Karl Hess: Presidential Speechwriter Turned Homesteader

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There's a super-conservative taxpayers group, for example, over in the next county. It's made up of farmers and community leaders and it's advocating participatory democracy. Now this came right out of their own experience: they don't have any militant left wingers over there. They just know that if they can't control the political decisions in their own locality, they're helpless.

It's the same way now with the miners around here. They've got a wildcat strike going because they don't care what Arnold Miller says anymore. After all, Miller is only the president of their union while the miners are the union.

I see this movement-this insistence on controlling their own destiny-showing up more and more out here among the country residents where I live. I guess that's quite natural in a place like West Virginia, though, because the people here are used to being citizens. This is not a law-and-order state where the average man is just a subject and the police tell him what to do. Out here, the people don't just obey the law they make the law.

PLOWBOY: You're convinced, then, that the developing trend toward decentralization in our society is coming from the little guys. It's a spontaneous movement of millions of people from the bottom up, rather than being directed by any "leaders" from the top down.

HESS: Oh it's always tempting to think that today's social change is being led by a few fancy people like me-rich guys who've become poor guys-because that's sort of sensational. It's the gaudiest form of change. But it's only a very, very small part of a much larger movement that has already started and which gains a great deal of strength every time a plant closes down and three hundred people get laid off or we make another monster wheat deal with Russia and the price of bread goes up or the man in the street learns that yet another industrial by-product causes cancer. It's tens of millions of little guys all over the country-banding together to gain more direct control over their lives on a local level-who are making this revolution not just a few big city dropouts like me.

PLOWBOY: Yes. You are a big city boy, aren't you? Tell us how you got from there to here and start at the beginning.

HESS: Well I was born in Washington, D.C., and I've spent virtually all my life there. It's my hometown and I have a lot of affection for the place and the people who live there except, maybe (soft laugh), for some of the yo-yos on Capitol Hill and in the Pentagon.

PLOWBOY: Go on.

HESS: I was an only child. My father was a multi-millionaire type a good tennis player, a socialite, and a lecher. My mother was and still is-a remarkable woman who left my father as soon as she could and got a job as a switchboard operator. So I've always gotten a great deal of pleasure from knowing that if she hadn't been a woman of such moral integrity, I'd have been a rich kid. That knowledge was quite comforting as I grew up. It gave me a secret strength to draw on whenever the other kids were putting me down.

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