Public land: Our great equalizer

What to do with public land has been a conundrum for us since before the ink was dry on our Constitution. If you look at a map of the United States as it existed in 1787, you’ll see the 13 original states, but also a vast swath of land called the Northwest Territory that wasn’t included within any state’s border.

A few years later, after the Louisiana Purchase, the United States doubled in size and pushed our nation’s border westward to the Mississippi River. Thus began the debate over how this land should be occupied.

Leading this debate were two of our founders, Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, who approached this question from different philosophical standpoints that frame the debate to this day.

Hamilton, a closet monarchist, wanted to impose the European model of land tenure on the newly acquired property of the United States. Under this system, new land would be given to wealthy elites to establish an American aristocracy. He argued that, as in Europe, this new land-owning aristocracy would provide built-in support for the government that made them rich through land.

Hamilton envisioned that the Earl of Ohio or the Baron of Louisiana would populate their fiefdoms with serfs who would break the soil, fill the land and share the products with their feudal lords. The lords would kick back some of the increase to the government (or the crown, if you prefer), and raise an army of serfs to defend the nation, if required.

The European model had functioned for centuries after the fall of Rome, and Hamilton believed it would work here as well. To him, as the nation expanded, so would the aristocratic class, thus providing the backbone of the new country.

Jefferson, an anti-Federalist rebel, was aghast at this idea. He had a bellyful of monarchs and aristocrats and posed another option. Jefferson’s ideal of the yeoman farmer would prevail, and the new nation would expand on the shoulders of the common American frontiersmen who would build the United States ever westward, farm by farm, town by town.

Hamilton’s thinking was old, Jefferson’s new. Hamilton was elitist and top-down. Jefferson was democratic and bottom-up. Those two schools of thought about land are with us today.

When the dust settled after Manifest Destiny, and the country stretched coast to coast, the government instituted various homestead acts to encourage population growth in the nation’s vast interior. We, in the American West, live in the world that Jefferson shaped.

But not every acre was settled by homesteaders and the towns that sprang up around them. There remain more than a million square miles of unsettled land that is still in the public’s hands, and it should remain that way. Every citizen shares ownership of this land. It is our American heritage, and a common touch point for us. We can all use it, because it is in OUR hands. This land equalizes us.

When we hear political forces clamor for the public’s land to be sold, we should remember the tension between the Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian models of land tenure. If we permit our public land heritage to be sold to the highest bidder, for whatever reason, we accept Hamilton’s misguided notion that our country should belong to an aristocratic class of oligarchs instead of “we the people.”

The choice is pretty stark. We can cash out our shared land holdings in order to fund federal profligacy by selling our public domain to wannabe earls and barons, and thus become a nation of strip malls and trophy ranches coast to coast. The question becomes, “What shall we do with our shared soil?” We can pave it over so that rich folks can get richer. That seems to be the direction our Wyoming congressional delegation is leaning and, for the life of me, I can’t figure out why — other than tossing a posthumous bone to Hamilton.

Or we can scratch and claw to preserve our public lands, and keep them out of the greedy hands of Wall Street elites. If we choose that course, we’ll be able to bequeath the legacy of democratically held land to our great-grandchildren from a generation that loves them and wants them to enjoy what is rightfully theirs. We will keep our shared soil fertile, to nourish the roots of the American middle class. We can pass along to them the gift that Thomas Jefferson gave us.