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The Problem of the Early American Crowd

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Edward Countryman
Edward Countryman
Affiliation:
University of Canterbury, N.Z.
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Extract

Some six years ago Gordon Wood closed a brief discussion of mobs in the American Revolution by asking whether, if the mob was no less a mob than its European counterpart, the revolution was any less a revolution. Three recent full-length studies, Pauline Maier's From Resistance to Revolution, Richard D. Brown's Revolutionary Politics in Massachusetts and Patricia U. Bonomi's A Factious People, deal in significant part with mob, or, as I will call it, crowd activity in early America, although in none of them does it form the main subject. The approach to it of all three is fresh and sophisticated but, as the cliché goes, they raise as many questions as they answer. This essay will look first at the questions they answer and then go on to the ones they raise.

Type
Review Articles
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 7 , Issue 1 , April 1973 , pp. 77 - 90
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1973

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References

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40 It would be surprising on any theoretical basis if such an event did not have reverberations throughout the society. Chalmers Johnson, a disciple of Parsons, suggests that ‘under dis-equilibrated conditions … status protests may develop throughout the system, even when most statuses were not affected directly by the initial source of change’. Revolutionary Change, p. 80Google Scholar. See also Smelser, Neil J., Theory of Collective Behavior (London, 1962)Google Scholar, which, though excessively formalistic, maintains that a revolutionary change, meaning one in a society's values or highest integrating elements, will necessarily bring the collapse of all lesser social elements. See esp. Chapter 6. Ralph H. Turner made the point in a lecture at the University of Canterbury that disruption serious enough to threaten a community results in the suppression of factionalism, but it seems to me, both from my research on New York and from my experience in the Cornell crisis of 1969, that such suppression is only temporary where factionalism is serious. Turner's argument will shortly be published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution.

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43 A version of this essay was given at the Australia-New Zealand American Studies Conference, Adelaide, August, 1972. I wish to thank George Rudé, James A. Henretta, Rhys Isaac and Neville K. Meaney for comments made on that occasion.