"America’s Lost Egalitarian Tradition" by Sean Wilentz, in Daedalus (Winter 2002), Norton’s Woods, 136 Irving St., Cambridge, Mass. 02138.

Equality in America comes in many fla-days is equality of wealth, laments vors—equality of opportunity, equality of Wilentz, a historian at Princeton University. races, equality of sexes, to name just three. When the nation was founded, But one variety seldom mentioned these Americans disagreed about many things, but not, in general, he says, about what Thomas Jefferson called the "numberless instances of wretchedness" that stemmed from gross inequalities of property. As Noah Webster, the staunch Connecticut Federalist, said in support of the Constitution in 1787, "a general and tolerably equal distribution of landed property is the whole basis of national freedom" and "the very soul of a republic."

The actual distribution of property then did not live up to that egalitarian ideal, of course. On the eve of the Revolution, by one recent analysis, the richest one percent of Americans held more than 10 percent of the nation’s total wealth. Even so, the inequality of wealth in that era was much less than it was in Great Britain and Europe—and much less than it would be in later periods in the United States.

"Because the vast preponderance of American wealth came from the land, because American land was plentiful, and because ownership of the land was widely distributed" (compared with the Old World), observes Wilentz, Americans then could imagine their country as a kind of utopia. All wealth was created by human labor, they believed, and, while perfect equality would always be beyond reach, great disparities of wealth could be avoided as long as government did not interfere.

"Though not unchallenged, and though open to conflicting interpretations," Wilentz writes, "the conceptual basics of the egalitarian tradition lasted for a century after the Revolution." In the latter decades of the 19th century, however, large new business corporations and trusts emerged, along with "an all-too-conspicuous American plutocracy," and economic thinking changed. The labor theory of value was inadequate as a basis for understanding the corporate economy. By the 1920s, many Americans had come to regard not only the huge corporations but gross inequality of wealth as "a perfectly natural result of market forces."

Yet, Wilentz says, "the American egalitarian impulse" survived, albeit in dramatically different form: "Now government became the instrument, and not the enemy, of equality." And the Progressives, New Dealers, and Great Society liberals showed that this "reinvented proactive egalitarianism" could work to reverse the trends toward gross inequality of wealth. "After 1940," he says, "economic inequality abated, to the point where, by 1980, [it] was roughly the same as it had been in the 1770s." But then came Ronald Reagan and the conservatives, throwing latter-day egalitarians on the defensive. "By the early 1990s... inequality of wealth distribution returned to the levels of the 1920s."