I continue to spend my time in the 1890s lately, as I read and annotate the selection of essays of Wilson R. Bachelor that my collaborators and I will be publishing (along with his diary and letters) down the road. The 1890s: a period not entirely like our own in the U.S. A period in which the super-wealthy richly deserved the appellation "filthy rich," as they threw lavish spectacle-parties to celebrate their financial success and to poke fun at the 99% who had been shoved from the socioeconomic table by this success--parties to mock the failure of the 99% and to proclaim that the 1% have no obligation whatsoever to care for the very poor.
The 1890s were like our current era in another respect, too, and this is one that drew the attention of Wilson Bachelor, who was, as I noted in a previous posting, a Republican leader in Arkansas in the latter part of the 19th century. Because both of the major parties were so enthralled and enchained by the wealthy elite, neither had the ability to offer any substantive solution to the economic suffering (for the 99%) of the gilded age. And so the White House passed back and forth between the Democrats and the Republicans with little real change at all in the living conditions and prospects of most citizens of the U.S., no matter who held power.
And attempts to form a viable third-party movement--an Occupy movement--representing workers, farmers, and those with socialist political leanings proliferated. All of this led Bachelor to distance himself from all parties and political movements in this final decade of his life (he died in 1903). There's a melancholy, elegiac quality to what he wrote in the 1890s--a taking-leave and looking-back quality that causes much of his work in this period to be poignantly introspective and philosophical. As he tells his friend and fellow author (and fellow doctor) Addison McArthur Bourland in an 1894 letter published as a review of Bourland's recently published novel Entolai,
. . . I am not sorry that the friction and conflicts in the great arena of human life, to me, have become insipid. I would rest. I have passed out and beyond the bars that have been set about me. I see the battleground receding; I still hear its clash and din; but I can rest only in the contemplation of nature.
But not entirely detached: in a snippet of political commentary that he appears to have published somewhere in March 1893, Bachelor notes his intense concern--consternation is not too strong--at the way in which some popular religious leaders of the day were actively working to incite mob violence among their followers. As the White House had gone back and forth between Cleveland the Democrat (1885 and 1893) and Harrison the Republican (1889), and as both appeared willing to reach across the aisle to the other party, Bachelor says wryly that he was beginning to think he could "see streaks of the early dawn of the millennium" in the bipartisan initiatives.
And then he read in the papers that one of the most powerful evangelists of the day, Rev. Samuel Porter Jones, had just given a sermon to thousands in Memphis defending the right of lynch mobs to take the law into their hands, if they imagined that the legal and judicial system had failed to protect them.
"Taking the law into one's own hands" was, of course, coded language in this period in the American South for lynching: for racial violence. It almost always meant, in the American South in the 1890s, a white mob finding a black man or some black men, stringing them up, torturing them, and killing them in front of crowds of cheering spectators, to see justice done. (If you want to learn more about the history of lynchings in the American South, I recommend this exceptionally valuable set of resources offered by Bill Moyers at his Journal site, though, as the site warns, many of the images are stomach-churning, as are the images linked to the material about the Henry Smith lynching below.)
As I noted in my last posting about Dr. Bachelor's work, historian Leon F. Litwack finds that in the 1890s, some 140 people were lynched each year in the U.S. (almost exclusively in the South), and almost without exception those lynched were black men. Almost no one who participated in these widespread murderous acts of racial terrorism was ever apprehended or brought to justice. When a court hearing was held to determine who had engaged in a lynching (and this was not by any means a predictable outcome of a lynching), the courts always and without fail found that no one could be blamed for the lynching. Even when an entire community knew precisely who had tortured, strung up, hanged, and/or burned another human being, the identity of that person or persons suddenly became opaque, elusive, impossible to establish when juries adjudicated these cases.
That March 1893 essay of Dr. Bachelor: what frightened him when religious rabble-rousers like Rev. Sam P. Jones defended mob violence was, he says, the following:
Mob law is the ebullition of the worst passions of a lawless majority—the sovereignty of an element destructive to law and order. It is the brute force of majorities over minorities. It will soon be found out that mob law instead of restraining viciousness and crime—only stimulates the worst passions of human nature.
And here's why, I suspect, these themes were on his mind as he wrote this particular essay, though the essay does not allude in any specific way to this incident. It probably couldn't do so without opening the door to danger to Dr. Bachelor and his family, in the over-heated climate of racial violence (violence frequently fueled in overt ways by the religious leaders whose social control he contested) in which he lived.
Here's what had just taken place in Paris, Texas, where Dr. Bachelor's daughter Lula and her husband William David Harris were living: on 1 February, after the body of a little girl, Myrtle Vance, had been discovered in Paris, a lynch mob had apprehended a mentally retarded African-American man, Henry Smith, had charged him with murdering the child, and had burned him at the stake in front of a crowd of 10,000 people at the fairgrounds outside the town.
Smith had been savagely beaten a few days before Myrtle Vance was murdered--beaten by her father, a local sheriff known for his repeated sadistic acts towards black citizens of the community. When he learned that he was being blamed for the crime, Smith fled for his life, but was apprehended in Hope, Arkansas, and returned to Paris, where his lynchers placed him on a mock throne on a kind of Mardi Gras float, paraded him through town, and then tied him to a stake on a platform at the fairgrounds, and proceeded to torture him with hot irons, moving inch by inch from the soles of his feet up his body. Until his tormentors plunged hot irons into his eyes and then burned him at the stake, as the crowd cheered and demanded souvenirs of the crime--some of Smith's ashes, bits of his torn garments . . . .
But there's also this: after Myrtle Vance's body was discovered, Methodist bishop Atticus G. Haygood had helped stage the violence that ensued when Smith was apprehended by stating that the little girl had been "taken by her heels and torn asunder in the mad wantonness of gorilla ferocity." Following Smith's burning at the stake, it came out that Myrtle Vance had been strangled and not dismembered as Haygood had claimed.
(Whether Smith killed this little girl remains an open question, I think. But this is a question impossible now to answer with any ease, given the way in which "justice" was served when he was seized without any court hearing and executed by a mob in a barbaric fashion that also makes it impossible now to use terms like "civilized"--or "Christian" or "faith-based"--without strong irony, to describe a society that could not only permit but even encourage such barbarism. And there are strong indicators in pieces of testimony that have survived from the Afirican-American community in Paris that Smith was known to be schizophrenic, that friends and neighbors had pleaded for treatment for him, and that his savage beating by Myrtle Vance's sadistic father days before her murder was hardly calculated to serve his mental stability.)
I just wrote that what citizens of Paris, Texas, did to Henry Smith in February 1893 makes it impossible to speak without strong irony of a society capable of such casual (casual, because socially acceptable) barbarism as "civilized" or "Christian." I'm not aware of data regarding the religious demographics of Paris in 1893. Contemporary data available at the City-Data website show that, at 65.4%, Paris has a percentage of religious affiliation considerably higher than that of the national norm (50.2%). And of those 65.4% of residents who belong to a religious group, all but 1% belong to Christian churches.
The large percentage of these church members are Southern Baptist. But lest one jump to the conclusion that only a community dominated by evangelical Protestants can be capable of such barbaric racial violence--and Catholics certainly couldn't ever stoop to this barbaric behavior--it might be a good idea to keep in mind that one of the last, and most horrific, incidents of lynching to occur in the U.S. took place in June 1920 in Duluth, Minnesota. Which has a church membership rate of 53%.
Half of whom are Catholic.
And so, as I spend my days in the 1890s, reading news of events like Henry Smith's unthinkably savage public torture and murder in a "Christian" and "faith-based" community, and thinking, along with my uncle of several generations ago, Wilson Bachelor, about the very mixed role religion has played and continues to play in human history and human societies, I'm watching my Catholic co-religionists who are hotly defending "religious freedom" along with their bishops with no little perplexity.
Can they really not know, I ask myself, what religious groups and religious people have long been capable of doing under the banner of "religious freedom"? Are they really as blind as they appear to be to the tragic ambiguities of that phrase--"religious liberty"--that seems, to their eyes, always to be surrounded by bright and shining lights, as if it's an obvious and unmitigated good?
Do they know any history at all? Do they know of the Inquisition and auto-da-fes, of a period of Catholic history that the lynching of Henry Smith inevitably brings to mind for anyone who knows much history at all?
Even more, do they care about the losers of history, the Henry Smiths, the economic "failures," the 99%? And how can they possibly care about those losers, those failures, when their crusade to "protect" religious freedom implicitly serves the political interests of a party whose leading presidential candidate can casually observe, only yesterday, that the "very poor" are outside the purview of his interests. Because someone is taking care of them.
Or so he seems to have heard.
Can the highly educated Catholic intelligentsia and media spokespersons who have lined up behind their bishops with such alacrity to "defend" religious freedom, and who appear to think the bright-and-shining shibboleth term is self-explanatory and transparently good, really not know that Thomas Jefferson and other founding fathers who defended religious liberty did so precisely because, like Dr. Bachelor in the 1890s, they feared the well-documented ability of religion, when it had no restraints, to do considerable harm to human beings and the body politic?
And so they fought for religious liberty against the notion of an established church in order to mute the influence of religion, insofar as religious ideas and religious groups can produce the kind of violence that had torn European societies apart and resulted in widespread violence and massive loss of life on the eve of the colonization of North America. To use Jefferson's defense of religious liberty as a mask for granting any religious body special "conscience exemptions" permitting that body the "right" to flaunt laws designed to serve the common good--to discriminate--is to turn the concept on its head in a way that is exceptionally cynical. Or exceptionally stupid.
I'm not sure which. And the more I listen to my fellow Catholics of the intellectual-media class who are, these days, either exceptionally cynical or exceptionally stupid as they gaze in wonder at those bright and shining lights around the phrase "religious freedom," the more inclined I am to stay in the 1890s. And, with Dr. Bachelor, to rest and contemplate nature in the days left to me.
Since I don't do the stupidity very well. And I want to guard against becoming cynical as I prepare to meet my Maker.
According to the slideshow of images at Bill Moyers's Journal website to which I link above, the photo I've used as the graphic for this posting is from a cover of Billie Holiday's album "Strange Fruit."
No comments:
Post a Comment