Kauffman - Bye bye, Miss American Empire : neighborhood patriots, backcountry rebels, and their underdog crusades to redraw Americas political map

NEIGHBORHOOD PATRIOTS,
BACKCOUNTRY REBELS,

and their

UNDERDOG CRUSADES
to

REDRAW AMERICA'S
POLITICAL MAP

by

Bill Kauffman

CHELSEA GREEN PUBLISHING
WHITE RIVER JUNCTION, VERMONT

Copyright 2010 by Bill Kauffman
All rights reserved.

Excerpt from The Mad Farmer, Flying the Flag of Rough Branch, Secedes from the Union,
by Wendell Berry, used by kind permission of Wendell Berry.

Lyrics from Two Hundred Years Is Long Enough by Pete Sutherland. Copyright 2008 by Pete Sutherland, Epact Music, BMI. Reprinted by kind permission of Pete Sutherland.

No part of this book may be transmitted or reproduced in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

Project Manager: Patricia Stone
Developmental Editor: Joni Praded
Copy Editor: Laura Jorstad
Proofreader: Nancy Ringer
Designer: Peter Holm, Sterling Hill Productions

Printed in the United States of America
First printing June, 2010
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 10 11 12 13

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kauffman, Bill, 1959
Bye bye, miss American empire : neighborhood patriots, backcountry rebels, and their underdog crusades to redraw America's political map / Bill Kauffman.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
eBook ISBN: 978-1-603582-81-0
1. Secession--United States. I. Title.

JK311.K38 2010
320.473'049--dc22

2010016118

Chelsea Green Publishing Company
Post Office Box 428
White River Junction, VT 05001
(802) 295-6300
www.chelseagreen.com

TO CARLOS NARVAEZ (19591997)
In the prayerful hope that you knew how much you were loved
Rest peacefully, old buddy

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION
Wherein We Meet Genial Radicals by the Shores of Lake Champlain

CHAPTER ONE
More Thomas Jefferson than Jefferson Davis: A Brief and DigressiveHistory of Secession That Is Not Tinctured in Shades of Gray

CHAPTER TWO
Start Splitting the State: New York, New York

CHAPTER THREE
California Sunsetand What About West Kansas, Jefferson,the Texas Republic, and the Yoopers?

CHAPTER FOUR
Why Is This a State? Or, Will Walrussia Give Its Star Back?

CHAPTER FIVE
And Why Is This a State? Aloha, Hawaii

CHAPTER SIX
Viva Puerto Rico! Or, An Island Interlude Masquerading as a Chapter

CHAPTER SEVEN
To Live and Die (and Live Again) in Dixie

CHAPTER EIGHT
Made in Vermont

There is only one of him, but he goes.
He returns to the small country he calls home,
his own nation small enough to walk across.
He goes shadowy into the local woods,
and brightly into the local meadows and croplands.
He goes to the care of neighbors,
he goes into the care of neighbors.
He goes to the potluck supper, a dish
from each house for the hunger of every house.
He goes into the quiet of early mornings
of days when he is not going anywhere.

Wendell Berry, from The Mad Farmer, Flying the Flag of Rough Branch, Secedes from the Union

I believe that our country is too large for its own good. Great countries... are a menace to themselves and everyone else. People are not meant to live in such vast, impersonal political communities.

George F. Kennan, Democracy and the Student Left

I was born, like other men, in a spot of the earth which I loved because I had played boys' games there, and fallen in love, and talked with my friends through nights that were nights of the gods. And I feel the riddle. These little gardens where we told our loves. These streets where we brought out our dead. Why should they be commonplace? Why should they be absurd? Why should it be grotesque to say that a pillar-box is poetic when for a year I could not see a red pillar-box against the yellow evening in a certain street without being wracked with something of which God keeps the secret, but which is stronger than sorrow or joy? Why should any one be able to raise a laugh by saying the Cause of Notting Hill'?Notting Hill where thousands of immortal spirits blaze with alternate hope and fear.

G. K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill

To the States, or any one of them, or any city of the States,
Resist much, obey little,
Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved,
Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this earth, ever afterwardresumes
its liberty.

Walt Whitman, To the States

For the chance to treat these subjects in their pages, I thank editors Hal Clifford, Karl Zinsmeister, Erich Eichman, Scott McConnell, Thomas Fleming, Kara Hopkins, Steve Fraser, Terry Golway, Dan Hall, Jeremy Beer, and Marty Zupan. Effusive thanks to John S. Whitehead for his thoughtful responses to my questions on Alaska and Hawaii. I am grateful to Joni Praded and John Barstow for their editorial advice. And I salute my friends in Vermont, who are an inspiration, a lesson in the rejuvenescent possibilities of small things in our age of Bigness run riot. Come Independence Day, I hope you'll locate your New York embassy in Genesee County instead of the Imperial City.

INTRODUCTION
Wherein We Meet Genial Radicals
by the Shores of Lake Champlain

T he American Empire is dead. That gathering murmur you hear is not sobbing: Good riddance to the damn monster. Rather, the noise is the sweet hum of revolution, of subjects learning how to be citizens, of people shaking off (or flipping off ) their Wall Street and Pentagon overlords and taking charge of their lives once more, whether as members of verdant countryside or the sodality of the city neighborhood.

Oh, the empire's corpse may yet wander the desert sands, rattling chains in Marley-like clangor, but the thing itself, as a breathing and vascular entity with its own tomorrows, is dead. An expiry long past due, I might say. Senator J. William Fulbright, the only good Bill ever to exit Arkansas for the national political stage, said in the 1960s that the price of empire is America's soul and that price is too high. always was the enemy of the true America, the America of Mark Twain and Levon Helm, Henry Thoreau and Zora Neale Hurston. The empire demanded that we pledge allegiance to the distant over the near, to the abstract over the real, to perpetual war over peace and harmony.

The Crash of 2008 and its salutary humbling of the hubristic was only the overture. The dissolution is yet to be played out, though the plot thickened and union thinned early in the first year of the presidency of Barack Obama, who continued the Bushian policy of socializing risk and privatizing reward in his series of bailouts of corporate entities that were, in the obscenely inverse phrase of the mass media, too big to fail. The phrase reeked of wishful thinking, though it conveyed with great effectiveness the mind-set of those who run the empire. Bigness is next to godliness, which is in turn a subsidiary of Goldman Sachs; smallness is mingy and negligible; and modesty is for losers. Ten thousand corner delis must die so that AIG can live. The political corollary is that Xenia, Ohio, and Fairbanks, Alaska, are nothings, fit only to send tribute in the form of taxes to Washington and future corpses to the war of the hour. The fifty stars of Old Glory are no more than smudge marks on a wet rag; what counts is the octopus in the District of Columbia whose tentacles curl out to smother and strangle and steal from the nether provinces.