PRAIRIE REVOLT
Wellstone, Barry M. Casper and Paul David
BOOKS PRAIRIE REVOLT POWERLINE by Barry M. Casper and Paul David Wellstone University of Massachusetts Press. 314 pp. $18.50 hardcover. $7.95 paperback. On January 11, 1978, Nina and Dennis...
...Powerline suggests that these values still may nurture the political renewal of a democratic Left...
...Through the personal sketches, we also get a sense of the way in which radical actions grew naturally out of a perfectly ordinary assortment of values...
...Casper and Wellstone illustrate how difficult the leap was for many of them...
...In the view of the authors, this resistance is only the beginning of a rural revolt against intensifying corporate domination of the land...
...brief biographical sketches of many of the participants are interspersed throughout...
...Week after week, farmers harassed surveyors and led troopers on a merry chase, making good use of manure spreaders and tractors in this newer form of civil disobedience...
...Jonathan Burack (Jonathan Burack is a staff associate of The Progressive...
...As frustrations with the regulatory show intensified, farmers took increasingly militant action...
...Facing them were some state troopers and a frustrated team of power company surveyors ready to set up their tripods on the Rutledge place...
...On January 11, 1978, Nina and Dennis Rutledge stood quietly holding hands on their Minnesota farmland...
...Instead, we are allowed to see the complex, partial, and human ways in which they changed and responded to events...
...Mistakes were made: too much hesitancy at times, too much haste at other times, excessive faith in state government...
...When the farm couple stepped in front of the surveyors, the troopers arrested them, along with six others, for "obstructing legal process...
...By 1978 the fight was already four years old, and it continues to this day, waged by citizen action groups and remarkable guerrilla sabotage squads ("bolt weevils" and "wire worms") which surreptitiously topple towers and splay wires...
...not enough trust in potential allies...
...Two days later, the Pope County district attorney, C. David Nelson, refused to prosecute the "Rutledge 8." He resigned instead...
...To its credit, Powerline does not romanticize the politically awakened rural people...
...Casper and Wellstone make clear that the powerline under siege was unlikely to be of any real value to Minnesota farmers...
...What unites these elements is a theme of hope, a story of ordinary people developing intellectually and politically, penetrating myths, taking radical action in what is supposed to be a reactionary time...
...They asked about health effects and about conservation and renewable energy resources...
...Wellstone reported and analyzed the prairie revolt in the December 1977 issue of The Progressive...
...At issue was an 800,000-volt direct current powerline which the utilities wanted to string across the Rutledges' land...
...At every turn, they were ruled out of order...
...These were the homespun, traditional American virtues which the Right seems to have cornered recently: the family, community, property, the land, hard work, thrift, and stability of people and institutions that are a stock-in-trade of life in the Middle West...
...the outcome is anyone's guess...
...The steps they came to endorse frequently went against their grain...
...Powerline is at its best in detailing the insult and intimidation embedded in a regulatory process which, stripped of good-government pretense, was revealed as deceptive and anti-democratic...
...Opposition to the utilities was all but universal in Pope County and much of the rest of central Minnesota in the winter of 1978...
...To their credit, many farmers resisted this effort to limit them to matters of narrow self-interest, which would have pitted them against one another...
...Opponents increasingly felt that they were guinea pigs in a test of a wasteful energy policy aimed at corporate aggrandizement at the expense of rural people and environmental protection...
...The utilities were eager to test the feasibility of cheap western coal as the generating fuel for electricity which would then be transmitted over long distances by way of direct current powerlines...
...Powerline, by Barry Casper and Paul David Wellstone, is a history of the entire struggle...
...At first, the farmers had but a modest appreciation of all that was at stake...
...At hearings, their testimony was confined to the inevitably divisive issue of where the line would go...
...They raised the simple question: Who needs the line...
...As the protest evolved, a number of peculiarities in the planning and financing of the project made opponents even more suspicious of claims about the overriding need for the line...
...The book includes a detailed analysis of the energy issues involved...
...Still, Powerline does help us to appreciate the radical potential in our social and cultural traditions...
...This is an encouraging thought, but a movement for democratic renewal and economic transformation will require more than local uprisings against specific instances of corporate arrogance...
...As they began to ask more comprehensive questions, they found that a supposedly democratic regulatory process that featured public hearings at every stage actually worked to stifle them...
Vol. 46 • January 1982 • No. 1
