Thomas Naylor

Thomas Naylor, born May 30, 1936, in Jackson, Mississippi, is a Professor Emeritus of Economics at Duke University, the author of thirty books, and a founder of the Second Vermont Republic (2003). Naylor is author of ten academic books and three books advocating secession.^{[citation needed]}

Biography

Naylor graduated from Millsaps College with a Bachelor of Science in 1958 and a second one from Columbia University in Industrial Engineering in 1959. He received a Masters in Business from Indiana University in 1961 and a Doctor of Philosophy in Economics from Tulane University in 1964. He began his career at Duke as an Assistant Professor of Economics in 1964, teaching economics, management science, and computer science, ending his career there in 1993. He also has served as a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin, Middlebury College and the University of Vermont.

During the 1970s Naylor was president of a 50-person computer software firm with Fortune 500 clients worldwide. He also was an international management consultant advising major corporations and governments in over thirty countries.

His articles have appeared in The New York Times, International Herald Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Christian Science Monitor, The Nation, and Business Week. He has made appearances on all major American television networks as well as CNN, Fox News, BBC and National Public Radio.

Second Vermont Republic activism

Naylor moved to Vermont in 1990. In 1997 he published with William H. Willimon Downsizing the U.S.A., which called for Vermont independence. After the United States invasion of Iraq Naylor began informal meetings of the Second Vermont Republic, holding the statewide meeting in October 2003, where he announced the publication of his book The Vermont Manifesto.

Naylor was involved in the 2004 "radical consultation" among various grass roots secessionist groups in Middlebury, Vermont, which resulted in the creation of the Middlebury Institute. He was mentioned prominently in reporting of the secessionist conferences of many of the same groups in 2006 in Burlington, Vermont. and 2007 in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

In 2007 Naylor was criticized when it was alleged that some advisory board members had affiliations with Neo-Confederate groups, such as the League of the South (LOS). Thomas Naylor told The Vermont Guardian that the organization has no direct link to LOS, except a link on the SVR website, and that SVR is not racist. He told a radio audience: "The SPLC is a well-known McCarthy-style group of mercenaries who routinely engage in ideological smear campaigns on behalf of their wealthy techno-fascist clowns. It’s all about money, power, and greed." In July 2008 Naylor asked the League of the South to consider several "actions aimed at eliminating once and for all any perception that the LOS is a racist organization." In 2009 SPLC wrote that Naylor agreed to share the stage with what it labeled as "Neo-Confederate" scholars at an Abbeville Institute secessionist conference called “State Nullification, Secession and the Human Scale of Political Order.”

In May 2008 Feral House published Thomas Naylor's book Secession: How Vermont and all the Other States Can Save Themselves from the Empire. Author Kirkpatrick Sale wrote the foreword. Professor Walter E. Williams of George Mason University writes it is a "serious examination of our God given right of self governance and that right’s implication for secession. Dr. Naylor has made a persuasive case of the identical response to today’s ‘train of abuses’ that led the Founders to secede from King George’s tyranny."

In January 2010 nine Vermonters announced they were planning to run for governor, lieutenant governor and seven seats in the state Senate on a Vermont secession platform. Lieutenant Governor candidate Peter Garritano said the idea to run came during a meeting two months before with Thomas Naylor. After the candidates were labeled a "Green Tea Party" in a Huffington Post article, Naylor disagreed, saying "While tea partiers think the system’s fixable, the secessionists believe America has become ungovernable — and that Vermont must break away from 'the empire' to survive."

In January 2011 Time magazine named Second Vermont Republic one of the "Top 10 Aspiring Nations," mentioning Naylor as its founder.

Partial bibliography

Academic books

• Microeconomics and Decision Models of the Firm (with John Vernon). New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1969. Translated into Spanish.
• You Can't Eat Magnolias (editor with H. Brandt Ayers). New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972.
• Strategies for Change in the South (with James Clotfelter). Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1975.
• Corporate Planning Models. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979.
• Simulation Models in Corporate Planning (editor). New York: Praeger Press, 1979,
• Managerial Economics: Corporate Economics and Strategy (with John M. Vernon and Kenneth Wertz). New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983.
• The Corporate Strategy Matrix. New York: Basic Books, 1986. Translated into Hungarian.
• The Gorbachev Strategy: Opening the Closed Society. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1988.
• The Cold War Legacy. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1991.
• The Abandoned Generation: Rethinking Higher Education (with William H. Willimon). Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1995.
• Affluenza (with John De Graaf and David Wann). San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler, 2001. Second edition, 2005. Translated into six languages.

Books on secession

• Downsizing the USA (with William H. Willimon). Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1997.
• The Vermont Manifesto: The Second Vermont Republic. Philadelphia, PA: Xlibris, 2003.
• Secession: How Vermont and all the Other States Can Save Themselves from the Empire, foreword by Kirkpatrick Sale. Port Townsend, WA: Feral House, 2008.

External links

• Thomas Naylor writings at Second Vermont Republic site
• The Vermont Commons
• The Middlebury Institute
• Jay Walljasper, How to Be an Expat Without Leaving Home, Utne Reader, January/February 2004.
• Christopher Ketcham,Long live secession! Salon.com, January 20, 2005.
• Free Vermont, Bill Kauffman, The American Conservative, December 19, 2005.
• John Schwenkler, States: if at first you don't secede, The American Conservative, November 3, 2008.
• The Divided States of America (Audio Documentary) featuring Thomas Naylor on Second Vermont Republic (solidprinciples.com) April, 2009