Howie Hawkins goes national 

GREEN PARTY POTUS CANDIDATE 
AUTHENTIC THIRD PARTY SPOILER

Howie Hawkins. | AP Photo/Hans Pennink

By BILL MAHONEY

07/12/2020

ALBANY — Syracuse resident Howie Hawkins has officially won the Green Party’s nomination for president, giving him a chance to take the relative success he’s found in New York to the rest of the country. The party designated him as its nominee during a virtual convention on Saturday.

Hawkins, the Green Party’s top vote-getter in his home state thanks to his showings against Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the past three gubernatorial campaigns, is now in a familiar spot. As was the case with his statewide races, he’ll try to persuade progressives to vote for a real socialist rather than a traditional liberal, in this case, Joe Biden.

"We’re getting a lot of [Bernie] Sanders people,” Hawkins said.

There’s a chance that Hawkins will become a household name in the coming months, at least to the degree that predecessors Ralph Nader and Jill Stein were. Fairly or not, much of the discussion of his candidacy — from the media as well as the types of voters he’s hoping to attract — will focus on whether he’s setting himself up to be a spoiler who could give President Donald Trump another term.

Hawkins, 67, has been a community organizer, logger, and for the 17 years preceding his 2018 retirement, a Teamster working the red-eye shift, unloading trucks for UPS in Central New York. His running mate, Angela Walker of South Carolina, has been a transit operator in Milwaukee.

“When’s the last time you had two truck drivers running [on a national ticket]?” Nader said in an interview. “You see how off the wall that sounds, even though there are millions of truck drivers. These are not professional politicians, they work with their hands … That’s a good combination, because people often try to pit labor against environmentalists.”

Hawkins is sociable, but he’s hardly a stereotypical back-slapping politician. He’s more like the owner of a used book store owner who’s eager to talk about any item on the shelves.

“Howie is one of the most well-read and well-rounded persons that I know when it comes to political thought and knowledge,” said Frank Cetera, the treasurer of the Onondaga County Greens. “You can’t bring up a topic that he can’t speak to.”

Hawkins has run for office 24 times in New York, batting 0-24. The campaigns have ranged from local contests where he’s been somewhat competitive (in 2011, he received 48 percent of the vote in a Syracuse district councilor race) to more-ambitious statewide races (in 2006, his vote total was not in the same ballpark, or even area code, as then-Sen. Hillary Clinton’s).

But it was the 2010 gubernatorial campaign that made him a fixture in New York politics.

Facing a challenge from the proto-Trumpian Republican Carl Paladino, a developer from Western New York, Cuomo dusted off a page from his father’s playbook and welcomed every candidate on stage for the campaign’s only debate, minimizing Paladino’s screen time and ensuring that anti-Cuomo messaging would be seen as the stuff of lunatics.

And the stage was certainly filled with characters. There was a housing activist, Jimmy McMillian, who proclaimed that the rent was too damn high and pledged to let people marry shoes. And there was Kristin Davis, dubbed the “Manhattan Madam” by the tabloids, who explained how her career managing prostitutes was the ideal experience for working in Albany. (“The key difference between the MTA and my former escort agency is I operated one set of books and offered on-time and reliable service,” she said.)

The only quirk of Hawkins that stood out in the debate was his accent — it’s been compared to Foghorn Leghorn. He has said that’s the product of the diverse and polyglot community of San Mateo, California, in which he grew up.

Thanks to a brief tenure living in Polynesia, he’s also able to speak Tongan, though he says it’s a bit rusty. It’s a language that’s “more logical than Esperanto” in areas like tenses, but can be tricky due to the metaphors — “they use a lot of plants and flowers,” he said. He was unable to find a fellow speaker with a Ph.D. who could test his fluency when he attended Dartmouth, meaning he fell one foreign language requirement short of graduating.

But during that infamous gubernatorial debate dominated by unique figures, Hawkins did not come across as particularly eccentric. He was obviously far to Cuomo’s left, but was grounded enough to present a reasonable alternative to liberals disenchanted with the Democratic Party’s selection of a moderate standard bearer.

“We may not see the world the same or support the same solutions to our problems, but he’s as passionate a believer as they come,” said Dutchess County Executive Marc Molinaro, the 2018 Republican gubernatorial nominee. “He was a gentleman and fun to debate. When it comes to his beliefs and supporters, he is the real deal.”

In his first gubernatorial race, Hawkins talked about issues — like free public college tuition, legal marijuana for recreational use, a ban on hydrofracking and single-payer health care — that were certainly not part of Cuomo’s agenda. Now, some of those policies, or at least versions of them, already have been implemented.

He also discussed at length a comprehensive plan to create jobs in an environmentally conscious way. He called it a “Green New Deal,” recalling the program implemented by the last upstate New Yorker before him to head a national ticket, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Under his plan, people who couldn’t find jobs in the private sector would be provided state-funded work in areas like clean energy.

Of course, Democrats such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and even Cuomo himself have since picked up on that phrase and concept. But the way they’ve approached it underscores the need to vote Green, Hawkins argues.

“They took the brand but diluted the content,” he said. “For example, a nationwide ban on fracking and new fossil fuel infrastructure — that’s the first step in a real climate action program, because if we build that infrastructure, we’re locked into fossil fuels for decades more and the planet is cooked. We called for cuts in military spending to fund the Green New Deal. They dropped that. And they extended the deadline for zero emissions from 2030 to 2050.”

Hawkins will presumably not win in November. And there’s certainly a risk that Democrats will label him a spoiler as they’ve done with Nader and Stein in recent presidential elections. Given the unprecedented degree of loathing for Trump on the left, it’s possible that some people will wind up classifying him as one of the greatest villains in American history for years to come if the president is re-elected in a close vote.

Greens defend themselves ferociously against accusations that they are spoilers. They'll argue that even in a situation where, say, a Democrat loses a swing state by 5,000 votes after a Green receives 10,000, it's wrong to simply assume those 10,000 votes would have gone to a Democrat if there were no Green in the race. Many might have simply stayed home.

“The reporters have to get over one thing in order to clarify their mission — the politically bigoted word ‘spoiler,'" said Nader. “That’s politically bigoted because it’s only applied to third parties, it’s not applied by one major party against another. And that’s [major parties’] way of trying to marginalize, not giving them a chance to grow from one election period to another and exposing them to malicious ballot access obstructions, litigation, and keeping them off the polls and basically telling reporters, ‘don’t bother, all they can do is be a spoiler.”

Still, it’s clear that there’s at least some segment of the progressive electorate more concerned than ever about the Greens playing a role in helping a Republican win.

“It’s usually the intellectuals, the professors, and all I can say is they can afford Joe Biden,” said Hawkins. “But working class people in this country, [their] life expectancies are in decline, they need some real relief economically, Medicare for all and a job guarantee and so forth. Biden’s for none of that. If you’re a professor, you’ll be all right, but if you’re struggling, particularly now with this coronavirus depression, you need something more than just the status quo.”

What does he hope to accomplish with his quixotic campaign?

For one, he envisions this race as an opportunity draw attention to his issues. He pointed to the 2014 gubernatorial contest, when he received 5 percent of the vote against Cuomo in the general election after liberal Zephyr Teachout received 34 percent in the primary as the “best model” to emulate.

“[Cuomo] was the social liberal, fiscal conservative, and after that he rebranded himself the programmatic progressive and we got the ban on fracking, we got the $15 minimum wage,” he said. “I think we moved the debate. The more votes we get, the less we can be taken for granted.”

He also needs to receive votes to keep the Green Party viable at the local level. He’s done that before.

New York has traditionally required parties to receive at least 50,000 votes in a gubernatorial contest in order to be categorized as “qualified” and enjoy perks such as easier ballot access for all the state’s offices for the next four years. The only Green to hit that threshold before 2010 was “Grandpa” Al Lewis. That was due in part to the unprecedented amount of press coverage his 1998 candidacy received because of his legal battle to appear on the ballot under the name of the character he played on “The Munsters,” a 1960s sitcom. Hawkins hit that mark in his first run and has blown by it in his past two races, ensuring the party of spots in the sorts of down-ballot contests they can occasionally win.

Now, he’ll have the opportunity to play a similar role at the national level.

“In 40 of the 51 states and DC, the presidential vote determines whether you have a ballot line for the next election cycle,” he said. “In most states, it’s 1, 2, or 3 percent, and that’s achievable. So with more ballot lines, you can run more candidates down ballot, and we’ve always said that’s how we’re going to build the Green Party into a major party, by electing thousands of people to local office and state legislatures and congress.”

Thanks to a recent change that seems to have originated from Cuomo’s feud with the progressive Working Families Party — which differs from the Greens by focusing its efforts in Democratic primaries rather than long-shot general election challenges — this year’s presidential contest is also key to the party’s continued viability in his home state.

Instead of the traditional 50,000 votes in gubernatorial contests, parties now need to meet higher thresholds each year. Under the changes Cuomo promoted, Hawkins will likely need to get at least 160,000 votes in New York this year or risk wiping out everything he’s accomplished in the state over the past decade.

“We’re fighting for our ballot line,” Hawkins said earlier this year. “The Democrats get on their high horses about the Russians, but in New York, who needs Russians when you’ve got the Democrats?”

AMERICAN PROPAGANDA ARM

Cuba broadcaster confronts budget calamity amid fight with lawmakers
DECONSTRUCTING GOVERNMENT
The Office of Cuba Broadcasting has become collateral damage in a struggle between Congress and its new boss.
The Office of Cuba Broadcasting in Miami, pictured in 2007, is responsible for beaming radio and television broadcasts into communist-run Cuba. | Alan Diaz/AP Photo

By DANIEL LIPPMAN

07/09/2020

The U.S. government’s Cuba broadcasting office is quickly running out of money and could be forced to furlough some of its employees and fire contractors, according to three people familiar with the matter.

The office, which is responsible for beaming radio and television broadcasts into communist-run Cuba, falls under the umbrella of the U.S. Agency for Global Media. That agency is in turmoil over the recent arrival of Michael Pack, a Steve Bannon ally who pushed out the heads of Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and other outlets as he started as CEO of the taxpayer-funded media group.

The budget crisis is due to the uproar Pack’s moves provoked on Capitol Hill, where senators in both parties fear the Trump administration is seeking to lean on coverage that is meant to be independent. Lawmakers are upset that Pack has yet to schedule a time to testify on the matter and are holding up funds until he agrees to explain his actions.

The impasse is having its most immediate impact on the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, which operates Radio and TV Martí. The Cuba office was already struggling to digest roughly $8 million in budget cuts in the most recent appropriations bill.

Officials at the media agency told Congress they couldn’t cut funding so quickly, and obtained a temporary reprieve: Lawmakers allowed them to reallocate up to $7 million from another of its accounts, sparing the Cuba office some unpalatable choices.

But Pack’s mass firing of top agency leaders, known internally as “the Wednesday night massacre,” has irritated powerful members of Congress, particularly within the Senate Appropriations Committee.

On June 18, staffers of Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), the top members of the Appropriations subcommittee that oversees the State Department and related issues, placed a hold on the transfer of the Cuba funds. They were concerned about Pack’s actions, a staffer said, and wanted to hear from him directly, according to two people familiar with the exchange.


“The staffers and their bosses wanted to know: What’s happening? Why are you doing this and creating all of this turmoil?” said one of the people.

“Those funds are on hold until we have a better understanding of what Mr. Pack’s intentions are,” a Senate Democratic aide said. “We want these funds to be used, but Congress also has responsibility as overseer of the funds to know what is going on down there, given that every week there’s a new revelation of someone being fired or something being eliminated and we have no idea what the basis for it is.”

Pack, a veteran documentary filmmaker whose films have appeared on PBS, told the Washington Examiner that it was necessary to fire some of his new colleagues because it would better help him reform the organization to align more clearly with its original mission. He said he wanted to “clean house and start fresh. Far from being a witch hunt of Democrats, it is a very fair, let’s-start-over process.”

Pack’s problems with the Hill compounded on July 1, when a bipartisan group of seven U.S. senators, led by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), wrote a letter informing him they were planning on doing a “thorough review” of the agency’s funding to ensure that its journalism wasn’t politicized and that the agency could carry out its core mission. It also said that the firings of the agency’s various components raised “serious questions” about the future of the agency under Pack’s leadership.

Notable among the ousted leaders was Jamie Fly, a Republican and respected former foreign policy aide to Rubio who headed Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, based in Prague.

In a reply this week, Pack said he was “eager to meet and work with you to discuss the strategic direction of the agency so that U.S. international broadcasting efforts advance human rights and the American national interest.” But he hasn’t agreed to any specific dates to testify.

With the agency projecting that the Cuba office is going to run out of cash in mid-July, officials there have to move money around next week to ensure that they have enough cash for their next payroll and to pay contractors, according to one of the people. If they don’t do that, they would have to lay off most or all of the agency’s 70-odd contractors, furlough some of the office’s roughly 100 federal employees or dramatically reduce or stop shortwave radio broadcasts to Cuba — or some combination of all three.

Loss of the contractors, many of whom have digital and social media skills the permanent employees lack, would hurt the office’s efforts to reach young audiences in Cuba, a person familiar with the matter said. It’s not just payroll that is at risk: the office also has to pay for costs like electricity for a radio transmitting station in Greenville, N.C. USAGM didn’t respond to requests for comment.

In a move that’s known among budget wonks in Washington as “blowing through the hold,” USAGM is planning to shuffle around $1.5 million to forestall such drastic steps, according to one of the people. But the agency is worried about provoking “wrath” on Capitol Hill by ignoring the hold, this person said — with a response that could include ratcheting up reporting requirements and “a lot of invasive things that would lower the effectiveness of the agency.”

The Cuba office is now led by Jeffrey Shapiro, another Bannon ally who spread conspiracy theories about the former director of the office being a secret agent for the Castro regime, according to The Daily Beast. Conservative critics of the editorial direction under the former director, Maria “Malule” Gonzalez, had complained that the coverage had veered too far from its traditional tone of strident anti-communism.

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Radio and TV Martí got into hot water after it aired what USAGM described in a statement as an “egregiously false and anti-Semitic story” about billionaire financier George Soros in 2018, an incident that led the agency to order a third-party independent review of its Cuba programs. An internal human resources investigation led to the agency firing or disciplining employees and contractors involved in the story, and USAGM said the reviews “highlight some urgent needs at OCB — particularly in shoring up journalistic principles and practices.”


The Cuba office isn’t the only wing of USAGM affected by budget issues: The Open Technology Fund, a grantee of USAGM, is still awaiting its July tranche of funding of about $1.5 million. Some of OTF’s money every year goes to support critical tools like encrypted messaging app Signal that help people around the world communicate securely. OTF’s Rapid Response fund has been used to help protesters in Hong Kong fend off digital attacks and surveillance.

OTF had sued Pack and USAGM late last month, arguing he was legally barred from replacing its staff, but on Tuesday, a federal court upheld the administration's right to revamp the leadership.

Earlier this week, Pack selected former South Carolina secretary of state James Miles to lead OTF in an acting capacity; the official announcement didn’t list any technological expertise for Miles, but Pack cited Miles’ “wealth of knowledge from extensive professional experience involving business, the law, management of non-profits, and major public office.”

“The new CEO has been starving lots of the broadcasting entities and grantees for funds,” the person said. “The ‘freeze’ he instituted largely continues.”

Trump Hails “Good Bloodlines” of Henry Ford, Whose Anti-Semitism Inspired Hitler



In 1938, Henry Ford accepted Nazi Germany's highest honor for foreigners, The Grand Cross of the German Eagle, for his service to the Third Reich. The award was presented by two Nazi diplomats in Detroit, along with a personal message from Adolf Hitler. Photo: Associated Press File

Robert Mackey May 21 2020, 10:50 p.m.

DONALD TRUMP’S CAMPAIGN to change the subject from the coronavirus pandemic took a bizarre turn on Thursday, as the president paused during a speech at a Ford Motor Company plant in Michigan to praise the “good bloodlines” of the family descended from the firm’s founder, Henry Ford, a notorious anti-Semite and favorite of Adolf Hitler.

In an apparent ad-lib, Trump looked up from his prepared remarks — which praised the firm for teaming up with General Electric to produce ventilators and face shields for medical workers — to observe that Henry Ford’s descendants, like the current chairman, Bill Ford, who had introduced the president, have “good blood.”

President Trump: "The company founded by a man named Henry Ford -- good bloodlines, good bloodlines." pic.twitter.com/faCEBwDpwN— The Hill (@thehill) May 21, 2020

“The company founded by a man named Henry Ford,” Trump’s prepared text appeared to say, “teamed up with the company founded by Thomas Edison — that’s General Electric.” But when Trump came to Ford’s name, he looked up from the text and observed: “good bloodlines, good bloodlines — if you believe in that stuff, you got good blood.”

Trump has made no secret of his own belief that he inherited everything from intelligence to an ability to withstand pressure through the “great genes” passed on to him by his parents and grandparents. He has also frequently compared the importance of “good bloodlines” in humans to the breeding of champion racehorses, a view that overlaps in uncomfortable ways with those of eugenicists and racists like Ford.

“I’m proud to have that German blood,” Trump once told an interviewer. “You’ve all got such good bloodlines,” Trump reportedly told British business leaders at a dinner in 2018. “You’ve all got such amazing DNA.”

Trump has also frequently suggested that because his uncle, John Trump, taught for decades at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he is similarly smart. “My uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT,” Trump said at a South Carolina rally in 2015. Pointing at his right temple, he then added: “Good genes, very good genes — okay? — very smart.”

Then in March, after he spoke to scientists working on the coronavirus response at the CDC in Atlanta, Trump told reporters: “I like this stuff. You know, my uncle was a great person. He was at MIT, he taught at MIT for, I think, like a record number of years. He was a great super genius. Dr. John Trump. I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it…. Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability.”

Trump also suggested on Thursday that Ford and Edison were both in heaven, “looking down right now.” The president’s belief that Ford, the only American singled out for praise in Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,” should be in heaven was a stark contrast to his sarcastic comment during a visit to Michigan in December that the late Democratic congressman, John Dingell, might be “looking up” from hell.

Among the many reasons to believe that Henry Ford does not deserve a place in heaven is the fact that, as the writer Matthew Wills noted, starting in 1920, “Ford’s newspaper, the weekly Dearborn Independent, which was distributed through Ford dealers and sent free to schools and libraries around the country, published 90 anti-Semitic articles, later collected and distributed as a book called ‘The International Jew.'”


Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent published 90 articles attacking Jews in the 1920s.


Victoria Saker Woeste, the author of “Henry Ford’s War on Jews and the Legal Battle Against Hate Speech,” explained that “the first article staked out the familiar anti-Semitic trope of ‘The Jew’ as ‘the world’s enigma. Poor in his masses, he yet controls the world’s finances,’ and was, ‘the power behind many a throne.'” The articles recapitulated and excerpted the notorious anti-Semitic forgery, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” for nearly 700,000 readers.

The collected articles were sold as a pamphlet, which was subsequently translated into German, and inspired Hitler’s praise for Ford in “Mein Kampf.” “It is Jews who govern the stock exchange forces of the American Union,” Hitler claimed, “only a single great man, Ford, to their fury, still maintains full independence.”

The New York Times reported in 1922 that Ford’s importance to Hitler was very obvious. “The wall beside his desk in Hitler’s private office is decorated with a large picture of Henry Ford,” the newspaper’s Berlin correspondent observed. “In the ante-chamber there is a large table covered with books, nearly all of which are a translation of a book written and published by Henry Ford.”

Although Ford was eventually forced to sign a public apology for the articles in 1927, after being sued for libel in federal court by Aaron Sapiro, a Jewish-American activist smeared by his newspaper, he remained an anti-Semite and a favorite of the Nazis. In 1938, Ford accepted the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, the Nazi regime’s highest honor for foreigners, on the occasion of his 75th birthday. The two Nazi diplomats who pinned the medal on his chest also brought a personal message of congratulations from Hitler.

In 1940, Steven Watts recounted in “The People’s Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century,” Ford told the automobile editor of The Associated Press that he blamed the Jews, not Hitler, for the war in Europe. “I still think this is a phony war made by the international Jewish bankers,” Ford said, in remarks later reported by the automaker’s former personal secretary.

Trump’s praise of Ford on Thursday prompted Jonathan Greenblatt, the chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, to demand an apology from the president for hailing a man who was “an antisemite and one of America’s staunchest proponents of eugenics.” “If he doesn’t know why,” Greenblatt added, the president should read his organization’s history of Ford’s role as an anti-Jewish propagandist.


CONTACT THE AUTHOR:

Robert Mackey robert.mackey@​theintercept.com@RobertMackey

The Invention of the Police

Why did American policing get so big, so fast? The answer, mainly, is slavery.
By Jill Lepore July 13, 2020 THE NEW YORKER

The Chinatown Squad, a notoriously harsh police unit in San Francisco, in 1905.

Photograph courtesy Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley
To police is to maintain law and order, but the word derives from polis—the Greek for “city,” or “polity”—by way of politia, the Latin for “citizenship,” and it entered English from the Middle French police, which meant not constables but government. “The police,” as a civil force charged with deterring crime, came to the United States from England and is generally associated with monarchy—“keeping the king’s peace”—which makes it surprising that, in the antimonarchical United States, it got so big, so fast. The reason is, mainly, slavery.

“Abolish the police,” as a rallying cry, dates to 1988 (the year that N.W.A. recorded “Fuck tha Police”), but, long before anyone called for its abolition, someone had to invent the police: the ancient Greek polis had to become the modern police. “To be political, to live in a polis, meant that everything was decided through words and persuasion and not through force and violence,” Hannah Arendt wrote in “The Human Condition.” In the polis, men argued and debated, as equals, under a rule of law. Outside the polis, in households, men dominated women, children, servants, and slaves, under a rule of force. This division of government sailed down the river of time like a raft, getting battered, but also bigger, collecting sticks and mud. Kings asserted a rule of force over their subjects on the idea that their kingdom was their household. In 1769, William Blackstone, in his “Commentaries on the Laws of England,” argued that the king, as “pater-familias of the nation,” directs “the public police,” exercising the means by which “the individuals of the state, like members of a well-governed family, are bound to conform their general behavior to the rules of propriety, good neighbourhood, and good manners; and to be decent, industrious, and inoffensive in their respective stations.” The police are the king’s men.

History begins with etymology, but it doesn’t end there. The polis is not the police. The American Revolution toppled the power of the king over his people—in America, “the law is king,” Thomas Paine wrote—but not the power of a man over his family. The power of the police has its origins in that kind of power. Under the rule of law, people are equals; under the rule of police, as the legal theorist Markus Dubber has written, we are not. We are more like the women, children, servants, and slaves in a household in ancient Greece, the people who were not allowed to be a part of the polis. But for centuries, through struggles for independence, emancipation, enfranchisement, and equal rights, we’ve been fighting to enter the polis. One way to think about “Abolish the police,” then, is as an argument that, now that all of us have finally clawed our way into the polis, the police are obsolete.

But are they? The crisis in policing is the culmination of a thousand other failures—failures of education, social services, public health, gun regulation, criminal justice, and economic development. Police have a lot in common with firefighters, E.M.T.s, and paramedics: they’re there to help, often at great sacrifice, and by placing themselves in harm’s way. To say that this doesn’t always work out, however, does not begin to cover the size of the problem. The killing of George Floyd, in Minneapolis, cannot be wished away as an outlier. In each of the past five years, police in the United States have killed roughly a thousand people. (During each of those same years, about a hundred police officers were killed in the line of duty.) One study suggests that two-thirds of Americans between the ages of fifteen and thirty-four who were treated in emergency rooms suffered from injuries inflicted by police and security guards, about as many people as the number of pedestrians injured by motor vehicles. Urban police forces are nearly always whiter than the communities they patrol. The victims of police brutality are disproportionately Black teen-age boys: children. To say that many good and admirable people are police officers, dedicated and brave public servants, which is, of course, true, is to fail to address both the nature and the scale of the crisis and the legacy of centuries of racial injustice. The best people, with the best of intentions, doing their utmost, cannot fix this system from within.

There are nearly seven hundred thousand police officers in the United States, about two for every thousand people, a rate that is lower than the European average. The difference is guns. Police in Finland fired six bullets in all of 2013; in an encounter on a single day in the year 2015, in Pasco, Washington, three policemen fired seventeen bullets when they shot and killed an unarmed thirty-five-year-old orchard worker from Mexico. Five years ago, when the Guardian counted police killings, it reported that, “in the first 24 days of 2015, police in the US fatally shot more people than police did in England and Wales, combined, over the past 24 years.” American police are armed to the teeth, with more than seven billion dollars’ worth of surplus military equipment off-loaded by the Pentagon to eight thousand law-enforcement agencies since 1997. At the same time, they face the most heavily armed civilian population in the world: one in three Americans owns a gun, typically more than one. Gun violence undermines civilian life and debases everyone. A study found that, given the ravages of stress, white male police officers in Buffalo have a life expectancy twenty-two years shorter than that of the average American male. The debate about policing also has to do with all the money that’s spent paying heavily armed agents of the state to do things that they aren’t trained to do and that other institutions would do better. History haunts this debate like a bullet-riddled ghost.


That history begins in England, in the thirteenth century, when maintaining the king’s peace became the duty of an officer of the court called a constable, aided by his watchmen: every male adult could be called on to take a turn walking a ward at night and, if trouble came, to raise a hue and cry. This practice lasted for centuries. (A version endures: George Zimmerman, when he shot and killed Trayvon Martin, in 2012, was serving on his neighborhood watch.) The watch didn’t work especially well in England—“The average constable is an ignoramus who knows little or nothing of the law,” Blackstone wrote—and it didn’t work especially well in England’s colonies. Rich men paid poor men to take their turns on the watch, which meant that most watchmen were either very elderly or very poor, and very exhausted from working all day. Boston established a watch in 1631. New York tried paying watchmen in 1658. In Philadelphia, in 1705, the governor expressed the view that the militia could make the city safer than the watch, but militias weren’t supposed to police the king’s subjects; they were supposed to serve the common defense—waging wars against the French, fighting Native peoples who were trying to hold on to their lands, or suppressing slave rebellions.

The government of slavery was not a rule of law. It was a rule of police. In 1661, the English colony of Barbados passed its first slave law; revised in 1688, it decreed that “Negroes and other Slaves” were “wholly unqualified to be governed by the Laws . . . of our Nations,” and devised, instead, a special set of rules “for the good Regulating and Ordering of them.” Virginia adopted similar measures, known as slave codes, in 1680:
It shall not be lawfull for any negroe or other slave to carry or arme himselfe with any club, staffe, gunn, sword or any other weapon of defence or offence, nor to goe or depart from of his masters ground without a certificate from his master, mistris or overseer, and such permission not to be granted but upon perticuler and necessary occasions; and every negroe or slave soe offending not haveing a certificate as aforesaid shalbe sent to the next constable, who is hereby enjoyned and required to give the said negroe twenty lashes on his bare back well layd on, and soe sent home to his said master, mistris or overseer . . . that if any negroe or other slave shall absent himself from his masters service and lye hid and lurking in obscure places, comitting injuries to the inhabitants, and shall resist any person or persons that shalby any lawfull authority be imployed to apprehend and take the said negroe, that then in case of such resistance, it shalbe lawfull for such person or persons to kill the said negroe or slave soe lying out and resisting.

In eighteenth-century New York, a person held as a slave could not gather in a group of more than three; could not ride a horse; could not hold a funeral at night; could not be out an hour after sunset without a lantern; and could not sell “Indian corn, peaches, or any other fruit” in any street or market in the city. Stop and frisk, stop and whip, shoot to kill.

Then there were the slave patrols. Armed Spanish bands called hermandades had hunted runaways in Cuba beginning in the fifteen-thirties, a practice that was adopted by the English in Barbados a century later. It had a lot in common with England’s posse comitatus, a band of stout men that a county sheriff could summon to chase down an escaped criminal. South Carolina, founded by slaveowners from Barbados, authorized its first slave patrol in 1702; Virginia followed in 1726, North Carolina in 1753. Slave patrols married the watch to the militia: serving on patrol was required of all able-bodied men (often, the patrol was mustered from the militia), and patrollers used the hue and cry to call for anyone within hearing distance to join the chase. Neither the watch nor the militia nor the patrols were “police,” who were French, and considered despotic. In North America, the French city of New Orleans was distinctive in having la police: armed City Guards, who wore military-style uniforms and received wages, an urban slave patrol.

In 1779, Thomas Jefferson created a chair in “law and police” at the College of William & Mary. The meaning of the word began to change. In 1789, Jeremy Bentham, noting that “police” had recently entered the English language, in something like its modern sense, made this distinction: police keep the peace; justice punishes disorder. (“No justice, no peace!” Black Lives Matter protesters cry in the streets.) Then, in 1797, a London magistrate named Patrick Colquhoun published “A Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis.” He, too, distinguished peace kept in the streets from justice administered by the courts: police were responsible for the regulation and correction of behavior and “the prevention and detection of crimes.”

It is often said that Britain created the police, and the United States copied it. One could argue that the reverse is true. Colquhoun spent his teens and early twenties in Colonial Virginia, had served as an agent for British cotton manufacturers, and owned shares in sugar plantations in Jamaica. He knew all about slave codes and slave patrols. But nothing came of Colquhoun’s ideas about policing until 1829, when Home Secretary Robert Peel—in the wake of a great deal of labor unrest, and after years of suppressing Catholic rebellions in Ireland, in his capacity as Irish Secretary—persuaded Parliament to establish the Metropolitan Police, a force of some three thousand men, headed by two civilian justices (later called “commissioners”), and organized like an army, with each superintendent overseeing four inspectors, sixteen sergeants, and a hundred and sixty-five constables, who wore coats and pants of blue with black top hats, each assigned a numbered badge and a baton. Londoners came to call these men “bobbies,” for Bobby Peel.

It is also often said that modern American urban policing began in 1838, when the Massachusetts legislature authorized the hiring of police officers in Boston. This, too, ignores the role of slavery in the history of the police. In 1829, a Black abolitionist in Boston named David Walker published “An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World,” calling for violent rebellion: “One good black man can put to death six white men.” Walker was found dead within the year, and Boston thereafter had a series of mob attacks against abolitionists, including an attempt to lynch William Lloyd Garrison, the publisher of The Liberator, in 1835. Walker’s words terrified Southern slaveowners. The governor of North Carolina wrote to his state’s senators, “I beg you will lay this matter before the police of your town and invite their prompt attention to the necessity of arresting the circulation of the book.” By “police,” he meant slave patrols: in response to Walker’s “Appeal,” North Carolina formed a statewide “patrol committee.”

New York established a police department in 1844; New Orleans and Cincinnati followed in 1852, then, later in the eighteen-fifties, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Baltimore. Population growth, the widening inequality brought about by the Industrial Revolution, and the rise in such crimes as prostitution and burglary all contributed to the emergence of urban policing. So did immigration, especially from Ireland and Germany, and the hostility to immigration: a new party, the Know-Nothings, sought to prevent immigrants from voting, holding office, and becoming citizens. In 1854, Boston disbanded its ancient watch and formally established a police department; that year, Know-Nothings swept the city’s elections.

American police differed from their English counterparts: in the U.S., police commissioners, as political appointees, fell under local control, with limited supervision; and law enforcement was decentralized, resulting in a jurisdictional thicket. In 1857, in the Great Police Riot, the New York Municipal Police, run by the mayor’s office, fought on the steps of city hall with the New York Metropolitan Police, run by the state. The Metropolitans were known as the New York Mets. That year, an amateur baseball team of the same name was founded.

Also, unlike their British counterparts, American police carried guns, initially their own. In the eighteen-sixties, the Colt Firearms Company began manufacturing a compact revolver called a Pocket Police Model, long before the New York Metropolitan Police began issuing service weapons. American police carried guns because Americans carried guns, including Americans who lived in parts of the country where they hunted for food and defended their livestock from wild animals, Americans who lived in parts of the country that had no police, and Americans who lived in parts of North America that were not in the United States. Outside big cities, law-enforcement officers were scarce. In territories that weren’t yet states, there were U.S. marshals and their deputies, officers of the federal courts who could act as de-facto police, but only to enforce federal laws. If a territory became a state, its counties would elect sheriffs. Meanwhile, Americans became vigilantes, especially likely to kill indigenous peoples, and to lynch people of color. Between 1840 and the nineteen-twenties, mobs, vigilantes, and law officers, including the Texas Rangers, lynched some five hundred Mexicans and Mexican-Americans and killed thousands more, not only in Texas but also in territories that became the states of California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico. A San Francisco vigilance committee established in 1851 arrested, tried, and hanged people; it boasted a membership in the thousands. An L.A. vigilance committee targeted and lynched Chinese immigrants.

The U.S. Army operated as a police force, too. After the Civil War, the militia was organized into seven new departments of permanent standing armies: the Department of Dakota, the Department of the Platte, the Department of the Missouri, the Department of Texas, the Department of Arizona, the Department of California, and the Department of the Columbian. In the eighteen-seventies and eighties, the U.S. Army engaged in more than a thousand combat operations against Native peoples. In 1890, at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, following an attempt to disarm a Lakota settlement, a regiment of cavalrymen massacred hundreds of Lakota men, women, and children. Nearly a century later, in 1973, F.B.I. agents, swat teams, and federal troops and state marshals laid siege to Wounded Knee during a protest over police brutality and the failure to properly punish the torture and murder of an Oglala Sioux man named Raymond Yellow Thunder. They fired more than half a million rounds of ammunition and arrested more than a thousand people. Today, according to the C.D.C., Native Americans are more likely to be killed by the police than any other racial or ethnic group.

Modern American policing began in 1909, when August Vollmer became the chief of the police department in Berkeley, California. Vollmer refashioned American police into an American military. He’d served with the Eighth Army Corps in the Philippines in 1898. “For years, ever since Spanish-American War days, I’ve studied military tactics and used them to good effect in rounding up crooks,” he later explained. “After all we’re conducting a war, a war against the enemies of society.” Who were those enemies? Mobsters, bootleggers, socialist agitators, strikers, union organizers, immigrants, and Black people.

To domestic policing, Vollmer and his peers adapted the kinds of tactics and weapons that had been deployed against Native Americans in the West and against colonized peoples in other parts of the world, including Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, as the sociologist Julian Go has demonstrated. Vollmer instituted a training model imitated all over the country, by police departments that were often led and staffed by other veterans of the United States wars of conquest and occupation. A “police captain or lieutenant should occupy exactly the same position in the public mind as that of a captain or lieutenant in the United States army,” Detroit’s commissioner of police said. (Today’s police officers are disproportionately veterans of U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, many suffering from post-traumatic stress. The Marshall Project, analyzing data from the Albuquerque police, found that officers who are veterans are more likely than their non-veteran counterparts to be involved in fatal shootings. In general, they are more likely to use force, and more likely to fire their guns.)

Vollmer-era police enforced a new kind of slave code: Jim Crow laws, which had been passed in the South beginning in the late eighteen-seventies and upheld by the Supreme Court in 1896. William G. Austin became Savannah’s chief of police in 1907. Earlier, he had earned a Medal of Honor for his service in the U.S. Cavalry at Wounded Knee; he had also fought in the Spanish-American War. By 1916, African-American churches in the city were complaining to Savannah newspapers about the “whole scale arrests of negroes because they are negroes—arrests that would not be made if they were white under similar circumstances.” African-Americans also confronted Jim Crow policing in the Northern cities to which they increasingly fled. James Robinson, Philadelphia’s chief of police beginning in 1912, had served in the Infantry during the Spanish-American War and the Philippine-American War. He based his force’s training on manuals used by the U.S. Army at Leavenworth. Go reports that, in 1911, about eleven per cent of people arrested were African-American; under Robinson, that number rose to 14.6 per cent in 1917. By the nineteen-twenties, a quarter of those arrested were African-Americans, who, at the time, represented just 7.4 per cent of the population.

Progressive Era, Vollmer-style policing criminalized Blackness, as the historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad argued in his 2010 book, “The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America.” Police patrolled Black neighborhoods and arrested Black people disproportionately; prosecutors indicted Black people disproportionately; juries found Black people guilty disproportionately; judges gave Black people disproportionately long sentences; and, then, after all this, social scientists, observing the number of Black people in jail, decided that, as a matter of biology, Black people were disproportionately inclined to criminality.

More recently, between the New Jim Crow and the criminalization of immigration and the imprisonment of immigrants in detention centers, this reality has only grown worse. “By population, by per capita incarceration rates, and by expenditures, the United States exceeds all other nations in how many of its citizens, asylum seekers, and undocumented immigrants are under some form of criminal justice supervision,” Muhammad writes in a new preface to his book. “The number of African American and Latinx people in American jails and prisons today exceeds the entire populations of some African, Eastern European, and Caribbean countries.”

Policing grew harsher in the Progressive Era, and, with the emergence of state-police forces, the number of police grew, too. With the rise of the automobile, some, like California’s, began as “highway patrols.” Others, including the state police in Nevada, Colorado, and Oregon, began as the private paramilitaries of industrialists which employed the newest American immigrants: Hungarians, Italians, and Jews. Industrialists in Pennsylvania established the Iron and Coal Police to end strikes and bust unions, including the United Mine Workers; in 1905, three years after an anthracite-coal strike, the Pennsylvania State Police started operations. “One State Policeman should be able to handle one hundred foreigners,” its new chief said.

ANTI ITALIAN HYSTERIA ABOUT ANARCHISTS ARREST OF SACCO AND VANZETTI

The U.S. Border Patrol began in 1924, the year that Congress restricted immigration from southern Europe. At the insistence of Southern and Western agriculturalists, Congress exempted Mexicans from its new immigration quotas in order to allow migrant workers to enter the United States. The Border Patrol began as a relatively small outfit responsible for enforcing federal immigration law, and stopping smugglers, at all of the nation’s borders. In the middle decades of the twentieth century, it grew to a national quasi-military focussed on policing the southern border in campaigns of mass arrest and forced deportation of Mexican immigrants, aided by local police like the notoriously brutal L.A.P.D., as the historian Kelly Lytle Hernández has chronicled. What became the Chicano movement began in Southern California, with Mexican immigrants’ protests of the L.A.P.D. during the first half of the twentieth century, even as a growing film industry cranked out features about Klansmen hunting Black people, cowboys killing Indians, and police chasing Mexicans. More recently, you can find an updated version of this story in L.A. Noire, a video game set in 1947 and played from the perspective of a well-armed L.A.P.D. officer, who, driving along Sunset Boulevard, passes the crumbling, abandoned sets from D. W. Griffith’s 1916 film “Intolerance,” imagined relics of an unforgiving age.

Two kinds of police appeared on mid-century American television. The good guys solved crime on prime-time police procedurals like “Dragnet,” starting in 1951, and “Adam-12,” beginning in 1968 (both featured the L.A.P.D.). The bad guys shocked America’s conscience on the nightly news: Arkansas state troopers barring Black students from entering Little Rock Central High School, in 1957; Birmingham police clubbing and arresting some seven hundred Black children protesting segregation, in 1963; and Alabama state troopers beating voting-rights marchers at Selma, in 1965. These two faces of policing help explain how, in the nineteen-sixties, the more people protested police brutality, the more money governments gave to police departments.

“You get the wine.”
Cartoon by Pia Guerra and Ian Boothby

In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson declared a “war on crime,” and asked Congress to pass the Law Enforcement Assistance Act, under which the federal government would supply local police with military-grade weapons, weapons that were being used in the war in Vietnam. During riots in Watts that summer, law enforcement killed thirty-one people and arrested more than four thousand; fighting the protesters, the head of the L.A.P.D. said, was “very much like fighting the Viet Cong.” Preparing for a Senate vote just days after the uprising ended, the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee said, “For some time, it has been my feeling that the task of law enforcement agencies is really not much different from military forces; namely, to deter crime before it occurs, just as our military objective is deterrence of aggression.”

As Elizabeth Hinton reported in “From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America,” the “frontline soldiers” in Johnson’s war on crime—Vollmer-era policing all over again—spent a disproportionate amount of time patrolling Black neighborhoods and arresting Black people. Policymakers concluded from those differential arrest rates that Black people were prone to criminality, with the result that police spent even more of their time patrolling Black neighborhoods, which led to a still higher arrest rate. “If we wish to rid this country of crime, if we wish to stop hacking at its branches only, we must cut its roots and drain its swampy breeding ground, the slum,” Johnson told an audience of police policymakers in 1966. The next year, riots broke out in Newark and Detroit. “We ain’t rioting agains’ all you whites,” one Newark man told a reporter not long before being shot dead by police. “We’re riotin’ agains’ police brutality.” In Detroit, police arrested more than seven thousand people.

Johnson’s Great Society essentially ended when he asked Congress to pass the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, which had the effect of diverting money from social programs to policing. This magazine called it “a piece of demagoguery devised out of malevolence and enacted in hysteria.” James Baldwin attributed its “irresponsible ferocity” to “some pale, compelling nightmare—an overwhelming collection of private nightmares.” The truth was darker, as the sociologist Stuart Schrader chronicled in his 2019 book, “Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing.” During the Cold War, the Office of Public Safety at the U.S.A.I.D. provided assistance to the police in at least fifty-two countries, and training to officers from nearly eighty, for the purpose of counter-insurgency—the suppression of an anticipated revolution, that collection of private nightmares; as the O.P.S. reported, it contributed “the international dimension to the Administration’s War on Crime.” Counter-insurgency boomeranged, and came back to the United States, as policing.

In 1968, Johnson’s new crime bill established the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, within the Department of Justice, which, in the next decade and a half, disbursed federal funds to more than eighty thousand crime-control projects. Even funds intended for social projects—youth employment, for instance, along with other health, education, housing, and welfare programs—were distributed to police operations. With Richard Nixon, any elements of the Great Society that had survived the disastrous end of Johnson’s Presidency were drastically cut, with an increased emphasis on policing, and prison-building. More Americans went to prison between 1965 and 1982 than between 1865 and 1964, Hinton reports. Under Ronald Reagan, still more social services were closed, or starved of funding until they died: mental hospitals, health centers, jobs programs, early-childhood education. By 2016, eighteen states were spending more on prisons than on colleges and universities. Activists who today call for defunding the police argue that, for decades, Americans have been defunding not only social services but, in many states, public education itself. The more frayed the social fabric, the more police have been deployed to trim the dangling threads.

The blueprint for law enforcement from Nixon to Reagan came from the Harvard political scientist James Q. Wilson between 1968, in his book “Varieties of Police Behavior,” and 1982, in an essay in The Atlantic titled “Broken Windows.” On the one hand, Wilson believed that the police should shift from enforcing the law to maintaining order, by patrolling on foot, and doing what came to be called “community policing.” (Some of his recommendations were ignored: Wilson called for other professionals to handle what he termed the “service functions” of the police—“first aid, rescuing cats, helping ladies, and the like”—which is a reform people are asking for today.) On the other hand, Wilson called for police to arrest people for petty crimes, on the theory that they contributed to more serious crimes. Wilson’s work informed programs like Detroit’s stress (Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets), begun in 1971, in which Detroit police patrolled the city undercover, in disguises that included everything from a taxi-driver to a “radical college professor,” and killed so many young Black men that an organization of Black police officers demanded that the unit be disbanded. The campaign to end stress arguably marked the very beginnings of police abolitionism. stress defended its methods. “We just don’t walk up and shoot somebody,” one commander said. “We ask him to stop. If he doesn’t, we shoot.”

For decades, the war on crime was bipartisan, and had substantial support from the Congressional Black Caucus. “Crime is a national-defense problem,” Joe Biden said in the Senate, in 1982. “You’re in as much jeopardy in the streets as you are from a Soviet missile.” Biden and other Democrats in the Senate introduced legislation that resulted in the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984. A decade later, as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Biden helped draft the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, whose provisions included mandatory sentencing. In May, 1991, two months after the Rodney King beating, Biden introduced the Police Officers’ Bill of Rights, which provided protections for police under investigation. The N.R.A. first endorsed a Presidential candidate, Reagan, in 1980; the Fraternal Order of Police, the nation’s largest police union, first endorsed a Presidential candidate, George H. W. Bush, in 1988. In 1996, it endorsed Bill Clinton.

Partly because of Biden’s record of championing law enforcement, the National Association of Police Organizations endorsed the Obama-Biden ticket in 2008 and 2012. In 2014, after police in Ferguson, Missouri, shot Michael Brown, the Obama Administration established a task force on policing in the twenty-first century. Its report argued that police had become warriors when what they really should be is guardians. Most of its recommendations were never implemented.

In 2016, the Fraternal Order of Police endorsed Donald Trump, saying that “our members believe he will make America safe again.” Police unions are lining up behind Trump again this year. “We will never abolish our police or our great Second Amendment,” Trump said at Mt. Rushmore, on the occasion of the Fourth of July. “We will not be intimidated by bad, evil people.”

Trump is not the king; the law is king. The police are not the king’s men; they are public servants. And, no matter how desperately Trump would like to make it so, policing really isn’t a partisan issue. Out of the stillness of the shutdown, the voices of protest have roared like summer thunder. An overwhelming majority of Americans, of both parties, support major reforms in American policing. And a whole lot of police, defying their unions, also support those reforms.

Those changes won’t address plenty of bigger crises, not least because the problem of policing can’t be solved without addressing the problem of guns. But this much is clear: the polis has changed, and the police will have to change, too.


Published in the print edition of the July 20, 2020, issue, with the headline “The Long Blue Line.”

Jill Lepore is a professor of history at Harvard and the host of the podcast “The Last Archive.” Her fourteenth book, “If Then,” will be published in September

A summer of protest, unemployment and presidential politics – welcome to 1932

July 1, 2020 8.27am EDT

An election looms. An unpopular president wrestles with historic unemployment rates. Demonstrations erupt in hundreds of locations. The president deploys Army units to suppress peaceful protests in the nation’s capital. And most of all he worries about an affable Democratic candidate who is running against him without saying much about a platform or plans.

Welcome to 1932.

I am a historian and director of the Mapping American Social Movements Project, which explores the history of social movements and their interaction with American electoral politics.

The parallels between the summer of 1932 and what is happening in the U.S. currently are striking. While the pandemic and much else is different, the political dynamics are similar enough that they are useful for anyone trying to understand where the U.S. is and where it is going.
Tanks and mounted troops advance to break up a Bonus Marchers’ camp of veterans protesting lost wages, Washington D.C., July 28, 1932. PhotoQuest/Getty Images
Multiracial street protest movement

In 1932, as in 2020, the nation experienced an explosion of civil unrest on the eve of a presidential election.

The Great Depression had deepened through three years by 1932. With 24% of the work force unemployed and the federal government refusing to provide funds to support the jobless and homeless as local governments ran out of money, men and women across the country joined demonstrations demanding relief.

Our mapping project has recorded 389 hunger marches, eviction fights and other protests in 138 cities during 1932.

Although less than the thousands of Black Lives Matter protests, there are similarities.

African Americans participated in these movements, and many of the protests attracted police violence. Indeed, the unemployed people’s movement of the early 1930s was the first important multiracial street protest movement of the 20th century, and police violence was especially vicious against black activists.

Atlanta authorities announced in June 1932 that 23,000 families would be cut from the list of those eligible for the meager county relief payments of 60 cents per week per person allocated to whites (less for Blacks). A mixed crowd of nearly 1,000 gathered in front of the Fulton County Courthouse for a peaceful demonstration demanding US$4 per week per family and denouncing racial discrimination.

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The biracial protest was unprecedented in Atlanta and yielded two results. The eligibility cuts were canceled, and police promptly hunted down one of the organizers, a 19-year-old Black communist named Angelo Herndon. He was charged with “inciting to insurrection,” a charge that carried the death penalty. Lawyers spent the next five years winning his freedom.
Protests over unemployment

Five hundred unemployed ‘Hunger Marchers’ protest on Boston Common on their way to the State House, demanding unemployment insurance and other relief measures, May 2, 1932. Bettman/Getty

But race was not the key issue of the 1932 protest wave. It was government’s failure to rescue the millions in economic distress.

Organizations representing the unemployed – many led by communists or socialists – had been active since 1930, and now in the summer of 1932 protests surged in every state. Here are examples from the Mapping American Social Movement Project timeline from one week in June:

• June 14

Hundreds of Chicago police mobilize to keep unemployed demonstrators at bay at the start of the Republican Party nominating convention.

• June 17

A so-called “hunger march” of 3,000 jobless in Minneapolis ends peacefully, but in Bloomington, Indiana, police use tear gas on 1,000 demonstrators demanding relief, while in Pittsburgh unemployed supporters crowd a courthouse to cheer the not-guilty verdict in an “inciting to riot” case.

• June 20

Police break up a march by 200 unemployed in Argo, Illinois, and a much larger protest by jobless in Rochester, New York. In Lawrence, Massachusetts, 500 protesters successfully demanded an end to evictions of unemployed mill workers; in Pittsburgh, protesters block the eviction of an unemployed widow. The same day in Kansas City, a mostly Black crowd of 2,000 pleads unsuccessfully with the mayor to restore a recently suspended relief program.
Farmers’ uprising

The unemployed protests in urban areas of 1932 seem similar to today’s protest culture, but that was not true in the farm belt.

Dealing with collapsing prices and escalating farm evictions, farmers in many regions staged near-uprisings. Black farmers in the cotton belt braved vigilante violence when, by the thousands, they joined the Alabama Sharecroppers Union, which advocated debt relief and the right of tenant farmers to market their own crops.

Newspaper headlines focused on the white farmers mobilizing in Iowa, Wisconsin, Nebraska, Minnesota and the Dakotas in the summer of 1932. The Farmer’s Holiday Association formed that year pledging to strike (“holiday”) to raise farm prices. The strike that began on August 15 involved sometimes heavily armed white farmers blocking roads to stop the shipment of corn, wheat, milk and other products. The strike withered after a few weeks, but farmers had sent a message, and some state legislatures quickly enacted moratoriums on farm foreclosures.

Counties that today are marked as Trump territory distinguished themselves in 1932 as centers of what became known as the “Cornbelt Rebellion.”
Farmers set up a roadblock near Sioux City, Iowa, during Farmer’s Holiday Strike, August 1932. State Historical Society of Iowa

Unrest helped FDR defeat Hoover

Periods of grassroots protest and civil unrest interact in unpredictable ways with presidential elections. In 1932, unrest helped Franklin Roosevelt defeat incumbent Herbert Hoover. Again, there are similarities between that summer and this one.

Democratic presidential candidate Roosevelt, like today’s Democratic candidate, Joe Biden, enjoyed the luxury of running on platitudes instead of programs. Roosevelt used the phrase “new deal” in his nomination acceptance speech, but details were few and it was not until he took office that the phrase acquired real meaning.

Roosevelt could avoid commitments because the political dynamics of 1932 forced the incumbent to play defense, much like today.

Herbert Hoover was no Trump, almost the opposite. Cautious, principled, quiet, a moderate Republican, he had made major errors in the first years of the Depression, and his reputation never recovered. Democrats accused him of inaction (which was not true), while the unemployed movements fixed the label “Hoovervilles” on the homeless encampments and shacktowns that sprang up in cities across the country.

Hoover’s credibility was further damaged in the summer of 1932 when more than 15,000 World War I veterans converged on Washington, D.C. under the banner of the Bonus Expeditionary Force, commonly called the Bonus Army. They demanded that Congress immediately pay them the bonuses they were due to get in 1945.

When the Senate rejected the proposal, the Bonus Army settled into a massive encampment across the Anacostia River from Capitol Hill.
Shacks burned by the U.S. Army in the shantytown constructed by protesters called the ‘Bonus Army’ after they were forced out by the military. Bettmann/Getty

A month later, Hoover called in U.S. Army troops. During a night of violence, the army burned thousands of tents and shacks and sent the Bonus Army marchers fleeing.

For Hoover, the deployment of U.S. Army units played out much as it did for Trump this May, when he had Lafayette Park violently cleared of protesters. Hoover’s action deepened his image problems and strengthened the sense that he lacked compassion for those in need, including those who had fought for their country only 14 years earlier.

Hoover tried to mobilize a backlash against the summer of protests, claiming that Communists were behind all of the unrest, including the Bonus Army, which in fact had banned all Communists. It didn’t work: Roosevelt won in a landslide.
The poor handling of the unrest and economic crisis by President Hoover, right, led to his election loss to Roosevelt, left. Roosevelt: Hulton Archive/Getty Images; Hoover: General Photographic Agency/Getty




In the end, the protests helped Democrats in the election of 1932. In Congress, Democrats gained 97 House seats and 12 in the Senate, taking control of Congress for the first time since 1918. And equally significant, they helped propel the agenda of the New Dealers, as the new administration prepared to take power and launch the ambitious legislation of the first 100 days.

Three years of grassroots action had forced even reluctant politicians to recognize the urgency of reform. The early New Deal would race to provide debt relief for farmers and homeowners, jobs for the unemployed, and public works projects – part of what demonstrators had been demanding for years.

Author

James N. Gregory
Professor of History, University of Washington