Let's all be our own carpenters!

I ought to have said, too, that we live in dead men’s houses; as, for instance, in this of the Seven Gables!

But we shall live to see the day, I trust, when no man shall build his house for posterity. … If each generation were allowed and expected to build its own houses, that single change, comparatively unimportant in itself, would imply almost every reform which society is now suffering for [1].

I have already said ideas like this were in the air all during my youth. Brownson actually wrote up a plan to see such a thing implemented. For him, it was the only way to fix the problems with society. Reform of the spirit is not enough; six thousand years of experience proves it. Brownson, like me, thinks that everybody deserves a level playing field at birth. No more of this being born rich or born poor business. “A man shall have all he honestly acquires, so long as he himself belongs to the world in which he acquires it,” he writes. “But his power over his property must cease with his life, and his property must then become the property of the state, to be disposed of by some equitable law for the use of the generation which takes his place” [2]. He knows, too, what a monumental effort such a reform will take. “It will come, if it ever come at all, only at the conclusion of war, the like of which the world as yet has never witnessed”[3]. I hope to God we could accomplish it easier than that.

It was quite typical for Americans in this time to worry about these things. How could we have done away with monarchy and aristocracy and not have done away with hereditary property? Indeed, many scholars have seen in my comments a connection to the father of American democracy himself, Thomas Jefferson. According to Holly Jackson, “Jefferson held that generational sovereignty would be required for the true practice of democracy so that no American would be chained to his predecessors, breaking from the old-world traditions of inherited fortune and misfortune in family lines. … Government by the people, according to the needs and values of their own time, would require radical noncontinuity with the ancestral past” [4].

So I guess I'm just trying to say that, yes, I am a radical, but I'm also exemplifying a very American point of view. I'm just participating in the movement to create an identity for our new country. 

[1] Hawthorne 127 

[2] Brownson 245-246 

[3] ibid 246 

[4] Jackson 276