Planting Quotes
Both Mrs. Roosevelt and the President, wealthy sophisticated “city” people, went out of their way to learn about rural life in the country, and they both were always champions and defenders of agriculture and rural America—much more so than many politicians who came from rural states.
This quotation illustrates a very interesting historical fact about white understanding of Native American concepts of property and ownership. Here is a Scottsman before the American Revolution who is writing about American Indians and their communal concept of property. The “purchases” of Indian land from individual Indians therefore has even more doubt cast on the propriety than if the whites were acting in good faith. Furguson had personally visited North America for a brief visit.
The Diggers were a religious-economic movement that even today would be considered very radical. They advocated the right of the poor to go onto public lands and farm them—thus the name “Diggers.” Beyond their opposition to the private ownership of land to the exclusion of the poor, Winstanley and the Diggers promulgated another very modern doctrine: That the poor should take the responsibility and have the right to determinine how the society should provide for the poor. A version of this became one of the Mottos of the Poverty Program of 1964. See {616966}.
