The vision of broadly shared wealth is a long-standing American theme, dating back to the yeomen farmers of colonial times. America, uniquely, was a land of freeholders. Its egalitarian distribution of property undergirded its nascent political democracy. Thomas Jefferson explicitly put public policy on the side of broadly distributed property wealth when he decided that the public lands in the territories should be conveyed not to absentee real estate companies but to settlers who would work the land. The freeholding tradition was continued into the nineteenth century with the Homestead Act, the establishment of land-grant colleges, and the freedmen's demand for 40 acres and a mule.