VIOLENCE

If America was already a violent nation by the time of the Civil War, the war itself, still the bloodiest in the country's history, did nothing to change people's habits and attitudes. In truth it served to increase America's penchant for brutality. One historian of violence in America, Richard Maxwell Brown, has written that the Civil War "had an almost incalculable effect in the following decades. The latter part of the nineteenth century was one of the most violent periods in American history" (p. 47). No less an apologist for America than Walt Whitman (1819–1892) remarked the barbarous effect of the war. He who in the 1850s had celebrated the United States for being "essentially the greatest poem" had by 1870 graphically depicted the obscenity of war. Far from alerting Americans to curtail violence, the war, in which more than 600,000 people died, actually seemed to broaden the field of brutality, not only within the nation's borders but, for the first time, overseas as well.

As it had been with the Civil War, race lay at the bottom of much of the postwar increase in violence, and by then "race" included ethnicity. Racialist attitudes toward Africans held by northern Europeans, most of whom lived in the South, accounted for much of the barbarism. One image more than any other conjured up the physical and psychological violence caused by America's anxieties of race: a burning cross, the infamous sign of terror of the Ku Klux Klan, the ruthless vigilante organization first formed in 1868. Similar anxieties existed in other parts of the country, and in the burgeoning northern cities they led to brutalities against new immigrants—Germans and Chinese as well as Irish, Italians, and Jews, where the bigotry was also anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic. These prejudices were heightened by economic turmoil inasmuch as the new Americans found work as unskilled day laborers. Disputes between labor and management became deadly as the country's commercial forces grew rapaciously, aided by legal and political governance favorable to laissez-faire capitalism.

THE ASSASSINATION OF JAMES A. GARFIELD

The death of President James A. Garfield was the result of bitter in-fighting within the Republican Party. During the administration of President Rutherford B. Hayes (1877–1881), the party was divided into two main factions: the Stalwarts, who were violently opposed to Hayes's efforts to reconcile with the South and supported instead the strong Reconstruction measures of the Radical Republicans, and the the Half-Breeds, whose name had been coined in derision by the Stalwarts and backed Hayes's lenient treatment of the South. Garfield was affiliated with the Half-Breeds. In hotly contested voting that required 36 ballots, the party convention finally elected Garfield as the presidential nominee. As a gesture of conciliation, the delegates elected a Stalwart, Chester Arthur, as their vice-presidential nominee. Garfield and Arthur narrowly won the general election. In naming key appointments, Garfield seemed to the Stalwarts to slight their faction.

On 2 July 1881, less than four months after his inauguration, Garfield was shot at the Washington railroad station as he prepared to board a train for a summer retreat. Charles Guiteau, angered because he had not been appointed U.S. ambassador to France, raced from the shadows and fired two bullets into Garfield's arm and abdomen as he shouted, "I am a Stalwart, and Arthur is President now!" Guiteau's attack did not immediately endanger President Garfield's life. Many doctors, eventually sixteen of them, working without the aid of anesthesia removed a rib and repeatedly probed the wound in the abdomen with fingers and dirty instruments, enlarging a relatively harmless three-inch wound into one twenty inches long. In terrible pain, Garfield lingered for eighty days, wasting from 210 pounds to 130. He eventually died on 19 September. The physicians submitted bills totaling $85,000, but the Senate authorized payment of only $10,000, and many Senators referred to the doctors as quacks.

At his trial, Guiteau, who had a history of erratic and even homicidal behavior, acted like a madman while his attorney argued his innocence by reason of insanity. The trial, one of the most publicized insanity trials of the century, set precedent in the judgment of the criminally insane. In the years following, psychiatrists generally agreed that Guiteau was truly insane and that the trial had been a miscarriage of justice. Guiteau was executed in 1882. The assassination promptly ended usage of the terms "Stalwart" and "Half-Breed."

The most storied and romanticized violence in the country's history occurred on the frontier, in the Wild West, where outlaws like Billy the Kid and the James Gang were proud of their reputations as gunslinging killers. Public violence was usually a male endeavor, male against male, but when it was behind closed doors, violence was often male against female. Violence between whites and Native Americans that had lasted nearly three centuries climaxed in 1890 at Wounded Knee Creek at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. The post–Civil War years saw three of the four assassinations of U.S. presidents in the country's history: Abraham Lincoln in 1865, James Garfield in 1881, and William McKinley in 1901. As the old century drew to a close, the nation was engaged in its first international armed conflict, the Spanish-American War, ostensibly to liberate Cuba and the Philippines from Spanish domination but ultimately to gain resources and strategic locations for America's own commercial and military advantage. By the end of the period, two decades into the new century, the country, just emerging from its embroilment in World War I—the Great War, the War to End All Wars—was so torn by divisions of race and class that in some ways it was more violent than ever.

RACE AND ETHNICITY

Doubtless the most egregious violence in American history was that associated with race-based chattel slavery and its aftermath. So pervasive and systematic was it that despite the Civil War, despite the passage of three "Civil War Amendments," despite Reconstruction, and despite a Civil Rights Act, de facto enslavement of Africans continued well into the twentieth century. Moreover, with the failure of Reconstruction and the increase of such states' rights efforts as black codes, a conservative U.S. Supreme Court assured that on the highest judicial levels de facto slavery continued de jure too. In the "Civil Rights Cases" (1883) the Court struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875, calling it unconstitutional, and a decade later, in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), with three of the same justices adjudicating, the Court went even further by deciding that Jim Crow "separate but equal" laws were constitutional. For many, early forms of scientific racism made such thinking legitimate. Coinciding exactly with the Court's action regarding the Civil Rights Act, race-based brutalities increased sharply. The Chicago Tribune drew attention to the outrage by immediately beginning to publish the number of reported lynchings nationwide, a practice the paper continued for more than twenty years. Thousands of African Americans were lynched in the South during the period. No white was arrested for such a crime until 1918.

Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862–1931) was the most powerful voice when it came to condemning "lynch law." Born a slave but college educated, she sided with W. E. B. Du Bois's Niagara movement as one of only two women to sign the call to form the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909, and she explicitly opposed Booker T. Washington's segregationist strategies. She traveled extensively, speaking against oppressive state laws and the atrocities they permitted against blacks. In print she railed against racial violence in uncompromising newspaper attacks and in her chronicles of lynchings, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892) and A Red Record (1895). Other women of color built on the base Wells-Barnett had established. Frances E. W. Harper (1825–1911), in essays, speeches, and her novel Iola Leroy (1892), and the equally multifaceted Pauline E. Hopkins, in her journalistic work and her novels Contending Forces (1900) and Of One Blood (1902–1903), drew attention to the devastating psychological effects of sexual traumas perpetrated by white men against black women. Equally unique in a different way was George Washington Cable (1844–1925), a former Confederate soldier who was the first southern writer to denounce the smug self-importance of the southern elite. His early fictions, Old Creole Days (1879) and The Grandissimes (1880), and his essays on civil rights, The Silent South (1885) and The Negro Question (1890), identified the aristocracy as the fundamental cause of southern barbarism.

Reconstruction novels became a species unto themselves, with the best known coming from the pen of Albion W. Tourgée (1838–1905), a northern attorney who had been a judge in North Carolina during Reconstruction and who used that experience to write a series of novels about the aftermath of the Civil War from the standpoint of a "Radical Reconstructionist." The most incisive was A Fool's Errand (1879), where late-night barbarities figure prominently in its critique of both the South's cavalier attitude toward racial brutality and injustice and the North's diffidence in not ending the violence and not assuring that Reconstruction succeed. His literary reputation led to his becoming the lead attorney for Plessy in the Supreme Court case, his arguments finding their way into Justice John Marshall Harlan's lone dissent. Tourgée's writings about Reconstruction were an intellectual influence on W. E. B. Du Bois, while his use of fiction for social protest served as a model for Charles W. Chesnutt, the first African American writer to have a large northern white readership. Chesnutt's novel The Marrow of Tradition (1901) was based on a violent event resulting from the Plessy decision—the 1898 race riot in Wilmington, North Carolina, that left many dead, both black and white.

Not all postwar writers grieved over the failure of Reconstruction to end violence and gain racial equality, of course. Some sought to keep the Old South alive, and that meant denying that there really ever was any violence. The tales of the friendly old black servant Uncle Remus of Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings (1880) were mildly nostalgic, and violence was but a humorous trope in them. Much more idealistic were the moonlight-and-magnolias fictions of writers like Thomas Nelson Page (1853–1922). His collection of short stories treating the antebellum South, In Ole Virginia (1887), included Marse Chan, a narrative by an old faithful former slave about a young man who had died for the Southern cause, placing duty and honor above personal gain. Most pernicious were the militant fictions, especially those of the prolific Klansman Thomas Dixon Jr. (1864–1946), whose Klan trilogy specialized in depicting violent, "extra-legal" justice administered against blacks in the name of preserving civilization. One of these, The Clansman (1905), became the basis for The Birth of a Nation (1915), the country's first film epic.

In a culture of permissible violence against "others," the idea of race expanded to include ethnicity. Immigrants—Jews, Slavs, Italians, and others from southern and eastern Europe as well as Chinese—poured into the large cities. Living in squalid enclaves, they were met with aggression paralleling the Ku Klux Klan's against Africans in the South. Loathing of Catholics, especially Irish and Italians, often took a violent form under the aegis of the bigoted American Protective Association. New York's famous Five Points shortly before the Civil War was the prototype of the urban immigrant slum, marked by poverty, crime, ethnic and religious strife, and violence. During the following decades, similar slums sprang up in other cities, leading to open warfare, including riots against Chinese in San Francisco (1877), Africans in Wilmington, North Carolina (1898), and others in Atlanta (1906), East St. Louis (1917), and Chicago (1919). The period of riots peaked between 1915 and 1919, when twenty-two riots occurred (Brown, pp. 40–41). In New York City by 1880 more than a million immigrants were crammed into Manhattan's Lower East Side, in ghettos with names like Jewtown and Bandit's Roost.

The destitution was captured in separate but complementary ways by the documentary photographer Jacob Riis (1849–1914), himself an immigrant twenty years earlier, and Stephen Crane (1871–1900)—Riis in his book of stunning images How the Other Half Lives (1890) and Crane in his novella featuring Irish Catholics, Maggie, A Girl of the Streets (1893). Abraham Cahan (1860–1951), a Russian immigrant living in the Jewish ghetto, depicted in Yekl (1896) and The Rise of David Levinsky (1917) the brutality involved in pursuing the American Dream only to discover that the dream was spiritually empty. Similar conflicts existed on the other side of the continent, where fear and hatred of Chinese led to the Chinese Exclusion Act, first passed in 1882 and repeatedly renewed for more than sixty years. In essays and short stories the first Chinese American writer, Sui Sin Far (pen name for Edith Maud Eaton, 1865–1914), countered the dominant Caucasian attitude that Eurasians were dirty and morally corrupt. Though by appearance Eaton, half-Chinese and half-British, could have passed for white, she asserted her Chinese ancestry, and her stories, collected in Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912), depict Chinese as ordinary humans, though in America they were victimized by discriminatory immigration laws and regularly subjected to ethnic hostilities.

Violence between whites and Native Americans peaked in 1876 at the Battle of Little Bighorn, in which Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull led Indian warriors to defeat the flamboyant and glory-seeking George A. Custer and his troops. Contemptuous of the Indians' bravery, Custer led his men into certain defeat as thousands of Lakota (Sioux), Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors surrounded his unit on a ridge at the Little Bighorn River in Montana and killed all 210 of them. Attempts to assure that grievances were redressed invariably failed. Angered by what Chief Standing Bear related in a speech about the forcible removal of his tribe from their Nebraska land, Helen Hunt Jackson (1830–1885) seized upon the government's mistreatment of Native Americans for her A Century of Dishonor (1881), a copy of which she sent to every member of the U.S. Congress with an inscription: "Look upon your hands: they are stained with the blood of your relations." Three years later, hoping to repeat the impact of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), Hunt wrote Ramona (1884), depicting the violence of the Indian experience. The bloody three-century saga culminated savagely in 1890, when U.S. government soldiers massacred three hundred Sioux men, women, and children on the snowy banks of Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota.

FAMILY FURY: FEUDS, THE WILD WEST, AND DOMESTIC VIOLENCE

In the archetypal Judeo-Christian act of violence, brother killed brother when Cain, a tiller of the ground, rose up and slew Abel, a shepherd. In the United States, in the final year of a war recalling that Genesis fratricide, two families in the southern Appalachian Mountains began to fight obsessively—over no one knows exactly what. The feud between the Hatfields of West Virginia and the McCoys of Kentucky, sympathizing with opposite sides in the Civil War and including many not related to either family, was only the most captivating and best known among many such vendettas in southern Appalachia in the late nineteenth century. The bloodiest period of that feud was during the 1880s, but it lasted fifty years and entered the folk history of the nation through song and story as a symbol of America's habit of violence. The feud in Mark Twain's (1835–1910) Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) was based on one along the Kentucky-Tennessee border that Twain had known firsthand while he was a steamboat pilot before the Civil War. In Life on the Mississippi (1883) he recollected that real feud between the Darnells and the Watsons, but in Huckleberry Finn he changed the names to Grangerford and Sheperdson.

Whether by families, gangs, or lone gunmen, lawless violence moved West with the frontier. The most famous outlaw of the Old Southwest was Billy the Kid, a cowboy in the New Mexico Territory until the so-called Lincoln County War broke out in 1878. He was deeply involved, siding with the ranchers in a dispute with businesspeople, and he became a primary combatant when he killed the county sheriff and two deputies. He escaped execution, and while he remained on the loose he killed over twenty others until, not yet twenty-two years old, he was killed in 1881 by another storied gunman, Sheriff Pat Garrett. The James Gang was equally folkloric. It was headed by Jesse James, who in 1863 as a sixteen-year-old, with his older brother Frank, had joined Quantrill's Raiders, a band of marauding Confederates that had become famous for savagery when they slaughtered nearly two hundred people in Lawrence, Kansas. After the war the James brothers joined forces with another family of outlaws headed by Cole Younger and his brothers to form the infamous gang of murderous bank and train robbers that operated throughout Kentucky, Missouri, Iowa, and Minnesota, continuing Quantrill's legacy of bloodshed by employing the same hit-and-run tactics and embellishing the myth of the western outlaw that remains fixed in the popular imagination. The passing of this violent "nomadic, bachelor West," as Owen Wister (1860–1938) called it in Members of the Family (1911), was depicted by post-frontier writers like Stephen Crane ("The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky," 1898), Wister (The Virginian, 1902), Zane Grey (Riders of the Purple Sage, 1912), and Willa Cather (O Pioneers!, 1913, and My Ántonia, 1918), all of whom introduce women, marriage, and home to the West. The result, though, as shown by William R. Handley, did not "civilize the savage male violence of the frontier" but rather "[brought] that violence home" (p. 5).

Yet much of the violence of the period was domestic, occurring in ways that could be hidden so as to go unrecorded. The nationwide publicity surrounding the grisly ax killings of Lizzie Borden's father and stepmother in 1892 was exceptional, all the more sensationalistic because the alleged butcher was a "nice respectable girl." Usually family violence took the form of verbal attacks and physical assaults, as suggested in Edwin Arlington Robinson's poem "Eros Turannos" (1916) about the deep privacy of abuse and codependency, but the brutality could extend to sexual violation and mutilation and even to rape and murder. Police reports might not record it, but narratives imaged the fury in some domestic relations. In two of the most well known, McTeague, in Frank Norris's (1870–1902) McTeague (1899), batters his wife, Trina, in a frenzy of fear and frustration, leaving her slowly hiccuping to death in a pool of her own blood; and Pap Finn, in Huckleberrry Finn, in fits of self-hate, brawls drunkenly with his son so that Huck stages his own murder, then runs away from home.

Secret violence could be the most savage and perverted, involving torture and ritualistic disfigurement. Perhaps not surprisingly, early rape scenarios, as Sabine Sielke has demonstrated, occurred within racial narratives—like Thomas Nelson Page's Red Rock (1898) and Thomas Dixon's The Clansman—that depict black men as being criminal by nature, irresistibly lusting after white women, and that also include literal or symbolic castration. A rape image by Dixon illustrates the bestiality he employs to promote white anxiety about the sanctity of home and family: "black claws" sink into a "soft white throat." Works by black writers retaliated against such stereotypes. Frances E. W. Harper's Iola Leroy recasts the brutalities of sexual exploitation by using inversion and mimicry, while Sutton E. Griggs's The Hindered Hand (1905) depicts in horrific detail the mutilation of a black couple engaged to be married. The image of sexual violence became so compelling that Edith Wharton (1862–1937) employed it as a trope, resorting unmistakably to the language of rape in The House of Mirth (1905) to demonstrate the brutal effect of patriarchy on female moral consciousness, all the more disarming when inflicted by a supposed friend in the privacy of home.

A COMPENDIUM OF LITERARY VIOLENCE: THE WRITINGS OF MARK TWAIN

Surely no single writer captured the broad range of the period's violence more comprehensively than Mark Twain, a humorist by fame. From drunken child abuse, duels, and family feuds to lynchings, murders, and massacres to slavery and international war, his writings feature a catalog of distinctly Americanized variations on the age-old theme of brutality. He started early, in the novel he coauthored with Charles Dudley Warner that named the period, The Gilded Age (1873), exposing the devastation wrought by the greed and corruption of American politics and business, especially land speculation and the railroad industry. And he lasted long, in such writings as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Life on the Mississippi, Huckleberry Finn, A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court (1889), and Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894). Following the Equator (1897) showed that his awareness of abuse had widened to a global perspective. In "The United States of Lyncherdom" (1901), his bitter portrayal of American racial lawlessness is drawn indelibly in a nightmarish vision of the torture by fire of 203 black victims of vigilante justice—the actual number of reported lynchings in America during 1900 and the first part of 1901. Four years later, in King Leopold's Soliloquy (1905), Twain satirized the Belgian king's system of forced labor that killed an estimated three million Congolese. As late as 1907 Twain was still speaking out against the brutality of imperialism in interviews and public statements. By the time of his death in 1910, his withering ridicule of violence—both within America and around the world—was so well known that his writings about it brought a second distinctive renown to him, matching his earlier fame as a fictionalist and humorist. No one of his time came close to his fervent yet disheartened exposure of the beast in man.

IDEOLOGY OF VIOLENCE: LITERARY, POLITICAL, AND ECONOMIC

But "the beast in man" was exactly what the new wave of writers averred. Following the lead of writers like Émile Zola in his La bête humaine (1890), they developed a theory of "naturalism" that emphasized humanity's violent and animal nature. Headed byFrank Norris and Jack London (1876–1916), they exploited the "survival of the fittest" ideas of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) and Herbert Spencer's First Principles (1862). Such novels as Norris's McTeague, The Octopus (1901), and The Pit (1903) and London's Call of the Wild (1903), The Sea-Wolf (1904), and White Fang (1906) deliberately blurred the line between man and beast and, as a matter of principle, foregrounded the violent in human behavior. A classic early example is Crane's Maggie, in which gangs of young toughs atavistically fight bloody street battles emulating the brutishness they see everywhere in their environment.

Literary naturalism coincided with a growing disillusionment with capitalism that had already produced tension between labor and capital and had become another major source of violence. As the nation became more industrial and urban during the postwar years, distrust and abuse increased until matters reached a head when in 1886 workers, expected to be on the job upward of twelve hours a day for a dollar of pay, united and formed the first national labor union, the American Federation of Labor. Its president, Samuel Gompers, and other leaders were called anarchists and socialists for pressing for national standards for employment, including fair wages and an eight-hour workday, and for developing strategies of resistance, including strikes.

The strike was a deadly tactic, already made fearsome by the 1877 railroad strike in Martinsburg, West Virginia, in which dozens of workers and guards were killed or wounded. Through the last two decades of the century, as strikes increased in size and economic force, they also became more violent, most notably the ones in Homestead, Pennsylvania, in 1892 against Carnegie Steel and in Chicago in 1894 against the Pullman Company. Doubtless the most inflammatory and infamous was the Haymarket "riot" in Chicago in May 1886 at the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company. As striking workers outside the factory were being addressed by an anarchist, the "scabs" who had replaced them inside came out, and a pitched battle ensued. When police were called and were assaulted with stones, they opened fire on the crowd, indiscriminately shooting men, women, and children, killing six and wounding many more. Frank Harris's The Bomb (1908), an early "proletarian novel," focused on the anarchists who were found guilty of inciting the Haymarket riot. In a highly publicized trial, eight men were punished by imprisonment or death sentence on patently weak evidence, a verdict vigorously opposed by many, including William Dean Howells (1837–1920) in the pages of the New York Tribune. In 1893 Governor John P. Altgeld pardoned the three who were still in prison. Howells's fictional treatment of the national climate that prompted the event came in 1889, in A Hazard of New Fortunes, which highlighted labor unrest and unscrupulous new wealth as the makings for social revolution.

Muckraking novelists, following Howells's lead, joined Harris in the attack. Norris's The Octopus detailed the forces of the monopolistic Southern Pacific Railroad, whose grasping tentacles engulfed settlers and drove them from their land. At the center was the Mussel Slough "tragedy," a deadly 1880 gun battle in Tulare County (now Kings County), California. The most powerful and best-known novel of the movement was The Jungle (1906) by Upton Sinclair (1878–1968). Strongly influenced by Norris's novel and his own bitter poverty, Sinclair fashioned a furious exposé indicting the corporate exploitation that was destroying Lithuanian immigrant families in "Packingtown" (Chicago's stockyards district). President Theodore Roosevelt, after reading the novel, ordered an investigation of the meatpacking industry, leading to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906 and a new governmental oversight agency, the Food and Drug Administration.

In the wake of the historic Haymarket tragedy, principled and effective opposition to violence increased, concentrating on the dispute between capitalistic democracy and socialism. In the spirit of Whitman's disillusionment, literature in the decades before and after the turn of the century registered abhorrence of American brutality. The utopian novelist Edward Bellamy (1850–1898), in Looking Backward (1888), looked forward to the year 2000 to project a socialist world that had eliminated strife between management and labor. Another writer exploring these ideological intricacies was Jack London in The Iron Heel (1907), a novel delighting in "ferocious violence" that features a twenty-seventh-century man living in a socialist utopia who, despite himself, seems to favor capitalism (p. 186). Much less conflicted was Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945), who relentlessly exposes the brutality of capitalism, first in Sister Carrie (1900) and then in his Trilogy of Desire—The Financier (1912), also the most purely naturalistic of his novels; The Titan (1914); and The Stoic (published posthumously in 1947)—in which he critiques the American Dream of material success.

In Leo Tolstoy's Christian socialism or in the more radical anarchism movement, writers like these found alternatives to the excesses they believed were inherent in capitalism and its attendant militarism. In increasing numbers, philosophers and historians considered violence to be a fit subject for analysis and commentary. Clarence Darrow (1857–1938), concluding in Resist Not Evil (1902) that violence itself was the chief problem of civilization, rejected force altogether. Emma Goldman (1869–1940), in Anarchism and Other Essays (1910), called for a nonauthoritarian organization to replace the state and an end to the existing antagonism between individuals and classes. Jane Addams (1860–1935), founder of the world-famous social settlement Hull-House in Chicago in 1889, turned her attention to world peace, publishing Newer Ideals of Peace in 1907 and opposing America's entry into World War I. John Haynes Holmes (1879–1964), a prominent Unitarian minister and social activist, spoke out against the war at a Unitarian conference in 1917, offering a resolution in favor of reconciliation, peace, and social justice. The former U.S. president William Howard Taft denounced the resolution, and as president of the conference, Taft then proposed an alternate resolution favoring the war as the only way to "stamp out militarism in the world." Even in such a setting, pacifists were a small minority. Taft's resolution carried, 236–9. After the war, continuing to advocate a socialist agenda that included nonviolent conflict resolution, Holmes demonstrated in Is Violence the Way out of Our Industrial Disputes? (1920) that the decades-old war between capital and labor was as violent as had been the recent war between nations, naively dubbed the War to End All Wars.

THE NEW COLOSSUS

The period was defined by wars to assure freedom, and much of the poetry of the period perpetuated old romantic notions exalting battle. Poems with a different attitude, like Stephen Crane's "Do Not Weep, Maiden, for War Is Kind" (1896), depicting war's horror, or Emma Lazarus's (1849–1887) "The New Colossus," were rare. Almost forgotten in the aftermath of the Civil War, the Statue of Liberty was given by France to the United States in 1886. To raise funds for the pedestal, works of authors like Mark Twain and Walt Whitman were sold at auction in 1883, and Lazarus, an American Jew, inscribed a poem to honor thousands of Jews fleeing to America following a wave of violent anti-Semitism in Russia in 1881. Titled "The New Colossus," her poem, recollecting the Colossus of Rhodes, one of the wonders of the ancient world, rejected the Old World glorification of warfare in favor of the New World's "mighty woman with a torch," who calls, "Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free." The poem aided the fund-raising by selling for $1,500, but its text was lost and forgotten until 1903, when it was rediscovered in a used-book store. Only then was the text of the poem engraved into the pedestal, making the statue perhaps history's greatest nonviolent symbol of freedom.

See alsoHaymarket Square; Ku Klux Klan; Law Enforcement; Penitentiaries and Prisons; Reconstruction; Weaponry

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Secondary Works

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Gottesman, Ronald, ed. Violence in America: An Encyclopedia. 3 vols. New York: Scribners, 1999.

Gurr, Ted Robert, ed. Violence in America. 2 vols. Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1989.

Handley, William R. Marriage, Violence, and the Nation in the American Literary West. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Hunter, Robert. Violence and the Labor Movement. 1914. New York: Arno, 1969.

Kowalewski, Michael. Deadly Musings: Violence and Verbal Form in American Fiction. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993.

Logan, Shirley Wilson. We Are Coming: Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999.

Lynn, Kenneth. "Violence in American Literature and Folk Lore." In Violence in America: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, vol. 1, edited by Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr, pp. 181–191. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1969.

Oggel, Terry. "Speaking Out about Race: 'The United States of Lyncherdom' Clemens Really Wrote." Prospects 25 (2000): 115–150.

Rice, Otis K. The Hatfields and the McCoys. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1978.

Sielke, Sabine. Reading Rape: The Rhetoric of Sexual Violence in American Literature and Culture, 1790–1990. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002.

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Twain, Mark. Mark Twain's Weapons of Satire: Anti-Imperialist Writings on the Philippine-American War. Edited by Jim Zwick. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1992.

Terry Oggel