Harvest Of Rage: Why Oklahoma City Is Only The Beginning

by Joel Dyer

Timothy McVeigh is not alone. The 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City killed 168 innocent people and shattered the complacency of a nation. But this event, horrible as it was, may well be only the beginning of an unprecedented wave of terror in America. This is the chilling conclusion reached by Joel Dyer in Harvest of Rage, the first book to explore the surprisingly deep rural roots of today’s growing and increasingly deadly antigovernment movement.As a reporter who has spent years investigating the personal and social devastation facing rural Americans, Dyer has documented the tragic, lingering aftermath of the 1980s farm crisis that we have all but forgotten. But our shattered heartland is still there, collapsing like a black hole, pulling an entire way of life down with it and distorting rural America’s perceptions of economic and political reality. In its destructive wake, only the question Why? remains.That is a hard question to answer for people who have lived right, invested all they had, and believed that the American dream would come by the sweat of their brows, only to find themselves driven to the wall by impersonal and incomprehensible forces. Some in rural America cannot overcome their deep sense of personal failure. They are ending their lives at a rate that has made suicide overtake accidents as the leading cause of death on America’s farms.But others have discovered an alternative. They are drawn in by the gravitational pull of radical right-wing movements offering support, friendship, and paranoid explanations for Washington’s flawed rural policies and the global economy that has crushed so many. It’s the Jews, they whisper, it’s the United Nations, it’s the Black Helicopters. And most of all, it’s the federal government.Harvest of Rage explains why many otherwise decent people have joined an “alternate America” that seems to defy rational comprehension—until you begin to see the grains of truth that reside in the big lies of the radical antigovernment movement. Dyer shows us the complex arguments that antigovernment proponents use to justify their actions. Based on unprecedented and often intimate interviews with the leaders and the foot soldiers of these groups, his research reveals a complicated and often contradictory amalgam of politically and religiously based forces.Some, like the Republic of Texas, have already “seceded” from the United States and declared war on the U.S. government. Others have set up a secret system of courts, supposedly based in Anglo-Saxon common law, that judges and sentences perceived enemies. Meanwhile, armed militias and independent terrorist cells stand ready to carry out those sentences, including the death penalty.As the year 2000 approaches, many of these groups share a growing millennial fervor, a sense that they are in a state of war with the U.S. government and that an all-out confrontation must take place in the next three years. In this warped world, Oklahoma City truly is just the beginning. And until we come to understand that, until we begin to address the true underlying causes of America’s confrontation with domestic terror, we are doomed to continue to reap what has been sown: a Harvest of Rage. Completely updated with new material on the McVeigh Trial, the defense of Terry Nichols, and the lingering doubt that both were not alone, but assisted by a host of ”unknown others” in the militia movements of rural America.

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics

304 pages, Hardcover

First published July 23, 1997

Reviews

[J.S.A. Lowe · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's kind of (extremely) weird to review this, cos it has my folks in it, and l know they were outraged and felt betrayed, having somehow believed they would be portrayed...very differently. Dyer's style is a bit purple for me and not terribly academic (per my preferences—not saying his book pretends to be otherwise) and l recognize the alt-weekly influence because it's part of my own style. A surprising many of the facts about my parents are wrong (even the spelling of their names) so it causes me to doubt other information. It's impressive that Dyer had the foresight and reportage to attempt this ambitious book at all, but it's a bit too ambitious and misses out on some subtleties by going for some (perhaps fictitious?) (certainly fugitive) big-picture sweeping conclusion that doesn't exist. This stuff never goes away, it just turns quietly into the Tea Party, or whatever the next change is. I've watched its movements for 40+ years. Dyer needed someone like me as a co-writer. I'm too close to all this to write a review & this makes no sense, but here it is anyway.

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the spring of 1996, the peace of Oklahoma City was shattered when a truck bomb ignited outside a federal office. Nearly two hundred people were killed, and nigh a thousand injured, in one man's act of rage against the government. But in Harvest of Rage, Joel Dyer writes that McVeigh was far from alone: he was part of a movement of thousands, spread across the country but concentrated in its withering agricultural heartland. The farm crisis -- the growing poverty and destruction of rural life in the wake of globalization -- has created legion of homegrown terrorists, whose despair has been crafted into insurrection against the government. Dyer spent seven years interviewing and visiting anti-government types attempting to get to the bottom of rural militancy, and offers sections on the movement's ideological bases as well as his economic argument. Although portions of this are badly dated, especially given that Dyer sees Endtimes-paranoia about the coming of the Millennium as a factor, the central issues are alive and well twenty years later.

Dyer is not sympathetic to most of the ideas that he encounters during his seven-year investigation (he refers to the free enterprise system as one "in which the government does nothing to help people"), but he does empathize with the plight of his subjects, sharing some of their concerns if not their response. The central issue, as Dyer sees it, is economic: as globalization allows for American firms to manufacture goods and purchase food more cheaply overseas, America's own primary industries are being gutted. Family farms are being eaten alive by monstrously large international entities like Cargill, and as they fail they take with them rural towns. Further , Dyer writes, a farm is different from other small businesses; a farmer is more likely to have inherited the estate from his father, who inherited from his own. The farm is home, and can contain within it an family's entire history. To be responsible for losing that heritage can be emotionally crippling: little wonder when this ruin looms, some farmers clutch at whatever desperate straws they can find.

Having established the nature of the farm crisis as one not causing a shortage of food, but one obliterating the livelihoods of families and local economies of families throughout the west, Dyer then argues that their legitimate grievances are being twisted into sometimes violent conspiracy theories. Farmers are not simply competing with multinationals; in fact, they depend on them for storage, equipment, and some supplies. Some chicken farmers are functional shareholders, doomed to contracts with giants like Tyson which constantly demand equipment upgrades that keep them in debt. The law is no recourse; not only are the oversight agencies tasked with keeping monopolies in check staffed by former members of the very companies they are policing, but the government bears responsibility in promoting “get big or get out” policies. Many of the families interviewed within were crippled by the farm policies of the 1970s and the monkeying-around with of interest rates. On realizing how many of their woes came from monopolies, and their sinister connection with the government which was supposed to be fair referee, the door was pried open for conspiracy. Government policy was not simply inappropriate, or corrupt: it became viewed as evil. Here was a plot to destroy individual freeholders and replace them by massive conglomerates controlled by a few, in one measure strengthening the cabal and undermining economic resistance. It was a sign of the times, the advent of a New World Order. The architect of this scheme was not a pocket-lining bureaucrat, but Satan himself. Obviously, it was the duty of every true Christian to resist – little wonder the government was so interested in taking the weapons of Americans! From there follows militia movements, composed of individuals willing to shoulder arms in defense of their rights – against the tyranny of the state, if need be. The threat of government assault was hardly theoretical, as the militarization of civil police forces caused a rash of civilian deaths, most notably at Waco.

All of this is tremendously interesting, although the central argument tends to wander away from its roots. Dyer’s goal is to link the farm crisis with rising antigovernment rhetoric and violence, but after some sections on farmers attempting to defraud lenders through legalese, he examines various parts of the antigovernment as a whole, not all of them with any rural dependence. Religious obsession with the rise of the New World Order and doomsday, for instance, was common in the sect of Christianity I was raised in, but we haven’t been farmers for three generations. The same is true of the book’s sections on strict Constitutionalism and monetary policy: one need not be a distressed farmer to hold the government in contempt for granting itself war powers in peacetime, or for entrusting the nation’s financial security to an entity that has control over the money supply, but no accountability whatsoever. Dyer has a tendency to make sweeping statements – at one time, he urges the reader to go into any small rural town and take note of the abundance of people with Constitutions in their front pockets. 99.9999% of the time, he says, these people are involved to some degree in the antigovernment movement. Well, who isn’t involved in antigovernment activity to some degree? He also assumes that all of the pipe bombs discovered in the United States in a given year were deployed by agents of the vast rural agenda. Dyer is genuine, though, both in his concern about how the heartland is being devestation, and in his fear of what is to come. No war of disaffected farmers ever broke out, however, despite the coming of the Millennium, and I for one think Dyer’s extensive time embedded in some fairly radical groups gave him his own acute sense of paranoia.

Harvest’s argument is stretched too thin sometimes to be credible, but the facts and stories Dyer turns up are worth the read alone. The issues at hand are still relevant: many of the grievances aired here drive the contemporary Tea Party movement, for instance. Even with its tares, Harvest of Rage is a commendable look inside American populism and how it can turn tragically violent.

[Dennis Blewitt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Joel gives insight into a movement in this country that is ignored by most. He describes the disenfranchised and a great segment of our population that feels frustrated and powerless.