The Auctioneer

0:00The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with Jeff Rigenbach. Joan Sampson was a depression baby, born in 1937. She died of cancer in 1976 when she was still in her thirties. In 1975, the year before her death, she published her only novel, The Auctioneer. This seems to be just about the sum total of what is publicly known regarding Joan Sampson. And that, I'm here to tell you, is a damn shame. Because that one novel of hers, The Auctioneer, is a real humdinger. And it would be nice to be able to tell you a bit more about its author before I go on to build the rest of my podcast around the novel itself.

0:54The novel is set in and around the small town of Harlow in central New Hampshire sometime in the early 1970s. The main characters are a farmer, John Moore, who seems to be in his late 40s and is just beginning to look a bit worn down by the hard life he's lived, his wife, Mim, short for Miriam, maybe ten years younger, still bursting with energy and utterly devoted to her husband, their four-year-old daughter Hilde, and their rural lifestyle, for all its austerities and deprivations, and John's mother, variously known as Mrs. Moore and Asmaw, who can no longer walk or even stand for very long without the aid of a pair of of Canes, and who spends her life on the living room couch watching TV and minding Hildy while her son and daughter-in-law do the work of both household and farm.

1:51One day the Moors have a visitor, Bob Gore, the local chief of police, or perhaps it would be more accurate to call him the entire one-man local police force. Gore is not taken quite as seriously by his neighbors in and around Harlow as he probably would like to be, at least if Mrs. Moore's comments may be relied upon as typical of the common view in those parts. Anything said by a gore, Ma tells her daughter-in-law at one point, you can put right out of your head. That was ever a topsy-turvy household. Weren't no one in it ever cared two whoops and thunder for the truth. Of course she also tells her daughter-in-law, in a different conversation on a different Say, that for all his talk Bobby got the share of cents for the whole 19 of them Gore kids, and if he'd a lit out of Harlow like the rest, we'd have old Toby, Gore's elderly father, on the dole, sure.

2:51But she tells Gore himself to his face that you ain't got no more cents than the rest of the Gores, and she ought to know. She's been acquainted with Bob Gore and his 18 brothers and sisters since they were students in her Sunday school class 30 or 40 years before. Nor does her son John think very highly of Bob Gore's prowess as a cop. All these seven years, John Moore says, he's been dreaming of having a real honest-to-gosh crime to solve, and now he's got a whopper, a stranglin', not to mention the break-in and the hold-up. And poor old Bobby ain't scared up so much as a suspect. That strangling Moore refers to is, as he himself notes, the only murder Harlow's had in a hundred years, and he believes it was committed by an outsider for sure.

3:42So's that other stuff, the break-in, the hold-up, most like. But as it turns out, Gore has paid them a visit on this Thursday afternoon in the early spring, hoping to convince them to donate something for an upcoming police benefit auction, John Moore is skeptical. If everybody in town was a deputy, there'd still be trouble, he grumbles, but he and Mim agree to contribute some rummage from the vast space underneath the barn that they've filled up with such stuff, stuff that could still be useful with a bit of mending, but they'll probably never get around to mending it. A week later to the day, Thursday afternoon, Gore reappears.

4:31He reports that the auction was a great success, and since, if one's good, two's better, they've decided to have another one the very next weekend. Might John and Mim have any more rummage out under the barn they'd like to see hauled away? They do. Gore loads it up and hauls it off. And a week later, he's back for more. It turns out the spark plug, the energy behind this sudden enthusiasm for police benefit auctions is the town's newest resident, Pearly Dunsmore, a professional auctioneer in his 50s who recently bought the old Fox Mansion on the town square, the house where the strangling took place, the strangling that made the house available for purchase by an outsider like Pearly Dunsmore.

5:19Each successive auction is deemed a great success for the safety of Harlow and vicinity. It isn't long before Bob Gore has five armed deputies and a couple of new cruisers for his department. It isn't long before the auctions become regular weekly events, as do the Thursday afternoon visits to pick up donations. And it isn't long before the Moors have completely emptied out the space under their barn where For the weekly Thursday afternoon pickups are now being made by armed deputies, deputies who also pass along local news and gossip while they wait to carry this week's donation out to their truck.

6:11That's how the Moors learn about what happened to Caleb Tuttle, for example. Caleb Tuttle, who cut the auctioneer off earlier than any of the other locals. Caleb Tuttle, who, the Moors here, ain't allowed Purley Dunn's Moor so much as a broken chair for a month, and meets them with a shotgun now, if Purley or any of the deputies he seems to have hand-picked for Bob Gore to hire so much as show up on Tuttle land. What a great pity it was when a heart attack got Caleb Tuttle just as he was heading into the barn to do the milking. Something must have startled him. Then there was Emily Carroll, whose husband took a job as a deputy, but then quit and afterwards refused to contribute to any further auctions.

7:00The steering on Emily's car suddenly and mysteriously went out as she was driving on a curving rural Road, leaving her paralyzed. And there was Tad Oakes, who owned a couple of commercial greenhouses near the town square, in which he grew geraniums. He stopped donating to the auctions, and then, mysteriously, a dead elm tree fell across his two greenhouses and smashed them up pretty good, one of the deputies tells John Moore on a Thursday afternoon. They was lucky, you ask me, whole damn family was up to Concord at the time. To the surprise of some of the townsfolk and nearby farmers like John Moore, Oakes sold his place immediately and moved to Manchester.

7:47Dunsmore gave him cash on the barrel head, the deputy tells Moore. These items of gossip about local people who opted out of the weekly auctions sound all the more ominous because of the folks passing them along. For the deputies who now do the collecting for the auctions, and otherwise seem to spend their time running errands and doing odd jobs as needed for pearly dunsmoor, are a pretty troubling lot, local thugs and hooligans most of them. When Bob Gore rattles off the names of his first five new deputies early in the novel, John Moore frowns and comments, Tough Lot. His mother is more emphatic about one of the five, the one that ends up replacing Bob Gore as chief of police.

8:36This deputy, Maude describes as the rottenest egg this town's turned out since I was big enough to hear tell. So the people in and around Harlow, including the Moors, allow themselves to be intimidated. They keep on donating to the auctions, even after they've already got rid of all the the old junk they really don't mind giving away. Gradually, they donate almost everything they own. They find themselves, after all, in their own particular version of a situation confronted sooner or later by every victim of the protection racket. They can see no alternative to their present course. It seems to them that they must either flee Harlow under cover of darkness, or stay and continue donating to the weekly police benefit auctions.

9:25It seems to them that there is no other way to ensure that an accident won't befall them, that they won't end up like Caleb Tuttle, Emily Carroll or Ted Oakes. Ultimately, the Moors are left sleeping on the floor on bare mattresses, all their furniture are gone, their tractor gone, their family heirlooms, as John later learns, now on display in Pearly Dunsmoor's fancy house on the town square. They're left, the Moors, without the wherewithal to run either their household or their farm. Ladies and gentlemen, behold the emergence of the state in a community that previously had only government.

10:10Not that Harlow was any kind of libertarian paradise before Purley Dunsmore appeared on the scene. But Albert J. Nock, whose usage I am following in this discussion, didn't maintain that government was always libertarian. He maintained that it should be. But the main thing he maintained was that in contrast to the state, government originated in the common understanding and common agreement of society, and served to implement the common and Desire of Society. And that sounds to me like a fair description of Harlow and vicinity in the pre-Dunsmore era. The people of this area had, of course, grown up in a society in which it was assumed, and never really questioned, that certain functions that could just as easily have been handled by private companies belonged properly to government, not to private enterprise, grading Planning and repairing the local roads, for example, ploughing those same roads when they got clogged with snow in the winter.

11:15The people who lived in and around Harlow had grown up in a society in which it was assumed and never really questioned that such services should be financed by taxes, that is, by forcible seizure of the assets of local residents. But the town government, as depicted in the pages of the Auctioneer, would probably pass The Government of Harlow is extremely unintrusive. It makes few interventions of any kind into the lives of the individuals who make their The Theory of Money and Credit Presently the purpose of the new order of things in Harlow and vicinity, the order introduced and maintained by Purley Dunsmoor and his corps of loyal deputies, Purley and his deputies have brought a genuine state to Harlow.

12:48Like most modern states, it lulls its victims into acquiescence and acceptance by kicking back to them an insignificant percentage of what it stole from them in the first place, whereby painting itself in the eyes of its victims as some sort of benefactor, but like most statesmen historically, the ones running pearly Dunsmore's state are quite willing to squeeze their victims until they are extinguished. As Yale political scientist and anthropologist James C. Scott notes in his recent book The Art of Not Being Governed, given a choice between patterns of subsistence that are relatively In the case of Harlow, it soon becomes clear that Dunsmore plans to bleed the existing population until it flees for its life.

14:04Then he plans to take the houses and farms those people used to own and sell them to new people, whom presumably he can bleed in turn, exploit to his profit. Does he bring it off? Or do the residents of Harlow and vicinity finally rise up against the state that has grown uninvited in their midst? Read The Auctioneer by Joan Sampson for yourself and find out. This is Jeff Rigenbach.