Investigating the Devils We Know

-- By PaulinaSalmas - 27 Feb 2010

As a pacifist with a bleeding heart, I am disturbed by the deaths that were caused by John Brown and Joseph Stack. However, I agree that people should be judged by more than the body count that they leave behind.

Amiri Baraka's poem "Dope" describes the speaker’s specious attempts to determine the cause of human pain. Eliminating capitalism, the police, “rich folks,” and Jimmy Carter as potential suspects, he concludes that it “must be the devil.” “[T]he devil killed malcolm / and dr king too, even killed both kennedies, / and pablo neruda and overthrew / allende’s govt.” The poem dramatizes the tendency that some have, when investigating questions of death and poverty, to avoid measured explanations that might lead to uncomfortable revelations about powerful people and celebrated ideologies. On the other hand, it is convenient to blame the devil because he is so single-mindedly evil. Because he is so indefensible and his guilt so plausible, we are less likely to scrutinize the case against him. As a result, the real causes of the problem are obscured and the status quo is preserved.

It is tempting to note that Brown and Stack caused the deaths of innocents, throw up our hands and blame it on the devil. But, as Henry David Thoreau urges, we should not engage in such idolatry.

In 1886, an unknown person detonated a bomb during an anarchist rally in Chicago’s Haymarket Square. One police officer was killed in the explosion, and dozens of attendees were wounded in the ensuing “riot,” a minutes-long exchange of gunfire. Ultimately, an openly prejudiced jury convicted eight anarchists of murder, even though the prosecution was unable to prove that any of the defendants were responsible for the bombing. Rather, their case was buoyed by the distrust that the public felt for anarchists, and five of the defendants were executed.

Popular contemporary novelist William Dean Howells was so appalled by this outcome that he campaigned for clemency, though his efforts were unsuccessful. The day after the execution,he wrote a bitter letter to the New York Tribune arguing that, suffering from a “spasm[…] of paroxysmal righteousness,” Illinois executed the Haymarket anarchists “for their opinions’ sake.” Indeed, the appellate court opinion affirming their death sentences quoted at length from anarchist newspapers, which urged workers to prepare for “a bloody revolution” and advised their readership on how to arm themselves inexpensively. “Daggers and revolvers are easily to be gotten. Hand grenades are cheaply to be produced[…]possibilities are also given to buy arms on installments.” An honest investigation into the riot and the backlash against anarchists would have unearthed, among other things, class tensions, xenophobia, and possible police brutality. Instead, the court, the public, and the media read violent selections of the anarchists’ newspapers and collectively concluded that it must be the devil.

Unlike John Brown, the Haymarket anarchists never actually killed anyone; unlike Thoreau, Howells would have been satisfied if the men that he pled for were recognized as innocents rather than heroes. However, both Brown and the Haymarket anarchists were vilified as devils when a less reactionary conception of them would have ensured them fair trials and, possibly, sparked a more informed debate on the social issues that moved them.

There is very little risk of deifying monsters in examining the motivations of accused killers and the contexts in which they act. In 2009, Scott Roeder murdered George Tiller, an abortion doctor. Thoreau estimated that, if successful, Brown would have saved 4 million slaves; Roeder, in taking a life, was attempting to save some of the approximately 820,000 “preborn children” (as he called them) that are aborted every year. However, if allowing abortion kills the preborn, criminalizing it kills the grown women who would die in illegal abortions. Furthermore, abortion is unpopular in the United States. Groups from legislators to pharmacists attempt to chip away at abortion rights, and the public in general dislikes the sexual autonomy that access to abortion facilitates in women. Roeder’s killing, unlike Brown’s, supported the status quo, even if his violent means made his ideological allies uncomfortable. Though Roeder believed that his violence was justified, he was hardly a revolutionary and certainly does not deserve, as Thoreau believed Brown did, a “statute…in the Massachusetts State-House yard.”

However, it was not the devil that provoked Roeder to kill. Like Stark, he became affiliated with a group whose message misled him (perhaps coincidentally, Roeder also attempted to avoid paying his taxes on Constitutional grounds). It is a pro-life cliché that abortion is murder, and Roeder clearly tried to avenge its perceived victims. Portraying Roeder as a monstrous murderer absolves more moderate pro-lifers of responsibility. While vocal pro-lifers should not be hanged for their opinions as the Haymarket anarchists were, public awareness of the consequences of their incendiary behavior would be a valuable addition to the abortion debate.

In general, to love is to compartmentalize. I don’t disown my friends even though they have obnoxious habits; I don’t burn books by brilliant sixteenth century poets even though they had bigoted opinions; I still admire Roman Polanski the auteur even though he himself is an unrepentant child rapist. If we cannot forgive the sins of others at least sometimes, we will end up as ascetics if we are successful, or hypocrites if we lapse.

(The citation for Spies v. People, quoted above, is 122 Ill. 1)

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