After last week’s dive into the Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, I hoped to segue seamlessly from America’s cultural myths to stories of our present-day insurrectionists. But the dots are harder to connect than I thought.
Vigilantism is a hot topic on criminal justice and security blogs these days. Legal journalists and political scientists are freaking out about political violence and threats to the rule of law in the United States. So that got me thinking about our history of vigilantism and how to understand its current manifestation.
Here are some of the incidents involving extra-legal activity that criminal justice observers are concerned about:
the Ahmaud Arbery killing and its precursor: the Trayvon Martin killing
mayhem and murder in Charlottesville 2017
mob violence on January 6 (insurrection)
bounties for informers who report women seeking abortions in Texas
bounties for informers who report teachers discussing forbidden topics in New Hampshire
Florida examples (too many to list)
Border vigilantes shutting down the butterfly sanctuary (more TX)
The more I delved into the topic of vigilantism, the harder it became to draw a straight line from the classic vigilantism of the Western frontier to our current political situation. (My rabbit hole is the Web of Science database.) Vigilantism is a complex problem with social, political, and cultural strands. And it is the tense intertwining of competing visions of the American polity that draws all the threads into a single skein.
Dr. Alan Bean, an advocate for criminal justice reform, writes:
America is a nation with two foundational dreams. There is the Manifest Destiny dream of steadily expanding white hegemony, and there is the Nation of Immigrants and Opportunity dream of radical inclusion. From the beginning, these two conflicting narratives have been fighting for the upper hand. The Civil War was simply the most bloody encounter in an ongoing war.
America’s founding documents are the source for the competing visions of the political community. Whereas the U.S. Constitution slices and dices the jurisdictions of power so that property (including enslaved human beings) would be protected by law, the Declaration of Independence sets forth the principle of equality and each person’s inalienable right to pursue happiness. This sets up the tension between the two dreams: one exclusive, one inclusive.
Both these competing visions are rooted in American history. Tensions arise when opposing factions interpret historical facts to support their preferred vision. Conflicts surface when factions mobilize —within the political structures or apart from them—to pursue their version of the American dream.
The history of the American republic is replete with vigilante activity. As the United States expanded its territorial reach in the 1800s, the Manifest Destiny narrative justified the extermination of native peoples (the “Trail of Tears”) and the expansion of white settlements westward. Prior to the Civil War, “Bloody Kansas” was the battleground of settler conflict over allowing slavery into the soon-to-be state. After the Civil War, there were three waves of Ku Klux Klan mobilization: a movement to re-establish black peonage following Reconstruction, the national Klan of the 1920s directing violence against Blacks, Catholics (Irish and Italians), and Jews (Polish and Russian), and the anti-civil rights Klan of the 1950s and 1960s. Generally, the Manifest Destiny idea propelled racist and revanchist vigilantism in rural areas and frontier regions. But the exclusionary underpinning of that national idea also fueled intergroup conflict in the industrializing northeast. Intense extra-political violence was directed against immigrants and migrants from the South. Its purpose was to secure the property rights of native-born “whites” in the cities. In 1920, this category certainly did not include Jews, or immigrants from Italy, Ireland, or Eastern Europe.
Three hundred twenty-six organized vigilante movements have been documented between 1767 and 1910 committing 729 murders; add to that 5,459 documented killings by unorganized lynch mobs from 1882-1951. Historian Richard Maxwell Brown notes while proclaiming a reverence for “law and order,” Americans exhibit a remarkable degree of lawlessness in practice.
The Declaration’s vision of equality and opportunity motivated the social movements of the 1960s and seemed to have established itself as the American dream. Women’s suffrage, the civil rights movement, LGBTQ activism, BLM— these movements confronted a status quo that had excluded them from full citizenship. Challengers mostly worked within the law and dared the country to live up to its ideas. As such, the marches, non-violent protests, petitions, and street theater took place in public. Their overarching cause was to expand democracy. They were not well-funded.
We are now living in a period of reaction and backlash. Much of the rightist mobilization is taking place out of public view, even though the militantly aggrieved take to the streets; they hoping to stem demographic and cultural change by causing chaos.
Our historians aren’t surprised to see a new wave of revanchist extra-legal violence by “citizens militias” and insurrectionists encouraged by reactionary politicians. Why are we?
If you missed Episode 1, it’s here.
Notes:
Frankie Bailey, Getting Justice: Real Life Vigilantism and Vigilantism in Popular Films.
Alan Bean, The American Vigilante Myth.
Richard Maxwell Brown, The History of Vigilantism in America. Ch. 5 of H. J. Rosenbaum and P. C. Sederberg, Vigilante Politics. ISBN: 978-0812276947
Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White. Paperback.* Kindle.*
Dahlia Lithwick, The Vigilante Next Door.
Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American, February 12, 2022.
Sam Tanenhaus, Jan.6 wasn’t an insurrection. It was vigilantism. And more is coming.
*Amazon Associate link to purchase the book. I receive a referral fee.
Excellant!
Great article and, sadly, reassuring