Tomgram: Mike Davis on the Return of the Vigilante

A few years back, I attended a conference on the Vietnam War and, at one session, found myself listening to the college-age child of Cambodian refugees. Her parents had embarked on a harrowing journey to this country, worked at the worst of jobs, and finally scraped together just enough money to start a small corner store. Now here was their child, eloquently discussing an American-Dream-style future as, perhaps, an international lawyer who hoped to work at the boiling interstices of American commerce in Southeast Asia. I couldn't help thinking, as I sat there, that there was nothing like an immigrant or an immigrant's child to remind you of what the American story can sound like at its most inspiring. Of course, I'm the grandchild of a Galician Jew, who ran away from home, arrived in New York harbor in the steerage of a ship with the equivalent of fifty cents in his pocket in a grim winter in the 1890s. He ended up constructing apartment buildings in Brooklyn until his life crashed just before the Great Depression hit.

You would think we would celebrate the immigrant. After all, most of us, or our parents or grandparents, once were. On the other hand, the resistance to immigration has a long, grim, powerful history in this country -- of legal constraint, of walls descending, of bitter prejudice, racism, and finally vigilantism. It's this history in its California guise that Mike Davis considers below. Tom

Vigilante Man

By Mike Davis

"The local people whipped themselves into a mold of cruelty. Then they formed units, squads, and armed them -- armed them with clubs, with gas, with guns. We own the country. We can't let these Okies get out of hand." -- John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

The vigilantes are back. In the 1850s, they lynched Irishmen; in the 1870s, they terrorized the Chinese; in the first decade of the twentieth century, they murdered striking Wobblies; in the 1920s, they organized "Bash a Jap" campaigns; and in the 1930s, they welcomed the Joads and other Dust Bowl refugees with tear gas and buckshot.