dependent nations,’ in the words of Chief Justice John Marshall. Until that fateful year [1889], although subject to many federal regulations, Indians owned all the land that was to become Oklahoma. Whites within their domain were there on Indian sufferance or were government or military officials. Illegal intruders were subject to expulsion.”

Between 1870 and 1890 the population of Texas nearly tripled and the population of Kansas nearly quadrupled, and the land lying between them became increasingly alluring to whites. Cattle drives north through Indian Territory brought whites into the region. Railroads, land agents, and others, including Elias Boudinot, member of a distinguished Cherokee family, agitated for opening unoccupied Indian Territory lands. C. C. Carpenter, a “Boomer” (homesteader) leader, assembled a group of farmers in 1879 on the Kansas border with the intention of settling in the so-called Unassigned Lands in the middle of the territory (fig. 5.15); only the stationing of federal troops in nearby Kansas towns prevented the threatened invasion. Other expeditions of settlers organized and entered the territory with varying success. Meanwhile advocates for opening parts of Indian Territory organized a national publicity campaign to change federal policy, and it soon had success. By 1885 President Chester A. Arthur had declared in favor of opening Indian lands, and on March 23, 1889, President Benjamin Harrison, during his third week in office, issued a proclamation authorizing eligible persons to enter identified lands for the purpose of making homestead claims.

…

In a relatively brief span from late 1889 to roughly 1906, these by-then-well-established resident tribes were given allotments or otherwise moved to small reservations and their “surplus” lands opened to white settlement (fig. 5.16). The most common method of opening Indian Territory lands was by “runs”: homesteaders were excluded from the opened tracts until a specific date and time, at which point the settlers literally raced to their desired plots, with the first to arrive winning the claim [hence “Sooners“]. Figure 5.17 shows the great increase in homesteaded acreage that was unleashed by the second dispossession, represented (approximately) in the figure by the dashed line.

Would-be homesteaders had repeatedly organized illegal and provocative white intrusions onto Indian lands and lobbied Congress and the national executive to extinguish Indian land titles. They succeeded.

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by Joel | 10 June 2023 · 5:14 am

Did Homesteading Cause Dispossession of Indian Lands?

From Homesteading the Plains: Toward a New History, by Richard Edwards, Jacob K. Friefeld, and Rebecca S. Wingo (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), Kindle pp. 127-128:

Although homesteading occurred in thirty states, this chapter has focused on the process in the Great Plains, its center of gravity. As we have seen, the relationship between homesteading and dispossession [of Indian lands] differed depending on place and time.

In the Nebraska pattern, which held for eastern and central Nebraska, the federal government had largely cleared Indian land titles even before passage of the Homestead Act [in 1862], and homesteading mainly served as an equalizing corrective to other federal land policies that had grossly favored speculators and other large operators. California, Kansas, and Minnesota appear to mostly follow the Nebraska pattern, though more detailed studies would likely reveal more nuanced local patterns.

In Colorado [which quickly became a territory in the wake of the Pike’s Peak Gold Rush in 1858], dispossession preceded homesteading by several decades, and homesteading simply came too late to have been a significant cause of dispossession. Montana followed the Colorado pattern, as did the northwest corner of Nebraska and seemingly New Mexico and Wyoming as well.

The Dakota pattern, by contrast, which characterized both Dakota Territory and Indian Territory, was driven by land seekers and their advocates becoming noisy and powerful advocates pressuring their federal representatives to open Indian lands to white settlement. In Dakota Territory and Indian Territory, homesteaders were not the only ones working to “restore” Indian lands, but their actions speeded up dispossession and emboldened federal leaders to open larger tracts of Indian lands for white settlement [in the wake of the Dawes Act in 1887].

This concludes our reexamination of the four stylized facts adopted by the scholarly consensus on homesteading. In analyzing the first three stylized facts, we find the consensus wrong or deeply flawed. In examining the fourth stylized fact, which links homesteading to dispossession, we arrive at a more nuanced conclusion than its simple statement allows. It is both wrong and right. Taken together, the consensus facts provide an altogether misleading interpretation of homesteading.

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by Joel | 8 June 2023 · 5:13 am

Calculating Homestead Fraud Rates

From Homesteading the Plains: Toward a New History, by Richard Edwards, Jacob K. Friefeld, and Rebecca S. Wingo (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), Kindle pp. 89-90:

After careful analysis, our most conservative (i.e., highest) estimate is that in the study area, 8.5 percent of proved-up homesteads may have been gained through fraud, and we derived plausible estimates of roughly half that rate. In these ten townships in the last decades of the nineteenth century, it appears that more than 91 percent of homesteads went to bona fide or “actual” settlers.

The evidence from Dawes and Custer Counties requires us to take a second look at the scholarly consensus regarding fraudulent homestead claims. Fred Shannon asserted an implicit fraud rate of between 22 percent and 37 percent; later scholars have contended that half of all homestead entries before 1900 were fraudulent or even that half of all homestead entries were fraudulent.

Our evidence makes those conjectures appear absurdly high. Rather than the homesteading process being rife with corruption and fraud, the results reported here suggest that the overwhelming majority of homestead patents on claims filed in the nineteenth century were probably valid; perhaps as many as 8.5 percent of patents issued may have been based on some form of fraud. The government granted a total of 80,103,409 acres as homesteads during the period 1868–1900. If we assume our estimated fraud rate of 8.5 percent applies to all these homesteads, then fraudulent claimants wrongly obtained approximately 6.8 million acres; alternatively, more than 73 of the 80 million acres were obtained by bona fide homesteaders.

So was homesteading more like the railroad giveaways or the modern Medicare program? The government gave 131.2 million acres to the railroads, and as Richard White has so eloquently demonstrated, much of this subsidy was unneeded and corrupt, simply a transfer of public assets to private individuals and corporations. Indeed, concerning just one transaction involving one railroad, and by no means the greatest fraud, financier Jay Cooke boasted that he gained “at once over 5 million acres between the Red River and the Missouri intact, not an acre of it lost. This of itself is worth a good deal more than the cost of the [rail]road on both coasts all the expenditures up to this date to say nothing of our other larger grant on the Pacific and in Minnesota & the completed railroad.” Cooke’s one land grab of 5 million acres was only slightly less than the 6.8 million acres that would have been lost to all fraudulent homestead claims (at the 8.5 percent rate) over the entire forty-year period.

By contrast, recent studies of improper payments and fraud in Medicare put the swindle rate at about 8.3 percent—extremely close to our most conservative estimate, 8.5 percent, of fraud in homesteading. Any loss of public land (or Medicare funds) to fraud is of course regrettable and wrong, but the exaggerated claims of Shannon and others of “an astonishing number” or “half were fraudulent” appear to have no basis in fact.

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by Joel | 7 June 2023 · 5:33 am

Nebraska Homesteader Demographics

From Homesteading the Plains: Toward a New History, by Richard Edwards, Jacob K. Friefeld, and Rebecca S. Wingo (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), Kindle pp. 71-72:

Custer County homesteaders in our townships ranged from 25 to 83 years of age, with 55.6 percent filing their final claims between the ages of 25 and 39. There were 292 men and 32 women who filed claims. A majority, 253 of the 324, or 78.1 percent, had been U.S. citizens before making their claim. Of these 253 citizens, 85, or 33.6 percent, migrated to Custer County from Iowa and other parts of Nebraska with the rest coming from the other states. Of the 71 noncitizens, 38, or 53.5 percent, came from central European areas of Austria, Bohemia, Poland, and Moravia.

In our five Dawes County townships, farther west than Custer County, the 297 successful homesteaders found flat grasslands cut by erosion and geological curiosities and bordered on the north by the pine ridge. A mosaic of mixed grasses covered a blend of sand, clay, and silt earth. These soils, along with the county’s 18 to 20 inches of rain per year and long periods of drought, made farming even more difficult than in Custer County, though it clearly did not stop homesteaders—domestic and foreign—from trying.

Homesteaders settled the area between 1887 and 1908, and 80.8 percent came during the 1890s alone. Their ages ranged from 21 to 87, with 54.5 percent of them proving up when they were between the ages of 25 and 39. There were 265 men and 32 women, the same number of women as in Custer County. Of the 297 homesteaders, 238, or 80.2 percent, were citizens; the remaining 59, or 19.8 percent, were noncitizens. Citizen claimants in Dawes County came predominantly from states stretching from the interior to the east coast, including 168, or 70.6 percent, of the 238 coming from Illinois, Iowa, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin; and 33, or 55.9 percent, of the 59 immigrant claimants came from Germany and England.

Homesteaders in both counties faced environmental disasters that complicated their progress. Grasshoppers plagued the state between 1874 and 1877. Hot winds scorched the crops. Drought hit the region for a hard twelve years between 1884 and 1895 and again between 1906 and 1913. The ten-year reprieve lured more settlers into the region; 197 individuals homesteaded in the study area between 1895 and 1904, demonstrating the enduring hope and short-term memory of those who dreamed of owning their own land.

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by Joel | 6 June 2023 · 5:17 pm

Database of Nebraska Homesteading

From Homesteading the Plains: Toward a New History, by Richard Edwards, Jacob K. Friefeld, and Rebecca S. Wingo (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), Kindle pp. 67-70:

To examine the extent of homesteading fraud more closely, we developed a database using the recently digitized homestead records; this chapter and chapters 6 and 7 report results obtained from this new data. Most previous studies of homesteading have been severely limited because researchers found it difficult to access the physical homestead records. Short of traveling to the National Archives or ordering costly paper copies of individual case files, scholars lacked easy access to the documents, and obtaining paper copies to construct a large database has often not been feasible. As a result scholarship has primarily employed anecdotes or the poor quality homesteading data reported in the General Land Office’s (GLO) annual reports, assembled by severely overworked land office clerks.

We use the digitized homestead records for Nebraska made available through a consortium that is digitizing all the case files of finalized homestead claims that are currently housed in paper form at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Nebraska, the state with the first homestead claim, was also the first to be digitized. The consortium includes NARA, the Homestead National Monument of America, University of Nebraska, Fold3.com (later Ancestry.com), and FamilySearch.com. Fold3.com and Ancestry.com are making these records available (for a subscription fee) to the public for the first time; the University of Nebraska is providing additional metadata for scholarly research on the Nebraska records. We developed a study area of five townships each in Custer County (central Nebraska) and Dawes County (western Nebraska). The bulk of homesteading in the Custer County townships occurred between 1885 and 1904, whereas in Dawes County homesteading occurred mainly between 1890 and 1899, both with their last claims occurring in 1908 (fig. 4.1).

…

At the time we began our research in the summer of 2013, the digitization of the main land offices servicing these counties, Broken Bow for Custer County and Chadron for Dawes County, was complete. During our processing, we realized that the Broken Bow office, which was open from 1890 to 1908, and the Chadron office, open from 1887 to 1894, did not in fact process all the records for our counties. The Grand Island office, open from 1869 to 1893, and the Alliance office, open from 1890 to 1908, also served homesteaders in our townships. The Broken Bow office opened in response to regional demand, while the Alliance office eventually replaced the more remotely located Chadron office to serve the sparse western Nebraska population better.

Independent scholar Russell Lang from Craig, Nebraska, meticulously classified all Nebraska townships based on the “methods of land transfers from the public domain to private and governmental entities.” Using his map, we identified five townships each in Custer and Dawes Counties in which the majority of the land was transferred via the Homestead Act. We defined these ten townships as our study area; five in Custer County … with 324 claims, and five in Dawes County … with 297 claims.

We created a database of all 621 successful homesteaders in these townships, recording application number and date, name, legal description of land, acreage claimed, gender, country of origin and citizenship application date (if applicable), state of origin (if applicable), age, and other information included in affidavits such as acreage broken, improvements made, and any absences from the land. Our database is thus not a sample but rather a full census of these townships. Where relevant, we also collected information outside the records on claimants’ land transfer, military, and census records. The military and census records are available through Fold3 and Ancestry.com; the land transfer records required us to go to the historical societies for both counties. In addition to collecting demographic data, we mapped the homestead claims. To fully explore the particulars of the homesteaded lands, we tracked down original survey maps for each township and overlaid them with modern geospatial data. We also recorded all four witness names included in each Proof of Posting for every homesteader in order to generate sociolegal networks of the community within each township.

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by Joel | 4 June 2023 · 4:26 pm

Better Statistics on Homesteading

From Homesteading the Plains: Toward a New History, by Richard Edwards, Jacob K. Friefeld, and Rebecca S. Wingo (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), Kindle pp. 33, 37-40:

We can make a more direct and useful calculation using acres as follows. In 1860 farmland in the seventeen-state West was 17,839,000 acres and in 1900 was 249,222,000 acres; therefore, the growth in farmland was 231,383,000 acres; with 76,480,436 acres homesteaded (counting proved-up and in-process), the percent of farmland gained via the Homestead Act was 33.1 percent, hardly the “small role” Cochrane asserted.

In sum, correcting Shannon’s analysis shows that his estimate of “less than a sixth” of the new farms originating from homesteads is badly misleading. In the twenty-nine homesteading states, we found that 32.6 percent of new farms probably developed from homesteads. But more relevantly, in the seventeen-state West, we calculated that 63.9 percent of new farms created originated in homestead claims, contrary to Shannon’s assertions and those of the many historians who repeated them. And we found that 33.1 percent of new farmland in the West derived from homestead claims, making the ratio of purchased to homesteaded land about two to one, not the “three or four times” Hine asserted. The bottom line is that between 1863 and 1900 homesteading accounted for approximately two out of three new farms created and one-third of the new farmland in the West.

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A more troubling question is why Shannon’s numerically wrong calculations and misleading statistical presentation have lingered for so long and found such ready acceptance among today’s scholars. The reasons scholars uncritically accepted his results are fundamentally unknowable, but the pattern is consistent with the hypothesis that having accepted that homesteading was somehow a sham, these scholars quickly welcomed any supporting evidence without checking it. It is long past time when such “evidence” should shape our understanding of homesteading.

Correcting the Historical Record

We can collect the findings from above to present a more accurate picture of homesteading in the period 1863–1900 in the West. First, we find that homesteading’s role in creating farms varied substantially among the seventeen states, as shown in figure 2.2. States where homesteading was very important in farm formation are Colorado (86.6 percent), Idaho (84.6 percent), South Dakota (80.3 percent), and Washington (96.7 percent). In some states, those with the highest density of homesteads, the number of homesteads patented actually exceeded the number of new farms created and still surviving by 1900—for example, Montana (109.6 percent), North Dakota (113.3 percent), Oregon (114.5 percent), and Wyoming (109.6 percent).

Although initially puzzling, this pattern (exceeding 100 percent) is quite understandable in areas where farms were undergoing the long-term process of farm consolidation. Imagine a section of land, one square mile, where there were no farms in 1860; in the next decade, four homesteaders each file 160-acre claims and prove up. In 1870 there would be four farms, all derived from homesteads, so we would say 100 percent of the farms in this section started as homesteads. Then, over the next thirty years, three of the four homesteaders sold out to the fourth. By 1900, our square mile would have four times (400 percent) the number of homesteads filed as functioning farms. As the example shows, how many homesteads resulted in functioning farms is highly time-dependent in a context of consolidation: the longer the period, the higher the ratio of original homesteads to functioning farms. For the West as a whole, that is, the sixteen states west of the Missouri River plus Minnesota, homesteading likely contributed up to 63.9 percent of the new farms created.

These findings are broadly consistent with Gilbert Fite’s conclusion: the charge that not many settlers actually obtained free land “is definitely not true if applied to the Minnesota-Dakota-Nebraska-Kansas frontier in the late 1860s and 1870s. . . . [Between 1863 and 1880] 86,169 farmers in Minnesota, Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas obtained patents [and another] 50,673 who had filed entries before June 30, 1880, gained their title [later]. Thus between 1863 and 1880, 136,842 of the 242,000 new farms were settled as homesteads. . . . This was about 56.5 percent of the total farms created. . . . About two-thirds of the farms in Minnesota were originally established by homesteaders.”

Homesteading was also important but less so in the proportion of land newly converted to farming in the West. As shown in figure 2.3, the states with the highest proportions are Idaho (65.4 percent), Washington (54.4 percent), North Dakota (50.3 percent), and Oregon (44.7 percent). Overall in the seventeen-state West, homesteading accounted for 33.1 percent of farmland added. Since homesteads accounted for a much larger percentage of farms than homesteaded acres did of new farm acres, the obvious implication is that homesteaded farms were on average smaller than farms obtained through purchase or other methods. This result would be expected, given that homesteads were capped at 160 acres (except under the Kinkaid and Enlarged Homestead Acts), whereas farms created via purchase, military warrants, agricultural college scrip, or other methods were not. This result again demonstrates why one cannot draw conclusions about the number of homesteaders vs. other farmers based on acreage unless one also knows the average size of each group’s farms.

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What picture of homesteading, then, emerges from the more soundly grounded statistics reviewed above? Considering the West during the period 1863–1900, and remembering our earlier caution about the approximate nature of the data, both of the stylized facts we began the chapter with have been shown to be incorrect. The first assertion, that homesteading was a minor factor in farm making and most farmers purchased their land, might be replaced, based on the data in figure 2.2, with this finding:

Homesteading was a major factor in farm making in the West; before 1900 it was responsible for nearly two out of every three new farms and almost a third of the new land brought into farming.

The second stylized fact, that most homesteaders failed to prove up their claims, is refuted by a corrected reanalysis of Donaldson’s data for the period 1863–80 and by the Historical Statistics evidence for 1881–1900; instead, it might be replaced with:

Most homesteaders—between 55 percent to 63 percent before 1900—succeeded in obtaining title to their land during the first phase of homesteading.

This is a nearly complete reversal of what scholars for more than a half century have accepted as the received wisdom on homesteading and have been teaching their students.