Let's Remember Some Civil Unrest! The 1967 Detroit Uprising

WYTS: Detroit Lions. Original post here.

We do not have time for joking in the intro. This is a really important one. The 1967 Detroit Uprising.

In June 1943, Detroit exploded with violence and rage. There was a rumor that a Black mother and her baby had been thrown into the river by a white mob. That fantasy set the city off, white and Black rioters attacking each other. 3,500 federal troops had to come in to restore order. By the time it was all sorted out, 34 people killed. Still, like most riots we’ve covered, everything mostly went back to normal after this. Detroit kept on booming. This riot was largely forgotten.

A generation later, with most of the problems in the city unresolved, the next rounds of battle would be even worse. And this riot would be televised. This would not be a historical footnote.

The early 20th sees Detroit becoming Motor City, a shining capital of an empire of steel. The new auto industry was a marvel of modern industry. Detroit’s assembly lines were the envy of the planet, a pillar of the Arsenal of Democracy that would spoil Hitler’s dreams. The city needed labor and needed it fast and paid well for it. Hundreds of thousands of African Americans left the South, where Jim Crow and sharecropping offered no hope of a future, to go north and settle in this growing Michigan mechanized paradise. Ford Motors knew that a racially diverse work force was also a less organized work force, they could always play their Black and white workers off each other. Black workers in Ford got a miraculously good deal, very fair wages.

Unfortunately, we can never stop being ourselves, even in a glittery new city of modernity. “The past is never dead”, said a writer I don’t care for. Color lines came to Detroit just as they came to every other part of America. By the time of the ’43 riot, 200,000 Black Detroiters were locked away in the city’s East Side, in places like Paradise Valley or Black Bottom. A new Black housing project in 1942 was met by white marchers burning crosses – the KKK was active here too.

Daily life in Detroit in the years leading up to the '67 Riot was a constant reminder of your skin color, in every aspect of life. The police were 97% white. After the whites took down their burning crosses, the more subtle system of Redlining limited Black access to much of the city and importantly the suburbs. The good jobs were already moving out of the city as America atomized and industry left city centers. Black workers could not move as quickly as the white ones. The remaining jobs at Chrysler and GM were dangerous, unfair, and paid worse than white ones. Stores would screw over Black customers with worse deals or simply keep you out entirely. You might not be able to get a drink. There was a long tradition of “blind pigs”, illegal speakeasies dating back to Prohibition. Since white bars did not want your business, this is where you had your social life, in the back of abandoned stores or empty offices.

In the Sixties, the clear disparities in social life were well-known and the government was trying its best to understand how to fix it. With the population already declining, Detroit knew there was a problem. The new wave of Great Migration Black workers came to Detroit expecting the middle class life of generations earlier and found they were not wanted. Unfortunately, solutions often made life worse, such as slum clearing for “urban renewal” or building freeways. 12th Street became the new center of Black life, but also the center of the city's crime, with an occupying white police force crushing them. Mayor Jerome Cavanagh was taking steps with Great Society funding to fix the schooling, the crooked credit system in stores, even maybe integrate the police force more. But this was too little, too late for many in Detroit.

And the disturbing part is that these would be remembered as “the good times”.

1967 had a very hot summer too. Temperatures soared into the 80s and 90s every day (which was unusual then, not like now when it’s normal and don’t worry about it). The cops were really cracking down on prostitution, often falsely-accusing women at night and molesting them. These were basically enemy raids and were not well-loved around 12th Street. Rumors were that the police killed a prostitute on July 1st. A few weeks earlier Newark had exploded with four days of rioting for the same social inequalities and divisions. Riots would happen across the country this summer in a very predictable pattern of police violence, angry response. But the worst uprising happened in Detroit.

A man named William Scott ran his own blind pig in the office of the United Community League for Civic Action, a civil rights organization, on weekends. This weekend of the 22nd and 23rd, late Saturday, early Sunday, 85 people were at Scott’s speakeasy celebrating the return of two GIs from the increasingly unpopular and insane-seeming Vietnam War. The cops raided the place at 3:45 AM. They intended to arrest all 85 people, overplaying their hand. A mere ticket might have avoided all of this.

This started a big commotion on the corner of 12th and Clairmount, who saw white police raiding a civil rights structure, or attacking one of their few outlets from the stress of life. One of Scott’s sons was working as a doorman. According to his account he threw a bottle at a policeman and that snapped something. The crowds became unmanageable and the police retreated. As dawn came up, four blocks of Detroit were in full riot.

As Sunday progressed the situation grew out of control. For the people on 12th Street, they instantly felt free of all social control, and certainly out of control of the Police Department. People were just wandering the streets in a manic frenzy, "a carnival atmosphere". Nearby clothing stores were looted and trashed. The cops were being laughed at. Well-armed police sweeps would come by, try to stop some looting, and be totally overwhelmed by thousands of civilians. What were they going to do? Shoot everybody? By the afternoon, a few fires were started. Many more would follow. Some enterprising individuals climbed up to rooftops to snipe at the police. Detroit was at war with itself.

That date, the Tigers played a double header against the Yankees, splitting the games. As the afternoon wore on, both teams had to ignore rising smoke over the left field fence. Left fielder, Willie Horton drove out to try to calm things down on 12th Street, but he was as successful as the police - and also the National Guard, who were pouring into the city at this point. Governor George Romney (father of a certain Mitt, small world) was coordinating with the mayor and they were throwing everything they had at the riot, which just kept spreading.

A lot of the local news reports are up on Youtube right now. WWJ News, a local CBS affiliate had a documentary made I think a week after the riot called "Six Days in July". In it, stunned white reporters recount what they witnessed as they replay their fresh footage. They're comparing the state of the city to London after the German blitz. Some of them have thousand-yard stares like they've just finished a tour of duty on Saipan. More terrifying is just the interviews with people, of all races. Some of them are still nursing gunshot wounds or terrified for their wives who have suffered second degree burns, their neighbors upstairs are dead. This was war, on TV, and they shot it in color film. The story of the Sixties, really.

By Monday, even the Michigan Guard were obviously insufficient. And in fact, some historians argue they were making things worse, being nearly all-white. Looters had pulled as many guns as they could out of stores and were happily firing back. This was both the worst parts of urban warfare and guerilla warfare. You could never know which car might drive by and which might shoot. Which guy walking on the street hadn't just been sniping at you. Tanks were rolling down the streets of America's fifth largest city because infantry needed protection from the high ground shots.

Much of the day was spent in technical legal arguments over sending in full US Army troops. The mayor and governor did not want to declare the city in Insurrection because that would apparently void all the insurance claims in the city at once. Plus, George Romney was eyeing a presidential bid, the family business, and maybe President Johnson felt a way about that. However, all levels of government realized that this problem needed to be stamped out with every tool available. That included famous divisions who had once fought in Normandy. The 82nd Airborne were sent in, along with the 101st. From escorting kids to school in Little Rock to now fighting a rebellion in Detroit, the 101st had seen every side of the Civil Rights Movement.

The paratroopers were racially integrated unlike most of the local gendarmes and that helped quell things. But this riot would take another four days to burn out steam.

There’s countless stories. A little girl was shot and killed in her house, in her room, by a stray bullet. A few Black men were summarily executed in a hotel by police officers. (That's the Katherine Bigalow movie that I do not think is very good.) There's also a lot of good stories. There was a panic that the few stories left open would price gouge their customers, that didn’t happen. There were interfaith, inter-race spontaneous acts of welfare. Black families saved white reporters, or unions gathered aid to whoever needed it. Obviously since Detroit had burned much of itself down, this was the worst of humanity, but in rare occasions it was the best.

In the end 43 people were killed, there were 1,100 injuries, countless arrests. 400 buildings were destroyed, hundreds of families were now homeless, millions of dollars in damage. By that raw data, the 1967 Riots are not the biggest event of civil unrest in American history. But in another perspective, this was the very worst. The NYC Draft Riots might have killed hundreds of people - but NYC survived and in fact thrived. Most of the cities I've discussed just kept growing, and people loved these communities. These events are odd curiosities at worst.

That's not the case for Detroit. It was a lot harder to forget everything that happened when it was on TV, the riots being one of the first signs that the late 60s would be an apocalypse of social upheaval. Shooting at cops just isn’t a constructive means of positive change. This defined the city for decades, which only became more overwhelmed by pornographic images of poverty. The car, Detroit’s source of glory, also killed it. It allowed America to suburbanize and grow increasingly conservative, seeing the cities as a kind of grotesque Bantustand for unwanted racial elements. And what future could people see in a place like this?

Detroit never really recovered from this riot. White flight was already well underway in 1967, and the damn burst after the Uprising. Half the white population of Detroit had left by 1980, things not helped by Stagflation or the oil crisis and then the Crack Epidemic right after that. The city lost a million people by 2020 - that’s barbarians cutting aqueducts numbers. Motor City would not report a population increase again until 2023. When I visited the city as a kid in the 2000s, it felt actively post-apocalyptic. At night, the city was blanketed in darkness because the streetlights had been in disrepair for decades. In 2013, the city declared bankruptcy and it seemed like this place was in terminal decline. The movie RoboCop was a prophecy that came true.

Things are better in Detroit now. Parts of it have rebounded, especially in downtown. Ford restored Michigan Central Station at great expense. Other parts of the city are as ruined as ever. I see a future for a smaller Detroit but one that will never again be the Motor City of the mid-century. That city died in 1967 and rotted for half a century under severe corruption and macroeconomic abandonment. The future will have to be something new. I don’t know if anybody has figured out what that will be yet.

Let's Remember Some Civil Unrest! The 1913 Indianapolis Streetcar Strike

WYTS: Indianapolis Colts. Original link here.

I have a ridiculously simple vision for how to fix America: trains, more trains. The Colts play in a sea of parking lots. That should be dense urbanism supported by rail lines. Indianapolis has almost no trains today, just freight and Amtrak. A century ago, there were so many trains, what a paradise, and the city tore itself apart over them. Labor activists did not fuck around back then. This is the 1913 Indianapolis Streetcar Strike!

Streetcars in Indy start getting built in 1864. The first lines were so simple as to be powered by mule, not even steam. By the 20th century the whole system was electrified. Streetcar lines expanded quickly in cities around the world and were prosperous symbols of safe modernity. There’s a lot of money to be made in building a transit network, especially when you can bring customers to exciting new real estate. In addition, Indianapolis was served by a system of "interurbans", a kind of light electric passenger tram that connected 15,000 miles of the country. The interurbans sadly ceased to exist by the time Eisenhower took office. The Indianapolis Traction Terminal, built in 1904, was a mighty monument to rail power, serving 7 million riders a year, 500 trains a day.

This all sounds wonderfully successful. But the problem with railroads is this: it's very profitable to build them, a lot less profitable to maintain them. If you’re say, a capitalist, you can very easily not spend money keeping up infrastructure or hiring enough men, and before you know it, your whole business has gone to shit. This would be the sad story of rail in the 20th century.

Our first signs of trouble begin with labor problems. Streetcar strikes were endemic in this era in dozens of cities, some much worse than the one we're covering today. (31 dead in San Francisco’s strike, in St. Louis they were tossing dynamite around.) The 1913 strike was Indy's second major labor battle in this industry, it was the long-awaited sequel to a strike in the winter of 1892 that ended inconclusively. These strikes were not like the LIRR workers staying home for a long weekend, these actions paralyzed cities. And we’re in the golden age of American socialism, these workers were itching for a fight against the bosses. Sabotage, violence, all kinds of mayhem were common. It’s almost inspirational, but my legal team tells me to advise you not to throw a brick at your boss for everybody's own sake.

Our dramatis personae are the Indianapolis Traction & Terminal Company and the Amalgamated Association of Street & Electric Railway Employees of America. For my own sanity I'll call them "The Company" and "The Union". The Union's VP was John J. Thorpe, and opposing him was Company President Robert Todd. Through the fall of 1912, the Union was gaining more and more members. What made Indy a tempting target for labor organizers was that the Indianapolis Street Railway Company was a union shop, which had been bought by the bigger Indiana Traction Etc. Etc., which was non-union. So in the same city you had union workers living a better life, and non-union guys getting ripped off. Meanwhile, the Company would have preferred that their men work for like 900 hours a week for a half-penny, and also run crews of zero guys per car, if possible, preferably -2 guys.

The Department of Labor offered to mediate the dispute. Todd told them to suck eggs, he was sure there was no labor problem in Indianapolis. Less than half the Company had joined the Union, after all. If there was not a streetcar problem, the Union decided to make one.

On the night of Halloween, the strike began. The whole event had a surreal atmosphere of a grand spooky party, with Union men streaming out of their HQ, Labor Hall, and starting a ruckus. Most of the people on the street seemed to think it was part of the night’s festivities. One clever Union tactic was to drag uninterested guys to the Hall, smack them over the head, and make them sign up while lil birdies flew around their blurry vision. Meanwhile, the Company had been well-prepared for this action. They had spies following Thorpe, had written viscous letters threatening his wife, and imported a lot of scab strikebreakers from Chicago, the dreaded Pinkertons.

The next day, the entire streetcar system in Indy was shut down by protesters and sabotage. The Interurbans seems to have kept running though. People were throwing rocks at cars, throwing bricks at cars, climbing up to cut down the electric lines, I've heard a story that women were just pouring soap on the tracks to destroy traction, which I don’t actually think would work. They were doing whatever they could think of to be maximally annoying, and it seems to have been great fun. The police mobilized to protect "loyal" workers and the repair crews, but actually Indy's police seem to have been on the side of labor here, so they did not get a lot done. Labor solidarity extending to the cops, rare moment in history here.

By the 2nd, the strikebreaker crews had arrived, being well-paid with free room and board so that Company didn't need to pay their regular workers a fair wage. But even they were not all that successful. Every time the scabs managed to launch a streetcar, the mob would rush in, beat the crews up, smash everything with a blunt heavy object, and finally light the car on fire. The cops just watched. Even the mayor, a comedian named Lew Shank (not making that up, he was a Vaudeville guy whose gimmick seems to have been auctioning potatoes - really), did not order a crack down. Election day was coming this week and Shank was a lame duck, so he was happily with the populists here.

Then on the 3rd, Todd tried to retake control of his Terminal Building with an ambivalent police escort as armed guard. He got pelted with so many missiles from the crowd that he had to be rushed to the hospital. He seems to have ended up just fine, not that I can find much info about Mr. Todd, he was not as colorful a character as Mayor Potatoes. The whole city was in a glorious chaos now, John J. Thorpe having proven his point and moreso.

The governor, a progressive reformer named Samuel Ralston, declared martial law. The National Guard were in town by the 5th. The company's headquarters were secured by Gatling Guns (pointing machine guns at crowds happens a lot in these stories). A week after the strike began, the Company had to cave to most demands. The workers got their union, their better pay, and their shorter hours. Some of these gains were lost later as the state came up with their own arbitration: the Company could still hire non-union guys for example. The scabs left town on an Interurban back to Chicago, and the National Guard went home by the 10th. Union leader Thorpe also agreed to leave Indiana and not come back.

Two scabs were killed in the riots, four strikers. Over a hundred injured. And nobody got to work on time for a week.

Meanwhile, Mayor Shank and the police force were in a bit of a bind. 33 officers were threatened with firing for insubordination. Shank resigned a month early in protest and saved their jobs, also saving himself an impeachment. For a moment it looked like the cops would go on strike themselves and start the whole riot over again. (This has happened in other cities.) Mayor Potato Comedian would return to office in the 1920s and unsuccessfully fought the Ku Klux Klan who took over Indiana for a time, but we don't have time for all that today. Governor Ralston, meanwhile, joined with the KKK. He was a successful reformer, but his politics were… complicated. Very Anti-Catholic, turns out.

As we know, all this fighting was a temporary victory, the streetcar system was doomed by history. This was due to decades of deferred maintenance by the Company owners, and the mid-century assumption that streetcars were for the past. This thing called the automobile happened and it was the future. This made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move. If you're a city post-WWII, the federal government was offering you infinite, practically free money to build yourself a highway network, so highways you would build. In 1953, the streetcars were dead, followed by the trolley buses four years later. The Traction Terminal limped on as a bus station for a bit, until it too was torn down. A dismal-looking Hilton stands in its place today.

Since 1957, if you want to get around in Indianapolis, you do it by car or bus. That's it. I actually don’t think your commute times have improved greatly in a century of progress. A very unscientific guess is that it took about a half hour in 1913 to get to work, it’s about a half hour now. Mike Pence was born in 1959, and I'm not saying that streetcars would have stopped that from happening, but we should explore that possibility with more research.

It is illegal to build a light rail in Indiana today. Don’t you even think about it.

Let's Remember Some Civil Unrest! The Dade Massacre

WYTS: Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Original post here.

(Painting is by Ken Hughes.)  

You ever wonder how Florida became Florida? How American got these scars? Well, let's remember a battle in 1835 known only for a losing commander, the Dade Battle, or Dade Massacre, the opening shots of the Second Seminole War. One of my commenters on Defector asked "do the good guys ever win?". This is one of the rare cases where the answer is "yes".

We need to rewind back to the first Spanish explorers arriving in Florida in 1513. Guys like Ponce de Leon and de Soto did not find gold or the Fountain of Youth, so North America was not terribly interesting to the Empire. However, they did bring Eurasian diseases and most of the pre-contact Floridian cultures were wiped out by the 1700s. In that century, the peninsula was too swampy, too tropical (disease-y), and too depopulated to be very useful for Spanish. Plus, there was the problem of nearby British colonies, soon becoming Americans. Spanish missions were subject to raids from the Carolinas and Georgia, Florida kept flipping between colonial powers as a bargaining chip in the various treaties, and eventually Spanish Florida was down to just a handful of forts as a buffer against the Thirteen Colonies.

Into this vacuum began the creation of a new people. This is "ethnogenesis", where a group of people come together and recognize themselves as something new. This is how your Romans came to be, how your English came to be - nobody comes from a "pure" ethnicity except in racist mythologies. These guys called themselves “yat'siminoli”, which Anglicizes to “Seminoles”, a name meaning “free people”. Its etymology is similar to the Spanish word “cimarrones”, from where we get “maroon”, which in this context, refers to escaped slave communities. The Seminoles were a fusion of Muscogee Creeks moving south, surviving Floridian Natives, and quite a few escaped African slaves, the “Black Seminoles”. They were thriving under light Spanish rule, probably numbering somewhere around 10,000 by the time they came into conflict with the USA.

Also, you may have noticed, that, yes, this is yet another conflict with its routes in slavery. It is almost like the core of all evil in American history is this Peculiar Institution...

By the 1820s, it was hard to see how Spain would keep control of Florida. Most of Spain's great American empire had fallen through a series of fast revolutions. In the 1810s, Americans were raiding Florida to fight the natives. In 1816, a community of slaves in a former British fort in Pensacola had been destroyed by the US navy, the battle of the "Negro Fort". And in 1817, General Andrew Jackson invaded Florida in the First Seminole War, largely to protect Georgia’s slaves from any temptation to run off and go Seminole. Spain and the US made an agreement, the Adams-Onis Treaty, which traded Florida for all American claims to Texas. Spain gained nothing but the saving of face here, Texas was already lost to the newly independent Mexico... and not for long either, America got it all, baby! Woo, USA!

As far as the Seminoles were concerned, these geopolitical shifts were just part a wider sequence of conquest from the north. We break up the Seminole Wars into three phases, starting with Jackson’s attack. But from the Seminole point of view, this was one continuous battle for freedom from roughly 1811 to the Civil War. The climax being the years around today's events.

In 1823, the US and Seminole chiefs signed the Treaty of Moultrie Creek, with the Native Americans giving up North Florida in exchange for a reservation in the center of Florida to be left alone. The Americans built a series of forts, including Fort Brooke in a spot that would become the city of Tampa fifty years later. One of the Seminoles moving south was a half-British, half-Creek boy born "Billy Powell", who would later take on the Seminole name of “Osceola”. He'll be important.

Obviously the Americans were completely trustworthy and peace lasted forever and our story ends here-

-oh wait, no Andrew Jackson is president in 1829. Oh no, Indian Removal Act of 1830... Jackson is ignoring the Supreme Court on this one... full on ethnic cleansing of most tribal lands west of the Mississippi. The states of Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama need more land for plantations, guys, you understand. Even the "Civilized Tribes" have to go. Yeah, they were adopting Christianity and developing their own writing systems, some of them were going so far as to copy the chattel slavery system. Doesn't matter. The poor Cherokee tried so hard to be Southerners. Not to be. On to the Trail of Tears you go.

The Seminoles had a different relationship to slavery and also would not be as easy to dislodge. Florida's lakes and swamps made perfect Guerilla warfare ground. US troops would never get much better at this kind of warfare, as we’d see again in the Philippines and Vietnam, and might see again soon.

By 1835, everybody in Florida knew a big war was coming. But there were still attempts to settle this “peacefully”, as in, buying off the right people. A government agent named Wiley Thompson got a few dozen chiefs to sign on to removal. One of them was Osceola, who gritted his teeth and signed away. For this, Thompson gave him a beautiful silver-plated Spanish rifle, a sign of eternal friendship. Meanwhile, columns of American soldiers were already massing in places like Fort Brooke. Osceola and his allies realized somebody would strike first, might as well be them.

Two big actions begin this war. The first is that Osceola ambushed Wiley Thompson and murdered him with that very same silver rifle. I'm just choosing to believe that bit of folklore because it rules.

The second was the case of an unfortunate column led by Major Francis L. Dade, a veteran of Jackson's Indian Wars. His men were marching north to Ft. King at present-day Ocala on December 28th. Dade would give his name to the battle, though he did not get to fight in it long. He had 103 men, moving through an Un-Floridian-y cold day, with their rifles tucked away in their coats. They were passing through a grove of trees, perhaps whistling a jaunty tune when a shot rang out. Followed by more shots.

You can debate if this counts as a "riot", or a battle. Somebody write me a taxonomy of combat if you want. It was not exactly either because the Americans did not get much of a chance here. From complete surprise, the palmetto trees exploded with well-aimed fire and half the Americans were killed in seconds. Major Dade was one of the first ones gone. Command passed to Captain George W. Gardiner who organized a desperate defense, but his men were surrounded. He would die in the fighting too. Versus 180 Seminoles, the fifty or so surviving and terrified Americans had little hope. They also got little mercy. Only three Americans managed to survive, along with their Native guide. The Seminoles lost only three men.

That set a tone for the Second Seminole War to come, which would be seven years of unglamorous, difficult fighting. This was one of the most bloodiest wars the US ever fought against a Native adversary. About 1,600 Americans died in the fighting with 3,000 Seminole casualties in return. The inevitability of white victory was never much in doubt, even though the Americans lost nearly every set piece battle. Many Seminoles would be dragged off to new homes in Oklahoma. The Black Seminoles fled to places like the Bahamas or Mexico rather returning to slavery.

But at least the Seminoles could live happily in Oklahoma forever- oh Crap Baskets, the American government went back on that promise too and let white settlers take most of it in 1889.

Osceola, who did just miss the Dade Battle but would fight in others, would be led to a truce negotiation in 1837 and then captured in an act of cowardly treachery. He was in bad health from malaria and a tooth abscess, and he died soon after. Major Dade was avenged, I suppose. The warrior's head was cut off by a doctor and kept as a fun curiosity on a shelf for a few decades.

 

Major Dade would get honored with Dade County, now known as "Miami-Dade County", which we featured in the last Florida story. He also got a city named after him, Dade City. A few hundred German Afrika Korps prisoners were kept there during WWII.

You might notice that there was a Third Seminole War. Even though the US government could declare victory, they never did clear Florida of Seminoles. The Natives retreated into the Everglades and kept fighting. Eventually the federal and state governments got exhausted and had to recognize Seminole reservations in Florida. A population of about 4,400 people live on in the state to this day. They also own the Hard Casino chain, including one in Tampa. That's not the most dignified ending but what dignity is there to be had in Florida for anybody?

PS: Really not sure about naming a football team about them. That doesn't smell right to me.

Let's Remember Some Civil Unrest! The Know-Nothings Riots

WYTS: Baltimore Ravens. Original post here. 

You could have set the movie Gangs of New York in Baltimore. Though you’d have to rename it “Gangs of Baltimore”, and then nobody would have seen it. Pre-Civil War, this city got the nickname “Mob-Town”, which speaking of titles, sounds like a great TV show that I'd watch. (Netflix and I have a lunch date set up to discuss this further.) Baltimore was full of nasty gangs with such colorful names as the Plug Uglies, the Rip Raps, the American Rattlers, the Blood Tubs, the Wampanoags, and my personal favorite, the Butt Enders. Tag Yourself! They wore bowler hats, got extremely drunk, beat people up, and were extremely racist and xenophobic… oh, it kinda all seems less fun when you remember that last bit. I might leave that out of my Netflix pitch. I'll pretend I know nothing about it - Boom! Transition! 1856 Know-Nothings Riots!

To start, we need to go back to the 1840s, which saw a very bad famine across Europe, particularly awful in Ireland. This came with political upheaval, the failed Revolutions of 1848. American cities were seeing huge waves of immigrants, mainly Irish and German. Perhaps as many as 15% of the country was foreign-born by 1860s. Baltimore’s population nearly tripled between by 1860, hitting 212,000, a quarter of them foreigners. These huddle masses were not starving or ignorant. They were well-organized and successful, cannily understanding the political machines of their new cities. That actually made the newcomers all the scarier.

Worse, they were Catholic. Now, as tempting as it is to go all the way back to the Wars of Religion and the English Civil Wars to explain why there such a paranoia about tyrannical Popish plots, we’ll just gloss over that, this is long enough already. Not that this kind of vileness requires a rational explanation. We’ll speed up to the part where the Maryland colony was founded specifically as a Catholic refuge. There is a wonderful irony in proud Baltimoreans fighting for a Protestant Maryland in a city named after a Roman Catholic lord.

In 1839, a Catholic convent in B-more was attacked by a mob. Not a promising sign of things to come. Baltimore, like Cincy and NYC, loves to riot.

Then the 1850s are one of the weirder eras in American politics. It did end in a Civil War, after all. I mentioned in the Dallas riot that the party system was in flux and Republicans would win. But before that, it could have gone a lot of other ways. Take Millard Fillmore, whose name reeks of mediocrity. He was already a failed unelected president thanks to Zachary Taylor’s rebellious digestive system killing him and giving us a President Fillmore. Nobody much liked the idea of that, especially his own Whig Party. He started his career as a member of the Anti-Masonic Party (which I also cannot get into right now), so he was not a stranger to crackpot conspiracy theories. Fillmore was rejected by the Whigs for the 1852 nomination, ending his presidency in lame duck obscurity. But in 1856, he had a new home, the Know-Nothing Party, with its obscene official title “the Native American Party”.

“Native” of course, being in the scariest of scare quotes. The "Know-Nothings" nickname came from a loose organization of a few xenophobic secret societies, whose members claimed to “know nothing” when asked. This was not a Socratic method but perhaps it was an admission of their idiocy. Know-Nothingism was an example of those brief waves of militant Protestantism which bubble up into the mainstream of American politics every so often. If we’re lucky, they are defeated quickly and laughed out of the room. If we’re unlucky then…oof.

Also, in a weird quirk, the Know-Nothings were founded by a Jewish man, Lewis Charles Levin. Mass Jewish migration to the US would not be a thing until after the Civil War, and anyway, the party’s imagined enemy was radically conservative Pope Pius IX, not any rabbis. (Meanwhile, the Pope likely had no idea who they were.) Fillmore was the presidential candidate in 1856, an unsuccessful one. Voters knew then not to give failed presidents second chances. He came dead last in a three-way race, and won only one state. Guess which one?

Besides Baltimore, this wave of Nativism saw violence across the US. There were riots in NYC, New Orleans, St. Louis, Washington DC, and of course, Cincinnati - Cincy loves a riot. There were dozens of deaths across the country thanks to these incidents. Many of the Baltimore gangs like the Plug Uglies would travel to other towns and get into fights there.

1856 was going to be particularly rough because Baltimore had two elections, municipal and presidential, one month apart. Elections in this era were great fun, not really about having the most votes but the old sports cliché of “wanting it more”. If you were just walking down the street, you could be grabbed by a gang, say the Butt Enders, thrown into the ballot box, and made to vote for their man. Sometimes you’d be voting all day. Meanwhile the whole city was chaos of Rip Raps shouting in the street punching Democrats. Sometimes voters were given some coins or free drinks. You could get so drunk you’d be found a week later with no memory of how you got there, such as Edgar Allen Poe’s visit to Baltimore in 1849. He died a few days later. Not sure naming a Baltimore team after him is actually honoring the man based on his time in the city...

In 1856, the various gangs did not even wait until election day of October 8th to start shooting. In September a couple guys were murdered as a preamble. But the fighting really started on October 5th. Democrats pulled down a Know-Nothing flag and were fighting all comers. They had a cannon out until the police arrested them. A day later a tavern was sacked, with a fifteen-minute shootout on Holliday Street. On election day itself, twenty wards were hit by violence, with three Democrats killed, two Know-Nothings in return.

A month later for the presidential election of November 4th, the Blood Tubs and the others were far from done. Again, there’s reports of a cannon in town, this time being fired at the police. Apparently, the Maryland Infantry was on standby, but nobody bothered to send them in. By the end of the day, 67 people were injured, 17 people died. When the votes were counted, which were obviously fraudulent and nobody doubted this, Know-Nothing mayoral candidate Thomas Swann had won and Fillmore won Maryland. Fillmore disappeared from politics after his defeat in every other state.

In 1857, Baltimore increased its police force to 397 men, surely enough for a city of hundreds of thousands. Somehow despite this, there were still riots in the 1857 election… and then again in 1858. The Know-Nothings basically disintegrated as a political force by 1860, slavery was so hot-button everybody forgot about the Catholics. Even so, in 1861, the first Union soldier deaths of the Civil War occurred in Baltimore, in yet another riot.

Most of the gangs such as the Plug Uglies simply faded away during the war, as too many angry young men found other places to vent their violence. Decades of municipal reforms helped turn Mob-Town into Charm City, the WASP thugs calmed down. Baltimore was never known for criminal activity ever again, surely.

Nativism would return hard in the 1870s, now targeted against Chinese immigrants. ...But that is a story for another day... Get hype 49ers fans.

Let's Remember Some Civil Unrest! The 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre

WYTS: Atlanta Falcons. Original post here.

We're in the Deep South now. Guess what the theme of this riot is going to be? 

 

...Oh, how did you ever guess? Yup, it is the 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre.

On November, 11th 1864, General Sherman ordered Atlanta burnt to the ground during his March to the Sea, making "Georgia Howl". The occupying governments post-war had the opportunity to rebuild the South in vision they could. Their focus was mainly in breaking planter aristocracy power and turning the South industrial and urban. Atlanta, being a railroad hub, became a bastion of manufacturing (including a hot new product called Coca-Cola), middle class power, and city life. This was the "New South", a term coined in the city in 1874.

White supremacy was never really in much doubt by anybody except the most Radical - and correct - of Republicans. But still, Atlanta had a decent level of racial harmony, at least comparatively to the rural areas where sharecropping allowed a new form of slavery to persist for decades. A lot of the new business districts in Atlanta's Five Points had successful Black stores right next to white ones. A "Black elite" of successful bourgeoisie families thought they could earn their way to respectability. Booker T. Washington gave a speech in 1895 in Atlanta basically conceding to segregation, a year before Plessy v. Ferguson. However, he believed economic opportunities could solve the problem long term, even as they were losing power politically.

Washington and his “Atlanta Compromise” would end up looking painfully naive just a decade later. He was a smart man who did a lot for Black people. But there would never be a "live and let live" attitude with Jim Crow.

Reconstruction is marked traditionally as ending with the infamously crooked election of Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876 and the retreat of military occupation in the South. However, the full Jim Crow nightmare vision of the South in Jerry Jones’ living memory did not happen overnight. This was a process and it had to be built step by step, violence by violence. Segregation was still expanding into WWI, when President Wilson imposed it on Washington DC. That was relatively peaceful as these things go. In many places, such as Atlanta, Jim Crow was imposed with the death of at least 27 people and days of violence. Thus our story.

It begins with an intense 1906 gubernatorial battle between a moderate racist, Clark Howell, and a full-on piece of shit, Hoke Smith (who I talked about last year as one of the worst Americans in history). They were both newspaper owners, both making their case of different visions of white power as the centerpiece of the election. Howell felt a softer disenfranchisement with poll taxes and whites-only Democratic Party primaries were enough. Smith, backed by a firebrand populist, Thomas E. Watson, wanted more: clear legal impossibilities for Black voters to ever threaten Jim Crow. Watson had been a liberal reformer who even opposed lynching just a decade earlier, in case you're wondering how far and how quickly Georgian politics had shifted. By the autumn, Atlanta was a tinderbox getting hotter and hotter.

In September, a stage production of Thomas Dixon Jr's novel, The Clansman played in Atlanta, further inflaming things. (You might recognize that book title as the inspiration for the "landmark" film, Birth of a Nation, which would inspire the rebirth of the KKK in the 1920s - fun fact.) On Saturday, September 22nd, the Atlanta papers luridly reported sexual assaults of two white women, Ethel Lawrence and her niece, Mabel. It is not clear who did what, just that white pride assumed instantly that the perpetrator was Black. Men were soon roaming the streets ready to attack the first non-white face they saw. We don’t have to use a tinderbox cliché anymore. The correct metaphor now is something hotter, such as Hell.

The Atlanta Riots are one of the better-remembered and documented events, as far as racial pogroms go in the US. We can be reasonably sure of a timeline of events, where they happened, and have most of the names of the dead. It started small with bands of boys spontaneously attacking Black men downtown. These victims were random guys on the street or strangers unlucky enough to be on the wrong streetcar. By nightfall, there were tens of thousands of rioters, looking for any Black business to burn. For example, there was Alonzo Herndon's barber shop on Peachtree Street, which I've heard described as a kind of palace for well-to-do Black men to socialize. This place was a perfect example of Booker T. Washington’s ideal of compromise and Black success in the New South. The barbershop was destroyed, the New South would in fact be much like the Old South.

The riots continued into Sunday, but a lot of the initial energy had been lost after an early morning rainstorm. When the sun rose, the rioters resumed their attack into the Brownsville neighborhood. They were then surprised well-armed and determined resistance by Black men who had not fled the city already. A state militia sent into Atlanta to quiet things down ended up focusing on the Black defenders, getting into a gunfight with them. The fighting ended in a surrender of the victims, the militia rounding up about 250 innocent men. Those Black men were disarmed and arrested, but they were still alive.

By Monday the 24th, the violence was over. We can confirm 25 Black people were dead, 2 whites died in the violence as well. Some cite a number as high as 100 people were killed, but this is not confirmed. As for The Clansman, its next shows in its inter-city tour were either cancelled or secured by a heavy police presence. Black Atlanta largely moved out of the center of town to safer, segregated neighborhoods, notably Sweet Auburn.

Hoke Smith won his election in November and did everything he promised - an honest asshole though, right? A literary test was put into place to nearly completely disenfranchise the Black vote, with a grandfather clause so poor whites were not left out of the Solid South backbone of the Democratic Party. In 1908 Georgia put both measures into the Constitution as full Amendments, intending for this state to be forever linked with white supremacy.

A professor at Atlanta University, W.E.B. Du Bois - you may have heard of him - was so terrified to work in Atlanta he bought himself a shotgun after the riots. He was paranoid for weeks his family would be murdered one night. Du Bois never believed in Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta Compromise. He wrote a poem called A Litany of Atlanta about the event. “Behold this maimed and broken thing; dear God it was an humble black man who toiled and sweat to save a bit from the pittance paid him. They told him: Work and Rise. He worked…this man lieth maimed and murdered, his wife naked to shame, his children, to poverty and evil.” Du Bois would help found the NAACP in 1909.

Another witness to the event was Walter White (not that one), a future head of the NAACP. He was a fair-skinned boy and could have "passed" as white. He did not take that privilege. After witnessing the Atlanta Massacre, he wrote, "After that night I knew I never wanted to be a white man. I knew which side I was on."

The arc of history might eventually bend towards justice, but it would take decades of effort to change its course.

Let's Remember Some Civil Unrest! The Texas Troubles

WYTS: Dallas Cowboys. Original post here.

Most histories pre-Civil War make a note of how weak US leadership was during this period. Presidents like Franklin Pearce and James Buchanan are remembered for inaction, if they're remembered at all. That's actually looking at them in a positive light: if only they did nothing. These were pro-slavery guys, and the status quo was fine for them, even as it became increasingly unworkable and embarrassing. As long as the South had a solid hold on power, their barbaric way of life was safe. In 1860, that was going to change, everybody knew it even before the election. The Whig Party had already disintegrated over slavery earlier in the decade, and the Democratic Party was ripping itself in two. That meant this terrifyingly anti-slavery guy named Abe Lincoln was going to win. The South was extremely normal about losing political control, which is why in July of 1860, much of Northeast Texas fell into a mass hysteria called The Texas Troubles.

For some context, Texas was a slave state. They had defeated a Mexican army led by General Antonio de Padua María Severino López de Santa Anna y Pérez de Lebrón for the right to own other people, who would have no rights. But Texas also knew they were on the frontier limits of the slave economy’s expansion. The classic plantation system could work in the subtropical east of Texas, but as you went further west into the prairie and deserts, cotton just wasn’t going to grow. Kansas in the 1850s was a battlefield for slavery’s expansion, but only as a political question, it never made sense economically. There were 200 slaves at most in Kansas at any point. (Texas, meanwhile, had a third of its population as slaves.) If the country kept expanding west, the Cotton Kingdom would not expand with it. The inevitability of demographics meant that the Slave South would only get weaker. Lincoln in 1860 was just the start.

Thus, already, Texans are arguing about the big, scary S-word, "Succession" in the late 1850s. Texas could have mostly stayed out of the war as a slave-owning union state, like Kentucky or Missouri. As 1860 began, it may have even been leaning towards pro-Union. Governor Sam Houston, the hero of the revolution who defeated General Antonio de Padua María Severino López de Santa Anna y Pérez de Lebrón, was clearly against succession and had won his 1858 governor race on that platform.

Then in the summer of 1860, the entire state panicked over a slave uprising.

Thing is, as far as modern historians can tell, there was no plan in the summer of 1860 to spark a slave rebellion in Texas. There was no enemy out there. The only evidence seems to be some weapons discovered in a slave’s quarters, some confessions under threat of mob violence, and one newspaper man’s fiery essay. (Newspapers sure play a negative role in a lot of these stories, don’t they?)

For yet more context, this is a scary time for the South, even with slave power at its theoretical ascendancy. They won major political victories with the Fugitive Slave Act, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision. But on the other hand, these victories were so annoying that slavery was now the only question on anybody’s mind. Then there were some actual attacks on slavery, such as John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry in October of 1859, a largely quixotic effort to begin a spark a slave uprising against the white masters. Unfortunately, John Brown having one of the most magnificent beards of the 19th century did not mean his band of about 20 people could fight off an army led by Robert E. Lee.

Panics were becoming more and more common in Texas as this decade wore on. The white settlers loved to attack their Mexican neighbors for fear they would help the slaves escape over the border, into civilized Mexico where slavery was illegal. Then there’s the story of a little town called Dallas, a podunk nothing of about 678 people which will probably never amount to anything. In 1859, a Dr. Charles R. Pryor was writing for the local paper, The Dallas Herald, as its editor. He was certain two Methodist preachers were agents of abolitionism. Led by Pryor’s reports, the town had the ministers whipped and exiled.

Then in summer 1860, even with the scary Methodists gone, the fears had ended. It was a blazing hot July, with 110 degree temperatures reported on July 8th. All at once, fires erupted across multiple towns in Texas, including Denton, Pilot Point, and little Dallas. It was suspiciously coordinated, all on the same day, maybe even the same hour. People assumed this was the work of Republican abolitionist terrorists. There was this group of anti-slavery youth marchers called the Wide Awakes (the Republican Woke), who seemed very scary to Texans. …Or maybe it was white phosphorus matches which were popular at the time and were prone to combust when stored in large quantities at high temperatures. 

 

(Oh, and these matches would rot your face bones and mutilate your jaw out if you were a factory worker making them - just a fun little side story.)

At this point, Dr. Pryor, operating out of a new newspaper building since his old one had burnt down, began to write panicky letters of a vast conspiracy to the state. 'This was sabotage', his fiery essays implied, 'this was war'. On July 23rd, three Black men were executed at the county courthouse in Dallas: Patrick Jennings, Sam Smith, and a slave whose name I could only verify as “Old Cato”. This was a compromise from a suggestion to hang all the slaves in the county, which was considered economically unfeasible. Meanwhile, the contagion of panic spread all over the state. Under the threat of mob violence, the accused confessed to anything, including the imagined conspiracy.

In Austin, caches of weapons were discovered. There is a story of a strange powdery poison being found in a slave’s quarters. That turned out to be baby powder. Lynchings, show trials, and violence against slaves, freemen, northerners, or Mexicans spread everywhere. Sources on this entire event are hard to find, real scholarship needs to be done on the Texas Troubles, so any estimates as to how many people were killed is rough. I can't even verify how many incidents and in which places. It seems like every essay online has a different figure, but a good guess is somewhere around 10 killed, mostly Black slaves, but maybe as many as thirty whites too.

Lincoln win the presidency, as everybody knew he would. Texas was still so frightened of their own shadows that in 1861, they indeed voted to secede. Governor Houston was ousted from office, remaining pro-Union to his political end. There were still very pro-Union voices in Texas, especially a German Texan population who were massacred in 1862. In Gainesville, about 41 men were hanged in a mass execution in October 1862, suspected pro-Unionist. (That's the event depicted in this image above.)

 

In effect, Texas fought itself as much as the Union. Texas was a periphery theater in the war, with the state supplying about 70,000 troops to the lost cause. It was never important enough to warrant a full Union invasion. John Bell Hood was a Texan, and was one of the worst generals in the war.

The slaves were freed in 1865. Dr. Pryor seems to have left Texas sometime after the war and passed away in Boston years later. The Lone Star State would prefer you think of it as the land of cowboys and rugged individualistic heroes. The truth is a little different.

Let's Remember Some Civil Unrest! The Brooks Brothers Riot

WYTS: Miami Dolphins. Original post here.

In a lot of ways, this century of American politics has been the Florida Century. They have been kingmakers in many elections, and look at the glory to which they have led us! They never apologize for this dumbassery either, do they? Florida has only been getting worse, and more rotten in the past twenty-six years. God bless those still in the state fighting the good fight against their neighbor's worst, most hateful impulses. Anyway, let us remember fondly the moment that Florida took center stage in American politics, really the election that standardized how we imagine American politics to work, with the 2000 Brooks Brothers Riot.

If you’re ranking the civil unrests in terms of body count and actual violence, this is last. There will be several about bloody, violent elections, 2000 Florida was nothing compared to some Reconstruction elections. In this story there were no casualties, no arrests, no injuries, and no consequences, I’m not sure if there even was one fist thrown. But still, it linger as a kind of legend: the moment the election was stolen and America history turned towards darkness.

 

I should point out that the importance of this event may be a bit overblown. One afternoon of guys yelling in a hallway that was caught on TV did not decide the 2000 presidential election. Both sides get something out of mythologizing this protest. For Democrats, this was a clear case of injustice and an attack on the democratic process. For Republicans involved, you could claim you were a canny, ruthless political operative who out-smarted the enemy. Both Roger Stone and another guy, Bradley A. Blakeman, claim to have commanded this “coup” as part of their self-aggrandizing. And I would not be surprised if they're both full of shit.

But does that mean the Brooks Brothers Riot didn’t matter at all? Oh no. You don’t get a January 6th without a November 22nd.

So rewind to the year 2000, and if you’re me, you’re 9 and you’re mostly focused on Dragon Ball Z and Gundam Wing on Toonami. The rest of the country would have been better off joining me instead of getting addicted to CNN and Fox News. Those channels are making a meal out of this whole presidential election business. Cable news is going to define political discourse for a decade, until we found something even worse in the 2010s, Twitter. Nobody knew they were in a Red or Blue state until this election, which is where the campaign color maps come from. This was the longest presidential election of my lifetime, with no winner chosen until well into December.

The 2000 election was a classic example of “aw, crap, both these dudes suck”. The popular perception at the time was choosing between a boring nerd and a dumbass. Al Gore was Bill Clinton’s vice president, so you’re looking at more Third Way, New Democrat neoliberalism, I can't imagine he would have been so bold with his environmentalism if he actually was president. Maybe do not get too teary eyed about the counterfactuals. (Joe Lieberman was the Vice Presidential nominee, oof.) George W. Bush was the death penalty-friendly governor of Texas, and our first Evangelical presidential nominee. He had defeated John McCain after his campaign implied that McCain's adopted Bangladeshi daughter, Bridget was actually an African bastard child – never be fooled into thinking W. was a good person. Bush II would do anything to win, and did do anything.

You’ll notice that this is not really an election that was “about” anything. In 2004 we had gay marriage and the Iraq War defining the battle. In 2000, both parties were not that far away from each other, no matter how angry the arguments were at the time. History was still over, so it was really a personality dispute. We just needed to find the right man to bring history back. And oh did we ever find him...

So election Tuesday, November 7th, 2000, Al Gore wins the popular vote. However, due to our constitution being written with an entirely different country in mind than we the one we have, the Electoral College is what decides things. That means the great Sunshine State’s 25 electoral votes will choose the winner. Gore concedes early the morning of the 8th, when it appears that Bush is going to win Florida by 10,000 votes. All the big news networks paint the state red. But by 4:30 AM, with votes coming in from the three heavily Democratic counties in the Southeast corner of the state, Bush’s lead is only 1,784. That triggers an automatic recount.

See, the ugly secret about American elections is how fallible and corrupt they are. Any election is going have a failure rate that is disturbingly high. We are not quite in 19th century territory where you could vote four times a day or the dead could walk into polling stations, but still, there’s a lot of weirdness going on in Florida. By the 10th, Bush’s lead is down to about 300 votes, even with a lot of counties never doing the recount they were supposed to do at all. Plus there’s an issue of unclear or vague marks on ballots, the infamous hanging chad issue, where the machine punch did not fully remove the circle. The details of the legal battle are complicated to absurd degrees and there have been dozens of reviews of this election. It does not help that Florida’ Secretary of State was Katherine Harris, a co-chair of the Bush FL campaign, and the governor was Jeb “please clap” Bush. It was a near-tie election but Bush had the power in the state.

You will never find an actual count showing Gore won in Florida, just many projections that if the hand recount had been completed maybe Gore wins by about a hundred, maybe as low as 60. I don’t know who won the state in actuality. I believe in Florida so little that I’d bet Bush really did win by a small margin. Still not too late to apologize, Florida.

Now the actual riot part of this riot series is on the aforementioned November 22nd. This is in Miami-Dade County, where officials are attempting a hand recount of some 10,000 ballots the machines had been unable to tally. The argument is over whether the recount could be moved to behind some doors to speed things along for the current arbitrary deadline - the deadlines will move constantly. This is when hundreds of protestors fighting for "transparent democracy", mostly balding middle-aged men with nice watches and preppy clothes come storming into the building. The reporters at the time gave them the nickname the “Brooks Brothers Mob”, because this was so obviously a gang of middle aged comfortable lawyers.

To nobody’s surprise, turns out these were Republican staffers astroturfed for the job, many of whom got jobs in the new Bush regime to-be. A Democratic operative in the area, Joe Geller, nearly got stomped to death, he claims. The cacophony of shouts and noise was so bad that eventually Miami-Dade County’s officials had to give up the recount, never to be finished.

It still could have concluded later on. You see, the recount battle in Florida continued for another two weeks with all kinds of different numbers coming up. This was a major legal battle, you might recognize some of the lawyers working for Bush’s side, such as John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, who would go to completely discredit an entire branch of the US government. The Florida Supreme Court, then-overwhelmingly Democratic nominees, would make multiple rulings extending the deadline and revising the counting rules. Until finally we’re into December and we still do not have a president. Still, technically we have a whole month to go and there would be no particular harm to the nation without a choice. Nobody has to take office until January.

This is where the election is truly stolen. You want a coup, here it is. It was not done by any theatrics by Brook Brothers guys led by a weirdo who dresses like a Batman villain. No, we have to go to the Supreme Court’s Bush v Gore case. That shut down all recounts before they were completed and handed the election to Bush. Their 14th amendment’s reading meant that Bush and his voters would be irreparably harmed by a full counting. They noted that the count could never be fair, with so many odd cases along the way, including how Miami-Dade County had never finished its recount because… oh yeah, the Brooks Brothers Riot. Most commentators have found this ruling was a particularly bad moment in SCOTUS’s history (even noted asshole Alan Dershowitz was against it). But don’t worry, SCOTUS will have plenty of bad moments to come in our lifetimes.

Bush would then spend the next eight years ending the End of History. This would become apparent the next fall when terrorists knocked down skyscrapers on his watch. Florida is now a blood Red State, a bastion of anti-trans hatred and severe censorship of college professors. Since its population only grows every passing year, it gets more powerful each presidential cycle. The Brooks Brothers Riot did not get us here to this moment of absolute terror, but it sure didn’t help. In the year 2020, when self-made Florida Man Donald Trump was on the ballot, he’d try similar tactics with a more blatant putsch.

Florida is going to be real important in 2028. I'm sure Florida will make the wrong call, and I'll take your apology early since we never do get it late.

Let's Remember Some Civil Unrest! The Cincinnati Courthouse Riots

WYTS: Cincinnati Bengals. Original post here.

Some cities just seem like magnets for civil unrest. New York City, Baltimore, Chicago, they all have long histories and a lot of troubles. I was not expecting that for Cincinnati of all places, to be so riot-heavy (riotous?). In the 19th century this place had a major civil unrest about once a decade. They started early with a riot in 1792 when the town was only four years old and couldn't have had a population of more than 800 people. Skimming the history of Cincinnati is like skimming the history of Derry from IT, this place might actually be cursed. Is that why they never finished the subway? Let's remember the biggest civil unrest event, the 1884 Courthouse Riots.

Most riots in the Queen City of the West's history were about race, as usual, and not just white vs Black either. There was a major German immigrant population here going back to before the Civil War, which is why one neighborhood is called "Over-the-Rhine". A lot of German-Americans clashed with the rising Know-Nothings movement of nativist assholes. By the 1880s, none of these tensions had really been solved, made no better by a new tension, a crime problem.

There were 23 accused murderers sitting in jail on January 1st of 1884, and not much political will to do anything about moving them along. This is 19th century city politics, nakedly and shamelessly corrupt. The problems were sensationalized by The Cincinnati Enquirer newspaper, a former Pro-Confederacy Copperhead outfit. The Enquirer was a very pro-white, anti-Black paper in the 1880s, and basically remains so today. It's still a Republican rag. And since right-wing tabloids are the same across all eras, The Enquirer wrote hysterical articles about the city's lawlessness and crime, pushing for the Democrats in power to be thrown out.

All these racial and political problems came together very neatly with the December 24th, 1883 robbery and murder of William Kirk. Kirk was a stable owner, known for walking around with a lot of money in his pockets, and two of his employees knew his habits. The killing was done by a second-generation German man named William Berner and his accomplice Joe Palmer, of mixed race. The crime was far from perfect and both men were arrested quickly. On March 26th of the next year, the half-Black Palmer was found guilty of murder and was sentenced to hang. But the fully-white Berner, who had a better lawyer, got lucky with his jury, and was only guilty of manslaughter. So he would escape the noose, getting twenty years in prison. The public assumed immediately that Berner’s family had bribed the city machine to get him off. The whole town, even the judge, wanted Berner’s neck to snap.

The anger boiled over quickly across the city. In fact, this trial story tore Cincinnati apart in shocking speed. Imagine if the Casey Anthony verdict caused the Bastille to be torn down, that's how big this is going to get. The 26th was a Wednesday and peace would not be fully restored until Monday. Until then, we have a long weekend of action to cover.

On Thursday the 27th, several jurors were attacked by angry mobs. Some were beaten, some fled, one guy turned up to work only to find he was fired for his legal opinions. The rage was so intense that if you just had a similar name to a jury member, you were not safe. A guy named Phillips who had nothing to do with the trial had his house pelted by rotten eggs and "dead cats" (yes, that's what the source says, the mob threw dead cats). Berner, meanwhile, had been sent out to Columbus for his safety. Nobody knew yet that he had escaped captivity, not fleeing the police, but fleeing the mob. The convicted manslaughterer knew the state of Ohio could not protect him. He spent a few days hiding in a cabin in the woods playing cards, far away from the battles over him.

By Saturday, Cincinnati was in full revolt. 10,000 people were marching on the courthouse, which was now being desperately defended by every soldier the state of Ohio could find. The mob had grabbed weapons from the nearby armory and were storming militia barricades in full-on revolutionary battles. Eventually, the militia had to retreat. The courthouse set on fire, with the outer stone walls standing, but the interior gutted in the flames. Then the mob wanted to take the jail, some blocks away, which meant another fight. Joe Palmer, awaiting his execution, managed to survive for a little longer by fooling the crowd into thinking he was a white prisoner, not the "Black man" they wanted to lynch.

Eventually the state of Ohio did retake Cincinnati in the night, with the force of 425 men and gatling guns. This had been a massive gunfight. By the morning of Sunday, March 30th, the courthouse was a smoldering ruins and there was peace. Well, peace in that neighborhood, some rioters were still fighting across the city even after the main engagement had ended. But by the time federal troops arrived that afternoon, the city had tired itself out.

56 people were dead, hundreds wounded, a police captain who was killed in the fighting got himself a statue built in the new courthouse. The Courthouse Riots so shocked the city that in November, the Democratic Political Machine was replaced by a Republican one, which definitely fixed everything and there was never corruption ever again. That election, by the way, was also a near-riot. At least one sheriff deputy was killed in a gun fight with other cops.

As for the cause of all this chaos, William Berner peacefully gave himself up the weekend of the riots. He served his sentence without incident. Somehow he decided Ohio was not for him after being freed on parole, leaving the state forever.

Joe Palmer, ever the less fortunate member of the crime duo, was executed a year later, in July of 1885. Never doubt that the justice system works.

Let's Remember Some Civil Unrest! The Mormon War

WYTS: Kansas City Chiefs. Original post here. 

In 1823, a small-time con artist and folk magician named Joseph Smith was given a divine revelation by the angel Moroni and shown golden plates. I personally do not see any reason to doubt this story. In the next decade, Smith would build his church and expand on his mission, creating a new vibrant form of Christianity designed for this New World. The holy land was not oceans away, in fact. It was here, in America, in Kirtland, Ohio to be exact. Oh wait, sorry, not Kirtland, oops, Smith realized later that actually the Latter Day Saints’ new Zion was in Independence, Missouri. And then would change his mind again. God works in mysterious ways, I suppose, even for his latter-day prophets. Zionist movements often turn to violence, unfortunately, and this was no different. Smith would lead his flock to a near-decade of strife in the Show Me State, climaxing with the 1838 Mormon War.

Joseph Smith lived a colorful life; the path of a prophet is rarely an easy one. Wherever his Mormons settled, it usually ended poorly. Now, the modern mainline LDS Church will tell you that all these problems came from religious intolerance from hateful neighbors, and they are not 100% wrong. But also, Smith made some... let’s say, unwise choices in his ministry. He tried to seduce some underage girls in Ohio and seize all believers property in a single collectivized Soviet, and for that, he was nearly castrated by an angry mob in 1832. That led him to look further west for his utopian vision.

Since we’re talking Mormonism, you need to be extra careful with your research. There’s obviously a lot of LDS propaganda that would paint Joseph Smith as one of the great pious saints of history. To them, his word is not to be questioned, even the parts that contradict the other parts. But just as much, there’s a large contingent of Anti-Mormons (other Christians, ex-Mormons, South Park fans) who think everything Smith did was terrible and the whole religion is heresy. I can’t say Smith cuts a particularly glorious figure the more I learn about him either, but as a borderline Communist Jew I do not have a pony in this race. 

 

(Ask me about Jacob Frank sometime though. Smith and Frank are very similar figures to me.)

The Mormons began their history in Missouri in the early 1830s just around the time Smith is making himself unwelcome in Ohio. Independence, now largely a suburb of Kansas City, was then the major hub in the western part of the state. Oregon Trail fans will remember that the game starts here. Smith had grand visions for what would be his City of Zion, with a central Temple, with some lovely grid drawings for his heavenly urban society. Speaking of classic PC games, Smith would have loved Sim City 2000.

Soon enough Jackson County’s “old settlers” (as in, white people who have been here for decades at most) were unhappy with the Mormon newcomers. There’s a lot going on here besides the Mormons being religiously annoying. You might have thought so far “oh this is one of those unrests that won’t be about racism”, oh no. Missouri was a slave state, but only barely one. That made defending its slavery an urgent priority. The nearby “Bleeding” Kansas Territory would be a battlefield for slavery’s expansion. There will be two battles in the Civil War for Independence. In 1832, there was fear that the Mormon colonists might be abolitionists like many other new religions movements in the North. Some Mormons did have very egalitarian views of racial harmony, others didn’t. Smith's own opinions seem to flip and flop, I'd have to conclude the issue just did not interest him. However, Mormons were slavery-agnostic enough to freak out the South-leaning neighbors. The local Mormon leader, Edward Patridge was tarred and feather by an angry mob in 1833. Mormons were ready to fight back until confused, contradictory revelations from Joseph Smith back frustrated their efforts. On some days he'd call for peace, others war, and finally he wanted surrender.

Eventually a “compromise” was met in 1834 where the Mormons would leave Jackson County in exchange for twice the value of their property - which was not much since the locals had burnt it all. Smith told his followers that all these troubles were just the result of them failing a test of faith. And actually, Zion was never in Independence after all. Oops.

By 1838, Smith had made things bad for himself in Ohio once again. He founded an “Anti-Banking Society” (a bank that isn’t a bank, an anti-bank, sounds legit) that was a complete disaster. It was either a conscious scam or Smith was delusional in all things economics, so he needed to leave Ohio fast. Turns out the promised land was in Missouri after all, now in a city called Far West, to Independence’s east. He also found the first man, Adam’s home after getting expelled from the Garden of Eden. Wow, it was here in Missouri too. This time Smith decided he needed his own paramilitary force, the Danites. If the locals would attacked again, the Latter-Day Saints would be able to fight back.

Turns out arming themselves only made things worse, and tensions grew very quickly.

There is not one incident in the Mormon War, just three months of violence, intimidation, one skirmish, and one massacre between August and November 1838. It started ugly when the Mormons tried to vote, only to be intimidated, and then the Danite paramilitary marched back into town. They threatening to kill a local judge, setting the conflict off fully. The worst event would be the Haun’s Mill Massacre, where Mormon immigrants were living peacefully in their new town, until an Anti-Mormon militia force came upon them without warning. The militia murdered 17 people on October 30th, including two children. Five more Mormons would die in other incidents. Clearly leadership was needed from the state government to bring peace to the situation. Governor Liliburn Boggs took the extreme step of issuing a warrant for Joseph Smith’s arrest, and then proclaiming an order to exterminate them all, ending the Mormon presence in Missouri. 10,000 people fled the state for their lives in early November.

An attempt was made in 1842 to kill Governor Boggs. We still do not know if that was on Joseph Smith’s orders but the assassination attempt failed either way. Smith found yet another Zion in Nauvoo, Illinois. Here his people had been welcomed with open arms by the good people east of the Mississippi. Those open arms closed in only a few years, with Smith becoming a kind of small-time dictator of his fourth or fifth Zion, shutting down all descent, including an Anti-Mormon newspaper. An angry mob gave Smith the usual fate of messiahs in 1844, also scuttling his presidential campaign. He ascended into heaven and is up there with the other saints now. I personally don't see any reason to doubt that.

The majority of the Latter-Day Saints traveled to Utah under Brigham Young, an even more ruthless man who I covered in last year's WYTS with my list of Worst Americans. He solved the issue of abolitionism by deciding Black people were just not allowed in the church at all. The church finally changed their mind in 1978, shockingly late. Smith’s vision for his Zion utopian city would be completed in Salt Lake City. I’ve never been to SLC, but it must be an unmatched paradise on Earth. Surely.

PS: Lol, Chiefs. That season was hilarious. See you next Monday, KC.

Let's Remember Some Civil Unrest! The German Coast Uprising

WYTS: New Orleans Saints. https://defector.com/why-your-team-sucks-2026-new-orleans-saints?commentID=97a4e527-8c86-448c-9904-723bed0316b2Original post here.

(Artwork by Lorraine Gendron.)

 

In the 1780s, the French colony of Saint-Domingue was the most profitable colony in the world. Growing sugar cane and processing it into refined sugar made the colony the jewel in the crown for Ancien Régime France. In 1791, everything changed. Saint-Domingue saw the largest slave rebellion in the history of the Americas, and the most successful. These guerrillas defeated all comers, include an army sent by Emperor Napolean to re-enslave them. Soon enough the colony of Saint-Domingue would become the free nation of Haiti. It was but a single Black, free state, all alone in the world, surrounded by white settler powers. In the years that followed, nearly every colony in the Caribbean had a slave uprising. There were dozens Cuba alone. In 1811, it was Louisiana’s turn, with the German Coast Uprising.

Slave revolts are not the most popular subjects in history. Even in this field, the two-day failed revolution on the German Coast, a little stretch of the Mississippi River north of New Orleans, is very obscure. This uprising is listed by historians as the largest slave rebellion in American history, larger than Nat Turner, larger than John Brown, yet for some reason it seems to have been remarkably under-reported at the time. Wikipedia’s citations are mostly from the 1940s or 1950s, not a good sign if you want modern scholarship on the subject. They heavily cite a 2011 book by a Harvard undergrad, Daniel Rasmussen, which is probably the secondary source everybody else online is working off of. The historians do have written primary accounts, but also there's a lot of folklore and myth, which I hope I’m not repeating.

I have theories as to why the German Coast Uprising was so obscure. Number one is that Louisiana was not yet a state, it had only become part of the US in 1803. A lot of the people in this battle, white or Black, did not speak English or were illiterate. (In some parts of Louisiana, French or Creole were still the dominant languages well into the 20th century.) The only reports we have from the slaves themselves come from trials after the fact, a history written by the victors. The slavers class were not in much hurry to spread any liberatory message. Also, slavery was just different here at this time than in say, Virginia. The American-style racial caste system is a pure binary: white and Black. One drop of Black blood means you’re in the out-group. In Latin American slavery, there were levels to the racial castes. “Pure” Europeans were at the top of course, but if you had one white parent, it made a huge difference. Freed Mulatto groups are a very important part of the Haitian Revolution, who are distinct from the fully African slaves. The gradations are important here too.

The slaves in the German Coast were engaged in the sugar industry, just as in Haiti. And if you know your Haitian history, you’ll know turning sugarcane into sugar was a very labor-intensive, very violent practice, that depending on a lot of torture. These places imported a lot of slaves and expected at least half of the labor force to die out, either to exhaustion or disease. Sugar plantations were some of the worst places to be at any time in history. Meanwhile, the planters were living in the heights of continental European luxury just a few feet away.

On January 8th, 1811, rumors were already passing along the Mississippi of a planned revolt. The leader, it seems, was Charles Deslondes, probably about twenty years old, born a Mulatto slave on Haiti just before the revolution. He was brought to Louisiana in roughly 1793, with many “refugees” of the revolution. He worked on the white Deslondes family's plantation, who gave him their surname, but he was not one of them. Charles Deslondes would go on to become a Slave Driver for Colonel Manuel Andry on a neighboring farm. That meant he was one of the slaves who were middle management for the bosses, and by management, I mean torturer and brutalizer. The whites at the top did not even do their own dirty work. It did give Deslondes some freedom to organize and plan, and that night he made his move.

One night like any other, on a rainy January evening, Andry’s family was attacked by their own slaves. Col. Andry took one blow from an ax but ran out of the house. His adult son Gilbert did not escape the wrath of their human property. He was butchered in his bed. The Colonel fled north.

Deslondes and his band began to march, plantation by plantation, burning many of them on their way, towards New Orleans, about thirty miles away. We do not know their ultimate goal. There’s some talk from the captured slaves of a grand conspiracy from around the world, which has to be fantasy. Possibly they were just telling their torturers what they wanted to hear. We think they planned to turn Louisiana into another Haiti, ruled by free blacks. If they had any grand geopolitical strategy, maybe between Spanish, British, and American designs on the mouth of the Mississippi, they could play the great powers off against each other like the Haitians had.

Only one other slave owner, Francois Trepagnier, was killed. (Can’t say I feel all that sorry for him, he is reported to have treated his slaves literally like dogs.) The small army of slaves, somewhere between 200 and 500 in total, armed mostly with their agricultural tools and axes, but with a few muskets and horses, advanced fifteen miles that night and morning. Only a small portion of the slaves they met joined the revolt. Many others stayed in their homes, several even fled to warn their masters. The slave army had some semblance of military order, drums for the march, maybe uniforms. Opposing their route to the city were a few dozen American soldiers. If you know your War of 1812 history, you’d know that the American military at this time was in a miserable, hilariously corrupt state. Deslondes’ army could have caused a lot of chaos and built a larger movement if luck was on their side.

Luck was not on their side.

Unfortunately for Deslondes, his master Col. Andry was not just alive but also an energetic leader. He quickly gathered up a white militia of his neighbors from the north and out-flanked the few hundred slaves. By January 9th, the slaves were surrounded, with enemies coming from north and south. A final battle took place at the plantation of Bernard Bernoudy, where the fleeing slaves fought for a few minutes, losing 45 men, and they were routed. The slaves fled in all directions, but they did not get far. By January 11th, Deslondes had been captured, dragged out by dogs. He was tortured horribly and then killed. I’ll spare you the gruesome details.

Throughout the rest of January, the militia and army carried out swift justice. Trials were held, where scores of men and women were treated as bandits and executed. Reportedly one hundred heads on pikes decorated the road from Andry’s plantation to New Orleans. Louisiana became a state in 1812, and the slave economy of sugar lasted until the end of the Civil War. White power would be re-asserted several more times with severe violence, including the New Orleans Massacre of 1866 during Reconstruction.

Today, I’m sure, racial harmony has finally been achieved in Louisiana and we should stop worrying about all this ugly history. Seems like an anti-social un-American thing to do, remembering this stuff.