Rogue State

Until one day several years ago, I, like most people, harbored no ill feelings toward the state of Delaware. I suppose in some vague sense I thought of it as harmless and even endearing, the way you tend to regard other small things, such as Girl Scouts or squirrels. But all that changed the summer day I moved to Washington, when, making my way down I-95 in a rental truck with all of my worldly belongings, I screeched to a halt in front of what turned out to be a two-hour backup in Delaware. Never having driven down the East Coast, I at first assumed the traffic jam must have been caused by some horrific accident. But as my truck crept forward I saw it was no accident at all but a deliberate obstruction--specifically, a tollboth on the Delaware Turnpike. Slowly the full horror of it sunk in: The State of Delaware had turned the East Coast's main traffic artery into a sweltering parking lot merely so it could exact a tribute from each driver crossing its miserable little stretch of concrete.

The practice of charging road tolls is an archaic holdover blighting much of the Northeast. But Delaware has taken it to a grotesque extreme. Whereas the I-95 tolls amount to less than five cents per mile in New Jersey and four cents per mile in Maryland, in Delaware they cost an exorbitant 18 cents per mile. Which isn't surprising because, in a deeper sense, Delaware's tolls epitomize the state's entire ethos. The organizing principle of Delaware government is to subsidize its people at the rest of the country's expense. While tolls represent the most obvious of the state's nefarious methods, Delaware also utilizes its appallingly lax regulation of banks and corporations to enrich itself while undermining its neighbors. Indeed, Delaware's image as small and inoffensive is not merely a misconception but a purposeful guise. It presents itself as a plucky underdog peopled by a benevolent, public-spirited, entrepreneurial citizenry. In truth, it is a rapacious parasite state with a long history of disloyalty and avarice.

Delaware's status as the initial signatory to the Constitution--reflected in its self-declared and oft-repeated nickname, "the First State"--has bathed it in the soft glow of colonial-era patriotism. But the actual historical record is considerably less edifying. The Delaware delegation to the Constitutional Convention was spearheaded by a bombastic bully named Gunning Bedford Jr. (One delegate called him "impetuous in his temper and precipitate in his judgment.") Bedford fiercely insisted that the national legislature be divided not on the basis of "one man, one vote" but "one state, one vote"--meaning the citizens of tiny Delaware would be massively overrepresented in Congress. In what one delegate described as "the most intemperate speech uttered in the Convention," Bedford blustered, "I do not, gentlemen, trust you." If the large states didn't meet his demands, Bedford threatened, "the small ones will find some foreign ally of more honor and good faith, who will take them by the hand and do them justice."

This initial flourish of anti-patriotic coercion established a Delaware political tradition of self-serving venality. When the nation mobilized for the War of 1812, Delaware manufacturers, led by the du Ponts, demanded that their laborers be exempt from military service. Not only would military service harm Delaware's economy, the factory owners claimed, but it would teach the workers "habits of intemperance and slothfulness," as University of Delaware historian Carol E. Hoffecker writes in Delaware: A Bicentennial History. (That the du Ponts thought pitched combat would turn the workers soft gives some sense of the working conditions in Delaware's mills at that time.) Later, when British warships neared the region and the du Ponts feared damage to their holdings, they performed a quick about-face, successfully petitioning the governor to arm their employees and form militias--but only to guard their mills.

Aside from its tradition of self-interestedness, Delaware has historically distinguished itself primarily by its retrograde approaches to race, political reform, and the administration of justice. In 1798 it effectively barred blacks--slave or free--from even entering a county seat on Election Day. As residents of the last Union state to ban slavery, most Delawareans sympathized with the Confederacy, and its senators attacked President Abraham Lincoln as a "monster" (in the words of one) and a "despot" and "weak and imbecile man" (in the words of the other). Despite siding with the Union during the Civil War, the legislature earmarked funds to assist drafted men seeking to buy their way out of military service--reflecting either its affinity for the Confederacy or its general support for the principle of shirking one's patriotic obligations. Its political parties spent much of the late nineteenth century accusing each other (falsely, alas) of supporting black equality. Delaware voted against the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, which freed the slaves and gave them the vote and equal protection. It retained its Jim Crow laws into the 1960s, yet, perhaps due to its puniness, managed to escape the disrepute given to segregationist contemporaries like Alabama or Mississippi.

While its record on race put Delaware in a league with the Deep South, it had no peers when it came to political corruption. The small number of voters needed to buy one's way to power has tempted generations of Delaware tycoons. Electoral fraud established itself in Delaware as early as the eighteenth century, and 100 years later it grew endemic. In 1899 a gas magnate running for Senate offered voters as much as $50 each--an astronomical sum at the time. One late-nineteenth-century magazine story called Delaware the only state that "maintains so composedly and so contentedly the usages and ideas of the medieval period of American politics." Republicans outside the state, writes Hoffecker, were "acutely embarrassed by the bad publicity emanating from little Delaware, where journalists reported votes being sold as if at auction."

Delaware also set itself apart through its fondness for medieval forms of punishment. It was not until the early 1900s that Delaware became the last state in the Union to abolish the pillory, a twelfth-century torture device. (The pillory resembled the stocks, but it was even crueler in that it forced the convict to stand, with his neck craned at what drawings indicate to be a highly uncomfortable angle.) In addition, Delaware achieved minor notoriety as the last state to ban public whipping. Connecticut renounced the practice in 1828, Pennsylvania in 1790. Delaware, by contrast, flogged its last convict in 1952.

But Delaware's greatest specialty is finding ways to siphon money out of nonresidents. The most irritating of these is its toll system. If a state wants to charge drivers for the cost of maintaining roads, tolls are a dubious way to do it--the traffic congestion they produce can be more costly than the toll itself. (You could reduce this congestion by charging double fare on the southbound turnpike and eliminating the northbound toll, as Maryland does; but Delaware concluded this would prompt motorists to drive around the state altogether.) The more efficient way to maintain roads is by taxing gasoline, which nearly all states do. But Delaware has no gas tax*, presumably because if it did it would force Delawareans themselves to pay for most of the upkeep of their roads. Instead, the state uses its tiny stretch of I-95 to make out-of-staters foot the bill.

The reason Delaware charges a full $2 for the privilege of driving the scant eleven miles of the Delaware Turnpike--four times more per mile than the Maryland or New Jersey turnpikes--is straightforward. Casual observation of license plates shows that many, perhaps most, of the drivers on the Maryland and New Jersey turnpikes hail from those states. Since those states have no interest in gouging their own citizens, tolls are low on a per-mile basis. But on the Delaware Turnpike, native license plates adorn just a tiny fraction of the cars. (Delaware transportation officials say they've never tried to calculate how many.) So why not take the outsiders for all they're worth? Every dollar in tolls paid by New Yorkers or Washingtonians means one fewer dollar in revenue that must be raised from Delawareans.

And even after you've crawled through their turnpike and handed them your toll, the citizens of Delaware still haven't finished with you. There's still a $3 fare for the Delaware Memorial Bridge, which is run jointly by Delaware and New Jersey and whose proceeds--which far outstrip the bridge's maintenance costs--benefit both states about equally. (The News Journal in Wilmington reported that in recent years the bridge managers--political cronies from Delaware and Jersey--diverted $1 million in toll revenues for trips to Europe, five-star resorts, golf outings, and strip clubs.) Altogether Delaware collects some $120 million--around 6 percent of its budget--from tolls, most of it extracted from non-Delawareans. (Maryland, by contrast, collects a mere 1.5 percent of its budget from tolls, a far higher share of which comes from its own citizens.) Delaware transportation officials make a point of insisting that the revenue from these tolls--minus the cost of the odd lap dance--goes into Delaware's transportation trust fund. To nonresidents, of course, it makes not a whit of difference that our tolls finance Delaware's airports rather than its schools. The point is that Delawareans are forcing the rest of us to pay for their public infrastructure.