Before the Bombs There Were Mobs: American Experiences With Terror[1]
David C. Rapoport
A. Introduction:
Shirked by our historians, the subject has been repressed in the
national consciousness. We have been victims of what members
of the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of
violence have called a `historical amnesia.’ Yet it is not simply that
historians have found a way of shrugging off the unhappy memories
of our past; our amnesia is also a response the experience of a whole
generation.. .For the long span from about 1938 to the mid-1960s…
the internal life of the country was unusually free of violent episodes.
…Americans who came of age during and after the 1930s found it
easy to forget how violent a people their forebears had been.
Richard Hofstadter[1]
Alfred Nobel’s invention of dynamite in 1866 made modern terrorism possible. Fourteen years later revolutionary pamphlets were published which showed how small groups, and even individuals, using the new tool under the cover of surprise were able to frighten and influence huge numbers of people.[2] Understandably, the power explosives unexpectedly gave the first modern terrorists made them virtually worship dynamite.
It seems that the spirit of Shiva, the god of destruction, the eternal destroyer of life
resides in the depths of its strange composition. All the great phenomena of Nature
resemble it in their effects …it creates and it destroys, it annihilates and it gives life;
it is chained Prometheus and angry Jupiter; it illuminates and darkens. From
civilization’s necessity, it became its chastiser It has changed into a social anathema,
into the dissident sects’ weapon of terrorism.[3]
In 1900 after two frightening decades of modern terror, German newspapers, expressing a widespread anxiety felt throughout the West, proclaimed “society dances on a volcano…a small group of fanatics terrorize the entire human race. “[4]Explosives continued to be a cardinal feature of terrorist activity throughout the next century, a pattern likely to remain with us for the foreseeable future.
The bomb was the most striking and dramatic technological innovation for the development of modern terror, but other technological changes were relevant too. The telegraph and the daily mass newspapers transmitted information virtually overnight to all parts of the world. The transcontinental railroad enabled large numbers of people to move quickly, a condition necessary for large Diaspora communities to flourish, communities deeply interested in the politics of both their old and new homes.
It is impossible to discuss modern terror without emphasizing the crucial importance of this new international context. Note, for example, the circumstances of the Terrorist Brigade of the Russian Socialist Revolutionary Party in 1905. Its headquarters were in Switzerland, Finland provided the operations staging ground, and an Armenian group trained by an earlier Russian terrorist organization supplied weapons. The Terrorist Brigade refused funds the Japanese government offered, money said to be laundered by American millionaires!
After his predecessor was assassinated in September 1901, President Theodore Roosevelt launched the first “international crusade” against terror, an effort not repeated until September 11, 2001. Roosevelt’s “crusade” climaxed a decade called the “Golden Age of Assassination” because no period before witnessed so many major political assassinations. Most assassins crossed international borders to find their victims, demonstrating that modern terror involved many groups in different countries that often had relations with other groups elsewhere.
A third ingredient in the international dimension of modern terror is the importance of the pre-existing tradition of international insurrection the French Revolution bequeathed. Mass uprisings occurred in the capital cities of non-Protestant European states in 1820,1830, 1848, and 1871 with the professed aim of fulfilling the Revolution’s promises. Immigrants from various parts of Europe participated in the insurrections. But all the efforts failed and the aftermath in each case, especially that which followed the Paris Commune (1871), proved so disastrous that some revolutionaries were stimulated to produce a new method, one that would be less bloody (!) and more successful. [5]
But terror did not begin with explosives. It existed for at least two millennia before that date. Earlier terror took various forms, forms that have not been fully compared with the modern experience.[6] This paper focuses only on one form, “mob terror” a form that developed a century before modern terror emerged, but curiously has not yet been a subject for discussion in terrorist studies. Our discussion focuses on the two most familiar examples; both are American. The first is the “Sons of Liberty” (1765-1776), which precipitated the American Revolution . A century later, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) (1867-1877) emerged after the Civil War and was an indispensable ingredient in successfully resisting efforts to “impose” democracy on the South.[7]
Neither group had an international dimension. The KKK functioned only in the territories of the South. The Sons of Liberty operated only in its own land and made no move to seek international help, although after the War for Independence broke out and a legitimate government emerged, international support materialized.
The mobs unlike modern terrorists always greatly outnumbered potential victims. Mobs, of course, were not unique to America. Note Benjamin Franklin’s experiences in London.
I have seen within the year riots in the country about corn; riots about elections;
riots about work-houses, riots of colliers, riots of weavers; riots of coal-heavers;
riots of sawyers, riots of Wilkesites; riots of government chairmen; riots of
smugglers in which customhouse officers and excise men have been
murdered, and the King’s armed vessels and troops fired at. [8]
But there was a striking difference between the American examples and their European contemporaries. The Americans organized campaigns that persisted for a decade, while European riots were episodic.[9]
The American cases have been rarely compared.[10] One reason may be that few imagine (or want to imagine) the Sons of Liberty a terrorist group, while virtually all present day contemporaries are comfortable in seeing the KKK that way. The radically different purposes and achievements of the two groups are what we remember, or perhaps more precisely want to remember most about them. The problem represented here is familiar and plagued terrorism discourse since the 1940s and has led to the cliché, “One man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter.”[11] The Sons of Liberty were “freedom fighters” and the KKK terrorists. But the issue is more complicated than the cliché’ suggests. Freedom fighter refers to an end, while terror is a means. One can be both a freedom fighter and a terrorist. Our two groups used very similar methods, namely violence unrestricted by the rules of war to pursue political agendas, and those similarities are our subject.[12]
B. The Sons of Liberty 1765-1776: Initiating a Revolution
They trusted to horror rather than homicide.
Arthur Meier Schlesinger[13]
I was engaged in a famous Cause… of Scarborough vs. a Mob, that broke
into his House…The Terror and Distress, the Distraction and Horror of this
Family cannot be described by words or painted upon Canvass. It is enough
to move a Statue, to melt a Heart of Stone, to read the Story. A Mind susceptible
of the Feelings of Humanity…must burn with Resentment and Indignation, at
such outrageous Injuries. These private Mobs, I do and will detest.
John Adams[14]
In this section we will discuss the distinctive features of Sons of Liberty mobs first because they represent a very unusual pattern and help explain its special place in creating a nation and in beginning a war.
The colonial legislatures were fiercely opposed to the Stamp Act of 1765, a form of taxation they had never before experienced. When the Crown could not be persuaded to back down, a series of mob riots erupted. The Crown finally developed an alternative tax policy, but mob violence continued for a decade. The cleavages developed new political dimensions never anticipated by the initial participants themselves.
When the troubles began some ten years before no one could
have foreseen this outcome and few if any could have desired it.
Virtually everyone believed that the difficulties could be and
should be developed within the framework of the Empire. Hence,
opinion had been divided even among patriots in the use of (mob) violence. Men like James Otis and John Dickinson earnestly
counseled against it as not only unworthy of the cause, but …
far more likely to alienate England than induce concessions
(emphasis added.)[15]
Gouverneur Morris, an important sympathizer, noted that over time the mobs began to “think and reason” in order to move the resistance in ways that surprised all observers.[16]
“Mob violence”, an 18th century term still used by some historians, has connotations that do not fit the Sons of Liberty experience well. For the OED a mob is a “disorderly crowd”, emphasis added. The Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences concurs, “a mob is an angry crowd that attempts to inspire or destroy an object” and its activities do not involve “an implementation of a rational policy… Mob spirit refers to highly emotional and poorly coordinated behavior and expression,” emphasis added.[17]Webster stresses the Latin origin of the term, mobile vulgus, to explain that mob moods change rapidly and that most members come from the “lower classes of a community”, emphasis added.
18th century American experience, however, was more complicated and interesting. Most mob participants were tradesmen and artisans as the definitions suggest. But the organizers came from the “better” classes, i.e., professionals, merchants, and some were even local officials.[18]
A hierarchy of mobs was established during Sam Adams’ domination of Boston politics,
‘the lowest classes—servants, negroes and sailors were placed under the command of a
‘superior set consisting of the Master Masons’ carpenters of the town’- above them
were put the merchants’ mob and the Sons of Liberty, known to the Tories as Adams’
‘Mohawks,’ upon whom the more delicate enterprises against the Tories and Crown devolved.[19]
The “lowest classes” were always more visible.
When the resistance to the Stamp Act was at issue, the uprisings demonstrated
a remarkable political extremism on the part of colonial crowds. Everywhere
‘followers’ proved more ready than their ‘leaders’ to use force…`the better
sort are defending (English liberties) by all lawful means in their power,’
Thomas Hutchinson explained perceptively, and the most abandoned say
they will do it ‘putas aut nefas’-at any cost.[20]
The Boston “patrician” Samuel Adams led “The Loyal Nine” (which later became the local Sons of Liberty) to organize a number of mobs. “They kept their identity secret and wished it to be believed that the mobs they set in motion were really spontaneous outbreaks of violence from the ‘lower sort’…Boston was controlled by a `trained mob’ and Sam Adams was its keeper.”[21]
The Sons of Liberty clearly displayed important features that conflict with the standard definitions. Consistency was pre-eminent. The political purpose remained the same, namely “no taxation without representation”, a principle that after eleven years of violence finally became the essential inspiration of the Revolution. The course of the violence normally was carefully planned and exhibited considerable restraint. Sometimes, it seemed that every likely contingency had been considered to prevent the violence from getting out of hand as the Boston Tea Party (1773), perhaps the most famous incident in the period, demonstrates vividly. Several thousand colonists watched silently from the shore, while 342 chests of tea were seized and thrown into the water. Still, no one was hurt, and the property of the sailors (as distinguished from that of the East India Company) was respected; even a broken padlock was replaced! .
A more highly disciplined demonstration would be hard to find anywhere at any time. Indeed, since the incident was called a “Tea Party” is it appropriate to speak of this and other comparable demonstrations as expressions of mob violence. I think so; one cannot the isolate the incident from the campaign in which it occurred, namely the series of violent riots over the decade organized by the same persons who put the Tea Party together. One undeniable reason the Tea Party did not become violent was that the existing government did not or could not use force in this case to resist the effort. The government’s failure to use force cannot be read to mean that in principle it spurned force and the same is true for the Party participants. The latter generally preferred peaceful demonstrations, but they did not reject violence in principle. They were not pacifist rebels like Ghandi or Martin Luther King who believed that no matter what the circumstances they could and should conquer by their own suffering or martyrdom.
Occasionally a plan was flawed, and sometimes the emotions aroused made many explode “spontaneously”. But most “spontaneous” outbreaks were still restrained in important respects, at least with respect to committing fatal casualties. The mobs
trusted to horror rather than to homicide. Though occasionally brandishing cutlasses
and muskets, they typically employed less lethal weapons like clubs, rocks, brickbats
and clods of dung. `In truth’ wrote the English historian Lecky in the 1880’s,
generalizing upon this curious phenomenon, `although no people have indulged more
largely than the Americans in violent, reckless and unscrupulous language, no people
have been more signally free from the thirst for blood which, in moments of great
political excitement has been often shown both in England and France.[22]
To force Massachusetts Lieutenant Governor Hutchinson to resign as stamp distributor, a mob burned his home and stole his personal papers. The attack on personal property “startle (d) men accustomed to venerate and obey lawful authority and (made) them doubt the justice of the cause attended with such direful consequences.”[23]But the unanticipated event occurred after mob members got drunk from rum discovered in the cellar. Sam Adams, who organized the mob, publicly expressed dismay. Fortunately for the cause, “Boston patriots deprived Hutchinson of the sweets of martyrdom by the circulation of a story that letters had been found in his house…proved him to be responsible for the Stamp Act. Sam Adams, one should note, never produced these incriminating letters.”[24]
A similar attack went amuck in Newport, Rhode Island soon afterwards. The proximity of the occasions demonstrated how necessary it was to assure the public that the restraints would be mandatory and clear. Important Boston and New York papers published directives for mob “Leaders and Directors”, emphasizing that their mission was to redress grievances, not create new ones.
No innocent Person, nor any upon bare Suspicion, with insufficient Evidence,
should receive the least injury. They should recall that while they are thus
collected, the act as a supreme, uncontrollable Power from which there
is (no) Appeal, where Trial, Sentence and Execution succeed each other
almost instantaneously” so they were in Honour bound to take Care, that
they do no Injustice nor suffer it to be done be done by others lest they
disgrace their Power and the Cause which occasioned its Collection”…
The greatest care should be taken to “keep an undisciplined Multitude from
running into mischievous Extravagancies” [25]
The number of mobs and their geographic distribution suggest too that the situation would get out of control if sympathizers did not constantly remind potential participants that they could go too far. In the nine months the Stamp Act was in effect, over sixty riots occurred in 25 different locations. “During some of these months in port cities like Boston and New York, mobs were in the streets almost every night and government ground to a halt.”[26]There was considerable ambivalence in Parliament too about the Stamp Act; significant political figures like Pitt and Burke were strongly opposed. But if the riots had led to significant number of casualties the consequence could have mitigated that opposition.
The rebels, it should be emphasized, also argued that they were fighting for their traditional rights as Englishmen and not a new order. The victory in getting the Stamp Act repealed gave the rebels enormous confidence in their strength and virtue.
The successful attack on the Act…was of great importance in subsequent
periods of agitation when the opposition was not so universal. The
experience of working together, the ideas that were inculcated during
the agitation, and the sense of accomplishment resulting from united