The Long Hot Summer
A Brief History of Race/Labor Riots in the USA
Birdes of a feather will flocke togither. 1599, English lexicographer John Minsheu. Plato probably said it in Greek first. The United States has a long and infamous record of race/labor/religious rioting. We can’t take any pride in how we are: We can’t deny our past either. It may be true that, “our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” but sometimes we seem to get along about as well as red ants and termites.
There is no brief history of rioting in America. I’ve decided to jump into the story with the 1880s anti-Chinese riots in the American West. But… we could jump in anytime and anyplace and we could find Americans rioting. Especially new Americans. The tragic/comic element makes you feel guilty about laughing. So don’t laugh. The Chinese exclusion acts, starting with the 1882 exclusion act, banned Chinese from immigrating to the US and made them ineligible for Naturalization. We didn’t retreat from exclusion until 1943 with the Magnuson Exclusion Repeal Act. By that time China was a major ally of the US in our war with Japan.
I will not stop calling them labor riots, because when Americans riot, it is usually about competition for jobs, pay & housing. Sometimes our riots are not completely about labor, but they are never completely about race or religion either. And the Knights of Labor were always in the vanguard of the Anti-Chinese riots.
Anti-Chinese rhetoric and violence were more prevalent among the western chapters of the Knights of Labor. In 1880, San Francisco Knights wrote, "They bear the semblance of men, but live like beasts...who eat rice and the offal of the slaughter house." The article also calls Chinese "natural thieves" and states that all Chinese women are prostitutes. In March 1882, Knights joined the San Francisco rally to demand expulsion of the Chinese.[26] Several years later, mobs led by the Knights of Labor, a loosely structured labor federation, rounded up Seattle's Chinese-born workers and campaigned to prevent further immigration. Wikipedia
2 September 1885, at least 28 Chinese were murdered in Rock Springs, Wyoming. Their corpses were mutilated. The attackers were Eastern European immigrants, all fired up with the white-hot inflammatory rhetoric of the Knights of Labor. The surviving Chinese headed to Evanston, and didn’t look back. Chinatown in Rock Springs was a smoking ruin, and the newspaper was rejoicing the Chinamen had left. 7 September in Squak Valley, WA (present-day Issaquah, WA) Indian and white laborers fired into the tents of Chinese hops-pickers, killing three. Also, on 7 September the Knights of Labor formed a new chapter in Tacoma, where ten percent of the population was Chinese. Sparing the reader details about the truly nasty organizational tactics, the “Tacoma Method” involved a huge mob,
including elected officials, that marched on Chinatown and subsequently burned it down. In a torrential downpour, the mob herded the entire dispossessed Chinese population eight miles to the railroad tracks heading to Portland, where they either bought fares or walked a hundred and forty miles to Oregon. When Lum May (a prominent Chinese merchant) appealed to Tacoma Mayor Weisbach and noted General John W. Sprague's promise of protection for the Chinese community, Weisbach retorted that "General Sprague has nothing to say. If he says anything we will hang him or kick him."
The Tacoma ‘Method’ took action 3 November 1885, the day after the accused murderers of the Squak Valley Chinese had been acquitted. At least there was a trial. In the Rock Springs massacre, no one was even charged. Oregon was not quite as bad as Washington in enforcing the lawless exclusion of Chinese, but not much different, California was the worst.
There weren’t many Chinese in the Butte, Montana area. And they weren’t miners. But the Irish immigrant miners in Montana boycotted Chinese businesses and effectively drove them out, albeit, not all at once like in Tacoma. That is; when the Irish miners weren’t busy fighting with each other via their competing unions, or fighting with the Cornishmen, et al.
When the Repeal Act passed in 1943, there weren’t very many Chinese left in the United States. Less than 100,000 - many of them living in Hawaii. At least they finally got a quota, one hundred and five Chinese a year could now emigrate to the US.
In 1967 I first heard the term, “Long, Hot Summer.” It had to do with riots, specifically the Detroit riots. There were riots in the news all summer long, and it was worse the next year, 1968. Scores of people were killed, the National Guard was always getting called out. Over a hundred cities were involved. The most of oldtown, Washington DC was destroyed. The 1965 Watts riot was in large part about the palpable anger Blacks, (politely called Negros at that time), felt about being formally and informally excluded from buying property in booming California. The trigger was a drunk driving arrest, but the riot had everything to do with Negro sensibilities that the American system left Blacks in poverty and politically powerless. Plenty of jobs for blacks, but by no means the best jobs, and they owned no property. Watts was largely an expensive place for blacks to rent housing and shop in stores that were owned by whites. Watts was exclusively black because blacks were the only people who would live there.
Most Americans scratched their heads at the riots in the sixties. They thought it was senseless to burn down your own house, so to speak. It seemed there was nothing to show for their efforts, but a lot of dead Negros and block after block of uninhabitable neighborhoods.
I was watching the news. I was paying attention. The age of TV lends itself to dramatic video footage of fires and everyone and everything getting smashed up, it’s like cartoons or wrestling. One young black man said about Watts, “We won.” “How so?” They asked him. “They paid attention to us. They mayor came down here. The whole country paid attention to us.” Rioting as a metaphor for advertising had arrived.
Fifteen riots in Detroit since 1833
15 Big riots, that is, we don’t count the little ones. Now don't laugh, one of the riots saw young German immigrants burn down the red-light district on the German East-side where white women were servicing a largely black clientele. In 1863, Irish immigrants in Detroit rioted against conscription into the GAR (Grand Army of the Republic) by burning down black neighborhoods. I guess they thought freeing the slaves wasn't their fight. But being Irish, they were willing to fight about it. If you have time, click the link above and read all about it, the riots of Detroit. The upside of Detroit’s ‘Long, Hot Summer’ of 1967-68? The city lost a third of its population over the next 25 years, over 500,000 residents voted with their feet and split. If you don’t have security in your property or your life - you move.
The Irish do merit of special place in America's Riotous Hall of Fame. In the Philadelphia riots of 1844. The Irish and their priests were on the receiving end. The priests eventually snuck out of town in disguise after their churches were burned down and their Irish parishioners were burnt out of their homes. It all started over which version of the Bible would be read in public schools. The Irish refused to let their kids listen to the King James Version. I guess too many Irishmen in one place is always a problem. Evangelical preachers had been steering clear of Dublin for centuries. Irish Catholics don't congregate to hear you preach from the Bible; they gather together and throw the first stone.
My favorite American riot was the Orange riots of New York City 1870 - 71, where the Irish rioted against each other. The Ulstermen (Orangemen) had a parade and they marched into the Irish Catholic neighborhoods. They fought for days - and then did it again the next year. Summertime and the livin’ is easy. Even if the politics of the Irish ruling over themselves isn’t a cakewalk.
My second favorite riot was the anti-mask riot in San Fransico during the Spanish Influenza. But even for such a noble cause, I think pulling up my mask is a compromise I can make. I’m not into shooting my oppressors.
Back in the day, they killed each other too. Our most recent riots are remarkably free of murder, if not mayhem. Maybe all the participants now realize they are starring in a made for television movie, and murder doesn't fit the script. Even if a police homicide has often been the catalyst. The few murders attributed to the “mostly peaceful” George Floyd riots seemed to count homicides that weren’t clearly related to the rioting itself. The Kyle Rittenhouse murders were an exception.
Unfairly, I am going to deal with the South and all the riots/lynchings of Reconstruction and its aftermath in a single incident called the Colfax riot, aka, Colfax Massacre, Colfax, Louisiana April 13th,1873. Grant Parish and its Parish Seat, Colfax, was created on 4 March 1869 (Grant’s Inauguration) and was majority Black Republican. I think the Colfax Massacre is emblematic of the riotous struggle for social and political dominance, where in the south, demographically, you have a rough parity between blacks and whites. The Scotch-Irish Whites living in Northern Louisiana played for keeps and the struggle was often bloody.
Election fraud and violence were rampant during Reconstruction in the South. It was nowhere worse than in Louisiana. The Democrats declared they had won the 1872 local elections, but the Republicans produced their own slate of victors. How it played out in Grant Parish is the Republicans and the militia, mostly black, seized the courthouse and held out until the three-hundred white Democrats laying siege to the courthouse brought in the cannons. The Republicans surrendered (or ran away) when they saw the cannons. White flags came out. Then a shot rang out and one of the Democrats, James Hadnot was wounded. The surrender sort of turned into a take no prisoners affair. Best estimate is at least 100 Black Republicans were killed. The perpetrators fled to Texas. It was national news, and appeared in Eastern newspapers and the Federal Government and Republicans pursued the case with vigor. They eventually rounded up 98 men and tried 16 of them. But after lengthy appeals, eventually all the way to the Supreme Court, the convictions were dismissed. The Colfax Massacre and this tragic failure to prosecute the violence encouraged paramilitary groups like the White League and the Red Shirts which became, as one historian put it, the military arm of the Democratic Party. The lawless riots and lynchings were about securing white dominance over the blacks who were in places more numerous than the whites. It’s no wonder so many blacks moved north.
The poor whites (the Crackers) of the Postbellum South were mostly of Scotch-Irish descent. Growing up poor, black or white, was the default down south. All the tribal insecurities of the Scotch-Irish seem to be captured poetically in Bob Ewell, the antagonist in the novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. It’s not a book about riots, but it might be a book that explains them. A metaphor about the violent, tribal struggle for status in your town.
I haven’t even touched on the race/labor riots of the 1919/20 period. The Omaha Race Riot of 1919 is where my morbid fascination with mob violence took local root. Again, you find the Irish immigrant population at the center of the fight. The meat packers were bringing up blacks as strikebreakers in 1917. The Negro population of Omaha had doubled to over ten thousand in the last ten years. Second only to Los Angeles (16,000) among the new western cities that had become destinations for the great migration of blacks from the South moving north. Boss Tom Dennison (yes, an Irish immigrant) *definition of a racketeer, see Tom Dennison. Dennison cut his teeth and made his fortune with vice and the labor unions in Butte, MT. In 1892, at thirty-four years old, he was in Omaha, and he liked what he saw, “A wide-open town” with little legal control over gambling, prostitution and liquor. Boss Dennison was King of the vice-lords and the apex political power broker in Omaha for nearly forty years.
If Dennison hadn’t been at odds with the new Republican mayor and his administration, perhaps the riot never would have happened. As it was, on the evening of September 29th, this small mob of young men, mainly Irish, quickly grew to an uncontrollable number. They were after Willie Brown, a Negro, who had been accused of raping a white woman a few days before. They burned the courthouse, and they hung the mayor from a lamp post. The detectives brought the mayor to Ford Hospital. There he lingered between life and death for several days, finally recovering. "They shall not get him. Mob rule will not prevail in Omaha," the mayor kept muttering during his delirium. They did get Willie Brown. You can see his burning body if you want to click the voyeur link to the riot above. And when the inquiry was complete, two things were learned: One, police must quickly disperse small mobs while they have the chance. Two, you were never going to convict Boss Dennison of anything. Don’t doubt for a minute the possibility that ‘outside agitators’ are causal agents of riots. There was no real doubt, just a lack of evidence, that Dennison was behind the whole thing.
I went on a protest march once; it was September 1970. My Father, who was covering the story for the newspaper where he worked, saw me marching with the Mexicans and he marched right into their protest march and sent me marching back to school. Truth is, I was having my own doubts about raising my fist and shouting, “Chicano Power.” I was probably more surprised to find myself ‘protesting’ than I was to find my father abruptly ending my participation. I learned something about mob psychology, it’s easy to keep marching. Thinking and acting independently of the mob, is, as my daughter tells me, ‘Not for the weak.’
Winston Churchill never said, “the best case against democracy is a five-minute chat with an average voter.” Still, the self-denial and self-discipline of self-government is not for the weak. Protest actions are always at the edge of lawlessness. They are never love-ins. They are rooted in grievances and hatred for the “other.” They are never an exercise in, “love your neighbor as yourself.” The riot is always coming next, if you don’t curb your protest enthusiasm. And riots are never good. It never came up, but my father’s alternative to a protest march would surely have been, ‘write your congressman.” Or move, if you don’t like it here, move somewhere else. If you don’t like the job you have, quit and go find a better job. Or war. At least there are rules of engagement with war. In war, the soldier is always doing what he is told. Leave the non-combatants alone. In short, imagine you are smarter than the average voter. Vote for peace, not protests. Vote with your feet.
Speaking of war. I wrote a Substack shortly after October 7th in 2023. My point was: What Iran had done, albeit using Hamas, was they had gone and started a war with a riot, more specifically, a pogrom. A riot that was too successful. I wrote at that time: Looking through the fog of war, I’d say the Iranian regime will rue the day they decided they wanted this fight. But - am I a prophet?
I wish the Iranian people the best. They are finally rid of the fanatics who ruled over them and have caused so much trouble in the world for almost fifty years. It all started with a protest march that turned into a riot. Peace brothers, peace, and welcome back to the community of nations. Bring back the Shah.