THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER16, 2020 33
erful people: members of Congress. In
“The Field of Blood,” the Yale history
professor Joanne B. Freeman examined
scores of previously unstudied attacks
and melees, often initiated by Southern
lawmakers who regarded opposition to
slavery as a threat to their property and
their power. In the eighteen-forties, Rep-
resentative John Dawson, of Louisiana,
threatened to cut a colleague’s throat
“from ear to ear,” and was stopped from
shooting another only by the interven-
tion of other congressmen. Freeman de-
scribed a legislature guided by the eth-
ics of professional wrestling: “Punching.
Pistols. Bowie knives. Congressmen
brawling in bunches while colleagues
stood on chairs to get a good look.” The
fighting escalated to the point that a
Southern lawmaker threatened to lead
an assault on the Capitol, and British
diplomats came to regard the House
floor as too dangerous to visit. Benja-
min Brown French, a genial New En-
glander who served as clerk of the House
of Representatives, stopped socializing
with Southerners and ultimately took
to carrying a pistol.
When I asked Freeman how vio-
lence and the cult of reason could co-
exist, she said that they sprang from a
shared motive: “How did you prove that
you were a leader in that period, to a
vast audience? How did you earn sup-
port? Maybe through aggressive ora-
tory. Maybe by making, and keeping,
promises for your constituents, state,
and section of the Union. And, for a
time, maybe by displaying your domi-
nation of the political playing field with
bullying and aggression.”
Freeman’s history of congressional vi-
olence is an account of how some of the
most privileged members of a society
began to see their counterparts as ene-
mies, and eventually as existential threats.
Once political leaders lost trust in each
other, the public was doomed to follow.
“Unable to turn to the government for
resolution, Americans North and South
turned on one another,” she wrote.
I
n 1844, Samuel F. B. Morse, the pio-
neer of the telegraph, transmitted his
first message: “What hath God wrought?”
Morse predicted that his invention
would unify Americans, making “one
neighborhood of the whole country.”
Indeed, the telegraph brought benefits
beyond measure. But it also tipped pol-
itics toward entertainment and fear,
lighting a fuse that runs through to the
age of @realDonaldTrump.
The day after Morse unveiled his de-
vice, a newspaper used a telegraph to
relay the first squib of news from Wash-
ington to Baltimore. By the end of the
century, readers were wading through a
flood of cheap errata from afar—mostly
of war, crime, fires, and floods. Neil Post-
man, one of the twentieth century’s most
prominent scholars of communications,
wrote, “The telegraph may have made
the country into ‘one neighborhood,’ but
it was a peculiar one, populated by strang-
ers who knew nothing but the most su-
perficial facts about each other.”
In “Amusing Ourselves to Death,”
published in 1985, Postman described
how the triumph of television further
heightened the entertainment value of
politics. He watched the 1984 Presiden-
tial debates, between Ronald Reagan
and Walter Mondale, and lamented the
hollow dodges, casual deceptions, and
abbreviated answers. With a level of
alarm that now looks quaint, he be-
moaned Reagan’s easy laugh lines and
wrote, “The men were less concerned
with giving arguments than with ‘giv-
ing off ’ impressions, which is what tele-
vision does best.” It would be three de-
cades before the host of a reality show
entered a bid for the Presidency. But
Postman already sensed that “the de-
marcation line between what is show
business and what is not becomes harder
to see with each passing day.”
Richard Hofstadter, the eminent po-
litical scientist, is best known for his work
on what he called the “arena for uncom-
monly angry minds,” including anti-
intellectualism and “the paranoid style.”
But, in 1970, near the end of his life, Hof-
stadter became fascinated by the junc-
ture of politics and force. It had swept
through American life in recent years,
producing assassinations and riots. Work-
ing with a co-author, Michael Wallace,
who collected two thousand cases of vi-
olence—massacres, rebellions, vigilan-
tism—he hoped to address what he called
the American paradox: “There is far more
violence in our national heritage than
our proud, sometimes smug, national
self-image admits of.”
Sharp turns in politics and econom-
ics inspired new forms of bloodletting.
After the Civil War, the Ku Klux Klan
and other vigilantes adopted lynching
to prevent freed Black people from
working, studying, and voting. In the
first scholarly study of lynching, from
1903, the sociologist James E. Cutler
described it as a “criminal practice
which is peculiar to the United States.”
Later, as workers started to organize
“I’m sorry. I just don’t find anything funny right now.”
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