Securing the Fruits of Labor: The American Concept of Wealth Distribution 1765-1900.

Securing the Fruits of Labor: The American Concept of Wealth Distribution 1765-1900. By James L. Huston (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998. xxiv plus 483pp. $65.00).

Nineteenth-century Americans loved to boast that in no country on earth was wealth more broadly and more democratically diffused than in theirs. Into the ear of every passing foreigner they poured their convictions on this point. Americans still believe it, even though there is now no advanced industrialized economy in the late twentieth-century world whose wealth and income distribution is farther away from equality than that of the United States. James Huston's careful reading of nineteenth-century economic convictions goes a long way to unravel the history of that apparent paradox.

Nineteenth-century Americans took it as a point of faith that a widespread diffusion of wealth was indispensable to a lasting republic. At the same time, Huston shows, they rarely imagined that much sustained socio-economic work was necessary to secure it. The linchpin within this system of ideas was the labor theory of wealth. Let every economic actor enjoy the full fruits of his labor and a rough-and-ready economic equality would follow. Only two external forces could seriously derange this natural economy. The first was Malthus' nightmare--a piling up of populations beyond the economic capacities of the land. The second was the manipulation of the economy by men of artificial rank and status employing their privileged access to politics to leach wealth from those who produced it to those who did not. The Americans' answer to the Malthusian specter was Western conquest. It was the second nightmare, the nightmare of artificial economic manipulation, that shook them awake at night and fueled the rhetoric of their politics. That an economy might generate economic inequalities from within was, Huston shows, an idea that most nineteenth-century Americans tenaciously resisted.

It is the virtue of Huston's book to demonstrate how deeply seated these convictions were during the century and a quarter after the Revolution and how much ideological work they did. Pursuing his unit ideas through a very broad range of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sources, Huston carefully and persuasively pieces together an economic ideology that was rarely systematically enunciated but everywhere present. Like most strong ideas, these held more than one political valence. The labor theory of wealth and the "political economy of aristocracy" were staple themes among both labor radicals and social conservatives, slave holders and slavery's critics. They held the existing arrangements of wealth up to moral and political scrutiny even as they deflected attention away from the everyday processes of economic accumulation that created them.

It is where Huston turns from these sure-footed textual readings to context that disappointments begin to crowd in. Impressed by the stability of his unit ideas, Huston has chosen to frame his story as a narrative of long-term stasis and abrupt transformation whose exaggerations are puzzlingly at odds with the cautious tone of his substantive findings. For a century and a quarter, he writes, the American concept of wealth distribution persisted "without revision or deviation." And then, like the Deacon's one-horse shay, it fell apart utterly and absolutely. Into the 189Os, the axioms of the "Age of the American Revolution" endured; by 1900, they were "dead."

To explain this phenomenon, Huston posits a static economy dominated by small-scale agricultural and skilled craft production that endured, without essential change, from the 176Os into the 1890s, when it was suddenly and irrevocably overrun by large-scale industrial corporations. This reading of economic history in the image of the history of ideas leads to some peculiar distortions. The slave and cotton South falls almost wholly out of focus. Huston's assertion that the era had only one fundamental transformation and that the intensification of market relations cannot count as such seems, after two decades of historical work on the early nineteenth-century economy, a willful simplification. His assertion that the "unskilled worker" was a "person nearly invisible before 1880," will come as a surprise to the labor historians who have chronicled the nineteenth-century economy's army of poorly paid pick-and-shovel canal diggers, field hands, track layers, navvies, and general laborers.

Huston's notion of extraordinary immobility and catastrophic transformation does not serve his intellectual history better. For all their talk of the just and natural rewards of labor, nineteenth-century Americans also knew the market theory of wages, and they were quick to act upon it when it suited them. The public language of twentieth-century economics, by the same token, hardly shed all its moral convictions with regard to the distribution of wealth, as the deeply contested fights over minimum wage legislation and graduated taxation, among others, attest. Huston's simple correspondence theory of the relationship between society and ideas--in which deep economic structures and unit convictions move with the synchrony of a practiced ballroom dance pair--seems a throwback to a distant era in the sociology of ideas.

Readers who push their way past Huston's framing devices, however, will find the effort rewarded. "A general and tolerably equal distribution of... property is the whole basis of national freedom," Noah Webster declared in 1787. Securing the Fruits of Labor goes a long way toward explaining what Americans meant, and didn't mean, in an era in which that sentiment was a rhetorical commonplace of their politics.