Posse Comitatus
Aha! Here’s a good non-election topic. The Posse Comitatus Act that prohibits deploying military forces inside the United States. Vital safeguard of our civil liberties? Glenn Greenwald says yes:
For more than 100 years — since the end of the Civil War — deployment of the U.S. military inside the U.S. has been prohibited under The Posse Comitatus Act (the only exceptions being that the National Guard and Coast Guard are exempted, and use of the military on an emergency ad hoc basis is permitted, such as what happened after Hurricane Katrina). Though there have been some erosions of this prohibition over the last several decades (most perniciously to allow the use of the military to work with law enforcement agencies in the “War on Drugs”), the bright line ban on using the U.S. military as a standing law enforcement force inside the U.S. has been more or less honored — until now.
Robert Farley correctly notes, however, that post-Civil War restrictions on the deployment of the U.S. military were not so much aimed at safeguarding civil liberties as they were at ensuring that African-Americans living in the South could be systematically denied all political and civil rights through an organized campaign of terrorist violence. With state level authorities at best ignoring such terrorism and at worst directly engaging in it, the deployment of federal troops was the only possible method by which to secure the physical safety and basic rights of black people. One also might recall in this regard that federal troops were deployed to Arkansas to ensure compliance with court desegregation orders in Little Rock.
Now I’m not sure how much relevance that has to contemporary debates, but it’s a valuable reminder that the political valence of civil libertarian concerns shifts over time. And not just because members of the out-of-power party tend to be more sensitive to executive power claims. There’s some substantive ideological disagreement, with conservatives tending to see the risks primarily in terms of the long arm of the federal government as threatening the ability of private groups or local governments to engage in discriminatory practices.
54 Responses to “Posse Comitatus”
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September 25th, 2008 at 12:17 pm
I think it is tackless to publish a photo of a lynching victim without explanation of the circumstances.
September 25th, 2008 at 12:21 pm
I was going to say the same thing as Raoul. Posting a photograph of a lynching victim is questionable, but posting that photo without identifying the victim in any way is over the line into inappropriate.
Remember that many lynching photos were taken by the perpetrators, as souvenirs. They were acts of defilement of people who had been murdered. If we’re going to use those photographs today, we should take care to ensure that our use of them does not perpetuate that disrespect.
September 25th, 2008 at 12:22 pm
Take the photograph down.
September 25th, 2008 at 12:22 pm
Raoul, Matt’s post does include a passage that would explain why he would publish a photo of a lynching victime:
September 25th, 2008 at 12:25 pm
Danite, it’s not Matt’s reason for posting the photo that needs to be made clear, but the human story of the person depicted in it.
September 25th, 2008 at 12:26 pm
The photograph does need to be taken down. There’s not a solid enough justification for it.
September 25th, 2008 at 12:30 pm
Ok, I understand the complaints now and have to agree with the sentiment of those that want the photo removed or explained. I suppose that I’ve seen so many of these photos now, that I forget that there is an actual human being there. Brooklynite makes an excellent point about who took these photos in the first place and why they took them.
September 25th, 2008 at 12:43 pm
And wouldn’t you know it
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20080925/obama-effigy/
Obama effigy found hanging from Ore. campus tree
September 25th, 2008 at 12:45 pm
Fan of your blog, but putting up this image was a bad idea. The human being in the picture isn’t just some “figure a.” If you don’t know who it is, then please take it down.
September 25th, 2008 at 12:45 pm
Beyond the lynching issue, the “insurrection” clause is so vague that it’s more of a symbolic protection than an actual protection.
September 25th, 2008 at 12:48 pm
A few posts down, Matt, you mentioned Kant’s principle that human beings should only be considered as ends in themselves, not as means. You criticize whatshisname for using the Sudan as a rhetorical bludgeon. The picture is doing the same thing.
I did expect to find a collection of right-wing defensiveness in the comments column, and it’s actually refreshing to find, instead, real sensitivity to the serious issue of representing people in history.
With the picture gone, Matt’s point is thoughtful and right, I think.
September 25th, 2008 at 12:51 pm
A quick search tells me that the woman in the photo is Laura Nelson, who was hanged near Okemah, Oklahoma with her 14-year-old son in May 1911.
Nelson’s son, LW, had been accused of shooting a sheriff’s deputy, and when law enforcement came to arrest him, Laura confessed to the crime in an attempt to save him. They were both arrested. Some days later, a lynch mob stormed the jail, removed them both, and hanged them from a local bridge. According to some reports, Laura was raped and her son was sexually mutilated before they were killed.
September 25th, 2008 at 12:53 pm
Matthew forgot to mention the related tactic:
Gun Control laws were heavily used by Democrats in the South to disarm black populations and make them vulnerable to terrorism by the Ku Klux Klan — i.e, to allow the KKK to operate without fear of reprisals. That wasn’t just post-Civil War , that was how it worked up into the 1960s.
So intimidated blacks could not gain political power even in those areas where they were a majority of the population.
A lesson for the future. If you don’t want to be the poor sonofabitch swinging on the end of the rope, get an AK-47. That way you can let the motherfuckers know that you will take several of them with you.
Wayne LaPierre and the NRA leadership are two-faced and deceitful. As shown by their craven acceptance of Bush’s Patriot Act, warrentless searchs, imprisonment of Americans without trial,etc.
But the NRA rank and file have some things right — one of which is that a disarmed citizen is not a citizen, he’s a slave.
September 25th, 2008 at 12:53 pm
God d–n it, Yglesias, that picture is f—ing horrible. It’s a real person who was murdered by those creeps, not some tool to make a cheap political point. That lady had a family who cared about her, and a name. please take the picture down.
September 25th, 2008 at 12:53 pm
Robert Farley correctly notes, however, that post-Civil War restrictions on the deployment of the U.S. military were not so much aimed at safeguarding civil liberties as they were at ensuring that African-Americans living in the South could be systematically denied all political and civil rights through an organized campaign of terrorist violence.
Matt, do you have any authority for this contention? Farley didn’t see fit to provide any. And I mean this non-rhetorically, i.e., I would actually like to read more about it.
September 25th, 2008 at 12:56 pm
Hey Matt, just because you can scream “fuck pigs” in One Police Plaza at lunchtime, doesn’t mean you should, or that it’s particularly helpful to do so. Have some respect.
How about this picture instead?
September 25th, 2008 at 1:02 pm
Don Williams,
I don’t care too much about the gun control issue one way or another, other than that I am a believer in responsible hunting. But I think it would be inaccurate to say that a heavily armed populace leads necessarily to a civilized or free society. There are few places on earth where gun ownership is more widespread and democratic (and has been for many generations) than Afghanistan and western Pakistan. That hasn’t particularly meant either more security or more freedom for the people there.
An armed citizenry, by itself, is probably not going to be able to resist a modern military. Revolutions in modern times have succeeded owing to one or more of the following factors: A) the military itself was ideologically divided, and there were mutinous factions, B) the rebels got firearms from abroad, C) the military was either too incompetent or too indifferent to the fate of the government to fight, D) the existing order was sufficiently weakened by economic depression, foreign war, etc. that it could not organize to defend itself.
September 25th, 2008 at 1:10 pm
Glenn,
Check this out for more information, specifically on “erosion of the act”
http://www.homelandsecurity.org/journal/articles/Trebilcock.htm
September 25th, 2008 at 1:11 pm
Glenn, do you have access to a database like JSTOR where you can read articles by historians? What Matt says is completely uncontroversial, and fits everyone’s understanding of the post-Civil-War decades. I hope you won’t demand endless exact proof for generalizations that are known to be accurate. There is an archive on this.
September 25th, 2008 at 1:12 pm
I do think Matthew’s argument — that the federal military would ever be used to protect the poor and the politically powerless against the aggression of the rich — is a crock of shit. The federal military protects the wealth of the rich. Period.
Its not just the blacks who are fucked. My people in Appalachia had to fight a guerrilla war to throw off a feudal system imposed by rich motherfuckers here in Philly. The federal troops were always on the side of “Property”.
Look at the very architecture of Washington DC. The traffic circles (Dupont Circle ,etc) were designed as positions in which to set up artillery. To mow down the citizens of the Republic if they ever realized what a fucking con game the Constitution is.
Look at the white veterans of the WWI — who were gunned down by Eisenhower and MacArthur on Hoover’s orders when they marched on Washington in protest at the Great Depression. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonus_Army .
September 25th, 2008 at 1:14 pm
Please take the pic down Matthew.
This is a really strong and powerful photograph. It evokes very powerful emotions.
Take it down Mat.
September 25th, 2008 at 1:27 pm
Leave the photo up , Matthew. It might remind some of these swaddled nancies that politics isn’t a game.
September 25th, 2008 at 1:36 pm
Don Williams,
You are right, of course, that the federal government and military is the tool of an oligarchy. I wouldn’t argue with you there. However, there are oligarchies and oligarchies, and some of them are far more brutal and oppressive than others. I would prefer to be ruled by an oligarchy with a guilty conscience than an oligarchy with no conscience at all. Historically the Federal government, and the Northern oligarchy it served, _was_ an agent of liberation for southern Black people, _relative_ to the much more oppressive Southern oligarchy. It’s the same way with the British vs. the odious Boers in South Africa, or with “Crown and Altar” conservatives vs. liberal capitalists in colonial Spanish America.
September 25th, 2008 at 1:36 pm
Somewhere in Germany blog commenters are objecting to a picture featuring the crematoria remains of anonymous jews.
This is your fucking history crackers, deal with it.
September 25th, 2008 at 1:37 pm
It’s worth remembering that when it comes to doing a proper lynching, the US Government literally wrote the book:
http://www.loc.gov/rr/frd/Military_Law/pdf/procedure_june-1944.pdf
September 25th, 2008 at 1:40 pm
….in case I wasn’t clear, the “Crown and Altar” crowd was better for the Indians of South America than the liberal capitalists who replaced them. Marx got that wrong, as he got a number of other things.
September 25th, 2008 at 1:42 pm
I miss West Wing.
September 25th, 2008 at 1:46 pm
The complains about the picture are interesting, but I think I must be missing something. What’s more objectionable about using a photo of a particular lynching victim to illustrate a general point about lynchings than using a photo of a particular victim of, e.g., the Iraq war to illustrate a general point about the Iraq war?
September 25th, 2008 at 1:46 pm
Re Hector’s comment “Historically the Federal government, and the Northern oligarchy it served, _was_ an agent of liberation for southern Black people, _relative_ to the much more oppressive Southern oligarchy.”
————-
1) The South deserved everything it got –including that fucking from SHerman. IT was as Evil as Hitler.
2) But the GOAL of the Radical Republicans was never to liberate black people. That’s why they didn’t suppress the KKK and why they cut a deal with Southern conservatives in the 1870s.
3) The goal of Radical Republicans was to build National Empires in Coal, Steel, Railroads, etc without any bullshit from state legislatures re the rights of workers. The Republicans only wanted one set of whores to bribe and they wanted them collected in Washington.
So the Republicans didn’t free the slaves so much as they enslaved the rest of us. The black residents of the South, over 140 years since, have gotten a marginal improvement in relative standard of living.
But as Jesse Jackson reminded White Voters in 1984, most of Americans are still niggers in the eyes of Washington. Doesn’t matter what color our skin is.
September 25th, 2008 at 1:51 pm
Glenn, do you have access to a database like JSTOR where you can read articles by historians? What Matt says is completely uncontroversial, and fits everyone’s understanding of the post-Civil-War decades. I hope you won’t demand endless exact proof for generalizations that are known to be accurate.
No, rm, no I don’t have JSTOR access. And I’m not “demanding” anything, I was genuinely curious. I did some googling and didn’t really find anything supporting the claim. (The link by Statler in the comment above yours, which I had already seen, included.) I don’t find it difficult to believe, but I wanted something a little more than just Matt’s word for it. (Sorry, MY.)
September 25th, 2008 at 1:53 pm
# Glenn Says:
September 25th, 2008 at 12:53 pm
Matt, do you have any authority for this contention? Farley didn’t see fit to provide any. And I mean this non-rhetorically, i.e., I would actually like to read more about it.
Any book that covers the end of Reconstruction and the rise of post-slavery White Supremacy (from roughly 1877 on) or any high school Amer. Hist. class should do.
September 25th, 2008 at 1:56 pm
Guess Ike shouldn’t have sent the 101st Airborne Division into Little Rock.
September 25th, 2008 at 2:05 pm
I’m with those that think the pic is out of bounds. There is a time and a place for graphic imagery. This post isn’t one of them.
September 25th, 2008 at 2:18 pm
Mark, Don, Washer,
If Matt wants to use this photo, that’s of course his right. But this photograph isn’t a piece of clip art, or a work of photojournalism. It is an artifact of white supremacist popular culture, a grisly souvenir produced by the racist system that took this woman to a bridge in the dark of night, raped her, mutilated her son, and then murdered them both. The photograph was no less integral to the violent racism of its era than the lynching itself.
There are contexts in which displaying such a photo is the right thing to do. This may be one of them. But if Matt is going to make that choice, he has an obligation to take the two minutes necessary to do it in the right way.
This woman had a name, and she had a story. Her name was Laura Nelson, and she was raped and murdered on May 25, 1911, for the crime of trying to protect her 14-year-old son from the fate she herself suffered. Her murderers were never prosecuted.
Matt should have shown her the respect of telling her story, at the very least.
September 25th, 2008 at 2:32 pm
when it comes to doing a proper lynching, the US Government literally wrote the book
Mr. Williams weighs in against hanging the Nazis at Nuremberg, apparently.
September 25th, 2008 at 2:35 pm
Using that photo while making a pedestrian political point is offensive.
TAKE IT DOWN!
September 25th, 2008 at 2:39 pm
I guess you people are entitled to your own opinions. In my view, photos of lynching no longer contribute to the cause of white supremacy. They shame those whose history (and present) is tied to the movement.
September 25th, 2008 at 2:54 pm
Re rea’s comment “Mr. Williams weighs in against hanging the Nazis at Nuremberg, apparently”
————-
Not at all. I do share Winston Churchill’s bemusement at the whole charade , however. (Winston didn’t understand why the Top Nazis could be simply executed under an Act of Attainder defining the top Nazis as “Assholes who don’t deserve to live” ).
The Nuremberg “trials” were really Military Tribunals. Modern day Iraqis would be bewildered at the primary charges filed by the US Government against the Nazis:
”
1. Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of crime against peace
2. Planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression and other crimes against peace
3. War crimes
4. Crimes against humanity ”
——–
“But..but ..but…”
September 25th, 2008 at 2:56 pm
Correction: Winston didn’t understand why the Top Nazis could NOT be simply executed under an Act of Attainder
September 25th, 2008 at 3:00 pm
Here’s the Wiki definition for “crimes against peace”:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_against_peace
The definition for War Crime is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_crime
If you have any questions, ask John Yoo and David Addington to explain it to you.
September 25th, 2008 at 3:52 pm
Glenn, I apologize — I thought that comment might be the opening shot of a trolling session, but I see it was sincere and well-meant. I’m not sure if high school textbooks would whitewash this history too much (literally), and the history is complex. But I know most good histories would cover it. This article covers the period, and you can see how posse comitatus fits in, though it’s not mentioned specifically. Eric Foner is a major historian on the period. “The nadir of civil rights” or “the nadir of race relations” is a common name for the time. Mark Twain called it the United States of Lyncherdom. Google Scholar might get you somewhere.
September 25th, 2008 at 3:56 pm
Such as here.
September 25th, 2008 at 4:40 pm
If I remember correctly, Matt posted a similar or perhaps even the same pic over at The Atlantic blog – and got the same level of complaints.
Clearly he doesn’t give a shit about your complaints, which is no surprise, since he doesn’t give a shit about his readers, as he repeatedly demonstrated at The Atlantic.
And of course, it’s irrelevant to Greenwald’s point whether Posse Commitatus was intended or used to enable the states to suppress blacks. The point is that it was ALSO intended to prevent the Federal government from using the military to initiate a military dictatorship.
Of course, it would never be able to do so if the citizenry was willing to accept a dictatorship here – as it now apparently is happy to do.
September 25th, 2008 at 8:35 pm
Re: To mow down the citizens of the Republic if they ever realized what a fucking con game the Constitution is.
Nope. It was to defend against foreign armies. Remember, when Washington was designed it was only a few years since British armies had been marching to and fro in North America. And with independence came a fear that the nascent US would be easy pickings for other European powers. No one at the time foresaw that France, Spain et al were about to be largely booted out of the New World by a whole series of revolutions
Re: You are right, of course, that the federal government and military is the tool of an oligarchy. I wouldn’t argue with you there. However, there are oligarchies and oligarchies, and some of them are far more brutal and oppressive than others.
Hector, all governments are oligarches. You might as well try to invent water that is not wet.
Re: in case I wasn’t clear, the “Crown and Altar” crowd was better for the Indians of South America than the liberal capitalists who replaced them.
Depends on which crown and which altar. On the whole the French were probably the best in regards to treatment of Native Americans (but quite brutal to their African slaves in the Caribbean). The Spanish come in a poor second, then the Portuguese. The English dead last. (It’s difficult to judge the Russians or the Dutch in this regard as their tenancy in the Americas was rather brief and in the case of the Russians quite disorganized)
Re: But the GOAL of the Radical Republicans was never to liberate black people.
Some of them were corrupt SOBs, true, but I think that Sumner and Stevens at least had honest concern for the Southern slaves both before and after the war.
Re: That’s why they didn’t suppress the KKK and why they cut a deal with Southern conservatives in the 1870s.
???
They did exactly that: that’s why they withdrew troops in exchange for Southern electoral votes for Hayes. Once the troops were gone the KKK largely disbanded (the 20th century KKK was a revival, a nationwide one, and aimed its evil at a far wider selection of targets– not just Blacks, but Jews, Catholics and immigrants in general.)
Re: The goal of Radical Republicans was to build National Empires in Coal, Steel, Railroads, etc without any bullshit from state legislatures re the rights of workers.
Maybe, but if you think that state legislatures gave a damn about worker rights you’re smoking something. With a very few honorable exceptions nearly all expansions of civil liberties in this country have occured because of federal action, often against the will of reactionary state authorities.
September 25th, 2008 at 9:17 pm
What the fuck is your problem man? This is the second time I’ve opened your blog to find a picture of someone getting lynched. And there are loads of more appropriate pics out there. Jeez.
September 25th, 2008 at 10:55 pm
Ahh Man,
You’re wasting your time. It’s been half a day and Mr. Yglesias hasn’t taken it down. I’m not sure that he even reads the comments here.
JonF,
Just to clarify, I was _defending_ the United States federal government as regards the matter of race relations. I was saying that yes it was an oligarchy, but it was a lot better than the Southern state oligarchies, and was objectively the agent of liberation of Black people.
I wasn’t really comparing the Spanish to the French so much as I was comparing the early Spanish colonial regime (when the monarchy and the church had more power) to the later stages of colonialism and early stages of independence, when the regimes were more colored by liberal, capitalist, and mercantile interests. The Crown-and-Altar crew, as oppressive as they were, were at least bound by some conception of noblesse oblige and Christian charity, which the ‘liberal’ elites in the late 18th and 19th century were not. Unlike some of those classical-liberal elites, they were also bound by Christian teachings that all human races shared a common origin, so they never got onto the scientific-racist bandwagon.
Peasant movements in the Andes in the 20th century often took up arms to get back the lands that they had (at least on paper) been granted by the Crown, and that had later been taken from them by local landowners as the power of the Spanish crown began to gradually fade. In the US we tend to think of the wars of independence, and the ‘modernization’ of the Spanish colonies as an unalloyed good thing, but from the point of view of the Indians it wasn’t always.
I believe that Argentina and Chile were to some extent exceptions to the general non-genocidal tendencies of the Spanish colonies. (Oddly enough there were a few attempts to slaughter Indian tribes wholesale in the 20th century in Brazil and Paraguay, although it’s questionable how much responsibility lies with the government and how much with private landowners.)
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