Jesse James and Anwar al-Awlaki

Heather Cox Richardson

There has been a great deal of debate over whether or not it was legal for the Obama administration to order the September 30 killing of Anwar al-Awlaki. It seems unlikely to go far in the realm of political discussion, since al-Awlaki was not on American soil, and since few Americans seem to have digested the fact that, although he had a foreign name and was clearly implicated in major terrorist attacks on the United States, al-Awlaki was born in America and was thus an American citizen.

A similar question did, though, roil American politics in the 1880s: should the government be able to order the assassination of an American citizen? Then, unlike now, it was discussed on both sides of the political divide as a principled question of executive power and the rights of citizens.

The targeted citizen, in that case, was Jesse James.

James had fought for the Confederacy as one of Quantrill’s Raiders in Missouri. These men were so hated by the pro-Union Missourians that, when the end of the war permitted most Confederate soldiers to go home in peace, Unionists refused to acknowledge the Raiders as Confederate soldiers. Someone put a bullet in Jesse as he made his way home from the fighting.

For their part, James and his buddies were not cheerfully reconstructed ex-Confederates. They survived by robbing trains, banks, and express companies, all of which were associated after the Civil War with the Republican federal government. But James insisted that he was not a criminal; he had been forced outside the law by the government itself. After the war, ex-Confederate Democrats in Missouri could not vote, sit on juries, work as lawyers, or hold government offices. James maintained that the true perpetrators of the crimes for which he was blamed were Republicans. In his view, state laws barring Democrats from access to legal protection, juries, and offices guaranteed that he could never get a fair hearing. According to a sympathetic biographer (he referred to Jesse as “an angel of light”), their manhood forced men like James to “turn upon that law that hounded them and that society that hunted them, and outrage and defy it.”

Missouri officials had no luck bringing James to justice. Neither did Pinkerton detectives, hired by angry express company owners. (The James Gang robbed stagecoaches, banks, and trains and committing a host of murders along the way.) Finally, in desperation, the Missouri governor, T. T. Crittenden, persuaded a member of James’s own gang to murder him. Bob Ford shot James as he straightened a picture on the wall. When Ford and his brother pled guilty to the murder and were sentenced to death, the governor promptly pardoned them and paid them the bounty he had placed on James’s head.

Predictably, Democrats were outraged by the prospect of an elected Republican official arranging for the murder of a Democrat. But many Republicans were also unsettled. Crittenden had “hired an assassin” as if he were a potentate, one Republican newspaper editor wrote. Popular opinion swung quickly to an acknowledgement that James was a criminal, and even rejoiced that he was out of commission, but rejected entirely the idea that government officials should have the power to ignore legal processes and simply murder their domestic enemies. James’s portrayal as a man persecuted by the government made him a popular hero.

While any parallels should not be pushed too far, James’s situation was not unlike that of al-Awlaki. Both appear to have been criminals who protested a government that would not acknowledge their grievances. At the same time, al-Awlaki’s case raises questions the James case did not, questions, for example, about the nature of war powers during times of undeclared war, and how international terrorism should affect Constitutional rights. These are not unimportant issues. It’s too bad that they will most likely not get the bipartisan public airing they need in the wake of al-Awlaki’s death, the same public debate that followed Jesse James’s assassination.

Democracy on Trial: The Differences Between Protest and Mob Criminality

Philip White



In the past year, we have seen protests lead to the fall of autocrats in Yemen and Egypt, and incur the full wrath of dictators in Iran, Libya and Syria—where President Bashar al-Assad has used the army to crush resistance in the cities of Hama and Deil-al-Zor. With the use of jerry-rigged web connections in Egypt that overcame the government’s internet shutdown, and social networking tools such as Twitter in Iran, Libya and Syria, we in the West have had real-time insight into these demands for democracy and the repression they have prompted. From the living room to the highest office in the land, this coverage has prompted outrage over the denial of the right to protest that we take for granted. Indeed, Britain and America have led an international task force to prevent the slaughter of civilians and to remove the odious Colonel Gaddafi in Libya.



The common theme in each of these protests has been twofold: an indictment of the ruling regime’s abuses and control, and a call for elected, representative government through open and free elections. Have some of the protesters resorted to violence in the face of troops and tanks? Most certainly, but on the whole, these demonstrations have been peaceful. Perhaps this is because the protesters realize they cannot decry regime violence if they use violence in return, or maybe they know the world is watching. Whatever their motivation, they have not used their leaders’ harsh tactics as an excuse for widespread looting, vandalism, and brutality toward ethnic minorities.



Meanwhile, in my native England, one of the world’s oldest democracies and a supposedly “civilized” nation, armed mobs stalk the streets, burning cars, assaulting police officers and looting shops. As with the riots in Los Angeles in 1992, this was not a pre-meditated campaign of violence at its inception, but rather a spontaneous response to the death of a young man at the hands of the police. It should be noted that the mob did not wait for the results of the inquest before reacting in the worst possible way. Now, with five days of rioting passed, the disturbances are indeed coordinated, with the ringleaders using the same tools—texting, tweeting et al—as protesters in the Middle East and North Africa to spread their call for anarchy.



Here, we come to the need for clear delineation. The tech tools of the desired “revolution” may be similar, but the motives, methods and mentality are not the comparable. Participators in the “Arab Spring” are rebelling against regimes that deny them freedom of speech, expression, worship and the ballot box. Every aspect of their lives—from what they’re allowed to read in a newspaper to what they can view on a throttled internet—is controlled by the state.



In contrast, the criminals, and criminals they are, who are smashing up London, Birmingham, Manchester and other English cities live in a tolerant, open society that, despite its flaws, provides all citizens with the right to vote, to speak their minds, and to express themselves. Their recent acts are like the tantrums of a toddler who is trying to intimidate his parents into getting his way. Yet a toddler is more sophisticated, for he knows that he has a defined goal—to tip a bag of flour over his head or steal a toy from his baby sister, for example. These rioters, hooded and baseball bat-wielding—have no such clear aim. Instead, they rage against “the system,” and the politicians who are supposedly keeping them “down.” To punish the rich who they despise for their monetary success, they’re robbing diners at posh Notting Hill restaurants, trying to rip wedding rings off their fingers and demanding phones and cash. They’re also breaking into and stripping clean the businesses that they think represent the “evils” of capitalism. And it’s not just electronics and luxury goods chains that are under attack, but also those run by individuals who work as hard to eke out a living as the people who built up the nationwide businesses. Gangs of armed youths killed three innocent men, and others beat up journalists and those trying to stop the looting. These are not the actions of a group that deserves the “respect” they demand for their gangs, nor the right to indict anyone for their actions.



Democracy guarantees the right to protest, and in Egypt and Yemen we have seen that this can bring about change. Hark back to the March on Washington and we see that peaceful protests led by Martin Luther King, Jr. achieved their goals. Some of the rioters in England are from ethnic minorities (although just as many, or more, are white), and live in areas blighted by drugs, crime and absent fathers. There are doubtless problems spanning several generations that could be better addressed by Cameron’s coalition government. Yet these minorities are not denied places at lunch counters, made to use separate toilets or forced to sit at the back of buses, like King and those who stood alongside him.



The fundamental, liberating thing that they’re denying themselves is personal accountability. They are just a small, unrepresentative portion of the populaces they come from—99 percent of their neighbors watch in horror as their homes, businesses and cars burn. Many have joined mass cleanup operations, have decried the rioters’ actions and have protected their homes, businesses and places of worship from the mob. Those who are not on the streets indulging in mindless violence understand that you must take responsibility for yourself, and only you can make sure you stay out of a gang, stay in school, and obtain the job that your skills merit. The government is not forcing anyone to make poor choices, nor is it preventing economic, social or geographic mobility. Yet, regardless of whether they are Caucasian or another ethnicity, the rioters are making the all-too-common mistake of blaming others for their position, while abdicating responsibility.



The only way to bring about change in poor urban neighborhoods is for each person to be accountable for their thoughts and deeds, and to work to better themselves. Government programs can help, but handouts merely perpetuate the cycle, creating fiscal reliance on the state, removing the incentive to work and further encouraging the individual to avoid looking into the mirror of accountability.



If they want to truly protest, the English people who are raging on the streets should instead exercise their democratic right to demonstrate peacefully, and be thankful that they have the chance. In other parts of the world, people who are truly oppressed risk their lives for such rights. And they’re not beating cops, stealing TVs or burning down buildings with children inside to achieve them. Those English citizens who are doing such things should also recognize that democracy is not an a la carte menu from which you can pick certain bits while leaving others on the table. Thus, the rule of law in England must be upheld, and those guilty of vandalism, murder and arson will be rightly punished in the court of law, while they set themselves and their “cause” back even further in the court of public opinion.

London’s Burning! (And History’s Repeating Itself)

Dana Goblaskas



When I first heard about the riots that broke out in London’s Tottenham neighborhood on Saturday, I couldn’t help thinking that the situation sounded a little familiar. It all began peacefully as people protested the death of a young man at the hands of local police, and allegedly the chaos erupted after a 16-year-old girl threw a rock at police officers. That proved to be the spark that lit three days’ worth (so far) of riots all over London, as well as in Birmingham, Bristol, Liverpool, and Manchester.



The niggling thought that the riots reminded me of something bounced around in my brain for a few hours until it hit me—the Notting Hill Carnival riot of 1976. On August 30th of that year, the annual West Indian carnival descended into violence as youths threw bricks and rocks at police and set cars afire. I had heard about it from several interviews with The Clash’s front man Joe Strummer, who sang about the effect the riot had on him in the song, “White Riot.”



Strummer, along with Clash bassist Paul Simonon and manager Bernie Rhodes, was at the carnival when the riot broke out. As Strummer remembered in an interview in 1999, “Paul, Bernie and I [saw] this conga-line of policemen coming through the crowd. . . . Someone threw a brick at them, then another, [then] all hell broke loose.” (quote from The Complete Clash [2003] by Keith Topping) According to the BBC, the trouble started when police tried to arrest a pickpocket and “several black youths came to the pickpocket’s aid.” Relations between the police and London’s black community had been unstable all summer, and the Carnival ended up being the tipping point.



Fast-forward 35 years to the present. The Metropolitan Police, as part of Operation Trident—a unit dedicated to investigating gun crime in London’s black communities—have supposedly been increasing the number of stop-searches made on members of the community. As a result, suspicion of and resentment for police is bubbling under the surface. Unemployment rates in Tottenham are double the national average, and the neighborhood has one of the highest concentrations of poverty in the country. Then on August 4th, 29-year-old Mark Duggan was shot and killed by police during an attempted arrest. That lit the tinderbox.



Both the riots of 1976 and 2011 were prefaced by stark economic climates (as Strummer growled in “White Riot:” “All the power in the hands of the people rich enough to buy it”), high unemployment, and tense race relations. All it took each time was one moment of perceived injustice for the violence to erupt. Though it feels cliché to say it, these riots happening in London are a perfect example of history repeating itself. But whereas the Notting Hill riot lasted only one day, the current chaos in London has been going on for three, and has spread to other cities.



If people continue refusing to recognize what can happen if we don’t learn from history, how bad will the riots be a few decades down the road?

The Perspective that History Gives Us

Randall Stephens

I post here a brief talk I gave to history students at our annual Senior Banquet.

“Clio, the muse of history, is as thoroughly infected with lies as a street whore with syphilis.”
- Arthur Schopenhauer, 1851

We can hope that today the muse of history is at least a little less infected with the STDs of falsehood. In fact, I think it is much less so. History today is not chained to nationalism, bigotry, and religious zealotry as it was over 150 years ago. And maybe historians now cast a more critical eye on the past.

One thing that good history—the non-infected kind—can do is provide deep insight or perspective on the present. Someone who is informed by history can engagingly read current events, discern the issues that animate contemporary political battles, and see things more clearly through the eyes of history.

Last year, I delivered a little talk at this banquet about how history relates to the life of the mind, how it enriches our intellects and encourages us to better understand our world. This year—a year that has been rocked by traumatic events and social chaos—I’d like to focus on the perspective that history provides for us.

The famous American historian of race and slavery Kenneth Stamp wrote that: “With the historian it is an article of faith that knowledge of the past is a key to understanding the present.” How might this statement be true? How can our knowledge of the past lead to a better understanding of the present?

Let’s take a few examples from 2010 and 2011.

America’s most violent, memorable conflict, the Civil War, still has us reflecting on the legacy of race and racism. We still wonder how it is that this country holds together. (Eighteenth-century anti-federalists would be shocked that our republic operates as effectively as it does.) We still worry about the enormous political divisions that pit one American against another.

To quote southern novelist William Faulkner’s character Gavin Stevens: “The past is never dead; it’s not even past” (Requiem for a Nun, 1951). This year marks the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War, at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, off the coast of Charleston. When we think of that bloody conflict, is it true that the past isn’t dead, that it’s not even past? In some sense . . . yes. Two weeks ago an NPR reporter observed that

It's been nearly 150 years since the war began. But even now, the city of Charleston is still figuring out how to talk about the war and commemorate the anniversary.

Last December in Charleston, there was a re-enactment of that Secession Convention. It was followed by a Secession Ball—billed as "a joyous night of music, dancing, food and drink."

Costumed revelers waltzed and sang Dixie. Many South Carolinians were appalled; the NAACP protested outside. . . .

Many people in Charleston talk about using this anniversary to right the wrongs of the Civil War centennial, 50 years ago. Then, it was celebrated as a joyful tribute to South Carolina's Confederate heritage. Now, many remember the 1961 anniversary with embarrassment.

We could go on by looking at the historical parallels of or the differences between contemporary American political battles that have set pro-labor and anti-labor groups against each other and similar struggles from long ago. The political and intellectual fracturing of America, too, could use a historical perspective. (A plug for Historically Speaking here: Read the Daniel Rodgers forum!) Comparisons between our current economic meltdown and the recessions and depressions of yesteryear would also shed light on where we’ve been and maybe tell us something about where we’re headed.

But let’s shift our gaze to world affairs and think of how a historical point of view might inform how we view major events or natural disasters.

The Japanese earthquake and tsunami was unimaginably horrific. No one living in that part of the world had seen anything like it before. But throughout recorded human history natural disasters much like it have changed societies and altered the way men and women live. In fact, the New York Times published a story about stone tablets, some six centuries old, that warned of and recounted the devastation wrought by tsunamis. Among other things, these markers remind us that men and women have been learning from the past and applying those lessons to the present for ages. ("On Stones in Japan, Tsunami Warnings — Aneyoshi Journal," April 21, 2011.) It also humbles us when we view the world from the perspective of the long arc of history. We are not removed from natural and historical processes that have always shaped human life.

Moving across the globe we might think of other ways that our meditation on the past helps us understand the present. . . .

Is Europe in decline, as so many pundits have shouted from the rooftops? Is England in particular on the ropes? Is any of this talk of downward mobility anything new? "The country is used to the idea of national decline" writes Ian Jack in the April 24 issue of Newsweek, "'declinism' became a feature of British historical study many years ago—the U.S. is just now catching up. Public fears over the nation’s capability date back to at least the Boer War." You need to know something about the history of European nations and the long economic development of the West, of course, to make such judgments.

What about the revolutions that are reforming/realigning North African and Middle East nations right now? These seem to have come out of the blue, yet, of course, such political and social upheavals are the result or years of oppression and have a history that is politically complicated and deserving of serious attention. What might we learn about how contemporary revolutions will play out? Certainly we could look at past revolutions in third world nations and former colonies to get a clearer picture.

I conclude by highlighting the words of southern novelist Robert Penn Warren, who remarked with sternness: “The past is always a rebuke to the present.” The past makes us think about larger trends and gives us perspective and a more complete picture. We cannot afford to ignore the nuances and the fascinating point of view that history gives us. Without it we would roam about dazed, amnesiac, and blind to the world around us.

Getting Students to Read . . .

Randall Stephens

Over at Times Higher Education Tara Brabazon wonders how to get underaduates to care about reading ("Bringing Them to Books," March 9, 2011). I enjoy Brabazon's snarky reports from across the Atlantic. This one is particularly witty and relevant.

"One short sentence chills the expectations of teachers," Brabazon begins. "A student, in reply to a tutorial question or query about an assignment, shrilly replies: 'I don’t like reading.' This is an ice pick through scholarly culture. It is naive. It is short-sighted. It is foolish. It is ignorant. Without reading, a student is trapped within the limitations of their own life, confusing personal experience with researched expertise. Reading builds a productive network of authors, approaches, theories and evidence." For Brabazon, "Reading is not meant to be liked or disliked: it is a way to understand the views of others." How should professors "support the act of reading," she asks. Brabazon describes her use of GoodReads, a social media site where readers across the world post reviews and comments about their books. "GoodReads enables students to comment on books, meet authors who are registered on the site and commence a dialogue with an array of interested groups." Sounds like a great idea.

In my classes I use other, rudimentary strategies. I usually give a very basic quiz on the day that a book is due in class. (Sounds awful, I admit, but it works.) The quiz is elementary, asking the most simple questions to ensure that students are at least reading the book that we will be discussing in class. In my experience students need to know that reading is not optional and the quiz tends to help.

Still, how can a professor "make" a student care about reading? I occasional begin my classes by describing a recent book--by a historian, sociologist, religious studies scholar--and then using that as a hook for the lecture of that day. I also start off classes by pointing out a history book or a newspaper article that connects the topic we are covering in the class with a current event or a larger historical theme. Maybe, just maybe, that will make students think about how reading and being informed makes their lives richer and more interesting.

We know that reading widely helps individuals develop as writers. So, I tell my students that if they want to fine tune their writing and become better writers, they should read opinion journals, newspapers, serious nonfiction, and the like. William Zinsser puts it well: "writing is learned by imitation." He suggests that students find a writer whose style they like. "Study their articles clinically. Try to figure out how they put their words and sentences together. That’s how I learned to write, not from a writing course."

I'd be curious to know what carrots others use to attract students to the practice of reading.

Poltical Assassination and Motivation

Randall Stephens

On November 23, 1963 the New York Times announced "Leftist Accused: Figure in a Pro-Castro Group is Charged--Policeman Slain." Will Fritz, head of the Homicide Bureau, Dallas Police Department, linked Lee Harvey Oswald to the left-wing "Fair Play for Cuba Committee." Such connections proved more complicated than originally imagined. Oswald lied and was, by any account, a shiftless loser. Journalists and commentators grasped for a motive in the chaotic hours and days after President Kennedy's assassination. Texas, and Dallas in particular, was a hotbed of anti-Kennedy feeling and theories of a right-wing plot circulated widely. (Replace Texas then with Arizona now and some striking similarities in public discussion are apparent. Tea Partiers and John Birchers . . . anti-immigration and anti-communism . . .)

There was, in fact, enough hard-right political terrorism in the South to make such views seem credible enough. The Klan harassed and threatened civil rights workers and dynamited churches and schools. Pundits called Birmingham "Bombingham." In rare cases, gunmen assassinated black leaders and activists. The murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., in April 1968 created a political firestorm and produced innumerable theories as Kennedy's murder had less than five years before. After King's death in Memphis riots erupted across the country's cities and conspiracy theories of Klan involvement and a government assassin gripped the imagination of Americans roiled by the events of a turbulent year. Writing in Life magazine in June 1968 Paul O'Neil observed, "No real criminal organization conspired with [James Earl] Ray," King's alleged killer. Ray was, in O'Neil's words, like Robert Kennedy's assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, prone to bizarre fantasies and unreal self conceptions.

Medical professionals, journalists, and the general public have often questioned an assassin's sanity. And the current debate over the political motivations of Gabrielle Giffords' mentally unstable shooter parallel related events in history.

Was Leon Czolgosz, who shot and killed President McKinley nearly 110 years ago, insane? The American establishment, observes Eric Rauchway in Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt's America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003), could not "admit that a low criminal had accomplished so much, and so from the start they insisted he was insane, and his action an accident of a callous fate" (x).

What of America's most infamous assassin? "One is naturally tempted to ask whether John Wilkes Booth, son of the 'Mad Tragedian,' might have been found insane under existing laws," writes Michael W. Kauffman in American Brutus: John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln Conspiracies (New York: Random House, 2005), 353. Wilkes's brother thought madness ran through the male portion of the family. But, in this case, notions of melancholy and madness were closely linked. And diagnosing someone from the the remove of nearly 150 years would certainly be difficult.

Historians often ask why people do the things they do. Is it trickier to answer that question about current figures than about those from ages past? Figuring out the motivations of men and women from long ago, like judging why an unstable young Arizona man went on a shooting spree, can be a tough game. David Hackett Fischer explored motivation in his controversial, argumentative Historians' Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (New York: Harper and Row, 1970):

Historians have often used motivational explanations in their work. Almost always, they have used them badly. Problems of motive in academic historiography tend to be hopelessly mired in a sort of simple-minded moralizing which is equally objectionable from an ethical and an empirical point of view. Lord Rosebery once remarked that what the English people really wished to know about Napoleon was whether he was a good man. The same purpose often prevails among professional scholars who are unable to distinguish motivational psychology from moral philosophy, and even unwilling to admit that there can be a distinction at all. Moreover, many scholars tend to find flat, monistic answers to complex motivational problems, which further falsifies their interpretations (187).

But that won't keep Americans from wondering, speculating, and trying to make some sense out of seemingly senseless acts of violence, past or present.