The Farmer in the Mall

By Crispin Sartwell

Once, we were a nation of farmers. Now we are a nation of bureaucrats. These two classes of people still maintain a certain tension.

Dwight Watson could no longer make a go of it on the Whitakers, North Carolina tobacco farm that his family had worked for five generations. He blamed the bureaucrats who have regulated farmers (with their on-again, off-again subsidy and loan programs) and he blamed the bureaucrats who have regulated tobacco companies and smokers to within an inch of their freedom to sell and smoke.

In fact, Watson said he was once arrested selling tobacco seed, an incomprehensible crime, as when a cigarette store says "lowest prices allowed by law."

So Watson got in his tractor, drove to DC, pulled into a pond on the mall, claimed to have explosives, and started a stand-off. He said he was going to tell America about the problems of farmers or die trying. He mentioned Waco, Ruby Ridge. He said he'd surrender peacefully if the government treated him with respect.

When Jefferson was inventing our democracy, he saw it as potentially something new: a group of free agents, essentially unregulated, who could provide for their own needs (in trade with one another) from the lands they worked. He saw the United States as a nation of independent yeoman farmers: different from the Europe of peasants and serfs and lords and kings.

When Emerson wrote his great essay "Self-Reliance," trying to capture his hope for America and our hope for ourselves, he asserted that fierce independence - free thought, free trade, free action - was the essential prerequisite of real cooperation and democracy. "I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions," he wrote, in words echoed by many a fierce American (think of Patrick Henry, William Lloyd Garrison, Emma Goldman, Barry Goldwater, Abbie Hoffman), and echoed now by Watson.

DC, he told the Washington Post, "is supposed to be the city of liberty and justice for all, but that's a bunch of bull."

Dwight Watson comes by his cussed anti-statism honestly. As I say, he comes from a long line of tobacco farmers, participants in the ur-industry of America and the Carolinas. He served his country in the military, by all accounts with honor. His farm is described by neighbors as "immaculate," a model. This year, he cannot afford seed.

Not all American dissidents are movie or pop stars. Not all American dissidents are leftists. And though the excesses of "right-wing nuts" like Watson have been numerous and occasionally (as at Oklahoma City) straight-up horrifying, they also display a persistent strain of American politics. And the independence they assert, which is related to the independence asserted by the founders, is something almost impossible to maintain in America today, a country in which bureaucracies attempt to regulate every phase of the everyday life of everyone.

Watson's timing is rather unfortunate; his action is of course overshadowed by war. And what is being expressed is as much a personal as a political crisis. But, in a world that has grown beyond the scale where it responds to the real situations of real individuals, Watson's action shows how hard it is to make oneself heard.

Dwight Watson cares more about being heard by the bureaucracy than he does about his life. So perhaps his timing isn't so bad after all. Perhaps Dwight Watson can help us think about what we have left over here that's worth fighting for.