The Landless Man and the Manless Land

Abstract

Pebbles was referring to the army's late nineteenth-century experiment in fighting urban poverty by resettling the city poor on farmlands of their own, complete with houses, tools, livestock, and subsistence until they should eventually become self-sufficing, independent landholders. Originally there were three such colonies: Fort Romie in California, Fort Amity in Colorado, and Fort Herrick in Ohio. But Herrick soon became a refuge for inebriates and ceased to be a back-to-the-land vehicle for the urban poor. Thus the focus here is on the two western settlements--Romie and Amity-both pilot projects for what the army hoped would become large-scale, government-funded programs to reclaim three million poor from the depths of the evil city. That they failed was a combination of circumstance, bad luck, and an inability to convince politicians of the plan's feasibility. The idea of rural superiority is as old as ancient times. Even as the industrial revolution began, such high priests as de Tocqueville and Jefferson sang the glories of pastoral life. As nineteenth-century industrial capitalism flowered, spotlighting the ever-challenging, but chaotic and often dismal, city, many English and American voices urged a return to the virtues of tilling the earth. And numerous land colonies, often utopian or religious in nature, provided a more tangible protest against changes clearly visible, but not always understood. One expression of these common sentiments came in 1890 in General William Booth's provocative book, In Darkest England and the Way Out, which