Yo more than the homesteading of federal western lands, we’re gonna eventually need a land reform to redistribute the water rights in the “prior appropriation” jurisdictions west of the Rockies

It’d be a good first step if we could recognize both as “land reform” though. On top of all the homesteadings, the US did “orthodox”, defeudalizing land reform at least once, in Hawaii in the 1960-90s IIRC, that’s a precedent.

California itself was owned by two parafeudal land regimes, the original Spanish land grants and the later robber barons, tbh I’m not sure how that shook out. I don’t think there was ever a single monolithic “land reform”, more chipped away by gradual real estate and tax subtleties and dilution through inheritance. I know if you take the PCH up the coast, you run into a few necklace chains of small state parks, fertile valleys the barons owned to feed San Francisco by coastal shipping and then later gave up in lieu of taxes. I also know part was never reformed away, the master-planned towns of Irvine and Valencia were carved from intact monolithic holdings.

Then there’s reservation land (and the structures for dividing and distributing it, and the parastructures by which speculators reconsolidated it, and the paraparastructures resisting them), what else? Florida! I think that might’ve been under Spanish land grants, I know in the 20th century developers got huge tracts of land to subdivide. I saw a good longform about this recently, started with the author’s parents honeymooning on Miami Beach and getting bussed 4 hours to hear a sales pitch, someone point me. “Worthless Florida swamp lots” was a trope in the mid-20th century, they were the eponymous plot devices of Glengarry Glen Ross and I remember catching a few references on TV back before UPN and the WB, when the un-networked higher-number UHF channels would run old Looney Toons.

“Singing songs and carrying signs
Mostly say, hooray for our side”

Like, that’s supposed to be a knock, right? That these people aren’t deep enough or something, cause their signs don’t have arguments on them? So we shouldn’t take them seriously?

Like, that’s what a battle flag is. It’s a fabric sign that says “hooray for our side”. There’s a reason why there’s anarchist flags, and communist flags, and I guess whatever flag Bolivar flew, but there’s no such thing as a land reform flag, let alone a “land reform: because the concentration of farmland in the hands of few absentee lords rather than multiple smallholdings retards economic development, degrades peasants, and encourages decadent corruption” flag.