\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFor an economic crisis (crisis? it\u2019s at least cris-ish) that propagated by way of household debt and first manifested in evictions and foreclosures, it\u2019s really striking - if you\u2019ve got a background in American history - how little pushback there\u2019s been at the county level.
Nationwide debt crises used to happen regularly, and there were inevitably a few sheriffs or judges who would refuse to go along with the liquidation, creating a point of media focus and kicking the issue up to the state level, where governors and legislatures would usually compromise to some degree (especially if the lower officials had conveniently timed their resistance to match election cycles).
Which, if you\u2019ve ever deplored the effects of \u201cpoliticizing justice\u201d and wonder why anyone ever thought it was a good idea to subject judges and law enforcement officials to electoral pressure, there you go.
Of course there was also the option of getting a few people with rifles, besieging courthouses and blockading auctions, but that died out even earlier - mind the Grapes of Wrath \u201cThen who do we shoot?\u201d bit - as railroads both enabled rural delivery and thus finance beyond local store credit and the one-branch bank, and also made it practical to send nonlocal militia troops into the boonies (first in coal and iron territory, back before the Rust Belt rusted, and then further west).
Everyone knows that after WWII the federal government grew at the expense of state power, fewer appreciate just how much county power - which used to be pretty much the face of Government - receded. Today movements that aim at its restoration, like Posse Comitatus and Sovereign Citizens, are marginal among the marginal.
I blame the telegraph, for enabling realtime communication across distance and thus obviating the necessity of feudal hierarchies. A court, after all, comes from the term for a retinue of power with identifiable human faces. There was always power, but it used to be close enough and personal enough you could make a CHA check against it. (Or Intimidate, which is STR, iirc). Plus there\u2019s always the tendency to go native.
(The most functional method of countering this tendency was requiring courtiers to spend about half their time accumulating power at their own courts in the field and half spending it down at their liege\u2019s court - this was arrived at independently [as far as I know] by the Japanese bakufu, the French royalty, and the American DoD, where high ranking officers rotate back and forth from field command to the Pentagon. Probably parallels in pre-computerized large firms doing rotations between home and branch offices, but I think that was derived from DoD. Well, DoW, back then.)
Histories of the New Deal often acknowledge the federalization of power but then account for the TVA, rural electrification, Rural Telephone Service, etc. either as the political cost paid for that power, or as something that centralized power made possible, when they were in fact constitutive of that power.Is it okay link to some of this stuff?
\nIs there anything to this other than wild speculation? I\u2019ll note, off the top of my head, that use of non-local troops in rural areas goes back to literally George Washington.
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Okay when I first saw this late last night I thought this was on top of @slatestarscratchpad asking me for links. I\u2019m not an academic for reasons that include not having to footnote everything I say with proof that someone else said it first, but skepticism is reasonable, I get asks from time to time requesting more background on local vs. centralized power in American history, so it couldn\u2019t hurt to dig some up, especially if it\u2019s going to get linked around.
A lot of this stuff I think I first picked up in lectures by Stuart Blumin. He was a respected academic historian and I trust him. Though like I said you could pick up the influence of EP Thompson, whose thing was finding a \u201cuseful history\u201d of popular resistance in scattered acts that might otherwise be read as meaningless anomaly, so judgement call there. Also means I didn\u2019t have ready citations in hand, but even without academic database subscriptions a day of googling turned up some decent traces.
Before everything else to snap back at fnord -
Yeah, George Washington marched a militia into the sticks to suppress the Whiskey Rebellion, and it was a goddamn nightmare.
Militia will defend their own land but aren\u2019t enthusiastic about long-term marching against abstract threats, so raising the army almost set off more revolts. In the end the men they got were a mixture of human detritus and comfortable toffs on vanity trips, and they set off in ragged order, squabbling and looting (nicknamed \u201cThe Watermelon Army\u201d) and deserting in scores all the way.
In fairness that\u2019s normal for pre-Napoleonic armies, but still, marching a militia 200 miles with no combat required the personal attention and charisma of the sitting President/war hero/national founder just to operate at \u201cnormal fiasco\u201d levels.
Okay. Then, on sheriff\u2019s resistance, first apparently that\u2019s still a thing, getting stuff on Tom Dart of Cook County (Chicago), IL back in 2008, so. Honestly, if my sheriff or local judge did something like this I\u2019m not really sure what channel it\u2019d reach me by, so huh.
Let\u2019s see, going back, Richard Hongisto, the radical San Francisco sheriff who wore a badge with a peace sign and was jailed in 1977 for refusing to evict \u2026in political alliance with Jim \u201cKool-Aid\u201d Jones? Ha! I did not know that.
Going further back gets even harder to Google but these Tennessee statutes dating from 1858 (after the Panic of 1857) laying out punishments for sheriffs who refuse to conduct evictions are suggestive enough I\u2019m gonna consider the tradition established.
On judicial resistance it\u2019s tough because \u201cjudge makes ruling, is overruled\u201d doesn\u2019t leave bright traces as a break from the norm. A lot of things seem to point back to a 1943 article, Skilton, \u201cDevelopments in Mortgage Law and Practice\u201d that might (or might not, I dunno, paywalled) contain threads to be pulled, but for now I\u2019d say look at these Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court decisions.
Notice two details about that session linked - first, this was from 1821, in the aftermath of the Panic of 1819, America\u2019s first major economic disruption that led to its first major debt crisis. Second, that this September session is sitting in Lenox, at the western edge of Massachusetts, and hearing cases appealed from the region.
(This was a way that local county independence was circumscribed in a preindustrial era, a traveling court of prominent judges would make regular circuits into the backcountry to review the local judgements. Lenox to Boston is 131 miles on modern roads.)
Inland farming areas like Western Massachusetts were exactly where the debt crisis was most severe, the inability to turn over debts and thus demand for repayment in hard currency passing down from coastal importers to local merchants to fall on farmers with no capital but their land.
And here you see exactly what I described - local lawyers and judges working up lines of logic by which debtors are granted some relief from their obligation, thus \u201ckicking up\u201d the matter to the state level. Even if these are all overturned in favor of creditors, filling up the docket impresses the issue upon state elites and requires some expenditure of resources and political capital to address - many states responded to the Panic of 1819 with \u201cmortgage redemption\u201d laws giving debtors the opportunity to reclaim their land even after foreclosure.
Another thing, I\u2019m not a lawyer but an interested layman and one thing I notice about these decisions is that in contrast with modern statutory interpretations, they turn on *awfully* distant abstractions of common law.
Which, yeah, in the 19th century people were still struggling to make up after-the-fact justifications by which common law - the accumulated mass of judicial tradition and judgement - represented a coherent and integrated whole and law was a more wide-open field.
Here\u2019s a report from a commission convened by the Governor of Massachusetts about a decade later that diplomatically concludes \u201cmaybe we should codify the central bits of this common law, to make courts more smooth and regular\u201d. This was a trend that continued on - the rationalizing Restatements of the Law in the 1920s, that were part of the same professionalizing trend that favored (often state-) law schooling over \u201creading for the bar\u201d, the Uniform Codes that aimed to homogenize law nationwide.
Robert H. Jackson, the last Supreme Court Justice to not attend law school, eulogized the old ways as a source of charismatic \u201cfirst principles\u201d rural county power here.
(This means that when Freeman types pitch \u201cthe common law\u201d as an American foundation that\u2019s been lost, they\u2019re not wrong. And when they depict \u201cthe common law\u201d as \u201ctortuous fever-dream legal logic that affirms the protection of rural nobodies from central power and moneyed interests\u201d, well, they\u2019re not wrong.)
On mob resistance against debt collection - well, that goes at least back to Shays\u2019 Rebellion, the big outbreak since would be the farmland rebellions of the 1930s. Most striking example perhaps in Iowa, where farmers blockaded roads, backed \u201cpenny auctions\u201d where the threat of mob violence allowed foreclosed properties to be bought at minimum bid and returned to debtors, and ultimately threatening a judge not to conduct foreclosures (as in, he was dragged from his courtroom and out of town with a noose around his neck).
Now, martial law was declared in response, but note the details in that story - National Guard troops were dispatched from Sheldon and Sioux City. Those are about 30 miles from Le Mars - far enough to not have local connections - but 200 miles from the capitol of Des Moines, which remember is 2/3 the (admittedly, mountain-cleaved) distance George Washington himself struggled to project enough power to suppress insurrection.
But the governor received word of the events by telephone, ordered troops mobilized and dispatched presumably the same way, and sent a commanding officer by airplane. That\u2019s *exactly* what I\u2019m talking about how industrial technologies enabled government control across greater distance.
Finally, as desert I want to point you to this account of the Jackson County Rebellion, which is kind of a mix of all three - mob, sheriff, and judges\u2019 resistance (see page 42 on the earlier populist victory of direct judicial elections, which enabled later \u201crebellion\u201d) combined with the long Oregon tradition of batshit political violence you\u2019ve never heard of, like the Portland mob, or Vigilantes, or that time in 1984 when a cult that took over a town tried to take over the county by infecting 750 people with a bioterror attack.
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