Year: 2021

[Editor’s note: Michael Silvestri, Professor of History at Clemson, is an expert on policing in Ireland (and through Ireland, across the British colonies).   Through independence, partition, and the Good Friday Agreement, Ireland has had to successively form and reform police forces.  Thinking that maybe the Irish example could inform the current discussions about the police in the US, I asked Michael if he might contribute to this series.  He has, below.  This is Clemson Humanities Now.]

The issue of police reform has been at the center of political debates in the U. S. over the past year, most recently emphasized by the failure of police to prevent the mob from overtaking the Capitol on January 6th. Policing has had a contentious history in modern Ireland, and the question of police reform has occupied an important role there as well.

Irish people today continue to debate the legacy of the police force known as the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC). The RIC was the police force of Ireland from 1836 to 1922. Considered one of the premier forces of the British Empire and a model for other colonies to emulate, the Irish force was constructed differently from the “Bobbies” of the Metropolitan Police and other police forces in Britain. While many of its duties were mundane, the RIC was nonetheless an armed, centralized police force under the control of Dublin Castle, the seat of British administration in Ireland. (The force was given the title “Royal” in recognition of its role in suppressing the Fenian Rebellion of 1867.) The RIC’s main functions were to provide political intelligence to Dublin Castle and to maintain order in the Irish countryside. The fact that close to 80 percent of its rank and file were Catholic by the twentieth century did not endear it to many Irish nationalists, who regarded the “Peelers” of the RIC as traitors to the cause of Irish freedom.

During the 1919-1921 War of Independence, members of the RIC were subjected to attack from the Irish Republican Army. The force’s reputation among nationalists was further tarnished both by RIC reprisals, and the recruitment to the force in 1920 of two groups of former British Army soldiers, the “Black and Tans,” composed of former enlisted men, and the “Auxiliaries,” composed of ex-officers Both groups committed widespread acts of violence as part of the RIC. In all, over 400 members of the regular RIC, Black and Tans and Auxiliaries were killed during the conflict.

Many police forces of former colonies of the British Empire, whether in India, Africa, Asia or the Caribbean, can trace their lineage directly back to their predecessors under the British Empire. When the Irish Free State was established in 1922 in twenty-six of the thirty-two counties of Ireland, there was no attempt to incorporate the RIC into the structures of government. Instead, the RIC was disbanded and a completely new police force, An Garda Síochána (the Guardian of the Peace), usually known as simply the Gardai or “the Guards,” was established. This too, was a national police force, but with important differences from the RIC. The Gardai were unarmed, and owed their allegiance to the new independent Irish state; many former members of the IRA were appointed to senior positions in order to counter public suspicions that the force was simply the continuation of the RIC. Although a few members of the RIC with nationalist sympathies entered the Gardai, most remained in Ireland and attempted to adjust to civilian life, while over a third chose emigration, leaving Ireland either temporarily or permanently.

In recent decades, the lives and histories of Irish people who served the British Empire, particularly Irish soldiers during the First World War, have received increasing attention from historians and the Irish public. Yet, while the experiences of those soldiers have been portrayed sympathetically in Irish film and literature, as in the short film Coward (2012) and the novel A Long, Long Way (2005), the RIC continues to be a subject of controversy.

In 2018 Irish film Black 47, set during the Great Famine of the mid-nineteenth century, it is debatable whether the greatest villains are callous Anglo-Irish landlords indifferent to the sufferings of their Irish Catholic tenants, or the thuggish members of the Irish Constabulary, who in the film (as they did in history) provide protection for landlord agents carrying out evictions and guard shipments of grain intended for export from the starving populace.

The issue of the RIC’s legacy was thrust into the spotlight a year ago when plans were made to commemorate the RIC as part of Ireland’s Decade of Centenaries marking important events of Ireland’s “Revolutionary Decade” of 1912 to 1923.

On January 17th, 2020, the Irish government planned a ceremony at Dublin Castle to honor members of the RIC and the Dublin Metropolitan Police, which was responsible for policing the city of Dublin until 1925. The ceremony was explicitly not intended to honor the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries, but it quickly attracted widespread public criticism. Although the Prime Minister at the time, Fine Gael leader Leo Varadkar, defended the ceremony, arguing that “It’s about remembering our history, not condoning what happened,” a number of Irish mayors and politicians from both major parties, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, said that they would not attend. Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou MacDonald on Twitter called the ceremony “a calculated insult to all who stood for Irish freedom.”

The ceremony has been officially postponed, not cancelled, but on January 7th of this year, in response to a question in the Irish parliament, Justice Minister Helen McEntee stated that there are no current plans to reschedule it.

Anonymous White House insider reports claim that Donald Trump is behaving like “Mad King George.” In private, maybe he is; in public, though, on Wednesday, January 6, 2021, he acted like Charles the First. Less familiar to Americans today, Charles’s actions in 1640s England inform the eighteenth-century Constitution of the United States.

Infuriated by Puritans in the House of Commons, Charles the First told the Lord Mayor of London not to call up any troops, and, in the absence of any armed opposition, led a march across the capital city, from Whitehall to Westminster. There, Charles entered Parliament with a group of 80 armed soldiers, and attempted to arrest five prominent members of Parliament who were opposed to him. A marching progress across London was no secret to Parliament, so the Five Members, as they became known, had already evacuated to a secure location, a barge in the Thames, famously undisclosed by the Speaker of the House, William Lenthall, who told the King, “I have neither eyes to see nor tongue to speak in this place but as this House is pleased to direct me.”*

The king had entered Parliament, attempted to arrest legislators, and failed. It was a stupendous overreach, and disastrous. Within months, England was at war with itself; within years, Charles had been executed by Parliament, and England became a republic. No reigning monarch has entered the House of Commons since that day in 1642. Remarkably, that day was January 4th, technically in 1641, on the Julian calendar the United Kingdom (and its colonies) used until 1752. That is, Charles the First laid seige to Parliament nearly exactly 380 years to the day before Donald Trump told a “Save America March” rally crowd which was chanting ”Fight for Trump! Fight for Trump!,” “after this, we’re going to walk down and I’ll be there with you. We’re going to walk down–We’re going to walk down. Anyone you want, but I think right here, we’re going to walk down to the Capitol.”

Of course, there are differences between the two events. For one thing, as it turned out, Donald Trump was not there with them; he was back in the White House watching it all play out on TV. By contrast, Charles actually led troops into Parliament, and, by contrast, kept them out of Commons when he went in. In 1642, it was King Charles who sat in the Speaker Chair, but only after asking to do so; by contrast, it was members of the pro-Trump mob who having chased Congress out of their chambers then sat for selfies in the Speaker’s Chair. Charles and his troops did not damage Parliament; if anything, they damaged the monarchy. Of course, by contrast, those who stormed Congress smashed windows, tore down signs, and, reportedly, relieved—one might say “expressed”—themselves in the hallways and offices of elected representatives.  And, in 1642, no one died.

We are all still sorting what else Trump and his supporters damaged when they laid siege to the Capitol—possibilities include art works, carpeting, desks, democracy, international reputation, and the future itself.  What happened between the White House and the Capitol on the afternoon of January 6 is not unprecedented; it is instead loaded with precedents, which is what makes it so powerfully significant.  Every event is unique, and developing a completely accurate picture–every angle of every participant before, during, and after, plus all the angles not available to participants—is beyond us. The events of 1642 vex historians to this day, at a four-century remove. What used to be called the Puritan Revolution became known as the English Revolution, then the English Civil War, then the English Civil Wars, and, most recently, the War of Three Kingdoms.  In any case, by definition, historical analogies cannot be exact, and, therefore, in that sense, history cannot be a guide.  However, the examination of similarity and difference is one of the advantages of analogies; they constitute a means of a cumulative measurement.

The most important disadvantage of historical analogy in particular is the contextual narrative in which the historical example is embedded, and thus comes with. In the familiar narrative, for example, George the Third precedes a Revolution. As we saw on Wednesday the 6th, the siege takers saw themselves in George the Third terms: taking on the narrative implied by the analogy, they were re-doing the American revolution, complete with “Don’t Tread on Me,” and with Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi as the malevolent tyrants, apparently. (And like Charles, they arrived ready to arrest their five, albeit with plastic zip ties this time.) Here, too, the glaring inequity in treatment of Black Lives Matter protests and the Capitol siege involves the same racist logic seen in the analogical eighteenth-century ‘revolution’ against the Mad King George. As Samuel Johnson noted at the time, in his 1775 essay Taxation No Tyranny, “we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes.” Such iniquitous treatment in the defense of freedom is not unprecedented; it is built into the analogy. Nor, indeed, is racialized mob violence unprecedented. What happened to Congress on Wednesday, January 6, 2021, has happened at countless county court houses in the Jim Crow South, i.e., in America. It just hadn’t happened at Congress before. Fortunately, the stormtroopers were not able to find the people they apparently wanted to place in the nooses and scaffold they set up around the building. This time.

Despite all the disadvantages of the extraordinarily complicated contextual narrative of Charles the First (two civil wars, execution, Irish conquest, republic, Restoration, and thus interregnum), that analogy does highlight a central constitutional issue, then and now. Not only did the January 6 siege succeed in delaying, if only for a few hours, Congress’s certifying the election results, and thus in breaking the peaceful transfer of power in the US at the federal level. By doing so, the siege obscured the fact that the executive branch supported—seemingly even incited—an attack on the legislative branch, thus breaking the separation of powers at the heart of the US Constitution. Presumably permanently: if not formally rebuked, all future presidents can now hold rallies outside Congress, demanding their followers go there, “fight” and be “strong,” if there’s a vote whose results they don’t like.

Since 1642, no reigning monarch has entered the House of Commons, such a violation of the separation of powers was Charles’ arrival understood to be. The framers seeing the English experience with inherited monarchy, tweaked the separation of powers implicit in the English system: courts, a bicameral legislature, and an executive. It was, so to speak, an analogy, a salvage effort. As with all analogies, differences were also highlighted. Instead of a king, a President is elected, which is to say removable, without the execution that ended Charles’ reign. Unfortunately, the Constitutional Convention created and we have retained an indirect and thus analogically aristocratic form of electing the head of the executive branch, and it was that very feature of the eighteenth-century Constitution (in its late nineteenth century codification) which was in process at the time of the January 6 attack. The role of the electoral college will continue to be reexamined as a result. Through it all, though, the president of the United States has always required an invitation before addressing Congress (even for the state of the union address mandated by the Constitution), a separation-of-powers legacy of the English system, and Charles’s shocking disregard for it. On Wednesday, a president’s supporters took the building over, after he told them he would be there with them when they got there. It turns out, that last bit was fake news, straight from the head of the executive branch, but it sure looks like they went in to represent him. The case of Charles the First means both the integrity of US democratic elections and the constitutional separation of powers are both at stake in the aftermath of the invasion of the Capitol from the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

*Schama, Simon.  A History of Britain.  Volume II.  The Wars of the British, 1603-1776.  (New York: Hyperion, 2001), 123.

[Author’s note: Lee Morrissey, Founding Director of the Humanities Hub, and English Professor at Clemson, on media, civil war, and democracy in seventeenth-century England, and early 2021. This is Clemson Humanities Now.]

In 1995, when I was still a graduate student, I was lucky enough to get a job as an assistant professor of English, and I moved to Clemson from Manhattan, where I had been studying. Over the years, people have understandably inquired about that transition, sometimes out of curiosity, sometimes with a presumptuous knowing chuckle. Of course, there were many differences in my experiences in the nation’s largest city, and a town of 11,000 year-round residents, and some of them were improvements (if only because living on a salary in Clemson is better than living on a $10,000 stipend in upper Manhattan).

One difference, though, that no one has been able to anticipate has weighed on me, for decades now—the utopic excitement about the World Wide Web I encountered when I joined Clemson’s Department of English. The internet was twenty years old when I started at Clemson, although the World Wide Web was nearly brand new. A swath of my new colleagues were convinced not only that it represented the future, which it did, but more importantly that it boded well for democracy.

My own research in English literature spanned the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a period that goes from Civil Wars (culminating in the execution of a monarch) to the Enlightenment. In other words, my ‘field’ covered the protracted emergence of representative democracy from the ashes of a civil war and interregnum. As a result, my colleagues’ faith in this new technology struck me as naïve at best, even as I share their hopes for democracy.

Nothing about the democratization of print in the 1640s suggested that the World Wide Web was going to be an unvarnished good for democracy as my colleagues understood it. The experience with my colleagues changed my career: I wrote a book—The Constitution of Literature (Stanford UP, 2008)–on the topic, telling the story across nearly a century and a half, exploring different ideas of democracy as they unfolded in that period, and arguing in the end that “today’s discussion of the World Wide Web needs to consider each of these facets of the development of literary criticism. For the potential political instability, the possible emergence of critical protocols, and debates over models of democracy will all unfold for digital media, and the constitution of literature can provide a powerful, instructive analogue” (197).

Legacy broadcast media post-Fairness Doctrine played its part, but the impact and tenor of the Trump presidency have been facilitated by the openness and anonymity of the World Wide Web, especially what was once called the Web 2.0, the web that ‘you’ could create, which was, it was said, the most democratic form (non-linear and non-hierarchical, they said) of this most democratic technology. At the time, pointing out that there might be a problem with such an understanding of democracy was mistakenly seen as conservative, even though one could also already see, first, that the technology had system requirements that priced participation out for many people, and second, that the architecture was shaping the so-called choices, and third, that the algorithms were replicating real world biases (even as anonymous ‘users’ were enforcing them).

For those of us–not so many of us, perhaps–who study seventeenth-century English history and literature knew, the English Civil Wars coincided with, and were accelerated by, a new openness and accessibility of print. Eventually, the English political system stabilized, and a series of legal conventions (copyright, free speech protections, balanced by defamation accountability, etc.) developed to stabilize the political effects of print, too. As I wrote in The Constitution of Literature, “Eighteenth-century literary critics may have prioritized stability over openness. But early English literary critics describe their visions of reading against the backdrop of the profound instability created, they believe, by other modes of reading. It must also be said that stability is likely preferable to protracted Civil War; even the most libertarian digerati is probably concerned about the democratizing effect the internet seems to have offered global Jihadists. Moreover, within that eighteenth-century preference for stability there is a wide range of differing opinions on how to organize the constitution of literature, on how to understand literacy and political philosophy, and even on how to understand stability itself” (196-7).

This analogue, from print, has been on my mind throughout the Trump presidency, increasingly during 2020, but no more so than January 6, 2021, Epiphany Day, when Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube banned, albeit temporarily, the President of the United States from participating in the Web 2.0. In order to preserve one form of democracy—the deliberative, representative, and established one—these companies needed to suspend their form of anti-procedural participatory, rules-free democracy. Or, in the end the democracy offered by Web 2.0 had been revealed as a threat to democracy IRL. Of course, we had long suspected that it was a threat, truthiness and whataboutism having replacing reflection, even before the 2016 election hack by Cambridge Analytica and Russia’s IRA. But this is what made January 6, 2021 an epiphany: a new world is struggling to be born, and the supposedly democratizing technologies were enlisted in preventing it (in a seemingly non-linear and non-hierarchical way). Imagine if the three wise men had been sent to Bethlehem by Herod, Twitter, and GPS to trample through the inn, scare away the family, and take selfies.

The question, unfortunately, is whether yesterday represents an end of such behavior, or its beginning, the culmination, or the starter’s gun. Which epiphany or revelation it turns out to be will depend not only on whether or not to treat the president as if he were only the country’s ‘cranky uncle.’ It will also depend on a reexamination of technologies of representation. The good news is that the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century example shows us we have been here before. Regrettably for us, it took England a century before the final Jacobite Rebellion was quelled, and nearly as long for early copyright laws to be created. Fortunately, though, we have the lessons of their example to draw on; there are vaccines, already developed for print, and offering readily adaptable treatments today.

Earlier, I mentioned how arriving at Clemson from Manhattan and finding colleagues in an English Department who held techno-utopic hopes for the democratic possibilities of digitized representation changed my career. I mean, for the better. If you had asked me in my earliest post-doctoral years what I expected to be researching, I would have told you about a continuation of my dissertation, on authors who were also architects, topics in which I remain interested. It would be several years before The Constitution of Literature formed as a project for me. It is today my most-cited monograph, and it would not exist had I not been so surprised by my colleagues’ conviction that we were about to enter a golden age of the democratic word. Two decades later, the storming of the Capitol yesterday, by people egged on by the president, and by QAnon, shows how much we all need to sift these new media. My own experience, studying civil war and interregnum England, also shows how much these media were not new.