Give Me Liberty

We look too much at charts and statistics. We would learn more by looking at America.

Oddly enough, statistics appear only in times of agitation and distress. Their function would appear to be that of omens of worse to come. We seem to have a morbid taste for them, like that of children for ghost stories that raise the hair. The American air has not been so full of fragmentary statistics since the Panic of 1893.

I read again, for instance, that less than 10 per cent of our population own more than 90 per cent of the wealth. This alarmed me in 1893.

I read also that a hundred years ago 80 per cent of our population owned property and that today the percentage is 23. Such an expropriation, if it has occurred, is alarming. But it seems to me even more alarming that many American minds accept this statement as true upon no better proof than that they have read it, and from it conclude, first, that “something must be done,” and, second, that the proper thing to do is to take ownership away from individuals and have property administered by The State; which means, by autocratic rulers giving orders through an enormous bureaucracy.

When I look at America, I do not see that more than three citizens in four are destitute of property. What I see is that the forms of property have changed. I suspect that if any trained statistician would state that nearly four in five of us own no property, he would be speaking of forms of property known as “real property” a hundred years ago.

Fewer men own farms because better transportation and refrigerator cars have made it possible to deliver good food to large populations in cities and because improved farm machinery makes larger acreages inevitable. Fewer men own houses because many prefer to rent apartments. Almost all the thousands of little factories, worked by a family and a neighbor’s son or two, and all the little water-mills grinding corn and wheat, and making paper, have disappeared. On the streams of America there are no longer the little potato-starch factories, and the cracker factories, and the saw mills. In statistics it will appear that the Great Biscuit Company, one owner, has replaced five thousand owners of little cracker factories.

Yet how many men, a hundred years ago, owned endowment insurance policies? or a share in a building-and-loan association? or a few shares of Great Biscuit Company stock? or an automobile, a radio, an electric refrigerator and a typewriter? The fact is that in statistics I myself appeared as one of the dispossessed, when my annual income ran in five figures, and I know a dozen persons who pay large income taxes and own no “real property” whatever.

Looking at America, I wonder also about the statistical percentage of Americans who are somehow existing on an income below the “line of subsistence.”

I lived for some years in a farmhouse near a village of 800 people in a submarginal farming region in the Ozarks, technically known as rural slums. The upstanding, decidedly self-respecting Americans whose homes are those clean frame houses, warmed by stoves, lighted by kerosene, have no idea that they live in slums. They live as their fathers lived, and they like it. Every time they bundled their families into the car and drove to California, or Texas, or Idaho, they returned saying there’s no place like home.

They like fresh, cold water bubbling out of the rock, and watermelons cooled in the spring. They enjoy fox-chases, and fiddling, and basket dinners. Forty years ago they needed no “cash money” whatever except to pay their taxes. Today they have plenty to eat and room to shelter their relatives whose jobs have failed in the cities, and though they feel the pinch of taxes, they get along all right on a very few dollars a week from cream-checks.

In the town there are not sixty persons who would appear in statistics above the “line of subsistence.” In the whole county, only eight incomes are above the $1,000 a year which then showed on income-tax returns.

Yet this village has electric lights, a water and a sewer system, telephones of course, and a paved main street brilliant at night with Neon signs. We saw first-run moving pictures often before New York did. Our beauty shop had the latest equipment for facials, manicures, permanent waves.

With not twenty exceptions, the houses are pretty little houses, bungalows and stone cottages, well cared for, with lawns and foundation plantings, plumbing, ice boxes, telephones, radios. There are a number of electric refrigerators in town, and several electric ranges, though many women still use blue-flame kerosene ranges. Nearly every family has a car. The washerwomen use electric washing machines. Most of the men wear overalls except when they dress up, but you could find no more tasteful or more smartly worn clothes than the women’s inexpensive dresses. They all wore silk stockings, of course.

This village is no exception. Drive along the highways and you pass through such villages every few miles. A large part of the population of all of them is below the statistical line of subsistence.

I gather from these observed facts that there must be some millions of men and women in this country who, on paper, appear as in the direst need of rehabilitation, and who would be mortally offended if you told them so.