Walter Rodgers: Rural American Tradition of Disregard for Law Still Thrives
[Walter Rodgers, a former senior international correspondent for CNN, writes a biweekly column.]
The classic children’s story begins, “A wild, ringing neigh shrilled up from the hold of the Spanish galleon.” “Misty of Chincoteague” is one of those books you really wanted to believe as a kid: A shipload of Moorish ponies destined for the New World founders in a storm off the Virginia and Maryland barrier islands. The author tells us that for centuries they roamed “free, free, free,” on Assateague and Chincoteague as “the ponies adopted the New World as their own.” Today, the ponies still roam the islands, wild as ever. Reinforcing the legend, there’s a lovely bronze statue of “Misty” in the heart of the town of Chincoteague.
The author of this charming children’s book, Marguerite Henry, assures us that “All the incidents in this story are real.” But they probably are not. There’s no evidence that a Spanish ship carrying ponies sank there. A better explanation, historians say, is that these horses represent the grand American traditions of tax evasion and rural lawlessness.
Three hundred years ago, long before the Boston Tea Party, Virginia and Maryland farmers hid their horses on off-shore islands to avoid paying Colonial taxes on livestock. The pony herds eventually became feral. The historic lawlessness of Maryland and Virginia’s Eastern Shore is well documented in Charlton Ogburn’s Jr.’s classic, “The Winter Beach,” and James Michener’s novel “Chesapeake.”
Perhaps it would help to think of Chincoteague’s early Colonial tax dodgers as our bucolic pioneers in the disregard of the law – a tradition that still thrives. Fifteen percent of Americans admit they are likely to cheat on their taxes, according to a recent survey. Two-thirds of that group are men, mostly young and single. And nearly half say they are one paycheck away from financial disaster.
Increasingly, and not just in the tax arena, it seems Americans are looking at a distressed moral landscape, which often takes form as local poverty and blight....
Read entire article at CS Monitor
The classic children’s story begins, “A wild, ringing neigh shrilled up from the hold of the Spanish galleon.” “Misty of Chincoteague” is one of those books you really wanted to believe as a kid: A shipload of Moorish ponies destined for the New World founders in a storm off the Virginia and Maryland barrier islands. The author tells us that for centuries they roamed “free, free, free,” on Assateague and Chincoteague as “the ponies adopted the New World as their own.” Today, the ponies still roam the islands, wild as ever. Reinforcing the legend, there’s a lovely bronze statue of “Misty” in the heart of the town of Chincoteague.
The author of this charming children’s book, Marguerite Henry, assures us that “All the incidents in this story are real.” But they probably are not. There’s no evidence that a Spanish ship carrying ponies sank there. A better explanation, historians say, is that these horses represent the grand American traditions of tax evasion and rural lawlessness.
Three hundred years ago, long before the Boston Tea Party, Virginia and Maryland farmers hid their horses on off-shore islands to avoid paying Colonial taxes on livestock. The pony herds eventually became feral. The historic lawlessness of Maryland and Virginia’s Eastern Shore is well documented in Charlton Ogburn’s Jr.’s classic, “The Winter Beach,” and James Michener’s novel “Chesapeake.”
Perhaps it would help to think of Chincoteague’s early Colonial tax dodgers as our bucolic pioneers in the disregard of the law – a tradition that still thrives. Fifteen percent of Americans admit they are likely to cheat on their taxes, according to a recent survey. Two-thirds of that group are men, mostly young and single. And nearly half say they are one paycheck away from financial disaster.
Increasingly, and not just in the tax arena, it seems Americans are looking at a distressed moral landscape, which often takes form as local poverty and blight....