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Abraham Lincoln, often lauded as the Great Emancipator, was born in Springfield, Illinois. This was the city’s claim to fame, and something locals took great pride in. In the summer of 1908, the town planned a big celebration for the centennial of Lincoln’s birth the following winter. And all this is why newspaper editors throughout the Jim Crow South were beside themselves with schadenfreude when that summer Springfield erupted in an anti-black race riot.
In her book In Lincoln’s Shadow: The 1908 Race Riot in Springfield, Illinois, historian Roberta Senechal de la Roche examines the riot at the ground level, asking who in the town was most likely to join in the violence and who was most likely to be a target. Her analysis of these patterns draws from sociological theories of conflict, and you can see in it the seeds of her own later theoretical work. A major theme of her analysis is how social distance predicts collective violence, even down to the level of individual attackers and targets. But first she begins with a narrative of the events.
A Drifter and a Murder
The story begins on June 1, 1908, “when the freight train bound northeast for Springfield left the Mississippi River town of Alton, Illinois. Concealed in one of the boxcars was Joe James, a young black drifter from Alabama.” James had long been a drifter, doing odd jobs including playing piano in saloons. Though he lacked a respectable lifestyle, he had no criminal convictions prior to arriving at Springfield.
At Springfield he made his way down to the Levee, the local vice district. Located downtown, this was an area of saloons, cheap rentals, gambling dens, and prostitutes. It was also the area that contained most of the city’s black-owned businesses, including saloons and barber shops.
It made sense that James would go there first, both for whatever action it offered to a young man and as a place to learn about opportunities for work and board. He spent the evening playing pool for money. According to him, he was good at it, and the local black men he played against were mad about losing money. It was they who pointed him out to the some of the city’s police officers as a suspicious stranger, leading to his arrest.
The police — black officers, by the way — ordered him out of town, releasing him from arrest with two hours to clear town. But James refused to be run off, and so was arrested again and taken to jail on a vagrancy charge.
During his month-long stay in jail he was a model prisoner and became a trustee. One day the guards sent him out to buy food, but instead he made the very bad decision to visit the Levee and gamble with the money he’d been given. He won some money and spent the evening drinking and playing the piano. Eventually he got “thoroughly drunk” — he would later claim black-out drunk — and was thrown out of the saloon. He then “stumbled off into the night.”
Clergy Ballard was a white mining engineer. On the same night Joe James stumbled off into the dark, Ballard’s 16-year-old woke daughter up at 1:00am to find a stranger sitting on the foot of her bed. She couldn’t see the person and asked who he or she was but got no answer. Frightened, she cried out for her parents. The intruder fled. Ballard, awakened by his daughter’s cries, came running and chased the intruder as he fled into the front yard. He caught up with him and they struggled. The intruder had a knife and stabbed Ballard to death.
Early the next morning some white girls spotted Joe James sleeping by the side of the road several blocks from the Ballard home in the white working-class neighborhood of North End. Upon hearing the news, Ballard’s sons and neighbors assumed James was the killer. They found him and beat him severely. They probably would have killed him, but the police arrived just in time and took James away.
The murder was front-page news and caused great outrage in the community. It was shocking not just that a black man had allegedly killed a white man, but that it had happened in a respectable neighborhood. If it had happened between two gamblers down in the Levee, that’d be one thing, but this….
It didn’t help that Ballard was well-known and well-liked, drawing many supporters looking to avenge his death. An angry crowd formed at the Ballard household where there was talk of lynching James. But in the end things petered out without violence, and James was left in custody awaiting trial.
And that’s probably where it would have ended, except that a little over a month later, there was another alleged crime to stir up outrage.
A Rape Accusation
Mabel Hallam, a white woman married to a local streetcar driver, told police that she had been at home alone when a strange black man climbed into her bed. When she demanded to know what he was up to he told her “I am drunk” before choking her, dragging her to the backyard, and raping her. Eventually she was able to scream for help and the black stranger fled.
The local press ran wild with the story, producing headlines like “Dragged from Her Bed and Outraged by a Negro.” The police and victim fingered a man named George Richardson as the culprit and took him to jail, where Joe James was still awaiting his trial on a murder charge.
This crime was the straw that broke the camel’s back. It happened just a few blocks from the murder of Clergy Ballard. An angry crowd began milling around in front of the Hallam house, and eventually made its way downtown.
The men from the Hallam house joined others in front of the jailhouse. There was much talk about lynching both Richardson and James.
A Frustrated Mob
The first flares of violence happened around 2:00 PM, when a mob of white men attacked a random black man on the street near the North End, the neighborhood where the Ballard and Hallam families lived. The mob beat him with bats and bricks.
The crowd at the jail grew larger and angrier. By 4:00 PM the sheriff worried his men weren’t enough to secure the building if the mob was really set on a lynching. So he made a plan to get the prisoners to safety.
The plan was to drive the prisoners away. But this was 1908, remember, and cars were rare. Wealthy restaurant owner Harry Loper was one of the few locals rich enough to own one, so the sheriff asked him for help. Loper agreed, he later said, because he’d witnessed a riot in Cincinnati in 1884 that burned down the local courthouse, and he didn’t want such madness in Springfield. It’s ironic, then, that his assistance might have been what turned a potential lynching into a pogrom against the entire black population.
Having gotten Loper’s agreement, the sheriff set off a fire alarm to distract the crowd. Then some deputies snuck the prisoners out of the back of the jail and into Loper’s car, then drove them to another jail in a neighboring town. The mob would not be happy about this.
By 7:00 PM the crowd was even larger and even angrier. The commander of the local state militia had sent some troops to help secure the jailhouse. But the soldiers and lawmen combined were still drastically outnumbered by a crowd swelling well into the thousands. And the crowd was now loudly demanding to lynch the prisoners.
When the sheriff announced that the prisoners were already gone, then the riot really kicked off. Rather than disperse, the angry crowd began throwing bricks at the state militia, and a contingent — led by alleged rape victim Mabel Hallam’s husband and his coworkers — forced their way inside to verify the prisoners were indeed gone. Then word got around that Loper had helped the prisoners escape. Soon someone shouted, “On to Loper’s!” and the mob rushed toward his restaurant three blocks away.
Sacking Loper’s
Loper had returned to town by this point and was inside his restaurant with his employees. The militia commander had the foresight to send some protection Loper’s way, but it was SNAFU. In the chaos of the evening the four militiamen he dispatched had forgot to take ammunition and then failed to meet up with their ammunition resupply cart. Their empty guns were useless. When the mob arrived the rioters easily overwhelmed the soldiers and disarmed them.
There were also four policemen standing guard, and they proved useless as well. In fairness, there wasn’t much four men could do against a crowd that size. But witnesses later recounted at least one of the officers being supportive of the rioters, stepping out of the way to give a boy more room to throw bricks at the restaurant and seeming to approve of the act.
The mob smashed the windows of the restaurant and overturned Loper’s car. Loper and his employees retreated to the rear of the building. When the mob was done smashing up the exterior of the building and wrecking the car they hesitated to go further. Local boardinghouse owner Kate Howard spoke up, urging them to continue the violence: “What the hell are you fellows afraid of? Women want protection and this seems to be the only way to get it.” Then Howard led the charge into the restaurant.
Loper and his employees retreated to the basement. Upstairs, the mob smashed up the tables and chairs and looted all the plates, silverware, and liquor. Some of them crowded down the stairs and tried to break in the basement door to get at Loper. He had been armed the whole time, but reluctant to shoot. At this point, though, he fired two shots through the door, killing one rioter and convincing the rest to retreat up the stairs.
The crowd torched his car and was talking about burning the restaurant as well. Overhearing this, Loper and company snuck out through a basement window and fled.
Scouring the Levee
Around this point the mayor of Springfield arrived at Loper’s and appealed to the crowd for law and order. They responded by throwing bricks, and he fled.
By now there were around 5,000 people on the streets. The largest contingent was the mob at Loper’s, but smaller groups roamed downtown hunting for black people.
Most blacks were now aware that a riot was underway, and so had fled the downtown area if not the town as a whole. Still, some were caught in the open. Some were working. Railroad porter Will Stewart, for instance, was beaten senseless before being rescued by some fellow railway workers. Other men were caught on their way home, with several pulled from streetcars and beaten.
One black man ran from a pursuing mob straight into a political rally for a Prohibition Party candidate. The candidate helped him up onto the stage where police took him to shelter in the courthouse. The candidate then tried to press on with his rally, but the thwarted mob responded by pelting the candidate with bricks and stones, wounding him and ending the rally.
The big crowd at Loper’s was finishing its destruction of his property when someone shouted that they ought to go down to the Levee, the vice district where the black businesses were. And so they went.
At the Levee the mob began looting and smashing businesses, moving systematically from one end of the district to the other. They made an effort to only target black-owned businesses, with frequent cries of “that’s a white man’s place, pass it up!” Still a lot of white businesses took collateral damage, and a couple Jewish businesses sustained enough that it’s plausible the mob targeted them, too. In the end, the rioters wrecked every black business in the Levee.
While most black business owners fled in advance of the mob, some put up a fight. At Dandy Jim’s saloon, a group of armed black men shot guns at the crowd from the saloon’s second-story windows. Some in the crowd were armed and returned fire. In the brief firefight several rioters and onlookers were wounded, and at least one killed. But soon the outnumbered black men retreated out the back, and the mob destroyed Dandy Jim’s as well.
Burning the Badlands
Having finished with the black businesses in the Levee, mob leaders urged the rioters on to the neighboring black residential area — the Badlands.
Many or most Badlands residents had already fled. Some went to nearby towns, some of which let them stay, but at least one of which firmly turned away black refugees. Some went into the countryside, where one baby would die of exposure over the course of the night.
Many who remained behind were elderly and disabled people who lived alone and couldn’t flee on their own. The mob had little mercy on elderly Harrison West, for instance, beating him severely. When they came to the home of a paralyzed man named William Smith, some in the crowd objected to the idea of beating an invalid but were overruled by the others. Supposedly Kate Howard, who had urged forward the attack on Loper’s, played a similar role here. Finally, after Smith had been badly beaten, a white bystander managed to pull him to safety.
At times the mob showed a strange chivalry toward black women. Some women found at home were not beaten, but rather given a chance to gather their belongings and flee before the mob torched their house. In one case, the mob was even convinced to spare the home of an elderly black woman whose white neighbors spoke up for her. Rioters marked her house with a white cloth as a sign to other rioters that it should be passed over.
It was now 2:00 A.M. After several hours of smashing, looting, and burning the mob came to the home of black barber Scott Burton. Burton had sent his wife and children to flee but had stayed behind to defend is home with a shotgun. He fired two loads of buckshot into the crowd, wounding several, including mob leader Kate Howard. But buckshot was not enough against such a large group of attackers. When the mob pressed the attack, Burton tried to flee — but they caught him, beat him, and hanged him to death. Then they mutilated his corpse.
Quelling the Riot
During all this time law enforcement had been passive. The local militia commander, Colonel Shand, wanted to lead a combined force of deputies and militiamen to confront the rioters. But Sheriff Werner refused and ordered his men to keep guard around the courthouse. But the city authorities had called the governor, asking for reinforcements, and around 2:30 A.M. more militiamen finally arrived.
With greater numbers and arms, the sheriff and Colonel Shand led the combined force of militiamen and deputies to the edge of the riot zone. Confronting a large group of rioters, they fired a warning volley over their heads. It had no effect, so Shand ordered his men to fire low. Despite the confusion of the sheriff giving a contrary order, enough of the soldiers fired their multiball cartridges into the crowd to injure and kill several rioters. Finally, the crowd dispersed.
In the meantime, a group of black men had armed themselves to patrol the edges of the Badlands. They came across a group of dispersing rioters that had separated from the main crowd and ambushed them with gunfire. The white men fled, leaving behind a wounded man who would later press charges against the black men for what local newspapers agreed was an unprovoked assault on a law-abiding citizen.
Night 2: Hit-and-Run
Thus ended the first night of the riot. But there was more violence to come.
The following day was quiet as militiamen patrolled the city. But by 7:00 P.M. on Saturday another crowd was gathering downtown near the courthouse, and was once again becoming loud and disorderly.
More militia reinforcements had arrived, along with a Major General Young to take command. Young ordered cavalry downtown to disperse the crowd. It worked, but he soon got news of other mobs forming elsewhere in the city.
This set the pattern of the evening. The militia were able to prevent any large-scale mobs from forming and could protect certain likely trouble spots. But they couldn’t be everywhere at once, and small group of rioters would launch hit-and-run attacks at these weak points.
The crowd dispersed by the cavalry at the courthouse regrouped, and one of them shouted, “Forward citizens! Let us complete the good work begun last night!” They then headed to the State Arsenal where black refugees were hiding. Troops with fixed bayonets deterred them from that target as well. Then some of the scattered rioters decided to hit the home of William Donnegan.
Donnegan was one of the town’s most wealthy and prominent black men. He lived in an otherwise white middle-class neighborhood and had a white wife. The decision to attack him wasn’t spontaneous. As angry groups formed earlier in the day his name came up as a potential target, with some shouting “let’s get him tonight!” His family heard the rumors of the impending attack and tried to secure a detachment of militiamen for security, but to no avail.
Around 8:00 PM the mob reached the Donnegan house, where he met them at the door. The mob dragged into the yard and beat him with bricks, then one rioter cut his throat with a razor. As he bled out, other rioters tried to use a clothesline to hang him from a lamp post, but seemingly made a mess of it and left him lying on the ground.
The first night of the riot focused on the city’s “worst” blacks – targeting the saloons and vice dens of the Levee and the cheap hovels of the Badlands. The second night tended to target the “best” — middle-class blacks like Donnegan who lived in nicer, often mostly-white neighborhoods.
A black woman from a prosperous household later recalled that many of her middle-class neighbors were determined to defend their homes. The husband of the family next door “camped out in his yard armed with a shotgun, ready to shoot any suspicious whites who came near his house.” Another woman recalled that her father, a grocer, not only armed himself but advertised that his home was a hard target, sending word to “let everybody know that if anybody bothered him, he certainly had everything to [protect himself with].”
That in addition to the militia may have limited the scale of the violence that second night. Still, rioters succeeded in smashing, looting, or shooting up several black homes. At the Duncan household, the looters even made off with the eldest son’s old militia uniform and a pet bird in a cage. The Willis home was set on fire, but the militia dispersed the rioters in time to put the fire out and save the house. The house rented by the Harvey family was smashed and shot up, causing the frightened family to flee the town for good.
By Sunday morning, the riot proper was finally over. I’ve seen different estimates of the total causalities. Unless I missed something, Senechal de la Roche mentions only seven or eight fatalities, but a Wiki article on the riot claims a half dozen others went uncounted by most official sources. Either way, hundreds were injured, dozens of homes and businesses were destroyed, and many families were left homeless, some of them refugees in towns hostile to this sudden influx of strange blacks.
As saloon owner “Dandy” Jim Smith said, “I ain’t got a thing left in the world but my panama hat.”
Aftermath
Though the large-scale rioting was over, the threat of violence did not completely subside. In the weeks following the riots whites who employed or rented homes to blacks would receive threatening anonymous letters and phone calls demanding they sever these economic ties. Sporadic attacks on black people and their homes would persist for another month, and the white-working-class neighborhood of the North End became a no-go zone for black people.
The local white elite and the local newspapers were largely indulgent of the first night of rioting. The attitude was that the event was regrettable but quite understandable, and that it might have the silver lining of cleansing the downtown vice district of its worst denizens,
But after the second night of rioting, and subsequent threats and rumblings, elite opinion turned against violence. It had gone too far, was disrupting business, and it was giving hotheads the notion that they could threaten persons of substance. The result was that the town’s respectable whites distanced themselves from the whole thing, painting it as the work of criminals and ruffians with no respect for law-and-order.
The influential white people changed their mind about the rioters, but rarely rued the damage to black people. The papers rarely even acknowledged the damage, and when they did, they talked about the wrecking of the black saloons as good riddance to bad rubbish. One newspaper editorial even warned that another black person establishing a saloon downtown “would be an affront to the people of this city.”
And, after all this, there was still the matter of the two accused criminals whose escape from lynching had so enraged the mob.
Joe James, accused of killing Clergy Ballard, was tried in local court a few months later. James certainly couldn’t have gotten a fair trial from a white jury in Springfield. Even the black community mustered little support for him, possibly resenting the stranger who had brought ruin upon them and fearing his acquittal would bring more rioting. But he did get defense counsel from a black attorney who took his case pro bono.
The evidence against James was largely circumstantial: He was an escaped inmate found sleeping off a drunk in the victim’s neighborhood hours after the murder. There were no witnesses to the murder, and it had been too dark in Clergy’s daughter’s room for her to identify who was sitting on her bed. The only material evidence was a swatch of cloth and hat found at the scene. A fellow prisoner testified that the hat belonged to James, and others testified that when captured there was a piece of cloth missing from his shirt. James himself never confessed to the crime, but also said little in his own defense. All he could say was that he remembered nothing after he left the saloon.
It was enough for a white jury to convict him, and despite being below the minimum age for capital punishment (21 at the time) he was hanged shortly after.
James certainly had little chance in a Springfield court. But even if an impartial jury wouldn’t have found him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, it is plausible that he was factually guilty.
Accused rapist George Richardson, on the other hand, was not.
For the charges against Richardson were soon dropped when Mabel Hallam changed her story, fingering another black man instead. Town rumor held that she had recently developed a venereal disease, and that neither Richardson nor her husband had it. She only could have gotten it from a different man. Shortly after this, Mabel admitted to police she had made the whole thing up. No black man had ever attacked her. What happened, as the papers later said, was that she was having an affair with a white man and made up the assault story as cover for it, or to cover for her own husband’s violent reaction to finding out.
So the straw that broke the camel’s back and precipitated the angry mobs to march downtown was a false accusation. After this revelation Mabel and her husband soon left town.
A few dozen rioters were indicted for crimes, though many were acquitted. Kate Howard was indicted for being a ringleader in the attack on Loper’s and the killings of Burton and Donnegan. She seems to have been expecting more support for her actions. When the policeman came to arrest her, she committed suicide by taking arsenic.
Race Conflict in Springfield
Events build on one another. The Hallam accusation was the immediate trigger to the riot, but its impact was surely greater right on the heels of the Ballard murder. Given that not every crime leads to a riot, one might wonder if there was a deeper history of conflict — prior racial tensions that primed the white population for such a reaction.
Of course, racial prejudice was the norm, and racial prejudice itself involves a form of intergroup conflict — it can be understood collection of grievances and accusations against the target group. The white population would have largely shared the negative views of blacks as lazy, dumb, and dangerous.
But race prejudice was way more common than riots. Were there any issues more specific to Springfield?
One issue was the growth of black saloons and black renters in the Levee. The black population of Springfield as a whole was stable in the years leading up to the riot, but the black population of the Levee had increased considerably. At least six new black saloons had opened since 1892. There had also been a marked increase in black people, often the poorest and least stable, living in the tiny, cheap rented rooms above and behind the saloons.
Even if the black population hadn’t increased overall, to whites carrying out business downtown, and especially to the working-class whites who lived on the borders of the Levee, the town would sure look blacker than before. And other than the saloon owners, the sort of blacks they were seeing more and more of were the least reputable: the drifters and gamblers and drunks. With the mix of socially detached men, booze, and gambling, fights and robberies and various deviant behaviors would be on display.
The respectable black community was well aware of the danger in this. Local black newspapers ran editorials railing against the bad behavior of lower-class blacks in the Levee, warning it would cause trouble for blacks in general. White newspapers certainly gave a lot of attention to black crime in the Levee. It appeared that a lot of white elites especially were concerned with the vice district and welcomed the riot as a way to purge it.
Another tension growing in the years before the riot was political. Politics in 1900s Springfield was generally nasty and corrupt, with lots of vote buying and jobs given out as patronage. Blacks participated in politics, and those who could harvest the black vote were rewarded with city jobs — usually low status jobs, but still envied by those denied them. This included the city’s Irish population, who gravitated toward machine politics here as in other cities.
As the black presence swelled downtown, their political participation also became much more visible. Black political captains kept their offices in Levee saloons and large black crowds appeared on election day. Also, in 1908, there were record numbers of blacks working in highly visible patronage jobs, such as serving as policemen or firemen downtown. The policemen who arrested Joe James were black.
And here we get to another simmering racial grievance. Influential Springfield whites complained of the vote-buying and lumped it in with the vice problem as black misbehavior. But they also seemed concerned with the rewards and power blacks received from political participation. One editorial denounced those who, by giving blacks patronage positions, made them feel the white man’s equal. The complaint was that blacks increasingly had an “arrogant bearing” and “pretensions.” One white minister, in a sermon after the riots, complained of blacks not knowing their place and getting too much of a feeling of importance from politicians seeking to buy their votes. Several participants interviewed after the riots complained of blacks thinking they were as good as whites.
It appears one class of grievances was black crime, but another was black success. For while blacks were generally much poorer than whites, the city did have a solid black middle class. Some were quite wealthy men who owned restaurants or real estate, and who lived in mostly white middle class neighborhoods. And it was these that the mob targeted on the second night, sometimes passing up poorer but more accessible targets.
The murdered William Donnegan’s niece later said:
“They say my uncle was killed because [he] was married to a white woman, but they have been married twenty years and own considerable property. And the property was the cause of the murder. He was even told by some of the ringleaders of the mob that he had too much prosperity for a ‘nigger,’ and that he would be killed unless he and his family moved away.”
Both poorer and richer whites felt there was a “Negro problem” in town. To richer whites, the problem was mainly the criminals and riffraff in the vice district. Secure in their superiority, they maintained cordial if distant relations with better off blacks, some of whom lived in their own neighborhoods. To poorer and working-class whites, the better off blacks were part of the problem – exactly because they had climbed higher than many whites. Men like Donnegan were guilty of what Donald Black calls “the crime of doing too well.”
Who Joins a Riot?
Now we come to what sets this book apart: The author gets down into some fine-grained analysis of the participants and the relationships between them.
She starts by trying to identify individual rioters. Combining newspaper and legal records, she comes up with the names of 190 individual rioters. Some were arrested and let go, some were indicted for crimes, and some were merely reported to have been shot – meaning, given the events, they were almost certainly in the thick of things.
It’s a small fraction of the thousands who took the street that night, and probably not perfectly representative. But it might be enough to shed some light on who was more or less likely to join the violent mob.
Just about everywhere, the highest rates of violence are found among young men. So it’s no surprise that her sample of rioters was both young and male. Only 9 women were on the list, though one — Kate Howard — had outsized influence in leading the mob. (Local newspapers dubbed her “Joan of Springfield” in reference to Joan of Arc.) While the age of the named rioters spanned from 13 to 70, the typical rioter was in his twenties. He was also likely single, and either living with his parents or in a rented room.
The typical rioter also had a working-class background. The city elite exaggerated when they claimed the riot was mostly driven by criminals and vagabonds — there was no way a crowd of that size didn’t contain a good cross-section of the white community. But it does seem like prominent citizens tended to go home earlier on the first night of the riot and stay home on the second. Most of the sampled rioters were working-class, and it seems like people from the working-class North End played an outsized role in both nights of violence.
The typical rioter was also native born, and born in the North. Immigrants as a whole weren’t overrepresented among rioters. But there was variation among immigrants. Lithuanians and Poles, who stocked much of the city’s mining industry, were underrepresented in the sample of rioters. So were Germans. Italians on the other hand were over-represented. And the most riot-prone of Springfield’s immigrants were the Irish.
We can understand the ethnic and class patterns, in part, by different categories of white people’s relationships to black people.
Social Distance and Violence
Sociologist Donald Black proposes that violent sanctions generally increase with social distance. One kind of social distance, relational distance, is defined by the degree of involvement people have with one another. It is measured by things like time spent together, length of the relationship, or sharing mutual ties in a social network. The idea is that the closer people and groups are, the less likely they are to handle any given grievance with violent attacks.
Applied to racial and ethnic conflict, it means that the more members of Group A develop ongoing relationships with Group B, the less violent the conflict should be. The theory, our author notes, is consistent with what’s called “the equal-status contact hypothesis.” This is an idea from the study of group relations, holding that, under certain conditions, contact between members of two ethnic groups can reduce prejudice and hostility. One condition is that the contact should be as relative equals, like coworkers rather than master and servant. Another is that it needs to be in a setting with institutional and cultural supports for peaceable interaction.
In Springfield, one place you could find that sort of contact, and the relational ties it forged, was in the mining industry. Springfield sat on top of a huge coal deposit, making the mines one of the largest employers in the city. And it was the only occupation in the city with substantial racial integration.
In the North in those days, black men were mostly excluded from jobs in transportation and manufacturing. The unions didn’t want them. Mining was different, and both blacks and whites joined the miner’s union. Both employers and union leaders had incentive to keep interactions between workers peaceable, and largely they were. And when employers and the union came into conflict, black and white miners showed solidarity, striking together and attacking black scab workers together.
And it looks like white miners were less likely to join in when the riot broke out. They were less represented among the sampled rioters than those who worked in industries that barred blacks. And Lithuanians and Poles, the ethnicities most overrepresented in the mining industry, were least represented among rioters.
The effect of these work ties persisted after the riots. White and black miners were initially wary of going into the mines together, neither trusting the other in the dark. But union leaders made peace and convinced them to return to work.
Another source of relational closeness between blacks and white came from living near one another. Studies of other riots suggest that people rarely attack their immediate neighbors. In several race riots between 1910 and 1940, racially integrated neighborhoods saw less violence than others. And when black people in integrated neighborhoods were attacked, the assailants tended to be white people who lived elsewhere.
The same pattern appears in the Springfield riot. Of the rioters in Senechal de la Roche’s sample, only ten came from integrated neighborhoods and most of those were surrounded by white neighbors. And notably, the few who did live in integrated neighborhoods tended to bypass their own neighbors to go join the crowds attacking the Levee or the Badlands.
This was probably even more so during the hit-and-run attacks of the second night, which often targeted blacks living in mostly white neighborhoods. Black resident Margaret Ferguson later said that her family and other middle-class blacks did not fear their neighbors, but bands of distant whites.
Senechal de la Roche concludes:
“The location of rioters’ homes suggests that, while residential proximity may not have improved whites’ view of blacks in general, it may have created ties strong enough in interracial neighborhoods to produce white neutrality—and in a few cases limited support—during the violence.”
And indeed, there were some cases of white people helping protect black neighbors and coworkers from the rioters, including:
“Badlands whites who pleaded with the mob to spare an elderly black woman’s home on their block; Ferguson’s English neighbors who temporarily agreed to hide her family’s valuables; immigrant neighbors who offered to escort a black man back and forth from work to protect him from attack; and a Jewish woman who allegedly hid black neighbors in her basement”
The effect of neighborhood ties could also contribute to the ethnic patterns, as Poles and Lithuanians were not only more likely to work with blacks, but to live next to them as well.
But there was a big exception to this trend of social proximity reducing violence: Downtown in the Levee and its environs, it seemed to work opposite.
Remember that the Irish were the most overrepresented among rioters? Well, like the Poles and Lithuanians, they were also more likely to live and work near blacks. Only in their case it seems like more contact just meant more conflict.
Part of the reason, Senechal de la Roche argues, is that nature of life in the Levee. This is the town’s vice district, home to saloons and gambling dives. The living quarters here were tiny, cheap, and noisy. The boarders here tended to be young and socially detached; drifters, migrant laborers, and new arrivals who had yet to set down roots. With constant turnover, people in the Levee would have had shallow and transient relationships with one another and with those in the neighborhoods that bordered it. It was social environment filled with strangers and newcomers.
Add in the various bad behaviors bred by a vice district, and it was a recipe for interracial conflict without interracial ties.
Competition and Interdependence
The author goes into less detail on this, but the nature of the saloon business probably mattered in another way. There were a lot of both Irish and black people working in it, but unlike at the miners, the saloon keeper and workers would have had competition without an overarching institution like the mining company or the labor union to keep peace or create common interests. Combine with booze and gambling fueled conflicts, and it’s not surprising white saloon workers were well-represented in the sample of rioters.
In her later work Senechal de la Roche would follow Donald Black in pointing out its importance of interdependence for reducing violence. Whether you think of it as another dimension of relational closeness or its own separate thing, it has a big impact. And the effects of interdependence probably help explain the schism between the white elite and the white working class.
For while the white elite were okay with purging the “worthless” blacks from the Levee, they balked at the mob’s attempt to make Springfield a whites-only town. For the town’s white elite had many profitable and convenient economic ties with the black population. They were landlords of black tenants and employers of black labor. Some of the black people who lived in white neighborhoods were successful businessmen who owned their own homes, but others were domestic servants given quarters near the wealthy white families who employed them. White politicians relied on black voters and rewarded black organizers with patronage jobs.
Thus the elites tended to make a distinction between the transient and criminal element of the Levee and the decent blacks elsewhere. Not a very fine-grained distinction, mind you — the Mayor was the only white person to publicly complain some of the black saloons ruined by the mob were just as respectable as the best white ones. But still, prosperous whites didn’t want their employees and tenants and ward captains run off with the rest.
The largely working-class rioters saw it differently. They thought it high time Springfield was a whites-only town. And this became a major fault line among the white community. Hence the town’s prosperous folk were incensed to receive anonymous calls and letters threatening them with violence unless they cut all economic ties to blacks. This is surely part of why they redefined the rioters from understandably aggrieved to criminals and ruffians rebelling against all that was lawful and descent.
As the author notes, the town’s white people might have all more or less shared negative views of black people in abstract, but there were limits to the white consensus. Social and economic ties to the black community divided the white community.
Closeness and Partisanship
A few years after publishing this book, Senechal la Roche wrote an article asking “Why is Collective Violence Collective?” It’s a good question, as a lot of violent conflict is just a matter between two individuals. Person A offends person B, person B shoots him, end of story. Why do some conflicts generate big crowds like those in the Springfield riot?
Her answer is partisanship — taking sides. A fight between two people starts to collectivize when a third person jumps in on one side. Multiply that and the violence scales up. This pushes back the question. What causes large amounts of strong partisanship? Here she turns to Donald Black’s principle: partisanship is a joint function of social closeness to one side and social distance from the other. People tend to jump into a conflict on the side of the person or group they’re closest to. And they take sides more strongly when the opposition is more socially distant.
In a society already divided into racial or ethnic groups, that is an important kind of social distance. In Springfield, divided by the color line, an accusation by a white person against a black person was likely to result in white people taking the side of the accuser.
But it also matters how close a relational tie people have to the individuals involved. Clergy Ballard’s first and strongest partisans were those closest to him: His sons and neighbors who beat Joe James. He was also a popular man who had worked in several occupations, most recently the railroad, and current and former coworkers throughout his working-class North End neighborhood seemed to contribute to an especially vengeful core of the rioters.
When Mabel Hallam accused George Richardson of assault, her strongest supporter was her husband, his coworkers, and their neighbors. Their home was the first place at which an angry mob began forming on the day of the riot, and it was her husband and his coworkers who led the charge into the jail to search for the missing prisoners. And the Hallams too lived in the North End, the place that would provide a disproportionate share of rioters and that would remain most hostile to black people after the riot.
We’ve seen that black households were almost never attacked by their immediate neighbors. The one exception was that of the Harvey family, who lived in the North End, and it is the exception that proves the rule. The Harveys were newcomers living in a rented house; they had only been in the town a few weeks and had no ties to their working-class neighbors. And they lived in the same neighborhood as Ballard, Hallam, and their coworkers and long-time neighbors. Notably, five of the suspects arrested for smashing and shooting up the Harvey house were men who had worked with Ballard, one of whom had even boarded at the Ballard home for a while.
The Harveys were thus surrounded by people very close to the white victims and very distant from themselves. They were strangers “deep within enemy territory.”
Solidarity and Communal Violence
In her later article, Senechal de la Roche also proposed that collective violence is more likely when the third parties, in addition to being close to one side and distant from the other, are solidary among themselves. When people join in a riot or lynch mob or whatever, they’re not just joining in on the side of the original victim or accuser, but on the side of all the other people who are joining in. Social closeness among all the potential partisans encourages this. When potential supporters are already close to one another — a family, a circle of friends, a street gang — they are much quicker to act as a group.
The descriptions of some riot participants show how one could get drawn into the violence once it got started. Even if he wasn’t part of the angry core that marched on the courthouse, a North End man arriving late would see lots of familiar faces in the crowd.
William Lee, a young railroad worker at the time, told how his crew got word of the riot when their train stopped at the last town on the way to Springfield. A black migrant worker who’d been earning his passage hauling freight wisely got off. When the train got to Springfield, Lee decided to go downtown and see what all the excitement was about. He came up just as the crowd was smashing up Loper’s, where he ran into an old acquaintance, “another guy I was raised with and went to school with.” When Kate Howard called on the mob to go into the restaurant, the two men went in together and “knocked the cash register over and got the change out of it.”
Another young man from a local elite family remarked “the crowd contained man whom I knew, many whom I knew well.” He later admitted to being caught up in the excitement of the crowd: “I cannot deny that I felt the exhilaration. The urge to join one’s friends, the surge of the crowd, in an imagined righteousness growing by the minute into a monstrous thing.” He probably would have joined in throwing bricks at Loper’s if he hadn’t noticed his grandfather, a retired judge, standing behind him with a stern look.
As the numbers involved in violence swell, new sorts of behaviors become more likely. A rioting mob is not a homogeneous mass, and in the Springfield riot some rudimentary division of labor emerged. One man was an arson specialist: He later admitted to authorities that he had spent most of the riot pouring oil and setting fire to black residences. Some were more comfortable with interpersonal violence, being the ones to beat, stab, shoot, and hang victims. Others had less stomach for this, but acted as moral support, cheering on the violence. This could cross over into informal leadership, as with Kate Howard urging the crowd forward. And of course in any riot the chaos presents opportunities for private gain: There are pure looters who come in after the angriest segment of the mob have moved on to steal anything of value left behind.
This last example reminds us that while many riots are driven by a core of moralistic outrage, other dynamics come into play once the disorder begins. Whether a matter of mob justice or just celebrating a sports victory, a rioting mob produces a situation that social scientists call a moral holiday. Normally forbidden things are suddenly allowed without repercussion, and people take advantage — often to their excitement and delight. Have you ever wondered what it was like to throw a brick through a plate glass window? Doesn’t it look fun to dance on the hood of a car? Why, I’d never steal liquor but if you’re passing that stolen bottle around, I’ll have a swig. Along these lines, a local minister later reported that the crowd outside of Loper’s, far from being mostly enraged, were laughing and joking. He describes the atmosphere as like a carnival.
Keep in mind this is the days before television and internet and video games and cell phones. Socializing and visiting are the main forms of recreation. And it’s also a society through with mutual aid societies, charitable organizations, clubs, churches, fraternal orders, and all those voluntary associations that de Tocqueville thought made Americans unique. If you wonder why working- and middle-class folks are less likely to riot nowadays, part of the answer is they’re less likely to do anything as a group. Communities make possible both great altruism and great moralism. To adapt a phrase from sociologist Mark Cooney, riots like the one in Springfield show us the dark side of community.
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