This chapter situates the present rise of far-right intimidation and attacks against social justice movements in Oregon within the state’s history of white supremacist violence. Utilizing archival research, it elucidates the presence of vigilante activity at the heart of Oregon’s early development, from the genocide of Indigenous peoples to the exclusion of Black people and the persecution of people of Chinese origin. The article then sheds light on a leading exponent of those efforts to create a “white utopia”: the Klan’s idea of securing a white supremacist “Realm” through a complex understanding of vigilantism that includes policing groups, bodies, and space. The chapter further discusses the subsequent development of the City of Portland’s large fascist movement during the 1930s. Lastly, the chapter shows how the growth of the post-war Patriot movement out of the failed interwar fascist movement developed along the same porous boundaries between policing and vigilantism, on the one hand, and Conservative and fascist, on the other, enabling paradoxical partnerships engaged in an increasingly conflictive relation to the state.

Political speech, now one of the most highly-protected forms of speech in the United States, wasn't always protected. In times of stress, particularly times of war, free speech has been curtailed: Congress passed the Sedition Act of 1798 to silence critics of the Adams administration, and it passed the Espionage and Sedition Acts of 1917/18 to silence critics of US participation in WW I. Both laws openly flouted constitutional free-speech guarantees. In a series of high-profiile cases over the course of the twentieth century, the US Supreme Court developed a First Amendment doctrine that gave more and more types of speech First Amendment protection. Starting with the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris in 2015, this chapter looks at increasing protections for political speech from 1791 to the present, including free speech for students. We assess the continuing impact of the doctrine that might be called "free speech, but." Yes, speech is protected, but there is still some speech considered outside the framework of legal protection.

The new century’s radical songwork takes in the victims of the Triangle Factory fire, Mother Jones, and the bards of the Industrial Workers of the World (with Joe Hill at their pinnacle). The IWW’s Italian songwriters – Arturo Giovannitti and Efrem Bartoletti – emerge as important voices, as do the Finnish songwriters of the Italian Hall Disaster in Calumet, Michigan, and the multinational corridistas of the Ludlow Massacre in Colorado. Other revolutionary arenas include the vaudeville stage and the drag club, where the cross-dressing of Julian Eltinge and Bothwell Browne challenges the tyranny of heterosexual norms. Charlotte Perkins Gilman emerges as a leading songwriter for women’s suffrage and joins the ranks of those opposing US entry into the coming European war. As the government clamps down on the proliferation of antiwar activism, Tin Pan Alley leads the shift from antiwar to prowar songwriting. With the US now at war, Black soldiers produce a powerful body of song reflecting the outrages of segregation in the ranks. Black composers James Reese Europe and Noble Sissle turn their wartime service into pioneering art-song, and Lakota warriors –formerly forbidden to sing – lend their voices to the war effort. The Armistice produces a wealth of song celebration, but a new musical menace arises in the form of the Ku Klux Klan and its vicious songs.

Black Americans sing of their hope in the promise of Reconstruction, which is eventually betrayed as the white North and South sing their way into the “romance of reunion.” The Indigenous peoples to the west face a US government hostile to their songs and dances, Mexican vaqueros are immortalized in corridos, Chinese and Irish railroad workers are pitted against each other in minstrel songs, and the Fisk Jubilee Singers introduce the spiritual to the world (even as the Ku Klux Klan churns out its earliest sheet music). Woman suffragists and former abolitionists join hands in song; and as the country descends into the corrupt mire of a Gilded Age, Grange farmers take on the monopolies of railroad magnates and “robber barons” in songs that ring into the present century. In the Pennsylvania coal fields, the executed Molly Maguires are memorialized in powerful balladry, and the Knights of Labor provide the musical soundtrack to the greatest fight between labor and capital that the country has yet seen.

Nativism, racism, and sexism are leading characters in this chapter, as are the songs for and against them. The Ku Klux Klan leads the way in musical contemptibility, but there are others, such as the xenophobes of the Spanish Flu epidemic and the songwriting purveyors of the postwar “Red Scare” against peace activists, labor activists, Germans, and suspected Bolsheviks. The immigrant community is under siege in the atmosphere of “100% Americanism,” and their songs – in the Cantonese opera houses, on the German and Italian vaudeville stages, in the Yiddish musical theaters, and in the ethnic recording studios – aim to fight back. The Indigenous peoples of Alaska and the lower 48 continue to resist the eradication of their song heritage, and the Mexican corridistas continue to sing of their border-crossing struggles. On the vaudeville stage, Eva Tanguay shows her contempt for conservative gender expectations, while the as-yet-unknown composers Florence Price and Ruth Crawford lay the groundwork for their own emergence.

In American history there have arguably been three types of terrorism – two domestic and one transnational. The predominant expressions of domestic terrorism in the United States are rooted in ethnic and racial conflicts. Among the most important are aimed at the maintenance of racial hierarchies and specifically white supremacy. A second domestic form is rooted in the class conflicts of a rapidly expanding industrial society at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. This ‘revolutionary terrorism’ is rooted in the anarchist tradition, which garnered substantial amounts of attention but had shallow roots in the labour movement. ‘Transnational terrorism’ is likewise important in the American context. While carried out on American soil or against American outposts abroad, it’s often planned outside of it, or inspired by outside sources, and results from opposition to the United States’ global role. Richard Hofstadter observed that while political violence had been ubiquitous in American history, much of it had been carried out by groups of citizens against other groups, and that it has rarely shaken the political order. He likewise suggested that the most successful forms have been socially and politically conservative. This argument is explored in the three sections of my essay. The first two focus exclusively on domestic terrorism – racial/ethnic and revolutionary terrorism respectively. The third is more varied. Its emphasis is the transnational terrorism exemplified by September 11th, but it also explores domestic forms, notably the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and recent terrorist attacks associated with the radical right.

The political violence of Reconstruction, especially as directed at African Americans, initially occasioned national alarm and federal intervention.As Reconstruction progressed, however, literary tactics emerged that rendered acts of terror as discrete and disorganized, and thus as posing no threat to the nation state. Eventually dominating the domain of genteel print, literary and journalistic narratives adopted a number of strategies that rendered racial violence routine and even normative, portraying white southerners as besieged victims of the Reconstruction government forced to resort to violence in order to protect Anglo-Saxon prerogatives.Although the rhetoric of the “bloody shirt,” along with literary interventions by Mark Twain and Albion Tourgée, sought to foreground the continued threat of racial violence to the nation state and its citizens, this ascendant narrative increasingly controlled the “facts” of Reconstruction.By the early twentieth century, historians and novelists had consolidated the lessons of Reconstruction in ways conducive to an expansionist white nationalism.

The contours of Republican Party development in the South along with the legitimate successes that were achieved for black citizens and black civil rights more generally – before it all came crashing down – is the subject of this chapter. We focus first on the development of a Republican South after the Civil War. At first, Republican leaders were resistant to the creation of a Southern wing of the party, mainly because moderate members believed that enfranchising blacks – a necessary condition for the creation of a Southern GOP – was too radical for the Northern public to accept. They came around to the idea only reluctantly, after President Andrew Johnson broke with the Republicans on Reconstruction and the protection of black civil rights, and the Northern public sided with the GOP in the elections of 1866. Once invested in the notion of creating a Southern wing, Republican leaders stacked the deck by dividing the South into military districts, enfranchising blacks, and requiring new constitutions to be drafted before states would be readmitted to the Union. Combined, this led to some initial GOP electoral successes in the former Confederacy. These successes were not sustainable, however, despite strong and loyal black support, as a consistent and large proportion of white Southerners could not be persuaded to vote Republican. Without a true biracial foundation, the Southern wing of the GOP – confronted with violence and intimidation by white paramilitary groups working on behalf of the Democrats, as well as intra-party conflict – steadily collapsed, and Republican politicians were systematically driven from power. By 1877, white Southern Democrats had effectively “redeemed” all of the ex-Confederate states, and Reconstruction – despite its very real achievements, like the wealth of office-holding experience it provided for black citizens – had come to an end.