Lately I've been telling you a lot of good things about this country, and while I’ve meant every word, I want to be careful about something.
The version of patriotism that only ever flatters the home team isn't really patriotism; it's basically just marketing.
At home with my own kids, and in the work I do with our books and curricula, I’ve always tried to teach the whole story—the genuinely miraculous parts, and the parts that might make your stomach turn.
This is a stomach-turn story.
Twenty-one years ago this week, the Supreme Court ruled five to four that the government can take your home—a home you own, that you've paid for, and that by all measures is yours—and hand it to a private company so long as a city decides the company might generate more tax revenue than you do.
The case was Kelo v. New London, and if you've never heard of it, that's sort of the point.
Susette Kelo was a nurse in New London, Connecticut. She bought a little pink house on the water in the late '90s and restored it by hand, you know… the way people do when a place is going to be theirs for the rest of their life.
The city, however, had other ideas.
See, Pfizer had just built a facility nearby, and the city decided the working-class Fort Trumbull neighborhood would be put to better use as part of an upscale development that would, in theory, generate more tax dollars. So, they decided to take it. Not for a road, or a school, or for anything anyone could argue was a "public use" (I’m not saying that would make it okay)—but to transfer it to private developers who'd do something “better” with it.
Kelo fought hard, and The Institute for Justice took her case all the way to the Supreme Court.
Aaaand the Court sided with the city.
Twenty-plus years on, and the land they took from Susette Kelo and her neighbors still sits largely vacant. Pfizer made other plans, and all the destruction ended up being for naught.
That’s right. They destroyed a community for a tax projection on a spreadsheet, and they didn't even follow through.
There's a (semi) silver lining here, in that the SCOTUS ruling was seen as so morally indefensible that it sparked a bipartisan backlash, and in the years after, more than 40 states changed their laws or amended their constitutions to restrict this kind of taking.
But the ruling itself still stands. The Court has declined, more than once, to revisit it—most recently just last year—which means that the underlying principle is still technically the law of the land: under the right circumstances, your home is only yours until someone with more political pull wants it more.
Most people don't know any of this until it happens to them, or to someone they love. That's why we wrote a book about it.
The Tuttle Twins and the Little Pink House is one of our Choose Your Consequence books (did you know we have those?!) We’ve actually got five full-length stories that allow the reader to make different decisions as they read and choose the outcomes of the stories! (If you've got a teenager who says they don't like reading, these books are historically good at fixing that.)
In Little Pink House, Ethan and Emily watch their grandmother's home get targeted by a city using the exact same playbook New London used on the real Susette Kelo—blight designations, eminent domain, a private development dressed up as a public good. Can the choices they make along the way save her house? You’ll have to find out!
With America’s 250th birthday coming up, and Volume 3 of our America's History series shipping next week, I can’t help but wonder what the founders would make of a ruling like Kelo.
These were men who had just fought a war, in large part, over a government that didn't respect what was theirs. The right to hold property—to own a thing and have the law actually defend your owning it—wasn't a small thing to them. It was pretty close to the whole point. I think they'd recognize the Kelo decision immediately as exactly the kind of thing they built the system to prevent.
They’d likely want to remind us that the price of keeping a free country is that you never get to stop paying attention, and you never become less diligent in defense of natural rights—chief among them is the right to own ourselves and our property.
That's the real reason we teach the bad with the good. Not to make anyone cynical about America; quite the opposite, actually, but because a kid who knows the Kelo story, who understands what was supposed to protect Susette and why it failed her, is a kid who grows up able to tell the difference between loving your country and excusing whatever it does because the guy you like happens to be in power. It applies to everything.
And isn’t this the kind of citizens the founders were actually hoping we’d end up being?
— Connor
