Kristian Williams - Our Enemies in Blue - Police and Power in America

practical consequence of the Show of Force theory was a new demand fordress uniforms, public drilling, and parades.ll It was not shown to reduce thelikelihood of class conflict or to prevent strikes.In the 1880s, a wave of immigration made the authorities less reluctant touse force against striking workers.ll And after the Haymarket incident of 1886,the Show of Force approach was almost entirely abandoned in favor of moredirect responses: "[TJ acticians [came] to favor the use of force over shows offorce."ll Tellingly, racist comparisons between workers and Native Americansbecame more common. In 1892 the Army and Navy Register opined, 'The redsavage is pretty well subdued ... but there are white savages growing morenumerous and dangerous as our great cities become greater."14 This analogywas not merely rhetorical; many of the same units were used against strikersas against indigenous peoples.'The Maximum Force approach did have its disadvantages. "Fire tactics appropriatefor conventional warfare ... jeopardized innocent lives, invited publiccondemnation, and ... simply did not work in the urban terrain where mostriots took place.".\j As the National Guard's reputation for brutality grew, sodid sympathy for those who opposed them-especially striking workers. Atthe same time, Maximum Force was out of step with the authorities' overallstrategy in handling strikes, as the government and businesses came to relymore and more on the pacifying effects of concessions.Y' Nevertheless, anddespite atrocities like the Ludlow Massacre,17 Maximum Force remained thedominant approach well into the twentieth century.RATIONALIZING FORCEIt was not until World War I and its accompanying Red Scare that the MaximumForce doctrine was revised. State violence was thf'n ratinnali7ed-broken intodiscrete, ordered stages. lbis change represented one component in an earlyeffort to take some of the conflict out of class conflict "In short, repealing bellicosepost-Haymarket formulas for riot control was part of a multifaceted driveto wreck the Left, strip the working class of radical leaders, and put progressivemanagers in their place."18Of the new crowd-control strategists, the most influential was Henry ABellows, an officer in the Minnesota Home Guard and the author of A Manualfo r Local Defense (1919) and A Treatise on Riot Duty fo r the National Guard(1920) . In these works, he drew a distinction between crowds and mobs, andargued that the key was to keep a crowd from becoming a mob. Ideally thiscould be accomplished by preventing crowds from forming in the first placeor,failing that, by breaking up any crowd that did form and doing so before ithad the chance to transform into a mob. The crowd should be dispersed withas little actual violence as possible, but without hesitating to use whatever forcewas necessary.39 Bellows wrote, "Practically every riot can be prevented withoutbloodshed .. . if sufficient force can be brought to bear on it in time."40Army Major Richard Stockton and New Jersey National Guard CaptainSaskett Dickson expressed a similar view in their Troops on Riot Duty: AManual fo r the Use of the Armed Forces of the United States. They wrote:182