Those Who Spectate Are Bound to Murder

This page will further expose and explore the nature of spectacularism and violence as it relates to minorities in the American South and West from the early nineteenth to late twentieth century. Going into such a topic may seem too complex to be thoroughly explored throughout a master’s thesis running between seventy-five and one hundred pages in the history department at Clemson University during my tenure as a Master's student, however, I am hoping to continue my research through a Digital History PhD program at Clemson University if the university allows the program to succeed. For clarity on this topic, I am looking to answer three specific questions in my first exploration: 1) Can Native Americans function in much the same role of spectacularism as African Americans when it comes to extralegal violence in the American South and West? To look into this question, I am first aided by secondary and primary sources that Saidiyah Hartman and Sandy Alexandre’s books (Scenes of Subjection and T he Properties of Violence , respectively) look at most thoroughly, though most of my inspiration comes from the MonroeWorksToday website. I examine the role of the spectacle as it relates to violence through not only these textual examples, but also through the photographs and postcards depicting and further dramatizing extralegal acts of violence such as lynching which I will not show on this web page due to the objectifying nature of such an action. 2) How did violence shape the understanding of minority groups? This is a pointed question, and something more difficult to explore. Within this question, I am asking maybe two more: A) How did violence provoke a new/different understanding of members of minority groups to the outside world and B) How did these public acts of violence change how the majority saw these minority groups? 3) What is the best way for history to grapple with these forms of violence? I ask this question last because I believe it may be the most important one. As historians, and/or budding-historians, how can we speak to these violences without further perpetuating them? To answer these questions in such a short project is difficult, at best. Ultimately, the goal of this paper is to deliver a commentary on historical method and research approaches to the spectacle of lynching, while also creating a commentary on historical research gaps on this topic as my research continues. For this webpage, in particular, I wish to show my historical method, along with offer my research thus far on the topic.  

 https://clemson.maps.arcgis.com/apps/Cascade/index.html?appid=7ca8fa7412ed47bd94b2f05d794021ba 

      Many works of literature and history have informed this topic, thus far. In many ways, this web page, which will (hopefully) become a thesis, follows Sandy Alexandre’s formulation of writing most closely because I also attempt to write to an interdisciplinary audience. Organizationally, this thesis will similarly follow Alexandre’s construction of text. For example: Alexandre begins with a historiography in her introduction and Chapter 1 which covers a multitude of timelines and genres of work. Some notable scholars include: Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Ida B. Wells, Dylan Pennigroth, Amy Wood, Colin Dayan, Saidya Hartman, Stephan Palmié, Brent Hayes Edwards, Grace Hale, Stephanie Smallwood, and Marisa J. Fuentes, who all provide invaluable work that identifies and addresses the role of white supremacy in the production of historical knowledge. These various authors come from a wide range of disciplines, largely because this was Alexandre’s goal. She very explicitly claims that The Properties of Violence was written as an “interdisciplinary study with a broad appeal” because she wants to show how lynching, as a tactic and tool of violence and fear, “has been able to gain a foothold in these multiple fields of study.” [1] 

 [1]  Sandy Alexandre. The Properties of Violence: Claims of Ownership in Representations of Lynching. P. 18.

           Alexandre's book, similarly to my future thesis, opens with the above academic context in a historiographical setting, and then Alexandre proceeds to go into the more philosophically engaging questions of: What space is black space? Are black bodies self-possessed? As Alexandre adds to Grace Hale’s own work, “even the very bodies of African Americans were subject to invasion by whites” and these very bodies have become “foreign” and “strange” because of this constant inability for black persons to claim “a place” of their own, and instead finding themselves relegated to a space to be used by white “owners”. [2]  Her approach in looking at black bodies as object of possession in light of lynching is an observation that strongly situates art such as Allen’s and Morrison’s within the historical context. Alexandre is not asking her readers to think of black bodies merely as possessed by white bodies, she is telling them that they are objects of spectacle and nature. Something adored from afar until it is destroyed by a social construction: “the defining moment in…visual culture [is] that moment when we realize that the seeming natural visual image is in all actuality a social construction.” [3]  In the context of history, black bodies have been made manufactured to be fungible so as to be possessable, and easily adapted for the pleasure of white spectators. As Alexandre explains, “lynching’s leavings—its collateral damages” persist because, as she rightly articulates, justice cannot prevail from within the same system of violence that existed during the time of slavery, lynching, Jim Crowe segregation, etc. [4]  Once again, Alexandre is telling the audience how black bodies cannot find justice, nor peace, in the same system which institutionally backed slavery. Black bodies are, to this day, still suffering the after-effects of slavery and punishment, economic depravity, and, of course, groundlessness. This almost literary approach is not without historical context. Even more importantly, possibly, the question persists as to how historians are to write about enslaved (and even free) black subjects without replicating the violence of slavery, racial oppression, and archival reproduction, as Saidiyah Hartman brings up in her own Scenes of Subjection. The question, unfortunately, remains unanswered in Alexandre’s book, and yet it also allows this author to look into another nuanced question: How do Native Americans fit into this already situated framework, and why is there so little narrative on this topic thus far when there is such robust commentary on the dispossession of African Americans in the context of lynching? 

 [2]  Sandy Alexandre. The Properties of Violence: Claims of Ownership in Representations of Lynching. Pg. 8 and 13.

 [3]  Sandy Alexandre. The Properties of Violence: Claims of Ownership in Representations of Lynching. 132.

 [4]  Sandy Alexandre. The Properties of Violence: Claims of Ownership in Representations of Lynching. P. 14.

           In Saidiyah Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection, Hartman tells her readers that by continuing to subject dead victims to past lynchings through photographs, postcards, and dramatic reenactments, these subjections for entertainment are akin to asking these bodies to perform their deaths solely for the entertainment it brings to white persons. The conversation on this very concept does not translate, however, to commentary on Native Americans, yet. Specifically in Hartman’s work, Hartman grounds much of her research and commentary on how the roots of slavery grounds her position on bodily fungibility and dispossession in the black community. However, Native American’s experienced lynching in the Jim Crowe era and prior, and Native Americans also suffered prejudices for their physical appearances and cultural backgrounds in much too similar ways to African Americans. For instance, in a clipping from the Sacramento Daily Record Union on April 30th of 1890, there is a section that details the lynching of "Tacho."       

Tacho was lynched by an angry group of ranchers in Banning, California from a telegraph pole because, they claimed, he stole a horse and some cattle. [5]  This is an eerily similar narrative to some of the cases found in Alexandre’s work. Alexandre almost callously tells the reader that “lynching is exile on the cheap” and then immediately jumps into a conversation on how  economic precarity  leads white men to lynch and how black bodies, no longer productionally useful, are literally stripped of their human skin at the pleasure of white men because black bodies are still the main source of entertainment for the white populace, even though the form of entertainment has gone from the production garnered from slavery to the economic productivity found in lynching. [6]  Utilizing the bannister of extralegal violence for the sake of “preserving economic prestige” is very much within the purview of white supremacy during the Jim Crowe era, though the commentary on the entertainment value of such violence is a dark facet of history generally regarded within texts on racial persecutions. For example, in Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence, Amy Louise Wood describes the lynching of Henry Smith as: “The mob paraded [Henry Smith] through the city streets before bringing him to the scaffold, where men […] tortured him for nearly an hour before burning [Smith] to death…These spectators were not merely curious onlookers; rather, the sheer size of the crowd reflected that common heart and single impulse toward retribution.” [7]  Lynching is not about the death of a man/woman on a scaffold. Lynching is about the public entertainment value and the passing on of communal expectations to black bodies as much as it is to white bodies. However, Native Americans, much like Hispanics and Asian Americans, are generally forgotten in these conversations save for a few footnotes in history. This is an injustice to not only the marginalized groups whose members are forgotten, but also to the black community, itself.

 [5]  Clipping from Sacramento Daily Record Union, April 30, 1890, detailing lynching of Indian "Tacho." Courtesy, Library of Congress "Chronicling America" digital newspaper project.

 [6]  Sandy Alexandre. The Properties of Violence: Claims of Ownership in Representations of Lynching. P. 23.

 [7]  Amy Louise Wood. Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940. Chapel Hill: Univ Of North Carolina Pr, 2011. P. 71.

           The largest injustice (after the actions of violence, themselves) is the lack of attention these acts of violence have to this day. Michael J. Pfeifer, a history professor at the City University of New York’s (CUNY) John Jay College of Criminal Justice, suspects that the 137 Native Americans identified in the MonroeWorksToday map project (which describes not only where the Native Americans were lynched, but also the reason given for the extralegal violence) is too small a number. As recently as 2018, Pfeifer unearthed over twenty more cases of lynched Native Americans that had previously been ignored in historical examples of extralegal violences. The literature is largely silent on the spectacular/entertainment quality of Native American lynching. There are too small, but notable, spaces for African Americans lynchings to be spoken about in literatures and in art, because they were the primary recipients of these acts of violence, but yet the easily comparable nature of the two groups is largely absent in the conversation on extralegal violences. To be fair, there are many important literatures on how Native Americans were viewed (similarly to black persons during these times) as bestial and primitive, someone less than human—less than white humans—and thus there is an opportunity for comparison and extension on this conversation to make the connections which seem obvious, though lost. For instance, in Hannah Durston’s story, written by Cotton Mathers, there is a very positive reception to Durston’s killing and scalping of the ten Native Americans who had kidnapped her. Among the killed by Durston were six children, whom she did not regret her actions against. So much positive reception followed from the town, even, that Durston’s statue in Concord, New Hampshire is largely considered the first public memorialization of an American woman (and this statue is one of three built in her honor between 1861 and 1879). [8]  This is to say, there is a precedence in seeing social memorialization occur for acts of violence enacted against Native Americans in much the same way communities continue to memorialize Benjamin Tillman and John C. Calhoun in Clemson, South Carolina. That is to say, as these memorials still exist, that there is a transcendent and continued spectacle of violence occurring in the United States. 

 [8]  Barbara Cutter. “Why an American Woman Who Killed Indians Became Memorialized as the First Female Public Statue: Hannah Duston Was Used as a National Symbol of Innocence, Valor, and Patriotism to Justify Westward Expansion.” What It Means to Be American. Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History and Arizona State University, April 9, 2018. https://www.whatitmeanstobeamerican.org/.

      As is stated in the above abstract, there are three major questions I am looking to speak on within the constricted confines of this masters’ thesis: 1) Can Native Americans function in much the same role of spectacularism as African Americans when it comes to extralegal violence in the American South and West? 2) How did violence shape the understanding of minority groups? 3) What is the best way for historians to grapple with these forms of violence? I believe that there are many ways to frame these questions when looking at the broader issue of spectacularism and violence such as: silence, photographs, videos, and others, but there is something more important at stake within this proposed research. My thesis statement, that the public spectacle of violence leads to further marginalization and desensitization to slow violence, postulates that similarly historically disenfranchised and marginalized groups share a history of violence that are public and viewed as entertainment while at the same time finding themselves further marginalized because of the level of entertainment inherent to public violences. I am interjecting my research into this broader conversation on the nature of spectacularism and violence as it relates to minorities in the American South and West in the early nineteenth to late twentieth century because I believe there is a furthering of this narrative t hat needs to be accomplished .

           To begin much of the research, however, I will first start with looking at the role of spectatorship for a few  historiographical  reasons. 1) Spectatorship is a convoluted topic because Spectatorship proffers an apparent contradiction. The Spectator exerts power over a situation or event by being physically present, but, by definition, does not act. Thus, the Spectator is an agent who acts without action; the Spectator exerts power through presence alone, calling into question heretofore accepted definitions of the historical agent. The Spectator is the one who engages in an interaction without direct interference; the one who holds exercised without interactive action, through presence alone. 2) The Spectator follows within the mob and exerts power without the necessity for speech or individual action. 3) Spectatorship is a universal structure of power among human societies, providing the necessary mechanic to understand communal regulation among disparate communities, which is significant in the case of the geographically rambling and culturally diverse communities throughout the South and West. To speak to spectatorship, I will first need to understand the role of authority I am trying to claim as a spectator to this violence and as a non-racially marginalized person. It was here that I noticed an even further issue. There are levels of spectatorship. For instance, someone who witnesses an event, first-hand, has a very different experience than someone who may see the act on a photograph. In my paper, I will delve into these differences and separations so as to better clarify the ever-changing role of that which acts without action. This follows along much of the philosophical debate of Sartre’s voyeur, but it clarifies the historical importance of violence in acts of marginalization and othering.

           The Spectators are those who give weight to acts of offense or criminality with their Spectatorship. It is on behalf of the power of Spectators that the actors concerned in any historical event are compelled to play their part on the historical stage.  The Honor  that Wyatt-Brown, and those who found inspiration from his ideas, characterized only exists when there are Spectators who witnessed, or could have witnessed, acts of dishonor. The Spectators, for the purposes of clarity, are the fuel to fire for every duel and every lynch mob. Duels are/were had to reinstate each party’s Honor in the eyes of the community, the members of which are/were aware of (or potentially aware of) some transgression of the accused. Lynch mobs satisfy the community’s supposed need for justice/retribution or are used in order to enforce social and racial hierarchies. These messages of communal expectation can only make sense when the messages and acts of violence are made public; have witnesses. If there are no Spectators to judge, then duelists are performers in an empty theatre, and the lynch mobs would consist of two psychically active men—one to hold the victim while the second tied the noose—in an empty act of murder without communal payoff or acceptance. In many ways, they simply act as voyeurs.

           As I brought up in the previous paragraphs, the Spectator may also serve as an example of Sartre’s voyeur. In a description of human existence in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, Sartre describes humans as existing as true subjects only when they are engrossed in the actions of others, without being directly observed themselves. This stipulates that the Spectators are simply people (in this case, “Southerners” and “Westerners”) who watch actions taking place. [1]  Sartre describes voyeurs as observant beings, following the actions of others through a metaphorical keyhole, treating those they are observing as objects, and thus granting a particular type of power to the voyeur. For historical purposes, the “voyeur” is understood as the Spectator who is engrossed in the actions of others. The observed/victims are classified as historical actors, who are rendered as objects due to the observational and judgmental qualities of the Spectator. This is important because the objectification of the human being acted upon violently for some communal purpose or another, further speaks to the second question this paper poses: 2) How did violence shape the understanding of minority groups? This is a pointed question, and something more difficult to explore. Within this question, I am asking maybe two more: A) How did violence provoke a new/different understanding of members of minority groups to the outside world and B) How did these public acts of violence change how the majority saw these minority groups? These are necessary conversations that are sorely lacking in academia, currently. Even in the MonroeWorksToday website, the information on lynchings are plopped into a space, though there is little to no commentary on how the information interacts with the others. It is here where I also struggle to understand how best to separate levels of spectatorship and these problems of communication between research, so in my third section of the paper I look to flip the question on interpreting such violent acts on the historian.

           I ask 3) What is the best way for history to grapple with these forms of violence last because I believe it may be the most important question to date from my role as a historian. As historians, and/or budding-historians, how can we speak to these violences without further perpetuating them? Ultimately, the goal of this paper is to deliver a commentary on historical method and research approaches, while also creating a commentary on how historical research on this topic has been done in the past. To explain properly, this paper will participate in a thematic engagement between three terms: Primary Spectatorship, Secondary Spectatorship, and Tertiary Spectatorship. The ways in which these terms may be defined for this paper are as followed: Primary Spectatorship is a form of Spectatorship in which the witness must be in close enough physical proximity to act as witness to event. For Primary Spectatorship, specifically, it is about close distance to the scene of execution and the objectified, as will be better explained in the next section. Secondary Spectatorship is also bent upon a physical distance demarcation, and reliant on the Spectator being a witness outside of “real-time” and “real-space”. These Secondary Spectators are the individuals who watch the public execution through the filming of the execution after-the-fact and are reliant on the film, itself, to accurately portray “true” events. Tertiary Spectators, however, are mayhap the most interesting. These Spectators are the persons who seek out films portraying public executions to reinforce self-imposed moral codes, continuing the tradition of communal reinforcement to this day. These fake Spectatorships are also Real even though they do not watch “real” events because this form of Spectatorship also reinforces and perpetuates a very real othering within modern societies in the South and West. 

           One of the inspirations behind this research, beyond the MonroeWorksToday website, is based on The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery’s Portrait Gallery which ran from July of 2018 to January of 2019 through the artistic lens of lead artist, Ken Gonzales-Day. The Smithsonian acknowledges that people of color have long been missing in the works it exhibits, but it is also commenting on the diversity of lynching victims and the lack of conversation surrounding other victims of extralegal violences. The Primary Documents I most use can be found on the MonroeWorksToday website, as they not only clearly delineate geographic location of lynchings, and offer newspaper clippings and sometimes photographs of each individual encounter, but it also helps this research to engage in a conversation on how geographic location between two separate lynchings may offer a cultural commentary on the regional violence through an easily accessible location. As I stated before, this lack of a conversation on the website is a gap I believe this research can bridge. For secondary sources, there are many which this researcher engages with which the literature review spoke about more in-depth in the previous section. Some of the most important secondary sources to this research are Saidiyah Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection, Sandy Alexandre’s The Properties of Violence, Amy Louise Wood’s Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940, and Cynthia Skove Nevels’ Lynching to Belong: Claiming Whiteness through Racial Violence. Ultimately, the goal of this research is to bridge those gaps in the research, while also making note of the current lack of conversation as a potential complication for this project.

 [1]  Jean-Paul Sartre. Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology. Translated by Hazel Barnes. Abingdon, Oxon, UK: Routledge, 1943. P. xi.

        The thesis is separated into five major sections: The Introduction, Primary Spectatorship, Secondary Spectatorship, Tertiary Spectatorship, and the Conclusion. The Introduction serves to give context to the terms of spectacle which will be used throughout the text, as well as to give clarification to the secondary, thematic, separation of text based on the three major questions this thesis looks to speak to. In the Primary Spectatorship section, something I may also refer to as "Principal" spectatorship, the question: 1) Can Native Americans function in much the same role of spectacularism as African Americans when it comes to extralegal violence in the American South and West? In this section, I examine the role of the spectacle and spectator as they relate to violence. In this section, I will most poignantly speak to the primary documents such photographs, postcards, and newspaper articles depicting and further dramatizing extralegal acts of violence such as lynching. Intentionally, I do so with the purpose of bringing the documents closer to the reader and allowing them an even greater opportunity to examine their role in these documents as a reader, but also as a contributor to the continuation of this research. As you may have noted from this web page, however, I most certainly will not put forth the photos/postcards of lynching to be viewed. There is an intention behind such though, which I grapple with in this section. Mostly, I am concerned with two items: 1) By putting the postcard on the document, I would not be allowing the reader the opportunity to think as the primary spectator because I would be asking them to look at the photographic evidence (a secondary spectatorship expectation). Instead, I as the author, need to speak to how to evidence looks. I need to grapple with the intentions, feelings, and emotions of the spectator in the moment, and then grapple with first-hand documentation of the event. To do so, I need to look at the spectators, and take the pressure off of the lynched bodies.

           The Secondary Spectatorship section takes a step back from the more primary, in-the-face documents, yet still retains them as a focal point in understanding how communal reinforcement occurred. This section will also examines the second question: 2) How did violence shape the understanding of minority groups? This is a pointed question, and something more difficult to explore. Within this question, I am asking maybe two more: A) How did violence provoke a new/different understanding of members of minority groups to the outside world and B) How did these public acts of violence change how the majority saw these minority groups? This section, in taking a step back, grapples with secondary sources and journals to look at how the role of the spectator is changing at the same time the role of the victim begins to change and looks at similar documents (newspapers, photographs, postcards, etc.) but also looks at films of forms of extralegal violences and oral histories from differing perspectives that I have gathered during my time researching these topics of conversation. 

           Tertiary Spectatorship is the most important commentary in this thesis, and will make up the third section. In this section, I will analyze a major, teleological question which has plagued the historical discipline: 3) What is the best way for history to grapple with these forms of violence and what purposes do these histories serve? I will look at the different forms of chronicling history (photos, books, articles, websites, maps, etc.) and then discuss how historians are choosing to proceed with speaking to these acts of violence, whether it be through silence or raucous applause. It is imperative that I utilize technology in this section because only technology can further this research towards an answer. For instance, when I look at photographic evidence, what right and what duty do I, as the author, have for these victims? Throughout this web page, for instance, you will note that I stay away from brutalities and focus more on lifting up historically marginalized groups while also fixating on perpetrators of violence. The goal, then, is to change the discourse from entertainment, to culturally shifting the narrative towards historical triumphs over violent pasts. It is also critically important to understand that the idea of spectation is  changing with technology,  and will only continue to do so.

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