41. 42. 43. Richard F. Curtis, et al., “Prejudice and Urban Social Participation,” American Daniel Bell, “The Dispossessed,” in The Radical Right, ed. Daniel Bell, 1963. Hadley Cantril, The Pattern of Human Concerns (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Campbell and Schumann, 1968, Chapter 1. Philip H. Ennis, Criminal Victimization in the United States: A Report of a 44. 45. 46. Ennis, p. 57. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. Thomas F. Pettigrew, "Actual Gains and Psychological Losses: The Negro Ameri- Manpower Report, p. 90. Manpower Report, pp. 77-78. Harold M. Baron, "Black Powerlessness in Chicago,"Trans-action, VI, No. 1, Campbell and Schumann, 1968. Chapter VI WHITE MILITANCY INTRODUCTION The idea of "militancy" suggests the activities of blacks, students, anti-war demonstrators, and others who feel themselves aggrieved by the perpetuation of old, outworn, or milignant social institutions. The historical record, however, indicates that considerably more disorder and violence have come from groups whose aim has been the preservation of an existing or remembered order of social arrangements, and in whose ideology the concept of “law and order" has played a primary role. There is no adequate term to cover all of the diverse groups who have fought to preserve their neighborhoods, communities, or their country from forces considered alien or threatening. The lack of a common term for Ku Klux Klansmen, Vigilantes, Minutemen, KnowNothing activists, and anti-Negro or anti-Catholic mobs reflects the fact that these and other similar groups have different origins, different goals, and different compositions, and arise in response to specific historical situations which repeat themselves, if at all, only in gross outline. Still, certain patterns stand out in the history of white militancy. In the past, the white militant was usually-though not always-an Anglo-Saxon Protestant, and the targets of his protest included other white ethnic groups. Today, while the WASP remains a major figure in the overall picture of white militancy, much of the white protest, especially in the urban North, comes from ethnic groups-especially Southern and Eastern European-which were themselves former targets of nativist agitation. Another change is more subtle. Until recently, the violent white militant acted, very frequently, with the assistance, encouragment, or at least acquiescence of more "stable" elements of the population, and quite often in concert with the militant and nativist aims of the American political and legal order. Today this is considerably less true. With the exception of some areas of the country-notably parts of the South-the violent white militant has become a minority, and operates beyond the pale of the law and the polity, both of which he tends to distrust in proportion to his lack of political efficacy or influence. This chapter attempts to put white militancy in social and historical perspective. The first section considers the characteristic form of violent white militancy in history-vigilantism-in its interplay with the general thrust of a militantly nativist society. The following sections deal with contemporary white militancy in the South, the urban North, and among white para-military "Anti-Communist" groups. Vigilantism and the Militant Society1 American society has a lengthy tradition of private direct action to maintain order, coupled with a certain disdain for legal procedure and the restraints of the orderly political process. At the same time, American institutions have had a long history of nativism and racism. The interplay of these two traditions has resulted in vigilante violence most often expressed in racist and nativist channels. Every social order is maintained, at some level, by actual or implicit sanctions of violence. An important aspect of the American experience has been the degree to which private groups have taken it upon themselves to administer or threaten such sanctions. Some of these groups, perceiving the formal enforcement of law and administration of justice as weak or inefficient, have acted to "take the law into their own hands." In practice, however, private enforcement of the "law" has tended to mean a rejection of mere law in the name of a presumably overarching conception of "order" rooted inevitably in group interest. The nature of the American frontier produced the rationale for the extralegal enforcement of law which came to be known as vigilantism. This pragmatic approach to the genuine crises of order, occurring in areas where settlement had preceded the establishment of effective social control, was deeply rooted in American traditions of self-help. The roots of that tradition, in turn, are a number of national experiences and predilections, including the Puritan heritage of collective responsibility for the preservation of the moral order and a traditional distrust of government regulation and intervention. Perhaps more important than collective tradition was the immediate problem of danger and insecurity in areas where the formal agencies of law had barely penetrated, or had atrophied in periods of intense disorder. Not infrequently, vigilante justice brought a crude kind of order to these sparsely settled areas. This was the context of the pre-Revolutionary War South Carolina Regulators, the Law and Order, Regulator, and Anti-Horsethief Societies of the Eastern and Middle-Western states, the vigilantes of the western frontier, and the popular tribunals of the mining camps. In most of these private law-enforcement ventures, the aims were simple and unambitious. There was no attempt to create new legal forms or to promote a new vision of the social order. Rather, the aim was the establishment of mechanisms for order patterned, so far as possible, on familiar models. In the absence of formal institutions of social control, voluntary associations sprang up to get done those things which needed doing. Beneath the pragmatic zeal for order, understandable enough in the light of frontier conditions, lay a series of dangerous precedents. The self-help tradition largely sidestepped the restraints which a developed legal system imposes on the quest for order. Consequently, voluntary enforcement of the "law" tended to lean inevitably toward the enforcement of order, with or without law. Private violence, sometimes in conjunction with constituted authority and sometimes not, came to be used as an instrument for enforcing a threatened, or presumably threatened, system of social, political, economic and cultural arrangements against the claims of those groups standing outside the system whose actions-or, sometimes, whose very existence—were seen as threatening. Doubtless the first “alien" group to feel the combined assault of private and official violence was the American Indian. Regarded as wholly alien and wholly exterminable, Indians were subject to massive private violence which, like the massacre of over two hundred, largely women and children, which took place on Indian Island in California in 1860, more often than not took place under the tacit auspices of the American government. With regard to the Indian, "Many Americans cherished a conviction that they were waging what came to be called a 'war of extermination,' and they waged it with determination and hardly disguised enjoyment."2 The San Francisco Vigilance Committee of 1851 and the Great Committee of 1856 are the best known of the Western vigilante organizations. These committees were, on the whole, composed of leading citizens whose aim was the seizure of the administration of justice and the development of such means of subsidiary control, including standing armies, as were necessary in order to function without interference. They sought neither legislative change nor the reform of existing institutions, but rather the punishment of criminals and undesirables whom the courts had "allowed" to escape. They sought, in short, to act as a substitute for a judicial process which they saw as weak and inefficient. These committees had counterparts in all states west of the Mississippi. In practice, the rough justice of the vigilance committees was slanted toward nativist aims, and worked hardest against foreigners and minority groups, especially Mexicans and Chinese. The pursuit of "law and order" meant-as it apparently does today-a special effort against minority groups considered dangerous to constituted order, moral values and racial hegemony. In this effort the vigilante groups were not alone. Rather, private violence against minority groups in the West was only the leading edge of an endemic regional nativism supported by large segments of the population and in time elevated into the laws of the land. Ten Broek et. al. suggest this mixture of the formal and the informal, the legal and the criminal, in the treatment of the Orientals in California: The long agitation against the Oriental in California, to be seen in proper perspective, must be set against a background of violence and conflict involving the dominant white majority and the dark-skinned minorities; a heritage of hatred which had its inception in the fiercely competitive environment of gold-rush mining camps, was institutionalized in local ordinance and state law, and came to constitute a primary cause of some of the worst outbreaks of criminal lawlessness in California history.3 Private violence in California was encouraged by state law which prohibited Chinese from testifying in cases involving whites. With this protection, militant Californians were officially allowed to slaughter Chinese with relative impunity. As in other instances of nativist agitation, there tended to develop a division of labor between "respectable" elements who utilized legislationsuch as that resulting in the act of 1882 banning further Chinese immigration into the country-and mobs who looted, burned, and murdered men, women, and children in the Chinese quarters of the West Coast. This is not to suggest that a majority condoned mob violence. But the movement for social and political exclusion of the Chinese effectively withdrew legal protection against this kind of action. In the context of official denial of Chinese rights, the preservation of "order" meant in practice that virtually any pretext was sufficient for massive violence against them. In Los Angeles, after a white was killed during a tong war, mobs invaded the Chinese quarter, looting and "killing twenty-one persons-of whom fifteen, including women and children, were hanged on the spot from lamp-posts and awning."4 A similar combination of public and private action has characterized the expression of white militancy in the South, where the Ku Klux Klan has intermittently arisen in the context of a social order which has given official and widespread approval to the exploitation and subordination of the black population. The Klan arose in the aftermath of the Civil War, when emancipation, the Fourteenth Amendment, and the ravages of the war itself had disrupted the traditional caste order and weakened, to some extent, the effectiveness of the black subordination. To many white Southerners, the limited gains of the Southern blacks represented a state of fearful disorder. Woodward has described this atmosphere and the early legislation aimed at re-establishing social control along caste lines: The temporary anarchy that followed the collapse of the old discipline produced a state of mind bordering on hysteria among southern white people. The first year a great fear of black insurrection and revenge seized many minds, and for a longer time the conviction prevailed that Negroes could not be induced to work without compulsion. Large numbers of temporarily uprooted freedmen roamed the highways, congested in towns and cities, or joined the federal militia. In the presence of these conditions the provisional legislature established by President Johnson in 1865 adopted the notorious Black Codes. Some of them were intended to establish systems of peonage or apprenticeship resembling slavery.5 After the Black Codes were struck down, the Klan emerged to drive the freedmen out of politics and restore power and control to the dominant white leadership. The night-riding assaults on blacks, Northerners, and their southern sympathizers were justified as "the necessary effort to prevent crime and uphold law and order."6 The first Imperial Wizard of the Klan, General Nathan B. Forrest, explained the need for the Klan in these terms: Many Northern men were coming down there, forming Leagues all over the country. The Negroes were holding night meetings; were going about; were becoming very insolent; and the Southern people . . . were very much alarmed. . . parties organized themselves so as to be ready in case they were attacked. Ladies were ravished by some of these Negroes.... There was a great deal of insecurity.7 While Klan leadership was often held by men of substance, the rank-andfile Klansman was most often a poor white fearful of black economic competition. Klan violence, like western vigilantism; more often than not received support from significant segments of the dominant population. Acts of violence were usually applauded by the conservative press and justified then, and afterwards, by the always allegedly bad reputation of the victims.8 The typical weapon of the Reconstruction Klan and subsequent white terrorists was lynching. The Tuskegee Institute has kept a record of lynchings in the United States since 1882 which gives an indication of the extent of white violence and serves as a reminder that the white militant has been the single |