Summer of Hate: Charlottesville, USA by Hawes Spenser (review)

In August 2017, media outlets around the world ran headline stories about violence that had broken out on the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia. The disorder occurred during the Unite the Right Rally, a demonstration by members of the far right against the removal of a statue of the Commander of the Confederate Army, Robert E. Lee. More than thirty people suffered injuries when white nationalists clashed with counter-protesters, provoking Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe the following morning to declare a state of emergency. Despite this, later that day James Alex Fields, Jr., a young white supremacist, rammed a Dodge Challenger into a crowd of liberal activists. One of those demonstrators, Heather Heyer, suffered a blunt-force trauma from which she died after being taken to the University of Virginia Medical Center.

What provoked so much anger and soul-searching was not only the immediate incidents that occurred in Charlottesville but also the response of President Donald J. Trump. In failing to denounce the far right and instead claiming that there was "hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides," the president drew heated criticism for apparently drawing a moral equivalence between white supremacists and those who opposed the rally.

In The Shadow of Hate, Hawes Spencer re-creates the events in Charlottesville in forensic detail. He narrates the story from numerous perspectives including activists as well as local, state, and federal authorities. Spencer's dispassionate approach is both a strength and a weakness, providing for a granular account of events and their aftermath but lacking much in the way of opinion about their significance. His narrative is also far from linear, sometimes assessing events simultaneously from several vantage points and at others moving backwards and forwards in time. The effect at times is as disorienting as a film that makes multiple use of jump cuts.

It would be unreasonable to criticize this book for what it is not. Hawes Spencer is a journalist, not a historian, and his book reflects that in its focus on the events in Charlottesville and their immediate aftermath. What this does mean, however, is that there is plenty of scope for future scholars to research and write studies that place this ugly episode in a clearer historical context. Spencer does offer some reflection on the contested nature of Confederate war memorials, suggesting that the motivation for their erection during the Jim Crow era was clearly as an affirmation of white racial supremacy. Scholars who at a later point in time return to these events might develop this line of argument by situating what happened in Charlottesville not only in a broader chronological but also regional framework.

What Spencer himself could have done is to assess the implications of one of the epigraphs with which the book opens. Dave Matthews, the rock musician whose band hails from Charlottesville, states that a year before the Unite the Right Rally, people "anywhere in the world" might have had trouble identifying the city. "Now, everybody—people in Nairobi know, people in Cape Town know where Charlottesville is, and they know it's where nazis are." The Charlottesville incident had not only local and national impact but also an international one. President Trump's equivocation about the actions of the far right provoked criticism around the world that seriously damaged the reputation of the United States. The German media, for instance, drew on their own country's troubled history in portraying the president as a fascist. For example, the magazine Stern ran a front cover in reaction to Charlottesville that showed Trump draped in an American flag raising his arm in a Nazi salute. What happens in the United States continues to have far wider impact than any other country and future scholarship could consider how Charlottesville, along with numerous other conflicts and controversies, have affected the international standing of the United States.

Although by no means definitive, as a first draft of the events that occurred in Charlottesville, The Summer of Hate is a...