This horror of the works of the mob was evident in Adams’ subsequent design of the separation of powers in the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 (“to the end it may be a government of laws and not of men”), and after the unrest of Shays’ Rebellion in 1786, fear of the mob was one of the direct triggers for calling a Constitutional Convention. Our system of divided government, checks and balances, and staggered elections—all of them frequent targets of scorn by progressives these days—was purposely designed in good part to ensure that government by popular sovereignty would be deliberate and not ruled by mob passions and mob violence.
President Washington himself rode out in 1791 to crush the Whiskey Rebellion in Pennsylvania, and ever since, the usual pattern in American history—especially when riots are directed against local government—has more often than not been a backlash that puts down the rioters by force, as happened in the Draft Riots in New York in 1863. And contra Coates and Bouie, that has not been the pattern only when the rioters are black. Unrest among predominantly white college students, for example, was—just as much as urban African-American rioting in that era—a factor in the rise of Ronald Reagan to be California governor in 1966 and Richard Nixon to the presidency in 1968. When riots and lynchings have been effective, as they were in establishing Jim Crow in the 1870s, it was usually because they had local government on their side, and a weary and distant federal government (which under President Grant had originally reacted with blunt force against the KKK) was no longer on hand to respond. But the Klan of the 1870s is a poor role model for anyone looking for any kind of positive social change.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member