U.S. History, U.S. Riots: A Thread of Mob Violence : Civil Unrest: We forget that citizens have always taken to the streets to vent grievances. But now the response is ambivalent.

Los Angeles, better than other places, has cause to know that rioting has always been a part, albeit an ugly and frightening part, of the American political process.

Watts is close enough to the fire this time to remind us that, despite our image of ourselves as an orderly nation of laws, America has another tradition, one of disorder and lawlessness. Rioting and mob action have been a continuing aspect of the national life from its beginnings. What’s changed is the language of authority, whose latter-day ambivalence in the face of civil unrest seems an apt sign of the times.

There was rioting in North America even before there was a United States, and the following description, penned in 1765, illustrates an early use of rage for political purposes long before the latest outbreak of violent anarchy in Los Angeles: “The Boston Mob, raised first by the Instigation of Many of the Principal Inhabitants, Allured by Plunder, rose shortly after of their own Accord, attacked, robbed, and destroyed, several Houses, and amongst others, that of the Lieutenant Governor; and only spared the Governor’s, because his Effects had been removed. People then began to be terrified at the Spirit they had raised, to perceive that popular Fury was not to be guided.”

So wrote Gen. Thomas Gage, commander of the British forces in the North American colonies, of the riotous reaction to the promulgation of the Stamp Act. Today we see the miscreants as freedom fighters. Depending on who you were, the Boston Tea Party is a mob action or a heroic insurrection.

Those on the receiving end of mob violence call it mindless criminality; for those who sympathize with rioters, the murder, arson and theft are political expressions of desperate and powerless people. Often there is evidence enough for both points of view, as the current debate over the Rodney King riot attests. That the crime and the politics of mass violence are inextricably woven is reflected in the baffled fury of an editorial by Henry J. Raymond of the New York Times, written in the wake of the New York City draft riot of 1863, a disaster that left perhaps 2,000 dead in a matter of days.

“This mob is not the people,” he wrote, “nor does it belong to the people. It is for the most part made up of the vilest elements of the city. . . . They talk, or rather they did talk at first, of the oppressiveness of the Conscription Law; but. . . . Were the Conscription Law to be abrogated tomorrow, the controlling inspiration of the mob would remain the same. It comes from sources quite independent of that law, or any other law--from a malignant hate toward those in better circumstances, from a craving for plunder, from a barbarous spite against a different race.”

There are enough points of similarity between New York then and Los Angeles now to give pause. Both cities had huge, unassimilated foreign-born populations, large numbers of highly organized criminal gangs and much harrowing poverty. As the possibility of riot was anticipated in the Rodney King case, the authorities in New York were aware that putting the new draft law into effect might well be tossing the burning match into the excelsior. In New York, also, what began as political violence turned into a generalized sacking, with arson and attacks on firefighters. Ragged thugs broke into places like Brooks Bros. and emerged in the costumes of the comfortable.

Blacks paid a hideous price in the 1863 riot, which came in the midst of a war over slavery. Some apparently died under torture, and 18 or more were lynched.

Rioting was probably an import to Colonial America from the mother country, where there was a certain tolerance of mob action. In those days England was famous throughout Europe for its riotous and insurrectionary population. In America, there was rioting connected with every public topic of importance from the ratification of the Constitution to John Jay’s 1794 treaty with England.

With the crumbling of the old social order and the coming of egalitarian democracy in the 1828 election of Andrew Jackson, American rioting took a turn toward the homicidal.

The departure is marked by the death of Elijah Parish Lovejoy, editor of the Alton (Ill.) Observer. Three times rioters destroyed the presses of his abolitionist newspaper, causing the infuriated journalist to write, “These mobs will cease as soon as some of the mobites are hung by the neck and not before.”

But it was Lovejoy, attempting to defend his presses against yet another mob, who was shot dead on Nov. 7, 1837, thereby becoming an example himself of the courage demanded in the defense of law, justice and freedom. An American era of sporadic but murderous street warfare had begun, and it may still be with us.

Many more were destined to die. Throughout the 19th Century they fell in countless episodes of racial, religious, ethnic, labor and political conflict, all riotous mob action of one kind or another, including the anti-Chinese riots in San Francisco during the 1870s.

Nor should the labor strife of the period go unmentioned. In 1886, somebody threw a bomb into the ranks of Chicago policemen drawn up at a labor rally, and the ensuing mayhem has gone down in our history as the Haymarket Square riot. In 1894, a strike against Pullman Palace Car Co. wasn’t ended until the President sent federal troops into Chicago, provoking a reaction leading to widespread violence and arson.

The first years of the 20th Century saw renewed race rioting. The 1908 lynchings in Springfield, Ill., Abraham Lincoln’s hometown, were so disturbing to the consciences of some whites that they joined with African-Americans to start the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People. Neither this nor anything else could bring about a diminution of the anti-black street violence that claimed perhaps 50 lives in East St. Louis, Ill., in 1917, and then reached a climax of sorts in 1919 when all hell broke loose. W.E.B. Du Bois counted race riots in 26 cities that year. The riot patterns seemed to be changing. There was more firepower and, though blacks had fought back in the past, they were becoming much more determined to hold their ground.

During World War II there were the Zoot Suit riots here in Los Angeles, (triggered by the racially charged trial of two dozen Mexican-American youths in the so-called Sleepy Lagoon murder), disturbances in New York’s Harlem and riots over whether blacks would get to live in the Sojourner Truth Homes in Detroit, but it seemed that the day of mass rioting and destruction had ended.

Americans forgot their own history and therefore failed to appreciate their own willingness to indulge in massive law-breaking, incendiarism and murder. The rise of civil disobedience in the 1960s, which in many cases involved violating bad laws in a good cause, may have played a part in the fires that soon broke out. In addition to the ghetto rioting that so grievously wounded Los Angeles, Newark, Detroit and Washington, among many other cities, white college students took to mass demonstrations that passed the line into illegality in Berkeley, New York and Washington.

Although the popular imagination had consigned rioting to the past until the Rodney King explosion, in truth America has never ceased having episodes of serious public disorder. Since the 1960s Miami, Boston, Philadelphia and other places have been visited with mob violence. It’s possible that a nation sickened by events in Los Angeles will now call off its social wars, but the people who sell fire insurance aren’t counting on it.

In contrast to the past, when no quarter was given to lawbreakers, today’s public officials make statements based on a tacit acceptance of the rioting in our political processes. That doesn’t bode well for civil peace. The middle class, already shaken by the thought that law enforcement might offer no protection, may take the equivocal language of those in authority as a signal to arm itself and prepare to join the fray next time. Gun sales in Los Angeles soared after the recent disturbances.

Rioting has been particularly intense in periods of large-scale immigration and an emphasis on cultural, religious and racial difference--in the 1840s, at the turn of the century and now. Putting a premium on cultural diversity instead of cultural unity doesn’t mean that rioting is sure to follow, but experience suggests that when you encourage division you may get violence. Let’s hope the past is not prologue.