If I have been a bit sparse in my writing, is because besides my usual duties taking care of an elderly mother, I have been helping with research for a book and having to go through old newspapers online courtesy of the Library of Congress.
I am now in the late 1860s and amazed at the level of political violence back then. This is the era of the Ku Klux Klan and we are not talking a small bunch of rednecks wearing the wife’s bed sheets and burning crosses at night, but fully organized groups in the hundreds on horseback attacking in the daylight. Freedmen (Free Blacks), Republicans or anybody who does not have a reputation for being true to the Confederacy’s ideology, was a target and that included people running for office, judges (specially if they sided with the law against the KKK), military and elected officials. And when I say target, I mean they were killing them left and right. It got to the point where the celebrating a Republican caucus to select people running for offices was taking an unnecessary risk because it was going to be hit by the Klan and hard.
Newspapers of the area were either fully in support of the Klan or very silent about it. Paper un North and away from the Klan-dominated areas would comment on the suspicious self-restrain, but let’s face it: having your business firebombed and your ass shot by masked assholes protected or at least ignored by the local law was not a sane alternative.
I bring this up because it seems Portland is on its way to become as bad as New Orleans in 1866: A group of self-appointed defenders of what is good attacking their political enemies with the complacent support of the media and local Law Enforcement. It took five more years for Congress to act and pass the Ku Klux Act giving President Ulysses S. Grant (later to become head of the NRA) the power to kick some ass. It was then that the KKK stopped being so open about its actions and took the undercover role we have come to known till its resurgence again in the early 20th century.
We already had politically motivated attacks against elected officials: Rep. Steve Scalise and Sen. Paul Rand. With the Kavanaugh hearings, we saw confrontations almost getting physical and a complicity my the Media on publishing distorted information and outright lies. Clearly one side has chosen to forego civility to achieve political victory. But if civility does not hold and they cannot win by being verbally confrontational, the idea of physically damaging or killing your opponents cannot be far behind.
I will grant you it has not become as bad and that we have not had hundreds of people massacred in one day…yet. But I fear some killing will happen and the people will not wait for Washington to start hunting masked “warriors”. Only this time, the Glorious Masked Knights are not attacking unarmed folks but a heavily armed and out-of-patience majority.
History repeating itself? It does not bode well for those who ignore or are unaware of it.
One fact I didn’t realize, until I spent a year in New Orleans, is that it is illegal to wear a mask in public, except during Mardi Gras. This was part of anti-Klan legislation and was fairly common throughout the south. It was harder for the local politicians to terrorize their neighbors if everyone knew who they were.
On the subject of violence against civil rights, and the importance of armed self defense to deal with it, another good reference is “The gun culture and its enemies” edited by William Tonso. One of the chapters is written by a civil rights activist who worked all over the South during the 1960s. He describes, in detail, why the ability to go armed was essential to their being able to do their job — and to survive.