The politics of the streets
PERSONAL COLUMN
J. H. PLUMB The Senate House in flames: mobs roaring and rioting in the Forum, full of hate, hungry for blood: off they went looting and pillaging: confronted by rival gangs they fought and killed even in the Via Sacra itself, not once, but year after year as the Roman Republic crumbled. And the empire of Augustus brought only an uneasy peace: social welfare, free food and free fun, kept the excesses down, but it required little—rumour, bribes, stirring oratory, to bring the mobs back in the streets. Demagogues played on their fears and ex- ploited their savagery for their own ends. When the capital of Empire moved to the East, the mob was not lost. At Byzantium they rioted with equal panache, played on by oligarchs and factions in politics and religion.
In June 1780 London erupted : by the seventh it was a sea of flames; the prisons were broken open, the breweries looted and the gutters' flowed with beer; Roman Catholic chapels and households were first desecrated, then wrecked and finally burned; 285 rioters were shot dead, 173 wounded, 450 taken prisoner. But these, the famous Gordon Riots, were unusual only in their extent. There had been wild rioting, burning and looting in the 1760s and '70s; in 1753, 1736, 1733 London had been at the mercy of its mob, as it had been time and time again during the previous century.
Nor was London peculiar either to Britain or to Europe. Again it was summer time— the laSt week in July 1766—when the rioting started in Devonshire in south-west England. It spread like a prairie fire and for the rest of the summer the mobs flared up into Niolence throughout the kingdom : every market town of consequence had shops broken open, looted and burnt. The government shot down the rioters. hanged a selection of those it caught and transported the rest to the colonies. To little effect, because for the next eighty years periodic mobs swept the towns and country- side, howling destruction, threatening and offering violence and, above all, looting.
Generations of Englishmen in those cen- • turies had to learn to live with the riot as they lived with- disease or death. It became a part of the nature of their society. Nor was rioting an Englishman's vice; across the Chan- nel they were just as violent. In the 1620s, '30s and '40s France erupted in bloody riots that turned into a peasants' war in Normandy: for the rest of the century scarcely a year passed without the mob coming out in the streets of some provincial town, or in Paris itself. It wreaked its vengeance on those it hated, on those whom it thought responsible for its misery and its deprivation. Each wave of violence sank back into the sea of misery only to gain fresh force and momentum: inevitably the wave reared up again, crashing itself against the walls of society, bringing death, destruction and hate.
The French Revolution changed the Euro- pean riot quite fundamentally. The mob acquired more than a directing intelligence (it had rarely been without that): it now fell under the leadership of political strategists bent on using it for long-term ideological ends. Gradually the dispossessed and the frustrated acquired a deeper, a more ruthless sense of
identity which accepted violence, tragedy, pain, even death for the sake of the future, the un- born generations. And so riot became an instrument of revolution.
Things got better towards the end of the nineteenth century. Baron Haussmann drove his great boulevards through the riotous heart of Paris, providing excellent vistas for the rifle and later the machine-gun and the tank: the weapons at the command of authority out- distanced the capacity of the mob to retaliate once the issue was joined. Of course, there were still opportunities, for even the most brutal tyrannies hesitate to use the full weight of their fire power against their own people. Nevertheless, mobs tended •to decline into demonstrations of protest with a fringe of sporadic violence. It required the para-military formation of the Fascists, Nazis and the Action Francaise, on the one hand, and the Communist party, on the other, to resuscitate the riot in the 1920s and '30s.
The military fanatics having been crushed in Europe, the riot has declined once again into demonstration and protest that teeters along the borders of provocation and violence. The near-riot, the student-mob, which Europe is now experiencing, however, is quite different from the riots of its historic past. The student violence is organised for purely political ends, lacking the mass basis of class or the spur of social and economic deprivation, and therefore totally different in kind to the rioting which America has recently experienced. The Ameri- can riot is, as it were, the grandchild of the classical riot which was bigger, more in- coherent, more desperate, a deeper convulsion in the very bowels of society than the recent disturbances in Europe. The present American experience is more akin to the riots of pre- revolutionary Europe, before the mobs became infiltrated with political agents and exploiters who turned the riot to social revolutionary ends. This second stage may be beginning, how- ever, in America and could develop with great rapidity.
The riot, urban or rural, with which Europe had to live over so many centuries was rarely an act of despair by starving peasants or slum- dwellers. The old view of the traditional his- torians was that riots and mobs were sudden hysterical outbursts of anguish and despair. Certainly poverty played its role: high prices. scarcity of corn, brought out the rioters. But usually they had leaders—journeymen, artisans, skilled craftsmen, modest yeomen farmers— and often such people made up the hard core of riot and led it to its targets. Their aim was usually direct—to break open the granaries, to lower prices by threats of destruction or to improve wages or even secure work, for workers rioted as often as peasants. But the root causes of most riots were economic and specific. They were never aimed to overturn the structure of eighteenth century society. any more than most rioting negroes in Watts or Newark wished to overturn American capital- ism and its social structure. The rioters were out to secure immediate benefits; economic, social and local, not revolution.
The American urban riot is working, as yet, in the same way as its historic counterparts. `A little early Easter shopping,' said a negress, going off with a coat in the Washington loot- ing that followed the murder of Martin Luther King. The urban riot is for the rioters like a mildly hazardous game of bingo with plenty of prizes. And apart from immediate gains there are two others, one psychological. the other practical. The practical one is quite simple. Large physical losses of property scare owners into action. An urgent sense that some- thing positive and quick must be done for the negro immediately follows riot. It is a sobering fact that, as in the past so in the present, riots rarely fail and the rioters always win: not a long-term victory, of course, but in the short term.
The other gain is the release of social emo- tion. Before the nineteenth century, the lower classes, that is small craftsmen as well as labourers, Mc! little social hope. Societies, as far as they could see, never changed. There had been and always would be rich and poor. It was a changeless world and riot, therefore, brought revenge as well as a windfall. They beat with fury at their fate and burned their hatred across the countryside and into the cities in an orgiastic release of frustration. For the overwhelming majority of Americans, black or white, rich or poor, a fundamental change in social structure is just as unthinkable as it was to eighteenth century Englishmen. Few Americans can accept the fact that the land of opportunity may have closed its doors: that a black pool of poverty will stretch like slime across the cities, spreading and growing, so long as the economic and social structure re- mains unchanged. And as long as these con- ditions prevail, the riot with its emotional release and its material windfalls and illusory social gains will go on and on, hot summer after hot summer, as it did for centuries in Europe.
But in Europe riot turned in the end, in most countries, to revolution : in England. and England alone.' it faded into insignificance in the nineteenth century. Britain was saved, on the one hand by the enormous affluence of its Industrial Revolution in full spate, supported by a dependent and exploited empire, and on the other by creating a pattern of social hope for all classes through universal elementary education and full political participation. There were other and more complex factors at work, but these were the primary causes.
America is, in a sense, entering a political phase curiously akin to Europe in the nine- teenth century, a world of savage social con- flict and possible revolutionary turmoil. Which way will riot develop—will it be moulded by revolutionary leaders into a revolutionary movement, dedicated to social change and, if need be, civil war? Or will the riots fade away, as in England, by the creation of true, not false, social hope and by full, not spurious, political participation? I am not suggesting that the British governing classes made that social hope easily realisable, nor that full political participation quickly prised their hands from the wheels of government. Of course not. But classes, like men, leap at a glimmer of real hope. But it must be real and true. If time and time again hope proves illusory, a false and deliberate mirage, then the looting will stop, the rioters will become disciplined, ferocious, dedicated, willing to die in their tens of thousands so that they can kindle an unques- tionable spark of hope in the hearts of their own people. They will start fighting not for the present but the future.
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