Leonard A. Carlson
Associate Professor of Economics, Emeritus
Leonard A. Carlson is an Associate Professor of Economics at Emory University and an associated member of the History Department. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of California, Los Angeles, and earned a PhD in Economics from Stanford University. He joined the Emory Economics Department in 1975 and became emeritus in September 2021. At Emory over 7,300 undergraduate, graduate, and MBA students enrolled in classes he taught. Professor Carlson’s research interests include the economic history of the United States, the economic history of the relationship of Indian tribes to the federal government, the economic history of the southeastern United States, and labor economics. He has published a book, articles in major journals in Economics and Economic History, and has contributed articles to several edited volumes.
Professor Carlson pioneered the use of modern economic theory and statistical analysis to study the economic history of the relationship of the federal government and American Indian tribes. His most cited research examines the implementation of the General Allotment (Dawes) Act in Indian country in the years from 1887 to 1934. The Dawes Act of 1887 privatized land on most Indian reservations and allowed non-Indians to own land on reservations. The Act divided reservations into 160 acre farms assigned to Indians with the provision that the land was held in trust for 25 years to prevent Indians from selling land too quickly. Left-over land was opened to white settlers. Shortly after the law was passed, Indian farms were opened to sale and lease to whites if there was a hardship. The Christian reformers who advocated allotment saw privatization as a way to encourage Indians to become economically self-sufficient and assimilate into white society. Many historians dismissed this effort as doomed to failure from the start, since it was argued that Indians were not culturally suited to become farmers or ranchers.
Professor Carlson applies the economics of property rights, economics of household labor supply, and public choice to come up with a different explanation of the slow progress of Indian farmers after allotment. The restrictions on the sale of allotted lands meant that land was hard to assemble into efficient-sized farms or be used as collateral for a loan. Furthermore, when an Indian allottee died, the land was divided into small parcels assigned to different heirs that were too small to farm efficiently and the lands were either sold or leased to white farmers. Professor Carlson finds that many Indians had already established family farms on reservations and these inefficient allotment property rights actually discouraged Indians from working their own land, causing them to sell or lease the land instead.
The evidence shows that both Indian farming and Indian land ownership declined after a reservation was allotted. In sum, prior to allotment, Indian families proved more adaptable to the dramatic changes that followed the white settlement in the western states than previously thought. Further, reservations were often chosen for allotment when it was in the interest of surrounding white farmers, not when Indians wanted it.
Professor Carlson has also published research on the political economy of the forced removal of the Cherokee and other tribes from the Southeast in the 1830s. The Cherokees, Creeks, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Seminole tribes controlled land in four southern states. Settlers, especially from Georgia, wanted to open those lands to create more farms and plantations. Many Cherokee were unwilling to sell and move west to Oklahoma. The southern tribes had allies in Congress, especially representatives from the Northeast, but Congress voted to authorize removal by a margin of five votes in 1830. A statistical analysis shows that those who favored removal were most likely supporters of Andrew Jackson — a Congressman who voted the same week to make it easy for illegal settlers (squatters) to purchase federal land — and slave holders who wanted to expand the influence of the slave states in Congress. Other research includes a paper on how the standard of living of Indians changed in the nineteenth century as measured by the adult height of Indian men who served as scouts for the U.S. army. Somewhat surprisingly, Indians became taller in the first half of the century and then heights began to decline, suggesting a worsening living standard.
Professor Carlson has also compared U.S. Indian policy to that of the British in Australia. Unlike in the U.S., the original inhabitants of Australia were not recognized as having any property rights to land. Australia was considered terra nullius until it was overturned by a court decision two hundred years after the first English settlement. Further, the Spanish similarly did not recognize tribes as sovereign entities. This difference reflected the fact that many Indians in North America had settled farms and that tribes, armed with weapons provided by other European powers, were a formidable military opponent. This led the British in North America and then the U.S. under the Constitution to recognize that tribes had a claim to land and political rights, which still exist today in the form of tribal governments and the tribal control of reservations — something that Indians value highly.
Another line of Professor Carlson’s research is in labor economics. In the “Earnings of Women and Ethnic Minorities, 1960–1980,” he finds that the poor relative performance of some minority groups, especially Hispanics, can be “explained” by their levels of education, poor English skills, and lack of experience. For other groups, especially Black men and Indian men, there is a large “unexplained” gap due to discrimination or other unmeasured factors. Another paper examines the growth of the vital cotton textile industry in the South in the late nineteenth century. The cotton textile industry was the largest and fastest growing employer of manufacturing workers in the South. The expansion of employment and output was concentrated in four states — North and South Carolina, Georgia, and Virginia. Employment was largely limited to white workers, even though economic theory suggests that such segregation can be costly. Carlson argues that the location of new mills and continued labor force segregation reflected a legacy of the pre-Civil War location of mills. The all-white work force came into being during the boom in cotton production in the 1850s. In that decade, white workers replaced Black slave workers, who were pulled out of mills to grow cotton. The fact that there were already trained white workers made it more profitable to build new mills near where there was an existing industry and to continue to use a segregated work force in the racially tense post-Civil War era. Cotton manufacturers in the Southeast continued to use a segregated work force until the Civil Rights Act of 1965.
Professor Carlson’s current research studies how Indian tribes both lost and gained land in the United States since the ratification of the Constitution.