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.