Rural Radicals

(Conspiracy Nation, 11/20/04) -- "The division between urban and rural dwellers goes deeper than the issues of any moment," writes Ron Grossman. ("The shifting world of red and blue," Chicago Tribune, 11/14/04) "Since the beginning of recorded history, people who live in cities and people who live in the countryside have regarded each other with profound distrust."

Grossman goes on to scrutinize the etymology of some words. "Urbane" comes from "urban"; "civilization" comes from "civitas," the Latin word for city. Christianity spread first through the cities of the ancient world, notes Grossman. Christians sneered at non-believers, calling them "paganus" (e.g. country bumpkin). Paganus does mean "of the country, of the village, rustic," from which comes the word pagan.

The Gods of the Country

Ethan Allen, a hero of the American Revolution, once declared, "The gods of the city are not the gods of the country." Country folk live nearer to nature; the shy nature spirits might appear occasionally to the rural lad, but will never show themselves to his urban counterpart.

In the long view, cities are a relatively recent development. For most of its history, mankind has been rural. The rise of agriculture about 6,000 years ago meant a surplus of food. This led to a leisure class and their minions which congregated in cities. To adjust to the unnatural condition of living crowded together, the urbanites developed complicated rituals and sophisticated masks ("person," from the Latin "persona," meaning "mask, false face.") They called this evolutionary adjustment "civilization." In especially crowded areas such as Japan, these intricate rituals and masks are extraordinarily developed. In Asia, a major taboo is "to lose face."

Things Look Different From The Middle Of A Corn Field

Civilized urbanites like to see themselves as multicultural and tolerant of various perspectives. There is one perspective, however, which carries the taint of a social faux pas: the rural perspective. It is too reminiscent of where they came from. Just as the next move of the nouveau riche is to distance themselves from their commercial background (e.g. by marrying into the nobility), the city dweller avoids with disdain any country dust. The civilized is bigoted toward the paganus.

Rural Radicals

In Rural Radicals, author Catherine McNicol Stock revisits the agrarian roots of the American Revolution and removes mythological cobwebs.

Much of this nation began with a proprietary model, i.e., feudalism. Huge land areas were granted to a few individuals. These obscenely wealthy landowners leased portions of their estates to individual farmers. The Lords of the Manors had "reproduced in British North America a vastly hierarchical and unequal society, not so very different from the one they left behind." Not much taught in our civilized (citified) schools: Land riots in New Jersey and New York; The Great Uprising of 1766; Shay's Rebellion. (Stock, op. cit.)

"Between 1650 and 1750, colonists on the Euro-American frontier rose up against eastern centers of power more than forty times." Ethan Allen, disgusted with iconic American leaders, sought to form a Republic of New Connecticut, independent from the united States. "In their early struggles, settlers had fought not against the British but against elite Americans in the East." (ibid.)

The rural population had doubts about which side, Britain or the East Coast elite Land Lords, they ought to favor. "British army officers told them that their best chance of gaining freehold land was to support the British in overthrowing the landlords -- while their landlords told them exactly the reverse." (ibid.)

To lure the landless and the frontier settlers to their side in their fight against Britain, the American elite started mouthing promises like prodebtor legislation, equality, and natural rights such as freedom of speech and protection against unreasonable search and seizure. You know the routine: politicians make all sorts of promises still.

A Whitewashed Mythology

Also seeking to brush away the cobwebs from our understanding of the American Revolution is author Ray Raphael. In A People's History Of The American Revolution, Mr. Raphael delves deeper into our first civil war, "pitting neighbors against neighbors and splitting families apart... Almost before the blood had cooled, surviving patriots turned the victims into heroes and created a whitewashed mythology eulogizing the so-called founding fathers."

The so-called patriots we heard about in the citified schools were primarily armchair patriots. "Few of the patriots who cried so loudly about taxation without representation bore arms for more than brief periods of time. Buying their way out and hiring substitutes, those with property to protect left the fighting to poor men and boys with no farms or businesses of their own." (Raphael, op. cit.)

The common people, the mobile vulgus (i.e. the mob), were not the major consumers of tea: they rarely drank it. The American elite paid as much as fifty pounds for season tickets to the theater while the poor struggled just to eat, let alone drink tea. Corroborating Ms. Stock's narrative of recurrent riots not against the British per se but against native elites, Mr. Raphael notices "evidence of 150 riots in the thirteen colonies from 1765 through 1769..."

Boys and Men of Little Property

"This is to inform you are this evening drafted as one of the Continental men to go to General Washington's headquarters, and you must go or find an able bodied man in your Room, or pay a fine of twenty pounds in law, money in twenty-four hours." Thus read a typical draft notice. (Raphael, op. cit.)

The American Revolution was fought and won mostly by lads and men "so poor they had no other options."  These soldiers "came from an unrepresentative sample of the male population." They were "poorer, more marginal, less well anchored in society." (ibid.)

In one mass grave, a British lieutenant reported the oldest of three Continental officers was no older than seventeen. Colonial volunteer James Collins, sixteen years old, described the gruesome aftermath of King's Mountain (October 7, 1780): With an abundance of corpses yet unburied, "the wolves became so plenty that it was dangerous for anyone to be out at night, for several miles around; also, the hogs in the neighborhood gathered into the place to devour the flesh of men..." Throughout the war, at times, soldiers were reduced to surviving by eating dog meat.

Meanwhile, profiteers enriched themselves, just as they did later during the Civil War and as they do now during Gulf War II. "Immense fortunes have been made," wrote one chronicler, "by trade, or speculation." Was there trading with the enemy? Yes, and so numerous it became impossible to punish.

For What?

What was it all for? A faction fight between American and British elites led to a fierce, mythologized war, fought mostly by the poor. A trick used to entice these actual patriots was the hope that natural rights such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness -- the right to be left alone -- would be enshrined in law. The Bill of Rights, guaranteeing the promise, was reluctantly tacked on to the original U.S. Constitution. Those cultured, civilized men wearing wigs and noble poses didn't rush to fulfill the common hope for which so many died. And the descendants of those elite gentlemen have been chipping away at the Bill of Rights ever since. (It was George Bush I, father of the current president-elect George W. Bush, who warned, in 1988, that Michael Dukakis was "a card-carrying member of the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union]." The ACLU by all accounts defends the Bill of Rights, so why would Bush put them forward as a bogeyman to frighten voters away from Dukakis?)

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Conspiracy Nation. Card-carrying member, ACLU
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