The Taming of the American Crowd: From Stamp Riots to Shopping Sprees (review)

George Rudé and E.P. Thompson first brought to our profession’s attention the enormous importance of crowd actions in defending customary moral practices and shaming those in positions of power to do the right thing for the hoi polloi. Jesse Lemisch, Alfred Young, Gary B. Nash and others have shown that the same phenomena were equally present on this side of the Atlantic in colonial times and during the early US Republic. But whatever happened to the crowds such as those studied by these prestigious scholars? Today, with a few exceptions, purposeful crowds of that sort seem largely to have become a matter of history. Crowds are largely reduced to mere aggregations of people – to the passivity and conformism of shoppers in malls and of sports fans in stadiums and arenas. It is the question of what happened to the more radical activist crowds that is taken up here by scholar/activist Al Sandine. Sandine provides a set of historical vignettes illustrating crowds in their once spontaneous, rowdier variety – such as the ones that shut down the Stamp Act in 1765, those that freed slaves awaiting return to the South under the Fugitive Slave Act, those that joined with striking railroad workers in 1877 and striking textile and rubber workers during the 1930s, and finally those of the rebellions that broke out in Harlem in 1935 and 1964 and then elsewhere during the later 1960s. Sandine is fully aware that “mobs” have not always acted in ways that progressives of the political left could ever get behind – that even “killer crowds,” such as racist lynch mobs, must also have a space somewhere on display in what he refers to as the “crowd museum” – and he devotes a chapter to describing them, too. Nor were all crowds “self-owned,” as Sandine puts it. Many have been bought and manipulated like the high-pitched partisan political crowds during the Jacksonian period.

Sandine remains convinced, however, that much of democratic value has been lost in this transformation. Our ancestors were much more capable of taking useful collective actions, from barn-raising to hell-raising. That spirit needs to be revived. He reminds us that crowds, invariably derogated as “mobs” by the ancient and modern upper classes and their intellectual apologists, once ruled effectively in the Greek polis and the Roman republic. He argues that crowd and other collective actions are needed today, above all, to drive a wedge between politicians and the big business interests that hold them so much in their sway. Sandine hopes the present economic crisis, as it intensifies, will see a revival of them, and perhaps it will. (The book came out before the mass labour takeover of the State Capitol in Madison and similar struggles to defend worker bargaining rights in other states.) He holds out the mass anti-IMF and anti-governmental actions by workers and members of the squeezed middle class during the Argentinian debt crisis in the early years of the current century as examples of what can be possible.

So what happened? Sandine argues that during the 19th century the ruling powers moved to tame the streets and public squares that had long been contested class terrain. Longstanding popular festivals that involved role reversals and the mocking of clerical and civil authorities were suppressed by refusing to issue permits and by unleashing the newly created urban police forces and vigilantes. Festivals and marches affirming patriotism and capitalism, with most people relegated to the role of spectators on the sidelines, were promoted instead. The “ginger” was removed from the once tumultuous July 4th celebrations, and Labor Day was substituted for workers’ May Day. Today, the Macy’s Day Thanksgiving Parade, with its “family-friendly” commercialism, is much more the norm. Those who attend these events today have generally internalized respectable behaviour patterns and do not need much policing. Others simply watch at home on their individual TV sets. Also contributing to the transformation...