on television and online, c-span is your unfiltered view of government so you can make up your own mind. brought to you as a public service by your cable or satellite provider. american history tv continues now as historians analyze the correlation between violence and u.s. political change from the american revolution to present day. this was part of a conference held at purdue university. it's an hour and a half. all right. since we have a very on-time sort of coming of the room, i'm going to go ahead and kick us off. thank you so much for coming to the violence in american politics panel. i think you'll see it as an incredibly timely panel and a really good time to be putting these topics into the context of a broader american history. i'm going to start off by introducing our panel and everyone's going to give our opening statement and then we

start the conversation. sitting right next to me is an assistant professor of history cole jones. in addition to his book, he has published articles in the journal of the early republic. he is currently at work on a project provisionally titled patrick henry's war. kelly carter jackson is a 19th century historian. her book "force and freedom, black abolitionists and the politics of violence" out from the university of pennsylvania press, provides the first historical analysis exclusively focused on violence among .

gideon is a phd candidate in history at northwestern university. his dissertation explores the -- his research has received the support of the congressional center, the institute of american history, the melon foundation and the social science research counsel. finally, felix harcourt. he is the assistant editor of two volumes of eleanor roosevelt's collected papers. so coming from charlottesville, virginia, where i watched as neo

fascis fascists, it was also a moment that opened a debate about political violence, particularly as americans learned more about antifa. with visible racist political violence on the rise in the past few years, would antifa cost racists the moral high ground. did it make them irredeemable. those are the kinds of questions i run into when speaking to groups about

>> thank you so much for organizing this amazing conference. so my research addresses a perennial theme in the scholarship on political revolutions, the relationship between violence and political change. in both the popular and scholarly imagination, political revolution conjures images of

political violence. from the violence enacted during the arab spring in 2011 to that of the russian revolution of 1917 or the french revolutionary terror of 1793-94. revolutionary political change seems to come hand in hand with widespread violence. culture historians describe violence as a language. it's a way of communicating when other forms of communication break down. when protest fails to achieve the desired change, discourse can devolve into

the correlation often appears to be transhistorical. violence is the common denominator of revolutions. what about the american revolution? unlike the french, haitian, mexican, russian, chinese, countless other political revolutions, america's revolutions seem staid, even restrained. although hardly non-violent, we can all thank mel gibson for his gory reminder in "the patriot." american revolutionary violence appears legitimate, justified, even comical. think boston tea party or tar and feathers. it's hard to imagine john adams or thomas jefferson lopping people's heads off while wearing knee breeches and powdered wigs. america's experience does not appear to resemble that of the

revolutions of other nations in which people were killed, property destroyed and everything turned upside down. for wood, the revolution's radicalism lay in its republican ideology and the idea of popular sovereignty. this was an ideology that would transform not only america's government, but society as well, all of which was achieved by the early 19th century without ever erecting a guillotine in philadelphia. the apparent absence of widespread violence has prompted some historians to question whether the american revolution was really all that revolutionary. after all, king george iii survived the conflict with his head intact. perhaps america's revolution was unique, maybe it was even exceptional. in this framing, the american model appears as a shining city upon a hill, an kpaexample to b emulated if not exported around

the globe. yet to make this claim requires willful ignorance of the bloody civil warfare that pitted british americans against their metropolitan cousins, american loyalists against their patriot neighbors, liberated slaves against their erstwhile masters and indigenous nations against one another. most historians of the american revolution have segregated the political and social transformations of the era from the actual fighting. thus, we have a war for independence with its drums and generals and battles which is separate from the political revolution of 1776. when thinking of the political history, scholars often concentrate on the declaration of independence's enlightened preamble and forget jefferson's vitriolic denunciation of king george for destroying the lives of our people.

this hwould have pleased the founding fathers to no end. as john addams wrote jefferson n 1815, what do we mean by the revolution? the war? that was no part of the revolution. only an effect and consequence of it. adams and his peers scrubbed the war's violence from their histories. theirs was the good revolution, the moderate revolution, the gentlemanly revolution. but adams' revolution was not the one its victims remembered. recently historians no doubt influenced by our post 9/11 world's ongoing confrontation with political revolution and political violence, read terrorism, have worked to bridge the gap between the revolution's

rhetoric and its reality, unearthing shocking levels of violence in the process. but highlighting this violence is not enough. we must seek to understand its social, cultural and political causes and effects. if not, we will continue to accept a narrative of the american revolution divided into two halves. on the one side, the war, destructive and repressive. and on the other, the political revolution, idealistic, though unfinished. breaking down this barrier requires making the connection between revolutionary political change and revolutionary violence. my forthcoming book which is a history of the treatment of prisoners of war and the cycle of vengeance that treatment generated, centers the war and its horrors in the scholarly debate about the character and consequences of the american revolution. it argue that is the political revolution, rejecting monarchy

in favor of a republic had the unintended consequence of transforming the war waged to achieve it. by making the people sovereign, the revolution shattered the political elite's monopoly on je legitimate violence, fostering the conditions necessary for a. >> good morning. i look at a lot of the violence that is taking place, particularly in the 1850s before the civil war, i see the 1850s

as one of the most violent decades to prelude the civil war. i want to tell a story that you're probably all familiar with, the story of senator charles sumner from massachusetts and his caning in the senate chamber. i also want to go further and tell you how people responded and in particular how black people responded to this caning. so charles sumner, to give you a little context, is giving a speech. he's talking about the kansas nebraska act and talking about how horrible he thinks this act is. so charles sumner spoke out against the kansas nebraska act. using incendiary language and sexual imagery, he claimed southern's crime against kansas was, quote, akin to the rape of a virgin. he accused senator butler of being in love with a harlot,

that harlot being slavery. his three-hour speech was so controversial that steven douglas remarked to a colleague, this damn fool is going to get himself shot by some other damn fool. sure enough preston brooks, congressman to south carolina and nephew to andrew butler intended to make a lesson out of sumner. political violence took place not only in the remote territories of the west, but also in the senate chamber of the nation's capitol. just two days later while sitting at his chamber desk, brooks approached sumner and said, quote, i have read your speech twice over carefully, it is liable on south carolina and mr. butler, who is a relative of mine. at that moment he began to strike sumner over the head using a thick cane with a gold head. sumner was repeatedly bludgeoned over and over on his entire body. he tried to crawl under his desk

for rescue but his desk was b t bolted to the floor. brooks beat him so relentlessly that the desk eventually released from the floor. as sumner lay bloody and unconscious, brooks only stopped when his cane broke. in the end, sumner miraculously survived. it took him more than three years to recover from his injuries and some might argue that he never fully recovered. what i think is interesting is the letters of support that poured in for charles sumner from the black community. one letter that i'd like to share with you in particular. sumner's attack validated african-american's desires to intervene in politics at the national level and have their voices heard. one of the most remarkable responses to sumner's beating came from an editorial in the new orleans daily creole, a black newspaper. the op-ed was titled "a challenge to mr. brooks."

ms. amelia robinson called the attacks cowardly, to beat a man unarmed and down. she referred to brooks as a cringing puppy, who she would gladly challenge to meet her any place with pistols, rifles or cowhides. the outrage had no bearing on her sex. she like other black leaders was exasperated by the sacrifices that cost her dearly. she was 50 years old and a widow. she lost two sons in the mexican/american war. quote, well rk let us see some boasted courage. you are afraid to meet a man. dare you meet a woman. robinson declared that she was anxious to do her country some service either by whipping or choking the coward lly roughian.

she was willing to put her strong words into print and expose her disdain regarding the attack for sumner. much is revealed by robinson's remarks. she was publicly challenging senator brooks and even taunting him. she wrote with rage that signalled she had little to lose. the fact that sumner was immobilized from most of the beating under his desk was perhaps the greatest act of cowardice on brook's part. she claimed she would even whip him without weapons, quote, by

choking the cowardly ruffian. robinson was 50 and fearless and few men white or black responded to threats to meet sumner's violence with violence. robinson was willing to not just take on any man but a public figure and a politician. the significance of her being a black woman threatening violence against a white man should also be duly noted. the sexual violence that white men committed against black women was rampant. sumner was not wrong to allude to sexual imagery in his speech. it is likely that robinson's rage also stemmed from gendered violence that enslaved black women faced daily. accordingly, her response was clear, meet violence with violence, or more specifically, meet cowardly acts with justice. thank you. [ applause ]

>> so today i'm going to talk about my research which focuses on a form of voter intimidation that might not fit all that well with the topic of the panel because it's an explicitly non-violent one or at least it seems to be. i'm talking about economic voter intimidation. this intimidation is typically done by an employer against an employee. there are cases of intimidation, coercion going all the way back into the 18th century. in the last half of the 19th century after the panic of 1873, a really disastrous financial panic, there was a crisis of economic intimidation. the number of people who were

department f dependant for their wages on one boss dramatically increased as well. as political contests became closer and closer, it became a tactic to use their employees to try to win close elections. i'm going to give you a few examples of how that worked and also talk about the long-term consequences of this kind of intimidation on the laws that we have today. because to an extent that historians and political scientists have not grappled with economic intimidation is why we vote in secret and economic intimidation in particular activated labor constituencies in a way they never had before. what did voting look like before we voted in secret? i'll give you just one example, a perfect example of it from

oswego, new york. the polling place was in the center of the building, but to get to that polling place, to get into the center of the building you had to pass by two tables. one was staffed by republican, one by democratic operatives and they were the ones who gave you your ballot. the ballots were printed by parties, there was no official ballot. the operatives that worked for the republican party at that polling place happened to also work for a man named thomas kingsford. you might use kingsford starch in your cooking. it's used today. as the employees walked into the building, the republican operatives would hand them their tickets and remind them they were expected to vote the way thomas kingsford wanted them to. as one of the democratic observers testified, the workers dare not do it.

they dare not change their ticket, because they're watched. that was the key element, that they're being watched as they walk into the polls. because they were precarious at work during these very tough economic times and insecure at the polls, workers often had little recourse. this happened throughout the country and the crisis blew up because it was a politically useful crisis for some people. while there were thousands of people being intimidated, it was also useful for the partisan presses of the time to accuse the other side of doing this even more than they were. gradually democratic presses began to accuse republican employers of intimidating their employees out of proportion with what they were actually doing. this is a real crisis, this is really happening, but it is also a rhetorical crisis. these forms of intimidation,

threatening to fire someone if they don't vote the way you want to struck deeply at what a lot of workers believed was their manhood, their independence, their ability to provide for their families. in portland, maine in 1880 a road working municipal crew in portland were worried because there was a tough winter coming. the election took place in september. they knew the winter was coming and they didn't want to be out of work for the winter. their foreman yelled out as they walked to the polls, vote for your bread and butter. he walked with them to the polls, watched as they took the ticket that he wanted and voted. they had very little choice. it seems that one person actually refused to do so and went home and was never employed on the road crew again.

it could interlace with other forms of coercion, other violent forms of intimidation. this was especially true in the south. in virginia the black workers of the insane asylum were marched down to the polls by their boss. there were two lines to vote, the white line and the colored line. the employees from the asylum were allowed to skip both lines. of course the white line was allowed to vote before the colored line. these men were allowed to vote, but they absolutely were not allowed to vote for the candidates they wished to vote for. in this case they were told to vote for the democratic ticket and they did. the legal intimidation, the legal separation and suppression is overlaid on the knowledge of the violence rendered against

african-americans in the south and then add to that the coercion, the intimidation of losing your job. states f s tried to fight again this intimidation a number of ways. they passed several laws making this kind of intimidation illegal. in 1884, they actually attempted to enforce these laws. the state of connecticut arrested a man who had intimidated his employee in a mill in connecticut. the man said, i told him what to do when he went to vote, but the court dismissed the case. the judge determined that the employer had simply been using his first amendment right to tell his employee how to vote. gradually states began to adopt secret ballot laws. the secret ballot was invented in australia in 1851, comes to the united states shortly

thereafter. and the first american to advocate for the secret ballot in print is a man named henry george, who's a reform advocate. this is 1871 before he's famous for his reform advocacy. he advocates for a secret ballot because it would end bribery and the coercion of voters by their employers. the secret ballot, the first time it's mentioned in the united states is coupled directly with economic voter intimidation. and george's allies in reform and labor circles took up the call and advocated for ballot secrecy. the socialistic labor party was the first party to include ballot secrecy in their national platform in 1885. most states passed secret ballot laws, finally separating employers from their employees when they went to the polls. but those laws weren't passed in

all states. particularly in the south, secret ballot laws lagged. south carolina didn't pass a secret ballot law until 1929. secret ballot laws are not necessarily useful to protect against generalized forms of intimidation. they don't really protect african-americans going to the polls. they protect specific workers from their specific employers. secret ballot laws are never going to be effective at preventing generalized intimidation. that's not what they were designed to do. they were first enacted to prevent bribery, intimidation and this chain of knowledge between an employer and an employee about how they were voting. especially now as we're doing away with ballot secrecy in a number of ways through allowing ballot selfies in polling place, oh yes the supreme court refers to ballot selfies as taking a picture of your ballot whether or not you're in it. they don't seem to understand

what selfie means. also through no excuse absentee balloting reintroduces the possibility that you are voting in the presence of someone who might have a coercive influence on you. we need to understand why we have the laws we do before we decide to do away with them. i think the secret ballot is one of those most important laws too. thank you. [ applause ] >> as you can tell perhaps i'm getting over a cold so i'm a little croaky, that's one of the reasons why i will keep my formal comments brief, the other reason being that i want to get to our conversation. really this is just so that we can understand and convert the context in which i'm approaching these questions and this issue. my research focuses particularly on the ku klux klan of the 1920s

which is really when the organization was at the height of its power in the united states. it's when the organization is breaking sectional boundaries, moving outside the south to establish a nationwide power base, one of the strongest, most kind of powerful and influential klan strong holds, for example, was right here in indiana, of course, and the klan of the '20s peaks in membership numbers in 1924 with an estimated 4 million members nationwide. those members are drawn to the organization not just as adherence to the ideology, to the tenets of white supremacism, but also the klan of the '20s candidly sells itself as the answer to a variety of ills or supposed ills. so it's a fraternity

organization that protects against the feminization and the breakdown of mass clue masculine society, it's a law and order group, they are moralists defending against the apparent evils of modernism and jazz. oh, no, they're very upset at jazz. they are nativists particularly picking up on popular anti-catholic and anti-semitic sentiments to really drive calls to restrict immigration or halt immigration entirely. and far more than this, really the klan is very responsive to local concerns and tailors

itself in those ways. so we have this kind of interesting phenomenon with the klan of the '20s where even as this membership grows, klan violence declines. in fact, racial violence overall declines through the 1920s after the kind of sharp spike in lynchings post world war i. certainly compared to what's effectively the paramilitary klan of reconstruction or the terrorism of the klan in the civil rights era, historians have generally written about the klan of the 1920s as less physically violent, though, of course, still driven by the same fundamentally violent ideology. that's not the whole picture, though. and to correct that misunderstanding what we need to

do is look at the klan's political involvement. i think it's particularly interesting to look at this from the federal level. now, if we focus on electoral success, it's pretty easy to dismiss the influence of the ku klux klan on the politics of the 1920s, which is what historians have generally tended to do. they are very, very good at drawing a lot of attention to themselves, they are generally very, very bad at actually getting a klan candidate or a candidate tagged as affiliated with the klan to be elected to office. they have successes sporadically generally in local strong holds, indiana, of course, one of the most notorious strong holds of klan power, as i mentioned, and, therefore, some relative success in electing local officials and

state officials, but very rare at the federal level. what my current research focuses on is the fact that that electoral success isn't really the key to understanding the klan's influence on federal politics. the key to understanding the klan's involvement with federal politics in the '20s is understanding the ways in which the klan functioned as a political lobbying movement. not to think about what the klan is doing at the ballot box, but to think about what the klan is doing on a yacht on the potomac filled with senators and chorus girls. real situation. and it's there that the klan is tremendously impactful in

shaping legislation that is directly relevant to klan interests and particularly klan hatreds. it's there where the klan will help shape what federal prohibition legislation is going to look like. it's there that the klan is going to help shape what the immigration restriction legislation over the 10920s looks like. because of this the klan doesn't need extra legal vigilante violence to achieve their goals, instead the klan of the 1920s is very effective at shaping policy to support their violent ideology. political power meant the klan violence expressed itself as state violence.

it expressed itself not through robed klansmen, but through federal prohibition enforcement agents, it expressed itself through the border patrol created in 1924, the same year that the klan's membership peaks. and so if we are to understand the enduring legacy of the klan, it is that intersectional nexus between bigotry, violence and politics that we need to understand. thank you. [ applause ] >> well, that is a pretty good place to jump off about a broader conversation about violence in political history. i think that the first thing i'd love to hear you all talk about is the relationship between violence and politics from kind of a broader level, which is to say i think that there is often this idea that violence is a failure of politics and somehow

exists outside of politics and that in some cases it seems like violence is kind of a core component of politics in a lot of ways. so where do you see violence fitting into political history and into the practice of politics? >> well, i can say my own classes i talk about violence really -- violence is how we understand history in a lot of ways. that every significant moment in history we benchmark with violence. so even if you think about how classes are taught, it's like from the slave trade to the american revolution, the american revolution to the civil war and then we teach classes, you know, on the war, in between the wars, the cold war, world war ii. all of these moments. 9/11. like all of these moments are violent moments and that is how we mark turning points. so in a lot of ways i see

violence as this great like accelerator or this fluid that sort of moves political movements or social movements along. and i think it's a great way for looking at how we examine change because i think a lot of times there is a tendency to have this idea that change comes about through nonviolence or that when we look at the civil rights movement, oh, see, they pushed nonviolence and that's sort of how we get these great changes, but what they're responding to is violence, very much so in every aspect of their lives. so i'm constantly pushing students to sort of nuance how we understand violence, not to sort of dismiss it as something that's fanatical or peripheral or just is an episode that happens, it's just a moment, but really as an explanation for how policy is made or not made in terms of how progress is developed or not developed. and i think violence is the

perfect framework for that. >> so i think -- this is an excellent question. obviously -- i mean, where does violence fit in? if we need to think about violence as a political language, that violence has meaning, specific acts of violence have meaning and they can be used for political purposes. very rarely is violence unrestrained, unrestricted. it's usually focused for a particular purpose and groups will use violence, specific acts of violence, to try to get their political point across. so that's one thing i have students think about, what does it mean? what does a lynching mean in the 1920s, right? what are they trying to say? what does a cross burning mean? what are they trying to say? there's a sort of ritual to this. who is their audience, the audience of an act of violence, the sort of performative nature

of it. i think we also as political historians need to think about the role of violence and the state and the growth of the state, right? talking about the border agents, right, the violence of the state, violence is embedded in the state. the idea that the modern state has monopoly on violence and what constitutes legitimate violence, thinking about police violence, police brutality, the violence of the state, et cetera. if you get students to think through that as you were saying i think it's an enormously useful exercise, but also we should continue to be attentive to in our scholarship as political historians. i think we can't ignore that violence is at the very heart of american political history.

>> one element as well that i've come across in my research and in teaching students is that it's very easy to play a what aboutism game with forms of political violence. to say, oh, because this party used this form of violence and this party got into a scuffle, they're both violent, to put the label of violence -- i think this is what you were talking about earlier about antifa. one thing that i noticed in the gilded age in particular was that being able to claim that the other party was also doing bad things was a way for you to excuse your much worse things. thomas bracket reed the republican speaker of the house in the 1890s when talking about lynchings and violence in the south and economic intimidation in the north said, yes, these are both crimes but murder and catching fish out of season are both crimes, too, no one would ever confuse them. keep that in mind that when we are talking about violence we need to be very clear about what kinds of violence we're talking about, historical actors are using, how they compare to each other and not to just label each interactions between people as violence. to dig deeper into that. >> i teach a class on terrorism in the united states, the fun never stops in my classroom. i think i do so as a way of

getting -- addressing with students the idea that not just violence, but fundamentally political violence has been a through line in american history. when we look at obviously definitions of terrorism are going to be crucial within that, but ideas of legitimate violence, illegitimate violence, state violence, individual violence, they really do often function as driving questions in, as we kind of said, change or moments of change. actually to kind of do the terribly uncouth thing and respond to a question with a question. something that i was thinking about as i was listening to everybody talk was this kind of almost myopic place we are in today with regards to the use of

violence and political violence particularly. it's interesting -- this is, again, off the top of my head, just kind of thinking about this, but do you think we've come to a place where reform is associated with nonviolence, but revolution is associated with violence, and that that's why kind of political violence is seen as beyond the pale now? >> yeah, what do you guys think of that? does violence sort of render whatever the political aim is i will illegitimate? is revolution considered illegitimate today in american culture? >> i would say in some ways yes. for my own work, you know, i think it's very easy for us to look back at slavery and say that it was wrong, hopefully. i think it should be easy to say that. but i think that, you know, a lot of the stories in my book are about black abolitionists who are fighting back, who are

protecting their communities and using force and violence to protect their communities. everyone loves hearing these stories because they are like, yeah, slavery is wrong. i think in some ways you can even support that in talking about segregation or jim crow, hopefully we can all agree that that was wrong and that people will see that even, you know, taking up arms in self-defense might be, you know, rational, but i think that today the way that a race is sort of reincarnated itself and the way that it looks, it's extremely difficult to take up those same sort of stances to use protective violence or self-defense in a way to purport, you know, a revolution or change. people think that you're

radical, people think that you're crazy. it's funny because in the civil rights movement they thought they were crazy, too, and even the abolitionists they thought that they were crazy. so i feel like maybe you need distance in order to accomplish it, but, no, i don't think that people -- i think that people believe that you can accomplish anything through nonviolence and while i agree with that to some extent there is a little bit of, i think, historical naiveté in terms of how we really see change come about throughout this country. >> excellent. that's a great question. i'd like to just jump in there and take us back to the founding moment because i think that we're living with the legacies of that. this is a nation that was born in violent revolution, civil warfare, yet the founding

fathers eschewed that because the flip side of revolution is rebellion, slave rebellion, insurrection, illegitimate, must be suppressed by the state. who you do you justify the foundations of a new nations state that was founded in an act of illegitimate violence to overthrow the sitting government. the way that you do that is in part rewriting the history of that initial revolution, but then also combating -- becoming rather counterrevolutionary -- i think there is an argument to be made that the united states is one of the most counterrevolutionary countries in history, especially considering slave rebellion, but also around the world. i mean, they come out of vietnam, this is a counterrevolution. so i think that we as political historians sort of need to think through that perhaps a bit more and maybe trace some -- historians we love to explain change, right, but to think about some of the continuities that exist as well.

>> i think some of this can be explained in a way through the recent rehabilitation of john brown and the fact that he's now being reintroduced into the american cannon as the most american of all heroes when that would seem like in part because of the aftermath of the civil war and white supremacist efforts to paint him as a crazy person but also at the time he was considered quite the radical. so now to have him discussed as, you know, at the forefront of american liberty is a kind of remarkable moment. i wonder what it might say about the people who are understanding or putting him back into the american cannon in that way, what do they think about political violence if they're making john brown their patron saint. >> just to pick up on that for a second as well, it's interesting that we're seeing that the mainstreaming of that john brown idea now, right, but the people who have most often in the recent past compared themselves to john brown have been those attacking abortion clinics and

abortion providers. >> yeah. yeah. >> and that is this very specific form of political violence that they do see themselves acting within the tradition of. >> absolutely. >> one of the words that keeps coming up is legitimate and illegitimate, what's interesting about the question of violence is that aside from a very, very few committed pacifists, there aren't that many people in the united states hong that all violence is illegitimate. so how do you see historical actors making the case for their violence being legitimate? because i think that as historians it often changes over time which actors we think are -- john brown is a great example of this -- which actors are using violence legitimately and which ones aren't. so how are your people making their cases? >> i can tell you my black

abolitionists i have found no other group of people who have a moral sort of impetus for using violence. they talked often about american hypocrisy, about the american revolution being uncomplete, that the haitian revolution in haiti is where the real revolution takes place because they actually freed their slaves and put in place equality. so i think that black abolitionists are saying since slavery is wrong, slavery is violent and that we have a moral authority, a god-given right and that's really important that when they can sort of solidify their legitimacy with biblical tenets, who can argue against the bible, right? certainly in the 19th century you can't really do that. and so they're using these, you know, biblical allegories to justify using violence, to justify using force, and they're using revolutionary language -- i love the idea -- i talk about this in my book as well,

violence as a political language, they're using that language of give me liberty or give me death. he who would be free must himself strike the first blow. they are using this language over and over again to threaten and provoke, you know, the abolition of slavery and they feel justified in that because they believe that they are most oppressed. i think, again, it's very easy for us to look at this from a 21st century perspective and say, of course you're justified in this, but i also think that legitimacy comes through winning. so we look at the american revolution as legitimate because they won. we look at, you know, the civil war is legitimate because the north won, right? but what happens when you don't win? does that mean your cause is no longer legitimate? i think especially when you are looking at black freedom and black liberation there has not been a lot of victories but that doesn't mean that these actions are not legitimate.

>> that's excellent. the american revolutionaries were masters of this, of this game of legitimate versus illegitimate, right? because from the very beginning of this process they used the press, right, to -- they mobilized the press, were really quite effective way to paint their enemies, those who opposed the glorious cause or common cause as illegitimate, inherently illegitimate. if you think of the declaration of independence it's this masterful political document justifying american nationhood on the grounds that the british violated the laws of nations, respectable nations and they were guilty of these barbaric acts of violence that made them outside of the political sphere, right, and that this new nation would be respectable in the eyes of the world because it had -- it played by the rules, right, and so that's why very early on you see washington is so animated by the desire to turn these ragtag massachusetts

militiamen into what he calls a respectable army. they need to sort of look the part of the europeans, they need to play by these rules that would be understand in european eyes as a ways of legitimating what was illegitimate. the british had suppressed countless domestic insurrections, slave insurrections, jacker bite scottish and irish insurrections, by labeling them as others they were illegitimate. so the revolution is really very quickly joined to that and this political game and justifying their own actions. >> that's good. >> i think it's interesting to consider the legitimate/illegitimate question with how it intersects with another question that i see brought up with this a lot as well which is

effective/ineffective and this is particularly something that you see over and over again with the question of how to respond to white supremacist violence, is it effective not just is it legitimate but is it effective to respond to that violence with violence. and there is a fascinating debate that rages around that in the black press of the 1920s that says what is the best way to respond to this? do we ignore it, do we just deny it, the oxygen of attention and let the fire burn itself out. well, we could do that, but while we're ignoring it the fire is burning and is causing preventable devastation, so presumably we have to do something and what is that something? certainly there are those in the black press like "the messenger" who say simply, no, they already sent us a severed hand in the mail, we are not carrying on a debating society, we are encouraging our readers to carry

a gun or a brick or a bat and if you encounter a klansman you don't try to reason with them. so i think there is a really kind of interesting question there as well about not just how do we defend violence as legitimate, but how do we defend violence as effective at the same time. >> that's good. >> so employers in the late 19th century legitimized their coercion of their employees by what they call claiming the persuasive right. they say because i give you your bread and butter, because i pay for you to live in a house, i have the right to persuade. in different places they enforced that right differently. in the south the persuasive right is taken to mean that that persuasion will have an effect. like you will do what i have said. in some places in the north and especially in the west, that persuasive right is considered you will have to listen to me, i will give you my opinion, but i won't necessarily follow it up

with discharge from employment. so in some places those threats are less aggressive than others, but always the right is claimed because i pay you, you have -- i have gained an extra political right because i pay you your wages. so that's where the legitimacy comes from to be able to make these claims. it doesn't work the same way in all parts of the country, but generally the idea that i've paid you and, therefore, i have that right. >> it does strike me that one other missing legitimating tool for violence is the claim of self-defense, which is used quite broadly across the spectrum, whether we are talking about black panthers in the late 1960s or talking about white supremacists in any period of american history that there is sort of an inherent legitimacy to i am defending myself or defending my country or defending a set of beliefs or institutions that has been wielded effectively in the past.

i'm going to ask one more question and then i'm going to open it up to the audience, and it's -- i don't know that it's a good question, so you can tell me, but it does seem like one of the things that came out earlier in the conversation was about state violence and violence almost as a tool of state building. i think that forces our eyes to this centrality as few of you have suggested, the centrality of violence to american politics and american history. how does that change the story we tell about u.s. history to put violence at the center of it because i think that that is very contrary to the story americans like to tell themselves and we don't always tell like self-comforting stories as historians about the nation, but it seems like a particularly disruptive move to put violence at the center of that story.

>> i mean, i feel like that's what i'm trying to do in my work and it's incredibly hard to do to sort of flip the script a little bit in terms of how we understand violence and how we've been told, i think, these really romantic stories about the underground railroad or about the civil rights movement that feel very nostalgic and sweet. they are stories you can tell to kids, you know, rosa parks refused to give up her seat, you know, and that's very like, oh, yay. or you can talk about harriet tubman and she rescued these slaves and did it without hurting anyone. we can, i feel like, tell these stories and you can package them so well, but what i try to do is to tell the stories that are like in order to flee a lot of times you had to fight. so i tell the story about a man who was running away from slavery and this man was

pursuing him and he was like, stop chasing me, if you don't stop chasing me i'm going to kill you. he kept chasing him so he killed him. he tells this story and the audience is like applauding and they're like you did right, but, i mean, i tell this story to show that the whole system of slavery is inherently violent you did right, bravo. i did this to show the whole system of slavery is inherently violent. oftentimes, in order for people to bring about their own freedom they had to employ violence. how do we understand that in terms of black freedom and black liberation? how do we justice that and how do we take it into the present? one of the concepts i'm trying to work with is protective violence, to me, is more than self-defense, not just protecting yourself but protective violence is protecting your family, your community. even strangers, right? you're protecting marginalized

people, oppressed people, people who don't have access to the ballot, don't have access to these traditional channels to bring about reform? how do we examine protective violence as useful and also legitimate. i don't know if i'm answering your question. it's a really hard exercise to do because there's the paradox, right, in one stance we hate violence, abhor it, think it's awful. on the other hand, we love the american revolution and re-enacting the civil war. doing these violent things and re-enacting them, there is a love-hate relationship i haven't been able to reconcile. >> it brings up a question in my classroom unlike what i talked about in my opening remarks, the war fear with students is

synonymous, the same thing. they're not aware of the republicans' emphasis. for them, it's shooting red coats at lexington and concord and then crossing the delaware and we're a nation. that's a good violence. we like that, right? what i try to do with my book, that's what the revolution wanted us to think. it fails, a restrained battlefield victory heroic story degrades over the course of the conflict of the revolution loses control of the war. i think we need -- in some ways, rethink the constitutional moment, right, as an effort by these -- we can call them nationalists in this period to reassert a monopoly on violence.

this new state, we need to control this. we need to control violence because that was messy and bad and we will take charge of it. as we saw, there's a big debate over this, the origins of the second amendment, right, and armed populus. there's a contentious issue and we're still dealing with the reverberations of the debate. does the state have a monopoly on violence or does the state have the ability to defend and we need to engage in that. >> i think about the election of 1860. have any of you heard the phrase lincoln wasn't even on the ballot in this south in 1860? when you think about it, there was no official ballot. people had to hand out party ballots outside the polls. lincoln wasn't on the ballot because it would have required republicans in the south to stand outside the polls with a tick with lincoln's name on it

handing them out. you think about that historical moment, no way that would have happened. those people would have been beaten up and existed. lincoln wasn't on the ballot in this south actually conceals a great deal of violence that would have happened had they attempted to hand out ballots in the south. in that one moment we've managed to talk our way past a moment of pretty ex-strome violence or potential violence. >> that's good. >> two things i wanted to respond to a little bit. first of all, the idea of the self-defense violence or violence in self-defense, similar in terms of thinking about, that's a difficult question because it then asks us to determine what counts as self-defense, thinking particularly of kathleen blue's

book, unfortunately can't be with us today, but her point that the kind of paramilitary white supremacist movement in vietnam is in large part new because it breaks with the state and starts to see the state as the threat. and as such, needs to defend itself against the state. would argue that they're not acting in self-defense very much so, in a way of that protective violence. the other kind of definitional question i struggle with, with this, is then this relationship between political history and violence, going back to the doctor's keynote of last night, he discussed the political history being the political history of power.

at that point, then we have to determine what is the relationship between power and violence. i think that is a huge question that i am in no way prepared to provide a defivetive answer to. but i will say is that jacqueline jones' biography of lucy parsons, the radical feminist black an narcissist in the late 19th century. anarchist -- talks about the violence in her belief, violence is legitimate because in the anarchistic framework, all violence is inherently violent. there's certainly an argument made there to view it through that lens. >> to do back to what was said, it's not violence, it's

anti-racist violence. if you can't call it discrimination, it's anti-racist discrimination given his talk last night, goes into the same thing. >> i guess you could say it's racist self-defense and anti-racist self-defense. >> excellent. with that, i'd like to open it up to the audience. two ground rules. introduce yourself, also wait for the microphone, since they're filming. >> hi. i'm ellie shurmur. some of the things striking, i really enjoyed this panel, you did a great job going from the revolution until the 1920s. then we get into the rest of the 20th century. my question is picking up on the idea, do we need to expand the definition of violence? i think that's particularly clear in particularly the new deal and question of labor. i will actually not do labor, because even though it may not be as physically violent, the

kind of clashes that excite us and turn these narratives, what about the work of nathan connolly, putting a freeway right through black communities and destruction of that. he says it is no less violence. i think he's right. how about tax policies that rip whole communities apart, completely dislocating those communities. labor laws, you're right, we don't have violent clashes anymore, intimidation, we have basically taken your right to join a union and have that act right to work clause and labor laws, we have the right to starve laws and that kind of question. we have the question about voting. now, we can blame you for not getting to the polls on time or registering. how about the zoning that goes along with not allowing the multi-family universities actually enabling them to have food in actual neighborhoods we have whole food deserts, the lack of healthcare questions and

there seems to be -- there are real casualties to this trade war, rural america has already been devastating. what was shocking over the last three years, we have across the entire board, a decline in life expectancy, for the first time since the 1930s. we're dealing with levels of depression and suicides we haven't seen there. how much can we incorporate that as violence not only by the state but corporations. how does that framework? if we are going to expand the definition of violence for the 20th century, does that help change where we might be seeing other aspects of violence in maybe the 18th and 19th as well? >> great questions. it tackles a lot. i will stick with voting, what i know best. methods of preventing people from voting or taking away their right or making it more

difficult, we'll always try to adapt to whatever we do. any law that passes we think about not just what does it solve right now, what are the ways people will try to do to get around this, what will they do to get around it. a lot on the ballot emphasizes the progressive nature of it, you have to be able to read and write and all these things that makes voting by secret ballot more difficult than taking a piece of paper and dropping it into a box. that's absolutely true but if we are going to try to get rid of problems of ballot secrecy or polling places we have to remember the ways of people who will try to get around these things or subvert or undermine any ballot protection law we have. they already have a blueprint when there's no ballot secretsy,

we've done this already. justice ginsburg compared getting rid of the voting rights act when it was working to closing your umbrella when it's raining and you're not getting wet. these things could happen and focusing on, okay, if we're going to solve the problems, how to change the next problems. that's just the voting aspects. you can handle the rest. >> that's a lot. everything you said it a lot. it's sort of violence in slow motion, playing out in this insidious silent subtle way, so that when you call it violence, people are like, you're overreacting, my gosh, it's just a policy. those policies are destructive, intensely destructive, not just for a generation but for generations.

it's really hard, i think, because we think violence is immediate and in your face and aggressive and, you know, flashing all of these things that we have with violence, we don't recognize it when it plays out very slowly. >> i think for me, in some ways, it's time to start thinking about our definition of war, too. for part of that, i argue very vociferously, there was war at home during world war ii. we cannot pretend otherwise. those violent labor struggles continued until after the 1930s for sure. now, what we're dealing with is what does war look like now? it's not the kind of situation easy to talk about. we have drone attacks. i do think we need to think about -- i kept thinking, is this the return of millennium warfare? it's harder to call it violence, something unseen, someone is pressing a button.

i don't even know how it works, but then also the trade war. you think of the devastation that will cause on folks in the rural communities still struggling to make our culture work. how do we grapple that and begin to think about that there might be a casualty to this kind of warfare, even though it seems a joke to call it on par with something like the war in iraq or afghanistan. these are questions i'm not sure. if we are going to start thinking about the definition of war and violence, that it can happen at home, that it can be impersonal and can be about economics, can that be something that might be interesting to think about with the 18th and 19th century? i'm not sure. it's an idea. >> to think through, to what extent, how do you define violence, where you draw this lines around it, what is the utility of expanding the

definition. i don't know the answer to this question. is it a metaphor of violence in some situations or actual definitional violence. there's a trade-off for which one of those it is. but, yes. a great question. >> i'm mark. thanks for the great panel. at the end gesturing toward the talk that your panel overturns a non-violent american path. he also focused on why that old narrative persisted, and you gestured to this and kellie, about how rosa parks is a sweet

story and the founders wanted to think the revolution was non-violent. i'm wondering how through time you think this sort of narrative of political violence super central to american history got papers papered over. and in big synthetic histories, why is it papered over and who is doing the papering over to get this narrative in most american's heads of american history driven not by violence but something else? >> i think part of it, a small part, overestimating the influence the economy has. part of it is that historians don't tend to be particularly violent people. the reason i study violence in large part because i don't understand it. i don't understand why you would -- it's hard for me to

understand how you would hurt another human being. so, i'm trying to figure that out on the historic side and what it means at the time. i do think vitamins in part has been written out of a lot of our histories. you have the triumphant battle of gettysburg and militant history has always had its own niche and following. in jill lepore's new book, how much violence is there really? i don't know. when we're writing synthetic histories, are we a little bit to blame for that? i'm not sure. i haven't fully thought through that. it's a thought. >> we definitely sanitized history, there's no question there. i think, you know, the benefit in that is, this such a -- i hate using this, because we use

it all the time, white supremacy, i feel like that's the answer to everything. in white supremacy whiteness gets to be both the villain and the hero. the villain is the slave holder, the klan, really easy things we can attach to being bad, right? the hero part of it is also the savior. lincoln that saves the slaves, the abolitionist movement. the kind white man who on his blog says, not on my watch. we tell these stories because they perpetuate ideas of whiteness being the villain but then the hero. if you can show something that happened and show another good white person that did something to replace it, to remove it, to cure it, then you still get to be the hero at the end of the day. i think a lot of these stories

we get, one, they push people, in particular, black people, to the peripheries of their own movement. i don't know how many times we talk about frederick douglass and harriet tubman like there's no other abolitionist and rosa parks and mlk, that there's no others. we don't want you to know that hundreds of thousands are involved. we don't want you to know it was not a white person who didn't do the right thing at the end of the day or didn't tie it up in a nice pretty bow the end of the day. that is a way to inculcate ideas of patriotism or ideas of whiteness being supreme. we can all buy into that story because it makes us feel very good, feel very empowered, feel like we can play a role solving these issues because it feels easy to play a role.

put a hashtag on something. there's a reason why we've done this and none are solving problems but they're very effective at making you think you solved the problem. so, you can look at the civil rights movement and say, racism is a thing of the past. we solved that non-violently. why black lives matter? why are you so angry? because we don't want to acknowledge the anger. having to acknowledge the anger or rage or brutality forces us to answer questions we've never really wanted to answer, which is how white supremacy stays supreme. >> i gets to continue full-speed ahead on the white supremacy train, that feeling good element, i think, is a crucial issue here as well.

first of all, when we come to write these histories, violence is seen as unsavory and often left to the side. at the same time, when we're looking at self-definitions from historical actors, i think very rarely will you find people who define themselves as violent. if you look at the klan of the '20s or white supremacists or slave holders, they're not going to define themselves as violent people. they can maybe say they used violence but they deplore violence to achieve goals. they are not themselves violent people and therefore violence isn't their story. so it comes to this kind of interesting question when we're writing these histories, how do we center violence in a story in which the subject themselves denies the sen translate of that

violence. do we have to write the history of george washington as a violent man. he's a military man. he's a slave holder. violence is integral to his life. we never talk about him as a violent person. we talk about violent white supremacists, george washington isn't the first name that comes to mind. why doesn't he fall into that category and what does that say about our willingness to use and define violence within the life of these historical actors? >> a good point. >> i absolutely echo all that's been said here and military history is not exactly a popular subfield these days. i've been outside of history in changing to some degree. to specifically focus on military history and violence in some ways, makes it feel like you're not within the academy when you talk about these things.

i've experienced this to some degree and am currently a graduate student. when i mention about violence particularly about wars, people won't say, we don't want to talk about this, i'm more interested in these other areas. that's perfectly fine. military history has been well covered. it's something that can put aside, the fact that anyone would think we can put aside violence and warfare in american history i think is incorrect. >> thank you so much for this panel. it's been really thought provoking and i'm still processing a lot of it. one thing i wanted to ask about is actually democracy. i think in awe thortarian regimes we expect violence, but what i suggest of this panel maybe there's something inherent about democracy that makes it also violent or violent in different ways and something you said about popular sovereignty

leading to a new kind of violence or particularly intense violence. i was wondering if you all might be able to comment on that a little bit more? is there something about democracy and political sovereignty and how that is different from violence and other types of regimes. >> that's a great question. gets to the heart of my book. when we think of democracy, we think of the democratic peace, right? if only we could export democracy around the world, just make iraq and afghanistan democratic powers, no one would ever go to war. it's a noble dream. democracy, in many ways, has been divorced of its historic violence. it's one thing the founders were very concerned about. the tierney of the majority, the

51% who can use that power to coerce others, right? coerce the minority. you see that happening very clearly. it's one of the great ironies i discuss in my book, the beginning of the revolution, washington was men of violence. it was a different type of european style violence, right? violence is enacted in specific ways and context where interest was acceptable and legitimate and other ways it wasn't. that violence degrades over the process because ordinary people finally have a voice and are immobilized partly from rhetoric and newspapers and the actual violence of the british army they view as legitimate to demand revenge and demand their

government engage in revengeful practices. we need to do more to think through the ramifications of violence and democracy throughout american history. i'll turn it over to my colleagues to see what they think. >> i mean, yes, i agree. kwlor i don't think that we should think democracy is not violent or democracy has this moral high ground that doesn't allow for violence to take place. i think that's a falsehood. in a lot of ways, democracy is a double-edged sword to almost use violence to employ your means, to get your means across. we have seen history time and

time again, even introducing that concept or the idea democracy can be violent or democracy has violent tenants, i don't think it's something americans would be comfortable hearing but i don't think far from the truth. >> ben. >> thank you. [inaudible]. >> it's been very thought provoking. i'm inspired by my colleague's comments in the corner and reflect dif upon the conversation last night. and i found it wanting. we're speaking about democracy and the state and the extent american society has been democratic considering the nature of violence and racism and how democracy works. >> what i think is missing and i

struggled when she made this comments and reflecting remarks last night. this used of anti-racism, when we had this first drark is the violence towards africans to create violence. the scarcity at the outset was missing at the beginning of c e capitalism. we can critique it but i haven't heard a critique of capitalism. i'm inviting you to muse on that for a moment. we have this intensely capitalistic state, united states of america, and it is in tensely violent and racist. they were all born telling

around 2016. inviting you to muse on that question but this comment. that is the root of deprivation and scarcity, that i think breezed discontent in our society. >> uh-huh. >> thank you for the questions. well taken one. my work focused on the 19th century and capitalism and expanding in a bunch of different ways. it's a crisis or labor problem. and what they see as new industrial capitalism, what that means for democracy. what's shocking to me now we don't seem to have that sense of crisis. democracy is justice under threat. the labor crisis of the 19th

century, people were discussing it, driving elections, pretty much everybody had an opinion on the labor question. there is discussion, absolutely out there but i don't think it's democracy and capitalism now the way they explicitly used those terms in the 19th century. >> it's a great question. it's something that can tie you back to the klan issue a little bit. historians haven't dealt with all that well even though there is a lot of material on this from the time. particularly from somebody like randolph or other black organizers in the '20s and '30s, who do see the violence of the

clan as fundamentally a tool of capitol in other words to divide and suppress labor. that's why i think seeing the influence of something like the klan in federal politics is significant because then you see how that's used not just as the violence on a personal level, to kind of bring up the distinction we were looking at before, from personal violence versus impersonal violence. not only are you sending in the klan with strike breakers or as means to divide unions, also that they are starting a crusade against socialists. they are taking into their political lobbying that is going to become formalized and become things like the house on american activities committee, where johnny e. rankin, one of

the most obnoxious human beings ever to sit in the house is going to sit and declare the ku klux klan is an american institution even as he turns the state's attention onto the state's violence, radical change particularly within the african-american communities. snow that's an important question. i was chewing into ellie's definitional question. so many questions you were citing was extreme violence at the heart of everything from slavery to labor union battles. 150 years or so. that is so core, that's how capitalism works in the united states. not just labor strikes but

workers, workers assist. >> for me, we need to be attuned to as historians, we have to watch our anna little frameworks we're using, they shift over time. for me, the labor station continues. it stops being asked we're talking about. robin muncy just published a great article about that. we define with it change, we set this up using the word, "class." the word comes at a particularly industrial moment americans stopped using at the course of time. and we have capitalism we need to be more attuned and starting with some conversations we had at the conference how to connect outside the economic jargon.

if we start talking the way americans have talked over time, about somewhere violence, i feel we have a way of reaching violence has always been done to the supposed undemocratic public. why the language wasn't there. the teacher uprisings, look at the discussions they had and heart wrenching stories how much they're struggling to make basicnized met. there are analogs, about abusive sweat shots something much more for employees. >> in order to keep all the trains running on time, please.

thank our panelists for a great discussion. all week, we're featuring american history programs as a preview what's available every weekend on c-span3, american history, american artifacts, the civil credit card, oral history and the presidency and special event coverage about american history. enjoy it now and every weekend on c-span3. saturday on book tv at 7:00 p.m. eastern, in her latest book, "our women on the ground, author zaurra hankir talks about

what the women face. >> they were able to push through and deepest struggles. you mentioned someone and it's a chronic grief of the a loss and the state of the arab is today. it's an uplifting book. friday, princeton university, amani -- imani perry. and her latest book, "breathe." >> i have to arm them with not just skills and intellectual things to help them flourish and make sense of the hostility they encounter everyday from people

whose responsibilities is to treat them as community members. afterwards, brent bozell, big media's war against trump. >> all modicum of decency has been cast aside from not from donald trump to his opponents, his opponents to him. they call human far worse things. they are attempting far worse to thilm than what they accuse him of doing to them. they have no right, none. >> watch book tv every specked on c-span2. next on american history tv, historians discuss the effect of media and technology on 20th century politics. topics include the government's impact on silicon valley,