The Mob and Major Molineux

On a recent Why Is This Happening podcast, the guest was Omar Wasow. He and Chris Hayes discussed many things of interest, but a major one was the way oppressed people protesting their treatment have to remain nonviolent, or risk backlash against everything their movement stands for, while dominant-group movements can be violent and still be accorded legitimacy (such as the January 6 rioters, for instance).

Much of the discussion was about how Civil Rights movement leaders overtly strategized to get racist officials to attack Black youth in front of national press, so that the violence would be used against the white oppressors for once.

The whole thing is worth listening to, but the point I wanted to draw attention to particularly was near the end when they talked about how the years leading up to the American Revolution were full of white mob violence and property destruction against the British government. The Boston Tea Party is the best known example of this, but there are many other instances.

We are generally not taught in secondary school that our country's founding is based in mob violence and property destruction: rioting and looting. Loss of law and order that usually freaks out white people.

I learned about it in a second-hand way in 10th grade English class, reading the Nathaniel Hawthorne short story My Kinsman Major Molineux. I was fascinated by the story, and it led me to take an entire Hawthorne class in college (which I did not enjoy, unfortunately).

The short story, however, had a nightmarish quality that must have resonated with my proto-goth 15-year-old heart. I learned from that story what tarring and feathering is, and it (or maybe my teacher) got across to me just how terrible that reality is.

I don't think I really understood at the time what the mob was so angry about, or that the story takes place in the 1730s, rather than just before the Revolution. But the imagery has stuck with me ever since, so I have understood the idea of the mob probably better than many Americans who seem to go through life without acknowledging history.