Land Settlement for the Unemployed

Report Outline
New and Old Policies in Federal Land Settlement
Origin and Aim of Subsistence Homesteads Project
Plans for Use of the Subsistence Homesteads Fund
Federal Colonization Proposals; State Experiments
Land Settlement Practices of Foreign Countries

New and Old Policies in Federal Land Settlement

Acquisition by the Department of the Interior of land in West Virginia on which will be established a colony for unemployed coal miners and their families, announced last week, constituted the intitial step in actual application of a new federal experiment in land settlement. The West Virginia project and a somewhat similar enterprise started by the Dayton (Ohio) Council of Social Agencies, which has been given federal support, are the first to benefit from a $25,000,000 fund provided by Congress to aid in the purchase of subsistence homesteads. This little-understood venture, authorized by an inconspicuous eight-line section of the National Recovery Act, has been undertaken as a means of permanently improving the economic position of a segment of the unemployed population. In its broader aspects, it is a movement which has as its ultimate objective the decentralization of industry and the development in the United States of a better balanced society based on a carefully planned economic order.

The present program for providing government assistance in placing families on the land differs distinctly from the homestead policies under which the public domain was opened for settlement. The great resources of the public land areas of the West and the absence of crop surplus problems such as those which have depressed agriculture during the last decade permitted the federal government in earlier days to pass laws offering liberal inducements to prospective settlers on vacant lands, with no provision for directing or supervising the movement from the standpoint of economic or human considerations. While the Bureau of Reclamation has given careful attention to such matters in carrying out its irrigation and settlement projects, settlements under the homestead laws, which reached their peak in 1913, were encouraged by a policy based only on the idea of bringing about the occupation “of the wilderness areas and the creation of additional states beyond the frontiers of the original thirteen states.”

In contrast, the policy behind the current homestead project aims at supervised utilization of small land areas rather than unrestrained development of vast tracts. It has a social rather than a political purpose. And it is advanced chiefly as a corrective of industrial conditions unknown in the earlier period.