Rioting in America.

Paul Gilje's book, Rioting in America, surveys a fascinating subject, the riot, over the entire course of British colonial and U.S. history. At once a form of popular political mobilization in a democracy and a symptom of deeply held divisions in society, the riot has epitomized the strengths and weaknesses of U.S. democracy. For its subject matter and its scope, this study is greatly welcome.

Surveying popular rebellions from the colonial period to the present, Gilje delineates two basic types of riots: on the one hand, people expressed their discontent by use of symbolic gestures and rituals while adhering to unwritten rules of what constituted legitimate crowd behavior; on the other hand, rioters engaged in acts of unlimited violence that defied any set of conduct.

By use of these categories the author delineates four periods of U.S. history. Both forms of rioting first appeared during the early colonial era. Events such as Bacon's Rebellion - typical of the social tensions and widespread antigovernment sentiments of British America - resulted in numerous casualties and considerable destruction of property. By the eighteenth century, popular riots became more ritualized and less violent. Whether concerned with land distribution, enforcement of moral standards or imperial intrusions, the rioters of the eighteenth century preferred to humiliate their victims rather than kill them, and they engaged in limited, symbolic destruction of property. This transition reflected, Gilje argues, a turn to a corporatist consensus of sorts by which people identified themselves as members of a unified community and deferred to people of higher authority. Whereas riots of the seventeenth century still constituted battles over the social order, by the following century they were semi-legal spectacles that did more to affirm social hierarchies than to challenge them.

After the revolution, riots took on a more plebeian and rowdy quality that was disliked by the Whig leadership. The practice of tarring and feathering became emblematic of a more boisterous populace and also indicated that Americans had found their own style of rioting and ceased to adopt rioting "styles" from the mother country. Although in theory the "will of the people" would henceforth be expressed through representative government, riots remained a prevalent and semi-legitimate form of politics during the post-revolutionary decades. Still, the author claims, rioters generally adhered to the limited and ritualistic version of communal protest.

It was by the turn of the eighteenth century that increased societal divisions and the decline of a corporatist consensus led to qualitatively different forms of rioting that were to characterize U.S. social relations for the next century and a half. By the 1800s, Gilje contends, Americans increasingly fragmented along class, ethnic, racial and religious lines. As people ceased to consider themselves part of a single community and formed interest groups, they also rioted in more violent, often deadly terms.

Most of the book is devoted to narrating this violent nineteenth-century pattern of rioting. Clashes between different ethnic groups (Gilje focuses on Anglo-Irish conflicts) and across class and racial lines were marked by extreme violence and severe destruction of property. Violence increased, in part, because victims of riots no longer considered them a legitimate form of protest but saw them as a direct threat to their own interests and acted accordingly. The author provides an exhaustive survey of riots based on ethnic, cultural and religious differences, and he devotes two separate chapters surveying the race- and class-based violence during the nineteenth century.

This society ceased a war with itself only by the early to mid-twentieth century, Gilje argues, as rioting returned to a pattern of limited and ritualized form of protest that kept physical violence relatively limited. The author attributes this change to several developments. The federal government, especially during the industrial disputes of the 1930s and the civil rights campaign of the 1950s and 1960s, intervened on the side of the repressed, allowing workers and blacks to share in the American dream. With such integration of former outsiders and the restriction of new immigration, Americans became more alike and less likely to fight each other in violent ways. The rising vigilance of the mass media during the twentieth century, Gilje contends, provided a final blow to the outrageous, homicidal rioting of the nineteenth century. Inner-city racial rioters since World War II and student protesters during the 1960s, to mention a few, all restrained themselves to destruction of property and killed relatively few people. Even the L.A. riot of 1992 with a death toll of almost sixty people should primarily be considered a form of ritualized protest.

Gilje's study is admirable for its scope and broad knowledge of the subject matter, as is reflected in the use of an impressive array of secondary and occasional primary sources. Any reader wishing to find some information on a particular riot may well find it mentioned in Gilje's study. Furthermore, the author's categorization of riots provides a useful framework comprehending and historicizing what appear to be irrational mob actions. He also offers a provocative periodization of American history, by suggesting that the 1700s were a calmer century than the previous one, by implying that the Civil War proved only one episode in a century of violent societal confrontations and, finally, by indicating that the late 1960s did not mark a turning point toward a newly divided society.

Overall, however, this reader found the book disappointing. Despite its impressive scope, Rioting in America lacks analytical rigor and clarity of narrative. The book's argument does not suffice in guiding the narrative and in providing a tight analytical framework for the countless riots presented in the book. Gilje's sole consistent variable, in fact, is the presence or absence of physical violence. At times, the narrative turns into a laundry list of riots without an indication of the larger point at hand. When the author enters the history of labor, race relations, and politics, he does so quite superficially. For example, interpreting the industrial disputes of the nineteenth century as signs of "desperation" of workers over wages and working conditions simply does not suffice to make the story interesting.

The study thus fails to ask broader questions about the meaning of riots in U.S. history. What explains, this reader wonders, the great extent of rioting and extreme violence in U.S. history? One of the unique features of the U.S. is its early development of political democracy and egalitarian values. Gilje alludes to the problem of democracy lying in its exclusive nature, especially as far as African Americans are concerned. As he argues, society became more peaceful as democracy and equality were extended to "all" by the height of liberalism in the mid-twentieth century. Yet the problems of democracy in the U.S. also have concerned competing definitions of the very nature of democracy, that is, the tensions between a form of direct democracy - of which the street riot became a legitimate expression during the revolution - and a representative democracy situated in the halls of government. Americans resorted to extra-legal coercion not necessarily because they were excluded from government (certainly those lynching blacks in the post-bellum south were not), but because they felt it to be their personal right to do so without resorting to governmental authority. An explanation of rioting in America lies deeper in issues of political culture than the author is willing to explore.

The wealth of information provided in this book cries out for greater interpretative analysis. Women's participation in rioting, for example, is occasionally highlighted but never further explored. Neither is the author interested in the racial ambiguities of blackfacing or Indian masks. Another potential angle of analysis might have been the changing understanding of public space, the physical location of rioting. These suggestions for potential points of analysis are not meant to knitpick on the study, but rather to point to its general lack of analytical and theoretical rigor. In the end, the book serves as a useful, close to encyclopedic, survey of rioting in America, but fails to convince as a systematic interpretation of rioting in U.S. history.

Georg Leidenberger Universidad des los Americas-Mexico