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.

Let's Remember Some Civil Unrest! The Bonus Army

WYTS: Washington Commanders. Original post here.

Okay, next one is Washington DC… which riot to pick...? There is that obvious one from a few years ago at the Capitol... But I’m being told that was actually a peaceful demonstration and we were very unfair to those gentlemen. Sorry, I should call them "heroes". You’re just not allowed to question this. So instead, let's go back to the most politically-safe deep past of a century ago. Here’s the Bonus March of 1932.

Herbert Hoover is not remembered as a particularly great president. Now in fairness to him, he was an excellent disaster relief administrator, who saved millions of lives providing food to starving people across Europe. He was very good to post-Revolution Russia in the early 1920s, even while the US was having a face-melting freak out about the Bolsheviks. The Great Depression was not necessarily his fault either, the post-WWI chaos in international markets, along with years of incompetent Republican financial management did that. I’m not sure any president could have done a great job saving the economy. However, waiting for the free market to save the day was not the wisest of choices.

Also, anybody could have made better choices this in July incident than Hoover did.

This is before the GI Bill. Prior to a proper VA Administration, the government granted financial support its veterans in a messy, random way. This was usually land grants until we ran out of land to grant. It is not like our history of keeping promises to soldiers was all that great either. In 1783, the then-capital Philadelphia was besieged by Continental Army vets demanding Congress pay up their long overdue back pay.

 

As for the men who survived the trenches and beat the Germans in France, the plan was to only give them their regular weekly paychecks and nothing else. This changed in 1924 when Congress passed the World War Adjusted Compensation Act, over President Coolidge’s Veto (fuck Coolidge). That granted the veterans a dollar a day for service, with an extra daily quarter if you served overseas. However, this was made extremely complicated, with the dreaded Means Testing. Instead of getting the money right there and then, veterans were given a trust fund system, along with some options to borrow against their bond. In effect, they were not getting paid until 1945. In the Great Depression, the economy was fucked. "It's my money and I need it now!" said the soldiers, and there was no J.G. Wentworth and no opera to help. That bonus could be as much as $625.00 ($11,740.00 today) and when you’re starving, another thirteen years is a long, long time to wait.

In 1932 the veterans decided that the free market was not going to save them, in fact, no matter what Hoover believed. They traveled however they could, in some cases literally tramps riding the rails, and began to gather in Washington DC on the south side of the Anacostia River. They made camp with the Capitol Dome in sight. By July, there were 17,000 veterans with 26,000 others, many families, all set up in a tents in the open fields in the “Black side” of DC. This terrified the federal government, since these guys were calling themselves the “Bonus Army” or “Bonus Expeditionary Force” (BEF). Remember that in Europe, veteran movements had turned violent and fascist, such as Mussolini’s March on Rome, or the German Freikorps.

Despite the government's fears, the March went very peacefully and did not find a dictator to install. The closest thing was their leader, Walter W. Waters, who dressed in a brown uniform along his a small guard of... unfortunately-named "Khaki Shirts" (too similar to Brown Shirts for anybody's liking). The Bonus Army did have military ranks but this was informal. Waters claimed the rank of "Vice-Field Marshal". Walters had served in the 41st Infantry in the Great War, so would have seen combat at the Meuse–Argonne offensive, fighting until the Armistice. After the war he wandered around the country, not finding a place, a similar problem for many Shell Shocked young men. His life became all the more unstable with the Great Depression, when he lost his job. After the events in Washington, Waters would write about his experience as the unofficial leader of the BEF. I've skimmed his work. He's rather humble and gives a sober, truthful account of what happened, obviously self-serving, but this is not Mein Kampf. A reckless firebrand that demanded the heads of capitalists could have turned this into a violent coup, maybe. From what I can see, Waters was not that guy - I'm sure he's in some Hearts of Iron IV alt history mod as a tyrant of some kind. With his tone deaf fascist-adjacent costuming, Waters became an easy scapegoat to justify some very brutal federal responses.

 

In actuality, the Bonus Army had no plans to overthrown anything. They were just families waiting for the government to act. The Bonus Army had a very well-organized camp. It reminds me a lot of large strikes during the labor movement twenty years earlier, where whole families peacefully resisted against the Rockefellers for fair wages. As Hoovertowns went, the Bonus Camp was excellent, with libraries and mutual aid. They had no weapons. Even the superintendent of the DC police department, Pelham D. Glassford, treated the Marchers well and saw this was not a threat. He gave them food, supplies, and I'm told that crime rates went down in the city during the Bonus Army occupation. The Bonus Camp was even racially integrated, unlike the actual army back then.

On June 15th, the House passed the Bonus Bill to pay these men now. The Senate, meanwhile, defeated it in a 62-18 vote a month later. (Fuck the Senate.) Hoover promised to veto it too, so Congress went home for the summer.

The veterans were ready to stay for months, years if needed, Congress or no Congress. And they were very disciplined. This is one of the riots not 100% not started by protestors, but by the police. Speaking of, Washington DC’s appointed government had enough. (By the way, Washington DC had no home rule yet; the city would not get its own elected mayor until 1975!) On July 28th, during a march on Capitol Hill, there was a small police skirmish where two Bonus Army men killed. Then the army were sent in at 1:40 PM, led by soon-to-be very famous officers, themselves Great War veterans. The Washington Commander of this operation was General Douglas MacArthur with his junior aide, Major Dwight D. Eisenhower. He sent in hundreds of infantry backed by the 3rd Cavalry led by Major George S. Patton, with five light tanks against a Bonus Army lacking a single rife.

At first the Bonus Army cheered their brothers in arms. Then as the non-Bonus Army advanced with bayonets raised, the veterans realized this was anything but friendly. Soon it was chaos as they were chased off the streets and teargas filled the air. In one of those nasty ironies of history, WWI veterans were gassed once again, now by their own government. They fled back across the Anacostia River to their camp. MacArthur’s orders were just to disperse the men at the Capitol, but always horny for a grand advance, MacArthur kept going against orders, crossed the river, and burnt the camp. They were all "Communists" anyway as far MacArthur was concerned. The Bonus Army fled the city for their lives.

Twenty years later in North Korea, MacArthur will lead the US military to one of its greatest defeats by ignoring orders and advancing recklessly right into the jaws of the PLA. But that’s a story for another day. (Oh and fuck Douglas MacArthur.)

Back in 1932, it seems only those first two men died, but there were a further 55 injuries, including onlookers. The Bonus Army ceased to be - for now. Hoover’s re-election campaign for that fall was destroyed, his legacy secure as a failure of a president and now a national pariah. A second Bonus March happened a year later, testing a new president, FDR. This one ended peacefully with the men being granted Civilian Conservation Corps jobs. In 1936, Congress finally paid out the Bonus early, over Roosevelt’s Veto, by the way.

Walter W. Waters ceased to be a major political actor after the Bonus March. He did not take part in later Bonus Army events, claiming ill-health. He went on to write his book, worked at a gas station, and in 1935 got a job at the War Department under General MacArthur. It seems Waters also fought in WWII as a navy man. Details on his life are hard to verify after 1932. MacArthur later said, "Old soldiers never die, they just fade away", and that applied for both Doug and Walter.

Veterans would get better deals from the nation post-WWII and the GI Bill. But let’s not pretend all is good and rosy with our war veterans. We still have a lot of broken people and you can never fix what you’ve done to them. Few people survive a war 100% in fact. But hey, I’m sure randomly firing tens of thousands of VA employees will fix those problems.

 

Also, one day that free market will save us all, I’m sure.

Let's Remember Some Civil Unrest! Ten-Cent Beer Night

 

WYTS: Cleveland Browns. Original post here.

 

Shout-out to the May Day Riots riots in 1919, where the IWW and their fellow socialists opposed the conviction of their leader and Pullman Strike veteran, Eugene V. Debs, for sedition. Debs even had his citizenship revoked. This was one of the biggest battlefields of the 1919 Red Scare, when both sides were either inspired or terrified of the Bolshevik Revolution. The protesters were hit by police insanity, which included a tank shipped over from the Western Front. Two people were killed. That sounds important but let's do a silly one again. (We don't have many of those.) Here’s Ten-Cent Beer Night!

Cleveland at the end of WWII was an industrial powerhouse. It was a hub of the arsenal of Democracy that defeated Hitler. Post-war, the good times rolled on. Their baseball team, then known as the Indians, won a World Series in 1948. The new Browns football team were the greatest in the NFL pre-merger. Life was good. This city was far from being a punchline.

I sure hope Clevelanders had a Buddhist attitude about the temporary nature of things. Inevitability came, and the joke-ification of Cleveland began. You know the story of the second half of the 20th century, it’s the same in almost every city: deindustrialization, highway building, redlining, a lot of cars and a lot of suburbs and a lot of decline. The Browns started sucking in 1973 and never stopped, only pausing to get rocked by the Broncos for awhile, or to become the Ravens. Also, Seventies baseball was not much better. Forget World Series, these guys hadn’t had a winning record since 1968. This riot is probably the highlight of Cleveland baseball in this decade. I’m not sure there is much else to talk about.

Wikipedia helpfully tells me that beer back then was usually 65 cents at Cleveland Stadium, about $4.24 today. Ten-Cent Beer as a fun crowd gimmick would mean your beer costs about $0.65 in today’s dollars, so… oh, the 1974 price. I don’t know how much a Coors costs at Progressive Field today but in my experience, you’re talking $10 to $15 for a beer now. Back then, there were no credit limits on how many beers you could buy, no cut-offs at the 7th inning, and crowds of drunken assholes were just something to be expected. The boujee box seat revolution to make a baseball game a luxury item had not yet begun, these were tough working class crowds. This team would end the season with a depressing 77-85 record, the river was probably still on fire, your factory job was gone, if you’re in Cleveland at these games, you’re getting drunk.

Our story begins May 29th, 1974, in Arlington Stadium with the brand new Texas Rangers team and a player named Lenny Randle. The Indians were visiting and this game was getting punchy after Randle broke one of the sacred arcane “Unwritten Rules” of the baseball, meaning he was due for a beanball from the Cleveland pitcher, Mitt Wilcox. Instead, Randle bunted, on purpose, in a brilliant ploy to drag Wilcox off the mound to tag him out. This left Wilcox wide open so Randle could flatten the shit out of him when the pitcher least expected it. Excellent form, Randle barely loses a step as he gets to first base.

This creates a huge bench clearing brawl, classic baseball. Feelings are hurt, Cleveland fans are furious, especially when they lose 3-0. It isn’t made any better when Rangers manager Billy Martin cockily told reporters he was not afraid of going to Cleveland next week. “Nah, they won’t have enough fans there to worry about.”

Ten-Cent Beer Night could not have landed at a worse time, with both teams furious at each other. Now it is June 4th, there’s 25,000 people in the stands, twice as many as usual (Martin wasn’t wrong about attendance problems), and these fans are getting plastered. Many came drunk already. Or came with firecrackers and various other missiles in their pockets such as rocks, batteries, golf balls, and at least one hunting knife. They knew this would be a show. The Rangers do not make things any easier for themselves when they have an undiplomatic 5-1 lead just as the crowd is losing control.

There’s so much to tell before it gets really bad, who knows how many of these stories are apocryphal: a woman ran topless onto the field and tried to kiss the umpire. A naked man slid into second base in the fourth inning, which sounds very painful to me. Two guys mooned the Rangers outfield. Billy Martin walked out onto the field, receiving a blizzard of thrown beer cups, and blew kisses to the audience. I think he wanted a riot too.

In the ninth inning, the Indians rally to tie it, but this game is going down like a sinking ship without enough lifeboats. Baseball was on nobody’s mind at this point. There’s stories of random chaos in every direction. Somebody not in a kissing mood threw a hunting knife in the direction of the umpire, landing just short. When the umpire does not want to die that night, he calls the game off as a forfeit, Texas wins, attempted murder is not allowed in baseball. But the night is far from over.

That’s when Jeff Burroughs, Rangers outfielder, gets his hat knocked off by a speedy Clevelander who has also run onto the field. Burroughs trips, and Billy Martin, who was itching for a fight, marches his team out to battle. The crowd responds with hundreds of fans rushing the field, surrounding the Rangers. Billy Martin has proven to be a poor field general. Turns out the fans had the high ground in all directions and the numbers and the alcoholic momentum to be capable of anything. The Texans are now twenty-five mostly sober baseball players and one dumb manager in the outfield versus 200 of Cleveland’s meanest and drunkest. General Martin left no path open for retreat.

The Indians manager, Ken Aspromonte, in a moment of legitimate heroism, ordered his own team out there to fight their own fans and rescue Texas. After a brief battle, both teams fled the baseball field without casualties, locking themselves in the clubhouses. That left Cleveland Stadium in the hands of the mob. Fans run wild as security is overwhelmed, unable to take control – nobody had the wisdom to bring on extra guards or police before this night began. Every base was stolen along with anything else the fans could swipe. The broadcasters apparently kept going for another twenty minutes, detailing the madness with no game to report on, like the band playing ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee’ on the deck of the Titanic.

A half hour after the game ended early, Cleveland’s police finally restore order. The Indians would finish in fourth place in their division this year and would never win another World Series under that name, or any other so far. The Rangers finished their season in 2nd place, 84-76. Billy Martin would get fired from Texas in 1975 and then go on to get fired many, many more times under George Steinbrenner in NYC. Martin would win a World Series for the Yankees in 1977 and almost got into a fight with Reggie Jackson on national TV. Lenny Randle would play for the Mariners later on in his career, and infamously would blow on a baseball rolling on the turf into the foul line. Turns out you're not allowed to do that.

Nobody died for once in these stories, and as far as I can tell, nobody was seriously hurt either. Lotta hangovers the next day though.