Jefferson's Dream

Published in edited form in the Foothills Sun-Gazette, April 24, 2013

     It's been a rocky two weeks.  After shenanigans pulled at the April 9th Lindsay City Council meeting regarding Dollar General's "withdrawal," while we supposedly celebrated our agricultural heritage in the Orange Blossom Festival and the fragrance of orange blossoms wafted through town, I was tracking what actually happened.  All we really know is that the developer cancelled escrow on the Citrus Exchange site and the building is not now scheduled for demolition.

     When people heard the building had been saved, ideas about its future flew in like a flock of crows.  Everything from an orange museum to a family crisis center has been proposed.  When I didn't automatically applaud, people asked "Well, what do YOU think it should be?"  Waiting for an answer to arrive, I tried words like "community resource center" and "non-profit meeting place."  Then it came:  what I want to create there is The Center for the Dream that Dreamed Jefferson.

     That's not a name that would really light up the skies.  The idea is one that came in a sentence 20 years ago as I prepared a presentation for the 1993 California Studies conference describing the work of Paul Taylor, a professor of economics at UC Berkeley whom one scholar had described as "the last Jeffersonian."  Jefferson was an agrarian, and luckily scholars since 1993 have discovered that agrarians still exist and are working in the widening cracks of our decrepit economy.  Twenty years ago I was maintaining that Paul wasn't the last, and no one ever would be because what moved him, like what moved Thomas Jefferson, was bigger than any one person.  What I was maintaining was that both men were responding to the drum beat of a different Drummer, who is not going to stop drumming.

     I described the dream as the dream of human equality that formed this country, equality made possible by democracy. What Taylor and Jefferson both recognized was that democracy is maintainable only so long as the country's resources are evenly distributed.  Both men understood that land is the primary resource, and both worked for widespread land ownership for the greatest number of people because they both saw it was in the country's interest as well as the people's.

     Jefferson's dream was partial:  he didn't see that, in scoring the Louisiana Purchase for Americans to settle, they would be displacing Native Americans from their land.  Taylor's dream was partial:  he didn't see that developing irrigation supplies for small farmers would drown out valleys, destroy salmon runs and drive off antelope from desert lands that never should have been farmed in the first place.  But the dream that dreamed Taylor and Jefferson wasn't partial:  it was inclusive, universal.  They were cooperating, doing their part as best they could, and they both left enormous legacies we don't yet know how to appreciate.

     My part was to look again at the way landownership patterns influence the development of small towns, updating a research project conducted by one of Taylor's students, Walter Goldschmidt, who later became professor of anthropology at UCLA.  What I found was that the pattern holds:  towns that grow amidst a larger number of smaller-scale farms are healthier economically, socially, culturally and politically than towns that grow amidst larger-scale farms operated by a few.  It's the night-and-day difference between the east and west sides of our Valley that we all observe but fail to interpret because the economic power of the large landholders - "the big boys," as Paul called them - has put blindfolds on our thinking, gag orders on our mouths.

     What I want to create in the old Exchange building, that historic site of cooperative effort which maintained a viable place in the market for small citrus growers for fifty years and thus enriched this town beyond its own awareness, is a place where we can take the blindfolds off and look at what matters.  I want to create a place where the gag orders can be left at the door and we can begin to speak about solutions.  In that elegant, artfully-crafted building of light and sound I want to create a place where you can still hear that drum beat - so more of us can begin to do our part.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Trudy Wischemann is a dreamer who has often been accused of being merely nostalgic.  You can send her your dreams of restoring Lindsay or any small town % P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a message below!