A Short Break from Tradition
Rick Perlstein’s much-celebrated new book, Nixonland, opens with violence. Making the point clear, it opens with violence twice: The preface quotes the young Pennsylvania anti-war activist Linda Hager Morse testifying during the Chicago Seven trial on her decision to train with the M1 rifle in order to be prepared for violent revolution; then, moving back in time, the first chapter begins with the Watts riots in 1965.
In both instances, political and economic frustration led to violence, or at least to a serious willingness to consider the use of violence. And the feeling flowed in both directions. Perlstein quotes a Chicago ad salesman who believed that activists like those on trial in Chicago were ruining the promise of America. “I’m getting to feel like I’d actually enjoy going out and shooting some of these people,” the salesman told a reporter from Time magazine. “I’m just so goddamned mad.”
Touch down nearly anywhere in American history, and you’ll find significant political, economic, and racial violence.
Often it’s actual violence, but nearly everywhere you’ll find the rhetoric of violence – a stated willingness to go out and shoot some of these people. American political life has centered on violence as much as it has centered on a discussion of ideas: The Regulators of late-colonial North Carolina responded to government corruption with armed resistance; when a sheriff arrested some of their leaders in 1768, hundreds of armed Regulators showed up at the jail to get their leaders back. When colonists decided to stop buying imported British goods, a few years later, they policed the trade of tea with a brutal ritual involving hot tar and dirty feathers. (The tar blistered the skin; the feathers infected the blisters.) Federalists and Anti-Federalists fought in the streets over the Constitution, with Anti-Federalists capturing the Federalist cannon in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and Federalists destroying an Anti-Federalist printing shop in New York. And on and on.
But the violence has taken place within a context of rules, and particularly within a context of rules that limit both anti-government violence and government responses to popular violence. A favorite set of examples comes from Iowa and Nebraska in 1933, as farmers closed courts and fought sheriff’s deputies to stop the foreclosure and seizure of their farms. An Iowa judge hearing a foreclosure case in late April spoke to farmers in his courtroom with open condescension and hostility; the farmers responded by rushing the bench, dragging the judge away to a nearby crossroads, throwing a noose around his neck – and then stopping, their point made.
The next day, in Crawford County, the local sheriff and fifty deputies showed up at a deeply indebted farm to auction off its property on behalf of the farm’s creditors. Eight hundred farmers met them as they arrived, having traveled in from at least three neighboring counties. Deputies and farmers fought with “fists and clubs,” but one deputy went too far: He drew his gun. The farmers policed the rules of engagement; the deputy “was dunked in the water trough.”
Examples can be piled on top of examples, but the point is already clear enough: Where Americans have felt the anger that comes with racial hatred, economic crisis, or sharp political disagreement, they have always been willing to use violence against one another in an organized, serious, and controlled manner. It’s not quite fair to say that mobs made America, but it’s not entirely unfair, either. And they certainly made Kansas.
But now we have to modify that “always,” because the violence has vanished over the last twenty years. In the sixth year of a war that provokes millions of Americans to seething rage, with gas above four dollars a gallon in my neighborhood and on the way there everywhere else, with a wave of foreclosures emptying entire neighborhoods in a few places and a nontrivial number of homes all over the place – nothing. Even as one of the two Democratic candidates left in the race for president begins to channel George Wallace with bitter talk about “hard-working Americans, white Americans,” no hard hat riots have arrived to accompany the sentiment. Violence has drained out of the American public sphere in a very rare, very strange way.
So what happened? And will it last?