Whiskey Rebellion Anniversary
Douglas Rushkoff is a guest blogger.
In 1791, Alexander Hamilton imposed a new tax on Americans - both as a way of paying down the national debt and, in his words, "more as a measure of social discipline than as a source of revenue." The taxes led to widespread organizing, protests, and ultimately insurrection. The first shots were fired in the town now known as South park (not Colorado, but Pennsylvania, but it always made me wonder what Trey Parker had in mind).
By May, 1794, Americans in most states were raising liberty poles, the symbol of revolutionary American resistance to tyranny. Although dismissed by Hamilton as a "whiskey rebellion" in order to make it sound like a bunch of drunks dissing government authority, the movement was a widespread challenge to the federalist model that - perhaps ironically - led to the raising of an American army as big as the one raised for the Revolutionary War, and ultimately a vast increase in centralized control over the American economy, and society. (In the form of corporatism.)
May 13 is also the anniversary of the "May 13 Incident," when Sino-Malay race riots in Kuala Lumpur led to a suspension of Parliament and at least a couple of thousand people killed by police and Malaysian Army rangers.
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South Park is a real place in Colorado... they didn't make it up.
South Park is a real place in Colorado:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Park_(Colorado_basin)
Oh hai! Can haz cannabis rebellion now?
I actually live in South Park, Pennsylvania and just drove past Oliver Miller Homestead 20 minutes ago.
I do wonder what the area was actually called back then, though. Technically speaking "South Park" didn't even have a zipcode until the late 90's early 2000's. It was Library, PA (the only Library in all 50 states).
In the 50's and 60's it was Snowden, Township.
Nifty. One of my coworkers has one of the original flags framed & hanging in his office. At least, I assume it's original. It's in pretty bad shape.
For the record: the South Park in Colorado is not a town but rather a county. South Park county.
South Park is not a county. It's a land basin containing the town of Fairplay. It's in Park County.
Wow, 3/4 of the comments so far are about the location of South Park. Can we move on to the subject of the thread now? I'm sure it was not geography.
I had the honor of playing a Whiskey Rebel in a movie about twenty years ago:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fvxeVodTKw
I've always been sympathetic towards whiskey since that experience.
I'm not sure insurrection is the model we should emulate at this time. Slow transformation from within sounds like a much better alternative. Less violent and perhaps longer lasting...
For exactly what it's worth: It could be important, I think, to your argument (as I'm only now coming to understand it and admire it, reading Life, Inc.) to consider a distinction that almost all historians fail to make about Hamilton's relationship to the founding debt of the U.S.-- and thus to the founding itself, and to the nation, and to currency and corporatism. (The Whiskey Rebellion is on its way to you, but I'll distill -- ha! -- for your approval.)
AH was not trying to pay down the debt, your post (and almost everyone else) to the contrary. He was trying to fund it. AH's biographers (Brookhiser and Chernow most recently, but most of the others too) treat the debt as something that having somehow been run up to unfortunate proportions during the war, had to be faced up to and paid off by Hamilton, the responsible Treasury Secretary, via a tax.
No. AH spent the 1780's, under the influence of his nationalist finance mentor Robert Morris, doing everything he could to swell the domestic debt -- i.e., the bond holdings of high financiers -- to huge proportions, to tie it to the nationalist/military interest, and impose a tax to fund investor bonanzas. "Everything he could" included threatening the confederation Congress with military takeover. And with peace in the offing, R. Morris wrote an exhausted Washington to ask if war could be extended just long enough to get national taxes imposed, earmarked to pay tax-free interest to the elite bondholders.
The whole fear of nationalists was that the debt would be repudiated or steeply discounted after wartime emergency unity subsided. Everybody knows that Hamilton is famous for "funding and assumption." What that means is that he found ways to pay reliable, steady interest on the blue-chip tier of the domestic war debt, thereby consolidating the wealth of the country in a very few hands (mainly Morris's friends and colleagues) and yoking it to a national interest. He did that regressively, by "opening the purses of the people," as Morris put it, taking a tax from the masses of people who would never hold a bond, and earmarking its proceeds for the small investing class (who paid no tax on their investment income, and veered wildly, during the real-estate bubble of the 1770's and '80's, between ostentatious displays of luxury and debtors prison).
It was deliberate, brilliant, and highly effective, and AH sometimes made no bones about it. But his biographers either don't understand it (highly likely) or purposely whitewash it (equally likely). It's all told in a long, dry book, well regarded among scholars, by E.J. Ferguson, and more recently by Terry Bouton, in Taming Democracy, and it's been my effort, in two books (one discussed in another post, below) and in some articles, to make the story short and fun (i.e., pop -- a ref. to comments in that post below).
And I'm not saying national debt is inherently bad. I'm saying this is how the founding national debt worked. Nor am I saying "Hamilton bad," as a commenter on the other post has it. I'm saying this is what made Hamilton Hamilton. I've written about this subject, and given talks on it, and received the blessing of academic historians I admire, and I find this version at once more honest and more compelling -- yet I fear the banally liberal, consensus version will prevail. It's just easier to cope with.
How currency and charter issues come into it (re Life, Inc.) ... that's a story for another day. There was a beautiful moment in PA, in the 1780's, when populists won an assembly battle, taking Robert Morris's bank charter away on behalf of the people of the state. And Article One, Section Ten, Clause One of the U.S. Constitution, forbidding alternative currencies, has more significance as a deliberately regressive measure than it is usually given ...
Etc. ...
Anyway, back to reading your book, with pleasure ...!
@ PONTO - Did you get to meet Barry Bostwick??? I loved him in Mega Force even more than Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Perhaps someone should tell Rush Limbaugh that the Whiskey Rebellion was led by a brave patriot named Richard Hertz; a national hero who fought against liberal spending and big government--someone that current Republicans ought to emulate and celebrate, perhaps inspiring a modern day tax rebellion amongst the like-minded.
Big Head Press made an interesting libertarian graphic novel called "The Probability Broach" that has the Whiskey Rebellion as the divergence point. The novel is studded with references to Hamilton:
http://www.bigheadpress.com/tpbtgn
It's free to read.
Yeah, I've always been taught that the Whiskey Rebellion was a bunch of drunks who were overawed by the show of arms against them, and that they went down without a fight. I guess I need to look more into this.
@grimshaw - Yes, I met Barry Bostwick on the set. He was very nice to us lowly extras. Here's a shot of him between shots:
http://picasaweb.google.com/ajanus/TheOldRegiment#4998776043042111506
Or http://bit.ly/S328X
I have a shot somewhere of him sternly inspecting me - as a soldier in the Whiskey Army, not a rebel.
@ Ponto - That's truly awesome.