JF Ptak Science Books Post 2338
[Image source: Boston Public Library, here.]
This propagandistic political broadside and map had an influence in the thinking of voters in the 1884 presidential election--and in fact it was mostly wrong. That "wrongness" was perpetrated for the Democratic Party at the expense of the Republicans, and held influence for dozens of years in helping to form the idea that the Republicans gave away huge chunks of American land to railroad companies in corrupt deals.
The map: How the public domain has been squandered, map showing the 139,403,026 acres of the people's land - equal to 871,268 farms of 160 acres each, worth at $2 an acre, $278,806,052, given by Republican Congresses to railroad corporations , published by the Rand, McNally & Company, Chicago, 1884, is the culprit.
Well, some healthy percentage of those land deals were rigged/crooked--but not nearly all; and in fact there were huge sums of money raised by the government in granting enormous land offerings to the railroad companies, who were also monetarily encouraged to continue making their ways west. There were definitely multiple aspect in all of this.
I don't want to sound like so much prattle here--this is a long and complex story with a lot of sway, but the fact of the matter is that the entire history of land grants was not all entirely bad. (On the other hand, it was for the Native Americans, who were in large part the recipients of many of these new settlers...)
Part of the Depression/Financial Crisis of 1873 was a direct result of questionable practices associated with the land grants practiced by Jay Cooke's Northern Pacific, which was bankrupted and which helped crash the capital market. And the promise of an agrarian revolution for proletariat farmers responding to these offers by the government and the railroads didn't make it, nor did the visualized industrial centers that were supposed to spring up as a result of the railroad expansion.
In any event what was shown in this map was incorrect--and wildly so, and probably intentionally, which makes it "propaganda". The amounts of land involved were gigantic, but not so immense as shown above. By making the map in a somewhat crude and block-y fashion, the mapmakers/political hacks who created it glossed over the fine bits of the land grants, which wound up over-representing the grants by some 400%.
For example, Iowa is shown at about 90% land grant (and giving rise to the belief for decades that almost the entire state had been given away by the Republicans) when the actual number was 13%--still a lot of land, but not nearly the entire state. Ditto Kansas (shown at 62% but actually 16%, California (40% shown but actually 12%), Michigan (75% to 9%), and Minnesota (70% to 19%).1
The presentation worked for the Democrats, who wound up winning the Cleveland v. Blaine presidential election of 1884--first time in six consecutive elections (since 1856) that the D's won. (It was a squeeker; Cleveland 219 electoral and 20 states to Blaines 182/18, 4.914 million to 4.856 million, or 48.9% to 48.33%. Tough election.
Also there was taint enough for both parties for the both fair and foul land grant deals--the Homested Act, Preemption Act, Southern Homestead Act, Desert Land Act, Land Grant College Act, and so on, all had problematic parts to their histories.
That said, there weren't many other broadsides with such a wide effect as this one.
Notes:
1. Data from John Stover, American Railroads, 2008, p. 85.
Also see this nice and concise writeup on teh Library of Congress site/amsp for a history of U.S. railroad maps.
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