Erica Walch is a Newfane citizen.
NEWFANE-Tristan Roberts presents an overview of how the Enclosure Laws of medieval England and the regulation-free, child-labor-dependent early industrial era in the U.S. contributed to making the rich richer on the backs of workers and draws a direct line from those historical moments to the disenfranchised homeless of today.
A crucial historical aspect of life left out of Roberts' article is that throughout that time, communities felt a moral responsibility to care for those who struggled to get by and acted on that moral imperative.
The colonies and early Vermont were essentially agricultural and communitarian in spirit, much as Roberts posits as the best way to live. I'm with him.
In early Vermont, everyone who came to a town was expected to help build and maintain their new community. Article 9 of Vermont's excellent Constitution reads (in part): "[E]very member of society hath a right to be protected in the enjoyment of life, liberty, and property, and therefore is bound to contribute the member's proportion towards the expence [sic] of that protection, and yield personal service, when necessary, or an equivalent thereto […] ." You had intellectual and material rights protected by law, and you also had to do your part to maintain that community.
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Roberts notes that in 1797, the Vermont Legislature passed a law that "required towns to support their poor while preventing them from 'strolling' elsewhere" and that towns hired out or indentured those who could work. He seems to decry this, but it was a useful practice.
If a family couldn't care for some of its members, then the town where those people were born was responsible. Not the next town over, and not a whole other state of the union.
Mostly families, and sometimes towns, would indeed indenture their children to learn a trade, be fed and housed, be paid a little money, and then be freed at the end of their indenture so that they had the opportunity to become contributing members of society.
As Vermont's population grew, towns dealt with people who over previous generations have variously been labeled "layabouts," "drunkards," "feeble-minded," "shirkers," "gamblers," and "the ill." While we no longer use most of those often-hurtful terms today, I think we all recognize those behaviors in society. The problem of how to provide care for them also persists.
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Nineteenth-century Vermonters decided the best way to provide care for the destitute would be to build poor farms. These entities provided food and lodging for those individuals or families that were indigent.
The able-bodied worked on the farm or were hired out, the young were educated, and the elderly had a place to live out their lives in safety and relative comfort. People who'd committed minor crimes were often sent to the poor farm for a chance at reform rather than punishment. And those who committed major crimes went to jail.
The poor farms were self-sustaining and brought some income to a town. They provided care for the residents of their own communities. If someone from another town showed up, they would be returned to their town of origin.
It was unquestioned that every member of a community needed to pitch in to make their town function. (In fact, in early Vermont, most towns required all men to work on the town roads a certain number of days.) It also went beyond saying that labor of any kind is dignified, that there will always be destitute and infirm members of society, and they are first the responsibility of their family and then the responsibility of their own town.
During this time, towns set their own property taxes to pay for the essential functions of the town: roads and bridges, a town pound, schools, and maybe a jail. And that was all that regular people paid out of their earnings or savings, as the federal government was funded by tariffs and excise taxes.
Benevolent societies and private philanthropy allowed those who wanted to do so to help out people beyond their town, such as immigrants, unwed mothers, and widows and orphans, as well as missionaries and scientists in distant lands.
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In the 20th century, federal and state income taxes came in and utterly upended the social fabric. Instead of seeing exactly where your tax dollars went and making decisions at the town level, instead of providing local care for local people, instead of the men of the town working on the roads, big government came in, things got centralized and people's money got redistributed in unknowable ways to unknowable places and some impoverished and indigent people started "strolling" to wherever they could get the most benefits.
There was a lot of focus on rights and a lot less on responsibilities.
I don't know anyone who thinks the current system in Vermont for dealing with the people who are not making it in our society works. The state paying millions of taxpayers dollars for disadvantaged people to stay in cruddy motels with backed-up toilets and a microwave to cook on and then kicking them out with a tent and handshake is unconscionable.
And the lawlessness and lack of punishment for criminal behavior (often committed against these disadvantaged people) is discouraging and incomprehensible to anyone who encounters it.
The people getting rich on the backs of the poor these days include motel owners and the sprawling nonprofits that grow and grow and that depend on more "clients" to garner more funds. Neither the motels nor the "social services" seem to be making life better for anyone, and the criminal justice system is clearly failing when the same offenders get released and continue to wreak havoc.
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So, perhaps it's time to get back to basics and bring back the poor farm in some way.
If a family can't care for their own, then let towns or small groups of towns be responsible for their own citizens.
Give people the dignity of working for their living, learning a trade, and getting meals and a roof (not a tent) over their heads in their own community and maybe we can rebuild some of the social fabric and communitarian spirit that Vermont had from the start.
This Voices Response was submitted to The Commons.
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