Stop Mass Hysteria
Page 15
The “New South” of 1865 was a breeding ground for everything unwholesome in human nature. We’ve all seen video of the devastation caused by superstorms like Katrina, Sandy, Harvey, and Irma. Now imagine if that carnage spread across towns and cities covering a third of a continent, and instead of water, the means of destruction were fire, artillery, and gunfire. Add to that not dozens dead but more than one quarter of the military-age men who would have made up its working class. The proud, once-thriving farms had been either underworked or abandoned during the war, and a significant portion of the Confederacy’s livestock, including workhorses, mules, and food animals, had been killed. Much of the farm implements needed for the South’s agrarian economy were ruined. The railroad and riverboat equipment required to bring southern goods to market had been destroyed, and what remained of these had been taken from commercial and agricultural areas to military locations during the war where it was useless during peacetime and too expensive to move back.
Imagine an entire society where what we now call posttraumatic stress disorder affected not only soldiers but every member of the civilian population, young and old. Add to that the freed slaves who were largely without education or guidance, who were either scrounging for food—like everyone else—or searching for family members from whom they had been forcibly separated. Top off that mix with the fact that the southern states were under domination by a vanquishing army. Even the most compassionate, wise, and politically astute president would have had difficulty managing that miasma in a land where even the basic means of communication—newspapers and telegraphs—had been severely compromised. Abraham Lincoln, stupidly murdered by an assassin—an actor foolishly working from his own script—would have been that. Andrew Johnson was not.
Against this unthinkable background, white resentment did not just simmer. It was placed in a pressure cooker where it turned, understandably, into explosive hysteria.
Given that even Lincoln would have required the northern army to occupy the South, Reconstruction would have come under the military’s purview, and therefore was the responsibility of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. Stanton was a Radical Republican, a faction that sought immediate, sweeping, and punitive oversight of the South’s reentry into the union. President Johnson feared the antiwhite, problack excesses his stewardship might bring. In August 1867, Johnson overstepped his authority, a mild overreach compared to Lincoln: He suspended Stanton and installed a new secretary of war. In response, Johnson was impeached. He managed to avoid removal by a single vote.
One can imagine defeated, starving, and disease-plagued southerners becoming even more desperate and emboldened as they watched the chaos within their occupiers’ government. In Pulaski, Tennessee, what began in 1865 as a Christmas Eve gathering to honor six Confederate army officers soon turned into an outlet for resentment over the region’s defeat, anger toward newly freed blacks, and a forum for empowerment. This organization, which took its name from a bastardization of the Greek word for circle, created hooded white “uniforms” and was soon terrorizing and murdering enemies of the Old South as the Ku Klux Klan.1
As word spread of this vigilante force, similar groups formed throughout the South. There was no central organization and no formal agenda other than mayhem and intimidation. The hoods they wore and the guns they carried enabled them to create mass hysteria by scaring or lynching blacks, intimidating voters, attacking “Yankee” troops, committing felonies, and settling old scores, regardless of the race of the victim. There was, of course, an underlying theme of white supremacy and the reclamation of twisted honor, but that wasn’t codified until early in the next century as the result of a motion picture. More on that later.
The lack of central command may have worked to the Klan’s benefit. While individual cells were identified and intermittently persecuted by northern soldiers, the KKK as an entity did not come under federal clampdown until 1870—well after the impact of its voter suppression terrorism had been felt in Georgia, Florida, and especially Louisiana, where in the weeks leading up to the 1868 elections more than two thousand people were assaulted or killed.2
The Klan didn’t have a monopoly on creating violent hysteria. In Louisiana, a single rumor—which, like the Salem Witch Trials, was originally sourced from children—ended in hundreds of deaths.
Emerson Bentley was a teacher in Opelousas, Louisiana. His students were blacks and Creoles. Bentley was also the editor of the Landry Progress and in his spare time he registered blacks to vote. He actively supported the problack Republican Party, which met in a building adjacent to the Landry Progress office.
During the summer of 1868, rumors spread that Radical Republicans were quietly provoking blacks to riot. By fall, hysteria among southern whites was growing and two shipments of arms arrived for the purpose of arming Democrats. It was said that a large Republican gathering planned for Washington, a village north of Opelousas, was a cover for black plans to pillage.
The gathering, at least, was real—and peaceful, if uneasy. Word spread—most likely untrue—that hundreds of armed white men were hiding in nearby woods. At one point a white supremacist leader pointed a gun at Bentley’s head. Speeches were curtailed and the gathering broke up without significant violence. Less than a week later, Bentley wrote about the Washington gathering in the Landry Progress. In the piece, he called out the Democrats for their tactics.
On the morning of September 28, indignation and anger was transformed into mass hysteria—but mass hysteria with the will, the mandate, and the tools to set things “right.” Mass hysteria that didn’t burn off with the settling of a single score.
Three Democrats visited the school where Bentley taught and expressed their displeasure over the article. As Bentley’s students fled, the three men beat him and pointed a pistol at him, although they did not kill him. Bentley hid overnight and, the next day, fled Opelousas. But the children he was teaching did not see him survive his beating. Their last image of their teacher was of three white men beating him, and holding a gun to his head.
The panic of the children, their fear of returning to school, rippled through the region. Yet it wasn’t the problack Republicans who became afraid, it was the pro-white Democrats who feared retaliation for Bentley’s beating. They armed themselves as rumors of white people being killed began to circulate. Driven to hysterical resolve, these armed Democrats began searching for blacks—armed, unarmed, involved, or otherwise.
The afternoon of September 28 saw the first fatal conflict between Democrats and Republicans—or, more specifically, whites and blacks. A handful of Democrats got word of armed black men at a plantation just south of Opelousas. When the whites arrived, they indeed found two dozen armed black men. Faced with armed whites, the blacks refused to lay down their weapons and, instead, fired upon the Democrats. The subsequent firefight left one black man dead. Eight others were taken into custody and imprisoned.
Hysteria may not have been the goal, but it was the result. By the next day, most blacks in Washington village had fled. White Democrat militias kept an active search for blacks, however, and at the end of the day an estimated twenty-nine blacks had been sent to the jail in Opelousas, and scores more were likely killed: the Democrats weren’t keeping detailed records.
The blacks in the Opelousas jail may have thought themselves lucky. They weren’t. That night, a crowd broke into the jail, removed the prisoners from their cells, separated them into small groups, brought them into the woods, and systematically shot them. While this was happening, the offices of the Landry Progress were destroyed and its printing presses were burned in the streets. The building next to the Landry Progress’s offices was looted, and the Democrats used the Republican party records contained therein to hunt down potential “insurgents”—white or black. Many were shown the same level of justice and compassion given to the twenty-nine prisoners in the woods.
This intimidation of Republicans and the lawless killings went on for weeks. Anyone who was not known to be
a Democrat was a target. Outsiders representing law and order attempted to ascertain what had happen in the region. They were met by intimidated, silent blacks and recalcitrant whites. The randomness of the killings prevented those authorities from determining the number of deaths. Democrats put it at around a score, while a Union army officer who visited the area in early October estimated there had been more than two hundred. Whatever the number, few Democrats were ever held responsible.
The effectiveness of the Democrat tactics can, however, be measured. On November 3, 1868, the United States held a presidential election between Republican candidate Ulysses S. Grant and Democratic candidate Horatio Seymour. Of the 4,787 votes cast in St. Landry Parish, which incorporates Opelousas and Washington, not a single vote went to Grant.3
The 1868 elections were profoundly discouraging for huge areas of the South. But they also emboldened the first incarnation of the Klan. More and more white supremacists were relying on hoods and robes to keep their crimes anonymous, and even southerners who might have been sympathetic to these groups raised concerns that their activities were justification for northern authorities to further dictate southern affairs. By 1871, several southern states had passed anti-Klan legislation. Additionally, the U.S. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1871, which, among other provisions, authorized President Grant to suspend habeas corpus when dealing with white supremacy organizations. Unlike Abraham Lincoln before him, and Franklin Roosevelt after him, when Grant did this the United States was not at war.
DRAMATIZING THE SINS OF THE FATHER
The right to be heard, whatever the topic, is generally guaranteed by the Constitution. The need to be heard is baked into the American psyche. Generations after the peaceful marches of the civil rights era, that has been corrupted by the modern Democrats the same way it was corrupted by their forebears, the mid-nineteenth-century Republicans. And using the same techniques: loud speech to spread mass hysteria… with violence as the predictable result.
The degree to which the already-defeated white population of the South resented this suppression became evident in 1915 with the release of the film The Birth of a Nation. By many accounts, adjusted for inflation, it remains the most successful film in history. It was also groundbreaking in that it was a feature-length film in an era dominated by short subjects, and it employed many modern techniques of filmmaking, such as close-ups and moving cameras—rare in an era when movies were more often than not static, filmed stage plays. The movie was directed by D. W. Griffith, who grew up in rural Kentucky and was the son of Confederate war hero Colonel Jacob “Roaring Jake” Griffith. The Birth of a Nation told the tale of the miseries suffered by one small town in the aftermath of the war and the added indignities heaped on the population by the North. The result was the birth of the Klan. Despite the fact that the first shot of the film showed pathetic Africans being enslaved, and the second shot showed abolitionists at work, and film stunningly and vividly re-creating the assassination of President Lincoln in a way that brought history to life, what people remember is that it depicted the Klan as heroic. Which, to a man raised in Griffith’s environment, it was.4
The film is effectively banned today. One has to search hard to find the 1905 novel on which it’s based, Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman. I have a copy and quote from the author’s “To the Reader,” in which he describes how Reconstruction was “the darkest hour of the life of the South, when her wounded people lay helpless amid rags and ashes,” and adds, “The chaos of blind passion that followed Lincoln’s assassination is inconceivable to-day [sic].” He flatly states that the policies of the North were regarded as a “bold attempt… to Africanize ten great States of the American Union.”5
We know, of course, that this was not true. But in a time when communication between regions was slow at best and nonexistent at worst, when passions and humiliation coupled with resentment and shame were easily transformed to mass hysteria, it was easy for those ideas to take root. The novel, and the film, tell how that happened.
Leftists cannot and will not discuss the context of these works any more than they can discuss pretty much any topic with which the lemmings disagree. Griffith was so shocked by this reaction, even then, that his next film was the brilliant and widely lauded Intolerance, a saga of hate and hysteria through the ages. Unlike The Birth of a Nation, it was a commercial failure.
One terrible result of The Birth of a Nation was a surge of suppressed white pride and the resurrection of the Klan, not as a makeshift “police” force but as a well-organized tool for the cause of white supremacy. The Birth of a Nation was an early form of social media, carrying the same message across forty-eight states, that blacks are either shiftless (eating fried chicken in the legislature) or interested in chasing after white women (with the KKK riding to the rescue). Today the narrative by Dixon and Griffith is not interpreted as being in any way historical—which, in a filmed interview in 1930, is all that Griffith said he intended. He wanted to tell his father’s story. President Woodrow Wilson supported that view. After a screening at the White House, he is reported to have said, “It is like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.” The president did not say that just the antiblack parts were true. He used the word all.
Context matters. Of course, leftists don’t want to hear that. If you want to cause instant mass hysteria among them, try arranging a screening of the film in any public forum, whether it’s a theater or a college campus. It won’t happen and, if it does, the venue will be picketed and attendees verbally or physically assaulted.
The left doesn’t like to listen to anyone but other members of the left. When a liberal group like the Southern Poverty Law Center hides $69 million in offshore accounts expressly to target the sources and voices of disagreeable speech and to circulate discredited “data,” what chance is there for a dialogue?
Like President Trump after the rioting and death in Charlottesville, I—like most historians who haven’t been cowed to silence—will state that there was great wrong committed by both sides during Reconstruction, and that racism against blacks or whites or anyone is toxic and evil. Nonetheless, in addition to being evenhanded, I am prescient. Not at the level of Orwell or Andrew Jackson, but you can be sure that the reviews and memes of this book will call me an antiblack racist or a Nazi sympathizer just as they did President Trump for suggesting that soul-searching and calm dialogue is required by both the right and left. For citing the one accurate comment Goebbels made among the innumerable monstrous things he said and did, I will be labeled a “supporter.” It’s appropriate that the symbol of Twitter is a bird. It is, after all, the modern-day version of tarring and feathering. It’s also fitting that the antebellum world of plantation owners and slaves has been replaced by the new generation of the plantation owners of leftist commerce (Apple, Google, Facebook) and their mindless, obedient acolytes. For all the blood spilled and strife endured, our nation has gone backward.
THE RUSH OF HYSTERIA
Reconstruction and its effects were a world away to the Americans who had gone west. Many had been drawn across the Rockies a generation before by the discovery of gold at John Sutter’s sawmill in Northern California in 1848. Gold fever swept the land, thousands of “49ers” sold everything they owned and went west, and by the end of that year the population of the territory had jumped from eight hundred to twenty thousand. During the most profitable year of the Gold Rush, 1852, the yield was $81 million. By the start of the Civil War the Gold Rush was over… but not the hunger for prospecting. It was always there, metals like silver or copper possessing the siren call of instant, if not easy, wealth.6
What turns fever to mass hysteria is when there is a pedal applied to the metal, such as a lingering economic downturn, like the “Long Depression” that began in 1873 and lasted for more than two decades. Like rootless veterans who have nowhere to go and nothing to do. Like displaced southerners whose plantations were ruined and roots destroyed. By the
early 1890s banks began to fail, and then so did railroads, which were tied directly to America’s financial fortunes. As the country lost its ability to transport goods, farms and manufacturers lost their revenue means. In 1893, the nation fell into recession and unemployment skyrocketed.
Enter potential redemption, when miners discovered a substantial gold strike in northwest Canada’s Klondike region.7
The remoteness of the Klondike meant it took almost a year for the news to reach the States. But when the first ship bearing more than a ton of gold pulled into Seattle, the newspapers made up for lost time. “Gold! Gold! Gold! Gold!” trumpeted one headline.8 Eager to profit from the excitement, newspapers throughout the country ran breathless front-page stories and featured cartoons of prospectors surrounded by fluttering dollar bills.
The lure of easy riches drew the unemployed and the desperate, who, as the 49ers before them, sold everything they had to finance their trip. But it also attracted office workers, shop clerks, policemen, and even the mayor of Seattle. If they had anything in common it was both a dream and a complete lack of knowledge about prospecting. Many probably didn’t realize they faced a six-hundred-mile overland trip once they reached Canada. The nature of hysteria is such that few would have cared.
Prospectors may have been excited, but the Canadian government realized a swarm of miners unprepared for the country’s terrain and weather would tax its rescue and supply resources. In 1897, the Northwest Mounted Police began requiring those seeking gold to bring a year’s worth of food.9 That, along with camping and mining equipment, meant each prospector had to carry more than a ton of gear, either by buying several pack animals or making multiple trips.
If the Canadians hoped these requirements would curtail fortune seekers, they were mistaken. Again, that’s not how hysteria works. Within six months of the first reports, around one hundred thousand people sought the mining areas. The majority never reached their destination. Of the two overland trails that led to the gold-laden areas, one was too steep for pack animals. Miners taking the other tended to overload their animals and as a result three hundred horses and mules died.10