Sutter County Supervisors Vote to Leave California, Join “State of Jefferson”

Sutter County, named for the Swiss-American settler who founded Sacramento and on whose Sutter’s Mill property the 1849 Gold Rush is presumed to have begun, this week joined several other counties in northern California in voting to ditch the Golden State and join a future 51st state called “Jefferson” straddling the California–Oregon border.

The measure before the county’s board of supervisors was adopted unanimously in a vote on July 22nd.  This follows a presentation before the board in March (reported on at the time in this blog) by Mark Baird, who heads the Jefferson Declaration Committee.

An original 1941 “State of Jefferson” flag on display
at a museum in Klamath County, Oregon.

According to a report on the vote in the Marysville Appeal-Democrat, proponents of statehood cite among their grievances “abuses of Sutter County by the state, including the imposition of certain taxes and fees, the state’s disregard of payment-in-lieu-of-taxes funds owed to many rural counties, excessive environmental regulation that ‘has crippled our industry, delayed important public projects, and greatly increased costs,’ and disregard of the county’s historic water rights, among others.”  The Jefferson movement today is largely a phenomenon of the far right.  One Sutter supervisor, Ron Sullenger, refers to Governor Jerry Brown as “an idiot” and hints darkly of a coming tyranny.

Ron Sullenger of the Sutter County board of supervisors taking
the oath of office.  (Can any readers identify this odd flag?)

In a non-binding referendum last month (discussed recently in this blog), 56% of voters in Tehama County, to the north, voted to join Jefferson, while similar measures were narrowly defeated in two counties along the border with Oregon: Siskiyou and Del Norte.  In addition, Modoc, Glenn, and Yuba counties in California have also passed secession resolutions in board-of-supervisor sessions.  (Interest on the Oregon side of the line in a State of Jefferson is far more tepid.)

A map of one proposed shape for a State of Jefferson, with counties that have
held referenda or adopted county board resolutions on secession highlighted.

The idea of a State of Jefferson is also (as discussed recently in this blog) part of the Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tim Draper’s “Six Californias” plan for subdivision of the state, which has recently qualified for a statewide referendum on the issue in 2016.

[For those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with my forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  The book, which contains dozens of maps and over 500 flags, is now in the layout phase and should be on shelves, and available on Amazon, by early fall 2014.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even though you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook.]

Related: hear the author of this blog discuss the Cascadia independence movement in Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia in a recent interview for Seattle’s N.P.R. affiliate station KUOW-FM.  Click here to listen.

Related articles from this blog:

“‘State of Jefferson’ Backers Remain Optimistic, While 6-Way Partition of California Heads for 2016 Ballot” (July 2014)

“Yuba Is Latest California County to Join ‘State of Jefferson’ Movement” (April 2014)

“Sutter County Supervisors Mull Secession from California as Part of State of Jefferson” (March 2014)

“Study Finds Silicon Valley’s 6-Way California Split Is Doable” (Feb. 2014)

“Glenn County Becomes 4th California Jurisdiction to Opt to Join ‘State of Jefferson’” (Jan. 2014)

“Northern Californian Voters Torn between ‘State’ or ‘Republic’ of Jefferson” (Jan. 2014)

“10 Separatist Movements to Watch in 2014” (Dec. 2013)

“State of Jefferson Idea Won’t Go Away: Activists across Northern California Push for Statehood” (Nov. 2013)

“Silicon Valley Technocrats Plan to Flee U.S. for Libertarian Floating Cities” (Nov. 2013)

“Modoc County Joins Siskiyou in Seeking to Split from California as State of Jefferson” (Sept. 2013)

“Other California & Oregon Counties May Be Jumping on ‘State of Jefferson’ Bandwagon” (Sept. 2013)

“Siskiyou County, California, Takes the Plunge, Votes to Secede as Kernel of New ‘State of Jefferson’” (Sept. 2013)

“Colorado’s Secession Wildfire Spreads to Northern California: Siskiyouans Raise “State of Jefferson” Flag” (Aug. 2013)

“Let a Thousand Secession Petitions Bloom: The U.S. Balkanized, but Perhaps Only on the White House Website, Nowhere Else—but Most Importantly: What Does All This Have to Do with Topless Car Washes and the State of Jefferson?” (Nov. 2012)

“‘South California’ Statehood Movement Reignites in Election Year” (Sept. 2012)

State of Jefferson Idea Won’t Go Away: Activists across Northern California Push for Statehood

The political dust is still settling from last month’s partial rout of northwestern Colorado’s rural-and-Republican-driven 51st-state movement.  As reported at the time in this blog, five of the 11 counties that had the question on the ballot said “yes” to the idea of seceding as a new “red” state to be called North Colorado or New Colorado.  Disappointingly, the measure failed, narrowly, in Weld County, the least rural of the 11 but the one where the North Colorado movement first began.  The movement is not dead, but now seems to be shifting toward constitutional jiggering to create new forms of power-sharing between rural Colorado and increasingly liberal cities like Denver, Colorado Springs, and Boulder.

Meanwhile, the other two state-secession movements of this political season, after taking a few weeks to digest the Colorado results, are finding new life.  The Western Maryland State Initiative, which would (as reported earlier in this blog) like the five politically conservative and culturally Appalachian counties in Maryland’s landlocked panhandle to secede, held a town meeting in Cumberland, Maryland, on November 22nd.

The 1941 State of Jefferson activists were quite serious about it.

But the State of Jefferson turns out to be the state-secession movement with legs.  The idea was formulated in 1941, with five (or, in some versions, 12) counties in northern California and southern Oregon wanting to split away, complaining about poor government services.  They even set up roadblocks and distributed passports.  The attack on Pearl Harbor put those plans on hold seemingly permanently, but the idea persisted.  Later plans proposed an expanded Jefferson, made up of seven Oregon counties and 13 California ones.

The State of Jefferson booth at this year’s Tehama County fair.
(The “don’t tread on me” Gadsden flag imagery in the logo shown here is not the canonical Jefferson flag.)

But the Tea Party movement has reenergized Jefferson secessionism with a vengeance.  Inspired by the North Colorado movement (as reported in this blog), the board of supervisors in Siskiyou County, California, voted on September 3rd of this year to make their county the kernel of a new State of Jefferson (also reported in this blog).  Nearby Modoc County’s board threw its hat in the ring on September 20th with a unanimous vote (as reported in this blog), with (as also reported here) interest being shown in other northern counties as well.

There we go.  That’s the real State of Jefferson flag.

The board of supervisors in Tehama County, California, told a spillover, capacity crowd of hundreds in a special cession on November 13th that they were looking at the State of Jefferson idea and had a lot of concerns but weren’t taking it off the table.  They were waiting for “a structured plan,” in the words of the county supervisor, Dennis Garton.  The meeting was full not just of concerned Tehamans but official representatives of several municipalities, activists from the Jefferson Committee, and quite a few residents from other “Jeffersonian” counties, including Shasta, Siskiyou, and Glenn.

A Jefferson statehood supporter makes her case to the Tehama County board of supervisors.

Giving a presentation at the meeting, Tom Knorr, of the Jefferson Committee opined, “Our problems are lack of representation and lack of empathy.  It is a numbers question, it is not a question of the quality of people that represent us Los Angeles has more or less 25 representatives while the entire northern counties has four.  Urban legislation kills our rural economy.”

Which counties should be in or out has been a matter of debate.

Knorr went on to say that this year’s developments were only the beginning: “Once we have the declarations of 10 or more contiguous counties, the people will take the next step in initiating the separation. I want to point out that we are following a legal process as described in the U.S. Constitution, Article 4, Section 3.”

December 6, 1941.  Bad timing for a revolution.

Mike Murray, county supervisor for Glenn County, California, said on November 19th that he and his colleagues have been hearing a lot of clamoring to hop on the State of Jefferson bandwagon.  Though he avoided taking a position on the matter, Murray announced that there would be a public meeting to consider the idea.

The following day, a lecture hall at the California State University campus in Chico, the seat of Butte County, was also filled to capacity as Jeffersonian secessionists addressed activists, residents, and county and city officials.  Statehood activist Terry Rapoza tamped down rumors that Oregon—Oregon as a whole, presumably—was interested in joining California’s “Jefferson” counties in leaving the United States. “Oregon is in Oregon, California is in California, number one,” Rapoza said.   “Number two, we are not seceding.  We are not the South.  We are part of the United States of America and we want to be a state.  We want to have our voices heard.”  There was lots of talk of a 1964 court cases which helped shift California’s lower house to one based entirely on population, not on counties, which in the opinion of some erased rural representation.

Secessionist literature distributed at the Butte meeting showed one of the largest territories for Jefferson ever envisioned, slicing off approximately the northern quarter of the state just above the San Francisco Bay area, including a line of counties formed by Nevada (the county, that is), Yuba, Sutter, Colusa, Lake, and Mendocino and everything to the north.  According to Leslie Foss, a Jefferson activist, “Glenn County, Yuba County, Sutter County, Del Norte, numerous others, and Shasta County are all looking at it.  It is all up to the individual counties.”

Indeed, not all Jeffersonian activism comes from the right-wing end of the political spectrum.  Of the three candidates for a local State Assembly seat who addressed a gathering of Tea Party–affiliated “Corning Patriots” in Corning, Tehama County, on November 21st, two were Republicans, but the third, a Democrat from Red Bluff named Jim Reed, spoke against genetically modified foods and in favor of progressive taxation and labor unions.  All three share a concern for Southern California’s thirst for northern California’s water resources, and all three support the idea of the State of Jefferson.

The biggest barrier to Jefferson statehood is, of course, the United States Congress, which needs to approve any new states.  That may be an insuperable obstacle.  But for now, the State of Jefferson movement seems to have more momentum than it ever has in the over 70-year history of the idea.  So far, though, interestingly enough, only in California.  Where’s Oregon in all this?  Watch this space.

Political cartoonist Phil Fountain’s take on the Jefferson movement

[For those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with a forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  Look for it some time in 2014.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.]

Siskiyou County, California, Takes the Plunge, Votes to Secede as Kernel of New “State of Jefferson”

Recently on this blog I reported that the board of supervisors in Siskiyou County, in northern California, was considering whether to secede and form the State of Jefferson—referring to the 1941 idea to create a (what would at that point have been the) 49th state out of rural counties along both sides of the Oregon–California border.  The Siskiyou county seat, Yreka, was to have been its capital.  The resurgence of the State of Jefferson idea is part of a recent wave of 51st-state movements driven by conservative politics, including a South California movement, a North Colorado movement (which I have blogged about here, here, and here), a Western Maryland movement, a State of Superior movement based in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (U.P.), and a proposal by central Illinois lawmakers to split off Chicago as its own state, leaving Illinois a Republican Party stronghold.  See my article about developments in Siskiyou and North Colorado for a full detailed discussion of the State of Jefferson movement.

The State of Jefferson flag.  The “X”es refer to being “double-crossed” by urban élites.

Well, now, the Siskiyou supervisors (as the county-level legislators are called), at a meeting on September 3rd, voted 4-1 to secede as the State of Jefferson, according to reports, and a call was made to any counties that wished to join them.  With this, Jefferson, in its aspirations for statehood, joins the North Colorado movement—which will be on the ballot in 11 counties in November—as not just talk but a serious movement.  The Los Angeles Times reports that the hundreds who filled the hall when the vote was taken on Tuesday seemed, from a show of hands, to be nearly unanimous in supporting the idea.  One resident was quoted as saying, “Many proposed laws are unconstitutional and deny us our God-given rights.  We need our own state so we can make laws that fit our way of life.”  As in western Maryland, northeastern Colorado, and the Michigan U.P., gun rights, tax revolt, and opposition to same-sex marriage and to Barack Obama’s health-care reforms seem to be among the chief complaints—though in California the diversion of northern water to southern cities is a perennial source of regional animosity.

The original Jeffersonian secessionists

As a side note, if Siskiyou were to secede, it would not be the smallest U.S. state.  Western counties are quite large, and, at over 6,000 square miles, it would still be larger than Connecticut, Delaware, or Rhode Island.  However, with just under 45,000 people, it would far and away be the least populous; Wyoming, the current least-populous, has more than 10 times as many people.

I humbly predict that a cascade of Oregon and California counties will soon join the movement—maybe it will even spread beyond the original Jefferson area.  This is a trend that has legs.

[Also, for those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with a forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  Look for it some time in 2013.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.]

Al-Serw Declares Independence from Egypt in Publicity Stunt over Water-Utility Gripes

The residents of a small city in northeastern Egypt rallied in front of the municipal building on October 13th demanding not only redress of the community’s lack of potable water but even declaring independence from the Arab Republic of Egypt.  Protesters complained that the city, the province, and the water utility are all ignoring complaints about the decayed and ineffective water stations set up to supply the town.

The city in question, al-Serw (also spelled al-Sarw), is a small settlement in Damietta (in Arabic, Dumyat) province, east of Alexandria and not far from Port Said.  It is so small I can’t even find it on most maps.  It may be barely a municipality in all, in terms that are translatable to other administrative systems.  So far, there is no further information on these developments.  A new organization called the Popular Committee for the Defense of al-Serw is also mobilizing a hunger strike—which seems like a terrible idea, since it is important for hunger-strikers to say hydrated and ... well, you know.

Certainly there is no word yet on any flag for the al-Serw Republic, or whatever it would be called (Republika Serwska?).  But here is the flag of Damietta province itself, which—in addition to looking as though a child made it using Colorforms—seems a bit mocking of the inland areas, like al-Serw, which are suffering from lack of water:

[Also, for those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with a forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  Look for it in spring 2013.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.]