Swift to Wrath: Lynching in Global Historical Perspective

Part 2. American Lynching and International Meanings: How the British, Japanese, Russians, and Slovaks Gave Meaning to American Lynching

PART2 AmericanLynching andInternationalMeanings How the British, Japanese, Russians, and Slovaks Gave Meaning to American Lynching M ob violence has a dramatic history stretching far beyond the boundaries of the United States, as the essays in part 1 have documented. The word lynching has its own history as well, one well worth studying, as the word had and has enormous political power. Labeling a violent event a lynching is hardly a neutral act. The rhetorical history of lynching has America at its center. While it seems very unlikely that America exported the notion of mob violence, as other people in other places hardly needed the help of outsiders to form mobs, the word itself is an American export. Robert Zecker examines the ways emigrants to the United States made sense of the violence they encountered. He finds that Slavic newspaper editors reprinted numerous stories of American lynchings, generally endorsing the violence. Zecker argues that immigrant newspapers reported American lynchings sympathetically as part of a program to socialize the new arrivals into American culture. Not only did foreigners grapple with the meaning of lynching when they came to America, Americans journeyed to foreign countries, weaving the word lynching into their criticisms of American mob violence. Sarah Silkey finds in the British leg of Ida B. Well’s traveling antilynching campaign the beginnings of an American exceptionalism on the question of racial violence. In the mid-nineteenth century the British press regularly reported “lynchings ” in the United Kingdom. After Wells raised the issue, leading British politicians and journalists began accepting American claims that peculiarities in the American condition made the Americans especially prone to mob violence. This became part of the British national identity: people in Britain did not lynch. Two of the essays that follow show how the American word lynching allowed the enemies of the United States a propaganda advantage in World War II and in the Cold War. Fumiko Sakashita finds that after 1919 Japanese journalists and politicians began denouncing American lynching to promote their own country’s ambitions to lead nonwhite peoples against Western imperialism and racial prejudice. In World War II the Japanese directed antiimperialist propaganda at African Americans. Most American blacks rejected the propaganda, but it did influence their thinking. Many African Americans agreed with Japanese charges of American racial hypocrisy. Japanese rhetoric criticizing Western imperialism and white supremacy contributed to African 136 American Lynching and International Meanings Americans’ “Double V” campaign, arguing for a patriotic fight against the Axis but, at the same time, calling for a fight against American racial prejudice as well. Meredith Roman finds that between 1928 and 1933 the Soviet Union identified lynching as a defining feature of Western capitalism. The Soviets defined lynching in such a way as to make it impossible in the USSR. At the center of this moment came the Scottsboro Boys controversy. When the U.S. Supreme Court returned a decision favorable to the African American defendants in that case, the Soviets began to lose interest in American lynching. In 1956 when white Mississippians shot and killed Emmett Till, the Russian press hardly took notice. The essays that follow highlight a new approach to the study of “lynching ,” namely the study of the word itself and its rhetorical history. While the behavior and actions of lynch mobs will always be of great interest to historians, we hope that these essays demonstrate that there is much to be gained from studying the history of this word. It has a demonstrated rhetorical power, jumping across oceans, and the study of the word can open windows on the minds and attitudes of peoples not just in the United States but across the globe. Ironically, such rhetorical studies of lynching demonstrate simultaneously the international reach of the United States in the nineteenth and especially the twentieth century while also highlighting the limitations of American cultural hegemony as Americans have in no way been able to control the meaning of the word once it enters the language and culture of other nations. Americans invented the word, and growing American influence helped spread it, but Americans could not control its meaning or the use foreigners made of it. ...