The Anti-Rent War's Populist Legacy with Author Jennifer Kabat

Transcription by Jerome Kazlauskas

[00:00:00] Jennifer Kabat: In the 1830s, this radically wild period of time because it's a moment of mass enfranchisement in the U.S. Every white man gets the right to vote, which, you know, you and I... we are two white women. Every white man voting does not sound like democracy, probably to us, but imagine an era where only the people who have landed wealth can vote, so this is a time of, like, massive demographic change.

[00:00:27] Brett Barry: This week on "Kaatscast," an Election Day episode that looks to the past to better understand our present moment. What do you know about New York's Anti-Rent War? Not much? Yeah, I didn't either, so we sent our new literary correspondent, a.k.a. my wife Rebecca, to interview author Jennifer Kabat, whose new book, "The Eighth Moon," reflects on the political violence in Andes, New York, in 1845 that was rooted in immigration anxiety, financial distress, and a housing crisis. Gee, that sounds familiar! Kabat's book explores this remarkable local history and considers its legacy today, both in the Catskills and the broader United States. Reviewers have called "The Eighth Moon" luminous, lyrical, and transcendent. The novelist Jonathan Lethem dubbed it a psychogeographical memoir of the Catskills. Rebecca gave it five stars on Goodreads. Here is their conversation.

[00:01:34] Jennifer Kabat: I'm Jennifer Kabat, and I am the author of "The Eighth Moon," and I live just outside of Margaretville on a road called "Bull Run Road." I moved to the Catskills in 2005. I live on a piece of land, which I kind of write about in the book. It's 46 acres. It's made up of two different farms, and we moved from London, which is like a pretty weird thing, and I'm in the fire department, which I think is basically the biggest information of all that anybody could ever need.

[00:02:07] Rebecca Rego Barry: You had no family here, or what's your connection to the state of New York or the Catskills? Was there any previous connection?

[00:02:16] Jennifer Kabat: There was none. It was like almost a... put a dart at a map and consider where you're going, so we were living in London; my husband is British, and it turns out I am allergic to every city, and I was particularly allergic to London, which is a bowl and pollution would settle in, and I'm allergic to... like car exhaust, perfume, formaldehyde, all that nice stuff, and my doctor was... like... you need to leave. You need to, like, leave anywhere that isn't a city, and I'm being slightly practical. We did a list of all the places we might move [Scotland, The Isle of Skye, Cornwall, Crete]. Portland, Oregon, got on the list as a very pragmatic choice, and then I was like the Catskills; it's near New York, right? It's a little bit like Vermont. We came to visit, and David had never been here. He'd actually never really seen snow because he's British [he's like, 'this is cool'], and then we came and rented a place for a couple months, and it was like, "Great! This is it!" And, you know, it's strange being a city person who moves 3,000 miles away, not just three hours away, and begins a new life with a new community and a new place.

[00:03:34] Rebecca Rego Barry: So one day, you're out hiking or biking, and you find a historical marker and read something about something called "The Anti-Rent War." Is there something you had ever heard of before, and I ask that because, you know, we've been here for twenty-something years, and our kids have gone through the school system here, and, you know, it's not really something we were familiar with either, and it's only because Brett was in one of those living history cemetery tours in Margaretville a few years back, and he played the role of David Robert Scott, whose uncle was involved in the Anti-Rent War, Edward O'Connor of Bovina, and that's how we came to know the history a bit.

[00:04:13] Jennifer Kabat: So this land is Scotland, so this is part of what was the Scott Farm, but back in the Anti-Rent where the Scotts actually lived slightly further up the hill, and yeah, it was just happenstance, like it was that accident of... we were riding our bikes on the Tremperskill, which is in Andes, so it's the road that goes kind of from the reservoir to the Andes village, and along that road, there's this historical marker that's like one mile to the site where Osman Steele was shot, and the historical marker has a date, and it's 1932, and it was put up by like the State Teachers Association, and I had no idea what the Anti-Rent War was, and it took a while, like, learning about the Anti-Rent War, which is basically the sort of subject of my book. The book is kind of like about... woman moves from London to the Catskills and joins the fire department... that could be the plot, which isn't very plotty, and then it's about woman moves to the Catskills and learns about this socialist uprising. I'm a writer, and we moved here, and I was writing fiction, and I was trying to write a crime novel basically because my agent in London was... like... you're good at writing crime, and I think at that point kind of rural crime stories were selling, and so I tried to write a crime novel, but I wasn't particularly interested in it. I was actually really interested in the land, and I am also a bad fiction writer. I don't like making things up, and I was really also interested in this land that we bought from Muriel Scott, whose relative Brett played in the Living History Cemetery Tour, and on this land there are some ruins, and I wanted to know what they meant or whose they had been. At this point Muriel had died, and I emailed her husband, and he was like, I think they do it from the Anti-Rent War days, but I don't know anything more about that, and I asked Muriel's two best friends what they knew about it, also not a lot of information. They were like... they were old when we were there, and, you know, they were kids like in the fifties, in the late forties, so it was a kind of dead end, and then eventually Diane Galusha sent me a map with some numbers and I went to the county clerk's office, so secret tip: if you want to know any history about land, property deeds are your way in, and so there were these numbers on the map, which corresponded to pieces of the Hardenbergh Patent and I could find in property deeds, and in one of them, there was a name—Peter Klum [K-L-U-M], who had been rented the land as a farm in 1841 from Morgan Lewis—he had been governor of New York State and fought in the Revolution, and one of the founders of NYU and he was married to a Livingston and his daughter was the Margaret who became the Margaret of Margaretville. Anyway, this Peter Klum [K-L-U-M] who lived up the hill was the tenant farmer, and so I was like, "Oh, that's... that's interesting," and then I continued to research the land. The other part of Muriel's family's farm is formed from the Kittle Farm, and it was owned by somebody named Augustus Kittle, and he had three deeds for this land, and I'm like, that's weird. I don't understand that, and also in there, I did some census record searches because that stuff is all public information when it's over a certain date, and I found his firstborn son's name was Lincoln, and that was really interesting to me because he would... the child was born at a time in the Civil War, where the Civil War was very, very unpopular in New York State because the state had instituted a draft, and in that draft there were anti-draft riots, and those riots included burning black orphanages, so to have a son [to have your first son that you name Lincoln in that moment is a very strong political statement about what side you believe in] that you support the war and this was at a time also of kind of like rising anti-Black violence in America, you know, a few years after I moved here, this was in the early twenty-teens at this point, and I was like, "Oh, I want to be part of those values. I want that to resound here." I also learned he'd been arrested for manslaughter in 1845, so I'm starting to get these disparate pieces, so the Anti-Rent War comes to a head in Andes, New York, on August 7, 1845. That's the other thing in the historical marker, and so it turns out he was arrested for manslaughter in 1845 as part of the Anti-Rent War, and so these pieces start to come together, and then there's this other moment where I'm with Rudd Hubbell, whose family has been here for, you know, centuries. Hubbell Corners, his family's farm is in Kelly Corners, and I'm over at his house, and he pulls out this box, and... and he's like, I got something to show ya, and in the box is a mask and a costume. It's a dress, and... and I know what it is, and I'm like, that can't be real, and it is. It's a costume from the Anti-Rent War, so the other thing that happens in the Anti-Rent War is the governor outlaws disguises and masking, so all of these masks and costumes have been burned, and so all these pieces start to kind of fall into my lap. We've got a tenant farmer. We've got this guy in his manslaughter. We've got Rudd in his family disguise, so I start to research it, like, I don't know very much, and it turns out to be this really wild history, and I, you know, I like archives. One of my first jobs in high school was to be a research assistant to a director of a Smithsonian Museum, so I spent a lot of time in archives. It comes naturally to me, and so I just started prowling around. That was how it began.

[00:10:11] Rebecca Rego Barry: What happened exactly on August 7, 1845?

[00:10:15] Jennifer Kabat: So on August 7, 1845, there is a shootout in a corral in drag in Andes on Moses Earle's farm, and Moses Earle still has family relatives in the community, and the undersheriff was shot. Nobody really knows exactly who shot him, but two people, including Edward O'Connor, who was married into the Scott family, were sent to prison. We're accused of the crime. I'm going to backtrack a little bit to explain what happened to get us to the shooting in the corral, which is like a Western-like—I mean, a shootout in a corral in drag is pretty rad and weird and kind of messes with all the tropes of Americanness that we know from Westerns, but before that, almost all of Upstate New York was part of this kind of feudal kingdom. When the Dutch came, they created land patents, and a wealthy landlord would own it and rent out their land. It was the patroon system, and then when New York State passed from Dutch to English hands, the English wholeheartedly took the system on, and they loved it, and there were families like the Van Rensselaer family, the Livingston family, the Verplancks... they owned basically all of Upstate New York. James Fenimore Cooper's family... also landlords, so it was a landlord system and farmers who lived on that land. Basically, they had a few years rent-free, where you would improve the land, and then after that you would owe rent, and you would owe rent into perpetuity forever and ever and ever in ever increasing amounts, and you didn't just owe rent. The landlord would own everything of any real value on your land, so if there was a waterfall on your land, the landlord owned it. If there were any mining rights or mining rights discovered, or forest land or woods, they would own the mineral rights. They would own the waterfalls so they could put a mill on it, and they would own, no matter what, a proportion of the wood, so the money would always stay with the landlords, and there was a clause in the deeds that said, "If you ever fell behind on your rent, the landlord could just come onto your property and take back whatever was required to make good on the rent," and so if you're a poor tenant farmer, your house has no value. Nothing in your house has enough value to make up for that rent. The only thing that would... is your livestock, so that was your property, and the other thing I'll say is, "Alexander Hamilton, hero of American federalism, came in, and he was very close to many of those families, including the Van Rensselaers," so he actually wrote some of the early U.S. era deeds and rent agreements, tenancy agreements, to make them harder to get out of, to bind you further into the land, so basically, farmers here were living in a kind of perpetual peonage, and it wasn't being enslaved, but it wasn't far from that either. It was a little bit like being indentured to the land, but there was no promise of real escape, and so fast forward: now we're in 1837 and there's a recession, and the 1830s are this radically wild period of time because it's a moment of mass enfranchisement in the U.S. Every white man gets the right to vote, which, you know, you and I... we are two white women. Every white man voting does not sound like democracy, probably to us, but imagine an era where only the people who have landed wealth can vote, so this is a time of, like, massive demographic change, and it's also massive demographic change because there are factories and all sorts of changes in capitalism, and one of those changes, we got this mass enfranchisement. The other thing is that British banks are heavily investing in U.S. land and property, so there's a lot of development happening, and then suddenly something happens in 1837 where the banks get spooked and they take back all their credit, and it is a recession very similar to the housing crisis, so with the housing crisis, we have all this loose lending, 1830s, all this loose lending, and suddenly banks stop extending their credit, call in the loans, and that leads to this global recession, one of the first global recessions, and in the wake of that, you get a lot of immigration to the U.S. because there's a lot of poverty in Europe. In the wake of this recession, there's also a rise of a lot of anti-religious violence against dissenters, blah, blah, blah. People come to the U.S., and in the U.S. factory employment, wages go down, conditions in cities become untenable, and the landlords suddenly start calling in all their back rent, and there's this other wild thing that happens is that in the 1840s in the U.S., the response to this, I mean, there's a lot of anti-immigrant violence that happens and kind of nativist violence in cities where people are very angry at immigrants for taking what few jobs there are, but there are also these wild, radical, socialist, utopian movements, like here in the Catskills, is this idea to redistribute land to redistribute wealth. The idea is that the land is free; nobody owns the land, so anybody can farm, and in this moment of nobody owns the land, anybody can farm, they form alliances with groups in New York City like Horace Greeley, who edits the New York Tribune, who's like this huge publisher, and there are these radical groups in Bushwick and Williamsburg, and they kind of form these alliances... with this idea that anybody who couldn't... wants to farm can that this is an answer to, you know, crappy factory employment, and in this moment, the anti-renters go on rent strike and with this idea that the land is free, that the landlords can't own it, that the landlords cannot have a monopoly on the land. It's this really radical moment, and it's happening in this kind of, like, broader context of political ferment in this wake of a housing crisis, essentially. So in some ways, very, very similar to our moment, like we live in this era where, you know, in the early 2000s, we get this mass democratization through the internet, we have a housing crisis, and now we're living in the wake of those moments where we can see the fallout and there's a lot of political violence now, and it's not that dissimilar from that moment. It's just at different extremes.

[00:17:07] Rebecca Rego Barry: Yeah, when you were writing this, was it prior to the 2016 election? Because I know, so one of the veins in the story is this, you know, rural populism becomes a thing, and then we see that happen again in 2015-2016, so you saw some real parallels between then and now.

[00:17:23] Jennifer Kabat: So I started researching this. I would say probably 2014-2015. One of the things that happens in my research is there's the shooting in Charleston, and then there's Charlottesville, and Charlottesville obviously happens after the 2016 election. The Charleston shooting is before that election, and it's really clear that there's this political violence happening, and also on the left, there's, you know, we're in... in 2011, there's Occupy Wall Street, so there's... there are all these responses happening to our moment, and it felt like there was a historical context, and it felt like I was seeing reprisals in this place, yeah.

[00:18:11] Rebecca Rego Barry: Yeah, when I was reading the book that Faulkner quote kept coming back to me: "The past is not dead. It's not even past."

[00:18:17] Jennifer Kabat: Yeah.

[00:18:18] Rebecca Rego Barry: Is that something that kind of went through your mind as well?

[00:18:20] Jennifer Kabat: Totally! I mean, I also serve in the fire department. I feel like sometimes that's the most important thing to say about the book, is like, anybody can serve in their fire department, and you should. In the fire department, there are people, many of them, whose families were part of that uprising, and it's not that people don't know about the uprising, but really the radical politics of that uprising are lost, and it's not part of the curriculum. It's not taught. It's very disconnected, like there is a real kind of, don't tread on me, standing up against the big guys, like standing up against landed elites and kind of coastal elites that feel still like people own with that, but they don't necessarily understand just how radical the politics were, and they were truly radical. I mean, they were tying their peonage to enslavement in the South like they were abolitionists, and it was a pretty wild moment.

[00:19:18] Rebecca Rego Barry: I mean, radical enough that they ended up shooting the undersheriff.

[00:19:21] Jennifer Kabat: Yeah, and it's very interesting, like the up rent people called themselves "The Law and Order Party." I mean, Republicans today still call themselves "The Law and Order Party," but I will also say, "There's some irony in there." The anti-rent movement was one of the first planks of the Republican Party when it formed, so when the Republican Party formed, it was the party of abolition. It was Lincoln's party. It was the Free-Soil Party, so this anti-rent movement where they were, like, all land should be free to whoever will farm it that became free-soil not long after the anti-rent movement ended, so it kind of telescoped through time into the founding of the Republican Party and into what became one of the Republican Party's biggest lasting pieces of legislation outside the Civil War, which was the Homestead Act, and that changed the shape of rural America across the country.

[00:20:16] Brett Barry: To remind our listeners, the Homestead Act was enacted during the Civil War to encourage settlement of the American West. It provided that any adult citizen or intended citizen could claim 160 acres of land from the U.S. government to live on and farm. Stay tuned for the conclusion of Rebecca's interview with Jennifer Kabat, right after this...

[00:20:42] Campbell Brown: "Kaatscast" is supported by... The Mountain Eagle, covering Delaware, Greene, and Schoharie counties, including brands for the local regions such as the Windham Weekly, Schoharie News, Cobleskill Herald, and Catskills Chronicle. For more information, call (518) 763-6854 or email: mountaineaglenews@gmail.com; and by Briars & Brambles Books, the go-to independent book and gift store in the Catskills, located in Windham, New York, right next to the pharmacy, just steps away from the Windham Path. Open daily! For more information, visit briarsandbramblesbooks.com or call (518) 750-8599. This episode is proudly sponsored by Ulster Savings Bank. Stop in and meet the friendly staff at their Phoenicia and Woodstock locations. Call (866) 440-0391 or visit them at ulstersavings.com. Member FDIC Equal Housing Lender.

[00:21:42] Rebecca Rego Barry: Now, I know from reading the book and from what you've just said that you've met a lot of descendants of those who are involved in the Anti-Rent War. Have you heard any feedback from them?

[00:21:51] Jennifer Kabat: Yeah.

[00:21:52] Rebecca Rego Barry: Yeah?

[00:21:53] Jennifer Kabat: I mean, it's actually been... it was really wild. I did a reading in Andes yesterday as part of sort of the Community Day weekend stuff, and Community Day basically honors the day of that shooting, and I don't think it really exists to honor the fact that a cop was shot, but I think it's there to honor the fact that they stood up, and it was the last stand in that moment, and one of the people who was there. It was as if he... as if that history was still alive for him, and so it's really wild to read this in these places where people still feel a real connection to it, and then there are these moments where I'm like... "Did you know what your relative did? I've seen the arrest records!" and where their politics are definitely not the same politics, but in fact, you know, a lot of people might be on the sort of MAGA right, and there are things that, you know, I grew up in a very left-leaning family, a lot of working cooperatives, and the cooperative movement actually dates to about the same time as the Anti-Rent War, and yet that populism has a lot in common with this populism, just the aims are slightly different, yeah.

[00:23:11] Rebecca Rego Barry: The subtitle of your book is "A Memoir of Belonging and Rebellion," and I felt like the word "belonging" was really significant because around here there's sort of this ongoing joke that even if you've lived here for 30 years, you're not a local and you never will be. Is that what you mean by belonging, and do you feel like a local? Do you feel like a part of this land and this community?

[00:23:33] Jennifer Kabat: That is an amazing question because yes, like, I definitely hold to the... you could be here for 30 years and you're never a local. I fully agree. Like Rudd Hubbell, he is a local. His family has been here probably 200 years. Nate Hendricks, local, one of the first white settler families here. I am never going to be a local, but I will live here the rest of my life, and that's fine, and I also find it really interesting to be in a place where the connection to place is so strong, you could live here for 30 or 50 years and not be a local that... that actually feels like a true sense of understanding how long connections to land and place can endure. I mean, if you think about that, you can think about indigenous America and people who have been connected to land and place for thousands of years and then get displaced, and what does that mean? So I think sometimes in our thinking about who is local and who isn't, or you could live here your whole life, and you don't, you're not actually a local. You can flip that around to have a bigger understanding of what the possibility of people's true connection to place over time can mean that could be a much broader understanding of what place in America means, so I think about it that way, and I also joke, you know, I'm in my fire department, so I'm local enough to be in the fire department, but I'm never going to be a local, and I'm cool with that. I also think like there's something about being an outsider, which is important as a writer because you see things in a kind of new light, but the book is about kind of connection and belonging. You know, it's not just about "The Anti-Rent War." It's about my journey in this place and coming into community and forming friendships with people like Rudd or my neighbors over there, the Taylors, or also the plants and beings on this land, like, those things are just as much about community, and you get those things, I think, through a seasonal connection to a place through like observing. I think somebody can have that living in a city. I don't think you have to be in a rural place to have that kind of observational connection to a place and who is around you in a broader sense, but there was this one thing that I learned in the book, which I was kind of slightly tangentially aware of but didn't really understand. My parents, who were pretty old when they had me; they were in their mid-40s. Their first kind of, like, post-college job was running a rural electric co-op in Upstate New York in Madison and Oneida counties, which is like an hour and a half from here, and I didn't like... really understand that suddenly I was like... in the same territory where my parents had been and that my life was starting to cross over into their lives in ways that I found really interesting, and so that's another part of it. I mean, I wrote this book, and it's a diptych with another book that's coming out next year, and part of those books were about grappling with loss and grief and losing my parents, and my dad's work was entirely in rural America, and here I am, I find myself living in a rural community like, so I was really wanting to understand that work in this point in time and finding all these crossovers with the place where I am with the anti-rent movement and the co-op movement and my parents and place, so it kind of got knit together into this story. That's also about family and community and joining your fire department.

[00:27:20] Rebecca Rego Barry: Yeah, I mean, this book breeds so many different themes together. There's economics, there's ecology, there's politics—there's just... there's so much in it, and then there's, you know, your story. I was going to ask you about the second volume.

[00:27:34] Jennifer Kabat: Yeah.

[00:27:35] Rebecca Rego Barry: Is it finished, and what is it? What's different about it from this... this book?

[00:27:40] Jennifer Kabat: So the second volume is called "Nightshining," and it is finished. It's coming out next May, and both books use these local histories as ways of thinking about our present moment. I do not want to write another book about local history tied to our present moment because I just... I don't want to, like, overwork the metaphor, like they just happen to be the luck of this research and both... kind of research trying to understand here like this very here that we're looking out on, so the second book, "Nightshining," is based around floods. In 1953 in Margaretville or 1950, sorry, there's a flood called "The Rainmaker's Flood," and it was caused by what had been developed as a Cold War weapon by G.E. developed by Kurt Vonnegut's big brother Bernard and the scientist Vince Schaefer, who had never finished high school, and it was cloud seeding, which is rainmaking, and in 1949, there was an awful drought. The Pepacton Reservoir and the Cannonsville Reservoir had yet to be built, and New York City didn't have enough water, and so in their eagerness to end the drought and fill the reservoirs, the city did all sorts of things. They like rationed water and like they had no shave Fridays and you couldn't wash your car and you couldn't water your lawn... all this stuff. They decided to try out this Cold War weapon—cloud seeding, rainmaking—to see what would happen, and they did it over a kind of 6- to 8-month period, and the last time they did it was... "In the end of November 1950, and there was a disastrous flood." Now, in all fairness, that flood was also part of a cyclonic event that caused rain and devastation all up and down the Northeast and through the Appalachians, and it even flooded my dad's co-op. I have stories from my dad about being out with the linesmen after this, like, terrible flood and ice storm at the same time, so it wasn't just here, but the worst of the flooding here happened to be where they were seeding clouds, so that book kind of follows that story and the reservoirs and my own history of floods here, and the wild thing about that Cold War weapon is that it spirals in time. It is the plot point for Kurt Vonnegut's "Cat's Cradle." It was used in Vietnam. Its technology is why we have unleaded fuel in cars. Its technology was also part of experiments for Reagan's Star Wars, and the last thing is... is that... that technology is now seen as a fix for climate change as a very technocratic fix, so just as "The Eighth Moon" is my book about kind of populism and political violence and how we look at political violence and rural places. This book is about climate change and how we look at that and what do we do and who makes the sacrifices because we also live in a place where people have been asked to make huge sacrifices for a larger civic good for the New York City watershed system, so I'm very interested in like we are looking at a time where sacrifice is going to be part of our futures. Who bears that burden? How is that burden examined? Who is the public in that moment? And maybe the public is a kind of greater public than just us.

[00:30:58] Rebecca Rego Barry: That sounds fascinating! I can't wait to read it.

[00:31:02] Jennifer Kabat: I hope it'll be fascinating.

[00:31:03] Rebecca Rego Barry: It really does. I mean, Kurt Vonnegut's brother. I mean, this is, I mean, I love stories in books where it's history that no one's ever really heard of or ever really talked about, and you just do a little digging in the archives, and poof, you've got this story that everyone's like, what? How does... how is it possible that I never heard of this or, you know, didn't study this at all in history class, or even if you're a history major, you don't know about that?

[00:31:27] Jennifer Kabat: I mean, these two books, they're very lucky because these histories lend themselves to this larger story, but I didn't set out trying to tell a larger story. I just happened to want to understand here, and I'm really interested in snow, like I ski. I don't write a lot about skiing because I think it's such a weird thing, but I was interested in, like, snow, water, rain, all of that stuff, and I started to learn about snowmaking, and then from there, I started to learn about, like, this flood and wanting to tell those stories.

[00:31:58] Rebecca Rego Barry: So what is the legacy of "The Anti-Rent War" or the populism that surrounds it? What's the legacy of that in the Catskills today?

[00:32:07] Jennifer Kabat: So the legacy is actually national. I'm going to say first. After the Anti-Rent War, a lot of people here left, like they did have the option to buy their land, but a lot of the people who were at the center of that uprising and suffered the most moved west pretty quickly. William Brisbane, who was a Scottish immigrant. He'd been here five years when the Anti-Rent War happened, and he has these very moving letters where you can read his recollections about coming over in a boat from... from Scotland and he lands in New York and then moves to Catskill, and there are these stories that he writes in his letters about crying about feeling so lonely there with his wife Jenny and feeling so isolated, and he's got a ton of kids. Anyway, he ends up becoming a subtenant on a tenant farm, and he takes a plea deal essentially in "The Anti-Rent War" and goes to prison, and eventually his sentence is overturned and he comes back, but he doesn't stay here. I mean, it's too painful to be here, so he leaves, but his brother stays. His brother William stays, and their family, the Moshers now, are still here. Then there's Edward O'Connor, who [also] is sent to prison, and he ends up dying in the Midwest. People get spread out, and then the Homestead Act happens. Some people get farmed through the Homestead Act in the 1860s, but the ideas of the land being free and anybody can farm it... that has resolutely fueled many populist moments in America. Moments in the 1870s and 1880s... part of the thinking in the Grange movement, but really way more recently, you probably remember in early 2016, a group of farmers in Oregon took over a high plains desert land refuge and declared that they owned it and they were using the same language, so it still comes back like it... it very much fuels the land rights anti-federalism of the kind of like rural Western ranchers right now, and so those ideas are not dormant at all. There's like a lot of rage in politics right now, and that kind of standing up against the big guy, however you see it, whatever side of politics you're on, is very much part of that anti-rent movement. It's just, how is it articulated? Who is speaking for whom? How? Yeah.

[00:34:39] Brett Barry: "Kaatscast: The Catskills Podcast" is a biweekly production of Silver Hollow Audio. Today's episode was co-produced by Rebecca Rego Barry. Production Intern: Olivia Sippel, Transcriptionist: Jerome Kazlauskas, Announcements by Campbell Brown. Sign up for our newsletter at kaatscast.com, and please be sure to give us a rating. Five stars would be nice, wherever you get your podcasts, so more people can find us. Until next time, I'm Brett Barry. Thanks for listening.