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154 Chapter 6 The Appalachian Trail and the Rise of the New Right When Appalachian Trail advocates approached Arthur Delmolino in 1985 with a request to purchase land for a corridor through his cornfields and pastures in Sheffield, Massachusetts, the farmer stated that he was unwilling to cede his land to the US government and “sacrifice my property and 60 years of hard work . . . clearing this land to benefit a bunch of hikers in fancy boots.”1 Delmolino’s farm was located at the site of Shays’ Rebellion —a famous revolt of local farmers who resisted payment of debts and taxes to wealthy state officials in the late 1780s. Shays’ Rebellion ultimately inspired national leaders to write the US Constitution and establish a stronger system of centralized government that could protect individuals from local autocrats and prevent unequal economic policies between the states. In contrast, when the National Park Service began taking land to create new parks and trails in the late twentieth century, farmers such as Delmolino argued that a tyrannical centralized government had begun to infringe on the rights of individuals and state and local governments. As he leaned against the monument that marked the final battle of Shays’ Rebellion, Delmolino told a New York Times reporter that not much had changed since the 1780s. For Delmolino and many other landowners along the Appalachian Trail, the fundamental question was still the same: how much power should the government have in controlling the lives of private citizens? The picture of the twentieth-century farmer standing at the site of Shays’ Rebellion provided a powerful image to support protests against the National Park Service’s land acquisition program for the Appalachian Trail. By using symbols associated with the Revolutionary War era and the Rise of the New Right 155 founding of the US Constitution, even if the analogies lacked historical precision, the protests of landowners along the Appalachian Trail evoked basic questions about the relationship between private citizens and government power. Moreover, this kind of historical rhetoric helped landowners Massachusetts farmer Arthur Delmolino leans against the monument that marks the final battle of Shays’ Rebellion. Delmolino argued that the issue was still the same: the government infringing on the lives of private citizens. Photo by Steve Miller. 156 Rise of the New Right link their concerns to a political movement that had been stirring since the 1960s.2 As members of an expanding middle class became alienated by cultural changes in the 1960s and 1970s that were codified through federal legislation such as the Civil Rights Act and the environmental statutes of the 1970s, many engaged in their own form of political organization. Central to this movement was organized resistance to the growing power of the federal government to control the economic and social lives of everyday Americans . As exemplified in the campaign to elect Barry Goldwater in the 1960s, in the Sagebrush Rebellion in the West in the late 1970s, in the “wise use” movement in the late 1980s and 1990s, and, most recently, in the organization of the Tea Party, the New Right rose in status from being a fringe of the conservative movement to becoming a central player in federal politics.3 One of the most significant events in this shift from the periphery to center stage was the election of president Ronald Reagan, a self-proclaimed sagebrush rebel. Reagan’s appointment of James Watt as the secretary of the Interior in 1981 indicated that president Jimmy Carter’s extension of New Deal liberalism was being replaced by New Right conservatism. To limit the power of federal government and to promote private ownership, economic productivity, and local control, the Reagan administration reinvigorated Nixon’s plans for “new federalism.”4 New federalism aimed to give more power to the states and to promote local decision making, weakening the power of the federal government that had grown since Roosevelt’s New Deal programs in the 1930s. Reagan’s call for “creative conservation” essentially applied the tenets of new federalism to the administration’s environmental policies and programs. In the case of the Appalachian Trail and many other land conservation projects, this meant promoting local autonomy and private entrepreneurship by keeping land on local tax rolls and slowing the flow of federal funds for land acquisition. With the advent of the new administration and the economic recession of the early 1980s, leaders from within the AT community recognized that the landscape of national policy had fundamentally changed. Longtime ATC volunteer...

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