The Lion of Idaho series: Borah, the settlement of the West and the Jeffersonian Ideal

Sen. William E. Borah

Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God – Thomas Jefferson

 

During the second session of the 62^nd Congress (March 4, 1911 – March 4, 1913), Borah worked on and got passed an improvement to the Homestead Act of 1862.  A homestead is quite simply “a house with surrounding land and buildings, especially on a farm”.  This further increased the favorability of the Junior (at the time) Idaho senator, The Idaho Statesman (newspaper) having a headline that read: “Passage of Homestead Bill Makes Idaho Say: ‘Thanks’”.  And this from the Democratic Caldwell News: “If we did not feel that Borah is doing good wok for his constituents we would not use these columns to commend and endorse his work”. 

Wees Bar homestead, Idaho

Borah’s bill reduced the number of years that a homesteader had to live on their homestead.  Originally it was five years; Borah saw it reduced to three.  This was one in a series of improvements to the 1862 Act.  The amount of land was also doubled a few years before Borah’s bill:

Because by the early 1900s much of the prime low-lying alluvial land along rivers had been homesteaded, the Enlarged Homestead Act was passed in 1909. To enable dryland farming, it increased the number of acres for a homestead to 320 acres (1.3 km²) given to farmers who accepted more marginal lands (especially in the Great Plains), which could not be easily irrigated.

There was demand for western lands and that demand was accommodated.  In fact, giving people land to farm was ingrained in strands of American thought going back to Revolutionary times.

Thomas Jefferson’s thought provided the model for much of this opening up of government lands.  It is interesting to note the influence of Jefferson’s thought had on Borah’s.  Farming was a fixture in Jefferson’s ideals:

Jefferson's stature as the most profound thinker in the American political tradition stems beyond his specific policies as president. His crucial sense of what mattered most in life grew from a deep appreciation of farming, in his mind the most virtuous and meaningful human activity. As he explained in his Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), "Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God." Since farmers were an overwhelming majority in the American republic, one can see how his belief in the value of agriculture reinforced his commitment to democracy.

Thomas Jefferson

So too would Borah hold the rural population of Idaho in high esteem and fight for their needs.  Idaho was rural at the time, the cities at the time crystalized hubs that aided rural work.  I love this snapshot of Boise from Johnson’s book:

Boise City, as it was called when Borah first established himself there, was the capital of Idaho.  It was the second city in population with some 2311 inhabitants, while Pocatello could boast of 2500.  These figures are somewhat misleading from the commercial standpoint, for all frontier towns of this type served a fairly wide area and had much more trade and did a greater variety of business than the number of their inhabitants would indicate.  Within the spacious Boise Basin were some farms and large cattle and sheep ranches.  Within relatively easy access of Boise were valuable silver mines.  Railroad connections made Boise a distributing center (27).

Borah knew his constituency and appealed to them.  His Jeffersonian political philosophy was in accord with the nature of the state.  How different Boise is today.  The United States and the American farmer is quite different today, as well.  It is interesting the connection of farming to government.  As Johnson describes:

Borah has always been a Jeffersonian on the matter of local self-government.  He has always been opposed to “bureaucrats” in Washington or from Washington regulation the local affairs of the people in the states.  He has been opposed to it, if for no other reason, because it weakens the fiber of the people.  In the matter of conservation he felt that the people of the several states could conserve many of their resources much better than could the national government.  This government, he thought, was conserving them for decay and retrogression.

Times have changed