Men, Mobs, and Law: Anti-Lynching and Labor Defense in U.S. Radical History (review)

In Men, Mobs, and Law, Rebecca N. Hill presents a comprehensive, comparative analysis of labor-defense campaigns and anti-lynching campaigns. Both "were intimately related and have influenced each other substantially." Similarly, they "have worked primarily through appeals to public opinion in the media, used stories of terror and heroism to build alliances across lines of class and race, and have been formative in the creation of radical political identities" (2).

Mob violence has a long history in America. Many have viewed these incidents through the prism of race. As Hill explains, politicians, police, and citizens tended to see white rebellious crowds more as regulatory than revolutionary. White rioting "was defined by the will to fight for one's rights" (35). African-American rebels, however, were considered unmanly beasts that had no legitimate cause to engage in violence. Hill utilizes the story of John Brown as a telling example of not only how white rebels were held to a different standard, but also how cultural understandings were beginning to change in the nineteenth century. Brown's "legend followed the tropes of the Great Man," but the defense campaign for the Haymarket Martyrs which followed "introduced the concept of the executed men as fallen heroes in the class war." It was the duty of "the passionate masses to save them" (69). Additionally and significantly, some who defended the Haymarket Martyrs offered an analysis and social critique that linked the concepts of race and class. Nonetheless, as Hill demonstrates, it took decades before radicals in the labor movement and activists in the anti-lynching campaign began to solidify the connections between them. That happened clearly during the Red Scare after the First World War and gained momentum during the cases of Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco, the Scottsboro Nine, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and George Jackson. Often the alliances between radicals, progressives, and liberals took the form of various defense organizations such as the Industrial Workers of the World's General Defense Committee or the Communists' International Labor Defense or Soledad Brothers Defense Committee. These organizations were short-lived and fraught with contentious divisions. Nonetheless, the defense campaigns made significant advances in civil rights, labor rights, and other social endeavors such as the prison reform movement.

Men, Mobs, and Law is an important book that cuts across traditional lines of inquiry and analysis. Hill is to be commended for her creative use of historical evidence as well as cultural sources, including poems, novels, autobiographies, plays, and songs. Also impressive are her abilities to relate her topics to international issues and movements as well as to engage in theoretical and historiographical debates. Despite some minor factual errors (e.g., the famous Kidd case in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, happened in 1898, not 1903 [136]), the book makes a strong contribution to the study of American radicalism, the labor movement, the civil rights movement, and the law.