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Ownership in the United States incorporates notions of an exclusive relationship to land (Fiske 1991). Owning land has come to mean defending the inviolability of privacy and private property. Outcomes of these culturally shaped relationships to land are apparent in land-use and inheritance patterns. Typically, an American individual or family depends substantially on an inheritance of land from ancestors to achieve status while professing to being self-made (Clignet 1992; Salamon 1992). Property rights are understood to be relatively unlimited in the United States and to carry no obligation for wise use of the land (Strange 1988). Environmental degradation by farming, ranching, or mining that occurs on private property is therefore largely ignored; U.S. land is not considered a public resource or common property (Jorgensen 1984). "Land is a commodity that you can own and if you wish willfully destroy" (Strange 1988, p. 202). Currently, landlords own 70 percent of U.S. farmland and rent out nearly two-thirds of their holdings (Gilbert and Beckley 1993). Majority control of community land thus may be with owners who live elsewhere and have no vested interests in community services (or other indexes of quality) supported by real estate tax dollars.
"Social mobility is a realizable goal symbolized by landownership." Land as a commodity underlies a third cultural ideal, that of social mobility. Our individualistic and capitalistic society is based on the notion that if you work hard you can get ahead and do better than your parents did. Government policies such as the Homestead Act of 1863, inheritance laws that favor equal opportunities to all heirs, and the income tax system's bias toward homeowners exemplify the national value placed on landownership as the means to attain the American dream (Strauss 1971; Perrin 1977). The symbolic ladder of upward mobility is climbed by property ownership; conversely, one moves downward without it. Property is a measure of status, viewed as a source of economic security and a measure of a worthy citizen (Strauss 1971; Tocqueville reprinted 1990).
One passes through progressive stages of landownership if one achieves the American dream (Perrin 1977). One moves from tenant status to that of ownership of successively larger farms, according to this ideal of social mobility. Land simultaneously provides status, as well as shelter or livelihood. Landownership, especially in earlier historic periods, allowed people to use property mobility to attain social mobility without a change in occupation (Thernstrom 1968). In particular, immigrants pursuing the American dream through painstaking accumulation of property holdings have improved their social standing. Property ownership, however, also is an indicator of whether mobility is achieved by being symbolic of income differentials, racial inequalities, or geographical differences (Hacker 1983; Perrin 1977).
Jefferson was opposed to the social immobility and perpetuation of
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