On Sparks Before the Prairie Fire

If the state retains coherence, and one side grows strong enough to seize its powers, then the full weight of Leviathan will be used against their enemies. Such is tyranny. But such tyranny is often not possible. Then the people are reduced to an even sadder state, left to kill and be killed, dwindling as their fears drives them.

Hobbes envisioned this outcome, but he could not see its origin point. In some eras this point of no return is easy to identify. In a society tyrannized and divided, a despot’s iron arms may be the only thing that keeps enmity from escalating to armed contest. Depose the despot, and the Hobbesian descent begins. But not all feeble states host civil war. The world has seen empires fall and polities crack without their peoples ever being pushed down Hobbes’ cold slope. Failing authority must be matched with social enmity—and more important still, a sign that this enmity is moving from the world of words into the world of desperate action. “The empire, long united, must divide”—but only once a signal is sent that the word is now dividing. Men and women must believe that the rules have changed. Something must happen to show a divided people that ballots have given way to bullets. Some moment must teach that henceforth those who strike first live longest. 

 What might that moment look like? 

In 1871, Mark Twain lampooned the violence visited upon the American press with a short story named “Journalism in Tennessee.” A few paragraphs from the story provide you with a flavor of the whole:

I never saw a pen scrape and scratch its way so viciously, or plow through another man’s verbs and adjectives so relentlessly. While [the narrator’s editor] was in the midst of his work, somebody shot at him through the open window, and marred the symmetry of my ear.

“Ah,” said he, “that is that scoundrel Smith, of the Moral Volcano–he was due yesterday.” And he snatched a navy revolver from his belt and fired–Smith dropped, shot in the thigh. The shot spoiled Smith’s aim, who was just taking a second chance and he crippled a stranger. It was me. Merely a finger shot off.

“Then the chief editor went on with his erasure; and interlineations. Just as he finished them a hand grenade came down the stove-pipe, and the explosion shivered the stove into a thousand fragments. However, it did no further damage, except that a vagrant piece knocked a couple of my teeth out. [6]

Twain’s work is satire. Yet behind Twaine’s fictional caricature of the fiery, gun-toting editor were the many real fiery, gun-toting newsmen spread across the Union. Not long after Twain wrote that piece one such editor described his own armed defense of his old press. The editor in question was one Cassius M. Clay, lesser-known cousin to the Great Compromiser. When Clay first set up his press he was a rare species: a Kentucky abolitionist. Like many such upper South radicals, Clay’s hatred for slavery had less to do with sympathy for the black man than for a long-treasured hope to transform his home state into a lily-white, free soil paradise. Today we condemn these ideals as regressive. In the antebellum South, they were radical. By buying a printing press to share them, Clay’s ideas moved from radical to dangerous. Clay’s closest neighbors decided they must end the danger posed by Clay and his press themselves.

Listen as Clay describes the precautions he took to defend his press from the neighborly mobs he knew would come to ruin it:

I selected for my office a brick building, and lined the outside doors with sheet-iron, to prevent it being burned. I purchased two brass 4-pounder cannon at Cincinnati, and placed them, loaded with shot and nails, on a table breast high; had folding doors secured with a chain, which which could open upon the mob and give play to my canon. I furnished my office with Mexican lances, and a limited number of guns. There were six or eight persons who stood ready to defend me. If defeated they were to escape by a trap door in the roof; and I had placed a keg of powder, with a match, which I would set off and blow up the office and all my invaders. This I should most certainly have done in case of the last extremity.  [7]

The spectacle of a pamphleteer stocking his office with lance and powder seems alien to us today. It did not then. Such precautions would have seemed eminently sensible to the editors of the New York Herald, who saw their office mobbed in 1861 not for abolitionist ideas, but for being too friendly to the Slave Power. War time attacks on publishers were by then an old-time story. The outbreak of the War of 1812 led to anti-Federalist agitation across the country, and much of that was violent. One of the most dramatic of these was siege of Baltimore’s sole Federalist newspaper, a siege which ended with one Republican shot dead, nine Federalists beat senseless, another beaten dead, and a last set on fire. [8]

Strange as they may be today, attacks on the press are a staple of American history. The three episodes discussed above are a mere sampling from a violent dispensation that began in colonial era and did not subside until 1970s. Between that time there were hundreds of attacks on presses, writers, and editors. [9] 

Ours is a bloody history. Journalists and pamphleteers were hardly the sole, or even the favored, targets of American bloodlust. Over the course of American history treaties prompted street brawls, bank laws birthed riots, epidemics spawned civil strife, and both abolitionists and slave catchers were met by angry mobs. Less sectional than the mobbing surrounding the slave question, but no less violent, were mob attacks on Catholics, Mormons, Irish, Germans, Mexicans, and Blacks. To this ethnic and religious strife might be added the myriad strikes and labor confrontations that careened into violence. Extra-legal vigilance committees numbering in the thousands have, at one time or another, been charged with keeping the peace in every region of this country. Armed rebellions have seized both city and state governments. Democrats, Whigs, Know-nothings, and Republicans have all murdered and bludgeoned to keep their opponents away from the ballot box.[10] 

At various points in our history, Americans have wondered whether all this blood might deform the integrity of our institutions. One such American was the young Abraham Lincoln. Worried he in one 1838 oration:

Accounts of outrages committed by mobs, form the every-day news of the times. They have pervaded the country, from New England to Louisiana;–they are neither peculiar to the eternal snows of the former, nor the burning suns of the latter;–they are not the creature of climate– neither are they confined to the slave-holding, or the non-slave- holding States. Alike, they spring up among the pleasure hunting masters of Southern slaves, and the order loving citizens of the land of steady habits.–Whatever, then, their cause may be, it is common to the whole country.

…Thus, then, by the operation of this mobocractic spirit, which all must admit, is now abroad in the land, the strongest bulwark of any Government, and particularly of those constituted like ours, may effectually be broken down and destroyed–I mean the attachment of the People. Whenever this effect shall be produced among us; whenever the vicious portion of population shall be permitted to gather in bands of hundreds and thousands, and burn churches, ravage and rob provision-stores, throw printing presses into rivers, shoot editors, and hang and burn obnoxious persons at pleasure, and with impunity; depend on it, this Government cannot last.[11]

Lincoln was wrong. The government lasted. It lasted even though the violence continued unabated in the years leading up to his Presidency, and then continued again for another century after his Presidency was over. Only twice in that time did local violence seriously threaten the integrity of America’s republican institutions as a whole.[12] Americans brawled, burned, shot, and bombed—and America lasted through it all, her people barely remembering the atrocities committed in years past.

*

This is a puzzle. Political stability paired with widespread political violence is rare. It cries out for explanation. A parsimonious answer to the puzzle goes something like this: American political violence reached its apogee in an unusual political order. For most of American history, belief in popular sovereignty was matched by a truly popular participation in American political, economic, and civic life. Americans were experts in the ad-hoc committee. They expanded across the continent, building towns, cities, counties, states, school boards, sheriff departments, union chapters, churches, and associations as they went. Government was highly localized and subject to individual citizen influence. Many problems were solved by citizens directly, without recourse to formal government action at all. This was a world that did not defer to experts and could not appeal to management when things needed doing. Americans believed there was no problem that could not be solved by a gathering of their countrymen.[13]

Sometimes their gatherings were violent.

Today we sharply distinguish between (“legitimate”) violence conducted by the state and (“illegitimate”) violence inflicted by the mob. But in an age when many members of the mob had personally created, molded, and manned the offices of state, the distinction wore thin. Decentralized collective action was the American norm. When faced with perceived threats to their security, Americans did not hesitate to take matters into their own hands. [14]

This explains in part why social violence could be so common yet so inconsequential. The banality of American violence robbed bloodshed of Hobbesian significance. Gentleman, intellectuals, and lawyers might decry American political violence as barbaric, cruel, and senseless, but they understood it as an unfortunate excess of popular democracy. In a nation devoted to popular sovereignty, this sort of excess was inevitable and unremarkable.

The victims of riots, mobbings, lynchings, and bombings felt differently. Those who survived were left devastated and terrified. The shadows of attacks past lingered long. Many linger still. My own forebodings on this topic trace directly to the experience of my ancestors, driven out of the United States by murder and mobbery. 

But for most Americans, outbreaks of social violence like these forebode nothing. Clay might lose his printing press and the Mormons might be driven out of Missouri, but neither event was an extraordinary occurrence in a rough-and-tumble, populist republic. Neither eroded national political norms nor threatened national political coalitions. Each was but one more small outrage in a constant churn of small outrages. Stones dropped in choppy waters leave few ripples.

American waters have long been still. Like most places in the world, American society grew more peaceful in the 20th century. This is an international phenomena, and so cannot be explained entirely in terms of America’s unique national conditions. Yet I suspect the “diminishing” of American democracy (and the can-do populist culture that went with it) plays a critical role in this story, at least as far as social violence is concerned.[15] The American citizen now meets most problems with an appeal to management. A people unused to overcoming crises with the power of their own hands will rarely be tempted to use these hands in violence.

This has been a boon to the people of my country. Mobbing is a thing of the past. Black families last had cause to fear lynch mobs in the Civil Rights era; other groups were last mobbed in the 1920s. The final explosion of labor violence went off in the 1930s. The Battle of Athens was fought in the late 1940s; the last sustained set of attacks on the press occurred in the 1960s. The last real organized campaign of violence in American history, the few thousand bombs set off by a constellation of leftist terrorist groups in the 1970s, was more than 40 years ago.[16]

A question to ponder: just how would American society react if extremists (from either side) set off a few thousand bombs today?

A young Zoomer just come of age is four generations removed from serious social violence. They never learned about leftist bombings, Texas border lynchings, Mormon extermination, or electoral street brawls, and have never experienced anything like them. Events like these have faded from our national memory. They faded so quickly because even in their own day such small atrocities seemed like a background hum to the larger national narrative. Familiarity with violence bred “a confidence that almost any kind of mess could be brought under control quickly enough” notes one historian, “and that if a few people died in the meantime, that was just the way of the world.” [17]

Americans of our day are not so familiar with this way of the world. This has been a blessing. It may yet prove a curse.

One response to our historical survey brings comfort. “Do not fear,” whisper the unworried. “We have suffered disruptions to our civil order before. We can bear a bit more of it now. The lesson of American history is that we can suffer great violence without descent into tyranny or civil war.”

An American saying this in 1920 could be believed. But an American saying it in 2020? 

I am not so sure.

Liken the matter to a wildfire. Our Western coast lies scarred by terrible conflagrations. Naturalists have blamed bad forestry for the scale of these blazes. Small fires, burning often, clear out underbrush that sustain massive flames. Sparser forests mean less deadly forest fires. To promise more years without a fire, forest officials protect the underbrush from all small fires. But when fire finally breaks out, their actions have guaranteed the flame shall bloom into inferno.[18]

The metaphor is striking, if imperfect. Bloodlust does not grow like undergrowth. Political violence does not explode, inferno-like, because small grievances have built up without violent outlet. Human conflagrations require calculation. Actors must decide whether their world tends towards continuity or convulsion. Acting on that decision may stoke the flame, or stifle it.

In a past America, well experienced with all manner of violence, a mob here or a bomb there would cause few to think the rules were near their breaking point. There was no general rush to terrorize before one was terrorized. The fire stayed within the underbrush. 

 That was then. This is now. Now we must ask ourselves an unsettling series of questions. What will political violence mean to America unaccustomed to it? How much terror can the Americans of our day witness before they conclude that peace has ended—and act accordingly?  Where lies the threshold between doubtful peace and open conflict?

Just how small a spark will start our wildfire?