We know the United States is a land of stark economic inequality, but was this inequality inevitable? Or does history provide alternative frameworks for thinking about the nature of the American republic, ones that stress communitarian values rather than a winner-take-all mentality? In The Lost Tradition of Economic Equality in America, 1600 –1870, Daniel R. Mandell argues that a genuine alternative was present at the nation's founding; he reminds us that the idea of the American republic relied in part on a rough economic equality among citizens as a safeguard against tyranny. That equality would be based on land ownership. Thomas Jefferson, in particular, believed that a republic of small, independent landowners would stand the best chance of survival in a world rife with unchecked power.

The ideal, however, encountered resistance almost as soon as the Revolutionary War ended. An opposing tradition—what today we would call the liberal faith in the market and private property—gradually chipped away the link between economic and political equality. During the founders’ generation, Americans could claim that (with the perpetual exception of slavery) their society was less unequal than any society in Europe. But afterward, as industrialization spread in the North and slave-based agriculture dominated the South, many households found their dream of land ownership replaced by a life of permanent wage labor. As bank financing enabled more speculation, land increasingly became a commodity rather than the locus of republican virtue. Legislatures and courts protected individual property rights, enabling speculators to amass large tracts of land. The emphasis on property rights, in turn, made redistribution of land and debt jubilees nearly impossible; secure property rights also encouraged ambitious men to argue against any limits on landholding and other capital accumulation. In short, a republic that had aspired to widespread land ownership and the promotion of the common weal instead became a society increasingly divided between landless wage earners and the owners of capital. (As Thomas Picketty has famously argued, in the long run, the returns on capital always outpace economic growth—a further blow to economic equality.)

Mandell provides an encyclopedic account of the many voices pushing back against these developments. The book begins with the Levellers and Diggers—Christian radicals and agrarian proto-communists who gained influence during the British civil wars. Also noteworthy was the romanticized view that Europeans had of Native American societies; according to this myth, the Indigenous tribes were more egalitarian than were Europeans. (Of course, such views did not preclude seizing tribal lands and turning them over to white settlers.) Readers will not be surprised to learn that both the First and Second Great Awakenings intensified calls for more economic fairness, but Mandell also resurrects the history of the National Reform Association, a communitarian movement launched in 1844 seeking to revive the tradition of economic equality yet seldom receiving attention in standard history texts. He includes, as well, a slightly incongruous chapter on schoolbooks: conservatives, Mandell argues, used them to inculcate a nationalist republicanism and coax young readers to accept social hierarchy as a means to maintain social order.

Perhaps counterintuitively, during the Jacksonian period ideals of fairness evolved into “democracy”—in this case, the belief that expanding the franchise could, by itself, ensure political equality. This is perhaps the most important development that Mandell must explain: how the vision of a nation made up of independent landowning households gave way to an acceptance of wage labor, inherited power, and institutional privileges such as corporations—in short, to a permanent (if mostly low-level) class war assuaged only by the sacred right to vote. Mandell devotes a chapter to explaining how the link between political and economic equality was severed. Even before the Panic of 1819, the number of landless men rose, prompting calls to remove the property qualification; the states duly complied. Simultaneously, workingmen's movements countered the entrenched elites by creating another form of elitism: a right to vote that excluded women and many non-white men. (They succeeded. In 1860, only five states, all of them in New England, gave black men the franchise. Women could not vote in any state or territory.) In effect, republican equality could continue to exist by shifting the source of virtue from land to labor—but only of white men, who thereby earned the right to vote. This shift was probably the only way to preserve equality in politics, given the rising structural inequalities in the economy.

The tradition of economic equality can point to significant accomplishments. One was the scrapping of primogeniture and entail, laws that had kept property holdings intact by limiting who could inherit—usually the eldest son. Another major achievement was the federal government's distribution and sale of a large portion of its landholdings to over a million homesteaders. And yet, Mandell is right to call the tradition of economic equality “lost.” If anything, this history demonstrates that the tradition was always weak and contingent, coming to the fore only during periods of crises and extreme social tension. Moreover, widespread land distribution was possible only if governments took land from Indigenous and non-white peoples; and this was always done under the assumption that the land would go mostly to “productive” white households (and corporations). Attempts to redistribute land always came up against political and cultural limits; ultimately, the proposal during the American Civil War to confiscate Rebel-owned land and redistribute it to freedmen hit the firmest barrier of all: the color line. Mandell argues that the failure of radical Republicans to get the measure through Congress doomed economic equality to being a marginal idea at best.

Mandell usefully recovers the many and varied attempts to forge a link between economic and political equality in American culture from colonial times to the Reconstruction era, and he reminds readers that there have been numerous cries for greater economic justice since. Even so, The Lost Tradition seems as much a eulogy of an idea as it is a history. Perversely, I came away from it concluding that, in America, economic equality never had a chance.