Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [120]
There was, to be sure, an eastern and mid-western variant, which showed a somewhat different face. This was “whitecapping,” a “movement of violent moral regulation by local masked bands.” It began in southern Indiana in 1887 and spread rapidly. Brown mentions 239 incidents before 1900. The whitecaps did not, for the most part, punish ordinary criminals, horse thieves, cattle rustlers. They went after “crimes” that were not against the law: people who offended the local moral code. They usually punished by whipping; and their victims were “wife beaters, drunkards, poor providers, immoral couples and individuals, lazy and shiftless men, and petty neighborhood thieves.”47
The whitecaps in the South were a violent, secret group, something of a cross between the KKK and western vigilantes.48 They were active in Mississippi, for example, where men in white masks rode at night in protest against the crop-lien system. In Georgia, they threatened merchants who would not wait for prices to go up before processing farmers’ cotton. In some areas, they terrorized blacks; in others, they protected moonshiners. They whipped their enemies, and sometimes killed them. They were hard to prosecute because they intimidated witnesses and jurors; and because local officials were often whitecaps themselves. By 1895, however, the movement had just about run its course in that particular area.
In its home bases, whitecapping, like the vigilante movement, was something of an elite movement, or at least it had elite elements. Enforcement of morality was its main function. But morals crusades, as we saw, were hindered by a number of factors: corruption, the indifference of much of the public, and, very significantly, by the fact that many people wanted “immoral” services and goods. The whitecaps operated in this vacuum of enforcement. Like all vigilantelike movements, whitecapping grew out of a situation of legal pluralism—a situation of clashing norms. There was, interestingly, at least one example of women who acted as whitecaps: twelve members of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, in Osceola, Nebraska, in 1893 (if the National Police Gazette is to be believed). These women were scandalized by the immoral activities of “certain young ladies.” The avenging twelve put pillow cases over their heads, seized the shameless hussies, tied them up and gave them a thorough flogging. Eleven of the women were arrested; one of them was the wife of a local bank president, and all of them were “staunch church members and among the most charitable ladies of the city.”49
Violent Resistance to Law
Somewhat comparable to the vigilante movement was the wave of “counterrevolutionary terror” that “swept over large parts of the South between 1868 and 1871” in the form of the Ku Klux Klan, the “invisible empire.”50 The Klan, too, had its elite element; and it acted to enforce a code that the official law did not or would not recognize: strict white supremacy.
The Klan was formed for one overriding purpose: to resist, violently if necessary, any attempt by southern blacks to gain a few crumbs of political and economic power. The Reconstruction North was nominally on the side of the black victims; but their backing was weak, sporadic, undependable. The Klan began in the late 1860s and spread like wildfire through the defeated South. The Klansmen wore bizarre disguises—both for secrecy and as an instrument of terror and mystification. The costume consisted, for the most part, of white sheets with cone-shaped white hats and masks. In some areas, the robes were red with white trim; in others, they were black.51 The Klansmen rode at night, on horseback; they were the embodiment of white supremacy at its most extreme; they used menace, brutality, and intimidation