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Making a National Crime: the Transformation of US Lynching Politics 1883-1930

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Making a National Crime: the Transformation of US Lynching Politics 1883-1930 View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Carolina Digital Repository Making a National Crime: The Transformation of US Lynching Politics 1883-1930 Charles Franklin Seguin A dissertation submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Sociology. Chapel Hill 2016 Approved by: Kenneth Andrews Christopher Bail Frank Baumgartner Fitzhugh Brundage Neal Caren Charles Kurzman ©2016 Charles Franklin Seguin ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT Charles Franklin Seguin: Making a National Crime: The Transformation of US Lynching Politics 1883-1930 Under the direction of Kenneth Andrews Between the Post-Civil War Reconstruction era and stretching into the beginning of the Civil Rights era, a dramatic shift occurred in the public representations of lynching. Lynching was originally framed as a form of rough justice and popular sovereignty—a necessary response to the heinous crimes of blacks and slow courts. But, over this period, roughly 1883-1930, lynching came to be understood as a form of brutality, anarchy, and “barbarism”. This dissertation addresses the causes and consequences of the changing meanings of lynching. I argue that lynching was increasingly criticized as lynch mobs victimized people from outside of the usual black Southern victims, and thus expanded the scope of anti-lynching politics. iii For Barbara Seguin iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thanks are owed first and foremost to my adviser Kenneth Andrews who has been the best adviser and mentor that anyone could hope for. Many thanks also to my committee members, Chris Bail, Frank Baumgartner, Fitzhugh Brundage, Neal Caren, and Charles Kurzman: they made this dissertation possible, and they made it better, it would be better still if I had heeded all their advice. Conversations with many colleagues have helped to clarify and improve this dissertation, with apologies to those who’ve I’ve forgotten, I thank: Howard Aldrich, Kenneth Bollen, Sarah Gaby, Sally Morris, Didem Turkuglo, Robb Willer and audiences at talks at the University of Arizona, University of Iowa, University of Maryland, University of North Carolina, University of Pittsburgh, Stanford University, and Washington University at St Louis. David Rigby contributed immensely in our joint work putting together the dataset on which my dissertation is based, in our joint work on lynching, and in numerous conversations on the topic. Kaneesha Johnson, Emily Powell, and Jailen Wallis provided truly excellent research assistance. Friends who helped me endure the last years of the project, too many to list in full, but: Autumn McClellan, Brandon Gorman, David Rigby, Luke Sherry, and Tiantian Yang. Lastly my family who got me here, too many to list, but especially my parents Catherine Collison, Paul Seguin, and my grandparents Jean Collison, Herb Collison, Dennis Murphy, Barbara Seguin, and Charles Seguin. v TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES ix CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION: THE STRANGE CAREER OF JUDGE LYNCH 1 The Puzzle of Lynching Politics 5 Lynching as Grievance 7 Lynching as Repression 9 Symbolic Repression, Real Repression 10 Lynching Events as Exogenous Drivers and Turning Points of Politics 12 Methodological Approach 14 Organization 16 CHAPTER 2: THE HISTORY OF LYNCHING DISCOURSE 18 The Evolution of National Lynching Discourse 20 Dictionary Analyses 21 Civilization Discourse in Lynching Articles 24 Criminality Discourse 25 Periodizing Lynching Discourse 27 Dataset 28 Which Victims Were Covered 30 Presidential 37 The NAACP 40 CHAPTER 3: REPRESSION, RETREAT, AND RETURN 44 Repression 45 vi Southern Horrors 45 The Intimidation of the Black Southern Press 47 Retreat and Return 50 Expansion of Key Northern Black Papers 52 CHAPTER 4: THE VICTIMS 56 The Nations 58 The Lynching of Italian Citizens 59 Italian Eleven 59 Walsenburg, Tallulah and Other Foreign Lynchings 62 The Exogenous Effect of the Lynchings of Italian Nationals 63 The Italian Eleven as Turning Point 65 George White and Teddy Roosevelt 68 Our National Crime 73 The Spectacle 75 The Lynching of Sam Hose 76 The Lynching of Sam Hose as Turning Point 79 The Contemporaneous and Enduring Significance of Sam Hose 80 Sam Hose and Shifting Language of Lynching 81 The Sections: Legal Boundaries 83 Legal Boundaries 85 Ed Johnson 86 The Sections: Identity 86 Sam Hose and Northern Criticism 87 George White and Southern Criticism 88 Lynching South, North, and Federal 90 vii The Elites 90 Leo Frank 91 Lynching and Press Reaction 92 The Jewish Press & George White 93 Leo Frank and Jim Conley 96 The Lynching of Leo Frank and Jewish Anti-Lynching 97 Boundary Spillover 97 CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION: THE POLITICAL HISTORY OF LYNCHING 99 Periodizing Lynching Politics 100 The Political Actors 101 The Bigger Picture 102 The History of Lynching Politics 103 The Construction of Social Problems 105 REFERENCES 107 viii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Pro/Anti-lynching Frames in New York Times Lynching Articles 23 Figure 2: Civilization Discourse in Lynching Articles 26 Figure 3: Agency of Mob vs Victim in Lynching Articles 27 Figure 4: Lynching in the US 1883-1930 30 Figure 5: Total Articles Covering Lynching Victims 33 Figure 6: Number of Republican and Democratic Papers 47 Figure 7: The Expansion of the Northern Black Press 53 Figure 8: Lynching Articles in Black Papers 54 Figure 9: Number of Articles Mentioning Mafia 62 Figure 10: Number of US Lynching Articles 66 Figure 11: Civilization Discourse in Lynching Articles 67 Figure 12: “A Skeleton Of His Own” (Keppler 1903) 72 Figure 13: Agency of Mob vs Criminality of Victim in Lynching Articles 82 Figure 14: Articles Mentioning Leo Frank 93 Figure 15: Jewish Papers Mentioning Lynching 94 Figure 16: Jewish Papers Mentioning Leo Frank 95 ix CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION: THE STRANGE CAREER OF JUDGE LYNCH “Tradition sometimes plays strange pranks with dead men’s reputations,” according to a 1901 article in The Atlantic. The author was discussing how Charles Lynch’s name came to be synonymous with “organized savagery.” Charles Lynch was an American judge that had meted out summary justice to Tories in Virginia during the Revolutionary War, and in so doing had overstepped the boundaries of the law. The author argued that Lynch was a righteous and good man who had seen the necessity of rough, extralegal justice as a result of his frontier origins in a “primeval wilderness, where the savage and the beast of prey shared the supremacy.” If it was necessary to step outside of the law in these uncivilized conditions, however, the author argued, lynching itself had now become the savagery—and stained the reputation of Judge Lynch (Page 1901). Not long before 1901, something strange indeed had happened to the reputation of lynching. Lynching had long been understood in the US as a form of frontier “rough justice,” unmediated by the slow and ineffectual machinations of the legal process (Pfeifer 2011). Political discourse through the 1870s and into the early 1890s reflected this. Presidents and many other political elites largely ignored lynching, and the newspapers reported on “mob justice” meted out to nameless criminal victims. The New York Times, for instance, recycled the headline “Brutal Negro Lynched” eleven times from 1880 through the early 1890s (see e.g. Anon 1886). Yet around the beginning of the new century, and even before, lynching was increasingly represented as “organized savagery.” In 1897, McKinley argued in his inaugural address, that “Lynchings must not be tolerated in a great and civilized country like the United States 1 (McKinley 1897a).” Theodore Roosevelt denounced lynching strongly in 1903 (Roosevelt 1903b), and in 1906, argued in his State of the Union Address that “every lynching represents bjust so much a loosening of the bands of civilization (Roosevelt 1906).” In 1903, even stalwart white supremacist papers like the Atlanta Constitution were frequently and vehemently, if not consistently, denouncing lynching with arguments like “Lynching is Anarchy!” and that “the whole fabric of our civilization totters on an insecure base when every arm and sovereignty is broken through by irrational, irresponsible, and bloody-minded mobs (Atlanta Constitution 1903).” The public meaning of lynching had changed from a celebrated practice of “rough justice,” to one of “uncivilized savagery.” How did this happen? Some have placed lynching in the context of a centuries, even millennia, long “civilizing process” wherein interpersonal violence has increasingly become seen as illegitimate (Mennell 2007; Pinker 2011). The decline in the legitimacy of lynching might then be seen as simply one part of a universal process (Elias 1978). While the evidence suggests such a global process did indeed occur, the process and the explanations for it, tend to occur over centuries and millennia, while lynching lost its legitimacy over years and decades. Pinker (2011), for example, proposes that increasing literacy may have led to increased generalized empathy and thus a decline in the legitimacy of violence. Singer discusses an expanding circle of moral concern and locates the cause in the human capacity for reason (1981). Empathy, reason, and the civilizing process were, no doubt, necessary conditions for the decline in the legitimacy of lynching, but they are far from complete explanations of why lynching was considered legitimate in the first place, and why it lost its legitimacy at the historical moment that it did. In the conclusion, I discuss how the case of lynching can inform the global decline in the legitimacy of violence, but for now suffice to say 2 that these studies cannot explain much about of the specific historical trajectory of lynching politics. Sociologists and historians have documented the shift in the way lynching was understood and represented (e.g. Pfeifer 2011; Waldrep 2002; Wasserman 1998). However, few have attempted an explanation for why this shift occurred in the first place.
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