The Roots of Rough Justice: Origins of American Lynching

Epilogue

Epilogue The conflict between rough justice and due process sentiments persisted for decades after Reconstruction in the American regions beyond the Alleghenies . Vividly remembering Reconstruction as an era in which they had lost control of criminal courts and political offices, many white southerners turned once again to collective murder outside the law amid racial and political conflict shaped by the depressed cotton economy of the 1890s. In a contagion of collective murder that was less overtly political and less systematically organized but even more racial than the collective violence of Reconstruction, lynching became a prime means of punishing black resistance and criminality for white southerners skeptical of the efficacy of law and legal processes in the perpetuation of racial order in the New South. Southern urbanization and industrialization at the turn of the twentieth century catalyzed anxieties over racial mixing and in some cases evoked large-scale spectacle lynchings , but eventually a southern middle class coalesced against mob violence. Embarrassed by the increasing spotlight African American activists and a nationalizing culture shone upon lynching and fearing the loss of investment that might promote economic growth and prosperity in the region, middle class white southerners in the early twentieth century pressed instead for “legal lynchings,” expedited trials and executions that merged legal forms with the popular clamor for rough justice. As the frequency of lynchings in the South plummeted in the middle decades of the twentieth century, the practice went underground as lynchers no longer acted in large public mobs but instead in small, secretive groups that murdered in an expression of racial intimidation that by the late twentieth century was more often called a hate crime than a lynching.1 Pfeifer_Roots text.indd 88 2/7/11 10:17:33 AM The Midwest and the West were not as directly burdened by the legacy of antebellum racial slavery, and the trajectory of rough justice and lynching took different forms in those regions. North and west of Dixie, the practice slowly waned after the Reconstruction period but persisted into the middle decades of the twentieth century, occasionally reviving after allegations of particularly heinous crimes and under the influence of events such as the Mexican Revolution (precipitating the lynching of persons of Mexican descent ), World War I (the racial leveling of the war inspired the lynching of African Americans in several northern locales, while nativist and antiradical sentiment informed acts of collective murder in the West and the Midwest), and the social tensions of the Great Depression. In the Midwest and West, as in the South, legislators reshaped the death penalty in the early twentieth century to make capital punishment more efficient and more racial, achieving a compromise between the observation of legal forms long emphasized by due process advocates and the lethal, ritualized retribution long sought by rough justice supporters. Thus, as lynching came from the early modern death penalty, the modern death penalty came from lynching; the contemporary American death penalty carries forth the cultural legacy of the battle over rough justice and due process that marked the United States’ distinctive path during the long nineteenth century, with the United States constituting the only major western nation that retains the death penalty today. The United States, however, is not distinctive in its lynching.2 In recent decades, group killing across global cultures has, like American lynching in the long nineteenth century, reflected ambivalence about alterations in law and social values and rejection of seemingly ineffectual legal regimes that ostensibly do not offer sufficient protections for the property or security of particular communities. Though most recent group killings across cultures do not stem in any direct way from the extended nineteenth-century American contestation of law and cultural change, contemporary collective killing across global cultures often flows from local dynamics contesting the anxieties and ambiguities of legal change in the context of decentralized, weak, or fragmented states. Reflecting American linguistic influences, such collective murders have sometimes been labeled with the appellation lynching in local media and in Anglo-American press coverage. Group killings invoking concerns about rampant crime have flourished across Latin America in recent decades. Researchers have documented 482 linchamientos (acts of vigilantism that include collective killings as well as group violence falling short of group murder) in Guatemala from 1996 to 2002, 103 such acts in Mexico from 1987 through 1998, 164 in Venezuela in 2000 and 2001, and 30 such incidents in Cochabamba, Bolivia, in 2001. In Epilogue 89 Pfeifer_Roots text.indd 89 2/7/11 10:17...