My trip to Yreka was a lot of fun, and there’s quite a lot to be said about what I saw and heard. But for now, a few more secession-related links to follow up on the last batch.
The Web site for the small-but-active State of Jefferson movement is here; they sell t-shirts and hunters’ caps and other cool stuff with the state’s traditional “double-crossed” logo. You can learn more about the history of the State of Jefferson through Wikipedia, or by reading Bill Kauffman’s excellent article on the original Jefferson uprising from ISI’s First Principles journal.
Want more? Kirkpatrick Sale’s Middlebury Institute, which maintains a directory of North American separatist movements, holds an annual conference each year – Kauffman, who is presently writing a book on secession that will be published next year by Chelsea Green, attended the 2006 meeting in Vermont and filed this great report in Orion magazine. The Web site for the Second Vermont Republic, which is the secessionist movement that has probably got the greatest chance of succeeding right now, is here, and a collection of writings by Thomas Naylor – a former Duke economist who is the SVR’s foremost public intellectual – is here. Naylor also has a new book on secession, and here is a “secessionist primer” that he wrote back in 2005 for Vermont Commons, which is the official newspaper of the SVR and has published articles by a range of writers including Bill McKibben and Wendell Berry.
It doesn’t stop there. Here is a recent LA Times article about Needle, a town at the western eastern edge of California that has apparently been making a serious push to become part of Nevada. Here is an LAT op-ed by Christopher Ketcham, a writer and poet presently working on a book about secession, and who has been a contributor to antiwar.com as well as Harper’s, GQ, Salon.com, and many other publications. And here, finally, is the poll that Ketcham mentions at the start of that op-ed, which found that one in five Americans believe that “any state or region has the right to peaceably secede and become an independent republic”. Assuming all goes well, my TAC piece on secession should appear some time in October.
(Image via Flickrer go-bunny.)
Filed under: government/law
Native Jeffersonian here- born and raised in Keno, OR. Go Double X!
Excellent! I didn’t get across the border to Oregon, unfortunately … maybe next time, when I go back up to write something about what’s happening to the logging industry.