I have declared my birthday, July 3, to be “Interdependence Day” henceforth, and offered the following remarks at this year’s inaugural observation.

We remember together. We also forget together. On this Interdependence Day, I want to talk about collective memory, which drives our shared sense of identity, and nationhood.

I recently wrote a paper about Sacramento’s amnesia of the Squatters’ Riot, which those gathered may or may not remember. Allow me to briefly refresh your memory: In 1850, the Sacramento Settlers’ Association struggled against a corrupt city government that protected the interests of speculative landowners –many of whom were also public officials. The Association organized collective defenses against illegitimate evictions. The town was “excited” by progressively larger and more frequent meetings – hundreds of people, on a daily basis. Then, on August 14, several dozen Sacramentans finally lost patience with the courts and took up arms.

The resulting clash left eight people dead, including the sheriff and assessor. The mayor was wounded and left town to die of cholera months later. The “riot” aftermath included a financial collapse and severe crisis of government legitimacy, as well as waves of political violence including lynchings, suppression of dissent, and even the apparent disappearance of entire towns from the surrounding land. This was a major historical development, with severe and ongoing impacts. Residual conflict and strange disturbances continued for generations, including the disappearance of Monte Vista, the 1880s attempt at idyllic commuter suburbia – which originally featured an alley running through my back yard.

Something big and troubling happened in Sacramento. Something memorable. But most of it is forgotten. And it is high time we remember, together. We must recover forgotten memories of community and resistance, memories of interdependence. We must collectively change the story in which we are living. We remember things because they fit into stories, and we believe stories because they explain our memories. And I think a big part of our growing division is a splintering of what story we think we are living out.

To change our story, we must first identify it. For city like Sacramento, which burst into existence so suddenly during the Gold Rush, the community’s origin story is fairly pure and easy to isolate. It is a popular Western trope: The Black Hat Gang rides into Deadwood Gulch or wherever. They shoot up the saloon. They humiliate the mayor. They scandalize the librarian. Et cetera. But then, supposedly, the Man on the White Horse shows up and sorts everything out. We all know this story, which is at the core of every tale of manly frontier adventure.

But in our town, the Man on the White Horse never arrived. So the Black Hat Gang wrote the history of Sacramento. Those who did the lynchings portrayed themselves as the good guys, supposedly restoring the very law and order that they actually overthrew. As a result, Sacramento’s earliest memories fully scrambled. I’ve been deeply studying early Sacramento land struggles for most of a decade now. I’m a long way from the bottom of things, but I have no doubt that some serious trauma was purged from our collective memory. I believe that, until we recognize this and heal, we can’t move forward.

A warped frontier romanticism is currently rampant in America, selling us beer and trucks and politicians. In our collective identity we are the Wild West, including its really ugly bits. We are heirs of the Black Hat Gang. But we are also something else.

And here lies the good news: We have forgotten more than just bad things. The United States has its flaws, including collective amnesia about mob violence with political ends. But this nation is also one of the world’s largest and longest-running experiments in democracy. This nation is a fertile seedbed of cooperation and mutual aid – interdependence! – which is unfortunately left out of our political consciousness. The more we can remember that legacy of interdependence, the more tools we have to address the looming crisis of legitimacy begat by winner-take-all politics.

American democracy has always been about more than two parties chasing corporate donations and scrounging votes to seize and hold control of governments. Although we barely remember now, our countryfolk have long experimented with ways to distribute power downward and outward through society. Benjamin Franklin cofounded a fire protection cooperative, for example. Democracy has grown from much deeper grassroots than those tapped by any candidate.

Of course, much of this collaborative work has been limited to male-dominated projects that are tainted and sometimes saturated by white supremacy. After all, the Committees of Vigilance and the Ku Klux Klan were cooperative efforts to maintain elite control when government lacked a stomach for the necessary brutality. These are not good examples to emulate. These collectives met a common goal of a small part of society, but at a great cost of human suffering and general division. They undermined interdependence.

But the settlement of the West required interdependence. Surviving on the frontier was a group endeavor, for better or worse. Settlers needed collaborators for specialization of labor, for trade, and of course for dealing with the Indians (that’s the “worse” part). Stuart Udall’s Forgotten Founders shows how those who managed the challenging life of community building in places like Sacramento did it together. Even when that togetherness broke down, as in the Squatters’ Riot, it was hardly a free-for-all. Rather, there were competing visions of how the new Western version of American society should function. And rival groups organized collectively to see those visions become reality. By and large, the capitalist vision won out. But it was not alone. People read their Bibles, and got some interesting ideas about loving their neighbors. Frontier communes sprang up like mushrooms.

Most dramatic of these was the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints – our nation’s homegrown religion, still dominant in parts of the West. So what was up with the Mormons? Was this just an unusually large and powerful cult? The reality is more complicated and more challenging to our ideas of the American frontier. Yes, Mormons had peculiar theology and family structures, for which they were violently persecuted. But they also engaged in some dangerous economic practices that better explain the hostility they faced.

It turns out that the Latter Day Saints picked up their radical commonwealth ideas when a more-or-less standard Christian community converted to their faith, bringing their own ideas and practices of interdependence. Such practices were fairly widespread on the early American frontier, and they echoed the radical sharing of wealth and power that the first followers of Jesus had adopted, 18 centuries earlier: the Bible tells that, after Jesus abruptly rose into the sky, his followers shared their property and food, and “there was no poverty among them.”

But the Saints took it to an entirely new level, building a flawed but fascinating regional economy of religious interdependence – including the foundation for the West’s entire system of irrigated agriculture. And then their leadership was persecuted and their commonwealth destroyed, by a series of “raids” in the late 19^th Century. Supposedly polygamy provoked these raids, but does anyone believe that American politics were driven by concern for some poor second wife in a cabin somewhere out beyond the Rocky Mountains? In any case the raids’ actual result was the collapse of a socialist theocracy that was, more than anything, a threat and obstacle to capitalist exploitation of the West’s vast resources.

Around that same time, the National Farmers’ Alliance and Industrial Union raised another, more serious systemic challenge, analyzed in Lawrence Goodwyn’s The Populist Moment. With farmers pushed into debt and desperation, a revolution spread from the frontier of western Texas. Western Texas! Within a few years, this mass movement created a viable cooperative alternative, buying supplies and pooling their cotton. These co-ops were so threatening that the agricultural and financial industries just refused to do business with them. The Alliance even tried an audacious act of commonwealth: In pursuit of the capital needed to finance their efforts, members with land put up their farms as one gigantic collateral, to help themselves, each other, and even their landless comrades. The Alliance created what Goodwyn called “movement culture” – the belief that they could change things together. They created interdependence.

But the capitalist financial system fiercely resisted this threat. So the Alliance made an ill-fated foray into politics, in order to pursue their “subtreasury plan” to change how the federal government releases money into the economy – at the bottom instead of the top. The People’s Party was a brief and ineffective third party in 1896 – the last serious challenge to the enduring two-party hegemony. This political project was hijacked by political opportunists and silver promoters. The farmers lost. Still, the Alliance tangibly changed their lives for the better, organizing two million families in 43 states, hosting massive encampments that were called “a pentecost of politics.” The Alliance crossed the dreaded sectional divide in the Civil War’s aftermath and even included Black farmers like John Rayner, who was a top orator of the movement and a leader of the People’s Party in Texas. Yes, that Texas.

Both Mormons and Texans have largely forgotten their towering achievements of interdependence. These God-fearing rural folk launched what modern Americans would regard as wild socialist experiments. These experiments were imperfect, but they spread far from their points of origin, radically changing Americans’ ideas of what could be achieved when people worked together.

There’s a story in the Bible, about a fella named Nehemiah. He organized the community to do some amazing and miraculous stuff. After generations of despair and division under an imperial yoke, the people of Jerusalem rebuilt their city wall in 52 days, working together. They organized the work by radical, decentralized methods. Meanwhile, debts were forgiven. The Revolution was here! God was moving through a thousand hands! But then the religious authorities co-opted the revolt, re-establishing their control over a heartbroken community.

This story is in the Bible! But it is buried in the texts of Ezra, the religious authority who got Nehemiah’s rebellious community back in line. The story is still there, though, in the Bible, too important to omit and too challenging to remember. But what happens when the Bible, that favorite book of conservatives, dishes up a story so subversive, so deeply weird to capitalist Christianity? And what happens if rural America remembers that it was once on the brink of a real Texas-style revolution?

We Americans are capable of some pretty amazing business, when we work together. Rural America is especially good at this, even today. Farm co-ops are still an impressive feat of distributed democracy, despite their economic limitations and diminished vision. But, like the Mormons and the Texans, rural Americans forget what they have done.

Of course, people forget things. I’ve been around for half a century now, and most of my recollection of that time is pretty fuzzy. But then something jogs the memory. Back in 1978, when I was Deva’s age, Lawrence Goodwyn did some supremely important work reminding us what is forgotten: There was another way, which flowered briefly in the late 19^th Century before it was co-opted and withered away. The National Farmers’ Alliance and Industrial Union came a bit too early, before its urban counterparts were ready. Perhaps Goodwyn’s work was also premature, too much for us to grasp until we had a few more decades to see if the dominant order might eventually change for the better. Maybe we needed to see what false populism could do. These lessons are still out there among the Mormons and Texans, along with those of the Sacramento Settlers’ Association, and massive and persistent organizing by Civil Rights activists.

So what might happen if we remember our lost stories of resistance? What if we recognize that government is owned and operated by those with wealth – that political power is rooted in economic power? What if we remember that there is another path forward, in which people can build real collective power instead of fighting over the scraps left by rival elites? Extricating ourselves is especially important, as one of these parties has become entirely untethered from ethics and reality, pursuing whatever course seems likely to maintain its power. Even if the current crisis of truth is resolved, we are still left with over a century of entrenched rule by two cops trying to convince us they are the good one.

For better or worse, we’re all in this together. It’s a mess, but we can only get out together.