Robin Hood and Remote Rule

Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe

British North America developed from a landscape of religions into a nation of races over the course of the eighteenth century.This process culminated in a hot, locked Philadelphia hall in 1787, but the lessons upon which the drafters drew reached back to the Reformation of the sixteenth century and earlier to Rome.

Americans had, after all, just rejected their inclusion in the British variant. If they failed to grasp the significance of their success, Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of Rome, David Hume’s History of England, and the tales of Robin Hood1 served to remind them of the dangers of remote rule.

Early Modern Europe possessed two empires with established Protestant populations inhabiting borders under perpetual threat.The Holy Roman Empire’s borderland Protestants included the Southwestern Germans of Wuerttemberg and the Rhineland-Palatinate, for whom “cuius regio, eius religio” offered precious little protection from neighboring Catholic armies. The British Empire sent forth Scots to settle among and pacify the Catholics a few leagues away in Northeastern Ireland. These two groups moved away from their fraught locations on Europe’s bloodiest frontiers topopulate the so-called backcountry of eighteenth-century British North America from the Kennebec to the Altamaha.2

When Virtù Courts Virtue

Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe

I found my way to this topic via a peculiar trajectory that began along the Cam under the tutelage of Quentin Skinner, where the distinction between classical republican virtù and protestant Christian virtue first entered my consciousness.  The hybridized virtù(e) that filled the political treatises of the American Revolution/War for Independence fascinated me but were not the centerpiece of my doctoral research.  When I returned to Jane Austen as my entertainment while my second son nursed, I realized that the hybridization process took place on the pages of Miss Austen’s novels.

The historiography of the American Revolution nearly drowns in examinations of Republican motherhood and patricidal rage. Austen’s heroines need not kill their fathers. They are already dead (Sense & Sensibility) or emasculated by poverty (Pride & Prejudice, Northanger Abbey, Mansfield Park), frailty (Emma), and vanity (Persuasion).  It takes little imagination to envision Elinor Dashwood, Elizabeth Bennet, Catherine Moreland, Fanny Price, Emma Woodhouse, and Anne Elliot as the republican mothers of a future generation.  In attributes they share much with the ultimate Republican mother as proven in her dual role as the United States’ first wife and mother to (failed) Presidents, Abigail Adams.  They can hold their own in discussions of the lofty but are unafraid to engage in the lowly. Think of Abigail Adams mopping her floors with vinegar while her many children lay sick, and Anne Elliot caring for her injured nephew while his squeamish mother tends to her own nerves not his physical needs.  When the virtùous Captain and Mrs. Wentworth set sail, I suspect their destination is the new republic on the other side of the Atlantic.

Thomas Jefferson obsessed over virtù(e) and corruption in both the public and private spheres.  Jefferson is remembered for his assiduous adherence to the necessity of landholding independence as a prerequisite for political virtù. He never deigned to fight in the colonies-cum-new republic’s wars though famously wrote on the worth of blood spilled for a virtùous cause.   He is also remembered for his utter lapse in private virtue, bedding but never wedding a woman he considered his racial inferior.   Jefferson was a last gasp of  this double standard in the Americas.  The widow’s of New Jersey had already become the first in Atlantic world to cast their votes in a simultaneous demonstration of both their virtù(e)s. 

Finally, I beg leave to indulge in some Whiggish analysis and imagine that William Jefferson Clinton’s presidency would have been very different indeed  had Americans not come to accept Jane Austen’s definition of hybridized virtù(e) and applied it to men and women alike.

____________

Sources: Linda Kerber, Women of the Republic; Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters; and Jay Fleigelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims.

What on Earth is Guy Fawkes Night?

Randall Stephens

I've only been in the UK once during Guy Fawkes Day, or Bonfire Night.  I saw plenty of fireworks and bonfires lighting up night skies and scratched my head in wonder about the whole thing. What an interesting, historically odd celebration.

The BBC has this short summary and a video interview (see below) about the fiery fest:

Guy Fawkes night is the annual commemoration of the foiling of the Gunpowder Plot - when 14 individuals planned to blow up the House of Lords during the State Opening of Parliament on 5 November 1605.

The BBC's Carol Kirkwood asked bonfire night organiser Graham Callister why we celebrate Guy Fawkes night when it was in fact a plot to maim and kill.

See also this entertaining slide show at ABC News.

Is the celebration in danger of being extinguished?  The worry this year is that the fest has lost its, um, spark.  Halloween may be eclipsing Guy Fawkes Day.  Some down under are saying its time to let go on an "old English grudge." 

What about that grudge and the religious dimension?  Here's a very short report from the Beeb. 

History and the Voting Rights Act Roundup

NPR Staff, "The Voting Rights Act: Hard-Won Gains, An Uncertain Future," NPR, July 21, 2013

. . . . Congress also noted, however, that the Voting Rights Act was still needed, and it had

Fort Scott, Kansas, Tribune, August 6, 1965, p. 1
From the Google News Archive.

been used hundreds of times since 1982 to protect against discrimination.

But in his opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts suggested it is a new era. "Our country has changed," he wrote for the majority.

But Rep. Lewis says race is still very much at the forefront.

"I think there has been a deliberate and systematic effort on the part of certain forces in our country to take the whole idea of race out of public policy," he says. "Race is involved in everything that makes up America, and we cannot escape it. We have to deal with it face on.">>>

John Paul Stevens, "The Court & the Right to Vote: A Dissent," New York Review of Books, August 15, 2013

In Bending Toward Justice, Professor Gary May describes a number of the conflicts between white supremacists in Alabama and nonviolent civil rights workers that led to the enactment of the Voting Rights Act of 1965—often just called the VRA. The book also describes political developments that influenced President Lyndon Johnson to support the act in 1965, and later events that supported the congressional reenactments of the VRA signed by President Richard Nixon in 1970, by President Gerald Ford in 1975, by President Ronald Reagan in 1982, and by President George W. Bush in 2006.>>>

Memo to America, Re: Welfare in the Olden Days

Gabriel Loiacono 
 
One evening, chatting with friends from church, one asked me what kind of history I focused on. I told him: the history of welfare in early America.  He said: what welfare in early America?

"The drunkard's progress, or the direct
road to poverty, wretchedness & ruin," 1826.
Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

I find myself having a conversation like that one more and more these days.  Whether on the left or the right politically, high school grads or Ph.D.s, most Americans I talk to assume that welfare is a creation of the twentieth century: midwifed by Franklin D. Roosevelt or Lyndon B. Johnson.  Those hearty, independent minutemen of the Revolutionary period, they assume, either made the poor find work or relied only on churches for charity. 

Occasionally, this assumption is voiced explicitly in national, political discourse.  For example, in a famous September 12, 2011 Republican Presidential Primary debate, Representative Ron Paul described assistance to the poor in the past thus: “Our neighbors, our friends, our churches would do it.”  Less off-the-cuff, respectable-looking websites will tell you that charity was almost entirely private before FDR, aside from a few dark and dingy poorhouses, which were more effective at driving inmates out than keeping them comfortable.  And it is not only critics of welfare who think this; one can find defenders of welfare describing the U.S.A. as essentially without welfare before FDR.[1]

Summer Scholarship for the #altac

Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe

As I struggle to find the energy, focus, and drive to complete my summer writing deadlines, the opening lines of Thomas Paine’s The Crisis take on new meaning:

THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.

For those of us “Alternative Academics,” marked by #altac hashtags on Twitter, the summer IS the season that tries our souls.  Our tenure-line colleagues disappear into the archives and post to Facebook from glamorous destinations around the globe. At the same time we work full time and wonder whether or not to attempt CPR on the scholarly commitments we left flailing for breath during the academic year. 

The difference appears less acute from September to June.  I may advise while others teach, but the strain on scholarship seems less stark then.  In the summer, when the professoriate retires from lectures, seminars, and office hours, I still Skype with fellowship applicants as registrars revise databases.  In some ways the summer pressure is less.  Undergraduates don’t line the halls.  Thus, the summer #altac scholar thinks a flurry of productivity just might be possible.

Study of Past Sparks Debate about the Future in the UK

Randall Stephens

Readers might find interesting this recent article in the Guardian about history battles.   On the heels of the Niall Ferguson scandal, Labour Education spokesman and historian Tristram Hunt writes: "From curriculum rows to Niall Ferguson's remarks on Keynes, our past is the fuel for debate about th

Read the above at the BBC

e future." ("History is where the great battles of public life are now being fought," Guardian, May 12, 2013).

Here's a brief excerpt:

For as [Niall] Ferguson has discovered to his cost, history enjoys a uniquely controversial place within British public life. "There is no part of the national curriculum so likely to prove an ideological battleground for contending armies as history," complained an embattled Michael Gove in a speech last week. "There may, for all I know, be rival Whig and Marxist schools fighting a war of interpretation in chemistry or food technology but their partisans don't tend to command much column space in the broadsheets."

Even if academic historians might not like it, politicians are right to involve themselves in the curriculum debate. The importance of history in the shaping of citizenship, developing national identity and exploring the ties that bind in our increasingly disparate, multicultural society demands a democratic input. The problem is that too many of the progressive partisans we need in this struggle are missing from the field.

How different it all was 50 years ago this summer when EP Thompson published The Making of the English Working Class , his seminal account of British social history during the Industrial Revolution. "I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the 'obsolete' hand loom weaver, the 'utopian' artist ... from the condescension of posterity," he wrote.>>>

John Adams and the Rule of Law in Boston

Heather Cox Richardson

Message boards and blogs are full of angry people calling for Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to be tortured or killed. Or both. Immediately. After all, it’s pretty clear he’s guilty,

A Gilbert Stuart portrait
of John Adams, ca. 1821.

right? Why waste tax dollars on this guy with a long, expensive trial?

And anyway, who ever said a terrorist who murders Americans should get a fair trial?

Well, Founding Father John Adams, for one. Right here in Boston.

Adams was a rising lawyer in Massachusetts during the infancy of the American Revolution. On March 5, 1770, eight British soldiers opened fire when someone in a taunting mob threw a rock at them. When the shooting was over, five Americans were dead and others were wounded. Within weeks, a grand jury indicted the soldiers, along with their commander, Captain Thomas Preston. 

It seemed all Boston was inflamed against the murdering foreign soldiers. The “Boston Massacre” became a rallying cry for those eager to revolt against England. Son of Liberty Paul Revere produced his famous engraving rewriting the event to show the soldiers firing systematically into a peaceful crowd. Few wanted to bother to try the prisoners, and in the end, officials delayed the trial for seven months in the hope that emotions would subside. They didn’t.

The Titanic, Time, and the Fragility of Human Life

Heather Cox Richardson

I have been pretty vocal about my inability to understand why people are so gripped by the Titanic disaster. Just a shipwreck, I’ve said. I don’t get it. Why not the Lusitania, which was by a torpedo in the same era, or any of the thousands of disasters that happen every day?

Titanic survivors. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Maybe I get it now.

The RMS Titanic set out from Southampton on April 10, 1912, a luxury ship carrying more than 2,200 passengers. She made port in France and Ireland before heading out to sea on April 11.

I’ve just started experimenting with ways for historians to use Twitter, and for the last several days have been tweeting snippets about the voyage, day by day: the vessel leaving port; the crew member who jumped ship in Ireland; the ten-course dinner of April 14; the radio operator’s determination to send out passenger messages as soon as he could raise the Newfoundland station late in the night of April 14; his brusque dismissal of a nearby ship’s warning of an ice field. As I trawled through little events, what I began to see was just how calm and safe and, well, unremarkable, the experience of the Titanic’s passengers was.

Gorgeous Hussies and Parlor Politics

Joseph Yannielli*

One of the advantages of digital history is that it allows its practitioners to comment on public events in real time and achieve a potentially broader and more immediate impact. And what event could be more gripping than a big old scandal? Scandals tap into a seemingly universal appetite for tawdry drama. In times of great crisis or division, they serve an important cultural function. Brimming with prurient details, amplified by politicians and the media, public scandals are manufactured distractions. Really good scandals also have the capacity to shake revered institutions to their core—to disturb and expose powerful elements that are normally obscure or hidden.

Of all the endless varieties of public embarrassment, the sex scandal holds a special place for its ability to shed light on subterranean social anxieties. The latest example offers up a juicy blend of the military, politicians, the CIA, and the FBI (and the East Tuscaloosa Junior Marching Band, and Kevin Bacon, and your mom, and who knows how many others by the time the investigation is concluded). But the story is as old as America . . . or at least as old as Old Hickory.

The Petticoat Affair that almost derailed Andrew Jackson's first term as President was perhaps the first major American sex scandal. And like the still-unraveling Petraeus Affair, it disgorged fascinating information about the inner workings of power in what would become the world's mightiest military machine.

A Nation of Minorities

Chris Beneke  

With the present birthrate, the Nordic stock will have become a hopeless minority within fifty years, and will within two hundred have been choked to death, like grain among weeds. Unless some means is found of making the Nordic feel safe in having children we are already doomed.

- Hiram Wesley Evans, “The Klan’s Fight for Americanism” (1926)

When Evans, the Ku Klux Klan’s Imperial Wizard and Emperor, offered this non-scientific demographic projection in the pages of the respectable North American Review in 1926 he wasn’t far out of the mainstream. Two years earlier, the U.S. Congress had passed an immigration restriction bill that severely narrowed the gates through which immigrants from eastern and southern Europe passed. The impending, relative decline of the Nordics was a leading justification for the measure.

Evans’ apoplexy contrasts with the relative equanimity that greeted the recent news that non-white births now outnumber white births in the U.S.—presaging a non-white majority by midcentury.* While the initial frenzy of reporting dripped with anticipated angst, the nation largely managed to keep its composure.

Interestingly, much of Evans’ vitriol—and much of the contemporary KKK’s general vitriol—was aimed at the Roman Catholic church. Anti-Catholicism didn’t come to an immediate end when the Klan imploded in the late 1920s. But it never again reached such heights.

While religion and ethnicity are very different social categories, and early 21^st domestic and international politics much different than those of pre-Great Society, Cold War America, we can still discern some revealing parallels between the conditions under which white Catholics were successfully integrated into American society and those now surrounding the growing Hispanic population. In other words, we have a historical precedent for the accommodation of a large block of new immigrants in the U.S., despite the hyperbolic fury of the extreme right and the dour pessimism of the extreme left.

Setting aside the fact that nearly one-third of all U.S. Catholics are now Hispanic, there are at least five easily identifiable parallels between 21^st-century Hispanics and 1920s-era Catholics:

1. As early 20^th-century Catholics were a diverse group bound together by an ancestral  faith, so are Hispanics from a variety of backgrounds bound together by an ancestral  language; 
2. Hispanics are approaching one-fifth of the U.S. population—as were Roman Catholics in the first decades of the 20^th, but their birth rates are likely to level off as they did for 20^th-century Catholics; 
3.The Hispanic population now includes a predominant nationality (Mexican American) that will, like Irish American predominance among early 20^th-century Roman Catholics, diminish as illegal immigration slows; 
4. Hispanics are marrying members of other ethnic groups at a rate comparable to 20^th-century Catholic religious exogamy; 
5.Explicit prejudice against Hispanics is increasingly confined to the extreme, economically marginal right—just as it was for early-mid-20^th-century Catholics.

This ad-hoc collection of rough analogies doesn’t guarantee anything about the next few decades of course. The investment firm’s stipulation that past performance is no guarantee of future results also goes for social change. And we should worry about the effects that the return of pre-World War II-levels of economic inequality might have.  Still, the case of early 20^th century Catholics is instructive and  encouraging. 

______________

* There are problems with the accounting, mainly because those Hispanics who identify as whites were included in the “non-white number.”  On this see Jeff Jacoby’s piece in The Boston Globe and Matthew Yglesias’s piece in SLATE.

The Titanic and the “Tip of the Iceberg”

Steven Cromack

April 15, 2012 marks the one-hundredth anniversary of the sinking of the R.M.S. Titanic. In honor of the centennial, events are taking place across the world—in Belfast, in Southampton, in New York, and even in Branson, Missouri. James Cameron re-released his 1997 blockbuster in IMAX 3-D, and there are a slew of new books appearing on the shelves. What is it about the Titanic that makes it so captivating? The answer, I believe, is that the many stories, all of which compose the master story, have a universal and generational appeal. They resonate with the deepest elements of who we are as human beings, or the “collective unconscious” articulated by Carl Jung, beneath the surface of our iceberg-like minds.

In terms of maritime history, the Titanic does not hold any special records—it was neither the largest ship to sink, nor did it claim the most lives. Yet, no other maritime disaster in history has captivated the public’s attention more so than the Titanic’s sinking. The academy as a whole does not consider the ship significant in the grand scheme of examining change over time. Indeed, of the many books on the subject published very few come from academic presses. Historians consider the Titanic story merely as “popular history,” or a history in which the “past is mobilized for a wide variety of purposes including . . . profit-making entertainment.”[1]

The tale of the Titanic, however, is more than “popular history” or “profit-making entertainment.” The Titanic endures in the same way that Shakespeare’s works, or even those of Sophocles or Euripides, endure. It lives on, even a century later, because the narrative contains stories of heroes and villains, “what if” scenarios, secrets, mysteries, stories of romance, and of heart-wrenching loss. It warns of the dangers of hubris and is an example of Edward Lorenz’s “Chaos Theory” and “Murphy’s Law.” It is a Petri dish in which historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and psychologists can examine and argue over the deepest elements of human nature: what happens when human beings find themselves in a dire scenario.

The story of Titanic is an intricate masterpiece of characters, narratives, and sub plots upon sub plots. There is story that everyone can admire or anguish over. Perhaps it is the character of the “Unsinkable” Molly Brown, who took an oar herself, something undoubtedly Susan B. Anthony would have done, and insisted that her virtually empty lifeboat go back and pull survivors out of the water. Such an act would have put her and others at risk of being capsized. Or, maybe, it is the awesome love which Ida Strauss showed her husband, Isidor Strauss, the co-owner of Macy’s Department Store, when she refused to leave her husband to die on the ship. Another person, at some point during the night, went down below and released the passengers’ dogs from the kennel.

All of these mini stories weave together to form the “big picture,” or the master story. Robert Ballard, the discoverer of the wreck, said that the disaster was “truly a tragedy worthy of Shakespeare himself” because:

Mankind, in all its hubris, designs an unsinkable ship that goes down on its maiden voyage. Where the captain evokes the British ideal and instructs the crew to stand at their station and die while the band plays on even as the owner sneaks into one of the few lifeboats and gets away. Where women and children go first, unless you are third class, and where a rescue ship [the Californian] stands by and does nothing.[2]

The Titanic is also Greek tragedy, in line with those works of Euripides or Sophocles. It recalls a tragic hero, caught between the always-dueling forces of the nomoi and physis (pronounced foo-sys). The nomoi are the human traditions, conventions, and laws created and enforced by humans. Physis is “nature”—those forces and laws that do not originate in human will and are outside of human control (fate, chance, or fortune). The ship was a human creation of greed, avarice, and humankind’s attempt to dominate the ocean. At the same time, so many factors outside the control of those on board conspired, much like the Greek Gods, to seal the vessel’s fate. The sea was dead calm that night, making it nearly impossible to see the base of the iceberg. The binoculars went missing, the steel was not designed for the frigid waters of the North Atlantic, and according to one new astronomy theory, the moon’s position that year affected the ice pattern.

Such a tragedy “worthy of Shakespeare,” or of the Greeks, resonates with the deepest elements of the human psyche. Our minds, ironically, are like icebergs, in that we only use a small portion of our brains. Beneath the surface, beneath the layers of baseball trivia, historical timelines, and mathematical theorems is the “unconscious.” There, anything goes. It is where our feelings, the ones we cannot control, and the ones that shape society—love, passion, desire, etc—reside. In 1934, Carl Jung articulated the idea of a “collective unconscious,” or the thought that thousands of years of human history exists inside of every person. We, as humans, choose to make things sacred (and unsacred), shape and mold society according to these passions and feelings that rise from the unconscious to the surface.[3] Jung wrote in his Psychology of the Unconscious, “This world is empty to him alone who does not understand how to direct his libido toward objects, and to render them alive and beautiful for himself, for Beauty does not indeed lie in things, but in the feeling that we give them.”[4]

The stories of love and loss, mystery and fate, all interwoven together in the Titanic live on in 2012 because they appeal to our deepest emotions. The Titanic story will undoubtedly live on for another century. In many ways, the ship itself was just the “tip of the iceberg.”
______________

1. Peter Sexias, Theorizing Historical Consciousness (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 10.

2. Interview with Robert Ballard, University of Rhode Island Department of History, Online at: http://www.uri.edu/news/ballard/quest.htm#2

3. Victor Daniels, Handout on Carl Gustav Jung. Sonoma State University. Online at: http://www.sonoma.edu/users/d/daniels/Jungsum.html

4. C.G. Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious (Mineola: Dover Publications, Inc., 2002), 193.

Board Games, Capitalism, and Piracy

Heather Cox Richardson

It’s fairly widely known that the game Monopoly was developed in America in the late nineteenth century to illustrate the evils of land monopoly. Rising prices, especially in the cities, in the 1870s and 1880s brought fortunes to a lucky few and misery to many. Ideas for negotiating this rough transition to a modern economy sprouted from all sorts of fertile minds, but few held the popularity accorded to Henry George’s Single Tax plan. George had lived both in California and New York during land booms and argued that land values rose through public development, rather than through individual enterprise. To restore equality, he argued, the government should take this unearned wealth back from the pockets into which it fell by taxing the value of the land.

This seemed a remarkably easy way to address the problem of growing inequality. Henry George clubs sprang up across the U.S. and even spread to Europe. George came close to winning the mayoralty of New York City in 1886 (he won more votes than newcomer Theodore Roosevelt). And Elizabeth Magie invented The Landlord’s Game, Monopoly’s forerunner, to explain the principles of land monopoly to potential Single Tax acolytes.

As anyone who has endured a rainy afternoon as a child knows, playing Monopoly was also a brutal lesson in the harshest form of capitalism. Invariably, one player emerged early as the canniest trader, or was lucky enough to capture Boardwalk and Park Place. S/he would slowly bleed the rest of the players dry over the long, painful course of hours. The only real option for a losing player was to rob the bank (something that, sadly, I didn’t figure out until I watched my children play the game). As someone said to me today, a young loser did not figure out the game was rigged, but rather assumed s/he was just bad at the game.

The structure of “land monopoly” and the internalization of failure, of course, were what Henry George’s followers were trying to highlight.

In contrast to the long, slow death of Monopoly stands the original Pirateer, a game that took the toy world by storm in 1994. It was produced independently, very briefly, by the Mendocino Game Company. In 1996, it won the Mensa Select Award for board games. In Pirateer, four gangs of pirates compete to collect a treasure from the island at the center of the board. They must then get it back to their own harbor before their ships are sunk by the other pirates, tacking according to wind patterns and the roll of dice. It is a rollicking game, essentially a free-for-all, but one that is bounded by natural laws (the wind), limited elements of luck—the roll of dice—and by a player’s strategic skill.

Crucially, anyone can win Pirateer right up to the very last play of the game. A clever four-year-old seeing the patterns of the board differently than his opponents can beat a seasoned player. No one can have a lucky break that determines the entire cast of the game. Everyone stays enthusiastic. No one gets an early advantage that means success four painful hours later. And the resentments at the end of Pirateer are correspondingly minor compared with those after Monopoly.

The contrast between these games hit me today when someone suggested that the true secret to the success of capital accumulation was protecting goods from piracy. The discussion was of the 1400s and the importance of walled cities, but it seems to me to hold true for colonial settlements in America, and even for modern-day attempts to regulate the internet.

Monopoly and Pirateer. Worth thinking about.

London’s Burning! (And History’s Repeating Itself)

Dana Goblaskas

When I first heard about the riots that broke out in London’s Tottenham neighborhood on Saturday, I couldn’t help thinking that the situation sounded a little familiar. It all began peacefully as people protested the death of a young man at the hands of local police, and allegedly the chaos erupted after a 16-year-old girl threw a rock at police officers. That proved to be the spark that lit three days’ worth (so far) of riots all over London, as well as in Birmingham, Bristol, Liverpool, and Manchester.

The niggling thought that the riots reminded me of something bounced around in my brain for a few hours until it hit me—the Notting Hill Carnival riot of 1976. On August 30th of that year, the annual West Indian carnival descended into violence as youths threw bricks and rocks at police and set cars afire. I had heard about it from several interviews with The Clash’s front man Joe Strummer, who sang about the effect the riot had on him in the song, “White Riot.”

Strummer, along with Clash bassist Paul Simonon and manager Bernie Rhodes, was at the carnival when the riot broke out. As Strummer remembered in an interview in 1999, “Paul, Bernie and I [saw] this conga-line of policemen coming through the crowd. . . . Someone threw a brick at them, then another, [then] all hell broke loose.” (quote from The Complete Clash [2003] by Keith Topping) According to the BBC, the trouble started when police tried to arrest a pickpocket and “several black youths came to the pickpocket’s aid.” Relations between the police and London’s black community had been unstable all summer, and the Carnival ended up being the tipping point.

Fast-forward 35 years to the present. The Metropolitan Police, as part of Operation Trident—a unit dedicated to investigating gun crime in London’s black communities—have supposedly been increasing the number of stop-searches made on members of the community. As a result, suspicion of and resentment for police is bubbling under the surface. Unemployment rates in Tottenham are double the national average, and the neighborhood has one of the highest concentrations of poverty in the country. Then on August 4th, 29-year-old Mark Duggan was shot and killed by police during an attempted arrest. That lit the tinderbox.

Both the riots of 1976 and 2011 were prefaced by stark economic climates (as Strummer growled in “White Riot:” “All the power in the hands of the people rich enough to buy it”), high unemployment, and tense race relations. All it took each time was one moment of perceived injustice for the violence to erupt. Though it feels cliché to say it, these riots happening in London are a perfect example of history repeating itself. But whereas the Notting Hill riot lasted only one day, the current chaos in London has been going on for three, and has spread to other cities.

If people continue refusing to recognize what can happen if we don’t learn from history, how bad will the riots be a few decades down the road?

Bloody Sundays

Dan Allosso

I was driving home from work the other day, listening to music instead of audiobooks for a change; randomly playing the “top-rated songs” from my iPod. It’s surprising how songs you forgot you’d loved show up there from time to time. I found myself driving along to the snare-drum beat of U2’s 1983 hit, “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” which got me thinking about the events behind the song and about popular protest.

The U2 song refers to the 1972 shooting of unarmed protestors in Derry, Ireland. But the name Bloody Sunday has also been used to describe the reaction to the first Selma March (1965), police violence against unemployed protestors in Vancouver, BC (1938), a 1905 St. Petersburg massacre that helped spark the Russian Revolution, and two other days of violence in the Irish conflict (1920, 1921). The original Bloody Sunday was a November 1887 demonstration in London that was routed by the Army and Metropolitan Police.

The issues that led to 1887’s Bloody Sunday included the 1885-86 Irish Coercion Acts, but the demonstration was really a culmination of tensions brought on by England’s “Long Depression” of the 1870s. East Londoners had been demonstrating against unemployment and poverty in their section of London for several years. The difference in November of 1887 was, they marched westward with their protests, to Trafalgar.

The 1887 East End protestors were not the first to march on London’s centers of power. In 1848, Chartists had planned to march on Parliament, and had only been turned away when the Duke of Wellington placed cannons on the Westminster bridge over the Thames. But less than a generation later, Britain’s Reform League led demonstrations that brought hundreds of thousands of protestors to Trafalgar Square and Hyde Park in 1866, and to the Agricultural Hall and Hyde Park again in 1867. These protests had been declared illegal by government authorities. So how did the reformers “get away with” these massive demonstrations?

The leaders of the Reform League demonstrations had learned from the 1848 intimidation of the Chartists. Charles Bradlaugh was an East Londoner who had been beaten by police at age 15, while leading an East London sympathy demonstration on the day the Chartists surrendered to Wellington. Bradlaugh was subsequently posted to County Cork with the British Army, where participating in the eviction of starving Irish peasants helped to radicalize him, and where he learned cavalry battle techniques and tactics. Bradlaugh insisted on public protests, against the wishes of many of his fellow Reform League leaders, and personally led them with the military discipline he had learned in Ireland.

200,000 Londoners marched on Hyde Park in July 1866. Home Secretary Spencer Walpole had outlawed the protest a few days earlier, and threatened military action. Bradlaugh and his radical allies in the Reform League leadership declared the government’s position unconstitutional, and announced they would challenge Walpole’s illegal attempt to bar peaceful, free assembly. Of course, in order to be legal, Bradlaugh realized the protest would have to be peaceful. And, aside from the famous destruction of some railings around the “Marble Arch” gate, which marchers led by a carriage of Reform League executives were prevented from entering by a troop of 1,600 police and soldiers, the demonstration was disciplined and nonviolent. Bradlaugh wasn’t at the railings, he was leading another column of protestors across Knightsbridge toward Hyde Park at the time.

To make a long story short, Spencer Walpole resigned in disgrace and the Reform League’s demonstrations established the right of Londoners to march, occupy public parks and squares, and demonstrate for their political rights. In 1868, the Reform Act passed, extending voting rights to working-class people for the first time in British history. And yet, twenty years later, Bloody Sunday. What had changed?

In 1887, Charles Bradlaugh was not at the head of the demonstration. He was exhausted and ill, following a six-year battle to take the seat in Parliament he’d been elected to in 1880. And he had doubts about the programs proposed by the Social Democratic Federation, which was sponsoring the protest. Bradlaugh advised readers of his National Reformer to stay away, and warned SDF and Fabian Society leaders to be cautious and consider the security of their people. Believing the precedent set by the Reform League had established their rights once and for all, Annie Besant, George Bernard Shaw, and the other leaders of the demonstration defied the government and marched. The results were disastrous.

Men, women, and children marchers were beaten by London police. Over two hundred people were hospitalized. Three were killed. Infantry and cavalry troops were on hand, with fixed bayonets; but luckily were not called into action. Several of the march’s leaders were arrested and held behind bars for six weeks.

It’s difficult to pinpoint all the factors that had changed, between 1866 and 1887. There was a new government, with new people in key positions—although in both cases, the Tories were in power. Chicago's Haymarket riot of 1886 was fresh in the minds of both the protestors and the government. The radicals who had been united behind the Reform League had split into factions. Socialists who seemed to be gaining ground in London political circles offered utopian ideals but had little connection with actual working people (the Labour Party was established in 1893, partly in response to these issues). But it’s possible that the key difference was the 1887 leaders’ belief that their right to protest, established 20 years earlier, was inviolable.

The lesson of Bloody Sunday, it seems to me, is that we can’t take our rights for granted. If we are not prepared to defend them, they can be taken from us. Like Charles Bradlaugh and his fellow reformers, we have to be resolute, disciplined, and nonviolent—but prepared to defend ourselves. It’s not insignificant that when Bradlaugh died four years after Bloody Sunday, one of the mourners at his simple secular funeral was twenty-one year old Mohandas Gandhi.

Half-Breeds, Stalwarts, and Contingency

Heather Cox Richardson

A year or so ago, a graduate student studying for her comprehensive exams asked me if I could explain the difference between Stalwart and Half-Breed Republicans in the nineteenth century. I could, I said, so long as she understood that no one cared.

I went on to explain that the difference between Stalwarts and Half-Breeds crystallized in the Republican national convention in 1880. In that contest, Stalwarts, led by Roscoe Conkling and Don Cameron, wanted to secure the nomination for former president U. S. Grant. Half-Breeds backed James G. Blaine.

What was at stake in the nomination was really nothing other than a personal feud. Conkling and Blaine had hated each other since the war years. Conkling had become Grant’s right-hand man during his presidency, and he hoped to become the crucial figure in a renewed Grant government, handing out patronage to his supporters in New York. Blaine had a different set of friends, and they pushed his nomination in the hope that he would cut out the Conkling men.

The nomination process did not proceed as either camp hoped. A significant body of delegates refused to support either Grant or Blaine. They threw their votes to a dark horse, James Garfield of Ohio. The Blaine delegates, willing to vote for anyone but Grant, followed. Garfield won the 1880 nomination, and the 1880 election.

I told my friend that the distinction between Stalwarts and Half-Breeds didn’t matter because there was little daylight between the actual policy positions of Conkling and Blaine. The ascendancy of either would not have changed the course of the Republican Party, or the legislation it supported. For the purposes of the country they were interchangeable, and so, for that matter, was Garfield. The difference between Stalwarts and Half-Breeds was rather like the difference today between John Boehner and Eric Cantor: a difference in style, to be sure, but not such a great difference that one can imagine history graduate students in 2130 being asked to explain its significance.

Today, as I wrote about this fight, I rethought that flippant dismissal.

In order to quiet the angry Stalwarts, the Republican convention put Stalwart Chester Arthur into the vice presidency. But then, to calm the Half-Breeds, President Garfield named James G. Blaine himself to the position of Secretary of State in the new administration. This was the most powerful position in the Cabinet, and Stalwarts—led, as ever, by the insatiable Roscoe Conkling—cried foul.

When Garfield offered the fabulously lucrative position of collector of the port of New York to an appointee without consulting Conkling, the fat was in the fire. Conkling, a famously touchy character, was undoubtedly personally affronted. But he claimed to oppose the appointment on the grounds that the Senate’s power to advise and consent gave Senators the power of appointment. Garfield was usurping power, he insisted; senators had ultimate say over who received government appointments in their home states. What was really at stake, though, was whether or not Conkling would control New York.

To force the issue into the open, Conkling resigned his position in the Senate. New York’s other senator, Thomas Platt, joined him (thereby earning the memorable nickname “Me Too” Platt). They were confident the New York legislature would reelect them, thus slamming Garfield and returning the Stalwarts to the top position in the government. They were wrong. New Yorkers had had enough of Conkling’s dictates and were not willing to endorse the idea that senators should hold sway over the president’s appointments. The legislature turned to entirely new senators.

Traditional historians who even tried to find any significance in this teapot tempest blamed the fight between Conkling and Blaine for the assassination of President Garfield two months later. In July, Charles Guiteau shot President Garfield in an apparent attempt to put Stalwarts in power after all. From this the nation got civil service reform, but, as I told my scholarly friend, no real change in governmental policies.

Here is where histories generally drop the Stalwarts and Half-Breeds.

But I came to realize today that there was, in fact, a terrifically significant event to come out of this clash: Roscoe Conkling was out of a job.

With his political career suddenly gone, Conkling had to find a way to rebuild his fortunes. He had always been a brilliant orator, and he turned naturally to the law. The first client through his door was Jay Gould, the railroad magnate. Conkling used his great popularity and fame as a legislator to become one of the nation’s premier litigators for big business. It was in that capacity that he argued the case of San Mateo County v. Southern Pacific Railroad in December 1882. In this case, Conkling argued that a county tax on the railroad violated the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. He insisted, based on his position as a congressman who had participated in the framing of that amendment, that when it adopted the Fourteenth Amendment, Congress had intended for it to protect corporations as well as individual persons. The court did not explicitly comment on Conkling’s really quite outrageous claim in 1882, but in 1886, it announced that Conkling’s doctrine was so definitive that it would not hear arguments to the contrary. The principle that corporations were protected by the Fourteenth Amendment limited government regulation of business well into the twentieth century.

And therein lies the great historiographical revelation of my current project. I have always seen political history as the story of competing ideas, but again and again I find small personal quirks changing the course of history. If only Thurlow Weed had not wanted to protect William Henry Seward we would not have gotten President Andrew Johnson; if only Charles Sumner hadn’t been so snobbish the Grant presidency would have succeeded.

And if only Stalwarts and Half-Breeds had been on speaking terms, corporations might never have been protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.