We're outta here! - modern political secession movements in the U.S
Peter Overby
From the redwood forests to Staten Islands, America suffers from separation anxiety.
1992 Common Cause Magazine
Ulysses, Kan., population 4,800, is no hotbed of radical politics. Its civic center, a fluorescent-lit, folding-chair kind of place, isn't Independence Hall. But there stood Don Concannon, a craggy lawyer-politician, speaking to 200 rebellious Kansans last September and comparing himself to colonial firebrands like Patrick Henry, who uttered the immortal phrase, "Give me liberty or give me death!"
Concannon isn't taking a do-or-die pledge - his plea is "Give us equality or set us free." But he yearns for liberty from oppressive government, in this case the one in Topeka. This year, the onetime gubernatorial hopeful is stirring up the ultimate protest: secession.
Riled by a new state law that will boost real estate taxes and shift funds from rural to urban school districts, nine counties in southwest Kansas floated the idea of secession in straw polls. Voters eagerly embraced it. After Concannon's speech, at what was billed as a constitutional convention, the would-be secessionists even picked out the new state's name (West Kansas), flower (yucca) and bird (pheasant).
West Kansas, as Concannon happily concedes, is "the last place on Mother Earth where the political pundits envisioned demand for political equality and fair taxation." But it has helped inspire a surge of secession talk in cities and counties scattered from coast to coast.
Separatists are at work in Staten Island and Queens, N.Y. - by no coincidence, the wealthiest and most suburban of New York City's five boroughs. Staten Island is the size of Pittsburgh, and no major American city has ever lost an area that large. Queens is even bigger; as an independent city, it would be the nation's fourth largest, behind Chicago, Los Angeles and New York City itself.
Further north in Boston, secessionists have pushed referenda onto the ballots in South Boston, an Irish working-class enclave, and Roxbury, its poorest minority community (see "The Roxbury Rebellion," page 25).
Concannon's West Kansans get calls from disgruntled neighbors in Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas and Nebraska. Some Californians have concluded that their state is unmanageable, and are considering ways to split it into two - or three. And visionaries in the Northwest talk about a nation of Cascadia spanning northern California, Oregon, Washington and British Columbia.
Secession movements are the new extreme in middle-class American political discontent, which already expresses itself in the clamor for term limits, Proposition 13-style tax revolts and caps on municipal and state spending. Although the secession movements face uphill fights, they appeal to voters who are angry at insoluble problems, politicians they don't trust and a sense of powerlessness. And the separatists say they won't be going away.
But secession leads down a dead-end alley, falsely promising escape from a world plagued by lousy schools, higher taxes, rising crime and racial tensions. Such problems are rarely stopped by political borders. Meanwhile secession rejects the motto of the United States: E Pluribus Unum - from many, one.
"I think it's misguided," says Ester Fuchs, who directs the urban affairs program at Barnard College in New York. The movements are fueled by "some subtle notion that we'll leave other people who aren't like us," she says.
Secession advocates like to equate their causes with breakaway movements in Europe and the former Soviet Union (even though those movements have uncorked long-suppressed ethnic hatreds). In Western Europe, they note, Danish voters tripped up a proposal for continental unification. And Canada's October referendum brought that nation one step closer to unraveling.
Why should the United States be immune?
While nobody would mistake southwest Kansas for Ukraine, or New York City for Yugoslavia, the movements are more similar than many Americans would like to admit, says Amitai Etzioni, a George Washington University professor and editor of the Responsive Community, a publication promoting greater collective responsibility. The end of the Cold War caused "an absolutely world-wide inflammation of national and subnational movements" that reach the United States, he says. "The decline of the Cold War allows these things to spring forward."
Within this country, Etzioni adds, "It's unprecedented."
The Ultimate Protest
Secession talk is about desperation. Not so long ago, most people believed that government responded to the average person. Now, "people's experience [is] that government doesn't deliver the goods, problems don't get solved," says Ruy Teixeira, author of The Disappearing American Voter.
Sometimes the threat to leave is just a two-by-four, useful for whacking a mulish government over the head. "There are various alternatives to full secession," says Sean Walsh, chair of Queens United Envisioning Secession Tomorrow (QUEST). "If you asked me if I would vote for secession, my answer is I don't know."
The movements evoke the sound of a drawbridge being winched up - the drawbridge between the haves and have-nots. "They undermine the broader community and selfishly promote a smaller community," Etzioni says.
Secession offers the tantalizing prospect of escape, just as "white flight" to the suburbs did from the 1950s through the '70s. Since then, America's upper classes have continued to insulate themselves from social problems by choosing private schools over public, country clubs and health spas over parks, closed communities over neighborhoods - "the secession of the successful," as political economist Robert Reich dubbed it. The new movements are a political secession of the middle class.
"This isn't a separatist movement of rich from poor," says Brian Burke, a businessman-politician who organized the South Boston secession drive. "It's a middle-class movement that wants control of its own destiny."
But by seceding, as Richard Briffault, a Columbia University law professor who studies secession movements, tartly notes, "whites would not even have to go undergo the inconvenience of moving" to segregate themselves.
The secession movements also have become a catchall for runaway anxiety. In a global economy, Kansas farmers find themselves worrying about European agricultural policy, notes David Aubrey, editorial page editor of the Wichita Eagle. They can't do anything about Europe, but they can do something about property taxes. "You really see it out there in western Kansas: |I've got mine and I'm going to build walls around it so you can't get it,'" Aubrey says.
Anxiety, in turn, leaves communities ripe for exploitation. Fuchs, the Barnard College political scientist, compares secession to the mid-'70s tax revolt that started in California - middle-class people trying to get control over their lives." They are manipulated by cynical politicians, Fuchs maintains.
"It's elites who mobilize it," she says. "You can channel discontent into a secession movement or you can channel it into something more constructive. It focuses attention away from those legislators who haven't delivered effectively."
Fuchs blames the political discourse of the Reagan-Bush years, with its theme of looking out for No. 1. She adds: "It's selfish, is what it is. The reality is the richer counties don't want to help the poorer counties."
Indeed, secession movements have used the rhetoric of resentment. Listen to Queens Republican Serphin Maltese, a state senator and sponsor of the borough's first secession bill, compare New York Mayor David Dinkins unfavorably to the Nazis: "At the worst time of World War II, when the Germans occupied Paris," Maltese said in a widely quoted remark, "I think they paid more attention to the local city fathers than the mayor of the city of New York pays to Queens."
Another Queens pol, Democratic Assemblyman Anthony Seminerio, said: "I want the people of Queens to decide to get the hell out of New York while the going is good."
Outward Bound
If American secessionists have a guiding spirit, it's the New York City borough of Staten Island.
And Staten Island has one dominant symbol of the discontent: the Fresh Kills landfill. Fresh Kills - the name is topographic and in no way descriptive - is the largest landfill on Earth. Despite sharp reductions, it still takes some 15,000 tons of refuse daily.
Fresh Kills stinks, literally. But it's not the borough's only quarrel with the New York City government. Staten Island is just plain different from the other four boroughs. With 400,000 residents, it's the smallest and most suburban, and it sits across New York Harbor, nestled just a few yards from New Jersey. Average family income is one-third higher, the homicide rate three-quarters lower, than the city as a whole.
Staten Island, along with the other boroughs, was consolidated into New York City in 1898. But grievances with the city - Fresh Kills, poor mass transit, housing policy conflicts and others - sparked secession threats in 1916, '38, '47 and '66.
The seeds of the current campaign were sown in 1983, when a federal court ruled that New York City's Board of Estimate violated the U.S. Constitution's one person, one vote principle. The board, which wielded more power than the city council, gave each borough one vote; so when it came to zoning, contracts and much other city business, Staten Island had as much clout as Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn or the Bronx. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the decision in 1989, and New York City set about abolishing the Board of Estimate and reapportioning the council. Now Staten Island has just three of 51 council seats.
The legislature and Gov. Mario Cuomo meanwhile surprised everyone by approving a bill that let Staten Islanders hold a non-binding referendum on secession, which passed in 1990 with 82 percent of the vote. The next steps would be a referendum on a city charter and approval by the legislature and governor.
While critics tagged the movement a "sitcom secession," separatists such as artist and organizer Daniel Singletary say New York City is just too big to manage. "Staten Island is the ideal size, large enough to have the economy of scale and small enough to have a government responsive to the people," says Singletary. "There is no local government in New York City."
But the city government isn't giving up without a fight. City officials object that only Staten Islanders get to vote on the secession referenda, even though secession would directly affect the city's tax rates, bond payments and other financial matters. The city also is expected to argue that the state cannot break up a municipality against its will.
If New York's smallest borough leaves, many residents of its biggest borough would like to follow close behind. Queens - home to the New York Mets, the U.S. Open tennis tournament, LaGuardia and JFK airports and TV's Archie Bunker - has more single-family homes than any other borough, and the median household income is higher than the city-wide median. Some Queens secessionists echo Singletary's argument that New York City has grown too big, the city government too remote. In 1991 the city closed a firehouse in Queens to save money; a week later two men died in a fire nine blocks away.
"People are getting like, 'Why should I stay here?'" says QUEST chair Walsh. "There are no park services in Queens. Snow removal - we're the last to get snow removal. . . . Queens is not the whipping boy."
Maltese introduced a Queens secession referendum bill last spring. Yet it's highly questionable whether independence would benefit either Staten Island or Queens. Manhattan's commercial real estate provides an indispensable tax base for all five boroughs, while neighborhoods require substantially more government services (such as police, fire protection and schools). A departing borough would have to pick up its share of New York City's bond debt and would owe the city for schools, libraries, sewers, streets and other borough infrastructure.
"Their property taxes would probably go up a lot," Briffault predicts for Staten Island. "Their feeling is their expenditures would be a lot less. I don't know about that."
Educational Inequities
Like Staten Islanders, Kansas secessionists are frustrated by the Supreme Court's one person, one vote ruling, which shifted political clout in the state from the rural west to the eastern population centers of Topeka, Kansas City and Wichita. Legislators from seven urban counties now can outvote the other 98 counties.
That clout allowed the eastern counties last year to enact a statewide school finance law that sets uniform levels for both property taxes (which fund the schools) and per-pupil spending. School districts with excess money must send it to the state, which distributes it to needy districts.
Secessionists complain that the Big Seven" urban and suburban counties, even without the new school funding law, have been shifting the school tax burden onto other Kansans by waiving property taxes for business and industry. And they argue that southwest Kansas already puts more than its fair share into state coffers.
The nine breakaway counties cover 8 percent of Kansas but have just 1.5 percent of its people and only 7,500 public school students. While urban schools can afford to offer classes in Russian, Chinese, Japanese and Arabic, rural districts must consolidate their schools, spending extra dollars to bus students long distances and entice teachers to accept jobs on the prairie.
"The wisest thing for the legislature to do is take action to undo the inequities that exist," says Chris Concannon, a lawyer and son of Don Concannon. Otherwise, "we have to call their bluff."
As they organized, the Kansas secessionists piqued the interest of disaffected residents of the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles, Colorado and Nebraska. One call came from Texas state Rep. David Swinford, a Republican who proposed setting the panhandle free. A local radio station gave out bumper stickers for and against, and quickly ran out of "Secession Now" stickers.
"We would be the richest state per capita in the United States. So the bottom line is we don't need you, you need us," says Swinford. He dropped his bill after the panhandle reaped 70 percent of recent grants for fire, ambulance and health services, saying,"the point has been made."
Still another student of Staten Island is South Boston's Brian Burke, who got a non-binding secession referendum onto the November ballot there. It passed overwhelmingly.
Burke, a businessman and longtime Republican, says his goal is more money and autonomy for local schools. "We're basically doing it for the youngsters here in South Boston," he says.
South Boston, a white, largely working-class enclave of 29,500, sits on a peninsula. It erupted in violence against court-ordered busing in the 1970s and bfiefly sent a fiercely anti-busing councilwoman to Congress. The legacy of that turmoil, Burke says, is that most of South Boston's 3,600 school children now attend Catholic schools.
Boston is famous for its colleges, churches and hospitals - usually tax-exempt. But most of them are in other parts of the city, so South Boston has a relatively strong tax base. That means South Boston can afford to secede, Burke contends, adding, "Once you run your own town, you immediately gain control of your school system."
The Boston political establishment tried to ignore the secession referendum, and there was little organized opposition, Burke says. "We really haven't heard a single concrete argument against it. We asked ourselves, Why didn't this happen when the busing started?"
And then there's the mega-state, California. Its biggest city, Los Angeles, and capital, Sacramento, are 500 miles apart, twice the distance separating Washington, D.C., and New York City. A single school district - Los Angeles Unified - has 660,000 students, more people than Alaska, Delaware, North Dakota, Vermont or Wyoming.
Last June, even before the L.A. riot and the state's budget meltdown, 31 of 58 counties voted on a referendum advocating splitting California in two. The question was approved in 27 counties. Now the referendum's author, Republican Assemblyman Stan Stathem, says a three-way split would be better yet.
"What it's really tapping into is a total dissatisfaction," says Stathem, who lives north of Sacramento. "This is very analogous to [support for] Ross Perot."
Proposals to divide California are almost as old as the state. One plan even reached Congress, but died at the outbreak of the Civil War. In 1935, complaining about bad roads and general neglect from their state capitals, counties in northern California and southern Oregon threatened to form a state of Jefferson. They got as far as appointing an interim governor when World War II interrupted.
Today, California has swelled to a population of 30 million, and regional differences are greater than ever. San Francisco resents Los Angeles and Northern California doesn't like San Francisco. "We're talking about dividing a nation-state," Stathem says.
California voters may well see a final referendum next year. Stathem chairs a legislative committee charged with finding ways to split the state and vows to introduce a bill in the spring. Under his plan, the new states would be North California, above San Francisco, population 2.4 million; Central California, from San Francisco to Santa Barbara, population 10.1 million; and South California, the eight southernmost counties, population 17.9 million. South California would be the largest state in the nation.
Intrastate rivalries aside, division advocates say Californians need more clout on Capitol Hill. Northern California's biggest industry, timber, has been all but shut down in recent years, and many in the region blame federal policies. As a separate state, says Stathem, "We see getting two United States senators."
Because division would require agreement from the legislature and Congress (but not the governor or president), opponents rate it the longest of long shots. Still, as another lawmaker said, "People are looking for enemies, for someone to blame. We need to pay attention."
Bailing Out
The last time any state lost part of its territory to secessionists was during the Civil War, when West Virginia left Virginia in 1863. Despite the 130-year interlude, secessionists say they have an inalienable fight to leave if they want.
"The U.S. is the head cheerleader for everybody in Europe who wants their own nation," said Chris Concannon. "It's philosophically inconsistent for [Washington] to say it's good for them and not for us."
But in the United States - whose founders set out to "form a more perfect union" - secession seems to miss the point. "You have to both at the same time promote community and the community of communities," Etzioni says. "The answer is not secession. The answer is to respond to their legitimate needs."
What's needed? First, better delivery of government services, and second, equitable taxation to pay for it, many believe. Fuchs argues for two-tiered local government: a metro government that would collect taxes, thus ending urban-suburban inequities, and smaller units that would set local spending priorities.
And going beyond restructuring, she challenges politicians to do less manipulating and more healing and leading.
"We've basically been encouraging this kind of divisiveness," Fuchs says. "There is no spirit of community that extends across people's backyards. I believe that's become acceptable because that's the direction politicians have taken the political discussion. And that's a harder problem to address."
The Roxbury Rebellion
In most secession movements, it's the white middle class that wants out. But not in Roxbury, Mass., where separatists urge an urban minority community to abandon the city of Boston.
"The white people in Boston have managed this community to be a ghetto, not a thriving community," says Andrew Jones, a political organizer in Roxbury. "And not only is it lousy but we don't have any control."
Roxbury and several adjoining neighborhoods, with about 150,000 people in 12.5 square miles, are worse off than the rest of Boston by virtually every measure. The mean family income in Roxbury is 50 percent below the city average: the infant mortality rate 50 percent above average. FATE - Focusing Attitudes Toward Empowerment, a community organization campaigning for secession - accuses the Boston city government of giving Roxbury just one-sixth of the state Medicaid money it's entitled to.
"In the Third World, these conditions spark revolution," says Jones, who is also a violinist, documentary filmmaker and college instructor (but who is not connected to FATE). "We're talkin about the same things the Lithuanians are talking about, the Bosnians, people in South Africa."
Secessionists claim that Roxbury could become as self-sufficient as Boston - which is to say not very - while gaining control of its education, law enforcement and other services. Half of Boston's $1.5 billion budget comes from the state and federal governments. Secessionists contend that Boston pols divert Roxbury's share to other neighborhoods. But real estate taxes, the bedrock of city finances. look doubtful.
"That's one of the significant problems we have," admits FATE chair Sadiki Kambon. But he points to other Massachusetts cities of similar size, which operate on budgets that Roxbury could raise. What's more, Kambon says, the 80s construction boom left Roxbury with the most valuable underdeveloped land in Boston. He predicts, "The developers will be coming."
Roxbury, an ethnically diverse section where Malcolm X grew to adulthood, is no stranger to poverty, powerlessness - or radical ideology. FATE and a predecessor organization have forced four non-binding secession referenda onto Roxbury ballots in six years. FATE leaders hope to have a city charter drafted by 1994, ready for referendum in all precincts that would be in the new city.
"We've been working on this now for just about a decade," says Kambon. a social worker. "The conditions that exist in our community are putrid."
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