[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 116 (Thursday, August 1, 1996)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1448-E1449]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                          PRAIRIE GRASS RISING

                                 ______
                                 

                         HON. DANA ROHRABACHER

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                        Thursday, August 1, 1996

  Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, President Thomas Jefferson lamented the 
tendency, even in his day, of politicians to ``generalize and 
concentrate all cares into one body.'' Throughout our history, from his 
day to ours, there has been a constant battle between those who would 
centralize power in Washington and those who struggled to keep it 
dispersed among the people and in their local communities.
  I was proud to have worked for several years for a great man who was 
in his time one of the Nation's most eloquent voices for the 
Jeffersonian decentralist tradition, Ronald Reagan. During those years 
some of his most memorable remarks on this theme were penned by my 
friend John McClaughry, who served as one of Governor Reagan's 
speechwriters and idea people.
  When Governor Reagan was elected President, John McClaughry sold his 
cow to pay for the moving expenses from his log cabin on Kirby 
Mountain, VT to Washington, where he served as White House Senior 
Policy Advisor in the first 2 years of the Reagan Presidency. I suppose 
very few White House Senior Policy Advisors in this century, at least, 
can make such a statement.
  John, who has many friends among this body, went home to Vermont in 
1982. He was subsequently elected twice by large majorities to the 
Vermont State Senate, and is now president of the Ethan Allen 
Institute, a Jeffersonian think tank in Concord, VT.
  On June 28 he delivered the keynote address to the National 
Conference on Decentralism sponsored by the E.F. Schumacher Society at 
Williams College. I include at this point an excerpt of his remarks on 
that occasion, which I hope Members and others will find interesting 
and useful.

                          Prairie Grass Rising

                          (By John McClaughry)

       When this country was first settled by Europeans in the 
     17th and 18th centuries, there was little expectation that we 
     would fall prey to indigenous centralized power. That was 
     what most immigrants gladly left behind them in the Old 
     World. The new settlements were small and widely dispersed, 
     on the rim of a great, fruitful and thinly populated 
     continent. There was none of the industrialization that later 
     did so much to promote giant institutions. Indeed, as late as 
     1783, Mr. Jefferson could write in advocacy of an agrarian 
     America, ``let our workshops remain in Europe''.
       Another important fact was that Americans were never 
     subject to feudalism. Feudalism calls to mind castles and 
     crusades, jousting and feasting, Ivanhoe and Prince Hal. 
     Shorn of those romantic garments, however, feudalism was a 
     deadly serious business. At its heart was feudal land tenure.
       Land could not be owned by anyone save the crowned knave 
     called the sovereign. It could only be held, and the holding 
     carried with it all sorts of duties. The most important was 
     to lead armed men to the aid of the superior in the feudal 
     hierarchy when he got into a bloody altercation with another 
     such ruffian, spotted some easy and unprotected pickings 
     elsewhere, or went off to Jerusalem to free the Holy City 
     from the infidels and get in good with the Pope.
       Admittedly, feudalism was a strong force for social 
     stability and military security in a tempestuous age. 
     Unfortunately, feudalism stifled liberty, opportunity, and 
     self government. By the time the colonies were settled, it 
     was rapidly dying out in England.
       Thus it never took root on these shores, with the minor--at 
     least to us--exception of the great feudal estates just to 
     the west of where we meet today, in the Hudson valley.
       Yet another barrier to the rise of centralized power in 
     America was the ideology of what was called in England the 
     Country Party. That system of political beliefs was found in 
     abundance throughout the writings of the great republican and 
     whig leaders of our revolutionary period.
       The Country Party was bitterly opposed to the beliefs and 
     practices of its nemesis, the Court Party. It detested a 
     monopoly on religion by the established church. It had an 
     absolute horror of the standing national army and 
     conscription. It despised government run banks and the 
     issuance of paper money, which could be manipulated by rich 
     elites to defraud the honest farmer, artisan and mechanic.
       It hated corporate monopolies conferred by corrupt 
     governments, taxation without representation, and the gang of 
     fawning hangers-on who subsisted as parasites at the Court. 
     It demanded that the people of a community be given the power 
     to appoint their own judges and justices of the peace, and 
     the members of the militia be given the power to elect their 
     own officers. It resisted with vigor every effort of the 
     Crown to restrict the historic liberties of the common 
     people.
       As Lance Banning has so ably shown in his brilliant book 
     The Jeffersonian Persuasion, this Country Party ideology 
     became the ruling beliefs of the early Jeffersonians. And 
     when Mr. Jefferson came to the Presidency in the Revolution 
     of 1800, he acted on those beliefs.

[[Page E1449]]

       Mr. Jefferson's motto was ``equal rights for all, special 
     privilege for none.'' He cut in half the nation's foreign 
     embassies, laid off half the little army, began to sell off 
     the western lands to homesteaders, repealed all domestic 
     taxes, and abolished the equivalent of the Internal Revenue 
     Service.
       Mr. Jefferson's first budget dedicated 70% of the 
     government's revenues to paying off the national debt. The 
     amount remaining for current expenses was less than what was 
     spent by the national government in any year since 1793. He 
     sent out his commissars to ``hunt out and abolish multitudes 
     of useless offices.'' Now there was a true decentralist hero!
       But even before the end of his two terms, Mr. Jefferson had 
     been forced to backtrack from this auspicious beginning. He 
     had to revive the Navy--without Congressional authorization--
     to confront the Barbary pirates. He swallowed hard and 
     committed the new nation to the purchase of the huge 
     Louisiana Territory.
       Nonetheless, thanks to the wise policies of his Treasury 
     Secretary Albert Gallatin, the national debt was in fact paid 
     off completely in the year 1835.
       But as the new nation grew and prospered in the first half 
     of the 19th century, the forces of centralization gathered 
     steam. With the growth of invention came the rapid growth of 
     industrialization. Industrialization required capital. The 
     result was what came to be called Finance Capital, 
     interwoven, often corruptly, into the fabric of the state and 
     national governments.
       The greatest impetus toward centralization in America was 
     the War Between the States. This is not the time or place to 
     recount the centralizing effects of President Lincoln's 
     administration, but suffice it to mention conscription, total 
     war against civilian populations, suspension of habeas 
     corpus, arbitrary rule over the conquered states, and the 
     nationalization of money and banking.
       On the positive side of the ledger, the war did destroy the 
     Slave Power, but the victors tragically failed to deliver on 
     the empowering promises they made to the new black citizens 
     of the South.
       Half a century later the writer Randolph Bourne was to 
     observe pithily, ``War is the health of the State''. It was 
     proven again in his day, when the Wilson administration laid 
     the modern foundation for the all powerful Federal leviathan. 
     That era gave us, again, participation in a bloody war, 
     conscription, the income tax, the final nationalization of 
     money, the sedition act, the interweaving of Big Business and 
     government, and the beginning of J. Edgar Hoover and the 
     ruthless invasion of civil liberties.
       By the time of the Great Depression the pattern was well 
     established. As Robert Higgs has documented, every crisis 
     called forth more centralized governmental power. This 
     economic crisis, caused largely by grievous mistakes by the 
     new Federal Reserve Board and an oppressively protectionist 
     tariff law, disappeared only with the onset of the greatest 
     war in our history.
       As government grew, business used its influence to get 
     government to create new private fortunes. The rapacity of 
     finance capital called forth the organization of what has now 
     become Big Labor. In due course the trend toward giantism has 
     given us Big Media, Big Religion, Big Education, Big 
     Medicine, and a big and all powerful Judiciary.
       To this centralizing trend, dating back a century and a 
     half, there have been many honorable dissenters. The honor 
     roll begins with Jefferson and Jackson, curiously the alleged 
     patron saints of today's Democratic Party. It drew on the 
     genius of such dissimilar men as Ralph Waldo Emerson and John 
     C. Calhoun, Fighting Bob Lafollette and Louis D. Brandeis. It 
     included the valiant Loco Focos, the early Populists and 
     Western Progressives, the followers of Henry George, the 
     anarchists and cooperators, the homestead movement and the 
     Southern agrarians.
       Years ago I remember the thrill of discovering a yellowed 
     copy of the magazine called Free America, the journal of the 
     distributist movement of the late 1930s. Its credo might 
     serve us still today:
       ``Free America stands for individual independence and 
     believes that freedom can exist only in societies in which 
     the great majority are the effective owners of property and 
     in which group action is democratic. In order to achieve such 
     a society, ownership, production, population and government 
     must be decentralized. Free America is therefore opposed to 
     finance-capitalism, fascism, and communism.''
       To that movement from the past must be now be added many 
     newer voices. They include the many local currency movements 
     represented here this weekend; the communitarians of the 
     American Association for Rights and Responsibilities; the 
     various libertarian groups; the ``new Democrats'' of the 
     Democratic Leadership Council and the ``old rightists'' of 
     the Republican Liberty Caucus; the Civil Society Project and 
     the New Citizenship Project; the groups of all races working 
     for neighborhood renewal in our inner cities and rural 
     renewal in the countryside; and even many of the 
     spontaneously formed groups bearing the honorable name of the 
     militia.
       To these must be added the names of rising political 
     philosophers like Michael Sandel and Robert Putnam, and 
     technofuturists like George Gilder and Nicholas Negroponte.
       Indeed, in the magazines of the cyberworld articles 
     regularly appear showing how the rise of the Internet and 
     readily available cryptography mean the defeat of the 
     institutions of centralized power, just as perestroika laid 
     the groundwork for the rapid dissolution of the late 
     unlamented Soviet Union. That of course is the reason why the 
     government is trying desperately to gain policing authority 
     over the Internet, and to suppress the distribution of crypto 
     systems the government cannot penetrate.
       When we survey the sweep of American history, it is easy to 
     become despondent about the march of giantism and centralized 
     power. We mourn the inexplicable absence of a bold leaders to 
     force the issue of centralization and decentralization on the 
     national public. Many of us are doubtless disgusted with the 
     major party candidates for President, both of whom seem 
     committed to preserving and enlarging the central power, 
     albeit for different ends.
       I daresay most of us here today share the sentiments of an 
     out of work politician who said, back in 1978, that the real 
     issue is not the opposition of Left and Right. ``The real 
     issue,'' he said, ``is how to reverse the flow of power to 
     ever more remote institutions, and to restore that power to 
     the individual, the family, and the local community. Millions 
     of Americans, in both the small towns and great cities of 
     this land, are steadily coming to the same conclusion.''
       Three years later that man was President of the United 
     States. Although I can think of nothing his administration 
     did to reflect those sentiments, I can assure you that Ronald 
     Reagan sincerely believed in what he said on that radio 
     broadcast. So too, I think, do many millions of Americans 
     subscribe to that incisive sentiment, although they would 
     describe themselves politically in many diverse and 
     conflicting ways.
       Out in the western part of Kansas, bordered by waving 
     fields of grain, is an old two lane highway. Once it was the 
     great Route 66, America's mightiest highway, the mainline 
     from Chicago to the Golden West. No longer do the eighteen 
     wheelers speed over its pitted concrete; no longer do the 
     Harleys and travel trailers push forward to new adventures.
       Old Route 66 is abandoned now; the heavy traffic zooms by 
     on I 70 to the north and I 40 to the south. Even the local 
     small town traffic has passed it by. The prairie grass has 
     grown up through the cracks forced open by decades of 
     exposure to sun and wind.
       But just as that soft, flexible grass has pushed through 
     the hard, heavy concrete under the hot Kansas sun, the spirit 
     of decentralism, often paved over and ignored, always returns 
     to bring about a new beginning. We may not know quite what 
     form it may take, or what will fertilize its growth; but we 
     know it is there, in the hearts and minds of common people 
     everywhere. All overgrown institutions and centralized 
     tyrannies fear it. It can be and is suppressed, but it cannot 
     be destroyed. We are on the side of history, and though it 
     may not always be apparent, we are winning.
       John McClaughry is chairman of the E.F. Schumacher Society 
     and president of the Ethan Allen Institute, a state public 
     policy think tank in Kirby, Vermont. From 1980 to 1982 he was 
     Senior Policy Advisor to Gov. and President Ronald Reagan. He 
     later served as a state Senator and was the 1992 Republican 
     candidate for Governor of Vermont.

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