What Virtue There is in Fire: Cultural Memory and the Lynching of Sam Hose, and: Lynching and Specatcle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940 (review)

Neither What Virtue There is in Fire nor Lynching and Spectacle is a 'traditional' study of lynching; they do not grapple with its origins, its underlying causes, or its geographical particularity.

They are instead concerned with representations of lynching and with the power of these representations to fuel, justify and, in the case of Wood, suppress mob violence. In this sense, they build upon the important work of historians, such as Christopher Waldrep, who have pointed to the importance of analyzing language and rhetoric in tracing the rise and fall of 'Judge Lynch.'

In his study, Edwin T. Arnold examines the notorious burning of Sam Hose, accused of murdering his white employer in Georgia in 1899. He places this event in the context of both smoldering local race relations, including the massacre weeks before of a group of black men in a neighboring town, and of racial conflict at the state, national, and international levels. He points out, for example, that the United States was engaged in a blatantly racist war in the Philippines and that white Georgians were clashing regularly with the black soldiers being trained in their state. With his attention to these layers of context, Arnold largely avoids some of the problems that afflict many lynching case studies—namely, excessive local detail that contributes little to the larger theoretical and methodological concerns.

Arnold pays particular attention to the competing narratives that emerged from the Hose lynching, mining them to reveal how flagrantly the same 'facts' were manipulated by commentators—blacks, whites, northerners, southerners—to condemn or justify the violence. He is particularly effective in his discussion of the role of white newspapers in the creation of sensational narratives which not only reflected but also nourished white anger over alleged black criminality. "I am fascinated with the audacious vocabulary, the melodramatic verve, the bold disregard for 'truth' in many of these accounts," he notes. "Papers contradicted themselves from one day to the next, or even within the columns of the same page, with a kind of boisterous indifference" (6).

Arnold is, perhaps, at his best when he considers the continued appropriation of Sam Hose today. Though his argument might make some uncomfortable, he makes a persuasive case that historians have swapped the simplistic narrative of white victimization and black criminality which filled newspapers a century ago for an equally simplistic and dangerous narrative about black victims without agency. "[The] desire to redeem Hose from racist constructions comes at a price," he notes. "In effect, Sam Hose has . . . been denied his 'voice,' his capacity for action, as he is changed from active to passive participant in the drama of his death. While he could once be pictured as a revolutionary, an insurgent fighting against an oppressive and vicious system, today he all too often seems mostly a sad victim of very bad luck" (189).

In Lynching and Spectacle, Wood argues that "it was the spectacle of lynching, rather than the violence itself, that wrought psychological damage, that enforced black acquiescence to white domination" (2). She contends that lynching constituted a ritual enactment of white supremacy which created and sustained the impression of white racial superiority and unity for black and white observers alike. She further argues that spectators did not simply consume lynchings passively but actively engaged in them, 'witnessing' them in ways which created bonds of belonging and community among the witnesses. Wood focuses on a broad range of cultural spectacles, including public executions, religious rituals, photographic images, and motion pictures.

Beginning at the local level in the South, she shows that lynching photographs—intended for a largely local audience, or for friends around the country—initially reinforced the racist assumptions of lynch mobs themselves, acting as a...