I’m willing to cut apart my state! I live in Virginia, and I’d be perfectly happy to let West Virginia have the western parts of the state, North Carolina have the South, and we Northern Virginians will merge with Maryland and Delaware.
I’ve also thought that the state of my birth, Pennsylvania, could easily be split in half with New Jersey and Ohio each getting a piece.
Here are some ideas that have been floated, in earnest or otherwise, for reorganizing the American state system:
Despite the dystopian-fictional context, this might be a good system – if each province, district and county were ruled by a locally elected executive and assembly, rather than a commissioner appointed by the president.
2. In his 1972 book Reclaiming the Constitution: An Imperative for Modern America (Santa Barbara, CA: Clio Press), Leland D. Baldwin proposed reorganizing the “lower 48” into a system of 14 new states of roughly equivalent populations. Going from west to east (population figures are, of course, based on census data available in 1972):
Oregon: 6.3 million people. Includes the present states of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and the northwest edge of Montana
Sierra: 8.2 million. Most of present-day California north of the L.A. area.
California: 11.6 million. All of Southern Cal from L.A. to San Diego, down to the border with Mexico.
Deseret: 4.7 million. All of Nevada, Utah and Arizona, plus western New Mexico, western Colorado, and the southwest corner of Wyoming.
Missouri: 9 million. The Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, most of Montana and Wyoming, eastern Colorado, and northern strips of Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico (all in a line with the present Oklahoma panhandle).
Texas: 15 million. Most of Texas and Oklahoma, plus eastern New Mexico, western Arkansas and northwestern Louisiana.
Mississippi: 18 million. Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri, and Illinois outside the Chicago metro area.
Chicago: 8 million. The whole Chicago metro area, including adjacent urbanized parts of Indiana.
Erie: 23.7 million. Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana outside metro Chicago.
Savanna: 23.2 million. Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Florida, eastern Louisiana, eastern Arkansas, and the western tip of Tennessee.
Appalachia: 16.5 million. Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, and the bulk of Tennessee.
Alleghenia: 19.7 million. Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, and southern New Jersey.
New York: 17.6 million. The whole New York City metro area, including northern New Jersey, southeastern New York, and western Connecticut.
New England: 16 million. The remainder of New York and Connecticut plus all the other New England states.
For geographic reasons, Alaska (pop. 295,000), Hawaii (718,000) and Puerto Rico (2.7 million) are left as separate states.
The People’s Almanac, by David Wallechinsky and Irving Wallace (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1975), includes maps for two more reorganization schemes.
Pacifica: Alaska, Hawaii, Washington, Oregon, California north of the L.A. area, plus northwestern Wyoming and Idaho, and a western strip of Nevada. Capital: San Francisco.
Rocky: Montana, Colorado, Utah, most of Nevada, Wyoming and Idaho, northern strips of New Mexico and Arizona, western strips of South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, and some western bits of Oklahoma and Texas. Capital: Denver.
Angelina: Southern California, most of Arizona and New Mexico, and southwestern Texas. Capital: Los Angeles.
North Plains: Minnesota, North Dakota, most of South Dakota, northeastern Wyoming, northern strips of Nebraska and Iowa, the northern half of Wisconsin, and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Capital: Minneapolis.
Central Plains: Most of Kansas and Nebraska, plus western strips of Iowa and Missouri. Capital: Kansas City.
South Plains: Most of Oklahoma and northern Texas. Capital: Dallas.
North Heartland: Central and eastern Iowa, southern Wisconsin, western Michigan, northern Illinois and most of Indiana. Capital: Chicago.
South Heartland: Eastern Missouri, southern Illinois, a southern strip of Indiana, western Kentucky, northwestern Tennessee, and the northern third of Arkansas. Capital: St. Louis.
New South: Georgia, north-central Florida, southern South Carolina, the west ends of North Carolina and Virginia, a bit of southeastern Kentucky, the bulk of Tennessee, southern Arkansas, eastern strips of Texas and Oklahoma, and all of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama that are not assigned to Gulf Coast (below). Capital: Atlanta.
Gulf Coast: Southeastern Texas, southern coastal strips of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, and the western end of the Florida panhandle. Capital: Houston.
Industry: Ohio, eastern Michigan, northeastern Kentucky, western West Virginia, western Pennsylvania, western New York. Capital: Detroit.
Yankee: Maine, New Hampshire, Vermong, northeastern New York, eastern Massachusetts and half of Rhode Island. Capital: Boston.
Empire: Connecticut, western Massachusetts, southwestern Rhode Island, central and southern New York, northeastern Pennsylvania, northern New Jersey. Capital: New York.
Mid-Atlantica: Maryland, Delaware, south-central Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey, northern Virginia, eastern West Virginia. Capital: Baltimore.
Carolina: Southern Virginia, most of North Carolina, northern South Carolina. Capital: Norfolk.
Tropicana: Central and southern Florida, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. Capital: Miami.
4. Also in The People’s Almanac: A 38-state nation proposed by G. Etzel Pearcy, geography professor at California State University, Los Angeles. The resulting map looks a lot like what we’ve got now, except that the states are an average of 1/4 larger in area and there are no straight-line boundaries. I won’t try to list or describe the new states. More interesting is the commentary:
Excellent post, BG.
The above highlights one of the problems that I have with conglomerators (?) - most have nothing more than population glasses on. Why choose Minneapolis as the capitol? St. Paul already has a full set of governing buildings (some really quite nice) that would make the transition much easier, but noooo… Minneapolis has more people, see? We’d just have to build another humongous set of capitol buildings! About ten miles from the old set! Because it has more people! Damn the costs! Roll out the taxes!
Ummm…have you read the document to which you refer? Hint: You’re wrong.
Nothing “Unconstitutional” about it if the Legislatures and Congress agree.
I would also note that there is nothing in this section about leaving the Union although as far as the “Militias” go, it does have something to say…
Hmmm…consent of Congress. Fascinating document if you read it…
I think the civil war proved the exact opposite point. States are “soverign” in certain respects, but they are most definitely not completely “soverign.”
The people of Maine and West Virginia would be most interested in hearing that…
Zev Steinhardt
Well, yes, there is a statute – a federal statute – to that effect:
However, the “unorganized militia” clause has never, ever been used for any purpose, and there is no case law construing its meaning.
No, sir! The United States of America is not a “Union” in the sense that you are using the term. The United States is a true nation and a true nation-state, in a way that the Soviet Union never was, and the European Union never will be if it merges all political sovereignty in the European Parliament and holds together for a thousand years. The American people, despite regional, ethnic and class divisions, are one people, with a shared and unique national culture that existed on this continent at least a century before we declared independence from Britain.
The United States is not an “idea-state” like the Soviet Union, with liberal democracy substituted for Marxism-Leninism as the official ideology. The United States is a nation-state which happens, at this stage of its history, to have a federal republican system of government – just like Germany is a nation-state which happens, at this stage in its history, to have a federal republican system of government. Germany under the Kaiser, under the Weimar Republic, and under Hitler was still the same country. China is still recognizably the same country it was in the time of Confucius, even though since then there have been many imperial dynasties, periods of division, periods of rule by foreign conquerors, and most recently, Communist rule; China remains China. Poland remained Poland through all the centuries when no Polish state existed and the Polish people were ruled as subject minorities by the Germans, Russians and Austrians. If the United States were to come under a radically different political system, say a dictatorship, or a centralized unitary republic, or a reorganized federal system like we’re discussing in this thread, or even colonial rule by a foreign power, this would still be the same country. And bear in mind that some day, we Americans almost certainly will have a fundamentally different political system – several different systems, no doubt, over the course of the centuries: National cultures last much longer than constitutions or regimes. As George Orwell put it in his 1941 book The Lion and the Unicorn, “What can the England of 1840 have in common with the England of 1940? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.”
I think it’s worth mentioning that the various regional models discussed above miss a crucial element. As our recent voting trends point out, population centers tend to have concerns in common with other population centers. Whereas, non-urban areas tend to have concerns in common with other non-urban centers.
So, if I were to divide up the coutry differently than it is now, I would be more inclined to draw the boundries around large cities, separating out the less populated areas. Obviously, this would disrupt contiguous geography as a model, but it would certainly be more reflective of the common values exhibited by population groups through voting.
I agree entirely – see my above post proposing that every metro area as large as or larger than the Washington metro area should be made a separate “city-state.” A governor of Illinois, I forget his name, once committed a major gaffe by stating publicly that the official figures for crime rates in Illinois did not provide an accurate picture of crime in that state because “Chicago skews the results” – implying that Chicago is not properly part of Illinois. Yet it is true that the people, and the problems, of the Chicago area are very different from those of rural and small-town Illinois. Let there be a divorce: Let Greater Chicago be a separate state, with a metro government that has all the plenary police powers of a state government, and let it devote all those powers to solving uniquely urban and suburban problems, such as planning for regional transportation; and let the rest of Illinois, or whatever new state its territory becomes a part of, have a state government that deals with the problems of rural and small-town society. Each state government would then have a chance to specialize in its own kinds of problems.
I would add one more condition: No city-state should be an enclave entirely enclosed within the territory of a larger state, like Lesotho within South Africa, or the “independent cities” within the counties of Virginia. Let every city-state be on a border between two or more rural states. Since the urban agglomerations of population are very real, physical and social entities, rather than arbitrary lines on maps, let us begin with recognizing their existence, and use them as our starting points. “Greater Washington” is more clearly a real, distinct community than is an arbitrary regional description such as “Northwestern Florida” or “East Texas.”
So what? The blue field of the flag is getting too busy anyway. Let’s just drop the one-star-per-state tradition and go back to the original ring of 13 stars. At this stage in our history, no one will take that as implying any superior status for the original 13 colonies/states.
To put this in perspective: Originally, the U.S. flag had a stripe for each state, as well as a star for each state. At some point, I’m not sure when, our forefathers noticed that, as more and more states were admitted, this practice would soon cause the red and white stripes to visually blur into a solid field of pink; so they went back to the original 13 stripes.
The flag for a time had fifteen stripes, after the addition of the 14th and 15th states. It was during this era that they decided to not add a stripe for each new state, and went back to the 13th. But you can still find a few very, very old flags in museums with fifteen stripes.
Please bear in mind, unixrat, that one pretty much has to be a Minnesotan to really understand, or care, that St. Paul and Minneapolis are not exactly the same city.
And under practically any conceivable plan to rationalize state and local government in American, they would be the same city – that is, they would be consolidated in a single metro government. Same with Dallas-Ft. Worth, etc. And my own home town of Tampa, FL, would be merged with St. Petersburg and Clearwater.
So “Minneapolis,” defined as “Minneapolis-including-St. Paul,” could indeed serve as a state capital, using the same state government buildings that are now standing in St. Paul – no need to build new ones.
Here are the population rankings of the 49 U.S. metro areas with populations greater than one million, based on the 2000 census (source: http://mywebpage.netscape.com/fcsklabrie/ammetro.htm):
New York, NY-NJ-CT-PA 21,199,865
Los Angeles, CA 16,373,645
Chicago, IL-IN-WI 9,157,540
Washington-Baltimore, DC-MD-VA-WV 7,608,070
San Fransisco-Oakland-San Jose, CA 7,039,362
Philadelphia, PA-NJ-DE-MD 6,188,463
Boston, MA-NH-ME-CT 5,819,100
Detroit, MI 5,456,428
Dallas-Fort Worth, TX 5,221,801
Houston, TX 4,669,571
Atlanta, GA 4,112,198
Miami-Fort Lauderdale, FL 3,876,380
Seattle-Tacoma, WA 3,554,760
Phoenix, AZ 3,251,876
Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN-WI 2,968,806
Cleveland, OH 2,945,831
San Diego, CA 2,813,833
St. Louis, MO-IL 2,603,607
Denver, CO 2,581,506
Tampa-St. Petersburg, FL 2,395,997
Pittsburgh, PA 2,358,695
Portland-Salem, OR 2,265,223
Cincinnati, OH-KY-IN 1,979,202
Sacramento, CA 1,796,857
Kansas City, MO-KS 1,776,062
Milwaukee, WI 1,689,572
Orlando, FL 1,644,561
Indianapolis, IN 1,607,486
San Antonio, TX 1,592,383
Norfolk-Virginia Beach, VA-NC 1,569,541
Las Vegas, NV-AZ 1,563,282
Columbus, OH 1,540,157
Charlotte-Gastonia-Rock Hill, NC-SC 1,499,293
New Orleans, LA 1,337,726
Salt Lake City-Ogden, UT 1,333,914
Greensboro–Winston-Salem–High Point, NC 1,251,509
Austin-San Marcos, TX 1,249,763
Nashville, TN 1,231,311
Providence-Fall River-Warwick, RI-MA 1,188,613
Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill, NC 1,187,941
Hartford, CT 1,183,110
Buffalo-Niagara Falls, NY 1,170,111
Memphis, TN-AR-MS 1,135,614
West Palm Beach-Boca Raton, FL 1,131,184
Jacksonville, FL 1,100,491
Rochester, NY 1,098,201
Grand Rapids-Muskegon-Holland, MI 1,088,514
Oklahoma City, OK 1,083,346
Louisville, KY 1,025,598
I would not propose making all of these “city-states” – but, assuming any of you even accept the “city-state” idea in principle, let’s have some discussion on what should be the cutoff point. How long does a metro area have to be before it merits consideration of state status? (My position is, any metro area below that cutoff level should be made a consolidated city-county.)
For a contrary view – disputing the “self-evident” wisdom of consolidating local governments – see the following article by Elinor Olstrom, a polysci professor from Indiana University, from the website of the American Political Science Association: http://www.apsanet.org/PS/march00/ostrom.cfm
Sorry, in my above post I should have said, “How big does a metro area have to be before it merits consideration of state status?” Not, “how long”. I would have assumed polysci to be much too dry a field for Freudian slips . . .
None of the scenarios offer where the SDMB will reside.
I doubt that New York would ever consent to a consolidation model that would result in a phasing out of “New Jersey” jokes.
I expect we’ll have that kind of thing persisting in our culture for a long time, even after a given state is abolished or reconfigured as a political entity.
At least we’ll always have “The Rolling Mills of New Jersey”:
Down in Trenton there is a bar
Where the bums come from near and far
They come by truck, they come by car
The lousy bums of New Jersey
– by John Roberts and Tony Barrand, 1983; to the tune of “The Rolling Hills of the Border”
On the subject of states old and new, there’s an interesting and generally forgotten bit of American history: The area that is now western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee was once slated to be admitted to the Union as our 14th state, the state of Franklin (named for Benjamin Franklin). The project was floated by settlers there in 1784 but a dead letter by 1788. (Perhaps admission to “the Union” is the wrong choice of words here, as this was all when we had the Articles of Confederation, not our present Constitution which was ratified in 1789.) See http://homepages.rootsweb.com/~edwards/frank.html.
I once saw a contemporary leaflet about a proposal by nine adjoining border counties – three from southeastern Kentucky, three from southwestern Virginia, three from northeastern Tennessee – to secede from their respective states and form a new state of “Cumberland.” The idea was that these counties have a common regional culture, and interests, that distinguish them from Kentucky, etc. I’m not sure how seriously it was intended.