Rebecca Onion: Can you talk about the chronology of disunionist thought? The book concentrates on the 18th and 19th centuries—I got to about Page 300 and thought, “Huh, we just got out of Reconstruction!”—so is it fair to say that the ideas you’re talking about are most active, more influential, before the 20th century?
Richard Kreitner: I think most people portray secession as something that was settled at Appomattox. I really don’t think that’s the case. I don’t think that’s how history works. Of course, the 20th century is a more difficult chapter to write about—there are no major secessionist movements in the 1940s. But I think the disunionist thought of the previous centuries lived on under the surface of American society, in American culture.
Take the conservative, especially Southern, opposition to the New Deal, where they’re comparing the Tennessee Valley Authority and other New Deal programs to another invasion of the South, and predicting that if things go on like this, there will be another Civil War. That’s where modern conservativism comes from—opposition to the New Deal. In the 1950s, there was massive resistance to federal authority in the South, and the more you look at it, it feels like this much-lauded midcentury consensus wasn’t all it had been cracked up to be.
There were actual separatist movements, but fairly small and didn’t get anywhere, mostly because the federal government meddled in them—like, the Black nationalist movement that wanted to build a Black republic in the South, in the 1960s and 1970s, as a form of reparations for slavery.
But it says something to me about the United States that separatism is the form that our more radical protest movements often take, and it makes me question how united we really are.
This is a book about fractiousness—petulance, dissatisfaction. How do you discern, when historical actors are talking about wanting to exit the union, whether they’re serious or whether they’re simply venting? Whether the separatism is real or rhetorical?
I definitely think of those as two different strands of the idea. But the two represent the same tradition. Going back to the colonial era, American dissidence often takes the form of separatism. I think there’s something innately fractious in the American character. Just saying, you know, “This isn’t working for me. I want no part of it.”
There’s a whole idea I didn’t really explore in the book, that’s the idea of individual secession—people just saying, “I remove myself from politics and American national life.”