Readings in Jewish History: Jews and Race

It turns out I haven't done nearly as much writing this term for my Readings in Modern Jewish History course. Below is only the second writing assignment for this term and might be the last before I submit my term paper. That paper is due in the first week of May. In the meantime, I'll probably post my annotated bibliography.

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Elaborate on the connection between Jews and sexual activity according to Gillman. What is the significance of this connection in terms of the larger discourse on the Jewish body and the way in which it is viewed as sick, black etc. Muse on the way in which Gillman makes use of images. How do these images help to answer his question as to “how the representation of the Jewish body is shaped and, in turn, shapes the sense of Jewish identity.” (170)

Gilman's treatment of the connection between Jews and sexuality fits into the pattern already established in our course in the works of Hyman, Seidman, and Yerushalmi (when considering the topic vis-à-vis Freud's musings on the topic). Each of these authors has engaged the matter of the perception of Jewish men being in some way depraved, effeminate, or deranged. Seidman actually cites Gilman directly in this regard, writing that increasing visibility of homosexuality in Central Europe "coincided with the entry of Jews into the Central European bourgeoisie" (p. 97). However, whereas these authors' discussions of the intersection between Jews and sexuality remains muted and marginal to their primary exigeses, Gilman pushes these associations to their greatest extents. Remarkably, he does so without having to move the clock forward to the 1940s, demonstrating not only that the seeds of Nazi antisemitism's preoccupation with Jewish lechery began decades earlier but also that the overt association of Jews with sexually criminal behavior was already in circulation in the 1880s and well outside Central Europe.

Gilman accomplishes all this by pointing out how suspects in the Jack the Ripper case -- particularly "Leather Apron," an Eastern European Jew -- were characterized as Jewish in the public imagination. In this way, the Whitechapel murders become a synecdoche for the whole of Jewish perversion. The corpses mutilated by Jack the Ripper are likened to the phallus mutilated by circumcision and to the livestock butchered by the shochet, and the suspicion that the murderer was killing prostitutes as revenge for contracting a venereal disease is expanded to consider the common belief that Jews were carriers of syphilis. Finally, the association of Jews and prostitutes generally allows for the association of the sexually pathological to intersect with the far better established stereotype of the Jewish obsession with money. Thus, the sexualized image of "the Jew" does not replace earlier monetary or even religious motives for anti-Semitism; rather, it complements them and renders them more biological.

Arguably, the ability to communicate the visceral nature of these themes would be hampered without visual representations, which is perhaps why Gilman includes numerous plates providing examples in the chapter on the Ripper. It also becomes easier with these images -- as well as with those presented in the chapter "The Jewish Nose" -- to see the linkages between the popular art of late 19th century Europe and Der Stürmer. Moreover, Gilman uses the sexual othering of Jews to show how it coincides and intersects with racial othering. On the topic of syphilis, e.g., he writes, "It is marked upon his face as 'ethnic eczema.' It is a sign of sexual and racial corruption as surely as the composite photographs of the Jew made by Francis Galton at the time revealed the 'true face" of the Jew" (p. 125).

In this same section of the book, Gilman focuses on the internalization of these tropes by Marcel Proust, who wrestled with both his own Jewishness and his own homosexuality. The protagonist of À la recherche du temps perdu, created by a gay writer, is a Jew who marries a prostitute. Complicating these relationships further is Proust's French citizenship at a time when Jewish membership in the French nation felt tenuous but was not yet as publicly dispute as during the Dreyfus affair. In a way, how Proust negotiates his internalization of the complex relationships among sex, race, and nation is to externalize them in the form of Swann. In so doing, he creates an "arch-Jew" who is "visibly marked … as the heterosexual syphilitic, as that which Proust was not (at least in his fantasy about his own sexual identity)" (p. 126). Of course, Proust is only one example. Freud is another, but it is likely that neither of their cases was "typical." That said, the two men's conflicts of sexualized representations of Jews could indicate a larger phenomenon of self-loathing imposed by external anti-Semitism, regardless of how these conflicts are ultimately expressed or resolved.

Softening the Ground

This post will probably be long and perhaps only tangentially connected to history, but it's important, I think, to write down some things I've seen going on. I'm not alone in having seen these things, but perhaps can offer a perspective not yet put forward. My topics will be two, one specific and one general. They are, respectively, Stefan Molyneux and authoritarianism.

On Molyneux much has been said. Rather than retread old ground, such as allegations of cultish behaviors, blatant lying, perhaps most notoriously on Joe Rogan's podcast, and rank hypocrisy against his own earnestly stated personal principles, it suffices here to say that, until a couple of years ago, Molyneux was marketing himself as an anarcho-capitalist or hard libertarian: lots of talk about free markets and rising tides lifting all boats. That sort of thing. Then, he took a disturbing turn, even for him.

Molyneux as a public figure has always been conservative and right wing (terms that intersect quite a bit but not entirely). However, the far right turn he's taken over the last few years is more sinister. He's begun broadcasting explicitly racist positions, including a lot of pieces on the race-IQ correlation, with his conclusion (unsurprisingly) being that this correlation is both overwhelmingly genetic and immutable. He's blended in quite a bit attacking Islam generally, a subject with which I perhaps disagree with him less but that nevertheless he paints with an overly broad brush. Therefore, when Trump emerged politically, Molyneux was almost immediately on board, jettisoning in practice certain principles that, at least in theory, he'd long held, such as laissez faire (Trump is a protectionist) and moral absolutism (think about it for a second).

Of course, Trumpists aren't rare and right wingers aren't experiencing a shortage on the Internet, where Molyneux primarily resides. What's disturbing about Molyneux's case is the mainstream attention that he has received. Leaving aside an appearance on his YouTube channel a few years ago by Noam Chomsky, during which Molyneux largely kept his reactionary views to himself, Molyneux's right-wing guests have run the gamut from mainstream conservatives (e.g., Dave Rubin) to fringe mainstream figures (Ann Coulter) to alt-right mainstays (Mike Cernovich). As a result, Molyneux now gets retweeted by the President's sons, and this is where the danger really lies.

Before the general situation I mentioned above, however, a final specific point about Molyneux. His guest today (July 6, 2017) was Axel Kaiser, a Chilean writer and journalist with libertarian leanings who joined Molyneux to discuss "the untold story of Augusto Pinochet." Kaiser presented the standard mainstream right-wing case, i.e., Pinochet was bad but Allende was worse. He argued that Allende intended to institute a Marxist totalitarian dictatorship (false), committed horrendous violence (partially true), etc., but I didn't hear anything particularly surprising in what he said. Molyneux, however, pushed his luck. Isn't it true, he asked, that Allende was arming leftist terrorist groups? They were being armed, Kaiser answered, but probably not by Allende. In fact, he continued, many of the most violent leftist rhetoricians of the Allende period shrank away in cowardice rather than have to fight the junta that Pinochet led. Molyneux responded that he found that most leftists preferred to exert statist violence against the helpless and wilted when having to face a real military.

The obvious counterexample of the Viet Cong aside, one must note what Molyneux is doing here. He is painting the left as an inherently violent body of ideologies. Now place this within a larger context of the last few months or so, during which we have seen an overexaggeration of leftist violence against Trump supporters and either denial or weak excuses for right wing violence, not to mention a complete lack of responsibility to answer for Trump's clear exhortations to violence during the campaign. To be clear, violence is in general not something to be admired, and although the mere fact of punching a Nazi says more about the person that evokes such a response and how historically Nazis have had to be dealt with than it does about the person doing the punching, I accept as well that there is an inherent danger in defining the whole right as Nazis.

So we have the left being painted as violent and unhinged. Just think about the most recent episodes of right-wing outrage at Kathy Griffin's ham-handed kabuki theater of beheading the President or at the staging of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar in Central Park in New York with the title character decked out in Trumpian finery, and you'll notice a trend. Now couple this with the ongoing attacks on the media. Last week it was a dust-up between the President and Mika Brzenzinksi. This week, it's outrage that CNN found the creator of a video in which the President, in a clip from his WWE days, wrestles a person to the ground, the person having the CNN logo pasted over his face. "CNN has blackmailed this young man!" we are told by Molyneux and others. It is all part of a delegitimation of the left.

It’s worth noting that the interior logic here is sound, although the premises are heavily flawed. If the media against Trump is leftist, and leftists are violent, then of course the media are potentially violent enemies who would commit blackmail. That the U.S. media is overwhelmingly corporate, rather than liberal, is beside the point. So is the overwhelming lack of violence since the 1970s on the left, a large proportion of which supported a rather centrist candidate for President just a few months ago. The right has been significantly more violent in recent decades: the Order, Oklahoma City, and Eric Rudolph come to mind.

The most important question is where Molyneux et al. are going with this rhetoric. It seems to me that they are softening the ground for an authoritarian seizure of power. I've done my level-headed best to resist this position for the last several months, but it's become increasingly clear that this is what is going on. Trump is elbows deep in scandal, and some of it will inevitably catch up with him. It seems unlikely to me that he will finish his term as President, although how his term will end is anyone's guess. My wife suggests he has set the stage for an excuse of illness allowing him to resign. That's possible, to be sure. Impeachment, the other realistic way that he leaves office other than illness or death (he's 71 and obese), hinges on the majority party in the Congress, which is Republican in both cases. Obviously, there are Republicans who have taken (and a few who have even kept) principled stances against Trump, but they are few, and the majority of the party seems content to have Trump in office to rubber stamp whatever they are able to get passed, which seems to be the standard Reaganesque fare of deregulation, tax cuts, and making Americans poorer, dumber, and sicker.

If Trump were smart, he'd realize that he'd be impeached the minute he completed the Republicans' legislative agenda. But he isn’t smart, as should be abundantly clear by now, and I'm a pessimist with regard to this agenda and how successful it will be. And then, if my predictions are correct, Trump will face impeachment. The question for consideration here is what the alt-right will do when he does. I suggest that they are preparing for a violent confrontation and are hoping that they have sufficiently prepared the armed population among them for when push comes to shove. They will not allow Trump to be removed from power against their will.

Is Trump involved in this? Probably not, although maybe his sons are. Certainly figures like Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon are, I'd imagine; neither of them seems terribly enamored of democracy. The most important question, it seems to me, is whether the President would go along with a scenario like this. Maybe the most important question of all is whether they will even wait until impeachment becomes a viable option or will allow some Reichstag Fire/9-11 type event, whether staged or genuine, to be zero hour.

So what can you do? I'd recommend reading Timothy Snyder's excellent book On Tyranny and following the directions in there. Remember that what's happening in this country isn't normal by any stretch of the imagination and that defending democratic institutions and the rule of law is more important now than perhaps at any time in the last 150 years. Finally, whenever one of these people on the right wing wielding this rhetoric -- whether Molyneux or Cernovich or one of their band of merry men -- has a megaphone, be there to remind everyone within earshot what they are doing. They are preparing the stage to subvert democracy in this country. If that happens, then what happens next isn't pretty, if history is any lesson.

Don't let them win.

The Army, the Interior Department, and the Wounded Knee Massacre

            On December 29, 1890, at least 150 Native Americans of the Miniconjou Lakota people, including 89 women and children, were massacred by troops from the U.S. 7th Cavalry Regiment under the command of Colonel James Forsyth. As news of the massacre spread east from Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota where it occurred, different versions of the events, told respectively by members of the military, agents of the Office of Indian Affairs (within the Department of the Interior), and the media, emerged depending on the sources and recipients of information. By early the following year, the prevailing opinion about the massacre was that it had been a justified response to aggression by the Sioux. Public opinion and political repercussions were instrumental in resolving the issue of responsibility for the Wounded Knee massacre largely in favor of the version propagated by the military, rather than the more sympathetic version presented by the Department of the Interior.

            The Army’s version of events underwent its own evolution. The person who served as the source of information to Washington was General Nelson Miles, Commander of the Division of Missouri, although he was not present at Wounded Knee. His initial telegraph, to Army Commander-in-Chief John Schofield, reports “severe loss” on the part of the Lakota, which, he states, “may be a wholesome lesson to the other Sioux” and “may possibly bring favorable results” (Miles, 2015a, para. 1). However, the next day, Miles telegraphed Brigadier General John Brooke, commanding officer of the Army of the Platte, seemingly angry with the events at Wounded Knee, stating, “Some one [sic] seems to be suppressing facts” and that “Whatever the circumstances of that fight with Big Foot [i.e., Spotted Elk, chief of the Miniconjou and killed at Wounded Knee] may be it must have had the effect of increasing the hostile element very largely” (Miles, 2015b, para. 2).

Over the next few days, General Miles conferred with Schofield as an investigation began into the actions of Colonel Forsyth. On January 2, 1891, three days after the massacre, Schofield told Miles on behalf of Secretary of War Redfield Proctor, “He [President Harrison] hopes that the report of the killing of women and children in the affair at Wounded Knee is unfounded, and directs that you cause an immediate inquiry to be made and report the results to the Department. If there was any unsoldierly conduct, you will relieve the responsible officer, and so use the troops engaged there as to avoid its repetition” (Schofield, 2015, para. 8). A board of inquiry was established on January 4, and Miles relieved Forsyth of his command. By this point, Miles had already learned that a burial party that he had commanded to go to Wounded Knee, led by Major Samuel Whitside, had interred 146 Indians at the creek, including dozens of women and children (Russell, 2015, para. 11).

Within two weeks, however, the inquiry was over, and Colonel Forsyth had been reinstated, over the objections of General Miles and likely due to the testimonies of the soldiers under Forsyth’s command. Forsyth would go on to be promoted to brigadier general. By the time President Benjamin Harrison reported on the massacre in his State of the Union Address, the notion that the U.S. troops under Forsyth might have committed crimes against humanity had been effectively buried. While acknowledging that the Lakota had valid complaints about rations and other provisions, Harrison nevertheless stated, “the Sioux tribes are naturally warlike and turbulent, and their warriors were excited by their medicine men and chiefs, who preached the coming of an Indian messiah who was to give them power to destroy their enemies.” General Miles, the President wrote, “is entitled to the credit of having given thorough protection to the settlers and of bringing the hostiles into subjection with the least possible loss of life” (Harrison, 1891, para. 82).

Indeed, by the time General Miles wrote his annual report for Secretary Proctor at the end of 1891, even the general himself was more concerned with placing the events within the context of the larger effort to get the Indians to come to the reservations and how the massacre delayed the achieving of that goal. He refers twice to the massacre explicitly. The first mention is brief: “The unfortunate affair at Wounded Knee Creek December 29, 1890, in which 30 officers and soldiers and 200 Indians (men, women, and children) were killed or mortally wounded, prolonged the disturbance and made a successful termination more difficult” (Miles, 2013, para. 4) The second, in contrast, is more lengthy:

The result may be summed up in the loss of nearly 200 people, delay in bringing the Indians to terms, and caused 3,000 Indians to be thrown into a condition of hostility with a spirit of animosity, hatred, and revenge. The spirit thus engendered made it more difficult to force back, or restore the confidence of the Indians, and for a time it looked as if the difficulty would be insurmountable. (Miles, 2013, para. 9)

In neither case, however, does Miles indicate that the fault for the massacre lay with the Army, although he notes that the commander office (Forsyth) was relieved of his command. This report is more or less Miles’s final word on the massacre, and it is remarkable for its nondescript nature.

            In contrast, the annual report of the Office of Indian Affairs for 1891 is remarkable for what it says about the massacre and the victims. The first mention of the massacre occurs in the main part of the report, in a section discussing the Sioux uprising at large. The commissioner (Thomas J. Morgan) refers to the “fighting” as “short, sharp [and] indiscriminate,” and then continues, “The bodies of women and children were scattered along a distance of two miles from the scene of the encounter,” before finally referring to the Indians that fled as “frightened and exasperated” (Morgan, 1891, p. 130). The reader is further referred to an appendix of three pages of testimonies of Miniconjou survivors.

In the section of the report on South Dakota, the massacre is mentioned again. After detailing the campaign to get the Indians on the reservations and conceding that the reports of the massacre have been conflict, the agent for the state writes about the Indians killed, “As this band of Indians were on their way to the Pine Ridge Agency headquarters it is not probable that any hostility was intended” (Morgan, 1891, p. 390). Why was the likely peaceable nature of the Miniconjou killed at Wounded Knee not included in Miles’s report?

According to historian Heather Cox Richardson (Boston College), the differences between the accounts of the Interior and War departments were emblematic of a struggle for power over Indian affairs between the two departments. In her book, Richardson argues that the Commission of Indian Affairs, as part of the Department of the Interior, was motivated largely by political patronage; “its officers,” she writes, “[…] dispensed the valuable government jobs and lucrative contracts for Indian supplies to political supporters. By siding with reformers on the issue of managing the Indians, politicians kept this significant patronage power in their own hands” (Richardson, 2010, p. 47).

The Democratic administration under President Grover Cleveland had staffed the commission with agents sympathetic to the Sioux, but when the administration became Republican in 1889, the filling of positions with patronage jobs resulted in the hiring of agents fearful of Indians and ignorant of Indian culture. Nevertheless, upper-level positions continued to be staffed by more sympathetic people, and commissioner Morgan was among them, while Secretary Noble, a Harrison administration man, was more comfortable calling in the military, despite longstanding rivalry between the departments over who should manage Indian affairs. Conversely, the War Department, staffed with men with years of experience both fighting and negotiating with Indians and who felt a grudging respect for Native Americans, was more likely to be halting in the use of force. The result was that hostile agents and raw field officers were responsible for the massacre; in turn, more sympathetic senior officeholders within the interior department sought to exculpate the Indians, while the senior War Department leadership sought to keep the Army’s reputation clean.

            Another part of the answer lies in the two departments’ sources of information. Whereas the Army report relied almost entirely on the testimony of soldiers in the Army unit at Wounded Knee, with the only testimony of Indians that of scouts in the employ of the Army, the Interior Department’s information, as noted, came from Miniconjou who witnesses the massacre. As a result, the disposition of the Indians at Wounded Knee as not aggressive and as victims was more effectively communicated. The final part of the answer, and that which bears specifically on why President Harrison’s statement so closely reflected the official account of the Army, has to do with the media.

            Newspapers had been escalating public concern about the Lakota for months, specifically regarding the Ghost Dance religion that had inspiring the less assimilationist Sioux and motivating their resistance to some extent. For example, an article from November 22, 1890, in the Daily Tobacco Leaf Chronicle, published in Clarksville, Tenn., reported that Indians at Wounded Knee Creek were “still carrying on their dances and that they had heard of the arrival of the military, but what is of much more importance to the agents is they have strapped on their guns and are dancing fully armed” (“More Serious,” 1890, p. 1).

The American Studies scholar Christina Klein (also of Boston College) has identified the journalist William Fitch Kelley as a major culprit regarding the role of the press. Arguing that Kelley’s writing was part of a larger narrative that sought to subordinate the Sioux to a larger cultural order and narrative of stability in the face of widespread social upheaval, Klein writes, “For Kelley, the military represented the forces of order and the rebellious Indians the forces of chaos. In contrast to the tightly-disciplined army, the hostile Indians sowed mayhem among themselves and throughout the entire area” (Klein, 1994, p. 52). Kelley’s reportage was marked by grossly biased characterization of the Sioux and rank favoritism of the Army’s version of events. In this regard, and in so far as Kelley’s reports were representative, newspaper reports generally reflected the public’s opinion of the Lakota.

President Harrison’s response, therefore, can be seen as the culmination of several factors, including the competing versions of the events of the massacre between the interior and war departments, not to mention within the Army itself, as well as the public opinion, as enunciated in the newspapers, that the Indians were to blame. On the one hand, Harrison’s report acknowledges the complaints of high-level Interior personnel about the privations that the Lakota faced. On the other hand, the report simultaneously exculpates the Army of any wrongdoing, thus vindicating the version of the President’s own appointees at the top of both departments. Nevertheless, Indian affairs remained the province of the Department of the Interior. When President Harrison lost re-election to Grover Cleveland in November 1892, the issue past back to an administration that viewed itself as reformist.

In conclusion, the Wounded Knee Massacre was largely the result of inexperienced field officers the Commission of Indian Affairs and the Army. Because the departments of Interior and State relied on different witnesses, their versions of events at the Wounded Knee Massacre differed as well. The authoritative version as communicated to the people by President Harrison more closely resembled the accounts in newspapers and in the Army’s accounts, although the President conceded that the Sioux had legitimate grievances. In this regard, the “official” version was shaped both by the media’s treatment of the massacre and by the desire of upper-level cabinet officials to shield the administration.

References

Harrison, B. (1891, December 9). State of the Union Address. Speech presented in Washington,

D.C. Retrieved February 1, 2017, from http://millercenter.org/president/bharrison/
speeches/speech-3767

Klein, C. (1994). "Everything of Interest in the Late Pine Ridge War Are Held by Us for Sale":

Popular Culture and Wounded Knee. The Western Historical Quarterly, 25(1), 45-68.

Miles, N. (2013, August 19). Annual Report of Major General Miles. Retrieved February 1,

2017, from https://armyatwoundedknee.com/2013/08/19/1891-annual-report-of-major-general-miles-part-4/

Miles, N. (2015a, September 27). [Telegraph sent December 30, 1890, to Commander in Chief

John Schofield]. Retrieved February 1, 2017, from https://armyatwoundedknee.com/wounded-knee-investigation/

Miles, N. (2015b, September 27). [Telegraph sent December 31, 1890, to Brigadier General John

Brooke]. Retrieved February 1, 2017, from Miles, N. (2015, September 27). Retrieved February 1, 2017, from https://armyatwoundedknee.com/wounded-knee-investigation/

More Serious -- Indians Continue to Indulge in Ghost Dance. (1890, November 22). Daily

Tobacco Leaf-Chronicle, p. 1. Retrieved February 1, 2017, from http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn88061072/1890-11-22/ed-1/seq-1/#date1=1836&index=15

Morgan, T. J. (1891). Annual report of the commissioner of Indian affairs, for the year 1891

(Vol. 1, Rep.). Washington, DC: GPO.

Richardson, H. C. (2010). Wounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road to an American

Massacre. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Russell, S. (2015, September 27). Wounded Knee investigation. Retrieved February 1, 2017,

from https://armyatwoundedknee.com/wounded-knee-investigation/

Schofield, J. (2015, September 27). [Telegraph sent January 1, 1891, to General Nelson Miles].

Retrieved February 1, 2017, from https://armyatwoundedknee.com/wounded-knee-investigation/

Boston Busing Crisis

I agree that, in the long run, busing helped Boston because it desegregated the school system, providing equal educational opportunity for minority students, and set the stage for racial healing and an improved racial climate in the twenty-first century.

Regarding school desegregation, a ruling of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in 1987 found that school desegregation had been successful. they based this decision on three factors: that the number of single-race schools had decreased; that good faith had been exercised in the attempts by the School Board to desegregate; and that desegregation had been implemented to the greatest extent possible. On the third point, the court remarked, "Little in the record […] suggests that implementation beyond what presently exists is likely to be obtained." On the basis of the court's observation, we can conclude that desegregation was successful.

The second point is dependent on the first; i.e., successful school desegregation by its very nature guarantees that there will be equal educational opportunity for minority students. While metrics for equal opportunity are difficult to quantify, two statistics offered in the textbook provide some substantiation. First, the dropout rate among Boston high school students decreased to below the national average; second, the college graduation rate among alumni of Boston high schools tripled over the same period. These data provide sound proof of an improved educational situation. If the lack of segregation can be considered proof of equal opportunity, then opportunity not only was extended but actually improved.[1]

Finally, racial healing and an improved racial climate did in fact emerge after school desegregation in Boston. Here, the political career of Mayor Ray Flynn is instructive. As noted in the text, Flynn was able to secure a successful citizen referendum on replacement of the elected school board, which had been the locus of resistance to desegregation during the busing crisis. That voters would approve such a measure is indicative that the worst of bad feelings had passed. Although there are occasional outbursts of racism as there sadly are in most areas of the United States, these incidents are less common, and racial violence has virtually disappeared.

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     [1] Morgan v. Nucci, 831 F.2d 313 (1st Cir. 1987), accessed February 6, 2017, http://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/831/313/398470/

The King Assassination and Black Nationalism Ascendant

The effect of the assassination of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the civil rights movement was profound because Dr. King was the most visible and most politically "acceptable" of the leaders of the movement to white Americans. There were a variety of consequences to his assassination, which were both immediate and more remote. For instance, in the immediate aftermath of Dr. King's assassination, there were riots in the inner cities across the country, as simmering anger at continuing conditions of racial oppression exploded in rage at the assassination. President Lyndon Johnson mobilized the National Guard the day after the assassination and largely suppressed further rioting, although sporadic violence continued into the following month.

A more remote effect was a shift in the tactics of the remaining leaders in the civil rights movement. Although Dr. King's widow Coretta Scott King and his closest associates urged a non-violent response to the assassination, younger leaders in the movement saw in King's murder the end of civil disobedience and the beginning of armed struggle. The ascendance of the Black Panther Party, which had existed before King's assassination, into a leading role in the struggle for black liberation is a clear effect of the assassination, and the willingness of the Black Panthers to use violence in self-defense arguably caused a dramatic shift in the civil rights movement from that point forward.

Although it is unclear whether there would have been this evolution in the civil rights movement without Dr. King's murder, it is fairly clear that it would have happened more slowly, if at all. As noted, the Black Panthers were already in operation in 1968, and they had been preceded by more militant and separatist organizations willing to use violence, including the Nation of Islam. King himself had warned in his "Letter From Birmingham Jail" in 1964 that the failure of white Americans to embrace a moderate such as himself might result in the ascent of black radicals and nationalists, and he mentioned the Nation of Islam specifically in this context.

Moreover, it is often forgotten that Dr. King was assassinated the night before he intended to support striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. It is therefore often forgotten that the civil rights movement under King's leadership might have moved in a direction of social justice more aligned with a struggle for economic justice. Although this theme was always present in Dr. King's work and in his rhetoric, it is possible that the movement-wing tack after April 1968. Although many in the more militant black nationalist movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s embraced Marxism, they failed to achieve recognition among the older generation of activists who rejected violence even in self-defense.

Finally, I would argue that the rejection of non-violence by the civil rights movement following Dr. King's assassination was a necessary factor in its ultimate successes. Although most of the work had been done in securing voting rights for Southern African-American voters by the time of King's murder, and the Fair Housing Act was signed by President Johnson merely a week after the former's death, the issues of police brutality in the inner cities across the country and particularly in Los Angeles might have remained issues unknown to many Americans without the visible responses of the Black Panthers. Although these are issues that obviously still pertain to the African-American experience in the United States to some extent, the days of military-style assault on black neighborhoods by police are largely a thing of the past, thanks in no small part to the armed resistance of the Black Panthers.

Class as a Factor in Feminist Leadership

The selection from the text that I've chosen to discuss is the following:

The situation was exacerbated, according to Lisa Tetrault, because women could earn a living through the lyceum lecture circuit in the 1870s - 1880s, a popular form of entertainment and adult education featuring traveling lecturers and performers. They came to expect similar payment, typically between $10 and $100 per lecture, for an appearance at a suffrage meeting. Suffrage organizations thus had to compete with the lecture circuit when they paid speakers appearing at meetings or at their annual conventions at the state or national level.[1]

I chose this excerpt to establish the cause and effect, respectively, between the professional lecture circuit of the early 20th century and the increased influence of money on the politics of the women's movement. Although the first impression of the thesis of this article might be that money affected the culture of the women's movement, this passage demonstrates that the relationship ran in both directions. Because women could earn money as lecturers, they expected that, regardless of the cause for which they might be speaking, they would be paid to speak at suffragist meetings. As a result, the infusion of larger amounts of money became necessary to stage these lectures, which were themselves integral to convincing people of the righteousness of the cause.

Beyond this point, the article does not really clarify the economic hardships of women campaigning for suffrage. Rather, the article focuses almost entirely on wealthy women and the impact they had on the movement. The one place in the article I could find that discusses women who were not wealthy was the following: "Similarly, women began to give large amounts to make change for women in society, not simply to assist poor women but rather to broaden women’s educational opportunities, as well as political and reproductive rights."[2]

Money, it seems, was a major factor in identifying targets, devising strategies, and even locating political offices. Class, it turns out, was a major factor. On second thought, however, perhaps this fact is not very surprising. Lenin said that revolutionary parties could only be successful under the leadership of party vanguards of professional revolutionaries of bourgeois background – himself a chief example. Revolutionary as the women's movement was for its time, perhaps we ought not be surprised that this observation of Lenin's held in this case.

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     [1] Joan Marie Johnson, "Following the Money: Wealthy Women, Feminism, and the American Suffrage Movement," Journal of Women's History, 27, no. 4 (Winter 2015): 65-66.
     [2] Ibid, 64.