Remembering ‘Forgottonia,’ noticing new ‘secessions’

 

Bill Knight column for 1-25, 26 or 27, 2021

 Days remain to enjoy “Forgottonia: The Musical,” an original production presented online about a region seceding from the United States.

Loosely based on a real, if satirical, brainstorm by the late Neal Gamm in western Illinois in the early 1970s, the show is streaming at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday on www.youtube.com/flynorththeatricals.

Gamm, a Viet Nam veteran and theater student, boosted western Illinoisans’ feeling that the area was ignored, especially in transportation. Maps of the 16 counties along the Mississippi River then showed it was a “fly-over” (even “can barely get there”) territory. As Forgottonia’s self-proclaimed governor, Gamm, who died in 2013, got a lot of attention for a little while, from Springfield lawmakers to the New York Times. But then his public-relations act played out.

Now, the new play, directed by Sydnie Grosberg Ronga for St. Louis’ non-profit Fly North Theatricals, recalls such resentments, even with enjoyable fictional flourishes. It also indirectly nods at today’s social divisions, perhaps best exemplified by the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol. There, neo-Confederates and white supremacists, egged on by President Trump and others, tried a coup but left defeated, with five dead in their wake and countless arrests ahead. But suspicions and rage exist elsewhere, seemingly everywhere.

Actually, another political stunt in the November election had 20 of Illinois’ 102 counties voted to secede from the state. “The Illinois Separation” included a Forgottonia county where I grew up, Hancock, and others in southeastern Illinois.

Of course, such posturing is doomed, as foolish as a drunken senior on a backyard trampoline.

Still, it sometimes pops up, like weeds or mice. The most recent secession pandering was in 2019, when five southern Illinois Republican lawmakers tried a reverse: forcing Chicago to be the 51^st state. It failed, naturally, since the legislature listened to the Better Government Association’s response that the claim that Chicago was ripping off downstate was “total nonsense.” Using facts, John Jackson of the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at SIU/Carbondale the previous year had reported that for every dollar Chicago sends to Springfield, it gets back 90 cents.

Be careful what you wish for, numbskulls.

Such flights of foolishness aren’t new, either, as shown in two recent history books that address the idea – briefly touching on Hancock County, too.

Richard Kreitner’s “Break It Up: Secession, Division and the Secret History of America’s Imperfect Union” shows that “disunion” has been around throughout the continent since the union was established, from Aaron Burr to the Civil War to 21^st century suggestions like the “Western States Pact” between California, Oregon and Washington state. Illinois was home to a secession of sorts: the Latter-Day Saints’ Nauvoo. The Saints (Mormons) fled from New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Missouri before settling in Hancock County, where their population grew to more than 10,000 – bigger than Chicago in the early 1800s. That made Nauvoo politically powerful, forcing the state to grant the town an independent charter. So Mormon leader Joseph Smith set up not only self-rule, but his own militia, rivaling the state’s. However, Nauvoo leaders also sparked (and attacked) Mormons who objected to Smith’s policies and practices, and in 1844, after Smith was arrested for destroying an independent Mormon newspaper and inciting a riot, a mob of neighboring non-Mormons stormed the jail where he was held and killed him.

In 1845, Illinois revoked Nauvoo’s charter, and the next year representatives from 9 area counties negotiated Mormons’ departure, and they moved as a group to Utah.

Covered in more depth in Benjamin E. Park’s “Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier,” the Nauvoo experience may indicate that disunited areas such as Mormons’ independent theocracy in Illinois, with its separate constitution and government, are far easier to dream of as utopias than to realize, especially through some single unifying trait, whether Nauvoo, the United States, Forgottonia or Israel.

Park’s book asks, “Can religious and other minority groups survive in a democracy where the majority dictates the law of the land?”

Repeatedly fleeing persecution, Mormons, like other pilgrims, would say no.

Mormon dissidents, feeling Smith’s church dictatorship, would say no, too.

As current events seem to show, even faith, laws and guaranteed rights can seem insufficient.

As for “Forgottonia: The Musical,” it may “only” be a play, but there are lessons to learn from many sources, from screens at home, books at hand, or halls of governments.

Achieving and maintaining unity needs constant instruction.