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  • Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1874-1947
  • Paul A. Gilje
Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1874-1947. By Michael J. Pfeifer (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 2004) 245 pp. $35.00

Lynching and capital punishment are linked. Both practices end in death, and reflect the public's desire for retributive justice. Pfeifer takes this connection even further and argues that the rise of the death penalty in the United States allowed respectable middle-class Americans to assert a bureaucratic due-process rule of law over a rural and working-class sense of rough justice. This process began in the Northeast, where the rise of industrial capitalism and the triumph of the middle class early in the nineteenth century preempted any effort to establish lynching. Next, lynching ended in the upper Midwest, where many northeasterners settled and brought with them their bourgeois notions of law and order. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the rest of the Midwest and the Mountain West had joined the ranks of respectability, followed by the Far West of the Pacific Coast. Finally and belatedly, the South abandoned lynching, which was most often used as a means of racial oppression, as middle-class modernists sought to lure capital investment and "to erect a new legal order that would replace communal retribution with efficient, regularized, and racialized legal executions" (139). In short, Americans substituted lethal justice for rough justice.

Pfiefer does what few other scholars have attempted. He brings together an understanding of the lynching of the South with the lynching of the West and Midwest. He analyzes lynching in seven states: Louisiana, Iowa, Wisconsin, Wyoming, Washington, California, and New York. Despite providing a comprehensive thesis that covers lynching in such disparate locations, Pfeifer does not fall into the trap of oversimplification. In his discussion of Louisiana, which has by far the greatest number of lynchings, he carefully demonstrates significant differences in how rough justice was used in different corners of the state. He demonstrates similar sophistication in his approach by dividing Iowans use of lynching between the northern and southern part of the state, and showing the regionalization of lynching in California. How many more local explanations for lynching might have been added had Pfeifer covered more states? Asking that he provide a neighborhood by neighborhood breakdown of every state would have been too much. [End Page 145] However, adding one or two more southern states to the database, especially an upper-South state, might have offered a more complete picture. Why study Iowa and Wisconsin and not add Virginia and Georgia? (That Wisconsin had fewer incidents than any southern state would have made it relatively easy to add, whereas a southern state would have meant at least a year more of research). Pfiefer only included New York, for which he described one lynching, as a northeastern counterpart to the rest of the country and a place that moved quickly and extensively to a reliance on the bureaucratic, scientific, and antiseptic death penalty (the electric chair).

Ultimately this book is more than a social scientific explanation of the relationship between lynching and the death penalty. It is also an indictment of capital punishment. By tarring (to use a mob metaphor) both lynching and the death penalty with the same brush of retributive justice, Pfeifer provides a powerful argument against having the state murder criminals. Pfeifer convincingly shows the correlation between the rise in executions in any given state and the decline in the number of lynchings. Further, he shows how, in many cases, states used the death penalty disproportionately against minorities in an effort to intimidate the lower class and placate the anxieties of the middle class. His epilogue briefly traces the recent constitutional history of capital punishment to suggest that even in the beginning of the twentieth-first century, we wield lethal justice the same way mobs once turned to rough justice.

Paul A. Gilje
University of Oklahoma
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