To Shake Their Guns in the Tyrant's Face: Libertarian Political Violence and the Origins of the Militia Movement

Cleansing the Memory of the Revolution: Americanism, the Black Legion, and the First Brown Scare

cleansing the memory of the revolution: americanism, the black legion, and the first brown scare At the end of the Civil War, the dispute over the nature of American patriotism persisted. Republicans during the war had embraced loyalty to a strong national state and that state’s monopoly on legitimate violence as the essence of patriotism. In contrast, even at the war’s end, Democrats continued to insist that ‹delity to the Constitution and to eighteenth -century understandings of liberty and limited government de‹ned a patriotic citizen. They argued that patriotism sometimes demanded the use of revolutionary violence against the state. Beginning in the 1870s, however, a variety of bourgeois voluntary associations undertook the task of easing the war’s divisions by remaking the nation’s collective memory of the Founding era, and out of this effort emerged a new patriotic ideal, “one hundred percent Americanism.” By the early decades of the twentieth century, the memory of the American Revolution had been recast to emphasize the birth of a national state to which all Americans owed unquestioning obedience. In a similar vein, twentieth-century commemorations of the Civil War emphasized sectional unity, virtuous self-sacri‹ce, and the noble struggle between the white brethren of the North and South. The libertarian political philosophy that had animated Americans to take up arms against their lawful governments in 1776 and 1863 passed out of mainstream public discus- sion. From this refashioning of the past emerged an ideal of Americanism that combined the emphasis on loyalty and on the state’s monopoly on violence within wartime Republicanism with the assertion of white supremacy so embedded in the culture of rural Democrats during the war. Yet the memory of the Revolution as a libertarian struggle against the state continued to resonate on the far right of American politics. The Black Legion, the largest right-wing paramilitary organization in the United States during the Great Depression, combined a far right understanding of liberty as the preservation of white Protestant supremacy and patriarchal control of the home with a memory of the American Revolution that justi‹ed the use of revolutionary violence to defend these liberties. The legion accordingly hatched a plot to overthrow the Roosevelt administration in September 1936. This plot met with widespread condemnation, especially among Democrats and others on the political left. Its disclosure triggered America ’s ‹rst Brown Scare, a campaign by the Left designed to demonize opponents on the right and far right by portraying them as a “fascist ‹fth column.” In the process of this campaign, Democrats and others on the left embraced the state’s monopoly on violence and denounced their political enemies as un-American. They thus crafted their own vision of Americanism and abandoned the libertarian memory of the Revolution that had de‹ned the party’s response to the crises of 1798 and 1863. The Transformation of American Patriotism: Memory, State Power, and the Rise of One Hundred Percent Americanism In the aftermath of the Civil War the refashioning of collective memory was integral to a generation-long process of crafting a new ideology of American patriotism. The human and psychic losses generated by the Civil War stimulated popular interest in the preservation and celebration of the past. The rise of private organizations such as the Grand Army of the Republic, the Sons and Daughters of the American Revolution , and a host of genealogical societies re›ected this desire to honor personal ancestors and national values. These organizations lent themto shake their guns in the tyrant’s face 146 selves to the process of healing the divisions of the war and fashioning a new patriotism based on shared symbols and values. They also brought together members of both political parties and thus ameliorated the partisan strife that had dominated political and social life before and during the war.1 As Woden Sorrow Teachout observes in her dissertation on the Sons and Daughters of the American Revolution, Americans in the Gilded Age came to regard the Founding era as central to their search for timeless American values. During the centennial of the Declaration of Independence , these societies collected and preserved artifacts and manuscripts from the Founding era and celebrated the founders as exemplars of true Americanism. These celebrations advanced the cause of national reconciliation by offering the era of the Revolution as a symbol of national unity and self sacri‹ce, and as a...