Capital's Terrorists: Klansmen, Lawmen, and Employers in the Long Nineteenth Century

by Chad E. Pearson

Through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, employers and powerful individuals deployed a variety of tactics to control ordinary people as they sought to secure power in and out of workplaces. In the face of worker resistance, employers and their allies collaborated to use a variety of extralegal repressive techniques, including whippings, kidnappings, drive-out campaigns, incarcerations, arsons, hangings, and shootings, as well as less overtly illegal tactics such as shutting down meetings, barring speakers from lecturing through blacklists, and book burning. This book draws together the groups engaged in this kind of violence, reimagining the original Ku Klux Klan, various Law and Order Leagues, Stockgrowers' organizations, and Citizens' Alliances as employers' associations driven by unambiguous economic and managerial interests. Though usually discussed separately, all of these groups used similar language to tar their lower-class challengers—former slaves, rustlers, homesteaders of modest means, populists, political radicals, and striking workers—as menacing villains and deployed comparable tactics to suppress them. And perhaps most notably, spokespersons for these respective organizations justified their actions by insisting that they were committed to upholding "law and order."

Ultimately, this book suggests that the birth of law and order politics as we know it can be found in nineteenth-century campaigns of organized terror against an assortment of ordinary people across racial lines conducted by Klansmen, lawmen, vigilantes, and union busters.

Genres: History, Labor, Nonfiction, The United States Of America, American History, Economics, Politics

336 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 2022

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A truly excellent materialist look at the use of private violence and terror against organized workers in the period between the Civil War and WW1. Pearson starts hot right out the gate with an excellent evaluation of the first iteration of the KKK as a terroristic Employer's Association, a far more rigorous analysis than I've seen in many other sources.

Ultimately what makes this book so refreshing is its refusal to bow to academic convention of using softer, more neutral language to describe the horrific campaigns of violence waged by ruling class members throughout US history. Having an author willing to accurately refer to the vigilantes of the KKK, Law and Order Leagues, and Citizens Alliances as terrorists is a welcome change. For too long writers have bowed to the faux neutrality of refusing to call this reign of terror what it was, and to connect it to the violence carried out by the state and para-state groups today.

A must read for anyone wanting to understand the history of the labor movement and socialist struggle in the US.

[Ruthie · Rating 5 out of 5]

The human motivation to hoard resources, folks: it's all around us! We don't have to pretend it's The Secret, we don't have to pretend it's meritocracy, or effective altruism, or any of the other mystifying bullshit that excuses why our lives of toil are painful, isolated, and in many cases, miserable. Our employers meet up and make plans that control the course of our lives. We should be doing the same thing! This was what working people in the post-civil war era of the United States were fighting for. They formed unions to seize control of their destiny. And their employers fought back. This is the story of the employers' unions: the Klan, the Citizens' Industrial Association of America, the National Association of Manufacturers, and more.

To be honest, I found the use of "terrorism" throughout to be a little corny, but I understand what the author was going for here. Shooting, bombing, and imprisoning strikers was referred to as "terrorism" in the popular lexicon of the time. He is drawing attention to that fact and trying to reclaim its original meaning. From there, the term was rendered almost meaningless by the War on Terror, which attempted through media repetition to replace "terrorist" entirely in people's minds with the image of a Muslim - literally any Muslim. Using "terrorist" in your work invokes memories of those horrifying years, and doesn't bring people closer to understanding the conditions we labor under today.

I especially wouldn't use "terrorist" as he does in the epilogue to apply to the motley cross-class January 6 rioters, who as he points out, do share some qualities with the CIAA of the past. Although there were some poor working stiffs with brain poisoning, a lot of the people who showed up to the Capitol that day were business owners and petit bourgeois types, who in Pearson's recounting, quickly overwhelmed the police despite their protest inexperience. The cops' own pathetic performance made them so sad that many of them committed suicide in the months after. If a cluster of cop suicides even counts as an undesirable outcome, could you add that pile of dead pigs to the legal charges against the January 6 rioters? No, you couldn't legally do that. Now, if you're saying that the sad dead cops who failed at January 6 were the victims of domestic terrorism, I would have to agree. I think it's likely that they were murdered by their co-conspirators in the riot. Like many other examples of terrorism over the last decades, this one likely came from inside the house.

I can tell Dr. Pearson doesn't have conspiracy brain even as he writes about wide-ranging employer conspiracies. I appreciate his approach though. When you find a materialist account of history like this, hold it close to your heart.

[Daphne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Capital’s Terrorists is a very interesting book. The author’s point that petit-bourgeois and often big bourgeois labor-management groups (the og KKK, Law and Order Leagues, Citizen’s Alliances etc) acted as terrorist organizations was very salient. For being a book about white male violence, however, I feel that Pearson’s conceptions of race and gender are underdeveloped. Race isn’t merely another identity subsumed under Class, but rather co-constitual with class under Racial Capitalism.

The book as a history of intrasettler disputes between the labor aristocratic labor movement and the petit-bourgeois patriarchal civilizationists is really stellar and a welcome addition to many other histories of the racism of the euro-amerikan working class, but for a history that claims to be “materialist” I feel that the contradictions of race in a settler-colony could have been addressed more. Chapter one (about the KKK) was the standout chapter for me — if the entire book followed that trajectory i think I would be much more keen on it.

[Jay · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really great historical work on Capital and Labor relations. Shows how the “best” men of society, the rich, the powerful used their power and influence to commit massive amounts of violence on labor in order to coerce them for profit. This book also shows how the government and the media worked hand and hand with the rich in order to coerce labor. The KKK, Law and Order Leagues, Citizen Alliances all made up by the rich and powerful in order to terrorize honest, hard working workers. Like the author mentions in the book, we need to take back the word “terrorism” and call those who still to this day (as we have seen with Amazon try to flood out workers in freezing temperatures) use violence and intimidation against workers the terrorists that they are. If anything this book is a roadmap to what the rich will do to us workers as the contradictions of capitalism and class consciousness get sharper and sharper.

[Keir Walker · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is exceptionally well researched and proves the case that racial politics in post-reconstruction America was helmed by monied interests to divide the labor class and squash collective action between blacks against their former plantation masters and any economic organizing between working people, period.