Rural Radicals: Righteous Rage in the American Grain.

• Author: Koniak, Susan P.

By Catherine McNicol Stock Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 1996. Pp. xi, 197. $25.

When custom presses on the souls apart,

Who seek a God not worshiped by the herd,

Forth, to the wilderness, the chosen start

Content with ruin, having but the Word.(1)

INTRODUCTION

Strangers there are among us, practicing with weapons for something they believe might come -- something some of them believe should come. Militia men, patriots, self-proclaimed true Americans. Chosen people. What are we, members of the power elite, the academy, the legal intelligentsia -- the other chosen people -- to make of them? Sideshow freaks may titillate even a scholar, but they rarely, if ever, inform. Is there more here?

Along with the authors of Gathering Storm and Rural Radicals, I believe there is. Neither of these books sets out to convince lawyers or law professors in particular that these groups are worthy of attention, but both are written to convince a more general audience that these groups warrant serious attention. Gathering Storm is written for the public at large, while Rural Radicals is written for a more highly educated subset thereof. Unfortunately, neither book is entirely successful at its assumed task, although both pose important questions.

Gathering Storm is an informer's report, an expose of a movement whose numbers and potential to do violence most of America underestimates, according to the authors. The credentials of the authors suggest that they know of what they speak. Morris Dees(2) is one of the founders of the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization that Dees has valiantly led into battle against the Klan and other bigoted domestic groups. His co-author, Professor James Corcoran,(3) authored Bitter Harvest,(4) an insightful and well-written account of Gordon Kahl's odyssey from farmer to protester to killer to martyr, and the hardship and discontent that created so many Kahl sympathizers in America's heartland.(5) As an admirer of the work of both these men, I was disappointed to find their book poorly constructed and indulgent in style.

The chapters of Gathering Storm seem almost randomly ordered. I felt unsure, as I made my way through this book, that these authors had laid out a path designed to get their readers to any particular place. Instead, Dees's desire to illustrate his courage, foresight, and importance seems to dictate the route. Dees has reason for conceit: I believe he qualifies as a genuine lawyer-hero who has risked much to bring more justice into this imperfect world. Unfortunately, the chest-thumping in this book highlights his frailties and leaves his strengths in shadow -- surely not the goal he had in mind. For Corcoran, who can write well,(6) this book is similarly no tribute. Its writing is pedestrian at best. Perhaps Corcoran found playing second fiddle to Dees unsatisfying and lost interest or control over the final product. Nonetheless, with all of its flaws, the book contains some interesting information about these strange militia groups, and it manages to suggest why these groups should be of particular interest to scholars of the law.

Dees believes that law is the best answer to the militia threat. Dees's belief in law can hardly be considered naive; he has used law to combat evil before. Dees has put the Klan into bankruptcy (sees & Corcoran, pp. 100-01), enjoined those hell-bent on terrorizing their Vietnamese neighbors (sees & Corcoran, pp. 36-39); and crippled with economic damages other purveyors of hate, like Tom Metzger and his neo-Nazi White Aryan Resistance group (sees & Corcoran, p. 101). Indeed, the book ends with a legal prescription to combat the menace Dees and Corcoran describe: the active enforcement of existing state laws that prohibit private armies and the enactment of such laws where they do not now exist (sees & Corcoran, pp. 220-21). Dees's faith in law, and his use of it, challenges most modern jurisprudential thought, which portrays law as a weak force, a handmaiden to economics, politics, literature, or any other number of disciplines. If he is right, perhaps we are missing something about law's nature and its potential to reshape the world? If he's wrong, can we prove it? And then what?

Rural Radicals raises a very different set of issues. Professor Stock,(7) a historian at Connecticut College, seeks not so much to warn us of the danger posed by these strangers in our midst, but to locate them in a historical continuum of American activists and thereby convince us that there is promise as well as danger in the spirit that animates these folks. Professor Stock's project is to sort out the common threads in social movements separated by vast expanses of time, all of which she argues are properly identified as originating in rural, as opposed to urban, America.

Stock's whirlwind trip from Shay's Rebellion in the late 1700s to the Grange movement in the late 1800s to the patriot movement of our times, with various other stops, is intriguing, although in the end somewhat unsatisfying. Stock attempts to explain too much with the aid of a few, somewhat fuzzily defined concepts. For instance, she defines "rural" so broadly that this Brooklynite began to think Coney Island and its culture could qualify.(8) However ultimately unpersuasive her account is, this well-written, short book is worth the time it takes to read it. Why? Because it seems to me that Stock is onto something.

Stock succeeded in convincing me that the patriots of today are connected in some way to the whiskey rebels of our constitutional infancy and to many of the other groups she discusses. What she seems to lack are the analytic or other tools necessary to make sense of the similarities evident in the narratives she provides. Her failure to explain with any precision the connections among these various movements, or their import, makes it particularly important that other scholars who might be better suited to this task read her book and pick up where she leaves off. Understanding the connections Stock struggles to explain might teach us much about where we have been as a nation, where we are now, and where we might be going. That is not, however, the only reason that legal scholars should be interested in this book.

They "took the law into their own hands." Time and again, Stock resorts to this language or its equivalent to describe the actions of radicals in various historical periods (Stock, pp. 29, 89, 91, 96). Stock, not a lawyer or a law professor, obviously believes those words mean something, and she seems confident that what she means by them will be understood by her readers. As legal-scholars, however, these words are not so easy for us to understand. Can violence wielded by private parties ever be called law? What accounts for Stock's need to reach for this phrase repeatedly in describing the violence wielded by the groups she discusses? The fact that we would not expect to see that phrase in a book about the violence of drug-users suggests that some violence seems more like law than other violence. How does some violence masquerade as, or take on the quality of, law? In a society like ours, knee-deep in both lawful and unlawful violence, should not our jurisprudence concern itself with such a question?

Both of these books thus raise important questions for legal scholars, although neither sets out to do so. But they both ignore completely something about the groups they study, which not only would have enriched the analysis in each book and been of interest to the general public, but would also have made the importance of these groups to legal scholars much clearer The militia movement has created law.

It is the law that these groups have created that makes these groups of immediate importance to legal scholars. My interest in the militia movement's law and what it means for the law that we teach and the jurisprudence that we articulate is what brought me to these books. I was thus sorely disappointed to find that neither book discusses this aspect of the culture created by the militia, or Christian Patriot, movement. Perhaps the authors could not see the law before them because the dominant jurisprudential paradigm in our culture so thoroughly equates law with the state that law without a state is difficult to imagine.(9) In the remainder of this review, I insist that we stretch our imagination to enable us to see.

THE COMMON LAW WORLD

I have read a fiery gospel, writ in burnished rows of steel: "As ye deal with my contemnors, so with you my grace shall deal; Let the hero born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,

Since God is marching on."(10)

Origins

Out of a fiery gospel and a truncated version of the Constitution of the United States, a movement of people has created its own law. They call it "Common Law" and their courts "Common Law Courts"(11) or "Our One Supreme Court."(12)

Law is more than a system of rules to be observed or a set of formal institutions that demands recognition; it is a world in which people live.(13) From the legal world in which we live, the Common Law world seems incoherent. The Common Law calls its people "Freemen" or "Sovereign Citizens" and proclaims that our courts have no jurisdiction over such persons. Sovereign Citizens busy themselves filing liens against government officials and other nonsovereigns. In our world, these liens are legal nullities,(14) and the militias' obsession with them seems driven by nothing more than the capacity of the liens to annoy those against whom they are filed. Their courts entertain "Quiet-Title Actions," which have nothing to do with quieting title, as we understand those words, but rather purport to be a gateway to status as a Sovereign Citizen.(15) A person filing a quiet-title action appears in a Common Law court and presents proof that he was not born in Washington, D.C., but rather in one of the 50 states.(16) According to the Common Law, he then emerges free from the jurisdiction...